Archive for March, 2010
Obama's Pick to Head Medicare/Medicaid
Our last post was about Obama’s bad choices for his debt commission—people who want to loot Social Security. But there is apparently some good news: We have it on good authority—my sister, who is a physician assistant and medical director at a network of rural health centers in West Virginia—that Obama’s pick to head the ...Read more.
Social Security Looters
We received this comment from Matthew Skomarovsky of LittleSis, the “involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans” (if you haven’t check out LittleSis, you should do so asap): “Props as always to D&S for not letting this slip under the radar. Far too little attention has been given to how well the Social Security looters have positioned ...Read more.
Drumbeats on Social Security
The New York Times had something of a scare-mongering front-page article on Social Security the other day. The new reason for concern, the Times suggested, is that payout is expected to exceed pay-in this year. But as Dean Baker pointed out on his Beat the Press blog, “this fact makes absolutely no difference for the ...Read more.
Health Care Reform: A Victory for the Little Guy?
David Leonhardt, the New York Times economics reporter, has a cover story in today’s paper, In Health Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality, that depicts the new health care reform law as the first great social legislation in a generation. It is big, and it is social legislation, and it is true that it will be ...Read more.
Obamacare: "Asprin for Cancer" (PNHP)
It has become an annual Left Forum tradition for some D&S folks to meet up with D&S friends over dinner in the East Village, and this year one of the main topics of conversation was, of course, health care reform. No one at the table liked the bill, so the discussion was about whether it ...Read more.
D&S @ Left Forum
Come visit the D&S exhibit table at the 2010 Left Forum, Pace University, New York City, this weekend—March 19-21. Meet D&S blogger extraordinaire Larry Peterson and D&S co-editor Chris Sturr; former book editor and D&S stalwart Amy Offner will be helping staff the table. Visit the conference website to find out what other excitement awaits ...Read more.
Black and Spitzer on Lehman Fraud
More on the scandal that is brewing in connection with the last months of Lehman Bros.: Today’s New York Times business section has an article, At Lehman, Watchdogs Saw It All, that goes further in suggesting complicity on the part of the NY Fed, under the leadership of one Timothy Geithner, in Lehman’s efforts to ...Read more.
Synergy in Security
An article in yesterday’s New York Times, Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants, traces the efforts of a Department of Defense official, Michael D. Furlong, to set up a network of private security contractors, some of them former CIA agents and Special Forces operatives, to “track and kill suspected militants” in Afghanistan ...Read more.
Lehman: The Art of the 'Sale'
Friday saw the release of a mammoth official report on the demise of the late, lamented Lehman Brothers. Written by Anton Valukas, a court-appointed Chicago securities lawyer, the over 2,000 page report, which was based on a staggering 350 billion pages of documentation [hard to believe the "billions," but that's what's been reported], claims that ...Read more.
(Repost from March 9:) Items on Greece
A couple of items on Greece: First, Mike-Frank Epitropoulos, who is working on an article for us on the Greek debt/default situation, sent us this image. The German magazine Focus ran a cover story headlined “Cheats in the Euro Family,” with an image of the Venus de Milo giving (the rest of Europe) the finger. ...Read more.
