Deschutes County Democratic Party.............
Be an Oregon Delegate to
the National Convention
May 10 Delegate Academy Helps You Prepare for Delegate Campaign Oregon Democrats will be electing delegates to the National Convention in June.
Forty-Seven delegates will be chosen at six districts conventions on June 2nd, and 23 delegates and five alternates will be elected at the state convention on June 16th.
Bend will host a district sub-convention, June 2nd, 1 PM, for the 2nd Congressional District where four delegates will be elected.
If you would like to be a delegate, or help others get elected, you must register for the convention by 5 p.m. on May 17. You can register by clicking here.
To learn more, visit the Democratic Party of Oregon website at: Join the Oregon Delegation
Submitted by phastphil40 on May 17, 2012 - 4:30pm
Submitted by phastphil40 on May 16, 2012 - 5:39am
From: Common Dreams
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.
The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.
Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.
I contacted Morgan Lewis, the firm that represents Goldman in this matter, earlier today, but they haven’t commented as of yet. I wonder if the poor lawyer who FUBARred this thing has already had his organs harvested; his panic is almost palpable in the air. It is both terrible and hilarious to contemplate. The bank has spent a fortune in legal fees trying to keep this material out of the public eye, and here one of their own lawyers goes and dumps it out on the street.
The lawsuit between Overstock and the banks concerned a phenomenon called naked short-selling, a kind of high-finance counterfeiting that, especially prior to the introduction of new regulations in 2008, short-sellers could use to artificially depress the value of the stocks they’ve bet against. The subject of naked short-selling is a) highly technical, and b) very controversial on Wall Street, with many pundits in the financial press for years treating the phenomenon as the stuff of myths and conspiracy theories.
Now, however, through the magic of this unredacted document, the public will be able to see for itself what the banks’ attitudes are not just toward the “mythical” practice of naked short selling (hint: they volubly confess to the activity, in writing), but toward regulations and laws in general.
Go over to Common Dreams and read the whole article (hint -well worth it)
Submitted by phastphil40 on May 3, 2012 - 8:14pm
Submitted by phastphil40 on May 1, 2012 - 1:24pm
From Greg Sargent's blog at the Washington Post
One more time: Republicans don’t care about the deficit
By Jonathan Bernstein
So let me get this straight. Republicans are currently blocking the extension of lower student loan interest rates because they insist on cutting a health care fund to pay for its cost. But when it comes to the Bush tax cuts, they continue to believe that no budget offsets are necessary to pay for them.
The Hill reports: “House Republicans say they have no plans to pay for the extension of the Bush-era tax rates, a move that could erase the deficit reduction they have achieved since winning their majority in the chamber in 2010.”
In other words, Republicans intend to do exactly what they did when they passed the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts in the first place, which (along with not paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for Medicare prescription drug coverage) is exactly what created our budget mess in the first place.
Welcome, again, to the GOP War on Budgeting. You really couldn’t ask for clearer evidence that Republicans are not only wholly uninterested in reducing federal budget deficits, but even oppose the whole notion of considering individual spending and taxing decisions in the context of an overall budget.
Here’s how the GOP War on Budgeting actually works. If Republicans are seeking increased spending on one of their priorities (such as defense), or are looking to cut taxes and decrease revenues, there’s no need (in their view) to offset either; whatever they’re demanding is simply an urgent national priority, end of story.
If, however, Democrats want a tax cut (such as on the payroll tax) or spending increase on one of their priorities, then suddenly it must be paid for — by more spending cuts in programs that Dems favor, which Republicans are always for, regardless of the budget situation. That’s why Republicans have twice eliminated “PayGo” budget rules that would require tax cuts to be paid for.
All of this is accompanied by loud wailing about the deficit, which is apparently enough to fool some deficit idealists and quite a few reporters. But there’s little question about it: any party that truly believed that the budget deficit is the major threat to the nation Republicans say it is would absolutely insist on paying for tax cuts. Anyone who pays close attention to these things already knows that Republicans have little if any real interest in cutting deficits, but you really couldn’t ask for a clearer example than this one.
Submitted by phastphil40 on April 28, 2012 - 5:56am
From: The Reality Based Community
by Mark Kleiman
Thomas Mann (Brookings) and Norm Ornstein (AEI) writing in the Washington Post. Sounds like a formula for Inside-the-Beltway even-handedness between the firefighters and the fire, doesn’t it? But not at all. They have some frank observations:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
They have some advice for the press:
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
[snip]
We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.
Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
[snip]
Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.
They name names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
And they have some advice for the voters, too:
If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen …. it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.
Amen.
Submitted by phastphil40 on April 13, 2012 - 10:46am
Submitted by phastphil40 on April 12, 2012 - 7:19am
From: the New Economic Perspective
Professor William Black helps us understand:
The infected, odiferous, and bad tasting pink slime (aka, the “higher standard”) secretly added to our burgers for over a decade would be embarrassing to any system that pretends to the label “free enterprise,” but it has special resonance amongst economists. Adam Smith’s most famous saying, which captures his central vision of markets, is a seemingly paradoxical tale about butchers. He wrote that we could rely on the butcher providing us with wholesome meat not because of his altruism, but because of his far more reliable devotion to self-interest. Our butcher may not care about us, but he cares about whether he gets our business. This causes him to act reliably as if he cared for our well-being. He knows that if he sells us unfit meat we will cease buying meat from him and his business will fail. Pink slime is inconceivable in Adam Smith’s ode to the self-interested butcher.
Relying on corporate butchers’ self-interest (greed) has been proven to be unreliable by the pink slime deception. Greedy corporate butchers taught that they should not really care about the customer’s well-being realized that they could maximize their self-interest by selling us pink slime as long as they could do so secretly.
Modern finance theory extended Smith’s paradoxical tale about the butcher to the financial world. Theorists assured us that financial markets were, absent regulation, reliably “efficient” because they were “self-correcting.” Any pricing error created a profit opportunity for trades and those trades removed the pricing error. “Accounting control fraud” is impossible because it would create a consistent pricing bias by overstating the value of the securities issued by the frauds. The markets exclude fraud so effectively that “a rule against fraud is not an essential or … an important ingredient of securities markets” (Easterbrook & Fischel 1991).
Go over to the New Economic Perspective and read the whole article
Submitted by phastphil40 on March 28, 2012 - 8:30am
From: The Incremental Economist
The reporting from today’s oral arguments was predictably focused on Justice Kennedy. (Best Kennedy post – Brad’s Reading the Kennedy Tea Leaves) Justice Kennedy asked:
Is the government’s argument this–and maybe I won’t state it accurately. It is true that the noninsured young adult is, in fact, an actuarial reality insofar as our allocation of health services, insofar as the way health insurance companies figure risks. That person who is sitting at home in his or her living room doing nothing is an actuarial reality that can and must be measured for health service purposes; is that their argument? (p.56 of the Tuesday transcript)
If a healthy person doesn’t buy insurance, the average cost of the risk pool goes up.* This is unique to insurance markets. If a healthy person doesn’t buy broccoli, the average price goes down.
The Prescription Policy Choices brief from our BU health law class makes two important supporting arguments:
- The individual mandate closes a national marketplace, namely the market for self-insurance in health care. Congress clearly has the power to block markets (think: foreign prescription drugs, unpasteurized milk).
- This decision is rational, since the individual market for self-insurance is inefficient due to behavioral biases such as optimism bias and hyperbolic discounting.
This brief is a must-read for Justice Kennedy and his clerks. Professor Abigail Moncrieff of BU is the primary author; I’m the counsel of record.
@koutterson
* This is quite distinct from the free rider argument when uninsured people seek uncompensated care (see the Health Care For All brief); the health insurance impact is automatic and actuarial, whether or not the uninsured person ever seeks care.
Submitted by phastphil40 on March 27, 2012 - 9:04am
Submitted by phastphil40 on March 23, 2012 - 10:56am
From the Washington Post
Health reform at 2: Why American health care will never be the same
Posted by Sarah Kliff
In February 2009, Michael Zucker told a group of high-paid surgeons something they did not want to hear: The way they earned a salary was about to change.
Zucker is the chief development officer at Baptist Health System, a five-hospital network in San Antonio. For 37 common surgeries, such as hip replacements and pacemaker implants, it would soon collect “bundled” Medicare payments. Traditionally, hospitals and doctors had collected separate fees for each step of such procedures; now they would get a lump sum for treating everything related to the patient’s condition.
Four surgeons quit in protest.
“I’d describe the reception as lukewarm at best,” Zucker says. “There was a lot of: ‘How could you do this?’ and ‘I’m not going to participate.’ ”
The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality metrics. To earn a bonus, surgeons would, among other things, need to ensure that antibiotics were administered an hour before surgery and halted 24 hours after, reducing the chances of costly complications.
Only three doctors hit the metrics that first month, but their bonuses caught the attention of others. “There was a lot of, ‘Why are those doctors getting more, and I’m not?” Zucker says. Eight doctors got bonus payments in July; two dozen got them in August. Compliance with certain quality metrics steadily climbed from 89 percent to 98 percent in three months.
Two-and-a-half years later, Baptists’ surgeons have earned more than $950,000 in bonuses. Medicare, meanwhile, has netted savings: Its bundled rate is about 5 percent lower than all the fees it used to pay out for the same services. “It wasn’t a home-run,” says Zucker, noting the start-up costs in administering the program — not to mention a handful of lost employees. “But I’d call it a solid triple.”
Go over to the Washington Post and read the whole article.
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