A fifth column is a clandestine group of people who undermine a larger group, such as a nation, from within.  If the Republicans aren’t a true fifth column they’re doing a very good job of undermining America’s economic future nevertheless.

Take, for example, our energy policies.  The US Senate, in a procedural vote unique to the Senate that requires 60 votes to do just about anything, failed to gain the 60 vote majority needed to eliminate billions of annual subsidies to Big Oil.  Fifty one Senators voted to eliminate the subsidies, a majority, but only two Republicans voted with the majority.  This is ridiculous.  Big Oil needs subsidies like we need another hole in our heads.

From an article in the New York Times:

Despite pleading by Mr. Obama, the Senate on Thursday could not produce the 60 votes necessary to pass a bill eliminating $2.5 billion a year of these subsidies. This is a minuscule amount for an industry whose top three companies in the United States alone earned more than $80 billion in profits last year. Nevertheless, in the days leading up to the vote, the American Petroleum Institute spent several million dollars on an ad campaign calling the bill “another bad idea from Washington — higher taxes that could lead to higher prices.”

If you want a snapshot of what’s really wrong with our political system, the article points it out:

In the last year, the industry spent more than $146 million lobbying Congress. In Thursday’s vote, senators who voted to preserve the tax breaks received more than four times as much as those who voted against.

Apparently Big Oil is making good use of its taxpayer subsidies.  Nothing like funding a huge propaganda machine that can gear up on a moment’s notice to tell the American public what’s good for them.

Money has always talked in Congress. Now industry allies are aiming at voters. The American Energy Alliance, a Washington-based group that does not disclose its financial sources, on Thursday began an ad campaign in eight states with competitive Congressional races.

Voters in Michigan, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado will hear a 30-second spot peddling the industry’s misleading arguments against the Obama administration’s energy policies — including the fiction that those policies have led to higher gas prices: “Since Obama became president,” it says in part, “gas prices have nearly doubled. Obama opposed exploring for energy in Alaska. He gave millions of dollars to Solyndra, which then went bankrupt. And he blocked the Keystone pipeline, so we will all pay more at the pump.”

Four sentences, four misrepresentations. Gas prices, tied to the world market, would have gone up no matter who was president. Mr. Obama has not ruled out further leasing in Alaskan waters. Solyndra, a solar panel maker, is the only big failure in a broader program aimed at encouraging nascent energy technologies. The Keystone XL oil pipeline has nothing to do with gas prices now and, even if built, would have only a marginal effect.

All this comes as President Obama, working with countries around the world, ratchets up sanctions against Iran in a diplomatic effort to get that country to open up its nuclear power program to inspection.  Among the efforts is Obama’s influence to increase production in petroleum around the world while cutting Iran’s production out of the system.  The fact is, it’s working.   Another New York Times news article explains the effort and its risks.

Beezer here.  Face it folks, we’re going to be bought and sold as long as we continue to swallow this swill.  Big oil is once again successfully protecting its subsidies and fighting anything the government might do to encourage competition from nascent industries like solar, wind, geothermal, conservation etc. etc.  Even mature industries that could compete right now, such as natural gas, can’t get enough Republican votes to push pro-gas transportation now stalled in the House. 

Not going into all the parts, but the Oil Drum blogsite has a new post with a series of observations about energy related events across the globe.  It’s a good snapshot.  One take away is that we’re probably going to have to put infrastructure in place to use our natural gas for transportation, at minimum.  Can Democrats and Republicans get together on this?  Probably not because Republicans are only about trimming New Deal and Great Society safety nets in order to satisfy their ideological goals of shrinking government and giving their masters, the already wealthy, even more tax breaks.

Republicans in Congress were just barely able to extend for 90 days funding of nationally important transportation projects.  The only conclusion is that the GOP has become, collectively, a fifth column traitor against our future economic health.

From the Economist:

The Treasury has just published a white paper full of reasons to favour additional investment. Even if you are sceptical of the utility of fiscal stimulus qua stimulus, now seems like a very good time to undertake much more investment than normal. As the Treasury paper points out, very low interest rates and high unemployment mean that the odds of crowding out private spending and investment are much lower than normal. Cheaper than normal capital and labour also imply that taxpayers will receive a better deal on spending than would typically be the case. The cost-benefit calculus on infrastructure investment has shifted toward doing more of it, or at least squeezing more expected investment into the present period. Other research, like the new Brookings paper by Brad DeLong and Larry Summers, also indicates that the bar for greater investment should be lower. Given the potential that unemployment will become increasingly persistent as time goes on, the value of government spending that reduces joblessness—even temporarily—is higher than may be appreciated. Any projects that seemed like good ideas in general, and there are a lot of them, look like really, really good ideas now.

And yet Congress has struggled mightily to keep even existing spending going. The nation’s primary transportation-funding law expired in 2009. Normally a wholesale replacement or reauthorisation would follow that expiration; Congress has instead repeatedly extended the old law while bickering over how to come up with money to replace the increasingly meagre take from the nation’s petrol tax. The latest extension is set to expire, and legislators are arguing over what to do next. They might extend the measure again—for 60 to 90 days. Or they might stonewall themselves into a temporary shutdown of all federally funded projects.

Inaction is absurd and embarrassing, especially since funding is the primary (though not the only) source of disagreement and the costs of borrowing and unemployment (and the likelihood of a decent return on infrastructure investment) indicate that just borrowing the money to spend on new roads and rails would be a reasonable course of action. If ever there should have been a policy so obviously sensible as to attract bipartisan support, more money for infrastructure was it. Right now, when it comes to partisan politics, sensibility’s got nothing to do with it.

Beezer here.  How else to figure it?  Big oligopolies in Banking, Fossil Energy, Agriculture and Health Insurance are funding Super PACs which daily bombard us with propaganda about how they still need subsidies and protections against competition.  Tea Partiers and Libertarians are so disgusted with our government’s inability to help ‘We the People,’ they’ve paradoxically joined forces with the oligopolies–the very forces that bribe our government to insure our government serves the wealthy oligopolies instead of the general population.   

Professor Brad DeLong highlights this article by Dr. Jen Gunter in his blog Grasping Reality.

Cancer v. the Constitution « Dr. Jen Gunter:  The patient in the emergency department smelled of advanced cancer. It is the smell of rotting flesh, but even more pungent.

You only ever have to smell it once.

She had been bleeding irregularly, but chalked it up to “the change.” Peri-menopausal hormonal mayhem is the most common cause of irregular vaginal bleeding, but unfortunately not the only cause.

She hadn’t gone to the doctor because she had no health insurance. The only kind of work she could get in a struggling rural community was without benefits. Her coat and shoes beside the gurney were worn and her purse from another decade. She could never afford to buy it on her own. She didn’t qualify for Medicaid, the local doctor only took insurance, and there was no Planned Parenthood or County Clinic nearby.

So nothing was done about the bleeding until she passed out at work and someone called an ambulance. She required a couple of units of blood at the local hospital before they sent her by ambulance to our emergency department.

I looked at the fungating mass on her cervix. Later the Intern wondered why she hadn’t picked up on the smell. Probably a combination of it being so gradual and denial. It’s amazing what people learn to tolerate when their options are limited.

“I’m very sorry to tell you this looks like a cancer of the cervix,” I said

She looked surprised. “Oh.” She paused in silence as she adjusted to the news. And then quietly she added, “But the doctor back home said you could fix me up. He said you can offer free care because you have the university.”

But we didn’t have free care at the university hospital. While resident salaries come from Medicare dollars, there is very little, if any, money from the State for the medically indigent. We were in the same situation as her local OB/GYN. The cost of caring for those without insurance was born by the profits from those with insurance. But medical care was becoming more expensive and what insurance companies were willing to reimburse was decreasing. In addition, with more unemployment there were fewer insured patients and more uninsured. Not a sustainable model.

She needed a biopsy to confirm the type of cancer and a CT scan to see if the tumor had spread beyond the cervix. If she were lucky, she would have a some combination of a hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation with a 50-65% chance of survival. If the cancer had spread, she would have radiation and chemotherapy with about a 25% chance of surviving.

But the cancer surgeons were not allowed to offer an uninsured woman a hysterectomy. Every now and then they snuck someone in, claiming to the administrators that the patient was more emergent than they really were. But one surgery doesn’t cure stage 2 or 3 cervical cancer, or even stave it off for long. It takes multiple admissions and week after week of expensive chemotherapy and/or radiation.

The radiation doctors were also not allowed to see uninsured patients. They could not even give a dying women a few weeks of radiation to ease her tumor’s stench while it caused her to bleed to death or killed her another way. They could give her one dose today. A very temporary measure for the bleeding, but only if her blood count was low enough. It wasn’t because she’s had the blood transfusion to get her here.

There was a charity program that paid providers and hospitals pennies on the dollar for cancer care. One hospital had signed up, resigned to the fact that they were seeing those patients anyway so better to get something for the cost of the care than nothing. Our hospital administrators had declined to participate. Better to get no money and keep seeing these uninsured patients over and over in the emergency room, each time providing the same stop-gap care that has no hope of cure or even palliation like a purgatory version of Groundhog Day, than to be inadequately reimbursed for the right care.

I had never encountered this clinical scenario during my training in Canada. I had never seen a woman suffer because she couldn’t afford something as simple as a Pap smear, never mind deal with the indignities of shopping around her sorrow and hard luck to try to patch together what would inevitably be inadequate medical therapy. It is this reality of medical care in America for which I was wholly unprepared. Many times I found the residents comforting me.

I gathered my thoughts before explaining the situation. To get her care through the charity program there was a catch. A set of hoops to jump through and we could jeopardize her eligibility with specific tests. I explained the ins and outs of accessing care through the program, where she needed to go, and what specifically she must say. The Intern printed out the sheet of community resources and advocacy groups that might also be able to help her patch together some kind of treatment.

It’s not health care, not by any stretch. But as long as the Supreme Court finds it constitutional I guess they’ll sleep better than I do.

Beezer here.  Yup, just like Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia observed, it’s just like being forced to eat broccoli.  Moron.

From Jared Bernstein’s blog a link to what the GOP House budget proposal will do to smart kids who don’t have much money attending college.  Basically the budget cuts $2.963 billion from Pell Grants, eliminating tuition aid for 399,000 university students in the 2013-2014 academic year.  In New Hampshire that eliminates aid for 1,004 students.

Which should be fine for New Hampshire because legislators in Concord have already slashed the University system budget by close to 40%.

So much for politicians who claim the nation’s education system is critical to our future economic development.   Fortunately we still have some Democrats around, so this ridiculous budget will not get adopted for the nation.  At least not for now.   From Bernstein’s blog.

And for what?  So millionaires can get a tax cut of almost $400,000, if you include both the new Ryan and the extended Bush tax cuts.

A few weeks ago I promoted a model of the current political economy wherein income inequality does not simply divert growth from the poor and middle class.  If inequality gets high enough, it supports (buys?) a politics that reinforces itself.  What better way to do so than to block the educational mobility of the poor and use the proceeds to enhance the rich?  If it wasn’t so freakin’ tragic, it’d be laughably simple.

There’s another—a more global—dimension to all this.  According to this OECD analysis, the US has essentially ceased making progress in terms of college attainment.  The figure is a touch gnarly, but the blue (?—I’m color blind!) boxes show the tertiary, or college-level, attainment of 55-64 year olds in 2009, so people born between the mid-40s and the 50s.  The light blue (??) triangles show the college attainment of the current generation of 25-34 year olds, so people born in the mid-70s through the mid-80s.  This enables you to evaluate the progress made over a generation in college attainment across countries (let’s pause for some props to the OECD—they kill on this stuff).

Not only are the US attain levels now behind those of 12 other countries, but we’ve made no progress in a generation.

Politicians love to jawbone about how important education is to our future competitiveness, and to their credit, the Obama administration—members of whom are very much moved by that OECD graph—presided over a significant improvement in Pell grants.  But for many in the political class, it’s just talk—or, as the new House budget shows, even worse than talk.  It’s hypocrisy.

Beezer here.  Of course Bernstein was VP Joe Biden’s chief economist, so his priorities are different than those who prioritize tax cuts for the already wealthy instead of helping poor, smart kids gain a university education they can use to compete with the rich kids.  Can’t have that, can we?

This kind of goes in the folder entitled “Don’t Assume the Rich and Powerful Are Smart.”

Some of the questioning by the Supreme Court justices regarding Obamacare’s individual mandate was just plain stupid.  I mean, broccoli came up, as in “I don’t want to eat my broccoli,” and you can’t make me.  Good Lord, save us all please!

Anyway, back to the incredibly important and difficult issue of reforming our severely expensive and inefficient health care system.  From a blog at the Brookings Institute written by Henry Aaron.

Advocates of the mandate, on the other hand, see the relevant time period as some very much longer period, perhaps the individual lifetime. Thus, there is no real distinction between the healthy 20-year-old who chooses to go without insurance and uses no health care and the feeble, disease-ridden 80-year old who quite literally could not live without them. These two people are simply time-lapse images of the same human being. In discrete time, it is the pooling achieved through mandatory insurance that makes the multiple stages of the life-cycle fuse into a single sharply-imaged entity. I believe that the lawyers defending the ACA failed to create a sufficiently vivid story to elicit the life-cycle framing that is, in my view, necessary and sufficient to sustain the mandate. Whether the internal debates among the justices will do so is quite uncertain.

Beezer here.  Frankly, a lot of what I read and heard coming from the bench of the Supreme Court was embarrassing.  Alito doesn’t understand how insurance works for Heaven’s sake!  Justice Clarence Thomas never says anything, I suspect in his case that’s the wise course to take.  The only real option the Justices actually have, if they decide to rule the reform unconstitutional, is to require it be paid for via taxation.  Otherwise they will upend the Constitution itself.