Helicopter Harold

Harold Ford Jr., DLC Chairman, charter school proponent, union buster, and a former congressman from the right-to-work state of Tennessee, would like to run for Senate here in New York.

Just as he inherited his House seat from his daddy, Harold Ford Sr., Harold Jr. is hoping to work as little as possible at this and have prominent supporters (i.e., people with lots money) buy the Senate seat for him.

Don't laugh - connections have worked for him more than once.

Not only did he owe his Congressional seat to his family connections, he now works at a Wall Street bank even though he knows nothing about finance. Can't imagine he would have gotten that job without some connections.

And he's married to a fashionista wife with a wealthy family and lives in the Gramercy Park neighborhood with a winter home in Miami, though he's still registered to vote in Tennessee.

Guess it doesn't matter much when you live in that kind of rarefied air.

What a charmed life Harold Jr. lives - even more charmed when you consider the one job he tried on his own - law - he failed at because he couldn't pass the Tennessee bar.

That's all right, though - when you're as connected as Harold Jr. is, you don't actually have to succeed at anything.

Stuff just comes to you.

But I wonder if he's not shooting his sights a little high with Kirsten Gillibrand's Senate seat.

True, fellow charter school proponent Mayor Moneybags is a huge supporter of Ford and just might bankroll him in the race.

But Harold Jr. seems a little tin-eared to me to be a success in NY.

For instance, Harold Jr. says he's never actually seen much of New York outside of Manhattan except by helicopter when he's flown over the city on the way from the heliport to the airport.

Not kidding - that's what he told the NY Times in an interview.

He also says he loves to breakfast at the Regency Hotel and picks his favorite football teams by which football team owner he spends the most time with.

How's that for charmed living?

But he's never even seen the BQE, the LIE or the subway.

That should work great in campaign commercials.

Vote for me, I only know your state when I fly over it!

Anyway, it remains to be seen if Harold Jr. actually gets in this race (I suspect he won't now that most people are laughing at him) but I would say watch out for him to pop up and do damage elsewhere.

Anybody as clueless as Helicopter Harold Jr. doesn't know just how much he doesn't know and will no doubt show up in some prominent position to screw something important up.

I just hope it's not in education.

UPDATE: Taegan Goddard surmises Ford may not only be using Mayor Moneybags' dough to run for Senate, he might be using his political playbook as well:

Former Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) may be planning an independent bid in New York for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

Two key factors:

* Ford is primarily being advised by close advisers to independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
* Ford's recent rhetoric of being "independent" from Democratic leaders makes little sense in a Democratic primary.

However, it was a conversation with someone in Ford's inner circle that convinced me this might be his ultimate strategy. If New York Republicans run a weak candidate, he could essentially follow the Joe Lieberman path to the Senate.

An interesting side note: Both Lieberman and Ford were heads of the Democratic Leadership Council.

That may make more sense than running as a Dem against a well-funded Gillibrand.

Still, I think he can be dispatched pretty easily.

Just run ads with all the stupid stuff he says that make him sound like the spoiled blue blood brat he actually is.

SECOND UPDATE: Was it Shakespeare who once said, "First thing we do is kill all the DLC chairmen?"

Excise Tax Lives

Details have emerged on the "compromise" between unions and the White House on the excise tax. Here they are:

Unions had opposed the measure, which, as originally designed, would have imposed a 40 percent excise tax on insurance policies that cost more than $23,000 for families, and $8,500 for individuals, indexed just above inflation.

Under the terms of the proposed deal, the threshold for families would be raised to $24,000, and would exempt certain benefits like vision and dental, according to a Democratic source.

Collectively bargained plans would be exempted until 2017, to provide workers with a real opportunity to renegotiate their benefits packages, which were designed under current law and excluded from taxation.

The White House appears to have stood its ground, though, on the question of how to index the tax. By indexing it just above the consumer price index, the provision generates a great deal of cost-savings, which are crucial to getting a passing score from CBO.

Labor officials and progressives had suggested the index would have to be raised to keep pace with medical inflation--a tweak that would prevent the tax from ensnaring middle class people over time, but that would also eliminate the measure's savings potential. But they seem to have lost that fight.

So Obama is still going to f@$k union members, just not until 2017.

Notice too that if your plan is not part of collective bargaining, it is subject to the tax sooner (perhaps as early as 2011.)

So Obama still wants the middle and working class to fund his health care goodie giveaway to the insurance industry.

Labor got some concessions, but when you're dealing with a corporate whore like Obama, I guess there is only so much you can do.

I know what I'm going to do.

Write the White House again to tell them what I think about the excise tax and the corporate whore sitting in the Oval Office.

Then I'm going to write my senators and congressman and tell them what I'm going to do if they vote for health care (HINT: it involves staying home to count Republican votes in 2010 and 2012 on TV.)

Then I'm going to watch very closely to see if the progressives in the House can kill this provision from the bill before it goes for a final vote.

Finally, I am going to root for the Republican to beat the Dem in the special election in Mass to fill Teddy Kennedy's seat.

That may the only way to stop this abomination from becoming law.

What a f@$k Obama is. Much worse than even I thought - and I thought he was going to be pretty bad.

Most Americans Would Vote For Anybody Other Than Obama

Here is how badly Obama's fortunes have fallen in less than a year in office:

A new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll finds 39% of Americans would cast a ballot for President Obama in 2012, while 50% say they would probably or definitely vote for someone other else.

That didn't take long.

The amount of good will and political capital squandered by this president is unbelievable.

The right thinks he's an illegal immigrant, the middle thinks he's a tax and spend liberal and the left thinks he's a corproate whore.

Heckuva job, Barack!!!

Unions Continue Pushback On Excise Tax

Sam Stein at Huffingtonpost reports that union leaders stayed at the White House until midnight last night working on an excise tax compromise.

Here is the gist of what Stein reports:

The excise tax remains in the health care "reform" bill, but union workers would be exempt from having to pay it.

In addition, union leaders are pushing to have non-union workers with employer-provided health care plans who make under $200,000 a year also excluded from the excise tax.

Finally, union leaders want state and government workers in right-to-work states exempted from the tax as well.

"This is not simply just a deal for unions," said one of the sources briefed on the conversations. "This will take the burden off middle-class individuals as well."

If Obama is forced to accept this compromise, it absolutely will take the burden off middle class and working class Americans.

But we will have to be vigiliant to see that it isn't added back stealthily over the years.

And it is incumbent to remember that President Change We Can Believe In wanted to (and still wants to) fund his health care goodies package to the insurance industry on the backs of union members and middle and working class Americans.

It's not a done deal yet, but if the worst excesses of this excise tax are killed, it will also be important to remember that Obama would have gotten his way too had Big Labor not fought back.

And notice that Randi Weingarten and the AFT were not at all part of the pushback.

Update On Excise Tax

Sam Stein reports union leaders continue to battle Obama on the excise tax on employer-provided health care plans. They met with the president again yesterday to hammer out some compromise:

Negotiators are poised to raise the threshold of the tax, making it so that family plans valued at $25,000 (not $23,000) are now taxed. In exchange, a small tax would be placed on the wealthy to help fill in the funding hole created by raising the tax threshold. There is also talk of exempting all collectively bargained health care plans from the so-called Cadillac tax.

There is no word yet as to whether this would be acceptable for union leaders. White House officials, meanwhile, have refused to comment about ongoing negotiations.

Still not good enough. Lots of people have plans that have not been collectively bargained and raising the tax threshold on family plans only delays who gets taxed by this.

Kill the excise tax or kill the bill.

Dennis Kucinich on The Ed Schultz Show last night said over and over again that the excise tax remains the most "significant roadblock" to health care reform, there is "great resistance" to the tax and "this bill is in trouble if they think they can keep the excise tax in there."

Kill the excise tax or kill the bill.

This president thinks funding his health care reform giveaway to the health insurance industry can be funded on the backs of working and middle class Americans and union members with this excise tax even though he promised not to raise taxes on middle and working class Americans.

Kill the excise tax or kill the bill.

Unions Fight Back

Before an audience at the National Press Club, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka let Barack Obama and the Democratic establishment have it for screwing union members and working and middle class Americans with an excise tax on their employer-provided health care plans:

"In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised health care reform," Trumka said, according to a version of his prepared remarks. "Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street -- and not much more. We swallowed our disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was. But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the difference between the two parties. Politicians who think that working people have it too good -- too much health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too much power on the job -- are inviting a repeat of 1994."

That is exactly what Barack Obama and the Senate leadership are doing by insisting Obama's health care giveaway to the insurance industry be funded on the backs of working and middle class Americans with employer-provided health care plans.

They are saying "You have it too good now, we have to make life a little tougher for you, make your bills a little higher."

And why?

Because Obama doesn't want to raise taxes on individuals making more than $500,000 a year or families making over $1 million.

Sounds like George Bush and the Republicans to me.

Is that the Change America voted for?

I think not, though I suspect it will be the Change we get because Obama thinks progressives and liberals won't abandon the party or him come 2010 and 2012.

But I want to enlighten him that pissing off the unions and screwing union members, the very people who put his lying corporate whore ass in the White House in the first place, is going to make 2010 very ugly and send him home in 2012.

You can bet on that.

Just look at tonight's CBS poll to see where things are going - Obama's at 45% approval.

Or this CNN poll where more Americans say Obama's administration has been a failure than a success.

Or the latest polls on the special election in Mass to replace Ted Kennedy - a Republican might actually win that race.

That's how demoralized and disgusted the Democratic base are by this corporate whore in the White House.

And that's how much Americans are also coming to dislike this president.

Bloomberg's The Best At Everything!!!!

Bloomberg says fire fatalities are the lowest since 1918.

Last week he said murders are the lowest since Peter Stuyvesant owned the joint.

And of course we know we have the most edumacated students in all the land - with those high test scores and grad rates Bloomberg and Klein have brought us.

And we have the lowest levels of trans fats in the nation too!!!

And restaurants with low-sodium food!!!

And the best public parks located in the middle of traffic anybody could ever want!!!

What an amazing place to live, this Bloomberg's New York.

And this Bloomberg is just the best at everything!!!!

Wished I believed he wasn't full of shit on so much of this.

But I know better and I still say knowing how he screws with the education numbers, he's screwing with the fire fatalities and homicide rate too.

That's what a crook like Bloomberg - Wall Street trained like all good crooks are these days - does.

Screw with the numbers and know that the corporate-owned media won't call him on any of it.

NCLB Reauthorization

On Saturday, the Washington Post looked at the Obama administration's upcoming No Child Left Behind reauthorization push.

The gist of what will happen is best summed up by Diane Ravitch:

"They're really not going to repudiate No Child Left Behind," Ravitch said. "They're just going to rename it and add the twist of more choice, more accountability."

Like Mayor Bloomberg, like Bill Gates, like Eli Broad, like all the hedge fund managers/education "reformers," Obama wants to destroy teachers unions, sell off the public schools to the privatization folks, and make schools into 10 hour a day/300 day a year factories for churning out good corporate employees willing to work longer and harder to make a lot less than their parents and grandparents.

More change we can believe in from the Change We Can Believe In President.

One thing I would note about the NCLB fight - Obama is a weakened president already. Whatever cache and juice he had last year has been tarnished - people on the extreme right think he's a foreign-born terrorist, people in the middle are unhappy with the bailout policies and overall direction of the country, and some (though not nearly enough yet) on the left see him as corporate sell-out.

Obama can be fought on this.

Had he pushed through NCLB in 2009, he would have gotten everything he wanted.

But with Ted Kennedy deceased and Chris Dodd so weakened by his Countrywide scandal that he is retiring from the Senate, Tom Harkin is the new head of the Education Committee. Ed Week says the administration may actually get some opposition from Harkin to their reform plans:

Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, said he sees Harkin as “more of a traditional Democrat on education issues” than Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and an author of the NCLB law.

“Assuming that the administration is interested in promoting Race to the Top-style priorities through the [NCLB] reauthorization, Harkin could be trickier for them,” Mr. Hess said

As chairman, Harkin may provide a needed check on the administration’s agenda, Hess said. “We need more speed bumps, and Harkin is certainty more likely to be a speed bump than Dodd” would have been.

Also, Obama has spent a lot of political capital on the still incomplete health care reform measure, the economy remains in bad shape for nearly everybody but the people who work on Wall Street, unemployment remains at 10% and a double dip recession is not out of the question once government stimulus spending comes to an end. Obama will take a lot more heat in the coming days for the bailout mess as it becomes quite clear that his treasury secretary, Timmeh Geithner, gave away the store to Goldman Sachs, et al. And that's assuming that the terrorist threat doesn't continue to occupy much of his time and energy.

My point about all this is we may have a bit of an ally in the Senate to pushback on Duncan and Obama on some of the reforms they want to push and much of the country, weary already of President Accountability and his economic policies and the health care fight, may not be so thrilled about the permanent systemic change he wants to bring to education.

The key is to get the unions to see that Obama is weakened and can be taken down in this fight. Randi is a collaborator by nature, so I worry that despite a president with a tanking popularity and enough opposition in the country to push back against ed deform, she'll choose to cave instead.

Guess we'll just have to see.

In the meantime, I'm hoping the Repub actually wins that special election up in Mass (it may be close) and sends President Accountability his own accountability message - liberals are pissed off at him and willing to see his administration and its corporate-friendly agenda go down in flames rather than vote for crap they don't want just because it's a "Democrat" giving it to them.

Not to mention that would be the end of the health insurance giveaway program Obama is terming "reform," which just might be the best thing that could happen for both the long-term health of the Democratic Party and the country at large

It's Only Teachers Who Are Accountable

The financial system nearly collapsed last year because people in the financial industry at "Too Big To Fail" institutions like AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and others took too much risk and needed to be bailed out by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Many of those same people are being rewarded with seven and eight figure bonuses this year.

The financial policy makers who helped create this mess - like Ben Bernanke who voted yes on every Greenspan "moral hazard" policy decision and who has been printing money hand over fist to give to the "Too Big To Fail" institutions and Treasury Timmeh Geithner who oversaw the AIG bailout wherein he handed AIG counterparties 100 cents to the dollar on money owed to them for toxic assets they themselves had bought that were worth at best 20 cents and who asked one of those counterparties, Goldman Sachs, to keep this deal secret from the investigators at the SEC - continue to cheerfully make financial policy.

In fact, Obama renominated Bernanke for another four years and the administration said last week that Geithner has the full confidence of the president.

On December 25, 2009, a Nigerian man set his penis on fire trying to blow up a plane over Detroit. The man's father had warned the State Department that he had become radicalized and was a danger to the United States. In addition, the CIA knew he visited radical elements in Yemen and was a danger to the United States. Nonetheless the man bought a one way ticket with cash and bordered a plane in Nigeria without any luggage and flew to the United States with a visa that said he was coming for a "religious ceremony" (a jihadi euphemism for martyrdom.) The attack was only averted because passengers on the plane noticed his crotch was on fire and held him down until the plane landed.

Two days after the incident, Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said "The system worked..." when talking about the incident. Widely ridiculed for that statement, the administration forced her to walk that back the next day when she said "The system actually didn't work..." and Obama himself said there had been systemic failures throughout the intelligence apparatus that kept the Feds from stopping this man before he got on the plane to Detroit.

Nonetheless, Obama said he was not going to be part of a blame game and point fingers at anybody, so nobody was fired, nobody was held accountable for any of this.

Essentially Obama said "Mistakes were made" and left it that.

Now compare the way Obama has treated the "Too Big To Fail" institutions, the people at those institutions who are pulling in seven and eight figure bonuses for 2009, the policymakers who helped create the mess and the people in his government who missed the very obvious signs of a incoming terrorist attack and then afterward brushed aside criticism by saying "The system worked..." with the way he treats teachers and schools that he considers "failing."

You work in a school that used to be a "good school" but had hundreds of ELL's, support service students and other at-risk students dropped on it in the last few years from other schools that were closed, but have received no extra resources to handle the new students - too bad, Obama says your school needs to be closed down, the teachers need to be fired and a non-unionized charter should be opened in its place. Remember, it's only the test scores that matter.

You work in a school that has few resources, an overpopulated building, overcrowded classrooms, and bathrooms being used to hold math classes in because a charter school has been placed on the first and second floors of your building - too bad, Obama says your school needs to be closed down, the teachers need to be fired and a non-unionized charter should be opened in its place. Remember, it's only the test scores that matter.

You're teaching students who come from impoverished families with generations of dysfunctional behavior, mental illness, alcoholism and other addictions, students themselves who are in great emotional pain and act out that pain through angry outbursts in school or by simply never coming to class and you don't have any way to reach them - too bad, it's your fault they're that way and Obama says you're school needs to be closed down, the teachers need to be fired and a non-unionized charter should be opened in its place. Remember, it's only the test scores that matter.

In Obama's America, like in Bush's America, nobody is accountable for anything except for the teachers and the public education system.

Everybody else, including the president who gave himself a B+ for his first year in office (record deficit, 10% unemployment, hundreds of billions in giveaways to the "Too Big To Fail" firms, no major legislation passed, health care reform turned into major giveaway for the health insurance industry, reneged promises on Card Check legislation and DaDT) gets a pass, a "Heckuva job, Janet" pat on the back, or an eight figure bonus for taking the economic system to the point of collpase and needing billions in bailout dollars and continued access to Federal Reserve 0% interest-free loans to survive.

I cannot wait to hold President Accountability accountable come November 2010 and November 2012.

It's time everybody hold President Accountability accountable for not holding all these other crooks and incompetents accountable.

NY Times Says Unions Will Fight Obama's Excise Tax On Health Care Plans

According to the NY Times, the union heads who will meet with President Obama to discuss his health care reform will remind him that he once opposed his 40% excise tax proposal on employer-provided health care plans that will hit 1 in 4 union workers by 2013 and 19% of all workers (about 30 million) by 2016.

Obama refuses to remove the excise tax on employer-provided health care for a higher income tax on individuals making over $500,000 a year or families making over $1 million.

Apparently he feels his health care reforms should be funded on the backs of people making $30,000-$70,000.

During the 2008 campaign, he criticized John McCain for a similar proposal to raise taxes on employer-provided health care plans.

Now he supports that very proposal

Union leaders plan to tell him if this proposal is enacted as part of the health care reform, union workers will be demoralized and likely not come out to support Democrats in 2010.

Democrats are already expected to lose 30-40 House seats in the 2010 midterm elections, though they may lose only 1 or 2 in the Senate.

A 40 seat House loss would give the Congress back to Republicans.

Here is the tack unions are taking:

In recent days, labor’s strategy has become clear. Unions are urging their members to flood their representatives with e-mail messages and phone calls in the hope that the House will stand fast and reject the tax. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of nine million union members, has declared next Wednesday “National Call-In Day” asking workers to call their lawmakers to urge them not to tax health benefits. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is urging members to tell their representatives that “such a tax is simply a massive middle-class tax hike that this nation’s working families should not be forced to endure.”

Many Democrats fear that enacting the tax will hurt their re-election chances.

“This would really have a negative impact on the Democratic base,” said Representative Joe Courtney, Democrat of Connecticut, who has enlisted 190 House Democrats to sign a letter opposing the tax. “As far as the message goes, it’s a real toughie to defend.”

While union leaders would prefer killing the tax, some say privately that they could live with it if the threshold is lifted to $27,000, say, or $30,000. They argue that many insurance policies above $23,000 are typical of the coverage in high-cost areas like New York or Boston, or policies that cover small businesses or employers with older workers.

According to a union survey, one in four members would be hit by a $23,000 threshold, but only one in 14 if the threshold were raised to $27,000.

The only problem with not killing the excise tax is that once it is enacted as part of the "reform," it will be difficult to ever get out. And the point of the excise tax is to make decent employer-provided health care to expensive for employers to continue to provide so that they either drop coverage for employees altogether or switch them to cheaper HMO's.

Can you imagine a Democratic president who has the official policy to raise taxes on middle and working class union members so that they are dropped from their employer-provided health care coverage rather than raise taxes on millionaires?

That's what we have with President Change You Can Believe In.

I'll tell you, the only change I can believe in is when he gets his lying ass kicked back to Chicago in 2012.

Obama, Unions To Meet About Taxing Middle and Working Classes

Sam Stein at Huffingtonpost reports that President Obushma will meet with the heads of major unions to explain to them why he will not budge on his proposal to tax middle and working class Americans 40% on their employer-provided health care plans.

The unions include AFL-CIO, SEIU, CWA and AFSCME.

The unions are expected to tell Obama they will not support his health care bill if the excise tax on employer-provided health care plans remains, but they will not oppose it either.

Therein lies the problem.

They need to tell him in no uncertain terms, if you raise taxes on middle and working class Americans by levying the 40% excise tax on employer-provided health care plans, we will oppose the health care bill, work against it and work against you in 2012.

But they are not doing that. Instead they're saying "Oh, we don't like this, but we'll still support you..."

Like Marianne Williamson wrote a few days ago at Huffingtonpost, when you're in an abusive relationship with a guy who keeps hitting you, you've got to get out of it and stop the madness.

Currently, working and middle class Americans and union members in particular are in an abusive relationship with establishment politicians.

They keep screwing us while bailing out the richest and most powerfully connected.

Until we say "ENOUGH" the abuse will continue.

Apparently the heads of the unions just don't get that.

If this were Bush pushing the excise tax, they'd be screaming about it and opposing it 100% of the way.

But because it's Obama, a "Democrat," doing it to us, they're responding in a wishy-washy "Oh, well, what can you do?" way.

I'll tell you what you can do.

You can write the president and tell him you're sick of his bailing out Wall Street while he's screwing union workers.

You can tell him you will not vote for him in 2012.

And you can tell him you think he's a liar.

Remember, he said during the 2008 campaign that he wouldn't raise taxes on middle and working class Americans.

A 40% excise tax on our health care plans is raising taxes on us, Mr. President.

So as much as it pains me to say this, Joe Wilson (Wingnut - South Carolina), was right - YOU LIE!!!!

I cannot wait to work against Dems in 2010 and 2012.

And I have never voted Republican in my life, but now I really do see there is little to no difference between the parties.

Except that when there's a Republican in power screwing me, the unions tend to fight more than they do when it's Dem.

They rolled for Clinton on NAFTA and they're rolling for Obama on pretty much everything.

Whatever happened to that card-check legislation anyway?

Treasury Timmeh Shills For Financial Firms

From Huffingtonpost:

An arm of the Federal Reserve, then led by now-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, told bailed-out insurance giant AIG to withhold key details from the public about overpayments that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs.

Read the rest of the piece. Treasury Timmeh Geithner made sure AIG's counterparties got 100 cents on the dollar even when they were willing to take a lot less, then wanted to make sure those sweetheart deals were kept secret.

It's clear Geithner must resign from Treasury and President Obama must explain what he knew about Geithner's dealings during the period between November 21, 2008 when Geithner was picked to succeed Hank Paulson at Treasury and Geithner's Senate confirmation on January 26, 2009.

Reports about the 100 cents on the dollar sweetheart deals engineered by Geithner for Goldman, Merrill, et al. weren't made public until March but may have been circulated behind the scenes before that.

At the very least, President Accountability should have asked his pick for the Treasury Department just how he handled the AIG bail-out and why.

So tell us, Mr. President: What did you ask Geithner about his doings in the bailout mess before you picked him to run Treasury, what did you learn about his doings during the AIG bailout and when did you learn that Geithner ensured Goldman, Merrill, et al. would get secret100 cents to the dollar sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense?

The answers better be good, Mr. President.

There are a lot of angry people out there watching you give away the store to Wall Street and the Too Big To Fail firms while you raise taxes on middle and working class Americans.

Obama Raises Taxes On Middle Class Rather Than Rich

From the Huffingtonpost:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama signaled to House Democratic leaders Wednesday that they'll have to drop their opposition to taxing high-end health insurance plans to pay for health coverage for millions of uninsured Americans.

In a meeting at the White House, Obama expressed his preference for the insurance tax contained in the Senate's health overhaul bill, but largely opposed by House Democrats and organized labor, Democratic aides said.

...

The difference in how the bills are paid for is emerging as among the toughest disputes.

The House wants to increase income taxes on individuals making more than $500,000 and couples over $1 million, which would raise $460 billion over 10 years to pay for the bill. The Senate wants to tax insurance companies on plans valued at over $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for couples, raising $150 billion. Most analysts say the insurance tax would be passed on to consumers, and organized labor is strongly opposed, as are House Democrats, some of whom contend that the tax would violate Obama's campaign pledge not to tax the middle class.

"We did in our house bill something that protects middle class Americans from having to pay more for health insurance," Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., a member of the House leadership, said Wednesday. "So far we want to stay to that principle."

House members "have been very clear on that issue and working with the president to stick to what he said when he was campaigning for president, we're trying to make sure this does not affect middle class Americans," Becerra said.

When middle and working class Americans and union members with employer-provided health care plans pay more money for crappier health care, you'll know who to blame.

When employers reduce coverage and increase co-pays and other premiums on employer-provided health care plans, you'll know who to blame.

When people with employer-provided health care have a 40% excise tax passed onto their plans, you'll know who to blame.

It's President Change We Can Believe In.

And it's all to keep from raising taxes on people making over $500,000 a year.

Instead he wants to raise taxes on working and middle class Americans with employer-provided health care plans.

The Corporate President.

Plunge Protection Team

I'm a huge fan of CNBC's morning show.

Watch it nearly every morning.

What I have learned from watching that show in the last half year is that everything is fine and dandy with the stock market.

And if the market's up, well, then all is well with the state of the nation.

And since last March, the markets have been going up.

So all must be well with the economy and the nation , right?

Maybe.

Or maybe someone's funking with the numbers:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The massive stock-market rally in the past nine months is mostly due to secret government buying of stock-index futures, a respected stock-market analyst said Tuesday.

Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research, is the latest and most credible person to charge that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury (in league with top Wall Street firms) is rigging the stock market on a daily basis.

In a special report released Tuesday, Biderman said the $6 trillion increase in U.S. stock-market capitalization since March can't be explained by the usual sources of funds flowing into the market -- such as mutual funds, direct retail investment, pension funds, hedge funds or foreign purchases.

The only logical explanation for the extent of the rally, he suggested, is secret buying by a government committee known colloquially as the Plunge Protection Team. It's like the dark matter that astrophysicists conjecture must be there, even if we can't detect it.

The PPT was established by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 after the 1987 stock crash to coordinate the government's response to market meltdowns. It consists of the Fed chairman, the Treasury secretary, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Biderman acknowledged that he had no direct evidence that the Fed and other agencies have intervened in the stock market. But he worried about what will happen to the market if the PPT has been buying and suddenly stops.

Now maybe the government is doing nothing wrong and maybe they're disclosing all the Treasurys, agency bonds and mortgage-backed securities they've been buying in the fixed income markets.

Or maybe they're printing money at night and buying stock futures in the morning and hiding it from view.

Hard to know since there is no transparency at the Federal Reserve (which is the way Fed chief Ben Bernanke and Bernanke's boss, President Obushma, want it.)

But until the Fed proves differently, I'd lean toward the government buying up a bunch of Treasurys, bonds and securities with freshly minted greenbacks.

Remember, the people who caused last year's near financial collapse are still the ones running the show at the Fed and the Treasury Department.

Lots of good reasons why they'd be operating the Plunge Protection Team overtime these days.

Of course they can put all this tin foil hat stuff to rest by submitting to an audit of the Federal reserve the way Ron Paul and lots of others in Congress want.

Pelsoi: Obama Committed To Taxing Union Health Care

From Talking Points Memo:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just returned to the Capitol from a health care meeting at the White House. Walking toward her office, I asked her whether the Senate bill's "Cadillac tax" on high-end health care plans, which both the Senate and White House are pushing, would be a hard sell in the House.

"It's not a very popular initiative in the House or in the public," she said. "It's something the President is committed to, and we'll see how it works out."

In case that's not clear, Mr. President.

Pelosi has long-held reservations about the policy, and has even gone as far as ribbing the President for reneging on a commitment not to raise taxes on middle class Americans by supporting it. That said, she's still optimistic that identical reform package will pass the House and Senate.

Great! I get to pay a 40% tax on my health care plan because Obama calls it "high end" even though my union has negotiated many of those benefits over the years in place of monetary compensation.

And this is to fund the piece of #$%^ health care reform bill that forces Americans without health care to buy crappy insurance that will cover little but sure will make the health insurance companies and their stockholders rich.

I can't wait to see Dems get hammered this year in the midterms and Obama thrown out of office in 2012.

Let's be honest here - the only thing worse then getting screwed financially by the powers that be over and over again is getting screwed financially by someone you voted for.

But I won't make that mistake again.

And I wrote the White House today to let them know that.

You should too.

Klein-metic

Mayor Bloomberg says New York City has the lowest murder rate since the Dutch owned the place and it was called New Amsterdam.

Dunno if I believe him.

True, crime rates are down all over the country, but here in New York City we have that special accounting method known as Klein-metic in which only good stats are counted and bad ones are either ignored or suppressed.

Thus New York City has the most edumacated kids in the country even though many can only pass the dumbed-down, in-house graded state tests but not the more rigorous federal tests and graduation rates have been massaged by a credit recovery program that offers failing students a semester credit for reading a Spiderman comic book.

Just as schools are forced to show improved test scores and graduation rates every year or be closed down and replaced by charters, police precincts have to show improved crime stats every year or the city fires the existing brass at the precinct and brings in new brass.

Given the ease with which schools use Klein-metic to massage stats, I just have to wonder if police precinct captains aren't doing the same thing.

You know, like declaring a guy with four bullet holes in his back an "accident victim" ("We think he accidentally shot himself in the back four times...") or just miscounting the number of dead bodies at the end of every week to keep the math nice and neat (i.e., at zero.)

Call me cynical or paranoid, but anything that emanates out of Moneybags' mouth or the commissioners who work for him generally turns out to be self-serving, misleading or an outright lie, and I have trouble with this lowest crime rate since Peter Stuyvesant thing too.

Good Luck With That

Bill Thompson, who ran such a disorganized, lazy campaign against Mayor Bloomberg in 2009 that according to Marc Alomnte he was often late for his own events or simply didn't show up at all, has told NY1 that he plans to run for mayor again in 2013.

Bloomberg only beat Thompson by 51,000 votes even after outspending him $104 million to $6 million on the campaign,.

But that had little to do with Thompson.

New Yorkers were sick of the arrogant Moneybags decreeing himself Mayor4Life and wanted to send a message.

Had Thompson actually run a disciplined, organized campaign, it is possible some of the cowardly city unions might have thrown in on his side and churned up a GOTV effort to beat Bloomberg.

But Thompson ran badly and the cowardly unions stayed cowardly and now we have Mayor4Life Bloomberg for another four years.

So Thompson should follow Mark Green (another horrible campaigner) and get a job as a permanent "wise guy" on NY1's Road to City Hall carnival of cranks and stay out of politics.

Co-Dependent Liberals

Marianne Williamson writes about her disappointment with President Obushma:

It's hard to own the disappointment I feel over our moderate corporate Democratic President. The whole Obama phenomenon brings up memories from my distant past: the good-looking guy who talks real good, whose line you don't buy immediately but whose charm is so dazzling that he gradually convinces you that this time it will be different.

Yeah. Right. Really different.

What the current administration is giving us is minimal change. And not because the President hasn't had the time to do better; if he had truly wanted to make fundamental change, he would have gone in there fast and done his own version of shock and awe in the first hundred days. And not because he didn't realize how mean all those Republicans can be, either; Obama knew what he was getting into, and if he didn't, then he was as unprepared for the job as his opponents said he was. I see so many people now -- many of them men, interestingly enough -- tangled up in an almost school-girlish, co-dependent, apologetic relationship with this President. As though "poor baby" should be tacked onto the end of every description of his failures.

I must admit, I never thought all that much about Obama to begin with. I voted for him because the alternative was unthinkable, but his policies on education reform and health care reform seemed much too corporate-friendly for me (no single payer for health care, pro-merit pay/standardized testing/charter schools in education) and I really had to hold my nose to pull the lever.

But even I didn't think his administration would match the Bush administration in Wall Street bailout dollars, nor did I think he would cave on any meaningful financial industry reform. Couple the pro-privatization tone of the Race to the Top competition (the states that close the most public schools down and replace them with privatized charters win the money), the half-assed mortgage relief act that seems to have caused more harm than good, the jive he has been feeding the gay community on DaDt, and the corporate whores he appointed to the Department of Agriculture (only former Monsanto employees wanted), and you have the makings of a very corporate-friendly administration that pays lip service to liberal causes like health care reform or financial reform, but only if those reforms are corporate-friendly.

I am glad to see Ms. Williamson articulate her disappointment at Huffingtonpost. I do hope the jive turkeys at the White House are reading the blogs, because there are a whole bunch of liberals who voted for this guy in 2008 who intend to stay home in 2010 and 2012.

Why vote for a Democrat when all you get is Republican-lite?

It will be interesting to see how many Daily Kossacks and other liberal shills peel away from President Obushma before the midterms and how many keep apologizing for the same corporate-friendly policies that hammered Bush for.

Talk About Passing The Buck

Ben Bernanke said in a speech over the weekend that low interest rates didn't cause the housing bubble.

Instead he said lack of regulation caused it.

Uh, huh.

As a voting member of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke rubber-stamped ever Alan Greenspan move on money policy. That includes really cheap rates. Now it is true that a slew of financial innovations in mortgages allowing people to borrow money with little to no principle, to lie about their income and never get called on it, or to buy a house with mortgages payments that only pay interest helped bring about the bubble.

But so did really, really low rates. ARM's don't happen when interest rates are high.

Boy, it's a good thing President Obama has reappointed Ben Bernanke to the Federal Reserve for another term.

I mean, who doesn't want a guy who can't take responsibility for his own mistakes in charge of monetary policy for the U.S.

Silly me - accountability is for teachers, not Federal Reserve Open Market Committee members.

Applying Financial "Innovations" To Public Education

Via Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture, here are six lessons from the collapse of the economy in 2008-2009 that Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz says we haven't learned yet:

1. Markets are not self-correcting, and without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess.

2. There are many reasons for market failures. Too-big-to-fail financial institutions had perverse incentives: Privatized gains, socialized losses.

3. When information is imperfect, markets often do not work well – and information imperfections are central in finance.

4. Keynesian policies do work. Countries, like Australia, that implemented large, well-designed stimulus programs early emerged from the crisis faster

5. There is more to monetary policy than just fighting inflation. Excessive focus on inflation meant that some central banks ignored what was happening to their financial markets. The costs of mild inflation are miniscule compared to the costs imposed on economies when central banks allow asset bubbles to grow unchecked.

6. Not all innovation leads to a more efficient and productive economy – let alone a better society. Private incentives matter, and if they are not properly aligned, the result can be excessive risk taking, excessively shortsighted behavior, and distorted innovation.

Notice number six on the list. Stiglitz elaborates:

While the benefits of many of the financial-engineering innovations of recent years are hard to prove, let alone quantify, the costs associated with them - both economic and social - are apparent and enormous.

Indeed, financial engineering did not create products that would help ordinary citizens manage the simple risk of home ownership - with the consequence that millions have lost their homes, and millions more are likely to do so. Instead, innovation was directed at perfecting the exploitation of those who are less educated, and at circumventing the regulations and accounting standards that were designed to make markets more efficient and stable. As a result, financial markets, which are supposed to manage risk and allocate capital efficiently, created risk and misallocated wildly.

President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg are helping to bring the kinds of financial "innovations" Stiglitz is talking about above to public education.

Neo-liberals like Obama and Bloomberg privilege the "free-market" and want to bring "free-market principles" like merit pay, standardized test tracking and the Race to the Top zero sum competition for funds (12 states win, 48 states lose) to public education in order to shake things up and force what they see as entrenched schools and educators to innovate.

But as Stiglitz notes about the financial markets, if unregulated, they bring short-sighted action and greedy behavior that is harmful to individuals and society as a whole. That's the kind of action we're seeing in public education these days as cities and states try all kinds of unproven innovations, like closing whole swaths of schools in cities like Chicago and New York and reopening them as charter schools.

Mayor Bloomberg has closed over 50 public schools in the last three years. He says more closures are to come in the next four years of his third term. He closes these schools for low test scores and low graduation rates as measured by the Department of Education (some schools with lower scores and rates remain open, however, so the process is not very transparent.) President Obama likes that school closure policy and has institutionalized it as part of his Race to the Top zero sum/winner take all education funds competition.

Leaving aside how some of the most recently closed schools in New York City used to have higher test scores and higher graduation rates before hundreds of at-risk students from other schools were dumped on them, let's note that fear of closure will have all kinds of harmful effects on how schools and educators operate.

You can be sure this year's Regents exams will get extra special attention from the graders when grading time comes. You can also be sure that teachers will feel the pressure from assistant principals and principals. For the ELA Regents exam, essays that should be graded a "2" will get a "3" and perhaps even a "4" if a student is right under a 65 score for the test. With the stakes so high, grade inflation will be rife throughout the system. And merit pay creates the same kind of grade inflation/cheating environment that the school closure policy does, only on the individual level for teachers.

Public education needs to be a collaborative enterprise where teachers help each other and schools work together to educate children. But with the Obama/Bloomberg school closure policies, schools will compete to enroll students who are either at or above grade level while finagling to get at-risk students, ELL students, or support services students off their enrollment lists. Why should a school take a chance having test scores and graduation rates drop and have Mayor Bloomberg order them closed when they can simply exclude "problem" students (as so many of the charter schools do)? On the individual level, why should teachers take on "at-risk" students in their classrooms and risk low test scores when their pay is contingent upon the scores? Even worse, why should teachers take on at-risk students if the safety of their jobs is contingent upon scores, as both Obama and Bloomberg want to do by tying standardized test tracking to teacher evaluations?

As for the data being used to evaluate students and teachers, that too is suspect. Stiglitz notes that "When information is imperfect, markets often do not work well – and information imperfections are central in finance." Well, the same can be said for education. Test scores can be a part of the picture of how a student or a teacher is performing, but they are certainly not the whole part. And considering how easily manipulated the current battery of state tests are, I'm not sure they are even a part of the picture at all. Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan admits that the tests as currently constructed are imperfect and not a terribly good measure of student or teacher performance. But he also says they're the best we have, so we have to use them. The data fetish itself is a troubling thing these days, but the fact that the data fetishists insist upon using the data even though they admit it is suspect is even more troubling.

Finally, paying students merit pay for test scores seems designed to perpetuate the Wall Street mentality that nothing counts as progress unless it goes up every quarter and pays you a bonus. And I think that's the idea behind all these hedge fund managers and financial wizards getting into the public education sphere. It's simply another revenue grab by the robber barons who already own this country, have already been bailed out by middle and working class taxpayers and make ridiculous amounts of money for the task of moving paper around at the nation's most expensive casino on Wall Street.

You would think that after the hedge fund managers and financial wizards created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they would be shunned from public policy discussions instead of being given a seat at the education reform discussion table and given another taxpayer-provided punch bowl to devour.