Nasty piece of work, Bill Clinton.

Bob in AZ

A climactic senate vote Next August or so would really put blueblood & sellout congress slime on the spot with the voters. As the BS capitalist arguments run out of steam a campaign of carpet bombing the country with truth & reality might succeed & lead to a 4th quarter progressive rout,,, maybe even single payer.

Obama keeps saying we’re 80% there. Shit – we’ve been 80% there since Dickens wrote Bleak House.
5% still have all the ca$h.

To me, there really ought to be a real connect between the two camps. Private sector and public well being.

The public well being needs money to fund it. The more, the better. The private sector needs profits to survive and advance, the more the better.

In our town, highly liberal, here is how it goes: put up as many road blocks to business as you can, restrict them in as many ways as you can. Then, oh, we don’t have the revenue to do this project or that.

It never dawned on them that the more money coming into City businesses, the more taxes they get and the more projects they can undertake. They are so busy worrying about punishing evil profit takers, they cut off their own nose.

The two actually work together. Help local businesses (for local government) be as successful as possible, and rake in the taxes, then use it to help others.

Government actually has no other source of funds other than the success of businesses. Americorp doesn’t pay any taxes. Neither does Move On. YOu can tax goverment employee salaries, but that is only returning money you just had. Other’s salaries are only there to tax because some business was doing well enough to hire them.

One must never forget the rot that Elliot Spitzer uncovered in New York State at the State University System, the pay-off’s to top administrators and the Financial Aid Administrators. What Spitzer found was actually nation wide — but they settled with New York so fast it made your head spin, and no one moved the investigation to a higher level. Many of the private lenders put their top people on boards of trustees, available to fund this and that special project as such wants and needs became evident from Trustee meetings. Many of the lenders also offered investment services as a free-bee to educational instututions. Twas not at all unusual for College VP’s and Presidents, and Financial Aid officers to receive a leased BMW or Lexis without charges from that very helpful lender who of course leased a whole fleet of them. Conferences in the Bahamas in January were pretty common for College Financial Aid officers. All to the end of getting exclusive deals for providing Student Loans, and all because Clinton allowed them to make the direct loan program voluntary on the part of institutions.

To make matters worse, all the fancy lobbies in DC that are paid for by American Colleges and Universities were persuaded to support this small detail in the direct student loan program — the institution had to volunteer to offer the program. (Students at many institutions could not choose to take a direct student loan.)

Back in 1993-94 when this was an issue, my Senator, Paul Wellstone went around the country talking to activist student groups about taking a stand on the matter — doing some intense student lobbying work state by state. He needed about ten additional votes to create the level playing field, so that all institutions had to offer the Direct Student Loan program. Clinton cut him off at the knees. It was a very nasty story.

Michael Pollan, for example, made an interesting suggestion in this essay in the NYTimes from September 9th. He writes that BigInsurance will eventually be on the side of the sustainable agriculture people… i.e., against BigFood once they have to start covering everyone (assuming no more pre-existing conditions, rescissions, etc.) and the costs/benefits of our current ways of eating (in general) can be measured.

An excerpt:

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

But these rules may well be about to change — and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like “pre-existing conditions” and “underwriting” would vanish from the health insurance rulebook — and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.

The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.