President Obama wants to make college loans directly, instead of laundering them through various profit making corporations like Sallie Mae.  Doing so will save taxpayers $46 billion over the next 10 years.

That’s even more than doing away with oil subsidies, which costs taxpayers $40 billion over 10 years.

So who opposes such savings?  You got it.  The Republicans.  The party that describes itself as the fiscally responsible one.  The same party that opposes Obama’s recommendation to form a panel to study ways where we can save money.  The same party that opposes a consumer financial products protection agency.  The same party that opposed reforming our incredibly expensive health care system.  And opposes real regulatory reform of the Wall Street welfare queens.

You want to know where the Republicans stand you need answer only one question.  Who has the most money to fund re-election campaigns.  End of discussion.  Every other consideration, such as what’s good for consumers or the nation as a whole, aren’t even in the backroom shakedowns.

Here’s a link to Obama’s chief economist, Austan Goolsbee as he appeared on the John Daly show recently.

Pediatrician Margaret Flowers of Maryland is dedicated to the idea that America can afford having a universal, single payer health care system.  Basically, she believes the existing Medicare system for the elderly should be extended to all citizens.

She’s not alone when it comes to physicians, 17,000 of whom have joined with her as Physicians For A National Health Program.

Dr. Flowers found out firsthand about how “broken” our political system has become.  Despite consistent positive public support for single payer, universal health coverage, Dr. Flowers found that  Congress and the Administration are controlled by special corporate interests and decided to exclude any honest debate about a single payer system.   The Administration, said Flowers, decided that single payer simply could not get through Congress and therefore must be shunted aside.

What was left, she maintains, was legislation that was “designed to fail.”  If it had passed as written, she says, it would take five or six years before the public would realize that it was a failure, and the incredible pain and suffering our current system exacts on millions of citizens would continue unabated.

Also interesting in the interview was Dr. Flowers recounting how large insurance bureaucrats warp medical care delivery.  Dr. Flowers was advised by one insurance company to limit herself to one wellness visit per day.  And for any additional problems she found with her patients that were not the reason for their visit, she was advised to schedule another appointment (and thus another fee).

In other words a “churn and burn” medical philosophy where the insurance company was most definitely not interested in saving any money–otherwise they would advise NOT to make a second appointment, which would drive medical bills up.  This is not the advice of someone working in a competitive environment.

If you have any interest in this subject, you can watch Dr. Flowers in an interview with Bill Moyers here.

Republican Senators have already said they won’t support any legislation creating a Consumer Finance Protection Agency.

Which is consistent with the GOPs ideology.  Anything that hampers private corporate interests in making a buck is bad.  Even if the buck is made off the backs of working people by using incredibly hard to understand contracts. 

Obama says he supports having an agency focused on making consumer financial products easily understandable.  So does Treasury Secy. Tim Geithner.

So does Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who literally wrote the book on the need for protecting the consumer from the legaleeze and other shenanigans that have been used to pull the wool over unsuspecting consumers who use credit cards or sign tricky mortgage contracts.

Warren, who now chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the US Banking bailout, would be an excellent first chairman for the proposed consumer protection agency.  She and her daughter, Amelia Tyagi, have co-authored two best selling books:  “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan,” and “The Two Income Trap:  Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.”

The second book pointed out that a fully employed worker today earns less money, adjusted for inflation, than did a worker 30 years ago.   The growing gap between the wealthy and the rest of us (called income inequality) is thought by many to be a main cause of our current financial woes.

Warren also played an important role in discovering that the majority of personal bankruptcies came from overwhelming medical bills. 

From Wikipedia:

“In 2005, Dr. David Himmelstein and Warren published a study on bankruptcy and medical bills,^[6] which claimed that half of all families filing for bankruptcy did so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem. The finding was particularly noteworthy because 75% of those who fit that description had medical insurance.^[7] This study was widely cited, although critics from the insurance industry argued that the criteria used were too loose.^[8]. In 2007, the team repeated the study, using more robust criteria. They concluded that the proportion of medical bankruptcies had increased to 62% of personal bankruptcies and that, once again, about three-quarters of those families had health insurance at the onset of their medical problems..”

Warren is not intimidated by large corporation powers.  She regularly lambasts them for using shady practices against consumers and is a popular guest on television when the subject of protecting consumers comes up.

But the GOP knows the drill and knows where the easy money always is:  With large trans-national corporations.  Protecting consumers doesn’t get one dollar into the campaign till.  So among Republicans it won’t get one vote either.

“There was a moment a year ago when Obama, with his enormous political capital, might have been able to achieve this ambitious agenda, and, building on these successes, go on to deal with America’s other problems. But anger about the bailout, confusion between the bailout (which didn’t restart lending, as it was supposed to do) and the stimulus (which did what it was supposed to do, but was too small), and disappointment about mounting job losses, has vastly circumscribed his room for maneuver.”

So writes Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in an article that appeared recently in the website “Project Syndicate.”  Stiglitz served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 1995 to 1997 and his most recent book, “Freefall:  America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World’s Economy” is a best seller.

Obama recently called upon another economist, former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, to help shore up his support for financial regulatory reform.  It would probably be a good idea if he pulled out Stiglitz too, and used this well respected economist to both instruct Congress (and the public in turn) about how best to resurrect our economy and the nation’s well being along with it.

The GOP is a captured, bought and paid for, party.  It’s masters are the very oligopolic industries that most need reform and that means Obama will never get any political support from that group no matter what he does.  But he need not go it entirely alone.  He needs to continue bringing into the spotlight respected, non government leadership like that represented by Volcker and Stiglitz.  

Both these men are well spoken.  They can address the issues correctly and in a way that the public at large can understand.  They can frame the issues in ways that will unmask the GOP for who they truly are:  Representatives for large, trans-national corporations. 

Again, thanks to that fount of economic thought, Economist’s View for highlighting Stiglitz’s article.

I can’t recall where I read this, so I haven’t any citation.  But it is an interesting train of thought.

An immigrant is someone who comes to a new country and adopts it’s laws and culture.  This doesn’t mean immigrants give up their culture or attitudes entirely.  It just means they conform to the general population and to the specific laws of their new home.

Settlers are entirely different.  They keep the laws and culture of their original homeland and do not conform to the laws and culture of their new home.  The reject the old adage “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Europeans settled North America.  They were not immigrants.  They brought their own laws and culture and eventually displaced the native inhabitants.  Often by force. 

So the question is are Muslims who move to a new country immigrants or settlers?  It’s hard to tell sometimes.  The majority appear to be immigrants.  Many become citizens in good standing in their new homeland, including the United States.

But many do not appear to want to conform to the mores and laws of their new countries.  They bring with them intact the laws of their religion and reject secular laws that are adhered to by the majority of citizens in their adopted country.  These folks are not immigrants.  They are settlers.

There’s something of a Diaspora going on with Muslims in recent years.  Millions of them have fled from the oppression and strife in their homelands.  Most have fled to nearby European countries where the question of whether these new arrivals are immigrants or settlers is far more than merely an intellectual question.

Entire Muslim communities in France, Spain, England and elsewhere live under their religious laws, not the secular laws of their host countries.  They reject their host’s laws.  In fact some have successfully demanded that they be allowed to live under their own laws.

One wonders what the reaction will be in the United States if Muslim immigrants reveal themselves to be, in truth, settlers?

Here’s an interesting article in the Washington Post by columnist Ezra Klein that compares health care reform by Republicans with reform championed by more liberal Democrats.  Klein points out the Senate version more closely mirrors the Republican versions of reform.

Klein takes Rep. Paul Ryan’s health care reform proposals as representing the Republican version and then compares it to the reforms of liberals, including the single payer ideas they proposed.  In almost every detail cited, the Senate version apes the Republican ideas more than those from the left.

So one is left to wondering why the Republicans were so unanimously opposed to a reform that encompasses more of their ideas than those of the left.

My answer.  The Republicans weren’t really serious about reform.  They are owned by the huge corporate interests in the existing health care industry.  They were never going to vote for reform–even if it was their reform being proposed.