BTC News: If It Says 'News,' It Must Be True

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so I don’t have to write anything

Weldon Berger — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 04:23:06 +0000

I took this at about 3PM by the Santa Monica pier at low tide on an overcast day. At the risk of sounding immodest, please don’t use it without asking me for permission.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pier, these two gulls were into some kind of weird social transaction that was already happening when I got there and was still going on 10 minutes later when I moved along after finally getting a decent shot of them.

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From the annals of really bad decisions …

Weldon Berger — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:15:24 +0000

“Public Pension Funds Are Adding Risk to Raise Returns”

States and companies have started investing very differently when it comes to the billions of dollars they are safeguarding for workers’ retirement.

Companies are quietly and gradually moving their pension funds out of stocks. They want to reduce their investment risk and are buying more long-term bonds.

But states and other bodies of government are seeking higher returns for their pension funds, to make up for ground lost in the last couple of years and to pay all the benefits promised to present and future retirees. Higher returns come with more risk.

“In effect, they’re going to Las Vegas,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a Dallas investor and the former chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which oversees public plans in that state. “Double up to catch up.”

What could possibly go wrong? Sure, the higher-risk stuff the public pension funds are buying includes “commodity futures, junk bonds, foreign stocks [and] deeply discounted mortgage-backed securities,” the latter of which are the sad remains of some of the crap that torpedoed the more traditional investments of the funds and made them desperate for higher returns, but hey, the cards are bound to turn their way and the house is a caring institution.

When the new investments blow up, as they inevitably will, waiting in the wings will be some stern and sorrowful but eager-to-help advisors offering easy solutions to the problems created for public institutions by impossible shortfalls in the pension funds, among which will be simply refusing to meet their pension obligations to their future retirees and perhaps cutting payments to current ones.

There’s a proud tradition of private sector companies doing that, usually as a condition of emerging from bankruptcy. A management failure turns into an opportunity to screw workers on behalf of creditors, and who wouldn’t jump at that?

Meanwhile, lots of pension fund proprietors will use contributions from their current employees to pay off their retired ones. When Bernie Madoff did this, it was called a Ponzi scheme and he will die in jail from it. When governments do it, it’s called fiscal responsibility and making the tough choices, and nobody goes to jail. Some people have to work a decade longer than they planned, and some people have to give up their retirement dreams but they were only dreams anyway.

Yum! Cat food!

But who knows, maybe it’ll all work out. Let it ride, baby. Seven come eleven …

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Health Insurance Reform: How your precious bodily fluids got sapped

Weldon Berger — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:10:22 +0000

Anyone who takes health insurance reform seriously recognizes that universal government-funded health care is the only way to eliminate the abuses of the health insurance industry and control costs to the point that per capita spending on health care in the US falls more or less into line with other developed countries rather than running 50%-100% higher.

Call it single-payer, call it Medicare For All, whatever; it’s what will work in this country because it’s the most straightforward, most familiar, least complicated and most easily understood system. Barack Obama is on record supporting it; only before we get there, he said, “we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

But when it began to look as though those things were going to happen, candidate Obama backed way off, saying that while he still supported a single-payer plan in theory—“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system”—in practice, he now supported massively subsidizing the health insurance industry, although he didn’t put it quite like that, because “a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs … let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”

The devolution of Obama’s fondness for single-payer isn’t surprising; it wasn’t so much foreshadowed as trumpeted. He announced in advance his intention to include the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries in the crafting of his insurance reform legislation—which has now nonsensically become “health reform”—and to exclude single-payer advocates. It’s one of the few campaign promises he has fought hard to keep.

Now we’re at a point where the president has resorted to classic doublespeak. In a mass email sent out last week by Organizing for America, the Obama campaign machine, the organization’s director, Mitch Stewart, says that “[t]he President does not believe we can address a problem this big incrementally,” while Obama said last week that the subject had been completely explored and now was the time to act.

We began our push to reform health insurance last March, in this room, with doctors and nurses who know the system best. And so it’s fitting to be joined by all of you as we bring this journey to a close.

Last Thursday, I spent seven hours at a summit where Democrats and Republicans engaged in a public and very substantive discussion about health care. This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. And since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said — (laughter) — and just about everybody has said it. (Laughter.) So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and America’s businesses.

[...]Now, some also believe that we should, instead of doing what I’m proposing [tinkering around the edges of this challenge], pursue a piecemeal approach to health insurance reform, where we tinker around the edges of this challenge for the next few years.

The (Laughter) is from the White House transcript. Haha! Of course every idea has not been on the table; although the president mentioned that “some” support a “government-run health care system”, in fact the concept of universal government-funded health care was never given a hearing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised single-payer advocates in Congress the opportunity to bring existing single-payer legislation to the floor for debate (she graciously allocated 20 minutes), but the big moment never arrived.

So what we have at this moment is the mischaracterization and off-hand dismissal of an approach the president once supported but now says, without explanation, is “neither practical nor realistic” in the US, and the transformation of a proposal he once described as incremental to a much weaker version of the same proposal that he now offers as more or less the final resting place of health insurance reform. And even that probably won’t pass without further buggering, if at all. RIP.

Throughout the whole process, single-payer advocates have gotten the Bill O’Reilly approach from most supporters of the various incarnations of the “public option”—whether robust or microscopic or born without a brain—and the “pass anything” approach. “Shut up! Shut up!” We are alleged to have undermined the president and his allies in Congress by failing to support whatever they’re up to at any given moment, when in fact the president and his allies in Congress have repeatedly engaged in a dramatic reenactment of the famous Peanuts scenes in which Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown and he winds up flat on his back. And just like Charlie, supporters of that amorphous plan keep coming back for more. Or more accurately, coming back for less. And less.

The single-payer program can be explained in a sentence. “Everyone gets a comprehensive Medicare plan with no copays and no deductibles, and if there’s anything you want that isn’t covered you can buy supplemental private insurance for it, and it saves big, big money.” The details take a bit longer, but the proposal is about 2000 pages shorter than what’s circulating now, and it’s a whole hell of a lot easier to understand.

The current mishmash proposal takes a little longer to explain. “There’s some good stuff here and there in this bill but mostly it shovels about $50 billion a year in new revenue to health insurance and pharmaceutical firms, including a bucket of taxpayer money, by forcing millions of people to buy private insurance that will either strain their budgets or require government subsidies; it’s being paid for in part by taxes on the best employer-subsidized insurance plans, thereby providing incentives for employers to either scale back their plans or shift more of the cost to their employees; and it still leaves an estimated 10 million people uninsured.”

Let’s review. Obama plan: hideously complicated, doesn’t cover everybody, forces people to buy private insurance, further entrenches insurance companies, saves less, if any, money. Single-payer: Breathtakingly simple, covers everyone, saves very much money, breaks the insurance company stranglehold on health care delivery. But Americans are presumed to be so opposed to the simple solution that it’s not even worth explaining, let alone supporting.

And oh, yes: fixing the gaps in Medicare coverage and expanding it to cover everyone is a budget issue, which means it could be enacted through reconciliation. 51 votes in the Senate …

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ACORN-baiting whore solicits Washington Post’s Ezra Klein

Weldon Berger — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:23:05 +0000

If you’re not familiar with the back story, it’s this: James O’Keefe, a patently dishonest right-wing firebrand, if that’s not redundant, and Hannah Giles, a patently dishonest right-wing surf bunny took a hidden camera into various offices of ACORN, an umbrella operation for community organizing groups, and produced a patently dishonest video purporting to show ACORN staffers advising the pair how to obtain safely operate a prostitution ring while hiding the income from it. But in fact the video was a heavily edited pastiche designed to create the impression of wrongdoing that never actually occurred.

Well now Giles, the barely-legal pseudo-prostitute in the tale, is out to ensnare Ezra Klein, the liberal wunderkind Washington Post and Newsweek columnist.

As much as I don’t agree with his political views, I do get where he is coming from. I dig his new media expertise, and actually, I could learn a lot from him since I’m new to the internet news/political world. Also, once-upon-a-time I wanted be a nutritionist, so [Klein's reputation as a gourmet health food chef] scores extra points with me.

So here’s my challenge to Mr. Klein: how about it, Ezra? Will you make me dinner one evening? Let’s put our ideas to the test and see who wins.

One can only imagine what that hidden-camera video will look like.

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And the Oscar for post-primitive blue alien Tantric sex goes to …

Weldon Berger — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:22:40 +0000

Avatar will win a bunch of Oscars, although not enough to suit James Cameron. The first time I saw the film I thought it was a pretty faithful remake of Ferngully, a 1992 animated film about fairies whose forest is under assault by humans, one of whom winds up living among them and ultimately rescuing them. But of course there are other influences to be found as well.

When former Marine Jake Scully drapes his sinewy blue body around his Na’vi bride, Neytiri, the heroine of James Cameron’s Oscar-nominated epic Avatar, his neural tendrils fuse with hers, in the script, but off camera, in one of the most unusual sex scenes ever produced on film. Critics and commentators have been dissecting the themes of the Hollywood mega-blockbuster, from its just-war doctrine and environmental ethics. But there’s a philosophical dimension that this otherworldly sex scene captures that most folks have overlooked: the Tantra of Avatar.

A precursor to Hinduism and Buddhism, the ancient philosophy of Tantra dates back some 6,000 years to the Dravidian culture that flourished in the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan, seeping later into the religious traditions of India, Nepal, and other parts of the region. Its tenets of goddess worship, self-discovery, and spiritual liberation resonate in Avatar, from the Neytiri’s deity-like qualities to Jake’s journey of self-identity. Avatar’s climax is actually not the Tantric sex of their consummation, but a moment that comes later, when they do something modern-day Tantric sex experts call “soul gazing,” and racier sexperts call “sex gazing.”

So there’s that.

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