Reporting from Washington – As President Obama is preparing to announce a troop increase and new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, several powerful House committee chairmen have proposed a surtax on Americans to pay the future military costs.
Talk of the levy escalated Tuesday after Obama said he soon would deliver a plan to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. “I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals,” Obama said, “that they will be supportive.”
The suggestion that a surtax be used to help fund the increasingly unpopular war, though unlikely to pass, illustrated the fiscal anxieties that the president will face if he asks Congress to write another big-ticket item into the budget.
“There is serious unrest in our caucus” over whether the U.S. can afford the war, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said in a conference call with economists and bloggers. “We have to look at that war with a green eyeshade on.” More…
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans that have trouble putting food on the table shot up last year in an unprecedented spike to a record 17 million households, the government reported on Monday. The Department of Agriculture report, which has been released annually since 1995, said the number of Americans that were hungry rose to 14.6%. In 2007, 13 million households or 11.1% of Americans had trouble getting enough food.
The one-year jump is all the more significant, given the number of hungry Americans had never been higher than 11.9% since these surveys began.
Of the near-15% of the nation that couldn’t secure enough food last year, the USDA said one-third of them had “very low food security,” meaning they reduced the amount that they ate or disrupted their eating patterns during the year. That group made up 5.7% of all U.S. households, which was also a record high.
More than 500,000 households that scaled back the amount that they ate were households with children, making up 1.3% of all U.S. homes with children.
The USDA said the main cause of hunger and food insecurity in the country is poverty. More…
The House Judiciary Committee voted Wednesday to strip federal antitrust protections shielding health insurers from investigations into price fixing and other business practices, the first step in a legislative bid to clamp down on the much-maligned industry.
Although Democrats have led the repeal push in recent weeks, the committee’s 20-9 vote came with the support of three Republicans. The legislation would repeal portions of the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act that allows states to regulate health insurance providers without federal intervention. But critics of the law say that 64 years after its passage, the result has been regional monopolies that inflate premiums and discriminate against people based on their health status, gender and other factors. More…
In our view, both insurance & banking should lose their McCarran Act exemptions. Anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices are widespread in predatory lending, automobile & life insurance, homeowner’s insurance (Katrina!) and credit card practices.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama won’t walk away from the flagging war in Afghanistan, the White House declared Monday as Obama faced tough decisions — and intense administration debate — over choices that could help define his presidency in his first year as commander in chief.
The fierce Taliban attack that killed eight American soldiers over the weekend added to the pressure. The assault overwhelmed a remote U.S. outpost where American forces have been stretched thin in battling insurgents, underscoring an appeal from Obama’s top Afghanistan commander for as many as 40,000 additional forces — and at the same time reminding the nation of the costs of war. More…
White House wants to cloak discussion in back rooms for more secrecy and privacy
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appeared to subtly rebuke America’s top commander in Afghanistan on Monday for publicly speaking out against calls for scaling back the war effort there.
“I believe the decisions that the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important of his presidency, so it is important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right,” Mr. Gates said at a gathering here.
“And in this process,” Mr. Gates went on, “it is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilians and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately.”
As Subprime Lending Crisis Unfolded, Watchdog Fed protected banks not us.
The visits had a ritual quality. Three times a year, a coalition of Chicago community groups met with the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators to warn about the growing prevalence of abusive mortgage lending.
They began to present research in 1999 showing that large banking companies including Wells Fargo and Citigroup had created subprime businesses wholly focused on making loans at high interest rates, largely in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the south and west of downtown Chicago.
The state Senate approved a bill yesterday that would let Governor Deval Patrick appoint an interim successor to Edward M. Kennedy, paving the way for the appointment of a new US senator as early as tomorrow and providing Democrats in Washington the potential 60th vote they have been seeking to pass a health care overhaul.
The state Senate approved the measure by a 24-to-16 vote, just five days after the House had voted 95 to 58 to change Massachusetts election law and allow the appointment of an interim US senator. Both chambers are planning to give a final procedural endorsement to the measure and to send it to the governor’s desk today; the only potential hurdle is that Republicans are contemplating a last-ditch legal challenge in an effort to derail the legislation.
News of the vote reverberated yesterday from Beacon Hill to Washington, where US Senate majority leader Harry Reid, informed of the news when a note was passed to him, pumped his fist into the air and cracked a small smile, according to an aide. More…
With the next G20 Summit approaching in Pittsburgh, the President goes over the progress in stemming a global economic crisis. He discusses the impact of the Recovery Act, and pledges that “lobbyists for big Wall Street banks” will not prevent real reform for the future, including a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
Hit with $10 million penalty for “Bad Faith” after canceling the teenager’s policy without justification. Fortis and Assurant have been hit multiple times in the past ten years for making Bad Faith decisions that just happen to increase Assurant’s profits.
The South Carolina Supreme Court has ordered an insurance company to pay $10 million for wrongly revoking the insurance policy of a 17-year-old college student after he tested positive for HIV. The court called the 2002 decision by the insurance company “reprehensible.”
That appears to be the most an insurance company has ever been ordered to pay in a case involving the practice known as rescission, in which insurance companies retroactively cancel coverage for policyholders based on alleged misstatements – sometimes right after diagnoses of life-threatening diseases.
The ruling emerges from a conservative Southern state with one of the most pro-business climates in the country. And it comes as progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill are pressing for health care reforms, such as a public insurance option, that reflect wariness about the private insurance industry’s motives.
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court’s verdict against Fortis Insurance, now known as Assurant. The trial jury had awarded the former college student, Jerome Mitchell, $15 million in punitive damages; the Supreme Court reduced that amount by $5 million. More…
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/17/insurance-company-must-pa_n_289841.html
Americans must buy health insurance. Some Americans would be forced to use “non-profit health cooperatives” funded by the federal government that would in turn, purchase coverage from Blue Cross or United Health.
Baucus wants to stuff our money into Blue Cross and the insurance industry!
WASHINGTON — Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, on Wednesday unveiled his plan to extend health coverage to 29 million uninsured Americans, providing a detailed look at a legislative proposal that meets many of the requirements that President Obama laid out in his address to Congress last week.
The proposal is the result of more than a year of preparation by Mr. Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, and three months of intense talks among a small group of Democrats and Republicans. The three Republicans in that group so far have refused to endorse the bill but negotiations will continue in the days ahead.
The Baucus plan calls for the creation of private, nonprofit health insurance cooperatives, a compromise aimed at bridging the gap between Democrats who want a government-run insurance plan and Republicans who adamantly oppose that idea. More…
Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.
During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.
The last economic expansion began in November 2001 and ended in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means the Piketty-Saez data essentially cover that expansion. The last time such a large share of the income gain during an expansion went to the top 1 percent of households — and such a small share went to the bottom 90 percent of households — was in the 1920s More…
Poverty Gap at widest point since Great Depression
