Tag Archives: exchange

Chris Christie’s Aides Sure Did Joke About Traffic Jams a Lot

by MandyLienhop Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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I haven’t written about Bridgegate lately, figuring that MSNBC’s saturation coverage is probably plenty for anyone who’s truly interested in every last jot and tittle of speculation about what happened. Today, though, the New York Times adds something concrete to the story: yet another exchange between two of the people at the center of the scandal. For some obscure reason, they appear to have gotten annoyed with Rabbi Mendy Carlebach of South Brunswick Township, which prompted this exchange:

“We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?” wrote Bridget Anne Kelly, then a deputy chief of staff for Mr. Christie.

David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, suggested that they should think bigger. “Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed,” Mr. Wildstein wrote. (Again, he appeared to be kidding.)

This came a few days after Kelly’s infamous email to Wildstein that gleefully declared, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Apparently these two were pretty pleased with their little traffic jam idea and joked about it repeatedly. This adds to the evidence that they considered traffic jams a form of political retaliation, and that this was what motivated the lane closures at Fort Lee.

There’s still no evidence that Christie knew what they were doing, but Kelly and Wildstein sure seemed to think they were working in an environment in which this kind of thing was just another day at the office. It probably was.

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Chris Christie’s Aides Sure Did Joke About Traffic Jams a Lot

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Here’s What We Can Learn About Health Care From the Mortgage Crisis

by ColemanKrauss Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Health care isn’t the first boon that President Obama tried to give us through a public-private partnership. When he took office, more than 25% of US home mortgages were underwater—meaning that people owed more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them. The president offered those homeowners debt relief through banks. Now he’s offering health care through insurance companies.

In both cases, the administration shied away from direct government aid. Instead, it subsidized private companies to serve the people. To get your government-subsidized mortgage modification, you applied at your bank; to get your government-mandated health coverage, you buy private insurance.

Let a Hundred Middlemen Bloom

In other countries with national health plans, a variety of independent health care providers—hospitals, doctors, and clinics, among others—deliver medical care, while the government doles out the compensation. They let a hundred healthcare providers bloom, but there’s only a single payer. If the US moved to single-payer healthcare, however, what would happen to the private health insurance business?

In the 1990s, the conservative Heritage Foundation floated the idea of extending health coverage to more Americans via government exchanges or “connectors” that would funnel individual buyers to competing, for-profit health insurance companies. In other words, let a hundred middlemen bloom.

On the face of it, such a plan would seem expensive, since it means supporting two bureaucracies, one of which would be obliged to take profits for investors. Meanwhile, doctors would still have the expense of trying to collect from multiple insurers with reasons to stall. But the Heritage plan had one great advantage. Since Harry Truman, American presidents have tried unsuccessfully to get us national health care. The exchange system, however awkward it might be, pacified the insurance companies which had previously spent millions of dollars to defeat other plans for “socialized medicine.” With the support of those companies for a program that not only kept them in the picture, but also promised to deliver millions of new, subsidized customers to them, Obama gave us a national healthcare law.

The danger is that it essentially makes insurance companies our medical receptionists, a profit-making face that greets sick people whenever they try to use their government healthcare. That gives private companies a lot of power to make the government look bad.

That’s why it’s important to understand how banks used Obama’s mortgage subsidy program to sabotage debt relief and discredit government. If we grasp how they pulled that off, we may be able to protect the present health plan and someday even get genuine single-payer healthcare out of it. So here’s the story.

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Here’s What We Can Learn About Health Care From the Mortgage Crisis

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Here’s Why the CBO Thinks Obamacare Will Reduce Employment Among the Poor

by ClaireWCAgu Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Congressional Budget Office has updated its estimate of the effect of Obamacare on employment:

CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024….Because the largest declines in labor supply will probably occur among lower-wage workers….CBO estimates that the ACA will cause a reduction of roughly 1 percent in aggregate labor compensation over the 2017–2024 period, compared with what it would have been otherwise.

Why will Obamacare reduce employment? Because it’s a job killer? Because employers will push lots of workers into part-time positions? Because its taxes on the well-off will crater the economy?

No. Those effects are tiny at best. It’s much simpler than that. Obamacare will reduce employment primarily because it’s a means-tested welfare program, and means-tested programs always reduce employment among the poor:

Subsidies that help lower-income people purchase an expensive product like health insurance must be relatively large to encourage a significant proportion of eligible people to enroll.

….For some people, the availability of exchange subsidies under the ACA will reduce incentives to work both through a substitution effect and through an income effect. The former arises because subsidies decline with rising income (and increase as income falls), thus making work less attractive. As a result, some people will choose not to work or will work less—thus substituting other activities for work. The income effect arises because subsidies increase available resources—similar to giving people greater income—thereby allowing some people to maintain the same standard of living while working less. The magnitude of the incentive to reduce labor supply thus depends on the size of the subsidies and the rate at which they are phased out.

If, for example, earning $100 in additional income means a $25 reduction in Obamacare subsidies, you’re only getting $75 for your extra work. At the margins, some people will decide that’s not worth it, so they’ll forego working extra hours. That’s the substitution effect. In addition, low-income workers covered by Obamacare will have lower medical bills. This makes them less desperate for additional money, and might also cause them to forego working extra hours. That’s the income effect.

This is not something specific to Obamacare. It’s a shortcoming in all means-tested welfare programs. It’s basically Welfare 101, and in over half a century, no one has really figured out how to get around it. It’s something you just have to accept if you support safety net programs for the poor.

It’s worth noting, however, that health care is an exception to this rule. It doesn’t have to be means tested. If we simply had a rational national health care system, available to everyone regardless of income, then none of this would be an issue. There might still be a small income effect, but it would probably be barely noticeable. Since everyone would be fully covered no matter what, there would no high effective marginal tax rate on the poor and no reason not to work more hours. Someday we’ll get there.

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Here’s Why the CBO Thinks Obamacare Will Reduce Employment Among the Poor

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Vermont Is Kicking Everyone’s Ass at Signing Up People for Obamacare

by QuinnHeavener Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Which states are doing the best at signing up people for Obamacare? Business Insider has a state-by-state chart here showing the number of people who have completed the process 100 percent: they’ve actually chosen a specific plan and officially enrolled their families. But I figure a better measure of activity is the number of people who have completed an application and been confirmed eligible to purchase private insurance via the exchange. They still have the final enrollment step left, but they’ve obviously navigated everything successfully, which is a good measure of how smoothly things are rolling out.

The chart below shows the results for 49 states (there’s no data for Massachusetts). States in red are running their own websites. States in blue are using the federal website. Vermont and Kentucky are way ahead of everyone else, and demonstrate how well the Obamacare rollout is doing in places where the website is working and the state government is doing a good job of marketing and operations. Raw data comes from today’s HHS report.

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Vermont Is Kicking Everyone’s Ass at Signing Up People for Obamacare

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How Vulnerable Is a Congressman Without Health Insurance?

by FSZLazarots Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Members of Congress have spent the past few weeks grousing about their attempts to enroll in new health insurance plans they forced on themselves when they passed the Affordable Care Act. The law requires members of Congress to get their insurance, and employer subsidy, through the DC health exchange rather than through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Network, where they’d been getting it for decades—at a good price.

Not every member is signing up for the exchange. Some, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have cushy coverage through a spouse’s employer. Others are eligible for Medicare, the government’s plan for the elderly. And then there’s Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas tea party luminary and an outspoken opponent of the ACA. Rather than participate, Gohmert says he intends to pay a fine the law imposes and remain uninsured when the ACA’s individual mandate kicks in early next year. “I’ve pledged that I’m not taking the subsidy,” he told Politico. “Too many people in my district have lost their insurance because of Obamacare…and because of Obamacare, the remaining insurance is just too expensive. So I’m not going to have insurance, it looks like.”

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How Vulnerable Is a Congressman Without Health Insurance?

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What Kind of Crazy Anti-Environment Bills Is ALEC Pushing Now?

by AlysaNivison Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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The American Legislative Exchange Council may be hemorrhaging members and grappling with a funding crisis, but that hasn’t hampered its ambitions. In 2013, the conservative outfit, which specializes in generating state-level legislation, launched a multi-front jihad on green energy, with more than 77 ALEC-backed energy bills cropping up in state legislature. Among the most prominent were measures to repeal renewable energy standards and block meaningful disclosure of chemicals used in fracking. Most of these bills failed. But as state lawmakers and corporate representatives gather in Washington this week for the group’s three-day policy summit, ALEC is pushing ahead with a new package of energy and environmental bills that will benefit Big Energy and polluters.

More MoJo reporting on the American Legislative Exchange Council.


ALEC’s Campaign Against Renewable Energy


ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference


What Kind of Crazy Anti-Environment Bills Is ALEC Pushing Now?


Study: ALEC Is Bad for the Economy


Forced to Work Sick? That’s Fine With ALEC


ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco’s Homicides

On Wednesday, The Guardian reported some details of ALEC’s anti-green-energy offensive and its new policy roadmap, which began taking shape at an August gathering of the group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force in Chicago. The newspaper focused largely on ALEC’s efforts to undermine net-metering policies, which allow private citizens to sell excess power from rooftop solar panels to utilities. (“As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system,” John Eick, an ALEC legislative analyst, told the Guardian.) But the group’s energy task force—which includes as members fossil fuel interests, such as Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil—will also be peddling other pro-corporate state initiatives, some with far-reaching implications. Below is a roundup:

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What Kind of Crazy Anti-Environment Bills Is ALEC Pushing Now?

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Times are tough for the fossil-fuel lovers at ALEC

by BereniceMidgett Posted on December 4, 2013

Times are tough for the fossil-fuel lovers at ALEC

By

Light Brigading

Pity the poor right-wing schemers at the American Legislative Exchange Council. Things are just not going their way.

ALEC is a corporate- and Koch-funded group that pushes conservative bills in state legislatures around the country. Among many others, it’s promoted bills to roll back renewable energy standards (unsuccessfully so far), and now it’s trying to undermine net-metering rules that benefit solar-panel owners. In the first seven months of this year, ALEC helped get at least 77 anti-environmental bills introduced into 34 statehouses, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

But it was ALEC’s advocacy for so-called “stand your ground” laws, made famous in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, that started scaring off corporate donors.

Now, as The Guardian reports, ALEC has a big budget hole. And as a trove of internal ALEC documents reveals, the group is also facing declining membership among state legislators and potential concerns that it could be targeted for improper lobbying.

The Guardian has learned that the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which shapes and promotes legislation at state level across the US, has identified more than 40 lapsed corporate members it wants to attract back into the fold under a scheme referred to in its documents as the “Prodigal Son Project”.

The target firms include commercial giants such as Amazon, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Kraft, McDonald’s and Walmart, all of which cut ties with the group following the furore over the killing of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in February 2012. …

The Guardian has learned that by Alec’s own reckoning the network has lost almost 400 state legislators from its membership over the past two years, as well as more than 60 corporations that form the core of its funding. In the first six months of this year it suffered a hole in its budget of more than a third of its projected income.

The news broke just before ALEC’s big national meeting this week. Despite the group’s troubles, it’s still got big-name speakers on the agenda: Texas Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz and former Romney running mate Paul Ryan.

And it’s got dirty energy on the agenda too, as DeSmogBlog notes:

These findings by The Guardian come just one day before ALEC’s forthcoming States and Nation Policy Summit in Washington, DC, in which pro-fracking and anti-regulatory model bills and presentations will be the centerpiece of the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force’s convening. Shale gas industry lobbying powerhouse America’s Natural Gas Alliance will be named as a corporate member at the meeting.

A little “stand your ground” advocacy isn’t enough to scare off the companies that want to poison your ground.


Source
ALEC facing funding crisis from donor exodus in wake of Trayvon Martin row, The Guardian
Leaked Documents Reveal IRS Concerns, Funding Crisis At Corporate Lobbying Group ALEC, DeSmogBlog

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

by DeannaDeal Posted on November 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago, there was a big scandal over the fact that someone apparently learned about a Fed decision sooner than they should have. It takes seven milliseconds for a signal to travel from Washington DC to Chicago over a fiber optic cable, but a couple of big orders were placed on the Chicago exchange a mere couple of milliseconds after the Fed announcement. Shazam!

But if an advantage of a few milliseconds is so important, why bother with fiber optic cables? Why not mount repeaters on blimps or something, and then relay wireless signals? At the speed of light, it would only take about four milliseconds from DC to Chicago.

I suppose I should have guessed, but naturally someone is doing this:

Ari Rubenstein, a “Star Trek” fan who counts physics as a hobby….heads Strike Technologies, a New York company that’s part of a budding cottage industry racing to build networks of ultra-fast microwave radio transmitters linking the world’s financial hubs.

….Strike, whose ranks include academics as well as former U.S. and Israeli military engineers, hoisted a 6-foot white dish on a tower rising 280 feet above the Nasdaq Stock Market’s data center in Carteret, N.J., just outside New York City.

Through a series of microwave towers, the dish beams market data 734 miles to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer warehouse in Aurora, Ill., in 4.13 milliseconds, or about 95% of the theoretical speed of light, according to the company.

Remember that Keynes thing about goosing the economy by burying money in landfills and letting people dig it up? In terms of social utility, this strikes as about the same thing. It’s hard to imagine millions of dollars being spent more uselessly. Even gold plated toilet seats probably have more value to society than this.

In any case, I still think my idea for a neutrino communications network that transmits directly through the earth is a better bet. Sure, you’d need a million gallons of chlorine or heavy water or something to act as the detector, but that seems pretty trivial in order to save another 500 microsceconds. Who’s going to be the first to do this?

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

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Right-wingers want to teach kids that climate change is a fairy tale

by d2wk58 Posted on February 2, 2013

Right-wingers want to teach kids that climate change is a fairy tale

By Susie Cagle

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Last month, Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma all introduced bills that would make teaching about climate change in public schools less a science and more a political debate. The bills — based on model legislation from the supremely evil American Legislative Exchange Council — would require schools to teach that climate change is “controversial” and not widely accepted scientific fact.

From DeSmogBlog:

In the past five years since 2008, among the hottest years in U.S. history, ALEC has introduced its “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” in 11 states, or over one-fifth of the statehouses nationwide. The bill has passed in four states [– Louisiana, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas] …

ALEC’s “model bills” are written by and for corporate lobbyists alongside conservative legislators at its annual meetings. ALEC raises much of its corporate funding from the fossil fuel industry, which in turn utilizes ALEC as a key — though far from the only — vehicle to ram through its legislative agenda in the states.

The bills use almost the exact same language. Oklahoma’s, for example, calls for …

… the teaching of “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories,” including of global warming, saying it’s a theory steeped in “controversy” — not that the actual scientific record thinks so.

This is necessary, the bill states, “to help students develop critical thinking skills they need in order to become intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens,” going on to explain that it’s important to explore “differences of opinion on scientific issues.”

In a way, these kinds of laws seem like a last-ditch effort by desperate and backward-thinking plutocrats who are terrified of science and of broad public access to information via new technologies. Not that it makes them any less horrifying.

Teaching climate change not as “science” but as a debatable concept would make our public education system a polarized knowledge-free vacuum — kind of like Congress. And that is truly scary.

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Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 19, 2012

Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules

By Susie Cagle

BREAKING: Walmart did another terrible thing!

grass_stained_feet

The retail giant is not just the biggest employer in the U.S. — it also dominates Mexico with 2,275 outlets. And it got there by playing very, very dirty. According to the second part of a New York Times investigation, Walmart de Mexico routinely bribed officials not just to get its plans bumped to the top of the pile, but to “subvert democratic governance.” This is how the company successfully built a Walmart in a Teotihuacán alfalfa field a mile from ancient pyramids that draw tons of tourists. (Now those tourists get a view of a boxy Walmart supercenter when they climb to the top.) The local leaders said no, so Walmart de Mexico paid a guy $52,000 and redrew the zoning map itself.

Frankly, this is not very surprising. But it’s damning as hell. From the Times:

Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.

But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just a medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

The Times seems eager to point out that this is a Walmart problem, not a Mexico problem. These bribes were not, as Reuters puts it, “routine payments.” Except that in effect they actually were.

Walmart now says it’s all kinds of ready “to fully cooperate with the competent authorities in whatever investigation,”  Fox helpfully reports (even though the company abandoned its own internal investigation years ago). Perhaps this is because it could be facing “sizable fines.”

This is both vindicating and infuriating, like most times Walmart gets caught doing something terrible. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice might be investigating, but they aren’t commenting on the story, at least not yet. Meanwhile, shares of Walmart’s stock rose 30 cents today.

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