Category: Government

You are Welcome to Our Health Care System Design, But We Insist that in Compensation, Rob Ford Be Appointed Mayor of Some Town in Vermont…*

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While we are talking about the progress of Obamacare, it is important to note that Vermont is going with a full up single payer system:

All but ignored in the multitude of media coverage about the ACA and its problems, Vermont has become the first state in the union to pass a single-payer universal health care law for its residents. It has a snappy slogan: Everybody in, nobody out.

The system will be fully operational by 2017, funded by Medicare, Medicaid, federal money for the ACA given to Vermont, and a slight increase in taxes. Everyone will be able to go to any doctor or hospital in the state free of charge. No plans to figure out, no insurance forms to sweat over, no gotchas.

………

Dr. William Hsaio, the Harvard health care economist who helped craft health systems in seven countries, was Vermont’s adviser. He estimates that Vermont will save 25 percent per capita over the current system in administrative costs and other savings. Employers will suddenly be free to give raises to their employees instead of paying for increasingly expensive health benefits. All hospitals and health-care providers in Vermont will be nonprofit. Medicare recipients will no longer need to wade through an inch-thick book to choose supplemental plans and sort out other complex options in their Medicare enrollment.

If (and it is a big if) Vermont can decide on the funding method, it should be fully implemented by 2017.

* Not my bon mot. Stolen from TP at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Give Snowden a Medal and a 6-Figure Pension, Already

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Surprise! Snowden’s actions have inspired other whistle blowers:

The “courage” of Edward Snowden is “contagious,” according to lawyer and transparency advocate Jesselyn Radack, who says that additional employees at the National Security Agency are now coming forward with what they consider objectionable practices by their employer.

In an interview with ABC News on Thursday, Raddack revealed that an influx of NSA whistleblowers, inspired by Snowden, are now knocking on the doors of her organization.

According to Radack, several more whistleblowers have approached the Government Accountability Project (GAP)—the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization where she is the director of National Security and Human Rights—since Snowden’s story broke earlier this year.

“There definitely could be more revelations in addition to those that Snowden has revealed and that are continuing to come out,” she told ABC News.
The Obama administration’s “war on whistleblowers” is backfiring, said Radack.

“I think the government hopes to chill speech by employees in the national security and intelligence fields, especially those at the NSA and CIA, but the unintended consequence is [that] more and more whistleblowers are coming through the doors of the Government Accountability Project (GAP),”  said Radack. “I think courage is contagious, and we see more and more people from the NSA coming through our door after Snowden made these revelations.”

Courage is contagious.

This must be Barack Obama’s worst nightmare.

Matt Taibbi Nails it Again

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This time, he’s writing about how Wall Street is robbing ordinary working people’s retirement:

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

………

Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.

The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of “proprietary” information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. “When I asked, I was basically hammered,” says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island’s nine-member State Investment Commission. “I couldn’t get any information about the actual costs.”

This is the third act in an improbable triple-f%$#ing of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.

Read the rest.

Not enough bullets.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever………

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Look at the White House transcripts of the most recent press conference:

Q: Can you understand, though, why some people might not trust what you’re saying right now about wanting to —

 THE PRESIDENT: No, I can’t.

This is wrong on so many levels:

  • The constitution was explicitly created to make sure that we did not have to trust the authorities.  It was intended to create contention, and quite honestly distrust, to make sure that powers are limited.
  • He does not understand how people might be concerned that he might not be completely forthcoming.

I am not sure what is more alarming, his complete lack of understanding of the critical in the Constitution concept of the separation of powers, or the pervasive narcissism.

I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration of why the founding fathers were concerned about the possibility of excesses by the executive.

White People Do Not Trust Cops Either

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Susan Webber, better known by her nom de blog Yves Smith is white.

How white is she? This white: Harvard BA in literature and history (Phi Beta Kappa), MBA Harvard, Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co, head of M&A for Sumitomo Bank, and now she is the head of Aurora Advisory.

And guess what, after 4 decades of the war on drugs, almost as long a period of militarization of law enforcement, and 10 years of anti-terror hysteria, she now does not trust police officers:

Since I live the most boring personal life imaginable, my interactions with the police types are limited to the every-thirty-five-year big speeding ticket, the TSA, and passport and customs officials (well take it back, I have a very long ago funny story when I went on a car ride in Harlem with a couple of black men who offered me a lift to try to find a kid on a bike who’d snagged my wallet out of my hand. The men who trundled up in the car knew the woman who’d run down the block ahead of me trying to apprehend or at least identify the robber, so they looked to be neighbors in that little corner of Harlem. The men dropped me back where I’d called 911 on a pay phone, this being in the pre-cell phone days. The cops had just arrived and drove me home and thought I was clearly insane to have take up an offer of local assistance).

 I have heard bad stories about cops from cab drivers here (New York City and Bloomberg in particular has it in for cabbies for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom) and former DAs in other cities (for instance, that decades ago it was routine for cops to plant evidence and fabricate testimony in high profile cases if they couldn’t find a logical suspect fast enough). I’ve also heard some good stories about cops from local people and have seen them have to perform some unpleasant duties (like enforcing ridiculous cordons mandated by Presidential visits, the degree of lockdown and the diversions forced on locals who wind up on the wrong side of lines are insane, and the police stay patient with irate locals. I suspect they think the procedures are overkill, and even with all the overtime, they look none too happy about it). And then we have the really hair-raising media accounts, of paramilitary crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street and other dissident groups, of tasers and pepper spray and pain-inflicting zip handcuffs becoming appallingly routine.

 I’ve noticed a shift in my reactions to police. While I generally assume they need to be handled with care, I’ve assumed in certain tame neighborhoods that they aren’t so bad (as in the local needs don’t call for much aggressive policing), such as my immediate ‘hood and coastal Maine.

 But the other night, I saw a fire engine pulled up outside the local fire house. It had its lights on but no siren and wasn’t going anywhere. There was a cone next to it. I wasn’t paying much attention but it looked to have been deliberately parked close enough to the curb to allow traffic to pass.

 I was walking towards the fire engine when I saw a cop stop a cab trying to go by the parked fire engine (I didn’t see any police car visible, so I’m not sure how he came to be there). He asked for the driver’s license and registration and told the driver in a normal conversational tone, “Park over there, this is going to take a long time.”

 Now I have no idea what lead to this. I see a policeman taking a cabbie off duty (and remember, cabbies rent their vehicles, so this will force they guy into a loss regardless of what else cams out of this interaction). I realized later than with no information either way, no basis for knowing whether the cop was being completely proper or not, I assumed the cop was likely not in the right.

 Maybe I’m just an outlier, but here I am, in one of the tamest spots (in terms of police likely to get rough with a resident going about their normal business) and my default assumption with my own police force has become not to trust them. That may have been what I believed on some deeper level before, but that view has now become more apparent to me.

When someone like Ms. Smith/Webber sees a confrontation involving a cop, and immediately assumed that the cop was abusing his authority.

This is a direct consequence of the changes that we have made in our police forces.  They have gone from being peace officers that served the community into a paramilitary force that is intended to exert control of the community.

In other words, they have increasingly adopted a mind-set of an occupying force.

Good Point

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C.P. Chandrasekhar, discussing the so called middle income trap, where developing countries stall out at a slightly improved standard of living.

Why did places like Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan become prosperous, while newer partners to the dance don’t.

Money quote is at the end:

And there are many who argue that growth in Asia stalled not before they liberalized but after they did. This is based in particular on the evidence that dynamism in Asian economies other than China, and to an extent India, faltered after the 1997 crisis. That crisis, we must recall, was related to the financial liberalisation many of these countries were forced to adopt, either as a quid pro quo for continued access to the export markets on which they were excessively dependent, or because waning manufacturing export competitiveness as a result of rising wage costs and appreciating currencies, pushed them into liberalisation of financial policies in the hope of making financial services the new engine of growth. The result was vulnerability to boom-bust cycles of various kinds that led to the synchronised downturn in many countries (with Thailand, Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia, among them) in 1997-98.

 This should possibly lead to two conclusions. The first is that, beyond a point export-driven growth has a way of running into internally generated constraints. Second, that among the factors that can undermine a country’s growth prospects, even at relatively higher income levels, is excessive liberalisation, especially financial liberalisation. Possibly most countries, whether poor, rich or in some ‘middle income’ range, find their growth has stalled for reasons such as these.

(Emphasis mine)

Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan experienced their growths during the 1960s and 1970s, before we had “liberalization” (deregulation) and expanding inequality.

I tend to come from this from a more sociological perspective than a classical economic one, and I would argue that a liberalized economic policies, and in particular financial liberalization, is analogous to the colonial regimes in the 1800s.

The expanded financial services industries suck the marrow out of, well basically everyone in an orgy of non productive rent sinking, much like the colonial Satraps in the time of Victoria.

Basically, the banksters are f%$#ing the rest of us like a drunk sorority girl.

It shows that Timothy Geithner’s, and Wall Street’s creepy vision of the future:

Geithner hunched his shoulders, pressed his knees together, and lifted his heels up off the ground—an almost childlike expression of glee. “We’re going, like, existential,” he said. He told me he subscribes to the view that the world is on the cusp of a major “financial deepening”: As developing economies in the most populous countries mature, they will demand more and increasingly sophisticated financial services, the same way they demand cars for their growing middle classes and information technology for their corporations. If that’s true, then we should want U.S. banks positioned to compete abroad.

Is a disaster for the rest of us.

Awwww!!! Rick Perry’ Feelings are Hurt!!!!

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Texas’ Business Climate in a Nutshell

So, following the fertilizer plant explosion that killed 14 people, Sacramento Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman accurately depicted the political-industrial of Texas, and Governor Rick Perry demanded an apology, and his butt boy/Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst demanded that he be fired.

It really does amaze me just how much the “Real Men” of the Republican Party whine like little bitches when someone makes a reasoned critique of their policies.

It’s more than wimpy, it’s stupid.

No one but a few people in central California would have known about this cartoon if he hadn’t made an issue of it, but he just couldn’t let it slide.

I should thank him.  I never would have seen the cartoon but for his foot in his mouth.

This is Nucking Futs

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I get that the bombing at the Boston Marathon is a big deal.

But the saturation coverage is excessive, and locking down the Boston Metro area, the home to about 4½ million people, is insane.

Seriously, if this happens in a place like London (52 dead, over 700 injured), or Madrid (191 dead and 2050 injured), they kept the cities open.

It seems that every time that something like this happens, we are greeted by our authorities telling us to indulge in underwear befouling terror.

Seriously, our reaction as a society (I’m not talking about the first responders here) has been one of profound cowardice, and government officialdom has encouraged this whole thing.

I wonder if this is the ultimate goal. Is it all about sending the message, “Live in obedient fear, citizen.“

We Tortured

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A bipartisan panel convened by the Constitution Project has concluded that torture was practiced, and was approved by our most senior leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, actually use the word torture:

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

………

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

………

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Unfortunately, they do not take a position on prosecutions, which means that their warnings on the US returning to torture are pretty toothless.

The people who conducted, and ordered, torture should be sent to a Federal “Pound Me in the Ass” prison for a very long time.

It Works, and It Saves the Taxpayer Money, So Let’s Make it Illegal

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I am referring to the state-owned bank of North Dakota, which will be made illegal by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP):

Clearly, from Wall Street’s perspective, the North Dakota bank must go, and all other state efforts to replicate it must be thwarted. Wall Street’s stealth weapon may be lodged within the latest corporate trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which currently is being negotiated in secret. We already know that Wall Street is seeking to remove all tariff restrictions that prevent the U.S. financial services industry from doing business in countries like Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. The biggest banks also want the treaty to eliminate “non-tariff” barriers including regulations that create “unfair” competition with state-owned financial enterprises.

 Depending on the final language, it is possible that the activities of the Bank of North Dakota could be ruled illegal because “foreign bankers could claim the BND stops them from lending to commercial banks throughout the state,” according to an analysis by Sam Knight in Truthout. How perfect for Wall Street: a foreign bank can be used as a shill to knock out the BND.

The nickel tour on BND is that it is a state-owned wholesale bank (it only makes loans to other banks), and the state keeps its money in an account there.

It generates significant savings, and significant savings for the taxpayer, and its senior executives are paid less than the President of the United States.  (The most highly paid executive is paid about ½ that of POTUS.)

Also, the bank provides a financing alternative to bond sales managed by Wall Street firms.

Considering the Obama administrations neoliberal philosophies, along with its predilections toward direct and indirect government subsidies for the TBTF banks, I’m inclined to believe it.  Particularly since that is what the Obama Administration’s point person is explicitly saying the trade agreement:

Publicly owned enterprises, for example, are being targeted by negotiators. One such entity in the United States that has been the subject of considerable interest in recent years is the Bank of North Dakota (BND) – the only fully publicly owned financial institution in the country. The BND, which is only allowed to lend wholesale, was a stabilizing force that helped keep the already energy-rich state insulated from the shock of the financial crisis (Alaska, for example, didn’t fare as well). It has also brought a small fortune to the state’s treasury – $340 million in net tax gain between 1997 and 2009. Legislators in at least 13 different states have proposed studying or emulating the North Dakota model – state-owned development of central-bank style institutions guaranteed by tax revenue. But if the TPP is passed, that option might not be available. [Chief TPP Negotiator for the Office of the US Trade Representative Barbara] Weisel said that State Owned Enterprises (SOE) are routinely “competing directly with private enterprises, and often in a way that is considered unfair.”

 “Some of the advantages that can be conferred on State Owned Enterprises are things like preferential financing,” Weisel said. “Those are things that wouldn’t be provided to private companies – preferential provision of goods and services provided by a government.”

 She said that “State Owned Enterprises – which in some cases can comprise a significant percentage of an economy – can be used to undermine what we’re otherwise trying to gain from this free trade agreement.”

What they are “trying to gain” with this agreement is to replace democracy with unregulated markets (aka looting).

Call your Congresscritter and tell him that you are absolutely opposed to the TPP.

This is Free Market Mousketeer Bullsh%$

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Bolivia President Evo Morales is looking about setting up a state owned concern to refine his country’s huge lithium deposits:

Is Bolivia poised to become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” the vital ingredient in batteries for smartphones and electric cars?

The Uyuni salt flats, stretching across a remote Andean plateau in the southwest of the country, are easily the world’s largest reserve of the soft, light, whitish metal coveted by high-tech firms from Silicon Valley to Tokyo.

This year, President Evo Morales has moved swiftly ahead with plans to finally begin reaping a potential lithium windfall of billions of dollars for the impoverished South American nation.

In January, Bolivia opened its first trial plant. It will produce 40 tons of lithium carbonate a year. Over time, the government wants to ramp production up to 30,000 tons — roughly a fifth of current global demand.

Of course there are some potential difficulties, the salt flats are both moist, and contain a fair amount of magnesium, which makes extraction more difficult.

But here is the assumption that seems to be everywhere these days that just pisses me off:

Meanwhile, Morales’ socialist administration’s go-it-alone attitude — including recent nationalizations of everything from utilities to airports — may mean it will have problems accessing the foreign technology needed to process the lithium.

This is bullsh%$.

If they want the technology, they will get it the same way that multinational megacorporations do today: they buy the f%$#ing technology.

Exxon, BP, and all the rest don’t know how to do difficult drilling, they hire companies like Halliburton or Slumberger for their expertise in deep water drilling, they hire companies like Transocean for its expertise in building deep water rigs.

I’m not talking about industrial espionage here, it’s that companies have increasingly outsourced core competencies in the name of cost savings, and these are now available freely for sale.

You hire a company to do the design, you hire another to do the construction, and if you have any sense, you structure it so as to ensure that the local folks get at least a general understanding of the process when you do this.

Ain’t capitalism grand?

Priceless

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The Michigan state legislature, chock full of wingnuts, after losing an initiative on creating emergency managers for localities, promptly repassed the law with an attached appropriation to make it unchallengable.

And now they have appointed an emergency manager for Detroit, who has tax liens on his home in Maryland:

The man charged with fixing Detroit’s faltering finances has been hit with four liens in four years from the state of Maryland for unpaid taxes, records show.

 State records show Kevyn D. Orr, who was appointed emergency manager on Thursday, has two outstanding liens on his $1 million home in Chevy Chase, Md., for $16,000 in unemployment taxes in 2010 and 2011. Two other liens of more than $16,000 in unemployment and income taxes were satisfied in 2010 and 2011, records show.

 Orr said he didn’t know anything about the liens when shown records of them Friday morning by The Detroit News.

 “I don’t know what they are,” Orr said, as his new boss, Gov. Rick Snyder, sat next to him in The News’ offices. “That’s surprising to me, to be honest.”

 Late afternoon, a spokeswoman for Snyder — who appointed Orr to the $275,000 per year post Thursday — said Orr spent the day researching the issue and would pay “in full ASAP.” The Washington, D.C., bankruptcy attorney blamed the problems on an outside accountant hired to file his tax returns, said Sara Wurfel, a Snyder spokeswoman.

He had 4 liens filed on his home, and did not know about it. Yeah ……… right.

The emergency management process is a clown show for a reason, and it’s no accident that over half of the black voters in Michigan will be under emergency managers.

First they cut state aid to troubled municipalities, and then effectively abolish .

The motivation for this is two fold:

  • Modern movement (teabagger) conservatives visceral opposition to majority minority communities having meaningful self rule.
  • By eliminating self rule, they eliminate electoral possibilities for less senior politicians.
    • Basically, they are hoping to eliminate the “farm system” for a generation of politicians for political advantage.

That is why we are seeing this clown show.

They don’t care about governance, they just care about power. Everything is subverted to to that.

This Must Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Written

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There are any things that can be said about the death of Hugo Chavez, but this takes the cake:

Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

To be fair, AP business reporter Pamela Sampson may not be a complete moron, she might simply be a sociopath ……… or it could be both.

You choose.

H/t Atrios.

Hugo Chavez is Dead

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Certainly, he was never a friend of the United States, and this was exacerbated by the US tacit (and likely covert explicit) support of 2002 coup attempt against him.

As to how he was as the chief executive (and pretty much everything else) in Venezuela, I would not give him high marks, unless I were grading on the curve.

If I were grading on the curve though, he would get high marks against the previous ruling elites in Venezuela.

It is truly a shame that, when compared to the political elites who seemed primarily concerned with who got the loot, he was arguably a better leader.

Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat!

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For the first time since 1415, the Pope Benedict has announced that he will be abdicating:

Citing failing strength of “mind and body,” Pope Benedict XVI stunned his closest aides and more than 1 billion Catholics by resigning on Monday, becoming the first pope to do so in nearly 600 years and ending the tenure of a formidable theologian who preached a gospel of conservative faith to a fast-changing world.

Keeping with his reputation as a traditionalist, Pope Benedict delivered his resignation — effective Feb. 28 — in Latin, to a private church body in Vatican City. “I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,” he said. “For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of bishop of Rome, successor of Saint Peter.”

The decision by the 85-year-old German pontiff sets up a pivotal leadership contest in the marbled halls of the Vatican that is coming sooner than observers expected. Although questions about the pope’s health have long swirled — he was occasionally filmed nodding off during mass — he seemed committed to continuing a papacy that has divided Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

The question is whether it’s about his health, or whether, as as Digby suggests, that revelations from the case of former Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, where Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (it used to be called the Inquisition) was directing the (non) response to the church’s sexual abuse scandal.

I’ll look forward to seeing Jon Stewart’s take on all this.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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It appears that the best friend of DC self rule is ……… Darrell Issa???

The summons to Capitol Hill didn’t bode well. It was May 2011, and Mayor Vince Gray and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown had been called to testify on the city’s fiscal stability before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee on the District of Columbia. The short hearing advisory offered few clues to the panel’s aims, outside of one ominous paragraph.

“In 1995 the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Act established a five member ‘Control Board’ to oversee financial matters,” the advisory read. “The Control Board was disbanded in 2001 when the District had achieved four consecutive balanced budgets and met other criteria. There are seven separate ‘triggers’ which would automatically revive the Control Board.”

………

Their supplications quickly proved unnecessary. After listening to city officials testify and respond to a few scattered questions from his colleagues, committee chairman Darrell Issa took control of the hearing and revealed what was really on his mind: budget autonomy for the District.

“I am going to be offering an alternative that I hope [Norton] will join with me on that provides a mechanism for a separate vote and separate consideration of the District’s funds,” Issa said, adding, “I’m looking for some sort of a structured mechanism to where this committee could say, ‘They have a plan, they can live without federal dollars and still meet the requirement,’ and each time that is received, it would allow us to say, ‘We have no reason to be in the way of your spending your dollars if you can make the commitment.’”

Everyone in the room was taken by surprise—including Issa’s aides, who had no idea their boss was going to propose the policy long sought by D.C. officials to free the city’s operations from the mercy of a fickle Congress.

Seriously, Darrell Issa is DC self-rule’s best friend in Congress?

This is so weird.

Not Something I Did Not Expect From Time Magazine

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they just did an article about the advantages of state owned banks:

The American Great Plains are known for their expansive farm lands, endless horizons, and — in recent history — staunchly conservative politics. So it may come as a surprise that only state-owned bank in the U.S. (an institution more widely associated with communist China than the Republican Party) can be found in ruby-red, rural North Dakota.

 That’s right, The Bank of North Dakota (BND) — the largest bank in the state by deposits — was founded by legislative mandate in 1919, and has been a mainstay of the North Dakotan economy since that time, mostly through partnering with community banks to provide loans for local businesses. And advocates of public banking are holding up the BND as an example of what government-owned banks can do for an economy.

 ………

 Sure, there are many obstacles to launching publicly-owned financial institutions. Pulling state capital out of commercial institutions could prove to be disruptive to the current financial system. And proper controls need to be set up to avoid political considerations overwhelming proper analysis of lending opportunities. But North Dakota has avoided these pitfalls, and the NBD is an institution that has proven its ability to work alongside the private banking industry to help the state’s economy — one of the most successful in the nation in recent times — develop and grow.

The idea that this idea has gained enough currency to appear on the pages of Time Magazine is pretty remarkable. 

Generally, the MSM will view something like North Dakota’s as an anachronism, or some sort of upper Midwest peculiarity, like something from the movie Fargo.

They are actually taking this seriously, and that’s a change.

Dean Baker on Timothy Geithner, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

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This is positively brutal:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.

This was an impressive diplomatic feat – given the widespread popular contempt for Europe’s monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.

Just go read it.