Wal-Mart Not All Bad

As the largest retailer in the country, Wal-Mart holds a unique position in our marketplace. While many believe they are evil, they are simply trying to maximize their profits, and they usually do so within the confines of the law (the laws need to be changed - but that's another post all together). While this is bad news for their employees, as they desperately try to keep labor wages down, it is actually becoming a good thing for the environment.

Due to the high price of oil, Wal-Mart has taken the step of trying to reduce all shipping costs, and they currently pressure all of their suppliers to use less and less packaging. While it keeps their profits high, it is also good for the environment. Furthermore, they are now developing a "green score" for every product that they carry which will be displayed next to the price sticker. Because of their tremendous market power, they can force suppliers to do this in a way that would never be possible if we still lived in the land of mom and pop stores.

So while the free market system may not be effective for everything (including labor rights, fair wages, pollution regulation, etc.), it has been effective in creating more sustainable production practices. As much as I hate on the free market system and Wal-Mart, it's only right to give credit when what they do what is right.

It's been a while

I guess I kind of got too busy/ignored this for a while. Not that I wanted to, it's just that life gets so busy. A lot has happened, both in the world of politics and in my personal life. At the same time, nothing has happened. HCR still isn't passed, I'm still doing the same things I've been doing for the past 2 years. So take it for what it is.

All I really want to do is relive the past few days over and over. But, I can't. So right now I'm sitting in my room, surrounded by the NYT and the Inquirer. I have to count the ads in each, for a research paper I'm doing. I have a different paper due tomorrow. Both, like almost all research papers, will be interesting when they are done, but will be tedious and boring to actually write. So while I will (hopefully) admire my work when it is done, I am in the usual position of waiting until the last minute to do it.

I guess that's all for now. Off to my life again.

Rockefeller on Healthcare Reform

Watching the markup of the Baucus bill on CSPAN 3. The Republicans are absolutely insane. However, Rockefeller (D-WV), the main proponent of the public option in the Senate, just finished, and he said some good things, including "I don’t think that the healthcare bill does enough to make healthcare affordable...we had a very very good discussion last night...we are making progress...I look forward to voting on amendments, as I certainly have a lot of them."

The best of his amendments are:

• 185, Rockefeller, "Strike state exchanges, multiple competing exchanges, and regional exchanges, and create one national exchange"
• 191, Rockefeller, "Strike health care cooperatives"
• 196, Rockefeller, "Increase Medicaid eligibility to 150% of poverty"
• 201, Rockefeller/Hatch, "Remove the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) from the exchange"
• 206, Rockefeller, "Allow early retirees between ages 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare"

If you're looking for something to do today, call one of these Senators on the Finance Committee and tell them to support those amendments:

MAX BAUCUS, MT
KENT CONRAD, ND
JEFF BINGAMAN, NM
JOHN F. KERRY, MA
BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, AR
RON WYDEN, OR
CHARLES E. SCHUMER, NY
DEBBIE STABENOW, MI
MARIA CANTWELL, WA
BILL NELSON, FL
ROBERT MENENDEZ, NJ
THOMAS CARPER, DE

TGIF

Nothing in depth today. In fact, I'm taking the whole weekend off. Enjoy:

Phillies playoff odds now 98.6%.

Graph of Eastern Division.

Government is Good.

Eastern European missle sheild was unpopular in Eastern Europe.

And finally, what progressives are saying about the public option:

Hold the Line

Barack Obama, Rearanged, Means Anti-Christ

Jim Gerlach Against Medicare?

Here is an excerpt of an email from my Congressman, Jim Gerlach (R-PA) regarding an email about health care reform that I had sent to him:

The Democratic Leadership in the House of Representatives has put forth a health care reform proposal in the form of a 1,107-page bill, H.R. 3200. I do not support this bill as it is currently written. We cannot afford its massive tax and spending increases in this time of recession. This bill also contains a "public option plan," in other words, a health care plan that is controlled and run by the government. I do not believe that bureaucrats should be making health care decisions for our citizens, or controlling the medical decision-making process in a way that will delay or deny services for you or your family. It is not the proper role for the government to be telling Americans what doctors they can see, how many x-rays they can get in a year, or what prescriptions they can take. I believe it's imperative to preserve the sacred doctor-patient relationship and prevent the government from interfering in those decisions.

Besides the flat out lies that the government would tell you "how many x-rays [you] can get in a year", does he not think that government has any place in the medical insurance business? Maybe he is opposed to a little program called Medicare. Since he is running for governor of the state with the second oldest population in the nation, maybe he shouldn't position himself against the wildly popular government run insurance program.

And since when have Republicans been such staunch defenders of medicare? Well, since the current health care debate started!

Restructure the Senate

Today in the NY Times, there is an article about a lawsuit seeking to expanding the house, so that the "one person, one vote" rule could apply between state lines, expanding the rule from its current interpretation which is intrastate (i.e. congressional districts within PA must represent the same number of people as other districts within the state, but don't necessarily have to represent the same number of people that districts in DE do). The lawsuit is seeking to expand the house from its current 435 members to anywhere between 932 and 1,761 members.

While I generally sympathize with this movement, an easier way to have more proportional representation would be to abolish the Senate. Or at least do things how Germany does:

• Every state is allocated at least three votes.
• States with more than 2 million inhabitants have 4 votes.
• States with more than 6 million inhabitants have 5 votes.
• States with more than 7 million inhabitants have 6 votes.

Obviously the population numbers would be different, but why focus efforts on restructuring the House when it is much more reflective of population than the Senate?

PS I think this is the font/size I will be using from now on. Like? Dislike?

Santorum 2012

What a joke.

He is a completely irrelevant national figure, a one term Senator who lost to an anti-choice Democrat. In fact, it could be argued that the most memorable moment of his term was his 'man on dog' gaffe.

However, Santorum pretty succinctly summarizes the Republican attack against Obama stating that he has "failed to deliver on what he promised, to be a transformative president". This statement is very telling of the current Republican strategy.

Step 1: Obstruct. "This health care issue is D-Day for America...this will be [Obama's] Waterloo. This will break him." - Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Step 2: Pretend to cooperate, watering down and delaying a bill that the American people want, making it less effective and more costly for the middle class.

Step 3: Refuse to vote for the bill which you helped to construct.

Step 4: Complain that the president has "failed to deliver on what he promised" after either a) the bill fails to pass or b) the bill fails to deliver the savings promised because of your input into it.

Step 5: Take back control of the government.

And the democrats are perfectlly willing to play ball, because the more favorable the bill is to insurance companies, the more corporate money they will get.

Max Baucus as Committee Chair: Coincidence?

There's a good article at The Daily Beast which demonstrates the frustration of the left with the current health care bill, Max Baucus, and small state senatos. However, Michelle Goldberg wonders "Somehow, the most important progressive legislation in a generation has ended up in the hands of a conservative, unimaginative man whose coffers are stuffed with health care industry dollars, and who represents a state with less than half the population of Brooklyn," the following portion of her article demonstrates that it was no coincidence that it did. It is not "somehow" that it came to be.

Indeed, Baucus exemplifies much of what’s wrong with the Senate—both its fealty to corporate donors and the inordinate amount of power it accords to people from small, conservative-leaning states.

The combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona and Alaska are about equal to those of New York and Massachusetts. The former states have 22 senators; the latter, at the moment, have three. That creates a tremendously high bar for progressive legislation, even if that legislation is supported by a majority of Americans. Worse, campaign funding compounds the rightward tendencies of small-state senators. As Nate Silver pointed out last month, senators from small states, having a smaller fundraising base among their constituents, are more reliant on donations from corporate political action committees. “Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten largest,” wrote Silver, who concluded that small state senators have even more incentive than their colleagues to “placate special interests.”

The nature of the Senate is that any bill costing money must go through the finance committee, in addition to any other committees which have oversight. It will cost money to insure people, so it is under the jurisdicion of the Senate Finance committee, and public health bills are also under the jurisdiction of the Senate HELP committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions). Healthcare has been a Democratic priority since 1992. Democrats use a system of seniority and interest when choosing committee chairs, and small state senators are more reliant on corporate PAC money than large state Senators.

So is it really a random occurance that a conservative, small state senator would end up being the committee chair of one of the two committees through which health care legislation must pass? Or is it more likely that a small state senator knew that this would be a priority in the future, knew he would have to raise corporate money to be elected, so he showed an interest and therefore would be chairman of one of the two committees when the time came for creating a bill?

I don't think it was "somehow" at all - Baucus has raised more than $1,000,000 in the past five years from the health care industry.

Purpose

Most posts on this blog will have to do with progressive issues, current events, and economic issues on the national level. Others may include local (Philadelphia) issues, and random thoughts on a wide range of topics such as baseball and cycling. I started this blog because I feel it is the most effective, centralized way for my voice to be heard on the internet.