Controlling our own destiny, as a nation.

I realize that from writing the review below that the story of us is about whether we understand historical process and use our common understanding of all mankind to shape our future in a humane way. By that I mean that if we let external events that were unforeseen or ignored shape what happens we end up cleaning up the tragedy of misguided actions by people who take advantage of us or of leaders who betray our trust. So in hindsight was see how Hitler came to power or how Bin Laden took advantage of our openness, how by ignoring things put us at a disadvantage.

The anger directed at Politicians, even after having been in office for two years, at not solving economic problems and helping distressed people reveals a short attention span and a desperate belief in the myth that these public figures had as much ability to make a difference so fast, reveals ignorance of cause and effect and of history.

It is as if the way we teach history and talk about the past and causes of events is all wrong. For one, there is too much emphasis on American History as if no other history matters, as if our experience is so valuable that we have nothing to learn from other nations. Our attitudes toward business and economics and the abuse of power by the rich would surely be different if Americans were more aware of the history of Europe through the Industrial Revolutions and the shift of power from clan and peerage to business tycoon and the response of labor movements to it. I think this topic is under explored by American historians because they are afarid of reprisals from the conservative capitalists that fund their academic institutions. This is one of many blind spots in the academic and intellectual life of this nation that will not serve us well to cope with coming challenges.

The myths that come out of schools of economics and business schools are related to the same food chain of support for academe, there must be lots of people in those disciplines revising theories that were fashionable for a long time. If Alan Greenspan can admit in his understated obscure way that he was wrong about the bubble that burst in 2008, than maybe lots of others that touted market fundementalism can reconsider.

The craziness of our politics, driven by media feeding frenzy, probably meant by the
wealthy owners of the (NOT) Liberal Media, as a distraction to what is going on behind
the scenes, not, mind you, in some grand conspiracy, but in the long term changes to the political and economic landscape that take far more patience for the average short-attention-span consumer to understand: the shift of wealth in the world, the demographic changes both at home and abroad, as well as the better known climate change and energy costs. The Nightly News' lame accounting of what the Stock Market does, daily attributing its motions to this or that particular cause, is clearly misinformation. People blame the public figures because they can be examined by the
press, the same malfeasance goes on in private business, and worse, but is much less visible, so the average Joe, who already envies business people, will have the skewed view that the problems are all with the government. Americans have very short memories and in the latest crisis they seem to have forgotten that for 28 of the last 30 years that people other than the current crop of politicians were shaping events. There is a far greater connection between Reagan and the Bushes and Bill Clinton, who is in fact a conservative pro-business Democrat, and the economic collapse then the current administration and yet they are upset that the current people can't make it all better
overnight and then say they are going to put the same sorts of ideas that created the mess back in power.

It may be the case that these people far from being shallow really do believe that Conservatives of all types had nothing to do with the meltdown, or that they are so desperate to keep their life style that they will sell themselves to any rhetoric that sounds like it will make it easier to get that next job. Remembering the demographic that a large number of voters were not around in the 1950's that they are simply not aware of the risks of uncontrolled markets; again, this is where the historians fail to educate people about the past.

Aftershock Robert Reich

There are lots of reviews of this little book, which I read today. I think that its main point that the lopsided wealth distribution with the top 10% holding 30% of the net worth of the population and the Middle Class income remaining unchanged since 1975 while productivity has increased another 20%, is at the core of the political-economic problems facing this nation.

This paints a picture of stupidity by most Americans in thinking that politicians are either the cause or the cure of long-term problems, and so the anger at incumbents is largely misplaced and ineffective. It may be the result of a misinformation campaign waged by that powerful minority of wealthy with international connections and concerns which if revealed would call into doubt their patriotism, whatever party they are in. Reich takes pains to explain how politicians and Wall Street are not at the root of the problem, that the lopsided wealth distribution is.

The most critical remarks about the book's proposals have to do with its Progressive style of fixes, creating more taxes on the rich and spreading the windfall to the poor and disadvantaged. These are very unpopular ideas right now because most people don't understand what creating a permanent under-class would do and because they admire the greed and focus of people that have made it, regardless of how.

We DO need to tax the rich more, but not make it a direct redistribution of income, but make taxes a tool to control how the wealthy use their money in this society.

I have observed in my writings some of the same economic principles that Reich describes in his book having more wealth than you can use makes your use of it inefficient unless it is invested properly, which the Crisis of 2008 showed was not sound investment by people who had control of huge quantities of wealth, and that appreciation of the top-end of a price distribution drags up the price in the entire distribution, This drove the housing bubble as the asking prices were a dangerous percentage of the net income of many borrowers who are now in foreclosure.

Reich's dire scenario for the 2020 election, in which a Libertarian-style Independent Party takes the election from the Democrats and Republicans, Abolishes the Fed, and pushes the nation in isolation behind import tarrifs and withdraw from world bodies, is just the Reactionary fantasy that plunges the world into another Depression. It would play out a cycle in US History between a prospering Middle Class and a prospering Plutocracy each at the expense of the other, the key chart in the book is the percentage of wealth held by the top 10% which peaked in the 1890's, 1828, and 2007, each before major market crashes and recessions. It is a lesson we seem to need to learn about over and over, forgetting about it when the last generation to suffer has died off.

Reich goes on the describe the pretty-standard Left of Center proposals that have been around for a long time and makes them targets for dismissal by many people who think that the government should not be helping the disadvantaged, except of course that a much larger percentage of the population is being disadvantaged by the economic shift and that the only thing that prevents the anger from spilling out onto the streets is that many Americans blame politicians, which is largely a misplaced anger, and that they admire wealthy and successful people, wanting to become like them, not having realized that these people have gotten more wealthy and have more power at their own expense. When that realization reaches a tipping-point there will be a sea change in American politics that has never occurred before, because America has always had a way to grow out of its inequalities. That may not be true anymore, and with no Frontier, recalling that even during the Great Depression of the 1930's that migration was a way out. I think that Reich's Reactionary political swing will either not happen or it will quickly be overtaken by outside events, such as a world war.

It would be easy for Congress to roll back the perks given the rich especially since 1980 without earmarking the money for a dole, but if history is any guide, the cycle of inequality may already be forming its response which will have exactly the same effect as a tax on the wealthy. The critics of the New Deal claimed that it was WW II that ended the Great Depression and regardless of whether this was true or not, the world wide economic collapse of the 1930's made it easier for dictators of all sorts to come to power and wage war. So, if bad economics sowed dragon's teeth, the rich
wound up paying a tax. It is just too bad that more than 25 Million people had to pay with their lives as a result.

Why I HATE Textarea Editors

The last post was ruined by Google's broken editor which does not gracefully handle font changes. I would be forced to edit the HTML by hand, which I would do if it weren't so ugly. Since Google doesn't really host web content, I couldn't edit my own web page, get it how I like it, and upload it, even if I have to get it verified first. You get what you get here and I guess I will think hard about posting more here since Google seems intent on ruining your work.

I did knuckle under and edit the HTML by hand. What I found was the the nesting of <span> elements had gotten mis-matched. The nesting was messed up and it was easy to do as I have poor vision and have to retype a good deal. The resulting HTML was a mess. I am glad that Google hasn't taken away the HTML view the way it has in Google Documents, or when I last checked.

I was able to get it into some reasonable form by fixing the nesting of elements.

PG and E, Why we need MORE Govt., Not less!

PG and E and the San Bruno Gas Explosion

The high-pressure gas line that exploded last week was owned by the utility company for Northern California, Pacific Gas and Electric, which recently has had a checkered history and strained relations with the public and the regulators.

This is a sound example of why Conservative politics that puts more power into the hands of the wealthy and of private business is dangerous to the interest of the majority of citizens and needs to be restrained by public policy, by public disclosure and public regulation by government.


PG&E is doing all the misinformation seen in other for profit special interests.


Like BP this summer PG&E has learned that the better PR is to jump in and help immediately even if the aid is a token meant to protect their bottom line. The history of their troubled relations with their customers and the regulators proceedes them, however. After the explosion it came out that people in the neighborhood repeatedly called them telling of the odor of gas. You would think that the fact, which should have been well known to PG&E's support staff that a high-pressure gas line runs next to that area would raise red flags and cause them to send out a crew multiple times to investigate. Yesterday a spokesman said that the utility had recieved no such calls from the public, an obvious lie. The National Transportation Safty Board (NTSB) should by now have heard the claims of PG&E's customers to the contreary and force the company to disclose its support records. It will take the NTSB over a year to set the cause, and I am betting at that time that they will cite PG&E's denialism by its support people to heed what in retrospect was a real warning.

So why the disinformation campaign so soon? It is because, like BP, a for-profit business has a built in conflict with its customers. Its incentives toward its bottom line is to give as little for as much as it can charge. This is fine as long as costs keep dropping and as long as there is competition in its market to force it to pass its savings onto its customers. I can hear Conservatives at this point clamoring that the reason PG&E has any monopoly at all is because it IS regulated and that de-regulating utilities is in line with their political exonomics. I have a one word reply, Enron! The hold PG&E has on the market is due to its control of the local energy grid. Some local groups said that they wanted to generate green energy locally reducing their dependance on the grid. That is why PG&E spent $47 million to back Propisition 15 in the last election in order to protect that investment, that monoply, which ruse the voters saw through and defeated. Prehaps they should have spent that money on maintaining high pressure gas lines which they will now have to spend no matter what their bottom line says.

PG&E's Support Problems and its Bottom Line

There has been a big controversary about the utility's effort to install so-called Smart Meters to replace the analog meters that have been used for years, but they have lost the public's trust because their support and PR conduct has failed to ensure that people are reasonably served. It may turn out in the end that the new meters may actualy help customers better manage their energy use, but PG&E has to make up for ground lost because it stonewalled on those cases where people saw huge spikes in their bills after one of the new meters was installed, and because its support culture may be corrupted. Several years ago the utility cut maintainence and support to help its bottom line. This may be coming home to roost as its support groups ignore the needs of its customers, yet another case of the conflict between cost and service in a for-profit climate.

Having worked in support for several public companies, I know first hand how a culture of denial and contempt for the customers can develope if the management is too concerned with the bottom line and not attentive to the message and results. Both companies I know about are no more. I left them because my management had not done the right thing, and in one case the manager came to me several years later and admitted to me that the organization had not done the right thing. In fact, as it turns out a VP was defrauding its customers and a take over by another company was all that prevented the VP from going to prison.

In the wake of the defeat of the ballot iniative, the Iniative process in California is terribly broken as is the budgitary process because of the sucessful efforts of Conservatives to weaken the state government and resulting in a general neglect of infrastructure, PG&E launched a smiley-faced ad campaign claiming that it was doing enough to bring alternative energy options into its operation. I say "lie" every time I see that ad, because I know that the Grid is designed mostly to use legacy energy sources, natural gas, oil, and electricity from fossil fuel generators, not new energy sources. That is the threat of local energy competition with the grid, that the value of the utility's capital investment will go down if suddenly everybody installs solar panels and their metered use of electricity goes negative.

The Lexus and the Pothole

This idea was one that I formulated in response to Conservatives whose attitudes would result in infrastructue decay. It says they wouldn't notice the impact until their luxery car hits a hole in pavement and literally wracks up a bill for repairs since the public agency that keeps the road they use repaired lets the maintenence schedule slide because of declining revenue brought on by tax cuts on the wealthy and declining business tax due to mismanagement of investiments in the economy driven largely by conservatives in managment who want less regulation but are willing to let their greed allow them to take what has emerged as unreasonable risks. The call to de-regulate always implies an increase in responsibility on the part of investors and business. This has not gone well.

Whom do you trust less?

People are people no matter who they work for. They all have the same set of failings where a greater stake in the status quo in concerned. That is why the blame can go all around, to the utility and to its regulators. A group called the Public Utilities Comission (PUC) is supposed to oversee PG&E, indeed one of its employees was among the still-rising death toll from the disaster. The type of people you meet sometimes that like to negate any conflict they encounter, to reduce it to a nullification will say: "Oh well, everybody is lazy and selfish." and try to make issues go away. The trouble is that there is a big difference from public and private empres. It is that there is lots more disclosure in the public sector in the private. PG&E is a little unique in having to strattle that divide and so we may eventually get more insight into how internal decisions were made than we might get from almost any other for profit. I know how to shut up Conservatives for good. It is to make them to agree to disclose as much as what has to be disclosed by public bodies. That would be met by stunned silence.

Media Coverage Skews Awareness


I mean something particular about this. It is that the public watching the news might get the wrong impression that all of the contention is within the public sector; that the varities of human nature play out in the conflict of unions working for governments having to close budget gaps in public. But the same things and worse happen behind the closed doors of for profits defended by the blind law of the bottom line and out of the scrutany and moral judgement or morally anguished decision making if all of these matters had to be aired in public. Rembering that the same kind of people run both public and private organizations, and that the lust for power finds its way equaly into the statehous and legislature as the boardroom and executive offices, it is significant that the difference in disclosure matters. The case of Anthem-Blue-Cross comes to mind. They took a big hit when its was disclosed how much they were going to raise insurance rates; infact when no one is paying attention and the focus has been destracted by the Health Care Bill, which has lots of loopholes, they are quietly raising the rates by the same ammount.

Hidden Tricks of Regulation


There is good reason to hate Congress, or legislatures in general, or all Politicians. It is because they lie out one side of their mouths, and regulation and infrastructure issues like the ones that caused this diaster reveal how. Not only is the for profit business cutting corners, but the regulators and the legislative bodies that fund them are cutting corners. Ironically the reasons why those responsible chintz are opposite. Politicians knee-jerk respond to public pressure for more, and deliver less in the end, and for profits claim they are doing more for less, especially to their investors. The way this works in government is that legislatures pass laws that have "fiscal impact" that is they cost somebody, the taxpayers, to implement, to enforce. So legislatures and Governors and the President of the US all know that they can talk out of both sides of their mouth, fill the emotional clamor to fix something, and when the interest is destracted, prehaps in the next budget cycle, underbudget or fail to fund effective enforcement. This really becomes obvious in diasters, whether it is Katrina, although in that case the Conservatives may have deliberately appointed incompetants to office to make sure the government can't work, i.e. George W. Bush, and Mike Brown who headed FEMA at the time, or whether it is the PUC or other state or federal agency with a conflict of interest, promoting the industry it regulates, or who was underfunded to regulate effectively, the FDA, for example, or Dept. of Interior with respect to the BP spill.

Yellowstone Hot Spot shreds Subducting plate

I want to put on my geologist hat ( MS, '73, Stanford) and comment on an interesting article:

Citation: Obrebski, M., R. M. Allen, M. Xue, and S.-H. Hung (2010), Slab-plume interaction beneath the Pacific Northwest, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L14305, doi:10.1029/2010GL043489.

Whose abstract and a summery I've seen on the web. I haven't read the original article, fortunately I live within walking distance of the USGS Library in Menlo Park Ca.

The article uses some mantle geophysical sensing to claim that the Yellowstone hot spot brunt through the soft subducted Juan de Fuca plate and caused the flood basalts of Washington, the Snake River, and east to where it lies beneath Yellowstone Caldera, today. The regional map shown in the science news web site shows the trend of the volcanos that begin at the Oregon/Nevada border and trend with a slight bend to the left toward the north east. The summary says that the mantle plume forced its way up about 19 MYA through a rip or weakness in the subducting plate. I wonder if the authors of the paper have considered the Mendecino Transform as the weakness. It would be a transcurent fault that connects a former southern jog of the East Pacific Rise that was partly destroyed to create the San Andreas fault system of California (Atwater, 1970). This article claims that the effect of the mantle plume slowed the rate of subduction of the plate, which would happen if the plate in the mantle is disrupted and cannot exert pulling force on the remaining plate.

I have to find out the ages of the Washington Flood Basalts to find if they are generally older than the string of calderas that mysteriously begin just south of them and just north of the Basin Range Province. It has been known for some time that the latter was a region of uplift, extension and then volcanism which is older than 19 MYA. If the ages are right, the mantle plume may have caused all of these features as it lay trapped under the crust, heating and stretching and then emerging once the pent up heat and magma is released as the flood basalts and lesser regional volcanism of the Basin Range. Once that happens, the plume emerges through the crust as the string of caldaras with a change in plate motion possible about 16 MYA, roughly.

I have also been wondering for some time if the East Pacific Rise segment that was subducted is really extinct. There is the thing called the San Andreas Anomaly in which not all the convergence of North America and Pacific Plate is accounted for my strike slip on the SAF. A mantle plume could explain the oddly wide orogenic provinces of Western North America, but so could a not quite dead spreading center that might be taking strain off the SAF and trying to open a seaway further east. Maybe someday there will be beach front property in Death Valley and Los Vagas as the Gulf of California extends into North America.

Talent is Overrated by Geoff Covin

I Posted this to a blog:


I just glanced at this book, it was mis-shelved in the computer section; it belongs in Business and Management, which is the main problem I have with its ideas. Aside from the fact that Colvin seems to completely misunderstand the magnitude of the achievement of an 11 year old Mozart to write seven symphonies and get the function of the Augmented Sixth Chord established, and that the message of concerted practice at anything is obvious, it is the audience the book is directed to that bothers me the most, the very goal-oriented results-driven who distract the people who work with them from creativity and the support it needs. It seems to me that the most important factor in talent is a zen quality to be single minded in attention to the craft and to not care or be distracted either by what others want or say, least of all the average idiot who manages others. America will revert to a second class power because of its focus on results rather than its encouragement of talent. The latter will find better soil elsewhere, and not in Asia, but in Europe where it thrives because of a better toleration and not a short term ROI, that spoils things here. Cheap and Chintz will not reward Patience.

And I added:


Just an after thought on what I wrote above. The issue that is most glossed over in books written for business people about the people they manage is forming goals, and that relates to talent where goals were formed long before some business-types encounters someone whose abilities he may or may not call talent. It is because the business person does not recognize talent; he only sees a possible fit with HIS goals. And that is where Colvin’s idea falls apart. People become famous, or get recognition, or get hired, or get rich, NOT because they are talented, but because the average idiots in the world see value in what they do. The lesson of history is that most of whom we recognize from the past who have contributed to us with what we would call talent go unrecognized by their contemporaries and if we are to encourage that as a result the very last people whose judgement we ought to trust are results-driven business people. They don’t know anything; their word is not to be trusted at all.

It takes time for the truth to become visible and emphasis on short-term ROI is the last way to find out.

Is the American Political System Relavant at all?

The purpose of a political system in a free society is to have an open debate about the priorities represented by actions and sanctions taken about the activities of its population and in response to the activities of other countries and groups. I think this sounds vague, but it is important to set a framework for breaking through the rhetorical positions of the political factions here, and to point out how destructive these positions are to a meaningful public discourse and problem solving at the level of the nation as a whole, and to the States that make up the Union. A failure for the process to respond to critical need results in a loss of faith in the organizations and threatens the very integrity of the Union. This is not a far-off possibility.

If the job to focus on is that the actions of the branches of government is to set the priorities in society, not just of government spending, but through its influence over private business, to set national goals and to enforce national values, I contend that the rhetoric of the current political process obscures this function and that the conflict of interest of the major players sows the seeds for the abandonment of the system.

One may regard that no matter what the fortunes of the current political factions that failure to heed external limiting factors that reside in the Earth's biosphere now increasingly impacted by human activity will hasten the invalidation of these political and economic traditions and memes; that the human intention and ideology is trumped by the play of external limiting factors and random events.

The political process is too slow and inefficient to respond effectively and that given the accleration of human impact on the planet that no matter how well intentioned it will be discredited by a failure to act in time. The dialectical process of competing political factions does not leave time to effectively find a solution to a particularly pressing disaster and rather than working its effect through obvious catastrophe it will undermine itself through neglect. Those left out will lose faith in institutions, no matter how vaunted their design, prove to be made ineffective.

In the case of the BP oil spill, the political dialectic of the competing interests of the oil company to cut its losses, with its ability to delay and wait out those it has injured, along with caution in the government resonse that is seen as collusion or ineffectiveness, results in a raising of mistrust in all the powerful interests that in turn leads to an undercutting of their power. Ultimately money and investment does not replace trust and good-will, and if this is exaggerated by mismanagement of limiting factors in the economic and ecological process that the response is based upon, the dissolution is hastened.

This is why a simple change of political direction toward one of the poles of the political specturm wll not work; and why thinking about the underlying process of how priorities are set is a better way to proceed, and that the consequences of not acting effectively are not described by a conventional profit/loss or risk analysis, in other words the assessment of risk will be wrong. The consequences of that will not be forseen and can include a destruction of populations and wealth on a grand scale even if that consequence does not include World War. It will render political theory and traditions of politics irrevalant. It will probably render economic theory irrevalant as well.

I think I understand the cost of healthcare

Some facts I have heard recently about health care have suggested to me that the cause of the excessive cost of health care in America is linked to the rise of the housing bubble, and if economic history is any guide the bubble that is health care should burst rendering the current political battle over it moot. Or at least we might be able to do something about the bubble through the law, which might be better than doing nothing, this is risky because we don't know about the effectiveness of the law.

As I understand it the main thing that drives the Republican and Right-Wing opposition to Obamacare, the Health Care Reform legislation just pased, and why the reaction is so swift, is the idea that the government can force everyone to have to buy health insurance. That is the basis of up coming court challenges to the law, and the threat that government programs will erode that quality some people see in what they have now, including medicare, but certaintly also private medical coverage.

What doctors are saying now about the system, because they are on the front lines and will be affected by the changes in the law, is that the problem in that the per-capita cost of health care in the USA is about twice that of the nearest other nation, a nation about as wealthy as ours, and that problem is created by the demands of their patients. It is alittle more complicated than that because the government is a large player in the current system. The bitter pill, say the doctors, is that the expectations of their patients will have to change and that could take decades if the costs are going to come down on their own.

This sounds to me like the process that started the housing bubble, which I saw first in California in the 1970's, when high-paid tech workers started to bid up prices. One can label this supply and demand, and talk about the setting of price in a so-called free market, but in so doing one has to describe why such markets go very much ary and when the consequences become life-and-death as in the delivery of medical care when it is critical, we can agree that the behavior of a market becomes rather more important than whether or not someone gets the American Dream of owing their own home. But I can see that the economic mechanism is the same and with the same gremlins of assymetry in the flow of information, making unregulated markets generally not ideal models either of rational behavior or just allocation of a scarce resource. Enter Obama, wanting to fix inbalances created in the market for health care and insurance, mitigation of risk from sickness and disability. The government is a check on the sociopathy of markets that replace empathy with fiancialization. A legitimate role of public policy is to answer the blind spot created by reducing everything to its equivailent dollar value. This is especially true when the big-spenders skew the price distribution.

I am not an economist, but what the housing appreciation of the 1970's taught me is that supply and demand leads to the high-end driving up the price distribution regardless of the real value of the goods being supplied. This leads to huge margins in the construction of homes and the resale of existing homes. The market becomes rigged as the lenders and sellers speculate on the price, and the whole bubble bursts when the process becomes unsustainable. The markket fundementalists assert that if left alone such process will find a rational equilibrium, which mistaken assumption is based on the even flow of information between lenders and barrowers. This does not happen very well which is why is leads to cycles that end in chaos. The conservative finance types insist that the rigging is not their fault and blame regulators, whereas it is greed and self-interest that leads to secrecy that causes the imbalance.

The same thing is going to happen with health care, and some aspects are already taking place.Why are insurance companies getting so stingy with coverage? Is it possibly because they have access to information about their customers that is new, read electronic medical records, and they can cherry pick the least risky people to cover. They are not forced to disclose this process nor are they forced to compensate the people they have disadvantaged. This is why the legislation says that they can not longer refuse coverage. What it does not say is how much they get to charge for assuming that risk. There may be a hidden factor in this that maybe the insurance companies can't rise the the capital to meet the demand and are forced by the Bond Market to seek lower risk customers. This is means that the whole theory of managing risk with private insurance is under attack.

More importantly, like the high-end of the housing market driving all the prices up, the demand that people have for large intervention acute care for medical conditions, whith much less emphesis on preventative care, drives the cost of medical care up for everybody.

The Tea-Parties don't want to give up the perks this system has given them. They might fight to the death, literally, to keep what a skewed system has given them, which explains why they are so adiment, althiugh I think their activism is an almagum of issues ranging from regional animosities to Libertarian-like populism. For a while I had thought that this represented an early or possibly continuing manifestation of a class war in America, but for now it is enough to analyze it in terms of a classic rigged "free" market.

So, lets prognosticate. Suppose the legislation just passed had failed, or that the provision in it forcing everybody to get insurance is ovturned in the courts, or worse, the numbers don't deliver the savings to the National Debt or the real costs of health care don't come down, in other words, the legislation doesn't have the desired effect, as if it was never passed. The Right Wing asserts that this is what is going to happen anyway, goverment doesn't work, and maybe the GOP sees to that by appointing incompatants to office, making sure that their political economy is correct, so then what?

I think that the result if the fixes don't work and we get the status guo is a meltdown of health care in the form of a bubble, and that we may get what the conservatives fear the most, a disincentive to train doctors and their support staffs and the changing of the orientation of people trained in health care to it being a public service rather than a for-profit business. The beaucrats who overburden the system will surely go. Many hospitals and insurance companies and many HMOs will fail, and they may anyway, there will be a doctor and nurse shortage, and those who survive will have to learn how to efficiently dispense their expertise, and that will certaintly involve use of less-skilled people in public health out reach and preventative medicine. There will be deaths from this process; there will be people who will not be seen with the right intervention, but that is bound to happen now with the investment market driving the priorities of the system. This is why I support generally the intent of the passed legislation. I just never bought the argument that a government agency controlling costs and influiencing life and death decisions is any worse than some insurance underwriter hidden deep in the bowels of some corporation in Hartford Conn. At least it is easier to scrutanize the government than some corporation.

Broken American Politics

The debate which resulted in the passage of Health Care Reform and the continuing battle and the passions it has stirred up reveals that the American Political system is itself sick. It is not just the rhetoric and anger, but the polerization and lack of compromise which worries me.

I really blame the GOP and Right Wingers for this, although the situation was helped by strategic decisions by the Democrats. The Republicans and others on the Right suffer from such extremism that they can't even see that the abuses they supported by George W. Bush had almost destroyed them, now they are back as if they had no part in the scandal and corruption they were party to.

For her part Nancy Pilosi should hever have agreed to ananesty for Bush and Chany for war crimes and Obama should have reversed TARP and the Bank Bailout. They get the GOP and right wingers off easy and they came roaring back and its not over, because the Right could still undo this law and more.
If I were in her district, I wouldn't vote for her, even though she has been touted today as the most power speaker of the house.

I wonder if the state of American Politics really represents that a class war is going on, and has been going on for some time. There are many factons on the Right that pride themselves in no compromise, whether it is Right to Life, Fundementalist Christians, or Market Fundementalists such as Libertarians.
What the Health Care debate reverals is that the Party of No finds support from people who believe "I've got mine, screw you." a siege mentality. What this country needs is a retreat from that mentality and replacing it with one in which we share a common stake in the future.

Another indicator of this is how fiscal conservatives are allowing the states to falter vua under taxation and that the nation's public schools are being allowed to be destroyed. Rather than having the businesses who benefit from a well-educated domestic workforce pay their fair share in taxes, the No Tax Increase Republicans are standing pat on the insistance that states be allowed to fail because their revenues and investments have failed linked to the business cycle promoted by the GOP and free market advocates. One must question the partitism of the Right and in addition wheather any of these people believe that America has a future.

Health Care Reform Bill passes

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a Health Care Reform bill by a slim margin and the contentious issue is not going away. Already some states want to outlaw it and there are legal challenges already in the works. The battle has divided the country along conservative and liberal lines; it seems that the most contentious issue is the requirement that everybody buy insurance, and the argument that because of the power of the government that it will drive private companies out of health care. The argument has become very heated and the vitrol seems to come from several sources, not the least from people who are worried that they will lose their benefits or choices.

Some facts are that 87% of Americans have some form of Insurance, but that the rest, about 45 million either cannot afford to pay premiums or have been refused helathcare insurance. The bill aims to insure between half and two thirds of them through subsidies for the cost of getting insurance and it makes getting insurance by 2014 manditory.

I will be eligible for Medicare in two years and for me the benefit of the bill is that most of my prescription drug costs will be covered, along with what i will get under Medicare for doctor and hospital care.

One of the things I like best about the plan is the emphasis given to preventative care. It has been claimed that people with so-called "Cadillac" plans, which would be taxed, don't go for preventative care.

I am still puzzled by the rage this issue has seemingly caused in the piblic, which is in part fanned by the politicians who opposed it. There is alot of partisan politics and we haven't finished the battle over this. Like some of FDR's legislation the opponants will fight this in the courts even if Obama loses supporters who get defeated in the mid year elections.