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More on Protecting Monopolies

By David V. Johnson on July 1, 2009

The New Haven Independent reports that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D – CT) is leading a coalition of “centrists” and “moderates” against a public option for healthcare—a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurers. As we recently discussed, the public option is supported by about three-quarters of the public, who, in the terms of the Congressional debate, presumably represent the “extremists” and “partisans” of the political spectrum.

We also recently pointed out how Congressional opposition to the public option seems to be coming from those who represent small states whose healthcare markets are dominated by a local monopoly.

About a month ago, Health Care for America Now and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D – NY) released a detailed report that analyzed the healthcare markets in all fifty states. The report concluded: [...]

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New York Times, Transparent and Opaque

By Russ Baker on July 1, 2009

Two different sides of the New York Times were on display in a couple of articles published June 29 and June 30. In one, we got news about how the paper worked to prevent the release of information that might have harmed its correspondent, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Besides not publishing anything on the kidnapping and asking other news organizations to maintain silence, the Times teamed up with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to scrub details about the kidnapping from the reporter’s Wikipedia page. While the Times carried out this effort to protect its reporter’s safety (in the end he escaped his captors and is now home), and while the policy can be debated, the look at the Wikipedia operation is a fine example of self-examination.

Meanwhile, another article, the lead piece in the Arts section about a previously little-known socialite, feels like the fix was in at the paper. In “Philanthropist With a Sense of Timing Raises Her Profile,” a Times reporter describes how the wife of a billionaire investor became more visible in high society circles. The substance did not seem to justify the article, which did more than the woman’s own charity to raise her profile. Only in a very brief mention do we read that her husband’s firm owns 20 percent of the New York Times.

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Corporate Tool

By Russ Baker on June 28, 2009

Here’s a useful tool for finding out what US-based transnational corporations are doing around the world. Go to a website called Croctail, where you can search domestic and foreign subsidiaries of publicly traded companies. (Hat tip to www.dirtdiggersdigest.org which brought it to my attention, and to http://www.crocodyl.org/, a collective which sponsors collaborative research on corporations and created Croctail.)

And while we’re at it, here’s DirtDiggers on Shell’s spin on its controversial doings in Nigeria:

One of the advantages for a corporation in resolving a sensitive lawsuit out of court is that it can proclaim innocence and insist it is settling for other reasons. Royal Dutch Shell has done just that in a case brought in connection with the 1995 execution of author Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists who campaigned against the oil company’s operations in the Ogoniland region of Nigeria. [...]

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UBS or Just Plain BS?

By Russ Baker on June 24, 2009

The Obama Justice Department has just floated a trial balloon to see if it can drop a legal effort to force the Swiss Bank UBS to disclose the names of 52,000 rich Americans suspected of using the bank to evade US taxes. Back in February, the Justice Department sued the bank in an effort to force it to name names. Now, however, a straight, rather unquestioning article in the New York Times business section—likely not to get the attention it deserves—reveals that the whole matter may just disappear.

The apparent change of plans is offered to the Times by “a United States official briefed on the matter . . . The move, which would halt an unusually aggressive effort to force Switzerland to lift its veil of banking secrecy, could happen by mid-July.”

And the reason for this? An aggressive lobbying campaign. [...]

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Hedge Funds Flex Lobbying Muscle

By Russ Baker on June 23, 2009

The Wall Street Journal has a solid piece of reporting on the continued power of hedge funds to shape their own—and the nation’s—destiny. The lede says it all (subscription required):

Many hedge funds were relieved last week when the Obama administration’s financial-overhaul plan included no big surprises or threats to the lucrative, secretive industry.

It isn’t clear exactly why hedge funds escaped their worst fears. But one factor might have helped: The hedge-fund industry has been spending a lot more time and money in Washington during the past few years.

In fact, there’s a lot more to it than that. [...]

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Help wanted

By Russ Baker on June 22, 2009

The Family of Secrets team is seeking a volunteer for a long-term commitment of a short amount of time per day, to help with online marketing of a book (see www.familyofsecrets.com) and nonprofit investigative reporting site (www.whowhatwhy.com) that seek to get urgent information out to the public.

The ideal candidate would have experience using Twitter, Facebook, websites, and other media to build a community and promote ideas. Person can be located anywhere.

Principal requirements are: passion for the mission, competency, and reliability. Experience with Photoshop, HTML, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages is a must. Familiarity with FriendFeed and other social media tools is a plus. The job will require perhaps one hour a day, five days a week, on a schedule that suits you.

To apply: whowhatwhy.com [at] gmail.com

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Protecting Monopoly Power

By David V. Johnson on June 22, 2009

It’s rare that a public-policy proposal manages to please three-quarters of the public. A government-run healthcare option has managed to do just that, according to a recent poll by CBS News and the New York Times. Seventy-two percent of respondents, including fifty percent of Republicans, said they favored the creation of a public healthcare plan similar to Medicare that would compete with private insurance plans.

So how is it that so many legislators, even Democrats, have expressed opposition to the public option? Paul Krugman has a guess:

In fact, I may have a new hypothesis about the political economy of the health care fight. One thing that’s obvious, if you look at the balking Democrats I chided in today’s column, is that almost all of them come from states with small population. These are also, by and large, states in which one or at most two private insurers dominate the market.

So here’s a suggestion: while the opponents of a private plan say that they’re trying to defend market competition, what they’re actually doing is defending lucrative local monopolies.

[...]

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Goldman Sachs Record Bonuses: Where’s the Investigation?

By Richard Cummings on June 22, 2009

Goldman Sachs is on pace to make record bonus payouts after a robust first half, the Guardian newspaper reported on Sunday.

Goldman staff in London were briefed on the outlook and told they could look forward to the bonus hikes if the company registers, as predicted, its most profitable year ever, the report said.

The surge in projected profit can be attributed to a lack of competition and increased revenue from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products, the newspaper said, citing insiders at the firm. [...]

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Who’s Got Obama’s Ear?

By Russ Baker on June 18, 2009

In the New York Times, Joe Nocera argues that Obama’s steps at regulating Wall Street are tepid compared to FDR’s and are likely to leave in place some of the very mechanisms that contributed to the crisis. Read this excerpt, if not the entire piece, then my closing comment:

[T]he Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value. . . .

Many experts, even at the Federal Reserve, think that the country should not allow banks to become too big to fail. Some of them suggest specific economic disincentives to prevent growing too big and requirements that would break them up before reaching that point.

Yet the Obama plan accepts the notion of “too big to fail” — in the plan those institutions are labeled “Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies” — and proposes to regulate them more “robustly.” The idea of creating either market incentives or regulation that would effectively make banking safe and boring — and push risk-taking to institutions that are not too big to fail — isn’t even broached. [...]

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The End of American Hegemony?

By Russ Baker on June 16, 2009

At TruthDig, Chris Hedges, playing off an economist’s piece in the Financial Times, posits a dire future based on the collapse of the dollar, largely on account of the humongous military budget’s role in ballooning the deficit. The article, typically lively and controversial Hedges fare, is worth reading for its analysis, as are Hedges’s comments about the American media.

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze. . . . [...]

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