Unemployment Stats

We can't forget the depths of the crisis President Obama inherited, when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month:

Over the past year, the private sector has steadily added jobs while government jobs have steadily been eliminated:

Data Source: BLS.gov

Michael Moore and Wolf Blitzer

If you haven't seen Michael Moore making the TV circuit to promote his new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, the clips below showcase his best performance. He makes Wolf Blitzer looks like an amateur, with repetitive, sound-bite inspired questions:





My favorite moment came when Wolf asked Michael how he would respond to allegations that he is being hypocritical in his movie because he himself has benefited and become wealthy from our capitalistic system. To which Michael Moore responded:

"I wonder if there was a Wolf Blitzer 200 years ago who asked Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams, or George Washington: "Hey you guys are wealthy land owners, you've benefited from the Kings system, what are you complaining about? whats this revolt all about?"

Brilliant.

PS: If you missed Wolf's appearance on celebrity Jeopardy, you missed the man who represents one of the supposed leaders in cable news making a fool of himself and getting blown out by comedian Andy Richter. His grand total: -$4600.

A Little Perspective on Cost

As health care reform continues to bring out the worst in us, I thought I'd try to put the projected costs of Obama's plan into a little perspective.

According to a report from The Congressional Research Service, after the passage of the supplemental funding bill of 2008 on June 30, 2008, Congress had spent a total of $864 billion since 9/11/01 to fight the War on Terror (74% on Iraq alone and less than 1% on medical care for veteran). Once you include estimates for 2009 and 2010, the total spent rises to over $1 trillion in the last 9 years.

Or, to put it into more understandable terms:

As of February 2009, DOD’s average monthly obligations for contracts and pay were about $10.9 billion, including $8.4 billion for Iraq, and $2.6 billion for Afghanistan, a monthly average some $3 billion below last year.

If we accept that 9/11 was the root cause of this spending, then it is also fair to state that it was the murder of 2,974 people that gave Bush the "political capital" to initiate the massive government spending program known as the Global War on Terror. If you compare that to the 22,000 people that died last year due to lack of health insurance, over 7x the number of people that died on 9/11, the cognitive dissonance begins to set in.

With most estimates of the cost of Obama's health care plan ranging from $300 billion - $1 trillion over the next 10 years, how can ANYONE go on television and claim that the country can't afford to do it. Where were those same people claiming that we couldn't afford the Global War on Terror? My recollection may be a bit fuzzy, but I don't think ANYONE was claiming that we couldn't afford it. How are health care executives that make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars off of denying these now deceased people access to medical care any different than Al-Qaeda?

So, spending over a trillion dollars (over $10 billion a month) after the death of around 3000 people is a no brainer, but spending an equivalent amount to stop an ANNUAL death total of around 20,000 is considered political suicide? What happened to our government...

None of this even takes into account that the cost of health care causes an American to declare bankruptcy roughly every 30 seconds.

As a bit of a side note about George W Bush and "political capital," listen to this clip from 1999 where Bush claims that if he has the political capital, he WILL invade Iraq:

The Redistribution of Wealth...Upward

After all the sturm and drang from the Republicans about President Obama's socialist agenda to "spread the wealth around," a new paper from University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez shows that that has already occured...but in an upward direction. The above graph illustrates just how bad the situation is.

What Professor Saez found, to quote Paul Krugmann of the New York Times, was "truly amazing:"

• since 2000, just the top 0.01% of income earners DOUBLED their cut of the nations total income to 6%
• As of 2007, the top 10% of American earners accounted for 49.7% of total wages, a level "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the 'roaring" 1920s.'"
• "The top 1% incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007"
• "...while the bottom 99% of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7% per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3% per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth."

So, as you hear complaints that President Obama's proposed health care surtax on the wealthy is somehow unfair, point to this report. After seeing these numbers, is it any wonder why there is so much anger being displayed at health care town halls nationwide? In my opinion, the anger is justified, it's just aimed in the wrong direction.

The Department of Defense, Retired Military Officers, and Selling of the Iraq War to the American Public

In April of last year, David Barstow of The New York Times broke the story (for which he subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize) that the Department of Defense had employed retired military advisors to help them "sell" the American public on the Iraq War through interviews in the media. The question of whether or not this program amounted to a violation of the "use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda activities" is still being hotly debated despite two reports, one from the Inspector General of the Department of Defense and the other from the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the programs offenses did not rise to the level of a violation. A close reading of the two reports, however, shows why the debate is continuing.

According the IG's report:

We confirmed only one instance where an RMA was disinvited from Pentagon outreach briefings because of his unfavorable comments on DoD activities. In sworn testimony, a senior DoD official told us that General Barry R. McCaffrey, U.S. Army, Retired, was excluded from future briefings because he provided an “unfavorable perspective on the war” in television commentary.

In my opinion, the fact that even one retired military advisor was excluded due to his anti-war views is enough to consider the program propaganda. A brief consultation with Merriam-Webster would agree, as propaganda is defined as "ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause." Wouldn't the silencing of dissenting opinions be considered a deliberate action to "further one's cause?"

To make matters worse, the GAO report uncovered the follow details about the DoD program (FOIA means Freedom of Information Act, RMO's means retired military officers, and OASD-PA is the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs):

• A "trip schedule" that DOD included in its FOIA release identified nine trips that DOD arranged for RMOs, often accompanied by OASD-PA staff ... In some documents, OASD-PA staff described these trips as paying "huge dividends" with regard to media access, and suggested that future planned travel be limited to those RMOs with the greatest ability to serve as "message force multipliers."
• OASD-PA staff planned RMO conference calls, meetings, and travel to coincide with significant events. For example, OASD-PA staff scheduled conference calls with RMOs to coincide with the release of the President's budget request to Congress, and DOD reports to Congress on Iraq, and to coincide with congressional hearings on troop readiness.
• The Comptroller's Office, however, advised us that it did not have information permitting it to calculate the total cost to DOD of the RMO outreach program, including total RMO travel costs.
• While DOD did provide talking points and other information to RMOs, and some DOD staff referred to the RMOs as "surrogates," RMOs clearly were not paid by DOD to be news readers or otherwise to deliver text provided to them by DOD...The only restriction we found that DOD imposed on RMOs was that they not identify by name any particular individual as a source.

So, to recap, the Department of Defense sent retired military officers to Iraq, Guantanamo, etc at an unknown cost to the taxpayer, then had conference calls scheduled around "significant events" to unify their message to the press, even going so far as to provide them with "talking points and other information." Then, at the next news cycle, they only continued using those RMO's who had been the most effective in spreading the administrations message. Since these retired military leaders were portrayed by the media to be impartial commentators in the discussion of whether or not to invade Iraq, which they clearly were not, how is this not an explicit propaganda campaign?

The most confusing part to me is how the GAO report didn't reach the same conclusion. Part of their own report clearly states:

Agency communications are considered covert and violate the prohibition if they are misleading as to their origin ... or if the agency conceals its role in sponsoring the materials ... Concealing the agency's role in a communication goes beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities ... Otherwise, to the public it may appear that an independent party endorses the agency's position. Hence, materials prepared by an agency or agency contractors and circulated by them as the ostensible position of parties outside the agency constitute covert propaganda and violate the prohibition.

To me, that sounds like exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, one of the potentially more scandalous aspects of Mr. Barstow's New York Times article, was not even examined by the GAO:

While the New York Times' allegations generated legitimate scrutiny of the relationship between RMOs and DOD and raised questions about potential competitive advantage, compromised procurement processes, and the RMOs' commercial ties, those questions do not, in our view, implicate the prohibition on the use of appropriations for publicity or propaganda purposes and they are therefore outside the scope of this opinion. For similar reasons, this opinion also does not examine whether the RMOs disclosed to the viewing public or the networks whether they had commercial ties to DOD contractors or other possible conflicts of interests.

If we were to find out that a significant number of the RMO's employed in the DoD program were also on the payrolls of the same defense contractors who reaped massive profits off of the decision to go to war, we would truly be living in Orwell's 1984.

Torture Photos

In one of the biggest departures from his campaign promises of openness and transparency, President Obama's Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court decision requiring the Pentagon to disclose photos depicting alleged abuse of prisoners in U.S. military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photos had originally been ordered to be released due to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan is on the record as saying:

“The President of the United States and the Nation’s highest-ranking military officers responsible for ongoing combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have determined that disclosure by the government of the photographs at issue in this case would pose a significant risk to the lives and physical safety of American military and civilian personnel by inciting violence targeting those personnel"

President Obama has stated:

“It's… my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger."

So let me get this straight? Abusing detainees is legally ok, but releasing photos depicting the abuse isn't? There is a massive cognitive dissonance in that reasoning.

So far, the government has admitted that the photos depict “soldiers pointing pistols or rifles at the heads of hooded and handcuffed detainees” and one image showing a handcuffed and hooded prisoner and a soldier who is acting “as if” he is violating a detainee with a broom handle. Others, however, are claiming far worse.

According to Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted the official inquiry into Abu Ghraib:

“These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency... The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

One of the sworn statements given to Mr Taguba from a detainee, which was released due to a Freedom of Information Act request, went as follows:

“I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid’s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures.”

Either the photos show that Bush Administration is guilty of systematic torture and therefore the photos shouldn't be released out of concern of retaliation against our troops, or the pictures are 99% harmless and should be published. So, if President Obama really believes that we are in the first scenario and continues to block the photos from being released, he must launch an investigation into the previous administrations "enhanced interrogation" program. The President can't have it both ways.

To put an exclaimation point on this insanity, this story was initially broken back on May 10th 2004 by Sy Hersh in The New Yorker. How has this flown so far under the radar that all of the facts still aren't out by 2009? I would guess most Americans still have no idea that nearly 100 detainees have died in US custody since 2002 ...

Blackwater

Xe, the contractor formerly known as Blackwater, is rapidly becoming part of one of the craziest, jaw-dropping stories I've ever heard. The story, broken by Jeremy Scahill, has been covered on Countdown with Keith Olbermann all week, so I thought I'd consolodate the clips below.

The essence of the story is that Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, considered himself the head of a Christan army tasked with the elimination of Muslims around the world who murdered not only countless Iraqi's but also at least one person who was going to testify against the company. It's unbelievable.

The combination of this story, if it is accurate, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld putting biblical quotes on the coversheets of President Bush's Iraq War intelligence briefings paints a horrible picture of how the previous administration really saw the Iraq War...

Friday, August 7

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Big Pharma

A new study featured on MSNBC.com found that from 1996 to 2005, the number of Americans on antidepressants doubled from 13 million to 27 million, or almost 10% of the population.

According to IMS Health, in 2008 there were more than 164 million prescriptions written for antidepressants, which totalled $9.6 billion in U.S. sales. The reason this should be alarming, however, isn't mentioned in the study.

Psychologists from the University of Hull in England studied 50 clinical trials of modern antidepressants (4 Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs for short, were tested including Prozac and Efexor) and found that, for mildly depressed patients, they work no better than a sugar pill. Even the results of their efficacy for the most severely depressed patients were inconclusive.

As a results of the study, Professor Irving Kirsch from the university’s psychology department has stated:

The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking anti-depressants is not very great. This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments. Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.

The bad news doesn't end there. There is a huge collection of anecdotal evidence that SSRIs cause violent episodes and increase the patients risk of suicide. For example, both Eric Harris of the Columbine tragedy and Cho Seung-Hui of the VA Tech massacre were taking or had taken SSRI's. Because a study of 2200 children on SSRIs done by the FDA found that thoughts of suicide occurred at roughly twice the rate of a placebo, SSRIs currently have the most serious type of FDA warning: the "Black Box" label warning.

All that being said, why isn't our government doing something to protect the record number of current consumers from the potentially dangerous class of drugs? In my opinion, it again has to do with the power of money in our current political system. Courtesy of citizen.org, who produced the graph seen above, here are some interesting facts about the profitability of the drug industry:

• "it was rated the most profitable industry in 2000 and has been consistently ranked number one or two by Fortune over the past few decades"
• "Fortune reports that the 11 drug companies in the Fortune 500 enjoyed rates of profitability (measured in return on revenue) that were three to four times greater than the median for all industries in the Fortune 500. Pfizer, the second-largest drug company, has seen the value of its stock increase a stunning 1,454 percent over the last decade"
• "Public Citizen found that Fortune 500 drug companies plowed 30 percent of their revenues into marketing and administration, while committing just 12 percent of revenues to research and development"
• "The largest American drug company, Merck, had profits of $6.8 billion in 2000, which was more than the profits of all the Fortune 500 companies in the airline, entertainment, food production, metals and hotel/casino/resorts industries combined."
• "The drug industry’s success in Fortune 500 profitability rankings has become a rite of spring. In the 1970s and 1980s, Fortune 500 drug companies enjoyed rates of return on revenue that were two times greater than the median for all industries in the Fortune 500. In the 1990s, the drug industry’s rates of return on revenue were almost four times greater than the median for all industries in the Fortune 500."

In an example of what happens when the lobbyists win, all you have to do is look at Medicare Part D. By getting the now famous the-government-can't-negotiate-drug-prices-with-the-drug-companies donut hole in the program, the ten largest pharmaceutical manufacturers saw a combined $8 billion increase in their profits in just the first 6 months of the program. Also, because President Bush did not fund the program, Medicare Part D added an unfunded liability of almost 9 trillion to the national debt. Let's hope they don't get their hands on the current health care overhaul...

So, to summarize: A record number of Americans are taking a medication that may or may not be more effective than a sugar pill that has the most dangerous FDA warning because of increased risk of suicide and violence while at the same time bankrupting the nation and enriching the executives of a handful of multi-national corporations.

Bush's Legacy

According to a recent poll by The Economist, the Chinese are less tolerant to the use of torture than are Americans. How did the use of "enhanced interrogations" lead to the citizens of a democratic nation being more accepting of torture than those living under an authoritarian regime? We've come along way since George Washington said:

Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.

As well as:

Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands

Thank you George W. Bush for taking American down this path.

This Isn't Capitalism

I posted a story a few days ago about the lack of enforcement of our nations antitrust laws, and something caught my eye today that I feel is relevant to add to the story.

Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that Sprint-Nextel would be acquiring Virgin Mobile USA for $420 million. The deal would add Virgin's 5.3 million pre-paid subscribers to the 4.3 million Sprint-Nextel already had through their Boost Mobile brand. The reason I find this interesting is because in today's Financial Times, Sprint-Nextel announced that its net loss, year over year, had widened by 12% to $384m in the second quarter.

If the company is losing money, why are they buying up competitors? At what point does Sprint-Nextel attain the "too big to fail" moniker? Where is the competition in the telecommunications business? It's gotten to the point that there is no way to NOT support one of the telecom giants who assisted the NSA with Bush's illegal, domestic spying program. As a side note, Qwest was the only major company who refused to participate in the program because "it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants." What a novel concept.

I can already hear the telecoms pitching their need for a bailout from congress because if they were to fail, the US economy would grind to a halt. When our economy is being run by monopolies (Banking, Insurance, Telecom, Agri-business, etc), unregulated capitalism has reached its final stage...

Declassified Satellite Images

Satellite images of polar ice (that had been classified by the Bush administration) that were declassified last week by President Obama show just how devastating and extreme the polar meltdown has been in recent years. You read that correctly: George W Bush classified pictures that gave dramatic evidence of global climate change. I guess it was just another aspect of his War on Science. One amazing image can be seen above.

The photos, and their 1-meter resolution, helped scientists estimate the amount of ice that melted in the summer of 2007, the largest melt on record, at more than a million square kilometers. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has warned that America's satellite fleet is aging and may no longer be effective at monitoring and predicting climate change. This sentiment has also been reflected by the National Academy of Sciences in their warning that the environmental satellite network was "at risk of collapse." NASA had planned to put a high-tech, carbon-monitoring satellite into orbit earlier this year, but it crashed shortly after lift-off.

The good news is that President Obama, in his Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, has already allocated $170 million for climate modelling and the NOAA is looking for an additional $390 million to upgrade its environmental satellite fleet in 2010.

Here are two more of the freshly declassified pictures:

Democratic In-Fighting: Executive Branch

The media has done a good job showing the battles within the Democratic party vis-a-vis Congress, but they also exist within the Executive branch of government. Two examples that haven't gotten the attention they deserve involve torture prosecution and, in a story that is just breaking, antitrust enforcement.

President Obama has repeatedly stated that he wishes to look forward and not open prosecutions of any Bush administration policy, but a few weeks ago Attorney General Holder announced that he is "considering having a prosecutor investigate allegations of CIA torture of suspected terrorists, The Washington Post said." He has, however, also announced that the prosecutions would be limited to those who committed acts that went above and beyond the ones outlined in the famous torture memos and NOT to the architects of the program. This viewpoint has been eloquently challenged by the progressive Democrats in a letter to the AG by Senator Russ Feingold. I hope Holder listens...

Back in May, President Obama's antitrust chief, Christine Varney, announced that the Justice Department “will be aggressively pursuing cases where monopolists try to use their dominance in the marketplace to stifle competition and harm consumers." Apparently, the Bush Administration didn't just stop enforcing the antitrust laws already on the books, but enacted a legal policy that impeded the government’s ability to fight anticompetitive conduct by monopolistic companies in court. Despite the announcement and Mrs Varney making it clear that courts should no longer refer to the Bush administration policy, other departments within the Executive Branch are refusing to go along.

Why can't Democrats get their house in order and govern as one? It's the one aspect of politics that the Dems need to learn from the Republicans. For good or for bad, the Republican party is great at unifying their message and getting their legislative agenda passed. Personally, I suspect lobbying contributions have something to do with it.