Pew Research: What Does the Public Know? Not That Much

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1378/political-news-iq-quiz

Pew Research has released a study, which you can participate in if you’d like, on what the public knows and what it doesn’t know about current events. I’m frankly not sure what to think about the results.

First of all, what I am sure of is what everyone will be sure of, which is that the results are pretty dismal for a democracy.  For example:

• Only 23% of American adults know that “cap and trade” refers to energy and environmental legislation.
• 58% of Americans think that Iran and Israel share a border.
• Only 33% of Americans know that Ben Bernanke is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
• Only 33% know that the Dow is in the range of 10,000
• 82% do not know that Max Baucus is Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that has been working on healthcare legislation.

Here are some real kickers:

• Only 40% of Americans know that Glenn Beck is a TV and radio talk show host
• 44% of American adults do not know that the “public option” has to do with health care

There are also some non-surprises.  Older people know a lot more about current events than younger people, and more educated people know a lot more about current events than less educated people.

What I’m not sure about is whether this changes my world view of politics.

After untold hours of arguing with conservative friends about the entire array of issues and philosophies wrapped up in politics, and having only ever convinced one or two to change their opinion on anything, I’ve come to believe that expending a lot of energy on convincing people of anything is futile.  Calories are far better spent finding the people who already agree and convincing more of them to get their asses off the couch to vote and make phone calls than the other side.  Turn out is everything.

Do these numbers challenge that?  Could it be that if we can explain cap and trade to the 77% of Americans that don’t know what it is before the other side can, we actually have an opportunity to win them over?  Could it be that the 77% of people who think cap and trade has to do with health care, or unemployment, or banking and finance reform can not be convinced otherwise?  Or could it be that the 77% of people who don’t know this are just way more interested in who is winning Dancing with the Stars and they are never going to be an important political force whether they understand or don’t understand because they are never going to vote anyway.  I’m not sure.

Aside from the obvious, as stated above, what do you think this study means for the pragmatic practice of politics?

Race Captures Media Coverage – Pew Research Center

Race Captures Media Coverage – Pew Research Center.

This is exactly what I was talking about the other day.  We’re being setup by the financial and banking industries to frame the discussion of reform in terms of a race war rather than finance.

Whatever Happened to Private Mortgage Insurance? [PMI]

How many of you have paid PMI when you bought your first (or second, or third) house?  Remember this?  It is the insurance you pay if you don’t have a big enough down payment and it protects the lender in case you default.

Whatever happened to that money?  There have to be hundreds of billions of dollars of PMI premiums collected over the decades.  Where has it been going?

Next up: A Race War Instead of Banking Reform

The health care debate is over.  The money has spoken.  The people have spoken.  The population has been counted and counted and counted. The calculus has been done. The lawmakers know where their electorate stands.  They know that 77% of voters want a public option and nearly 50% want Medicare for all, and they know how many votes all those health insurance campaign contributions can buy them.  The door is closed to the people on this debate now.  It rests in the hands of the power brokers and the deal makers.  All we can do is hope.

The next thing we should do is a ground-up, constitutional amendment based overhaul of campaign finance strictly and severely limiting the role of corporate money of any sort in the political process.  But the next thing we are going to do is fail to reform banking and finance.

They’ve already called their play.  Here it is.

1. Bankers have just been banking all along.  They haven’t done anything wrong.
2. They were forced to make bad loans (they weren’t) by “the Clinton’s” (it was Bush I) to eliminate redlining (discriminating against African Americans and Hispanics).
3. Obama paid off the banks to hide this fact and to keep them quiet and because he’s a “n word” (a word you’ll hear more before this Christmas than you’ve heard in the last 20 years)
4. What we really need to do is get rid of welfare,  affirmative action, extra police presence in high crime neighborhoods, desegregation and especially busing
5. The last thing we should do is ruin the American banking industry, that keeps Americans first in blah blah blah, instead of fixing the real problem which is, of course, all ‘dem (n word)
6. Obama is effectively neutralized because A) he desperately doesn’t want to get into the race war B) the nuts can discount anything he says because he has a “conflict of interest”.

The networks are already geared up on both sides.  Is it a coincidence that the debate has just recently switched to racism?  I don’t like Joe Wilson anymore than anyone, but it’s a stretch to say that his outburst was race related.  Really, the seething against the Obama’s is not really any more pronounced, although it is better organized, than the seething was against the Clintons.  Is it a surprise that Rush Limbaugh blatantly called a school bus incident a symptom of “Obama’s (ie. a n-word) America”?

We’re heading into a full fledged race war, the flames of which will be fanned by the usual suspects on the right, executed on the ground by the same ad agencies and PR firms that have done so well at the health care war, and paid for by Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, Credit Suisse, etc.

And we’re already behind.  We need to start our planning RIGHT NOW.

UnitedHealth $7 billion more than Medicare to pay less than 10% of Medicare’s bills.

In 2007 UnitedHealth Group made a net profit of $4.65 billion on revenues of $75.43 billion.  6.2%, which sounds reasonable and fair.  That’s NET profit of course.  UnitedHealth Group also paid $2.6 billion in income tax.  Now, they don’t have a choice in this last bit, but the fact remains that a government run alternative would save the profit and the income tax UHG takes out of the healthcare system and which amounts to 9.8% of the insurance premiums they collect.

But that’s just the beginning. I’m not here to make a case that the government should run businesses solely because it doesn’t have a profit motive.  We have good reason to believe that in lots of cases that’s a bad idea.

United Health’s 2007 Cost of Goods Sold (their actual insurance payouts) were $56.2 billion or, 74.5% of their $75.43 billion of revenues.  We know that of the remaining $25.5% is $7.3 billion in tax and profit.  Now, as it turns out, UH wrote off $796 million in depreciation and amortization which the government also does in its own way, which left it with $10.583 billion in operating expenses, or 14% of gross revenue.  This 14% is where the REAL pain is.

A large portion of this goes to doing their damndest to not insure people who might need insurance and to cut them off from insurance in the instance that they ever do.  So, this really is the heart of our healthcare issue, which is that insurance companies make money by NOT paying for healthcare costs people pay them to pay for.  But the heart of the problem isn’t the only problem.

The other problem with the 14% (and actually, lets go ahead and make it the whole 25.5% again) is that the comparable cost for the combined Medicare and Medicaid program is… are you ready?  2.6%.  That’s right.  Medicare and Medicaid expect to pay out $709 billion of medical payments covering healthcare for 95 million Americans (about 1 in 3) with administrative overhead of $18.6 billion.  Actually, a lot of this 2.6% covers fraud and abuse prevention and loss accounts, quality improvement programs, research, and grants to states for various things.  The actual program administration costs are one half of one percent.  That’s right.  0.5%

Another way to look at it is that if Medicare had a similar cost structure to United Healthcare, it would spend $180 billion on administration and profit to provide services to all those people instead of the $18 billion it actually spends.  Or, if UnitedHealth were as efficient as Medicare, its overhead would be less than $2 billion.

Sources:

United Health Group 2007 Financial Statements.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Performance Budget for FY 2009.

Liberals Head Into the Weeds on Right Wing Angst About Obama Speech

So, of course I can understand why liberals are incensed that after being called traitors, and unpatriotic, and being told to move to other countries, and beaten up sometimes, for even questioning the wisdom of a war that turned out to ultimately be a scam and a debacle based on deliberate lies that cost over a trillion dollars (and counting) and four thousand young Americans lives (and counting) and got us NOTHING, that conservatives would have the balls, yes the fucking balls, to suggest that even listening to the first legitimately elected President of the United States of America in a decade talk about anything at all, let alone the value of an education, could be anything but a blessing for their children…

And I have to admit that I am so incensed that I’m more than happy to let them know that I think they are pathetic substitutes for human beings, that they are so clearly the unwashed, uneducated, bible thumping, illiterate, shoeless, toothless, rusted pickup truck driving, unskilled laboring, snuff chewing, warm Miller beer drinking, sibling screwing, greasy haired, wife-beating, dirt floor shack living, car on blocks in the side yard having, faded plastic Mary in a bathtub in the front yard having, hair lipped, brown-shirt wearing, gay bashing, better to have an abortion with a wire hanger than a surgeon believing, underarm stinking, crotch crab infested, swamp-assed, bastard, worthless, piece of shit mother-fuckers that those of us who actually graduated 9th grade always knew they were…. where was I?

Oh ya.  The difference between being a liberal and a conservative is that while I find them despicable in all the above ways and more, I fully support their right, if their fetid little maggot infested minds lead them to want to, to have their children wait somewhere else while the rest of the kids benefit from a wholesome message about the value of an education from the President of the United States of America, the greatest nation on Earth.

Would that when we have an issue with our kids being arm-twisted to say that America is a nation “under God” which it MOST CERTAINLY IS NOT since THERE IS NO GOD EVEN THOUGH THEY INSIST THERE IS, that they would be as generous as we, and look out for our rights as individuals as much as we look out for theirs.

Filthy, buck-toothed, rat-faced, acrid, bug infested, little creep bastards.

We need 6,000 more Congress Critters

When the Founding Fathers designed the House of Representatives in the Constitution they sought to ensure that there would be no more than one representative for every 30,000 people AND NO LESS THAN one representative for every 50,000 people.

Each representative today has over 600,000 constituents and this inestimably cheats the citizenry of their fair say in Congress.

Remember that the Senate represents states as a whole. The House is to represent communities and neighborhoods. At 600,000 constituents per representative, neighborhood concerns are almost entirely lost and Representatives are left to only focus on the big, national issues of the day… those that the Senate is already designed to master.

At 600,000 constituents representatives must campaign via expensive, mass media which shifts their attention from voters to fund raising and campaign contributors… Most of whom come from OUTSIDE their districts and demand representation that actually harms the representative’s voters.

The people’s voice has been stolen and we need it back. We need our other 5,500 representatives.

Caveat emptor this

Let the buyer beware is wise advice in a world known to have dishonest businessmen.

As a government policy it is immoral. We have a right and an obligation to shut down predatory businesses when we find them and no choice but to use caution knowing that we’ll never find them all.

Public option will NOT automatically cause most companies to drop insurance.

There are exceedingly few companies in the United States today that are required by law to provide insurance for their employees.  So why do they do it when it is such a huge expense?

Companies provide insurance benefits to compete in the labor market.

No matter what the unemployment rate, sooner or later companies have to hire new employees.  When they do, it doesn’t matter whether there are three employees available or three hundred… no company wants the 3rd best.  They compete for the best.  They don’t always win the competition, but they try to.

When was the last time you met an electrical engineer with ten years of experience who would even consider working for some fly-by-night company that doesn’t offer medical benefits?  Or a Director of Advertising.  Or a Senior Database Security Analyst.  Or a Vice President of Finance and Accounting?  Or a District Manager of Food Service Operations?  Or a damn good Administrative Assistant?

To compete for the best talent, companies have to offer the most competitive compensation packages, and in today’s world that means health insurance as a benefit is mandatory.

Now, if a company is paying 15% of its payroll to provide insurance and it finds that it can stop doing that and pay just an 8% penalty… of course it is going to want to do that.  But it is only going to be able to do that if workers find that option to be competitive.  If the best quality employees, the ones with the most choices and options of where to work, feel that the public insurance and private insurance are equally as good, but their out of pocket cost is $300 a month for the company that provides private insurance (because of the employer contribution) but $900 a month for the company that makes them use the public option, they will work for the company that offers them the private insurance.  Until, or unless, the company not offering insurance pays them the $600 a month in cash to make them whole.  Likewise, if the out of pocket costs are the same, but the public insurance turns out not to be as good as the private insurance, the best employees are going to either demand to be compensated financially… or flat out refuse to work there.

If it turns out that the public option insurance is as good as the private insurance, and that after paying the 8% penalty and whatever amount they have to pay employees in cash to continue to be competitive it is still economically beneficial for them to do that… well, that will be the proof of the pudding that government can do it better!  We should all applaud.  The employees will be happy, the company will be happy, the taxpayers will be happy… everyone will be happy except the insurance company CEO that can no longer command a $10 million a year annual salary.

Fascism Anyone?

So often when we think of Fascism we think of genocide and anti-semitism.  For that reason when people see real fascism and it doesn’t look like genocide and anti-semitism, they assume that it must not be fascism.  But it is.

Fascism Anyone?. by Laurance W. Britt

The article above is very readable and discusses, briefly, these 14 characteristics that the fascist regimes of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Papadopolous’ Greece, Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia shared in common, and that are found to a much lesser degree, or not all together, in non-fascist regimes.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.

5. Rampant sexism.

6. A controlled mass media.

7. Obsession with national security.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.

9. Power of corporations protected.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

14. Fraudulent elections.