One of the biggest problems with our ridiculous health care system in the US? Besides the fact we spend much more than any other country for the same results, besides the millions of uninsured, besides how much of that gets siphoned off as profits straight to CEO pockets.

The problem is health care is tied to your job. So people keep jobs they hate just because they can't afford to lose health care. Or they might not get it because of "pre-existing conditions". Or they'd have a three month gap before it kicks in at their new job. Or they can't go start their own business because the health insurance costs would kill them. And companies are spending lots of money insuring their employees, when companies in other countries don't have to spend as much, because they have better universal systems.

This video has to do with that. I saw that a couple weeks ago but hadn't posted it. What set me off today was this report from the Kaiser Foundation about health care. Let me steal the section hilzoy quoted over on Obsidian Wings. I heard one piece of this, the 7% marriage part on the radio this morning.

"The poll also found that in the past year, 23% of U.S. residents said they or a member of their household had either decided to stay with a current employer, instead of accepting a new job, or had switched jobs because of health insurance coverage. In addition, 7% of respondents said that they, or someone in their household, had decided to get married to obtain health insurance through their spouse. (...)

According to the poll, 37% of U.S. residents reported at least one of six financial troubles over the past five years as a result of medical bills:

20% had difficulties paying other bills;

20% were contacted by a collection agency;

17% had used all or most of their savings;

12% were unable to pay for basic necessities, such as food, heat or housing;

10% had to borrow money; and

3% declared bankruptcy (Kaiser Family Foundation release, 4/29)."

But, y'know, universal health care will eat your babies and kicks puppies.

Which is scarier?

A) An angry retired black preacher

B) Rich old white guys who started a war that has killed more Americans than September 11th, along with probably a million Iraqis? And ran the economy into the ground, spied on Americans without warrants, let the city of New Orleans drown, let Osama bin Laden get away, and want to start a war with Iran?

Apparently, judging by the media, it's A.

Seriously, he's not even bothering to pretend he wasn't lying any more. Here, about how he kept insisting that everything was fine in Iraq while violence spiraled out of control:
"BUSH: Well, yes. I think we — and I wanted — that's as much trying to bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well as — look, you can't have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, "It's not worth it," or, "You're losing." I mean, what does that do for morale?"

via Kevin Drum.

Man, darn that liberal media, constantly attacking George W. Bush, Our Heroic Leader!

Oh, wait, what's that? Nobody mentioned the fact that the President was bullshitting us all along? Nevermind.

The media loves John McCain. He's the "Maverick" riding the "Straight Talk Express" to the Republican nomination. He's the rebel Republican who's stood up to the White House on tax cuts, global warming, and torture.

Hogwash. McCain has given up all of his "maverick" integrity over the last few years. He was one of the least bad of the Republican candidates, but look at his competition! He would make a very bad president. Probably not as bad as the criminals in charge now, but in no way a good president.

Why? Well, I'll start by looking at three of the issues that I'm most concerned about. There's plenty more, so this may turn into a semi-ongoing series of posts.

First though, I'll get the cheapest shot out of the way. Here's how distant McCain is from Bush, even after Bush and Karl Rove attacked his adopted daughter by claiming she was the child of an affair.

Can you hear the romantic music?

Okay, now on to the issues. First, let's start with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. McCain's never been anything but a cheerleader for the war. He supported it when it started, even while we were being lied to about Saddam. He supported every step of the way, every disaster and fiasco. Never voted to force Bush to have any accountability. Pushed for the "surge" and kept hailing its success, even when it wasn't. Never pushed for any new plan, or a defined strategy, nothing.

And from his campaigning, his plan for the future is pretty much "More of the same, but harder!" Even though the same hasn't worked at all and got us into this mess and is making us lose Afghanistan, where we had the best chance.

Oh, and his policy for dealing with Iran? "Bomb bomb bomb Iran. He's later claimed it was a joke, but if it was, it was a really bad one.

So given that he's one of the people who helped get us into this mess, and helped drive us further into this disaster, why on Earth should we trust him to be competent to get us out of it, and make things any better?

Answer: We shouldn't.

Okay, second issue. Torture. The Bush administration has been holding people without charges, "disappearing" "suspected terrorists", and torturing people. Routinely. In violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions, as well as in violation of decency, morals, and our reputation around the world. It's not just terrorists, since we haven't bothered with little things like trial or evidence to see if the people we've caught are actual terrorists or know anything useful. (Not that torture is good at getting useful information. If you hurt somebody enough, they'll tell you whatever they think you want to hear that will make you stop. That's why dictators use it for forced confessions.) McCain's gotten a lot of credit in the press for opposing Bush on it.

I call bullshit. He hasn't done a damn thing to stop Bush from authorizing torture. Every time a bill's come up in Congress, he's voted against it. Here's some more He hasn't lead any bold investigations into the criminal underbelly of the Bush administration. He has, once again, enabled Bush and his cronies every step of the way. Even though he should know all this, from being held captive by the Viet Cong. He's just spoken up enough to get credit from credulous media, not actually DONE anything to really oppose the Bush administration or reign in torture.

And third, the environment. Environmental issues are going to be having a lot more impact over the next many years, between peak oil, climate chaos, plastic islands, and all of the rest. Especially with places like China and India industrializing rapidly. McCain has a reputation as one of the more environmentally friendly Republicans (low as that bar is). So how'd he do last year? Well... according to the League of Conservation Voters, McCain missed every important environmental vote last year. Every one.

Here's his issues page. It doesn't say a thing, it's just a bunch of vague platitudes. Also, look at this. McCain was asked at one of the debates if he favors mandatory carbon caps. He says no, his plan is cap-and-trade. Um. Senator McCain. You see that part in your plan, where it says "CAP-and-trade"? The entire way a cap and trade program works is it sets mandatory limits on how much CO2 can be produced, and then sells or gives away credits for that much pollution. Either McCain doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about, or he's flat out lying. In either case, that's hardly a "Straight Talk Express".

There's plenty more too, including his self-professed lack of knowledge of anything to do with economics, his about face to the fantasy that cutting taxes increases revenue, his embrace of scary hatemongers, and many others. Which I may or may not get into.

The saddest part is, even with all this, he's one of the better candidates the Republicans ran this year. I just hope the media gets over their love affair with him and their "Maverick straight-talker" storyline and actually tells people some of this.

The European Union just slapped Microsoft with a $1.3 billion fine, the biggest ever, over Microsoft's anticompetitive actions.

For last year, Microsoft earned about $14 billion. That incredible $1.4 billion fine they make back in just over a month.

In related news, Exxon-Mobil is in court, yet again, about the Exxon Valdez spill, 19 years ago. They're appealing punitive damages levied because of the damage done by the giant spill. The captain had been drinking and wasn't on the bridge at the time, and Exxon had known he was a recovering alcoholic and had fallen off the wagon. They've appealed the punishment damages down to $2.5 billion.

Last year, Exxon-Mobil made a record profit of $39.5 billion. They make $2.5 billion dollars in about three weeks.

If America had $100 and 100 people.

This graph is the key point, though. The top 1%'s share of the national income has more than doubled over the past 30 years. Everybody outside the top 10%'s share has gone down.

Two sets of "they" I'm referring to.

First, the people the real blame belongs on. The Republicans in Congress, who don't even pretend to put the good of the country ahead of their bosses in big businesses. In this case, the giant oil companies, who've been raking in record profits for years.

But also, the Democrats in Congress, who aren't even bothering to pretend to put any effort into any of the things they were elected for, they're just letting the Republicans block everything with fillibuster threats, not even actual fillibusters. They just say they need more numbers to get anything done. Which is true enough, their majority rests on Joe Lieberman, who left the Democratic party and ran on the Lieberman for Lieberman ticket after he lost a primary challenge. But they don't even make the Republicans actually get up and fillibuster.

But on to the bill.

A few weeks ago, the House passed an ambitious energy bill, with renewable energy mandates, support for plug-in vehicles, increased fule effieiency standards, and other such goodness. It wasn't perfect, there was a lot of wiggle room and funkiness, but it was a definite step in the right direction.

So then it went to the Senate. And the Republicans there were having none of it. So, the renewable energy package was cut from the bill. It still wasn't enough for the Republicans, by one vote. 59-40 to cut off debate.

So what finally got the Republicans on board? A watered-down version which didn't close $13 billion in tax loopholes for the polluting oil companies. The same oil companies that have been raking in record profits from the high price of oil the last few years. Once that was dropped, the Republicans hopped on board, and the bill passed 86-6. The "free market" party put giant tax giveaways to huge companies who are too lazy to change ahead of tax breaks and incentives for small companies trying to innovate and help fix our problems. And President Bush, a failed oilman, said he'd veto any version with the oil tax llopholes closed, of course.

"The White House has said the taxes would lead to higher energy costs and unfairly single out the oil industry for punishment. A Democratic analysis showed that the $13.5 billion over 10 years amounted to 1.1 percent of the net profits that five largest oil companies would be expected to earn given today's oil prices."

The Democratic leadership couldn't even keep up a fight for more than a single day, to convince one Senator to vote a better way. Not even one of their own, the Senator from Louisiana who broke ranks.

And this is what the Republican party values. Tax breaks to giant profitable companies over the good of the country, over innovation in small and medium businesses, over the ability of our civilization to adapt to and weather the problems we've made.

This is a good little video about the writer's strike, and the whole myth of "rich writers who don't hardly have to work."

So, Rudy Giuliani has a new radio ad out, talking about how he had prostate cancer, and how much better Americian care and insurance is as opposed to Europe, in this case "England". Presumably to attack any kind of government involvement in health care. Except his numbers are completely wrong, and survival rates are nearly identical in the US and UK. And this was while he was mayor of New York, with government provided insurance. And for bonus points, the surgery was invented in Denmark.

To quote Ezra Klein: "So Giuliani's case for the superiority of our "free market" health care system goes something like this: While on health insurance provided by New York state, he was treated, using a surgery developed by Europeans, for prostate cancer, a disease that most commonly afflicts those covered by the federal government's single-payer health care system. Take that, Europe/national health insurance."

Kevin Drum has some pretty graphs.

Of course, this lie is a lot less scary than the fact Giuliani's main foreign affairs advisors are drawn from the ranks of the people who pushed the hardest for the invasion of Iraq. We really really don't need any more wars. Besides the fact that you'd think the outcome of Iraq would have proved that all of the people who pushed for it are completely wrong, or liars, or both. Neither of which are great recommendations for advisors.

And in other news, Fred Thompson is playing up to the paranoia of the NRA by claiming the UN plans to take away people's guns. This isn't true. Shocking, I know.

You'd think that'd be the kind of thing reporters who like playing "gotcha" would be all over. Funny how they're not.

I noticed an article in Business Week yesterday, called Little Green Lies. It's about Auden Schendler, an environmentalist who got a job at Aspen Skiing Co, as their environmental advocate. It starts off talking about how he's achieved"a lot of sexy projects", but doesn't feel they did anything.

The real story, as I read the article, is how every time he tried anything that would actually work, he was stymied by executives who were either baffled and confused by his insistence, or would rather spend the money on something much more short-term or just that they're used to. The most flagrant example?

" Thwarted on guest rooms, Schendler switched to Little Nell's underground garage. Guests never saw it because valets park all cars. For $20,000, Schendler said he could replace energy-gobbling 175-watt incandescent light fixtures with fluorescent bulbs and save $10,000 a year. Unimpressed, Calderon again balked. If he had $20,000 extra, he would rather spend it on items guests would notice: fine Corinthian leather furniture or shiny new bathroom fixtures."

He finally did get them to convert the lights, two years later, and after getting a $5,000 grant from a local non-profit. That's right, a big profitable company had to get a donation from charity to install equipment that would pay for itself in two years, and then save them $10,000 a year every year after that. Much more than would have been made in new bookings due to leather chairs or shiny faucets, I'm willing to bet. That's a 50% return on investment, better than anything you can find on the stock market. Later they talk about partially funding a solar energy farm outside Aspen, which would have a "paltry" 6.5% ROI. So it'd pay for itself in 15 years.

But as you can see above, corporate honchos aren't thinking long term. Even if the things they are thinking are completely pointless and would make less money than simple efficiencies. The moral of this story is, corporate execs aren't going to change how they do things, even if changing simple things would be a better investment. And since they won't change on their own, they need to be required to change, which means government has to get involved.

Last year, the top 1% of Americans made 21.2% of the total income in the US.

That's probably why, despite all the "great" numbers for the economy, most people don't think it's going so well. Because they're not. And neither is anyone they know. All the economic gains of the past almost decade have been going to the same tiny subset of people, rather than being spread out through society. All that extra productivity and work people are putting in doesn't come back to them, it gets hoovered up to the top.

And it doesn't trickle back down.

The following is the text of an email I sent to NPR's Marketplace show today, after they had a hack from the WSJ editorial page spouting nonsense straight out of the "Fairtax" book. Here's the article in question.

And my letter:
This morning, on the Marketplace Morning Report, you had Stephen Moore on, praising the benefits of a national sales tax.  His ideas and numbers come entirely from the book "FairTax" by Neal Boortz and John Linder.  And unfortunately, most of what he quoted is inaccurate or false.  A 23% sales tax would not replace all of the government income, the percentage was picked as near the maximum amount people would tolerate as a sales tax.  A national sales tax, despite his claim, would be extremely regressive and complex.  Most families who are out of the top 1% spend most of their income each year, which would make their net tax rate at LEAST 23%, plus the increases in cost that would come from this kind of tax.  Whereas the richest few don't spend all their money, which would make their net tax rate far below the 23% the rest of us would pay.  That hardly qualifies as "fair" by any stretch of the imagination.  And his idea of a $20,000 rebate for the sales tax spent?  That would be at least as complicated as the current income tax.  The rest of the work of tax collection would then be pushed on to the companies who sell products.  It would require just as much work, and we would still require the IRS to investigate cheats and other things.

His entire presentation was misleading at best, and outright false at worst.  The entire idea of a "fair" national sales tax is snake oil, designed to cover up for a gigantic tax cut for the rich and a tax hike for the rest of us, not any kind of serious policy suggestion.

If you're looking at buying a new USB thumb drive, make sure it doesn't have the "U3 launchpad" on it. If it does, the thumb drive's been preformatted with a second partition, which has been made read-only. That partition contains the "U3 Launchpad" program, which autoruns every time you put the thumbdrive in. Every single time. And it installs files from that on your computer, which it claims to remove when you take the thumbdrive out. And you can't disable it, since the partition is read-only. It's slow, annoying, eats six megs of the thumb drive, and it's on no matter what. Plus it doesn't do anything the Portable Apps launcher doesn't do better, and less annoyingly. They finally made a U3 uninstaller, but to uninstall it, it has to reformat the whole drive and wipe everything you have on it. So if you're unlucky enough to get one with this piece of crap, use the uninstaller before you put anything on it. It's really not worth it at all, and annoying as hell. Another example of Stupid Lame Design.

(Via Kevin Drum, who did the math)

Unions put pressure on again-profitable airlines.
"When the airline industry went into a deep slump after the 2001 terrorist attacks, American Airlines' pilots, flight attendants and mechanics agreed to billions of dollars in cuts in wages and benefits to keep the carrier afloat.

Now AMR Corp., American's parent, is back in the black, so much so that 874 top executives will receive more than $150 million in stock bonuses next week.

As for the 57,000 rank-and-file employees, they're seeing red.

"We made huge sacrifices," said Dana Davis, an 18-year American employee and spokeswoman for the Assn. of Professional Flight Attendants.

The airline's 18,000 attendants took an across-the-board 16% pay cut and gave up vacation days. "We're not getting anything back for it," Davis said."

Reminds me of the Safeway thing from a few months back, where they negotiated pay and benefit cuts for all their new employees, because otherwise they'd like go bankrupt or something. Then, oddly enough, a couple of months later, they reported record profits. Funny how that works out. Even with the stock options distributed to employees that are allegedly worth a billion now, that doesn't make up for the pay cut the employees took, and plus, what good are stock options when you don't have the money to buy them?

And then there's the matter of the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that was just given to the airlines as bailouts after 9/11.

On the sort of plus side, "Delta Air Lines Inc. stands in contrast. Its chief executive, Gerald Grinstein, has refused to take any extra cash, stock awards, stock options or a pay raise. And Grinstein cut his salary in half during the carrier's bankruptcy proceedings, to $338,000 a year, among the lowest for any major U.S. corporation."

Nothing more need be said. But if you want to read Republicans treating this as just rhetoric that needs to be re-aimed, here you go. The article's pretty good though, but the chart really says it all.

From the Department of Stupid Plans: Circuit City Plans to Replace 3,400 Workers in Stores

"RICHMOND, Va. -- Circuit City Stores Inc. said Wednesday that it plans to cut costs by laying off about 3,400 retail workers, or 8.5 percent of its in-store staff, and hiring lower-paid employees to replace them. It is also trimming about 80 corporate information-technology jobs.

Circuit City, the nation's second-biggest consumer electronics retailer, behind Best Buy Co. Inc., said the store workers being laid off were earning "well above the market-based salary range for their role." They will be replaced as soon as possible with employees who will be paid at the current market range, the company said.

"We are taking a number of aggressive actions to improve our cost and expense structure, which will better position us for improved and sustainable returns in today's marketplace," said Chief Executive Philip J. Schoonover.

Circuit City employs about 40,000 part-time and full-time store employees, according to spokeswoman Jackie Foreman. Those being laid off will get severance packages and can apply for any open positions after 10 weeks, Foreman said.

The company plans to replace all 3,400 workers "as quickly as store directors are able," she said.

"Firing 3,400 of arguably the most successful sales people in the company could prove terrible for morale," Colin McGranahan, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein & Co., wrote in a research note. "The question remains as to whether Circuit City can rebuild in time for the all-important holiday season."

The sales people being fired weren't given an option of taking a pay cut, a spokesman said. He declined to give the pay rate for fired workers or the expected wages for new hires."

Okay, so there's many levels of jackassery here. First, the company's firing 3,400 workers for no reason other than they don't want to pay them what they're worth. Then, there's the whole idea of it. How did this come up at a board meeting? "Hey guys! I know what'd be a good way to save money! Let's fire our best workers and hire newbies to replace them!" Seriously, where the hell does that make any sense at all? Fire your best people and then have to train new people, and end up selling less stuff because you've gotten rid of the few competent employees at the store.

Great work, corporate America!

So yesterday I was listening to the news while driving home from work, and they were going over the details of Bush's proposed budget. And one of the things he wanted, was to change the means testing for Medicare to not be indexed to inflation.

Which means, as inflation goes up, the caps wouldn't. So elderly people who are making the same effective amount of money would be paying more and more of their premiums and costs than they do now. Which would get rid of the point of Medicare, which is to provide health care for old people.

Man, such a compassionate conservative!

More details here.

At work, they've started up a new things where the CEO basically has a blog on the company intranet, and people can post comments which he may or may not reply to.

I'm wondering how long until somebody gets fired for something they post there. But that's not what struck me the most. What strikes me the most is how some of the replies sound like they're written by a regular human being, and then some of the replies are blatantly crazy corporate speak. Like when someone asked about putting solar panels on the roofs, for the tax breaks in California, the answer was that the buildings are owned by the malls or whatever (true) and that when something like that was cost-effective, Wal-Mart would lead the way. THAT was what made me laugh my ass off. Yeah. Wal-Mart leading the way. Uh huh. Sure. Right. And if the malls or wherever are going to do it, they're going to need pushes from the companies renting the space to make them want to do it. Most malls shift the costs for heating and electricity etc onto the renters, so they really don't give a crap how much it costs. These are simple basic facts of economics. But the environment of corporate culture has its expectations, and certain things aren't possible in there.

Okay, so Sean Hannity, the hacktastic Fox news dude, has a new show. And on this new show, he's basically stolen an the idea from Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" segment and Stephen Colbert's "On Notice" Segment. Only his is called Enemy of the State".

Now, leaving aside the happy Orwellian name there, and leaving aside the fact that Hannity's not an actual part of the state apparatus, for all that Fox is the Republican Party Propaganda Channel, what makes it the stupidest is this. The stupidest part is that the first person Hannity names as an "Enemy of the State"? Sean Penn, the actor. Um. Yeah, okay, great sense of priorities there.

Other than that though, this is just another outgrowth of the right-wing culture of hate and declaring your enemies to be traitors and inhuman scum, which has reached ridiculous heights of venom and stupidity over the past decade. That and they must be trying to put parody out of business, because how can you even try and parody something that's already completely stupid on its own?

I wonder how many computers it would take to run the Internet if spam was gone. I don't get a lot of regular email, true, but the spam that gets by my yahoo email's filter almost always outnumbers the real emails I get by an order of magnitude. The problem is, spam's so cheap, all they need is one person to fall for the crap, and it pays for itself.

How many resources are wasted creating and sending and blocking spam? Lots. I hope that work at least grants some side benefits to the Internet.