Desperate Times, Stupid Measures, and Obamacare

Republicans in Washington are determined to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. This week already, Sen. Mike Allen (R-Utah) proposed a government shutdown if Obamacare isn’t repealed. Steve Benen lists several other ways Republicans are determined to either stop the law or make sure it doesn’t work.

Ed Kilgore:

It’s taken a few years, but the GOP has managed to talk itself into a very firm belief that this national version of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health plan is a satanic abomination that will either, depending on which talking point they are following at any particular moment, crash and burn taking the entire U.S. economy down with it, or succeed in seducing Americans to sell themselves into the voluntary slavery of “socialized medicine.”

If they really believed it will crash and burn, I don’t think they’d be quite so frantic to stop it. If it crashes and burns, this would give the GOP a great issue for the 2014 midterms. If they really believed it will crash and burn, I think they would just step aside and let it. But if they can sabotage it …

Paul Krugman wrote a few days ago that Obamacare is the Right’s worst nightmare

Yglesias is right: there will be bobbles along the way, but this is going to become an immensely popular program. By the time Liz Cheney challenges Hillary Clinton’s reelection campaign, there will be signs at the rallies declaring “Don’t let the government get its hands on Obamacare!”

Conservatives are right to be hysterical about this: it’s an attack on everything they believe — and it’s going to make Americans’ lives better. What could be worse?

Byron York probably speaks for many righties when he says that once Obamacare is in effect, it will be too late to repeal it entirely. That’s because people will like it. He says,

When Washington conservatives gather to talk among themselves, and the discussion turns to Obamacare — it happens pretty frequently — it’s not unusual to hear predictions that the president’s health care law will “collapse of its own weight.” It’s a “train wreck,” many say, quoting Democratic Sen. Max Baucus. It’s unworkable. It’s going to be a big, smoking ruin.

So what’s the problem?

On the other hand, a lot of thoughtful conservatives are looking beyond Oct. 1 to Jan. 1, the day the law (except for the parts the president has unilaterally postponed) is scheduled to go fully into effect. On that day the government will begin subsidizing health insurance for millions of Americans. (A family of four with income as high as $88,000 will be eligible for subsidies.) When people begin receiving that entitlement, the dynamics of the Obamacare debate will change.

At that point, the Republican mantra of total repeal will become obsolete. The administration will mount a huge public relations campaign to highlight individuals who have received government assistance to help them afford, say, chemotherapy, or dialysis, or some other life-saving treatment. Will Republicans advocate cutting off the funds that help pay for such care?

The answer is no. Facing that reality, the GOP is likely to change its approach, arguing that those people should be helped while the rest of Obamacare is somehow dismantled.

What the GOP continues to ignore is that the rest of it can’t be dismantled without dismantling all of it. The program is about a lot more than subsidies. The many moving parts work together to make it possible for more people to get insurance. Even many who don’t get subsidies will be paying lower premiums.

So, yeah, it’s starting to sink in to some of them that they’d better kill Obamacare now, or they’re going to find themselves in a far more unfavorable political landscape.

See also Jonathan Cohn, Conservatives Brace for the Possibility Obamacare Won’t Totally Suck and Charles Pierce, Mike Lee’s Latest Great Plan.

The Establishment Wants Us to Move On

You are no doubt aware that the Right went on ugly overdrive after the Zimmerman verdict, and then doubled down on the ugly after the President’s remarks on race last week. See, for example,

Nastiest conservative responses to Obama’s Trayvon speech

Top 12 Conservative Freakouts After Obama’s Race Speech

Fox News Host Calls Obama ‘Race-Baiter In Chief’ After Trayvon Martin Statement

Tea Party Host David Webb Hits Obama For ‘Playing Into Black-White Racist Dynamic’ With Zimmerman Speech

Sean Hannity Asks If Obama Is Like Trayvon Martin Because ‘He Smoked Pot’ And ‘Did A Little Blow’

I could go on and on. The mere mention of race drives the wingnuts into a rabid frenzy. It appears that even to treat racial injustice as a serious issue that deserves respectful discussion, or that African-Americans really do experience ill treatment because of race, is taboo. It must not be said in public. It’s like talking about your porn collection in church.

(One does not need a degree in psychology to know that the reason wingnuts feel this way is that they are in massive denial about their own racism. Which, in a way, is progress. Fifty years ago they would have been aiming their shotguns at freedom marchers. Now they’re mostly reduced to throwing tantrums. Well, except in “stand your ground” states.)

What I’m seeing today is, in a way, more insidious. For example, the Los Angeles Times has an op ed piece called “Rhetoric, race and reality in America” that fairly oozes with white paternalism. And yes, I realize one of the co-authors is black.

After criticizing the “hysterical response of some civil rights leaders” to the verdict, and their “message of victimhood and division,” the authors remind us that young black men kill other young black men at higher rates than whites kill young black men. Yes, but one suspects the police actually arrest the perpetrators within a reasonable amount of time.

And what would we do without Shelby Steele telling us that the civil rights establishment is in decline.

On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren’t so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, “You won’t call the tune here. We will work within the law.”

Never mind that the law is an outrage. Last year Steele was among the many right-wing media elites who willfully refused to acknowledge that the real issue was the inaction of the police. See also Conservatives Still Don’t Understand The Trayvon Martin Story from April 2012.

Whatever. The Establishment wants us to know that we’ve gone on long enough about Trayvon Martin, and it’s time to accept reality and move on.

Oh, and there are more threats to voting rights on the horizon, but I suppose we’re not supposed to notice that, either.

You’re Not Oppressed Until a White Man Says You’re Oppressed

I’m not necessarily suggesting you read it, but FYI today’s Ross Douthat column tells us that Texas-abortion restrictions really don’t oppress women, so liberals should quit bellyachin’ about it. Yeah, I’m sure Douthat is an expert on what women find oppressive.

He comes to this opinion via his usual highly creating juggling of cherry-picked “facts.” Yes, it’s true that many European countries have gestation limits for elective abortion that are even lower than 20 weeks. However, most of these countries do not have goon squads of Fetus People closing clinics on trumped-up pretenses, demanding transvaginal ultrasounds, or second-guessing physicians about which later-term abortions are medically necessary. And I believe in most of these countries abortions are covered by the national health care system, so that women don’t have to delay having an abortion while they save up the money to have an abortion.

Douthat writes of the potential consequences of Texas abortion law,

One possible answer is that Texas will make a forced march into squalor, misery and patriarchal oppression. Women’s lives will be endangered, their health threatened, their economic opportunities substantially foreclosed.

To the extent that this case rests on facts rather than fear, it’s based on cross-country comparisons. Around the globe, countries with abortion bans often do have worse outcomes — more poverty, fewer opportunities for women and, yes, often more abortions as well.

But, he says, comparisons with sub-Sahara Africa are not exactly like-to-like. What about Ireland? he asks. Which is a hoot, considering that it’s probably much easier for an Irish woman to take a ferry from Dublin to Liverpool than for a woman in middle-of-nowhere Texas to go anywhere civilized. Douthat says, “even if abortion were somehow banned outright in Texas tomorrow, it would still be available to women with the resources to travel out of state.” And the women who do not have those resources almost certainly can find hangers.

And Irish law specifically provides that Irish women have a right to travel to Britain or anywhere else to get an abortion. Just watch the whackjobs in the Texas legislature pass laws that prosecute women for crossing state lines to get an abortion.

And yes, Douthat mentioned Savita Halappanavar, a woman who really truly died in an Irish hospital because she was denied an abortion. But Douthat tells us soothingly that “there is little evidence that the Halappanavar tragedy reflects a larger trend.” I’m sure that’s a great comfort to her family.

Douthat continues,

Meanwhile, international rankings offer few indications that Ireland’s abortion laws are holding Irish women back. The country ranks first for gender parity in health care in a recent European Union index. It was in the middle of the pack in The Economist’s recent “glass-ceiling index” for working women. It came in fifth out of 135 countries in the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap” report. (The United States was 22nd.)

Now it’s also true that Ireland, like most of Europe, is to the left of Texas on many economic issues. All the abortion restrictions described above coexist with universal health care, which Rick Perry’s state conspicuously lacks.

So perhaps, it might be argued, abortion can be safely limited only when the government does more to cover women’s costs in other ways — in which case Texas might still be flirting with disaster.

But note that this is a better argument for liberalism than for abortion.

Dude — it’s all of a piece. Notice that the yahoos who lay awake at night thinking up new abortion restrictions are the same ones trying to sabotage “Obamacare.” And they’re often the same ones denying that women are really paid less than men or that anyone might need Affirmative Action or a living wage.

The day that abortions are covered by a national health care program, all women have reasonably good access to abortion providers, and physicians are allowed reasonable discretion in determining medical need for a later-term abortion, then a 20-week gestation limit on elective abortions wouldn’t be that big a deal. But until those other things happen, it is.

And if I were God, I’d give Douthat a womb. It might broaden his perspectives.

Well, I wasn’t going to rant on about Douthat quite this long, because I also wanted to mention the on-air argument between professional white guy Ben Ferguson and CNN host Don Lemon. Basically, Ferguson told the African-American Lemon that black men are not, in fact, profiled or harassed by police or treated differently by pearl-clutching matrons than white men, and an exasperated Lemon said,

“I’m telling you my experience, the president’s telling you about his experience. And you’re saying that we’re not having that experience. Who are you to tell us we’re not having that experience, when you’re not living it? You’re not in our bodies. It’s insulting for you to say, ‘No that’s not happening.’ You don’t live as a black man, you don’t know that.”

Hey, he’s the white guy; he knows everything. And you’re not oppressed until he says you’re oppressed.

President Obama and a Poignant Anniversary

The President made a powerful statement on race in America today. In the wake of the tragic Zimmerman verdict,

Mr. Obama eloquently rebutted those — like Republican Congressman Andy Harris with his dismissive “get over it” remark on Tuesday — who said that the verdict should have ended discussion of the case, especially talk about race and gun laws.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”

He said there are “very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store” or “the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

“That,” he said, “includes me.”

The full transcript is here. See also Why Obama Decided To Speak Out On Race And The Zimmerman Verdict.

It so happens today is the 150th anniversary of the assault on Fort Wagner by the 54th Massachusetts regiment, which you might remember was portrayed in the film Glory a few years back. The 54th Massachusetts was the first African-American regiment organized in the North to fight for the Union. The 54th suffered nearly 45 percent casualties at Fort Wagner, but gained immortality.

Ayn Rand Never Ran a Business

There have been several stories this week about what CEO Eddie Lampert is doing to Sears. As Paul Krugman says, its the story of how an “Ayn Rand-loving hedge fund guy is driving Sears into the ground.”

Lynn Stuart Parramore writes,

A bit of background: Lampert cut his teeth on Wall Street at the risk-arbitrage desk of Goldman Sachs under Robert Rubin, who later became U.S. Treasury Secretary and now serves as vice chairman at Citigroup. In 1988, Lampert founded ESL Investments and joined the billionaire’s club at age 41. He rose to fame in the early 2000s for seizing control of Kmart during bankruptcy and then using it to take over Sears. Along the way he was kidnapped and deposited on a motel toilet in handcuffs for nearly 40 hours, and lived to tell the tale. Lampert is known for his touchiness and odd habits, such as conducting meetings from a bare bones room to Sears executives forced to tune in by videoconference. He hates flying.

You might say that Lampert is the distillation of the fervent market worship and wrong-headed economic approaches that came to dominate the U.S. in the 1980s and have yet to run their fatal course. He adores Ayn Rand, and is reported to have given out copies of Atlas Shrugged during an ESL annual dinner. Lampert is also a fan of Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist beloved by conservatives and libertarians. As a Robert Rubin protégé, he absorbed the lessons of a man whose discredited economic focus on budget deficits ended up starving the country’s infrastructure, education and alternative energy.

Looking at what Lampert has done to Sears, we can see what happens when the lessons of his mentors are actually applied in the real world. It isn’t pretty.

Long story short, instead of managing Sears in a way that allowed its many divisions to support and complement each other, he broke the company up into warring fiefdoms and told them they must compete with each other. Mine Kimes writes at Bloomberg Businessweek,

Since the takeover, Sears Holdings’ sales have dropped from $49.1 billion to $39.9 billion, and its stock has sunk 64 percent. Its cash recently fell to a 10-year low. Although it has plenty of assets to unload before bankruptcy looms, the odds of a turnaround grow longer every quarter. “The way it’s being managed, it doesn’t work,” says Mary Ross Gilbert, a managing director at investment bank Imperial Capital. “They’re going to continue to deteriorate.”

Joe Cahill at Crain’s puts it more starkly.

Mr. Lampert spent billions of dollars of the company’s once-prodigious cash flow in a vain effort to prop up the stock price through share buybacks. Between 2005 and 2011, Sears spent $6 billion on buybacks. Nevertheless, Sears stock has lost half its value over the last five years.

Part of the problem, according to Parramore, is that neither Lampert nor any of the top execs he brought with him had any experience with retail. And they didn’t think they needed any. Lampert seems to have believed he could make Sears and Kmart profitable again by applying Randian/objectivist principles. Cahill continues,

At least initially, Wall Street bought into the contradictory notions that he could use the company as a Berkshire Hathaway-style vehicle for other investments while restoring the two chains to their former glory. And if all else failed, we were assured, Mr. Lampert could simply harvest the vast value stored up in Sears’ real estate.

Mr. Lampert, for his part, insisted that his goal was to turn around the company’s retail operations. But he did little to discourage the Buffett analogy, misguided as it turned out to be.

Lampert is basically overseeing a slow-motion liquidation, Cahill says. And maybe that was his intention all along. But reading these articles, I get the impression that Cahill really believed he could run Sears better than it had been run in the past. Read the Bloomberg Businessweek article in particular on this point. Parramore concludes,

The lessons of Crazy Eddie seem so obvious that a bunch kids running a lemonade stand could understand them. You have to know something about the business you’re running, especially a big one. Success requires cooperation rather than constant competition. Greed is ultimately destructive.

The invisible hand of the market appears to have attempted to slap Lampert upside the head to teach him these things. But he remains committed to his nonsense, and the real losers are all the hard-working people who have lost their jobs, and the potential loss to the American economy of two revered brands.

It’s probably a good thing Ayn Rand never tried to run a business.

Somehow, this all makes me recall our old buddy and GOP presidential candidate Mittens, who believed he could run America like a vulture capitalist firm. We surely dodged a bullet when he lost.

New York Health Insurance Rates to Plummet

This is good news for me, anyway

State insurance regulators say they have approved rates for 2014 that are at least 50 percent lower on average than those currently available in New York. Beginning in October, individuals in New York City who now pay $1,000 a month or more for coverage will be able to shop for health insurance for as little as $308 monthly. With federal subsidies, the cost will be even lower.

Supporters of the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, credited the drop in rates to the online purchasing exchanges the law created, which they say are spurring competition among insurers that are anticipating an influx of new customers. The law requires that an exchange be started in every state.

As of this writing, this story has not been made available on the Fox News website.

The Senior Senator From Massachusetts Kicks Ass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ONEcoq9pjac#action=share

Charles Pierce:

My god, this is a kicking of the ass. Sooner or later, they’re going to realize that you really do have to bring the A-game on this stuff to the Senior Senator, or she is going to smile her Okie smile and the hook is going to come off the jab and, as the great Jimmy Breslin once put it, you will leave the ring in a blanket. She does mean business. Someone should start to believe that