And the Good News Is

Women pay higher premiums for health care than men do. Although American women live substantially longer and are generally healthier than men, they never the less pay higher insurance premiums than men according to a study reported in today's New York Times.

Now you may be thinking, well, of course, they become pregnant and have babies, so that will add to the health care burden, but the study takes that factor into account. Insurance companies justify the higher premiums by arguing that women seek out more health care than men do, and thus the cost is higher. In other words, because women take better care of themselves than men do, they are penalized for their behavior by being charged more by their insurance companies.

Once upon a time, insurance was a communal method for folks to share the costs of their health care. And then it became a way for a few investors to make money off of other folks' misery.

The Cost of Higher Ed To Continue Upwards:

So what else is new? Nothing seems capable of putting the brakes on the steady increase in the cost of sending the kids to college. For years the price tag of a higher education, the universal method of improving one's lot in life, has outstripped the cost of living, as universities pile on amenities to the "club med" lifestyle known as a college education. (See today's New York Times.)

Financial aid is expected to grow, which means more loans, as state assistance decreases. In other words, parents will go deeper into debt while their kids will come out of college even more deeply in the economic hole just as the odds of them landing the job their degrees have prepared them for disappear.

Bush Administration More Socialist Than Obama:

In an effort to "share the wealth," the Bush administration is expected to set forth a plan to help millions of home owners retain their homes in these failing economic times. (See The New York Times story.) Makes you wonder how Joe the Plumber feels about this. He didn't speak out when the banks and Wall Street were being bailed out at tax payer expense, but he objected to helping his neighbors across the street.

Wanna bet that Joe will gladly take some assistance in paying his $1200 in back taxes to remove the lean on his house? But maybe he doesn't need that sort of help now. We hear he's hired an agent to help him deal with his new found celebrity.

Banks To Give Bailout Money to Stockholders as Dividends:

Just when you thought you'd heard of everything, it turns out that more than half of the $163 billion of bailout taxpayer money that the federal government plans to give to banks so that they can provide more loans will simply be given to the banks' stockholders as dividends unless the government can put the brakes on these plans. (See today's Washington Post.)

No wonder the Bush administration was so eager to do the bailout. Their bodies stand to reap billions by robbing the taxpayers, just as their failed practices have tanked the economy. And you thought the Bushies were just about oil.

Speaking of Oil:

Exxon Mobil set a new record for quarterly profits, with a 58 percent jump. (See The New York Times story.)

Never fear, economists now think we are in a recession and that it may have started as early as this past spring. Phew! I was beginning to worry about that.

The Dude makes perfect sense: "I think it's very important for the American President to mean what he says. That's why I understand that the enemy could misread what I say. That's why I try to be as clearly I can." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., 2004. (He speaks for you, dude. / He speaks for me, dude. / He speaks for us, dude./ All over this land!)

Iraq: Better or Worse

We keep being told that the situation in Iraq is improving. So much so that the McCain candidacy in the U.S., which depended on it, has stumbled under the weight of the growing economic crisis. Iraq hardly makes the news anymore.

But Iraq just won't go away. The latest forecast is for increasing battles between the large ethnic minority of Kurds in the north, who would much prefer their own homeland and control over the rich oil fields in the region, and the Arab majority who control Baghdad.

The problem is heightened by the fact that Turkey, with its own Kurdish problems, is adamantly opposed to Kurdish independence. The Kurds are in a vice, but they have been strong allies of the U.S.

The Bush administration used a sledgehammer to try to perform surgery. (See today's New York Times story.)

The Good News:

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was found guilty of multiple corruption charges. The senator, who is 84 years old, continued to urge "Alaskans to re-elect him to a seventh full term next week" (Neil Lewis, The New York Times). Stevens is, of course, one of the leaders in the senate in leading the way to the deregulation that helped lead us into the current economic crisis. Greed, it seems, trumps rational thinking more often than some people believe, at least until they are forced to face the facts.

In the meantime, John McCain called upon Sen. Stevens to resign from the senate today (NPR.org).

The Dude describes the openness of his administration: "As you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2003.

Jobs Forecast Looks Bad:

Economists are now predicting unemployment to reach somewhere between 8 and 8.5 percent by this time next year, approaching the first Reagan recession numbers. (See The New York Times story.)

The Dude's world explained (by environmentalist Jennifer Cypher and anthropologist Eric Higgs): "the boundary between artificiality and reality [became] so thin that the artificial [became] the centre of moral value" (Wikipedia.org)

The Dude values life: "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet." — George W. Bush, Arlington Heights, IL, Oct. 2000. (The guy voted the one we'd most like to drink a beer with because he always seems drunk enough to think it's his turn to buy.)

Answer Me This:

If American capitalism is so great, why is it that both the Japanese and western Europeans have longer life expectancies than Americans?

Throughout the Soviet period in Russia, American politicians and propagandists for free trade consistently espoused capitalism and proclaimed the Russian people would be so much better off if they'd just shrug off their adherence to their Marxist doctrine. However, since the fall of communism, the Russian birth rate has not only decreased but life expectancy has steadily fallen. (Nicholas Eberstadt addresses the population problem in Russia in today's New York Times.)

The Dude loves Google: "One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see—I've forgot the name of the program—but you get the satellite, and you can—like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes." — George W. Bush, CNBC, October 24, 2006.

What's the Temperature in Hell Now?

Hell just got a little colder, and there is definitely snow in the forecast: Alan (Beloved of the Conservatives) Greenspan admitted today that maybe he made a tiny itsy bitsy mistake when he trusted the "free markets" to "regulate themselves."

As reported by The New York Times, Greenspan was "in 'a state of shocked disbelief' about the breakdown in the ability of banks to regulate themselves." Evidently, Alan has a different banker than I've ever had.

In the meantime those filing for unemployment compensation remained at over 3 million for the 26th week in a row.

A Million Bucks Ain't What It Used To Be:

Back in the 1950s a hit TV show called, The Millionaire, featured a butler who weekly handed over a million bucks to some poor sap with the instructions that he never reveal the exact amount of money he had been given. Then we got to watch what he did with all that money. By the way, the taxes had all been paid by the donor, so the gift receiver was actually receiving more than a million dollars.

In those days, a million bucks could set you up for life, or at least it seemed so. The average Joe earned between $5,000 and $10,000 a year and never referred to himself as middle-class unless he was at the high end of those figures. Not many had health insurance, and a dental plan meant getting your kids to brush their teeth before they went to bed at night.

So how far would a million dollars get you these days? I doubt many would turn such a gift down, but according to the latest statistics, one million dollars is only worth $455 thousand in 1983 dollars. I'd hate to think what it was worth in 1955 dollars. Maybe $100 thousand?

By the way, according to National Geographic, there are now more than 10,000,000 millionaires in the world. The U.S. still has the largest number with more than 3 million of them, but the rest of the world is catching up. Or they would be if the world's economy wasn't on the brink of collapse.

As for me, I'm still waiting on that billionaire's butler to knock on my door with an envelope and instructions to never tell anyone the exact amount of my gift.

Tom Friedman Explains It All:

The little Jewish Kid from Minnesota waxes glib and hits the nail directly on the head in today's New York Times Op-Ed section: "[T]he central truth of globalization today: We're all connected and nobody is in charge."

The Dude as prophet in 2000: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." — George W. Bush, LaCrosse, Wisconsin, October 18, 2000. (Boy, he got that right!)

Unemployment at 6.1%, May Reach 10%:

Money is being concentrated in a few powerful hands while unemployment grows and wages shrink even further. Economists now forecast that the recession will just have to run its course, with little that government or anyone else can do about it.

In the meantime, the stock market bounces like a rubber ball, playing havoc with people's retirement, and housing prices continue to slump. According to The New York Times, the American economy has lost 760,000 jobs since the beginning of the year.

And the Good News:

Bulgaria, one of the former Soviet Block countries that the Republicans in America claimed to have freed at the end of the Cold War, is now being run by the Mafia. (See The New York Times story.)

Shocking News!!!

Retail sales fell again in September! (See The New York Times story.)

Wait a minute! Just what did you expect would happen with the price of fuel through the roof, unemployment climbing, and the banking system facing collapse? That we'd all run out to Wally-World and buy trunk loads of plastic flowers?

At some point in the not so distant past, America stopped producing enough stuff to afford to keep buying lots of stuff, and so the American economy was fueled by a steadily increasing population of immigrants—Americans themselves had stopped having enough babies to keep their population growing—and by steadily inflated housing.

Eventually, things caught up to America. There were only so many computers to buy and so many McMansions to live in and try to sell to the neighbors for more than they could possibly be worth.

We bought SUVs, and then they told us we shouldn't drive them, and then they complained that the price of gas was falling because we weren't driving to shop enough. Now, come on! Which is it?

It was like our entertainment. We have a cable running into our house that can pump 500 channels for us to choose from, but the TV people can only come up with just so much programing, not nearly enough to fill all of those pipes, so they pump re-runs of re-runs at us and play the same old third rate movie over and over again.

It just got to be too much.

So we turned to The Dude: "I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children." — George W. Bush, 2nd presidential debate, October 2000. (Well, there is one economic term in that statement. Maybe he was talking about the economy.)

Tonight is the final debate between Obama and McCain. McCain has promised to come out swinging, and everyone is waiting to see if Obama's "rope-a-dope" strategy will get him through this final flurry.

The Republicans have promised that the fix is in, at least in a few states and as long as McCain can keep the fight close going into the final round, but McCain has just flat out pissed so many Republicans off over the past twenty-five years that it's not clear who's in his corner anymore.

At this point it looks like even members of the White House may be planning to vote for Obama, especially since McCain brought that Holy Roller in to be his second. There are some who are convinced her real job is on SNL and that she's really not the Governor of Alaska at all.

Of course, I'm not even sure if there is a place called Alaska, as I've never been there, so maybe the whole thing is a creation of some TV producer's madcap mind.

The tough part is that if Obama is elected the only people who will be allowed to complain about him is other black men and foreigners. It's just unseemly for white folks to elect a black man to office and then complain about him.

It reminds me of when Richard Nixon resigned. There was that seriously feel good moment and then the big letdown. The best you could do with Gerald Ford was poke a little fun at the fact that he sometimes tripped over his own feet in public. Now who hasn't done that?

And the Tide Kept Rolling In:

Ronny Rayguns and Nuke Getrich were all about the private sector's innate superiority and how a dammed up river would somehow trickle down to the garden at the bottom of the mountain if we just had faith in Scrooge.

Now that the globe has warmed under the sun of greed, the same folks who sponsored the current world-wide crisis are busily bailing with the public bucket. Ooopsie!

Today's news is a flutter with the latest program: We taxpayers are going to "invest" in banks to the tune of $250 billion, following the example—GASP!—of "several European countries" (see The New York Times story).

Is that a toilet I hear flushing?

The Dude is a graduate of an Ivy League school, with an advanced degree in business administration: "This morning my administration released the budget numbers for fiscal 2006. These budget numbers are not just estimates; these are the actual results for the fiscal year that ended February the 30th." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., October 2006. The fiscal year ended on September 30th. Ooopsie! Ooopsie! Ooopsie!

The problem with government is that all too often the person with the lowest possible qualifications is allowed to hold a position. Case in point: The Dude was a natural citizen, over the age of 35 and breathing.

How Your Government Works:

The Republican ideology that has been the governing factor in American government since 1980 has been to push for less government and more private sector control. The result—a massive world-wide economic collapse, as the private sector is allowed to run amok.

The other side of the coin has been government opacity. We see how the government operates only through a glass darkly, as it were, with only occasional light shed when massive corruption finally comes into focus, such as the story covered in today's New York Times. This is the story of how a mid level government employee "gamed the system" to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, within the national missile defense program. His explanation—he was tired of watching everyone else, from defense contractors to politicians, get rich off of military contracts and realized how easy it would be for him to do so as well.

The Dude explains his administration's policies: "[W]hether they be Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, people have heard the universal call to love a neighbor just like they'd like to be called themselves." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., October 2003.

GW's Legacy:

As if New York weren't Democratic enough, the Bush administration, according to The New York Times, seems to have succeeded in driving nearly all the voters in that state into registering as Democrats. Nassau County has been solidly and stolidly Republican for 110 years. Not anymore.

One key factor has been the increased registration of non-white voters. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the Republicans, as we've seen before, have discovered techniques for either denying Democrats the right to vote or by discarding those votes.

You can top that off with the fact that the Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's each had their worst week in history, falling by 18 percent. (See The Washington Post story.) Thanks, GW. You've done a fine job in leading the country.

The Sinking Ship:

The Dow plunges, again, this afternoon, down below 9 thousand. McCain/Palin promise real change. Evidently they plan to vote for Obama.

Today, the top 1 percent of U.S. citizens takes home 20 percent of the nation's income. The last time that few people earned that much of the nation's weekly paycheck was 1928.

It has long been the primary ideology of the neo-cons to return the nation to its economic condition just prior to the Great Depression. It seems that the Bush administration has enabled that scenario. Will there be breadlines?

The Greenspan Era Revisited:

With the world economy on the brink of collapse, the legacy of Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, is being reevaluated. Greenspan was, and continues to be, an advocate of deregulation. He is a big fan of "derivatives," (created to protect investors against losses; your insurance contract on your home is a derivative).

Greenspan's argument is that the current crisis is a result of greedy individuals; therefore, there is no need for regulation. For some reason he doesn't seem to understand that regulation's purpose is to protect the public against greedy individuals.

The lineup of people who are opposed to Greenspan's views is impressive. It includes George Soros, Felix G. Rohatyn, and Warren E. Buffett. All three have been warning the American public and government for years that unregulated derivatives were a time bomb. To get a better look at the situation, see today's New York Times. When Greenspan left his position as head of the Fed, he was generally viewed as an American economic hero, but the economy was already in a state of freefall that began almost precisely when George W. Bush took his first oath of office.

What about Afghanistan?

The prognosis for Afghanistan, the staging ground for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is worse than ever. The CIA is blaming poor leadership in the White House along with indifference among European leaders. (See The New York Times story.) The Afghan government is corrupt and failing, and the Taliban, the folks who like to blow up art works with cannons and who like having Osama ben Laden as a house guest, have made massive gains. Under American sponsorship, Afghanistan has become the world's largest supplier of opium.

The McCain Strategy:

With John McCain down in the polls, the media is focusing on his hit below the belt strategy in advertising and public appearances, with Winking Sarah taking the lead. But the real strategy seems to be tied to denying voters the right to vote. Check out what's happening in six important swing states, where voters are being delared ineligible to vote at rates in the hundreds of thousands. The process relies on use of the Social Security database, and is illegal, but little attention has been given to what is currenlty taking place. (See The New York Times story.)

Will voters "take it to the street" when another election is stolen?

The Dude: "Saddam would still be in power if [John Kerry] were the president of the United States, and the world would be a lot better off." — George W. Bush, second presidential debate, St. Louis, Missouri, October 8, 2004. (Out of the mouths of babes.)

At Last Some Progress in Education:

Today's New York Times reports that the teaching of Latin is returning. You can do as much exit testing and threatening of schools financially as you want, but those are negative steps in trying to improve education. Beating your horse will only get you so far. At some point, you actually need to feed and water the beast.

Back in the 60s, kids rebelled at studying Latin. The language was dead. Even the Roman Catholic Church was giving up on it. But what everyone knew who studied the language was that the study of Latin was the single most important thing a student could do to improve his skills in almost any other area. In limited testing, it was found that even math skills improve when students study Latin. Rationals very about why the study of Latin has this global effect on learning, probably it has something to do with the logical base of the language. Regardless of the reasons, it's good to see that something that focuses on student behavior rather that education theory and politics is actually being employed.

The Third Debate:

As economists around the world await tonight's debate between McCain and Obama, one thing is eminently certain—neither of these candidates has a clue about how to fix a problem that no one else in the world knows the answer to.

Four years ago, the winning candidate made this comment during one of the debates: "I own a timber company? That's news to me. Need some wood?" — George W. Bush, second presidential debate, St. Louis, MO, October 2004. (Georgie Boy inherited his wealth, and his family and friends took care of him his whole life. He never had any reason to ask where the money came from. He's the guy we elected because he was most like us.)

Between the Rock and the Hard Place:

Times are hard, so if you're like me, you've cut back on spending. Buying gas just to get to work and paying the heating bill this winter are terrifying prospects. (I paid $3.35 per gallon to fill the car's tank this evening. Who'd a thunk that'd seem cheep? The price per barrel of oil dropped below $90 today, which ought to make a gallon of gasoline cost less than $3.00 per gallon.)

Once upon a time, America was a producer nation, but sometime in the 1960s we began to move toward becoming a consumer nation. Buying stuff fuels our economy along with many of the economies in the rest of the world. It's supposed to be our job to buy stuff (and services) and then junk the stuff as soon as possible.

For a while in the 1990s, we were told that we were an "information society," but that was misleading. What we really did was consume. And then the inevitability happened.

Now regular folks all over the country are cutting back on consumption, and the little engine that could is running out of steam at both ends. (See The New York Times story.)

Flushing Your Medical Care Down the Same Toilet the Banks Used:

Paul Krugman's op-ed addresses the Neo-Con/McCain plan to deregulate medical care so that it can follow the same path that the banking industry followed to take the country down the same path of bankruptcy and federal bailout:

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

The Dude fools enough people some of the time: "See, free nations are peaceful nations." (Bush has led the U.S. into two wars.) "Free nations don't attack each other." (Bush took the U.S. to war against Iraq based on lies.) "Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction." (The U.S. has more weapons of mass destruction than any other nation on earth.)

Fannie's Story—How Fannie Mae Nearly Went Belly Up:

Charles Duhigg explains what happened at Fannie Mae in today's New York Times. Not many of us have much of a clue about how the economy works, any more than we understand how our automobiles run. We just get in our cars and go, until they don't. And then we count on someone else to help us out. Duhigg sheds light on the economy and its human failings.

McCain's Next Move:

Frank Rich postulates John McCain's new strategy for a Republican victory next month: "flipping the ticket."

Personally, I'm going to miss The Dude. Unless Palin comes into office to "affect impacts," when will we again see leadership that is "fully committed to working with both sides to bring the level of terror down to an acceptable level for both" (George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., October 2, 2001)?

Gail Collins' Analysis of the Biden Palin Debate:

The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.

(Gail Collins Times Op-Ed, 10-4-08)

Today's Times also features an op-ed by Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology, who comments on Palin's linguistic skills. His analysis comes down to this: "the overall theme that Ms. Palin and Senator John McCain have been trying to advance: that expertise is overrated, homespun sincerity is better than sophistication, conviction is more important than analysis."

In other words, McCain and Palin are playing the same game that Bush and Cheney did in the last two elections, with the roles reversed. This time it's the presidential candidate who is the tough guy ready to reside in the bunker, with the guy you'd like to have a beer with running for vice president. Is that real change?

The Dude's strategy to counter terrorism: "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., October 4, 2001. (The Dude has never lost an opportunity for furthering his plans to bankrupt the nation while advancing the enrichment of his friends.)

The House Passes and Bush Signs Bailout:

Along with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax cuts, the House passed the bill, which was then rushed by car to the White House for George Bush's signature. (See the NPR story.) The vote was 263-171. Quite a turnaround.

The bad news: Things are still going to grow worse.

Is It Greed or Stupidity?

Steven Pearlstein argues in favor of greed in today's Washington Post. He compares a stock boy's desire to earn better than mimimum wage to be a matter of greed, equating self-interest with the former. This has been the argument of neo-liberal free marketers, that a desire to improve one's situation is always equivelent to greed, and, therefore, being greedy is a good thing. It keeps a roof over your head and clothes on your kids' backs.

But the definition of greed is the excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves. Greed is usually attached to the notion of depriving others of their just rewards as well. People whose retirement systems may have invested in stocks and bonds can hardly be called greedy. While the CEOs of companies who have walked away from companies that failed under their stewardship with massive amounts of money after having done a job that would have caused a regular employee to be fired are in fact greedy.

In the meantime:

The one time Democrat turned Republican turned Independent mayor of New York City has announced his plans to do away with term limits for the position of Mayor of New York and run again. Unlike George Bush, Mayor Bloomberg's poll numbers are very positive, and most folks think he's actually done a bang up job of mayor-ing the city. His job description doesn't include monitoring Wall Street. And unlike his predecessor, whose most noteable achievements included dressing in drag on Saturday Night Live, Bloomberg has actually achieved a few things in the past eight years. (See The Washington Post story.)

Wall Street Rescued in Time To Watch Main Street March to the Uneployment Line:

The U.S. lost 159,000 jobs last month, the ninth straight month of job losses, adding further fuel to the argument that the Bush administration is the worst ever. Remember the prognosis when he first entered office? And there were no WMD or even any terrorists in Iraq before Bush led the country into that war. (See The New York Times story.)

Oh, well, Blackwater has made millions.

In Case You Haven't Noticed:

The price of oil is down. The weak economy has affected the demand for energy, lowering it. Thus the price per barrel of oil is down, reflected in lower gasoline prices at the pump. That should leave more money in the average American's pocket to buy things and fuel the economy. Some experts argue that it will mean billions of extra dollars in or collective pocket, but will it be enough to push the recovery? (See The New York Times story.)

McCain Abandons Michigan:

Temporarily, at least. Sen. John McCain's people have announced that they are temporarily pulling the campaign out of Michigan, where polls show the senator is falling further and further behind, with Obama's lead now in double digits. (See NPR.) With the auto industry in a world of hurt and the Republicans in congress voting against any bailout, the state's voters have sent McCain a strong message. His campaign, however, has indicated it reserves the right to return at any time. (Is that a threat?)

Who's Ag'in It?

The list of 25 senators who voted against the bailout is a curious one. Neither the far right nor left like the plan, which both conclude is nothing but a give-a-way to banks who have already squandered a massive fortune. What, they want to know, is to prevent them from doing the same thing again. Besides, the plan does nothing to address the central problem of a failing housing market. (See The New York Times story.)

You gotta ask yourself, pilgrim, what kind of economy is it anyway that relies on continuously building ever more new and bigger houses that cost more and more money. That's why it's called a balloon, sooner or later it's gotta bust.