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From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: jeevacation@gmail.com Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 10/13/2013 Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 08:43:33 +0000 Attachments: A_U.S._Default_Seen_as_Catastrophe_Dwarfing_Le_hmanlu2019s_Fall_Bloomberg_News October_6,2013.docx; What if Obamacare Is Popular Buffington Post October 6, 2013.docx; We_neecT_a debt-limit Tio-over harles_Lane TV7P_OctolTer —7,2013.docx; Obamacareps_here.fiet_used_to_it„Eugene:Robinson_TWF_October_7„2013.docx; Do_Politicians_Care_lfThey_Get_Caught_Lying_Molly_Ball_The_Atlantic_October_8,2 013.docx; New_Corporate_Tax_Shelter,_A_Merger_Abroad_David_Gelles_NYT_October_8,_2013.d ocx; 32_Republicans_Who_Caused_the_Govemment_Shutdown_The_Atlantic_October_4,2013 .docx; Sister_Rosetta_Tharpe_bio.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(1).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png DEAR FRIEND This week's government shutdown has consequences for all of us. Besides the real pain that the loss of jobs and services are costing workers and average Americans, it is also costing an estimated $300 million each day that the government is closed for business. As Bill Moyers pointed out last weekend, "when the president refused to buckle to this extortion, they threw their tantrum Like the die- hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn down the place, sink the ship." He goes on to tell us where the "reckless ambition" of the Republicans could lead us. Bill Moyers Essay: On the Sabotage of Democracy EFTA01132909 And now to the people who refuse to let democracy work. The people who hate government so much they've shut it down. Unable to abide by the results of democracy when they don't win, they turned on it. Republicans have now lost three successive elections to control the Senate and they've lost the last two presidential elections. Nonetheless, they fought tooth and nail to kill President Obama's health care initiative. They lost that fight, but with the corporate wing of Democrats, they managed to bend it toward private interests. So we should be clear on this, Obamacare, as its known, is deeply flawed. Big subsidies to the health insurance industry. A bonanza for lobbyists. No public option. And as The New York Times reported this week, "Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law." Largely because states controlled by Republicans refuse to expand Medicaid. As far as our bought and paid for legislative process goes, Obama's initiative made it through the sausage factory. Yet even after both the House and Senate approved it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it, the Republicans keep insisting on calling the law a "bill," thumbing their noses and refusing to accept that it is enacted legislation. Now they're fighting to prevent it from being implemented. Here was their order of the day on Thursday from the popular right wing blog RedState.com: "Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare. Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don't realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it. This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare, we leave the whole thing shut down." Once upon a time when I was a young man working on Capitol Hill, it was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with it. But you didn't bring down the government just because it wasn't perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been at least raggedly served, on to the next fight. That was a long time ago. Long before the Tea Party minority, armed with huge sums of secret money from rich donors, sucked the last bit of soul from the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln. They became delusional. Then rabid. Like this: It was also Newt Gingrich, speaker Gingrich, who was caught lying to congressional investigators looking into charges of his ethical wrongdoing. His colleagues voted overwhelmingly, 395 to 28, to reprimand him. Pressure from his own party then prompted him to resign. Yet even after his flame out, even after his recent bizarre race for the presidency bankrolled with money from admiring oligarchs, even after new allegations about his secret fundraising for right-wing candidates, Gingrich remains the darling of a fawning amnesic media. NEWT GINGRICH on Crossfire: I'm Newt Gingrich on the right. EFTA01132910 BILL MOYERS: On CNN.com the other day he issued a call to arms to his fellow bomb-throwers, "... don't cave on shutdown." At least let's name this for what it is, sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means. And let's be clear about where such reckless ambition leads. As surely as night must follow day, the alternative to democracy is worse. Congressional House Majority Leader, John Boehner and Republican conservative hard-liners are trying to Republicans have offered to restore funding on a piece-by-piece basis that would pay some of those workers and treat some of those patients. The president has said no. But why, CBS White House Correspondent Mark ICnoller asked at the press conference today. Obama responded that while he's "certainly tempted" to take up the GOP offers, he didn't want to fund slivers of the government, one at a time. On the one hand, funding the discretionary budget bit by bit spares the most headline-y victims and lessens the pain of shutdown. On the other hand, the piecemeal approach ... well, spares the most headline-y victims and lessens the pain of shutdown, prolonging the crisis, itself. So, depending on how you look at it, the piecemeal approach is both a plan to fund government as soon as possible and a plan to leave government unfunded as long as possible. There is a graph for this, of course. Michael Linden counts up the six piecemeal non-defense appropriations bills passed by the House (and unsigned by the president) and the eight other bills the House wants to pass in the coming weeks. "Together, these 14 bills allocate approximately $83.1 billion in funding," Linden writes. That would leave 82 percent of the $470 billion non-defense discretionary government unfunded. FIGURE 1 Piecemeal approach to government funding is impractical and irresponsible Nondefense appropriations, by bill passed or under consideration National Institutes of Health Border security Head Start Indian Affairs, Education, and Health Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, infants, and Children Federal Emergency Management Agency National parks and museums Veterans' benefits Food and Drug Administration Remaining unfunded functions impact Aid National Weather Servke National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Consumer Product Safety Commission Source: Congressional Budget Office. In other words (and colors), Obama wants to fund the whole pie above. The GOP, which would like to pair government funding with Obamacare's defunding or delay, is asking him to fund the blue slices only. The White House's logic is that passing the blue stuff makes it more likely that we go even longer without the larger, redder part of the pie. As Derek Thompson pointed out this week in The Atlantic — This isn't three-dimensional chess, exactly. It's not even chess. It's just a radical wing of the Republican party exerting on House members while holding the rest of government hostage. EFTA01132911 Meanwhile, the list of casualties deepens: the roads, the patients, the kids, the border, the veterans, the economic data, the product-safety inspections ... TED Ideas worth spreading As many of you may know, I am a huge fan of TED - TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference and TEDGlobal -- TED includes the award- winning TED Talks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize. TED conferences bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 15oo TED Talks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many in other languages, too. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. TED's mission: Spreading ideas. Last month author Chrystia Freeland looked under the hood of global capitalism to expose the technological, economic and structural inequalities pushing society in unforeseen directions. Along the way, she takes the temperature of a rising caste -- the super rich -- and shows how the creation of vast fortunes at the top hollow out the middle class in western industrialized countries. This rising income inequality, she argued, has a structural character, and is becoming a cultural and social issue, with consequences for social cohesion and social mobility. Freeland began her career as an "accidental journalist" with frontline bulletins from the Ukraine in the heat of the Soviet collapse. She is now an editor at Thomson Reuters, and is frequently featured on media outlets ranging from the International Herald Tribune to The Colbert Report. I invite you to look at Chrystia Freeland's recent TED Talk - The rise of the new global super-rich Web Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/chrystia fi eeland the rise of the new global super rich.html EFTA01132912 One of the most important economic fact of our time is that we are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India and our neighbor Canada. We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany. Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. In the 1970s, the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. The 0.1 percent in the U.S. today account for more than eight percent of the national income. They are where the One Percent was 3o years ago. Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 4o percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. As it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list -- and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans -- was 3oo billion dollars. Just think about it. You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased. We often hear pundits describe these mega-rich as job makers, when the truth is that the consolidation of wealth has produced the exactly the opposite. Take the number of $1.7 trillion divide by 400 people and consider how many homes and cars will they buy next year. Maybe, a thousand homes and many four or five thousand cars. Then imagine that if you spread this same $1.7 trillion, giving a million people a million dollars and consider how many more homes and cars would they buy.... Maybe a million homes and five or more million cars And this phenomenon/economic driver created the dynamic economic growth in the 1970s, 6os and 7os due to the burgeoning Middle Class. Due to the economic policies that shifted in favor of the rich, that was described as trickle-down economics, wealth is consolidating in fewer and fewer hands, creating a global plutocracy, that we've been slow to notice it. One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. But I think there's something else going on. Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening. As a result we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the topo. What's driving it, and what can we do about it? One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top. A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of "crony capitalism," political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be "don't do evil," to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem. After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street. EFTA01132913 While it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. Let's start with technology. I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I'm even more of a fan of globalization. This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable -- who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt. So what is not to like: One of the things that worries Freeland and others is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. And that's no mere hypothetical example. Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. Again, this is no mere hypothetical. It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K. A second thing to worry about is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race. The third thing, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. Let's start with technology. Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. When's the last time you used a travel agent? And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. T wenty years ago, AT&T had 330,000 employees while today Facebook fewer than to,000. The same is true of globalization. For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. Freeland - The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more. One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages. So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller -- well, there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early igth century. But it's important to remember that before we learned how to EFTA01132914 share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 187os, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. We created the modem welfare state. We created public education. We created public health care. We created public pensions. We created unions. Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. We need a new New Deal. *no* This week in The Huffington Post, Lynn Andriani wrote - 5 Things Wealthy People Don't Do - You don't have to be a millionaire to steal these ideas about work, retirement and even getting up in the morning. 1. They Don't Retire When Everyone Else Does The average age for Americans to stop working is now 61, according to a recent Gallup poll, up from 59 ten years ago and 57 in the early 1990s. But America's highest earners -- i.e., those with the biggest savings -- don't plan on retiring until they're at least 70, another new survey shows. Almost half of those people, who make $75,000 or more a year, say they plan to keep working because they want to. Granted, this group holds white-collar jobs that aren't physically taxing -- but the "never quit" concept is one that almost anyone can embrace. Stepping down to a less stressful position, or shifting to part- time work can put you farther ahead, savings-wise, when you do decide to retire. Because although you can start collecting Social Security anytime from ages 62 to 70, the later you start, the bigger your benefit. This article gives some useful guidelines for deciding when to begin. 2. They Don't Wake Up At 6 a.m. And Answer Emails You're no doubt aware that the highest achievers are up earlier than most people: The National Sleep Foundation says most 3o- to 45-year-olds get out of bed at 6 a.m. on a typical weekday morning, while this Guardian article shows that many CEOs of major companies wake closer to 5. You may not know, though, what those leaders are doing with the extra hour. Laura Vanderkam's new book What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast gives plenty of concrete examples (and none of them involves catching up on Facebook). For instance: A businesswoman knows she could spend her early-morning hour cleaning out her in-box, but since that's a job she can do in 5-minute breaks during the day, she devotes the alone time to making real, uninterrupted headway on a project that she's decided is a top priority for her -- and that will have clear career benefits, teeing her up for a promotion or other advancement. 3. They Don't Ignore Job Offers For Lateral Moves While many top earners keep an eye out for their next career move, they're not always looking to move up. They're often looking to make lateral moves, says Amanda Augustine, job-search expert at TheLadders.com, which originally began as a job-search site for people earning Ahoo,000 and more (they've since expanded to all salaries). This group is willing to move horizontally, or even to take a step down, Augustine says, if there is a future opportunity to move up and take on an even better role. Employees at every level can learn from this behavior, she says. Making a sideways career change (either within your company or to a new one with a similar title, pay and responsibility) can also be worth it if your industry is contracting and the new job is in a field that's growing, or if you'll be saving money with a shorter commute or cheaper parking, or getting better benefits, whether insurance- or retirement-related. 4. They Don't Buy When They Can Rent It's the American dream to own a home, but don't assume that everyone who can purchase a home does. The five-year rule (if you're not going to live in a home for five years, don't buy it) is back, says EFTA01132915 Trulia's real-estate and lifestyle expert, Michael Corbett, who is also the host of Extra's Mansions and Millionaires. Renting is more popular than ever, he says, even among the wealthy. While it once made sense for people who could afford it to buy a home and flip it after two years, and the market has improved moderately this year, we're hardly in a boom. This article by economist Robert J. Shiller explains that attitudes toward renting are starting to change; 61 percent of Americans in a recent MacArthur Foundation survey agreed that, "for the most part, renters can be just as successful as owners at achieving the American dream." 5. They Don't Buy Without First Comparison Shopping Chances are, if you're reading this here, you're likely also shopping online (8o percent of people who use the Internet have bought something by clicking). But wealthy shoppers are getting more shipping confirmation emails than others: According to a recent report by Martini Media and comScore, in the first quarter of this year, affluent shoppers were 47 percent more likely than buyers earning less than $100,000 annually to purchase something online. Just as interestingly, wealthy online shoppers aren't visiting luxury destinations as much as they're visiting sites with mid-level pricing (think Macy's). We know shopping online greatly lowers the likelihood of an impulse buy, but another major money- saving reason to buy from home is that you can easily do price comparisons. Plus, new apps such as Slice will even send you alerts when the price on an item you've purchased online drops so you can get a refund. ******* Whether you are a fan, Jon Stewart is a master of satirical irony and the current government shutdown by Conservative Congressional Republicans has provided an abundance of material for humorist like Steward, Bill Mather and late night television. To better understand how ridiculous the Republican defense of their thoughtless and silly action of shutting down the federal government please watch the videos of Jon Stewart calling them out on this issue. Jon Stewart Calls Out Republicans For Not Owning The Shutdown: 'Don't Fart And Point At The Do Comedy Ce n t r. Web Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/20B/10/09/jon-stewart-calls-out-republicans_n_4069528.html? utm hp_ref—mostpopular In this short clip from the opening of Tuesday's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart vows to not talk about the shutdown... except for that one little bit about the Republicans saying they aren't responsible for it. In a cathartic moment that most of us can appreciate, Stewart calls bullsht after rolling a clip of Speaker John Boehner admitting that he had made a deal with Harry Reid that he then broke: "Look, you think Obamacare's a big enough threat to this country that you need to shut down the government over it,fine. Own it. Don'tfart and point at the dog." EFTA01132916  Jon Stewart Goes Off On 'Bipartisan Curious' Republicans Who Won't Come Out Against The Shutdown Web Link: http:i/www.huffingtonpost.coin/2013/10/10/jon-stewart-bipartisan-curious- republicans_n_4076799.html As the government shutdown continues, we keep hearing about those moderate Republicans in the House who would vote for a dean continuing resolution, if only Speaker Boehner would allow a vote. Jon Stewart wonders, however, if there are so many of them, why don't they force the issue? Watch above as he and Al Madrigal discuss the "bipartisan curious" Republicans who care more about keeping their government paychecks than everyone else getting theirs. Death of the Dream With the recent calamity of the Government Shutdown and the looming debt ceiling fight, one thing has become crystal dear: we are witnessing the Death of the American Dream. In the past we believed all things were possible, there was absolutely nothing that Americans couldn't accomplish. In the '60s, President Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and few doubted the possibilities. After all, America was always capable of great and glorious accomplishments. We were the Dreamers. It was instilled in the American psyche, American ingenuity. We led the world in research, medical or scientific, our engineering feats astounding the world. We had a government that participated, encouraged, and supported this mighty economic engine. We had a middle class that was the envy of the world. Things were good, but they would even be better in the future. Our education system supported all economic classes, and we had fluid upward mobility. We made the impossible possible. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Naval Marshal General Yamamoto is rumored to have said, "I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant." And he was right. Within three years we built the strongest, most advanced military on the face of the earth. We believed in Democracy, in fairness. We believed in our Government. We disagreed, argued, but we never doubted our form of Government, or the Government itself. Now a harsh reality sweeps the land. Our precious form of government is dying. Democracy is dying. A minority can now control the majority. Fanaticism that we thought applied to less progressive countries is now homegrown. In the past we didn't always agree, but we accepted laws that were passed as the law of the land. We might fight to overturn some legislation within the halls of Congress, but a minority never took it upon themselves to deprive millions of Americans their jobs, stopping their ability to earn a wage. Never were we this destructive because a minority was opposed to a piece of legislation. And so our Democracy grinds to a halt. We might get past the debt ceiling crisis, the government shutdown, but the future of America is clear. We are no longer the wonder of the world. We exposed our ignorance, our ugly insensitivity. We are a petty people with a government that has ceased to function. The great achievements are part of yesterday. The future is a dark place. We have proven a Democracy is a fragile form of government. And we have shown the world how easy it is to kill it. EFTA01132917  Barry Levinson -- Buffington Post op-ed 10/11/2013 We have to ask, if Conservatives truly believe in American Exceptionalism, then why are the Republicans trying so hard to kill its government and it. For the Republican Conservatives in Congress and their supporters who put the purity of ideology over logic and prudence, suggesting that forcing the current government shutdown to stop Obamacare as their way of saving America is both the height of hypocrisy and disastrous government policy. And trying to blackmail the President of the United States into killing his signature achievement that now give tens of millions of Americans access to affordable healthcare as a way of making his, a failed Presidency has one of the largest Congressional blunders since the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, closely follow by the previous government shutdown spearheaded by House Speaker, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in 1995 with both being universally acknowledged super blunders. Let this past week's newspaper/magazine headlines speak for themselves. DEFAULT OVER 'SURRENDER' Boehner Gives Up The Game.. 'Too Embarrassed To Defend His Extortion Demands'... Investors Flee U.S. Treasury Bills... OBAMA STANDS FIRM: Won't 'Pay Ransom'... 'We Can't Make Extortion A Routine Part Of Our Democracy'... REPUBLICANS REJECT REALITY, Say Default Might Not Be That Bad!... Economic Confidence Tumbles... Worst Drop Since Lehman Collapse... THEN: 130 Republicans In Congress Raised Debt Ceiling For Bush... NOW: Debt 'Truthers' Risk Financial Destruction... LATEST UPDATES... BLINK: Boehner Pushes 6-Week Debt Hike...Won't Say What GOP Wants... MIGHT NOT HAVE THE VOTES... White House: No Budget Talks Ill Shutdown Extortion Ends, Too... POLL: GOP Hits Record Low... Taliban Mocks U.S. 'Sucking The Blood Of Their Own People' LATEST UPDATES... Now these same hypocrites are asking for compromise, suggesting that they are willing to support a six week funding and debt ceiling extension, with the caveat that the White House support repealing the 2.3% excise tax on sales of medical devices in the Affordable Healthcare Act, which is a straight $30 billion giveaway to the Medical Device Industry and their lobbyist, which later this week Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) proposed a six months extension. Whether it be six weeks or six months, would any sensible person or management group run a business this way. I urge the President demand that whatever is agreed — that it be for at least one year so that Congressional leaders in both major political parties make the structural changes so that this dysfunctionality does not happen again. This is not about winners and losers Its about adults working together to make the best decisions that they can for the American people THIS WEEK's READINGS In an article in BusinessWeek, Yahman Onaran wrote — A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman's Fall - that a U.S. government default, which is just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the government's debt ceiling (as it is threaten to do) will be an economic calamity like noe the world has ever seen, dwarfing the collapse of Lehman Brothers five years ago which caused the largest global financial disaster in recent history. Failure by the world's largest borrower to pay its debt -- unprecedented in modern history -- will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse. The $12 trillion of outstanding government debt is 23 times the $517 billion Lehman owed when it filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. As politicians butt heads over raising the debt ceiling, EFTA01132918 executives from Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Lloyd C. Blankfein have warned that going over the edge would be catastrophic. "If it were to occur -- and it's a big if -- one would expect a series of legal triggers, potentially transmitting the default to many other markets," said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., the world's largest fixed-income manager. "All this would add to the headwinds facing economic growth. It would also undermine the role of the U.S. in the world economy." While a short-lived default might be fixed without major damage to the global economy, the markets might forgive us, but if the government misses an interest payment by two days, four days, six days, that's a different story. During the final days of Lehman Brothers, Wall Street firms set up war rooms to chart the potential impact of the firm's demise and prepare strategies to cope with the consequences. Their scenarios, which focused on credit-default swaps, didn't forecast the contagion that quickly spread after the bankruptcy. Today, many banks are preparing contingency plans for a possible U.S. default, such as stocking retail branches with more cash, the New York Times reported last week. Those preparations might prove useless once again. The problem is that nobody knows what would happen if there were a default because the reality is there's never been even a technical default in the U.S. Therefore, the danger is that everyone is flying blind with the hard liners in Congress making the rest of us play Russian roulette, unless they get their way. In The Huffington Post this week, Robert Kuttner wrote an article asking — What if Obamacare Is Popular? - As it is beginning to look as if the Republican effort to hold the rest of the government hostage for the sacking of the Affordable Care Act just might backfire, big time. For starters, the effort has elicited something long missing on the part of this president -- some spine. Ever since he stepped into the Rose Garden on October 1 to warn the Republicans that he simply wasn't prepared to negotiate while the government was shut down and default on the debt was threatened, we've seen a much tougher Obama. The split in the Republicans, meanwhile, continues to widen, with an ever-increasing backlash among party professionals against the nihilism of Ted Cruz and company. Poor John Boehner tacks back and forth between frantically trying to hold his coalition together and signaling that he'd be willing to suspend the Hastert Rule and allow pragmatic Republicans vote with Democrats to keep the government open. Public opinion seems to be moving against the Republicans. The question is no longer whether they will continue their suicidal gambit but when they will cave and on what terms. Weirdly, by threatening to shut the government unless Obama killed the Affordable Care act, they got the opposite of what they sought. The rest of the government is closed, and Obamacare is open for business. And, while Republicans and movement conservatives have spent the better part of a year demonizing Obama's health reform, the more people become familiar with it, the more people will appreciate it -- leaving the Republican alarmism with no clothes. In that regard, the president and his strategists would do well to change one core piece of their rhetoric. In his Rose Garden remarks, the president said this: Now, of course, if you're one of the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, you don't need to do a thing. You're already benefiting from new benefits and protections that have been in place for some time under this law. But for the 15 percent of Americans who don't have health insurance, this opportunity is life-changing. In fact, that's profoundly wrong, and weakens the president's case. The statistically accurate contention that 85 percent of people will have no change in their insurance is a throwback to the early days of the health reform debate, when focus groups suggested that people who had employer-provided insurance and liked it needed to be reassured. But a lot has changed since then. Employer coverage is eroding. People who lose jobs or change jobs typically lose their insurance. COBRA protection paid entirely by the former worker is only a temporary and largely unaffordable stopgap. EFTA01132919 The fact is that the Affordable Care Act helps a lot more the 15 percent of the population. Young adults with no employer-provided insurance (and their parents) already know how valuable Obamacare is, for allowing people under age 26 to stay on their parents' insurance. People without jobs and at risk of losing jobs are also coming to value the Affordable Care Act. There is an analogy here with the revolution in broad acceptance of sexual diversity. As more and more gays and lesbians came out, straight people were initially shocked, then surprisingly accepting, as they realized that they had a friend, co-worker, neighbor, or family member who turned out to be gay. As more and more people sign up for affordable insurance thanks to Obama Care, many Americans who have insurance (and many who are worried about losing it) will hear heart-rending firsthand stories about friends, colleagues and relatives with medical worries, who finally get insurance. That coalition is a lot more than 15 percent. Many of these people, incidentally, are in red states, where the percentage of the uninsured tends to be far higher than the national average. In several such states, Republican governors have broken ranks and signed their states up for the provision of the Affordable Care Act that has the Federal government finance nearly all the costs of expanded Medicaid. No wonder the Republicans are so desperate to kill Obamacare in utero. The more it takes effect, the more their hysteria will be proven to be a phony. By 2014, when the Republican House majority will present itself for re-election, the Affordable Care Act could be quite popular. What then? President Obama, increasingly, finds himself in the chips. Let's see if this time he can resist the impulse to fold a winning hand. ******* Almost everyone in Government will tell you that the country's debt should be a serious concern and not raising the debt ceiling could be catastrophic — additionally the United States has experienced many periods of crippling partisan conflict in Congress as well as bouts of heavy national indebtedness. But seldom, if ever, experienced both simultaneously. And being the richest country on the planet is the reason why Treasury securities have come to be regarded as "risk-free," safe enough to use as reserves in banks — and central banks — around the world. Now, though, the government's publicly held debt exceeds 70 percent of gross domestic product, Congress is more polarized than it has been since the 19th century, and both conditions are likely to persist. This state of affairs makes the impasse over extending the debt limit especially fateful. But how did we get here? Between 1789 and 1917, the federal government's debt wasn't much of an issue at home or abroad. As Anita Krishnakumar showed in a 2005 article for the Harvard Journal on Legislation, the U.S. government was small and generally went into debt only to pay for wars, or when recession temporarily dried up tax revenue. Each time, Congress voted on specific bond issues. The understanding that debt was temporary blunted partisan resistance; once the crises passed, government reverted to balanced budgets or surpluses. It was not until global military conflict reached America's shores, in the form of World War I, that Congress felt obliged to end the practice of separate votes on each war-related bond issue. The result was the debt-ceiling law, which was supposed to constrain indebtedness without the need for constant votes. But just a decade after the Great War came the Depression, followed by World War II and then the Cold War. The net effect was a large national debt that ebbed and flowed but never disappeared. The permanent debt was accompanied by a new, and seemingly permanent, consensus that accepted a large national security establishment — to prevent a repeat of global war — and a large government role in the economy to protect against macroeconomic vicissitudes. Debt-limit laws regularly passed, more or less eventfully, but without anything like today's drama. Indeed, 1917 marked a new dawn of relatively low partisan conflict in U.S. politics, and it lasted through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, according to an authoritative analysis of congressional voting data by political scientist Keith Poole. In that time, the United States experienced a civil rights revolution, Vietnam and Watergate, yet its basic political stability remained so axiomatic that investors literally banked on it. Now, of course, the partisan comity that Poole documented has broken down. Why — whether because the Cold War no longer provides a common enemy or because selfish ideologues gerrymandered themselves into safe congressional seats — hardly matters. Neither the "war on EFTA01132920 terror" nor the Great Recession rekindled national unity, as many once expected. To the contrary, they spawned new divisions that the political parties have rushed to exploit. Republicans deserve most of the blame for the current crisis since they permitted a small faction of ultras to precipitate it in a mindless, futile bid to "defund Obamacare." But while GOP factionalism and extremism caused the present predicament, they are also symptoms of a wider breakdown in national consensus that must be addressed if we are to reassure the global economy about long-term creditworthiness. Reforming the debt-limit law is one place to start. It has its virtues, chief among them the power to periodically focus the nation's attention on its accumulated debt burden, which, though related, is a separate issue from the annual level of spending, taxes and borrowing. Alas, the law was crafted in a different era, before U.S. debts were so large, and our ability to service them so crucial to the world's well-being. Our politicians were not so easily frightened into voting against a debt increase — or so easily tempted to partisan blackmail. We need a new debt-limit law for a new era of permanent debt and permanent partisan conflict. Ideally, a reformed procedure would preserve the law's power to focus Congress on accumulated debt while removing, or minimizing, incentives to delay passage, and thus usurp presidential power. There should still be votes, but less frequently and with as little as possible at stake each time. One way to achieve this would be to exclude from the debt limit Treasury debt held by the Federal Reserve or trust funds such as Social Security and Medicare, as ICrishnakumar has suggested. What's really relevant to the government's credit is not how much it owes itself but how much it owes foreign governments, banks, pension funds and others — about $10 trillion of the current $16.7 trillion debt. As Charles Lane pointed out this week in The Washington Post titled — We need a debt-limit do-over — and there is no better time to do it. One of the greatest successes in Medicine in the 1950s and 1960s was for all intents the eradication of Polio which was a highly contagious virus that struck rich and poor alike, including our 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and my elementary schoolmate in Mount Vernon, New York, Robert (Bobby) Burns. Leading this assault against polio and other diseases is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which is trying to manage a partial shutdown at an institution where nearly everything is ultimately a matter of life or death. And the longer it goes, the more complex it is. What isn't an imminent threat to health on Day Four is on Day 10. As of now, eight of 10 global disease detection centers — the field offices where outbreaks are identified and countered — are closed. No processing of blood samples for parasitic diseases is taking place. No testing of counterfeit malaria medicines. Fortunately, the CDC's polio eradication effort has been largely exempted from the shutdown. It is part of one of the most ambitious