I'll take "Butthurt neoliberal Democrats" for $500, Alex!

Donna Rice & Gary Hart.
Should I Photoshop in heads of
Hillary Clinton & Robert Reich?

This has possibly been the worst PR week, and the worst brainpower week, for national Democrats — and the para-Democratic apparatus of places like MoveOn and Media Matters — since Gary Hart mythically invited reporters to "follow him around" in 1987, even as his Monkey Business visit with Donna Rice was heating up.

First, there was Hillary Clinton's email imbroglio getting unveiled, followed by questions about how this might benefit former or current staffers/fixers, further followed by Clinton shooting herself in the foot with additional lies.

Next came Robert Reich, a Friend of Bill's of some sort, and at least a quasi-Friend of Hillary, as Bill's Labor Secretary, and the only Clinton Cabinet member to stick the full eight years.

Reich claimed that Obamacare was a "great success," based on some current metrics. I carefully showed that those metrics meant bupkis, and beyond that, found old 2009 video of Reich bitching about Obamacare's problems compared to single payer.

We then had Daily Kos, emblematic of numerous partisan Democratic blogs, websites, etc., claiming that the 47 GOP senators who wrote a brief "letter" to Iran had, at a minimum, violated the Logan Act, and had possibly committed treason.

It's all partisan hackery nonsense, of course, and I deconstructed it here, even while having fun with Ted Cruz and the actual letter here.

Unfortunately, many Democratic voters are about as much "sheeple" as many Republican voters, afraid of enabling Republicans rather than voting for truly liberal Democrats, let alone Greens, Socialists or whomever.

#Obamacare — I thought Robert Reich knew better

Look, in the name of having a semi-unified opposition to the GOP, I can understand former Labor Secretary Robert Reich not openly criticizing Obamacare.

But, to outrightly fellate it, as in this Facebook post? Wrong:

Remember when opponents of Obamacare claimed it would bankrupt America?
 New cost projections, published yesterday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, show the law costing 29% less over the next five years than the CBO first estimated. The reason: Healthcare costs are rising more slowly than previously assumed. Why the slowdown? (1) Larger co-payments and deductibles have caused consumers to rein in their own spending on healthcare, (2) Obamacare has caused providers to improve efficiencies in delivering healthcare, and (3) The law has also created incentives for more preventive care, thereby reducing the incidence of costly chronic diseases (heart disease, some cancers, and diabetes). 

Bottom line: Obamacare is on the way to proving itself a huge success. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans who are still out to kill it.

It's not a "huge success," first of all.

Larger co-payments also push working poor and lower middle class people away from even preventive care, thus undercutting Reich's point No. 3.

Related to that, on Point No. 1, Reich doesn't say whether doctors and hospitals have reined in their charges to any significant extent (answer is a probable No), whether insurers, to riff on Point No. 2, have gotten even more efficient on refusing to pay for such such charges — without doctors and hospitals then trying to dun patients (answer is a probable No), whether electronic patient records so beloved of many O-care advocates starting with Dear Leader have done much to rein in prices (answer is an almost definite No), and how much of these cost savings are from insurers booting yet more doctors out of their network, and making network changes on a more frequent basis (answer is a huge Yes, and one that Reich knows exists, unless he's stopped reading the news about Obamacare nine months ago.)

In short, Reich, who theoretically eschewed neoliberalism after Slick Willie's presidency ended, is either vocally or tacitly touting purely neoliberal drivers of health care savings.

On Point 2, Reich doesn't even tell us what these "efficiencies" are. And, doesn't this smack of Republicans always talking about "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" in Medicare and Medicaid? Survey says yes.

Point 3 is nugatory if your doctor is out of network or you can't afford the copays, per Point No. 1 being wrong.

Bottom line? 

Reich still seems to put rallying the party wagons above other things, and didn't run so far away from his neoliberal roots after 2001, after all.

Oh, well, at least he's showing his true colors. Which is "Democratic Partisan."

Because, per Media Matters, six years ago, Reich was severely lamenting the lack of a public option. And, he was talking about how this was making the CBO price Obamacare so pricey.

The 'American decline' is not just the fault of the rich

I've blogged recently about Baby Boomers' retirement woes, and in that post, noted that many of them were drinking the Reagan Kool-Aid 30 years ago.

Well, Der Spiegel has an in-depth article on "the decline thing," and, in a different way, it kind of makes the same point. Much of the middle class willingly believed that the pony Reagan hiomself believed had ot be near the shitpile was there.

No, Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme, but, as Paul Kennedy could tell us from "Decline and Fall of the Great Powers," even before the housing bubble, other ways in which the U.S. economy became more and more finance-based were.

As was the outsourcing of jobs.

To riff on Martin Niemoller, "First they outsourced the unskilled industrial labor and I didn't complain. Then they outsourced the skilled industrial labor and I didn't complain. Then they oursourced the tech-skilled labor and I didn't complain. Then they outsourced gray-collar work and I didn't complain. Then they outsourced the less-skilled service labor, and I .... "

Well, with more and more call centers overseas, what next? Corporate paralegal work? India is a democracy, based on the Anglo half of Anglo-American legal principles.

At the same time, the middle class believed the Reagan undercurrent story that they should identify with the rich. Combined with the pee-down economics, it WAS class warfare in a country where everybody wants the appearance of middle-class-dom, believes the BS about mobility, lumps the upper of upper-middle class with the lower of lower-middle class, and otherwise sets itself up for sociological exploitation.

Like this, from the Spiegel story:

Sociologist Robert ... Putnam is worried about economic imbalances and new disparities within society. Today an American CEO earns about 300 times as much as an ordinary worker. In 1950, that number was only 30. The consequence is "social segregation," says Putnam, by which he means that people go to different schools and parties and live in different neighborhoods, and that there is no longer any overlap between groups.

But, again, Americans brought this on themselves.

The "ownership fetish," as in home ownership, which Spiegel discusses on its next page, is another example:
I had hoped that the Americans would change their way of thinking, that they would take responsibility and only spend as much as they made," says (Axel) Jakobeit.
Jakobeit, described as German by birth but American by choice, should have known better.

And, per Univ. of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan, is home ownership for lower income levels a partial equivalent of "bread and circuses"? I wouldn't totally disagree, at least.

Robert Reich is on the right track:

Reich has dissected the causes of the crash in his book "Aftershock," in which he analyzes an American character trait that seems oddly simplistic: If my neighbor has more, than I want more too. And I get what I want, because I'm an American.

Spiegel's on the right track, too. Simplistic.

Germany's to cold for me. And, my German is limited. There's Canada. Or Australia. That said, if the wingnuts in the US want to talk about "ownership society," can I withdraw my Social Security contributions if I emigrate?

Unfortunately, in addition to being simplistic, American exceptionalist means the belief in the magic pony, if it's even gone that far away now, will return soon enough.

And, for Preznit Kumbaya, the magic pony to be peddled is "college education." That's even as college costs have risen, and continue to rise, far faster than inflation and slower only than healthcare costs, and we don't need that many college graduates without creative college-needing jobs.

Some questions we'd like to see for Wall Street

A group of financial experts convened by the NY Times each offers three questions they wish the Congressionally-established Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission would ask Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America today.

Most the questions settle around the use of credit default swaps. No surprise there. Nor will it be a surprise if the actual commission asks none of those questions.

Meanwhile, Robert Reich notes both Congress and President Obama continue to dither on taking specific steps to keep our country's financial Rome from burning again.

Robert Reich beats the stimulus drums again

He ties two facts together in his columm, of importance:

1. The Dems will likely not have 60 Senate votes after midterm elections.

2. The jobs issue will likely be relevant for Obama in 2012, not just Congressional Dems this year.

So, get cracking, Mr. Politics of Hope!

Reich: Raise interest rates!

Yes, you heard me right. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says raising U.S. interest rates might be part of what’s need to make the “Wall Street recovery” into the “Main Street recovery.”

Of course, Reich should recognize that President Barack Obama cares little more for bottom-up Main Street recovery than did Reich’s old boss, Bill Clinton.

(When the Slickster “fulminated” about how his presidential program was captive to the bond market, at the start of his first term, he was pulling off his first great presidential acting job. He knew Jackson Stephens too well from his time in Little Rock to really be that surprised.)

And, Big Ben Bernanke probably never learned the biggest lesson from his study of the Great Drepression, and that is that we didn't get too much recovery then, either, until it got to Main Street.