you’ve done extraordinarily useful research and i appreciate your making it available to us.

for myself, i only go from what i sense about politics; i have little specific personal knowledge of the sort you have made available with this comment.

your comment fills in a big why-is-this-happening-to-us gap and leads us toward more precise questions about where the hell are we being herded to, in terms of health care.

thanks for the sharp cites and insights.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/8441
Obama’s False Friends of Health Reform
Submitted by Wendell Potter on July 1, 2009 – 8:29am.
If you watched the president’s televised Q&A on ABC last Wednesday night, you probably noticed that one of the people in the audience was Ron Williams, the chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., the nation’s third largest health insurer, and currently one of the most profitable. But there are a few things that you should know about Williams.

Back in the ’90s, Aetna set out on an acquisition binge in its quest to become the biggest health insurer in the country. It got there by the end of the decade after spending billion of dollars for several competitors. By 1999 it had 21 million health plan members, the most any insurer had ever had at the time.

But, as often happens after buying sprees, Aetna soon came down with a bad case of buyers’ remorse. As it turned out, some of the customers it had paid top price for were not as profitable as Wall Street analysts and the big institutional investors who owned most of Aetna’s stock expected. When they took a closer look at what Aetna had bought, investors started deserting the company in droves. As a result, the company found its stock price in a free fall.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on August 13, 2004, Aetna’s pretax profits as a percentage of revenues began falling dramatically after peaking at about 12 percent in 1998. By 2001 the company was a basket case as far as Wall Street was concerned. It had to do something, and fast.

Probably the most important thing it did to turn itself around was recruit Williams from rival WellPoint, the ambitious for-profit company that was gobbling up Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans from coast to coast.

A final point about Ron Williams: Not only are he and his fellow CEOs trying to kill the idea of a public health insurance option — a central part of candidate Obama’s health care proposal — but he is the leading advocate of an idea Obama rejected and which differentiated his proposal from Hillary Clinton’s — the imposition on all of us of an “individual mandate.” Many insurance executives were wary of such a mandate because they don’t like the government mandating anything, especially those pesky state mandates that force them to include certain benefits in the policies they sell. Advocates of an individual mandate eventually brought the skeptics, including many of AHIP’s board members, around to their way thinking by persuading them that insurers could make billions more in profits if every American had to buy an insurance policy from them. Now you know the real reason behind AHIP’s shift from neutrality on the issue to full-fledged support. It’s all about the money.

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now lets look at this:

http://www.politico.com/politicopulse/

Krugman says health reform ‘may well fail’ if Obama can’t inspire troops – Business Week blares: ‘HEALTH INSURERS HAVE ALREADY WON’
By: CHRIS FRATES & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN & MIKE ALLEN on August 7, 2009 @ 6:29 AM

SIREN — Business Week’s cover is “WHY HEALTH INSURERS ARE WINNING: The industry, deftly maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, prepares to profit from health reform,” by Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein.

The online headline is even blunter — “THE HEALTH INSURERS HAVE ALREADY WON”: “As the health reform fight shifts this month from a vacationing Washington to congressional districts and local airwaves around the country, much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and WellPoint. The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling. …

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Diagnosis: Reform

http://www.opensecrets.org/new…..eform.html

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector has given more money to Democrats–who had seized control of Congress in 2006–than to Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. This was the first time since the 1992 election cycle, right before the Clinton administration’s failed health care reform attempt, that the health sector made Democrats its financial darlings.

In the 2008 election cycle, the sector gave $90.7 million, or 54 percent of the total, to Democratic candidates and party committees, compared to $76.6 million to Republicans. That difference is even more pronounced in the first three months of 2009, when Democrats collected 60 percent of the total $5.4 million in contributions*. Obama, who made health care reform a large part of his presidential election platform, brought in $18.8 million from the health care sector in the 2008 election cycle–far more than any other presidential hopeful. Money follows power as the industries ride the tides of Obama-styled change.

Health providers, insurers and pharmaceutical companies have taken multiple approaches to winning over the federal lawmakers shaping the legislation. The health sector boosted its campaign contributions compared to the last presidential cycle, to $167.7 million in 2008 from $123.7 million in 2004. The various health industries have also steadily increased their lobbying efforts, from $448.1 million in 2007 to $484.4 million in 2008. So far this year, the sector has paid lobbyists $126.8 million to do its bidding on Capitol Hill. And those expenditures will only increase as the chairs of the five main committees working on health care legislation continue to iron out the details: Will the plan include a government insurance option? Will Congress mandate that all individuals, including the 47 million that are currently uninsured, purchase health insurance? And where will the money come from to pay for the reforms? The health sector–which includes some industries that are diametrically opposed to one another in their answers to these questions–eclipses all other sectors but the financial sector in lobbying spending since 1998, putting $3.4 billion into its efforts.

Dubai Sells U.S. Port Facilities To AIG – Forbes.comDec 11, 2006 … Controversial operations will remain, as always, with British-based P&O Ports, though ownership changes.
http://www.forbes.com/…/dubai-p…..dubai.html – Cached – Similar

BBC NEWS | Business | Dubai firm sells US ports to AIGDec 11, 2006 … Dubai Ports World agrees to sell its six US ports to an American firm after politicians voiced fears over security.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6169523.stm – Cached – Similar

Dubai Ports to sell U.S operations to AIG unit. Original deal sparked furor after Congress raised national-security concerns …
http://www.democraticunderground.com/…..all… – Cached – Similar

A little “aside” about Liddy.

Liddy was named by Paulson to spearhead AIG last fall.

Liddy was ON the board of Goldman Sachs at the time of the appointment.

And interestingly enough ,Liddy had been CEO of Allstate Insurance during Hurricane Katrina. LOTS of lawsuits in disputes over denial of coverage.

What has been mentioned very little was the nexus between the Dubai Ports Deal and AIG a few years back .

I always wondered how much AIG may have lost during that hurricane season,in relation to its ports holdings.

And if the ports were part of the collateral held by AIG that prompted the government to intervene with such financial largesse.

I will post link to AIG and Dubai Ports deal.

I was watching because I thought it would be paid for by the DNC or Move-On, or the usual dem groups..but nope..the list was all big Pharm groups.

I saw the commercial back to back a couple nights ago while watching a normal Tv show..

I haven’t seen it again, as I don’t watch much TV..but to see it twice on one primetime TV show had me wondering..what deal was concocted between the Obama White House and the big Pharm boys??

I got my answer in your post..and the NYTIMES article you posted.
Thanks!

Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) — American International Group Inc., the insurer rescued by the U.S. government, reported its first profit in seven quarters as investment losses narrowed.

Second-quarter net income of $1.82 billion, or $2.30 a share, compares with a net loss of $5.36 billion, or a split- adjusted $41.13, a year earlier, New York-based AIG said today in a regulatory filing.

The results may ease pressure on Robert Benmosche, AIG’s fifth chief executive officer since 2005. The former MetLife Inc. head, who replaces Edward Liddy next week, has to dismantle AIG to repay loans within a $182.5 billion bailout. The insurer posted more than $100 billion in net losses driven by failed housing market bets in the six quarters ended March 31.

“This buys him more time because its shows they’re getting some traction,” said Haag Sherman, who helps oversee $7.3 billion as chief investment officer of Houston-based Salient Partners. “He can use the operating profit to show that they have good assets and they just need more time to divest them in an orderly fashion to get the best prices for shareholders and the U.S. government.”

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…..anP…

Are they the guys down the road (on my, for some, vacation island)..on their Yacht’s every weekend drinking martini’s and laughing??

I Guess they liked my tax dollar bonus..because they are having fun on the weekends!!

NewsMay 13, 2009 … Goldman Sachs pays huge fine in order to avoid criminal prosecution over their noxious subprime business deals. I hoped to see GS executives …
emsnews.wordpress.com/…/goldman-sachs-pays-big-fines-escapes-jail-time/ – Cached – Similar

Merrill, Goldman, Deutsche Bank in ARS settlement – MarketWatchAug 21, 2008 …
DB pays $15M fine on $1B buyback. Goldman pays $22.5M fine on $1.5B

The NYT appears to have the same kind of Google ad at the top of the list of search hits for ‘justice samuel alito’. But NYT lists 1910 hits for that search term.

Here’s my hunch; it comes from too damn many hours spent on computers… the ‘hits’ rely on indexing. If someone who wrote an article didn’t explicitly tag it with ‘justice samuel alito’, it may not be pulling up.

So either the NYT writes more about ‘justice samuel alito’, or else they do a much better job of marking up (’tagging’, or ‘indexing’) the terms and phrases used in their articles that the WaPo does…

Hope this explanation makes sense.

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As for Greenberg… what a piece of work.
It’s hard to watch someone participate in looting an entire nation, and get away with the merest, slightest hand slap. In fact, more of a ‘hand tap’ than a slap.

Alito, no doubt, views Greenberg as some kind of capitalist genius.
Pathetic.

what am i missing?

why won’t info about alito show up?