NanoCare Update

The Congressional Budget Office, as you may recall from yesterday's post, warned that a couple million fewer people than originally intended would be covered under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The CBO today revised that figure yet again, and the outlook is even grimmer: it now predicts, in what it called a "worst case scenario" that 20 million people may actually lose their employer-based coverage in the next decade as a direct result of the legislation.

Then again, three million more people could be covered. Nobody really knows, because all the estimates are based on the future state of the economy, the political state of the states administering the programs and exchanges, and the fact that this is all a great big guessing game based on suppositions and theories and what-ifs. In other words, whether or not we receive medical coverage will still be pretty much dependent on the vagaries of the semi-regulated free market. How sick is that?

Here is the CBO techno-speak in its second press release in 24 hours:

Despite the care and effort that CBO and JCT (Joint Committee on Taxation) have devoted to modeling the health insurance system and the provisions of the ACA, there is clearly a tremendous amount of uncertainty about how employers and employees will respond to the set of opportunities and incentives under that legislation. In response to questions from Members of Congress, CBO and JCT have prepared an analysis showing how the effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage would differ under alternative assumptions about the behavior of employers.

Ohhhh-kay -- whether or not workers get health care will depend not only on the future economy, but also on their employers' mood and behavior on any given day. Hmmm. I guess the bosses are destined to turn into Scrooges, because last year the CBO forecast that only a million poor slobs would lose health insurance through their crapola jobs. They were only wrong by a factor of several hundred percentage points.

The White House is scrambling to contain the damage, dismissing the new CBO report as "what's a few million uncovered people in the grand scheme of things?"  And besides, if fewer people are covered, the budget can be balanced and the deficit cured. Letting sick people stay sick will save the taxpayers a bundle! I wish I were kidding about this tone-deafness, but I'm not. Here's the official line from the Obama Administration blog:

This suggests that taxpayers will save $50 billion more, on net, through 2021 and Americans will pay even less for private insurance than CBO previously projected – which is good news..... the bottom line is clear: the Affordable Care Act will reduce our deficit, control health care costs, and make health care more affordable.

Naturally, the vast majority of people expected to lose their employment-based coverage will be low-wage workers. According to the CBO, of the 11 million poorly-paid individuals to have benefits cut, three million of them will qualify for Medicaid. And then it's always possible that employers who drop or threaten to drop their employee health plans will get "incentivized" to provide at least a modicum of subsidized coverage. The Hill has more.

Math was never my strong suit, so I confess I do not understand all the number crunching and the convoluted prognostications. But then, I suspect, neither do the so-called experts.

Medicare for All, though, where everyone pays a progressive tax based on income? That is eminently understandable, and equitable to boot. 

Obama/Bloomberg '12?

Before getting into the speculation du jour, how's this for plutocratic chutzpah: Mayor Mike Bloomberg of NYC is spending millions of his own dollars on annoying TV commercials to try and convince us that public sector workers are enemies of the people. Unless we do away with the pension plans of future hires, our houses will burn down and there will be no cops to patrol our streets. Or so Bloomberg's ubiquitous TV ads imply.


And then there is the speculation that President Obama actually wants this odious little man, fellow deficit hawk, and sworn enemy of the Occupy movement as his running mate to replace Joe Biden. But first, the local stuff, just to give you an idea of what Bloomberg is all about. Clue: it isn't about you or your interests.


As I was watching TV last night, a whole series of commercials popped up as often as every five minutes. On every channel. There was literally no escaping them. These spots, sponsored by the "Committee to Save New York" big business lobby, ominously warn us that greedy teachers and cops and firefighters will destroy the entire state unless Gov. Andrew Cuomo keeps the taxes of Wall Street financiers and real estate moguls at their current low levels. Of course, the ads don't say this in so many words. They are very insidious and oblique. If you have seen those "I Vote" flag-draped commercials sponsored by the oil and gas industry, you know what I am talking about. Those greedwashing ads try to convince you that polluting the water and causing earthquakes via toxic hydrofracking is the patriotic thing to do.


But back to Bloomberg. As an elected official, he is not allowed to contribute directly to the Committee to Save New York propaganda effort. But as the 12th richest person on the Forbes List (net worth $19.5 billion) there is nothing to stop him from running a parallel propaganda campaign of his own. At a speech this week, he referred to public unions as "special interests", public pensions as "ticking time bombs" (union benefits are terrorists, my friend) and oligarchies as "people":

“Too often in Albany, it is only the special interests who are heard; we want to make sure that the people are heard,”Bloomberg said today at a breakfast sponsored by the Long Island Association, an 85-year-old organization of business groups, unions, nonprofits and government agencies representing Nassau and Suffolk counties, which have each declared fiscal emergencies.

You can see Bloomberg's ad here.


And the complementary multimillion-dollar ad campaign from the Committee to Save New York is just another in a series of pro-Cuomo commercials which largely praise the fiscally conservative Democrat for not raising taxes on the wealthy. The so-called Millionaires surtax was allowed to expire last year, thus reducing revenue to the state by an estimated $4 billion a year, and thus causing the manufactured disaster of budget shortfalls and imminent bankruptcies in many of our towns. That cloying ad can be seen here.


If you are saying to yourself, "Well, Bloomberg will be out of power next year and besides, he doesn't live in my back yard" here is a little factoid that might give you pause. According to the New York Times, President Obama recently hosted Mr. Moneybags at a long, intimate, private White House luncheon to discuss the mayor's future plans (the parenthetical speculations are mine and mine alone):

They traded thoughts about education (privatization via charter schools, teacher union destruction via mass layoffs through a phony race to the bottom program?), ruminated on the state of immigration ( chewed the cud on deporting more people while kicking reform down the road, and how to profit from all those private detention centers being built with public money?) and discussed the federal deficit. (how to win another term and finally be able to cut Social Security and Medicare?)

But most intriguingly, they talked about the future. Over a long private lunch at the White House, President Obama posed a question to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: what are you interested in doing next?

Mr. Bloomberg’s precise response is unknown. But their meeting a few weeks ago, confirmed by aides to both leaders and previously undisclosed, was potentially significant for both men, as Mr. Obama seeks support for his presidential campaign and Mr. Bloomberg ponders his post-mayoral career.

The New York Daily News speculates that Obama asked Bloomberg to be his running mate, or offered him the leadership of the World Bank, or wants him to be (heaven forfend) his next treasury secretary. The opinion piece lists five reasons why the shrillionaire mayor would be an ideal running mate for Barry: $$$money$$$, business connections, "post-partisanship" (my translation -- neoliberalism or phony centrism, which amounts to privatization of profits and the socialization of costs), the Jewish vote and electoral math (Florida!) and Tough on Terrorism. (both men have deemed the Constitution and civil liberties to be optional things.)


Remind me again why a President Romney would be any different than Bush's Fourth Term. Nothing would spell doom to our democracy more than a Vice President Bloomberg, an arrogant oligarch with more than enough money to eventually buy himself the presidency in 2016. And the second and third terms to which he is accustomed. (He is already a spry 70, so there would probably be a limit, even for him). Nothing. Just ask the spied-upon Muslims and the Occupiers rousted and pepper-sprayed with impunity by the mayor's private NYPD army, the thousands of laid-off teachers, the neighborhoods whose fire stations he closed, the patients and staff of the charity hospital he shut down to make room for luxury condos.

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A Pondering Plutocrat

The Putting Panderer and the Peevish Ponderer

Update 3/15: The New York State Legislature did its job the usual sneaky middle of the night way: under cover of darkness, it gave Bloomberg a little of what he paid millions for. The retirement age for state workers has been raised, and they will have to contribute more to their pension plans. Bloomberg's reaction? If people don't like it, they don't have to accept state employment. Let them get a better deal at WalMart! More here.



When ObamaCare Becomes NanoCare

I bet you didn't see this one coming: the Affordable Care Act is not going to be covering nearly as many people as originally thought. Since it was passed on the assumption that employers would be purchasing much of the mandated private insurance for workers, and millions of jobs have been and continue to be lost, the Congressional Budget Office now estimates that two million fewer people will be covered by 2016. More than 27 million Americans will still be uninsured four years from now. That is, if the Supreme Court rules favorably on the constitutionality of forcing people to purchase products from private vendors. 

In theory, this revised government estimate should make the deficit hawk critics happy -- since so many people will be getting thrown under the bus, it will also cost about $50 billion less than originally thought, too. People not getting the medical care they need will actually help balance the federal budget. Hooray for austerity!

But not to worry, says the CBO -- more people than ever will be eligible for the state-administered Medicaid programs because poverty is going up, up, up. So if you live in a state like Texas, which hopes to opt out of Medicaid entirely, you might want to think about emigrating.

Still, the CBO report goes on, the number of employers expected to pay penalties for noncompliance with the law is expected to increase, as are the individuals having to pay fines because they lack insurance. (That part is confusing. I am guessing that after the uninsured pay their fines, they can then qualify for Medicaid. Eligibility requirements for Medicaid are supposed to be looser once the law kicks in. And meanwhile, the Obama Administration is gifting Scrooge employers like WalMart and McDonalds with waiver after waiver after waiver. What an unholy mess). 

The CBO, to its nonpartisan credit, also takes note that American wages continue to stagnate. Therefore more children of struggling parents than expected will be eligible for the government-subsidized CHIP program. The CBO simply hadn't dreamed that one in four American children would be thrust below the poverty level when they started crunching their numbers two years ago in Obama's misguided effort to make his delayed health care plan deficit-neutral.

Julian Pecquet of The Hill offers a summary: 

The combined effects of the revised estimates over the 2012–2021 period add up to:

■ An increase of $168 billion in projected outlays for Medicaid and CHIP;

■ A decrease of $97 billion in projected costs for exchange subsidies and related spending;

■ A decrease of $20 billion in the cost of tax credits for small employers; and

■ An additional $99 billion in net deficit reductions from penalty payments, the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans, and other effects on tax revenues and outlay, with most of those effects reflecting changes in revenues.

As I laid out in a previous post, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the individual mandate in less than two weeks. The libertarian Koch Brothers are transporting busloads of "Keep Your Hands Off My Healthcare" astroturfers to demonstrate against the ACA, and the Obama administration is "facilitating" counter-demonstrations, even prayer vigils, to keep its behemoth of a signature accomplishment alive. Now that the CBO has estimated that the law is becoming ever more unwieldy because of the reality of the crappy economy, will the Court be that much more inclined to strike down the individual mandate? Without the provision that we all be forced to buy policies from insurance leeches, the whole law is kaput.

Obama blew it when he abandoned the single payer option. If he had really wanted to, he could have forced it through Congress via the reconciliation tactic.  So, while a declaration of unconstitutionality may be a blow to those lucky few people now benefiting from the measure, it will be a blessing in disguise to most of us. Almost two-thirds of those polled have expressed a preference for a Medicare for All program.

As former Labor Sec. Robert Reich puts it when making the case for Single Payer, nobody from either left or right would object to a payroll tax deduction, which is how it would be paid for. No court has ever struck down a payroll tax as being unconstitutional. Reich says:

Other federal judges in district courts - one in Virginia and another in Florida - have struck down the (ACA) law on similar grounds. They said the federal government has no more constitutional authority requiring citizens to buy insurance than requiring them to buy broccoli or asparagus. (The Florida judge referred to broccoli, the Virginia judge to asparagus.) Social Security and Medicare aren't broccoli or asparagus. They're as American as hot dogs and apple pie.

Fear, Loathing and Allergies

How can the weekend massacre of at least 16 sleeping Afghan citizens get any more shocking and disgusting? When the New York Times goes along with the U.S. government's propaganda machine, and attempts to whitewash what was essentially an act of terror into a pesky glitch. They bemoan the fact that this temporary aberration in our humanitarian effort makes us look bad. How unfair is it that the Taliban will get to seize on an "unfortunate event" by a lone gunman for some propaganda? The Times quotes one unnamed American military official as saying "the fear is that all these incidents, taken together, play into the Taliban’s account of how we treat the Afghan religion and people. And while we all know that’s a false account — think how many the Taliban have killed, and never once taken responsibility — it’s a very hard perception to combat.”

Yeah, it's hard out there for an invading military machine which commits atrocity after atrocity, night raid after night raid, drone attack after drone attack, to actually be called out for committing them by the real bad guys, isn't it?

The Times goes on to make the diagnosis that the Afghan people have developed an "understandable allergy" to a decade of American occupation. As one reader pointed out in the comments section, the use of the word "allergy" in describing the outrage and despair of an occupied people is cavalierly dismissive. An allergy, after all, is an abnormal reaction to an innocuous substance. In its insidious choice of words, The Times is deriding blowback by the victims of American imperialism as an unhealthy overreaction. An earlier article in the same newspaper describes the American invaders as being under siege:

American officials scrambled Monday to understand why a veteran Army staff sergeant, a married father of two only recently deployed here, left his base a day earlier to massacre at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan. The devastating, unexplained attack deepened the sense of siege for Western personnel in this country, as denunciations brought a moment of unity to three major Afghan factions: civilians, insurgents and government officials.

Not once to we hear any details from "the paper of record" about the actual victims of this massacre. A  majority were children, but like all "collateral damage", any vestige of the human beings they once were has been glossed over in favor of how their inconvenient deaths have presented a dilemma to the American overlords.  The real victims are the maligned invaders, it would appear. This is like the kid who murders his parents and then whines to the judge about being left an orphan. Here is my own comment in response to the Times article:

The unnamed military official quoted in this article has some chutzpah. He has the nerve to complain that this massacre and other abuses will be used as propaganda fodder by the Taliban, and that the occupying Americans are just warm cuddly puppies who totally respect the people whose Korans they burn and whose corpses they desecrate? This is either an indication of monumental ignorance, or imperialistic arrogance of epic proportions.

The Afghan people have been occupied against their will for a decade. The children murdered in what was really an act of terrorism have never lived in a country that was not occupied. And all the Americans seem to care about is how this "isolated" bad behavior puts a monkeywrench into their strategy and their psy-ops campaigns to win hearts and minds.

The American response to these outrages is always the same: express some shallow and unctuous regrets, throw some bags of cash at the impoverished "collateral damage", promise some vague accountability, cover up as much as possible, claim that these escalating abuses are isolated instances and above all, blame the victims if they continue to resist the benevolence of their invaders.

President Obama fit in his condolence call to Hamid Karzai while riding in his limo on his way to watch his own kid play basketball on Sunday. While he considers the massacre "tragic and shocking" it in "no way represents the exceptional character of our military."

We ought to rename this country the United States of Arrogance.

Democracy in Action: Supreme Court Prayer Vigils

Just one day after the White House announced the creation of its brand new ethical transparency website*, it is flatly refusing to divulge information about the scores of faith-based and other special interest groups it managed to corral yesterday. The Administration is coordinating a massive propaganda campaign to gin up public support for its embattled Affordable Care Act. Without naming names, Team Obama has coyly admitted that it will be "facilitating" a prayer vigil outside the Supreme Court as the justices mull over the ACA's constitutionality later this month.

Robert Pear of The New York Times reveals the White House propaganda push with typical government doublespeak: 

The advocates and officials mapped out a strategy to call attention to tangible benefits of the law, like increased insurance coverage for young adults. Sensitive to the idea that they were encouraging demonstrations, White House officials denied that they were trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone’s throw from Congress on Capitol Hill. They said a main purpose of this week’s meeting, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, was to give the various groups a chance to learn of the plans.

Translation: Speaking from both sides of its blow-hole, the WH is not encouraging the rallies, but rather instructing the veal pen when, how and where to partake in them.

The part of this "strategy" that really creeps me out is that a branch of our government is encouraging a totally illegal display of religious magical thinking on public land in order to promote a policy agenda. We are coming to expect, and accept, the daily whittling away of that increasingly arbitrary document known as the Constitution. Here is the comment I wrote in response to the Times article this morning:

It will be hard for the administration to defend a health care law that doesn't even kick in for another two years. The rationale for postponing full benefits -- to appease the deficit hawks -- amounts to sheer malpractice when you factor in the increasing ranks of the uninsured (50 million-plus), largely left unprotected because of job losses after the financial meltdown. And while people are on tenterhooks waiting for 2014, the private insurance leeches are raking in record profits as they inflict ever higher premiums and co-pays to guarantee they stay profitable. They should have been put out of business two years ago. The president should have kept his campaign promise and backed at least a public option. Instead, he sold out to the corporations. He and Congress did not follow the wishes of the electorate.

And now the White House has to rely on a massive public relations campaign to convince people there will be a better tomorrow, tomorrow. And frankly, the government helping to coordinate a prayer vigil outside the Supreme Court to ask for God's help in forcing us to keep the insurance parasites in business just reeks of medievalism and desperation.

Instead of praying to the guy in the sky, let's resume a national campaign to demand Medicare for All. Let's join the rest of the civilized world.

It appears that the Obama Administration got wind of planned astroturf Tea Party rallies and tent revivals and Supreme Court lawn parties sponsored by the likes of the Koch Brothers to protest the insurance company giveaway law. Once burned by the infamous 2009 Town Halls, they have decided to fight prayer with prayer, misinformation with pep rally glitz, the Lord's Prayer with a Hail Mary. They were also likely taken aback by a recent Gallup poll which shows that a majority of people, including Democrats, are not entranced with ObamaCare. Even those believing that it has its positive points also think that mandating Americans to buy private insurance is unconstitutional.

Whatever. Praise the Lord, and donate generously when the political collection plate is passed your way.

* See previous post for link.

Funny Stuff

It must be the silly season, or the full moon, or the big Solar Storm wreaking havoc with grids and the GPS, but I haven't encountered so much ironic humor while trolling the internets in months. In just the past hour alone, I have been treated to a three-fer laugh riot by simply doing a quick scan through my email and the Times website.

First, the email. In the same week that saw Attorney General Eric Holder claim transparency by giving a public speech opaquely defending the secrecy of the Obama Administration when it decides to kill people, the White House has announced a new website devoted to ethics and transparency:

The idea that government is more accountable when it is transparent is a principle that President Obama has worked hard to make a reality in his administration.

That's why the President pledged “to create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable format.”

This site, ethics.data.gov, is designed to be a fulfillment of that promise.

 You can supposedly punch in a name, or a keyword, and oodles and oodles of info will pop right out at you. It purports to rip the White House Visitors' Log wide open! I haven't tried it out yet, and don't know that I ever will. My hesitancy has a little something to do with the Obama re-election campaign being involved in a massive data-mining scheme -- bringing me to my second object of hilarity.

A story in today's Times lays out the secretive, massive high-techie-tackiness of his Chicago political arm, and how campaign workers have all sorts of sneaky ways to find out who we are, via tracking cookies and other nefarious methods. (There is also a great piece in ProPublica outlining how those annoying Obama emails begging for donations are subtly tailor-made to apply to each unique donor). Anyway, here's the part in The Times piece that cracked me up:

Many of the small donors who gave early and often in 2008 have failed to rematerialize, (though officials say that with new donors and increasing enthusiasm they have no doubt that they will at least raise the $750 million they did then). Some of the volunteers who went to work enlisting friends and neighbors have been turned off by unmet expectations and the hard realities of partisan Washington, though the Republican attacks on Mr. Obama this year have helped bring some back into the fray.

And, campaign officials say, they have literally lost track of many reliable Democratic voters, particularly lower-income people who have lost their homes or their jobs or both, and can no longer be reached at the addresses or phone numbers the campaign has on file.

So Mr. Obama’s re-election team is sifting through reams of data available through the Internet or fed to it by its hundreds of staff members on the ground in all 50 states, identifying past or potential supporters and donors and testing e-mail and Web-based messages that can entice them back into the fold.

This is priceless. They're actually attempting to locate the poor slobs who lost everything to the biggest, unpunished financial fraud conspiracy in American history, and thinking these people will be in any position or mood to give money to the biggest political sell-out in history. Don't forget to peruse the reader comments, especially the ones who still have listed phone numbers and get annoying daily -- daily! -- calls from the Obamatrons.

And last but not least, here is the third blackly humorous item on the agenda. Another Times story bemoans the fact that the corrupt Afghanistan government has not prosecuted a single case of corruption since the occupation, despite the fact that the righteous Americans are leading by democratic example! My stomach literally still hurts from the eruption of guffaws that one brought on. The Americans are said to be livid that Karzai has refused to go after crooks in his own country, despite being presented with tons of evidence by the generals. Karzai is inexplicably reacting to demands to prosecute his banksters with "interference, obstruction and delay." Wow. He probably had just gotten off the phone with Eric Holder, collecting some helpful tips in passive aggression.

Glenn Greenwald was having a field day with this one. "It’s simply shocking," he writes, "to find a country which would allow its political class to be dominated by those who 'have profited from the crony capitalism that has come to define its economic order' and who “nearly brought down” its banking system. What must it be like to live in such a country?"

The Pathology of Greed

Hardly a day goes by that we don't read an infuriating account of the bad behavior of rich people. This week, it was revealed that union-busting billionaire Chicage heiress and Obama bundler Penny Pritzker also makes a career out of systematically getting the property taxes on her many estates drastically reduced. There is a body of proof as high as a penthouse that the uber-rich as a whole are insatiably greedy, inhumane and really not as smart as they fancy themselves to be. If they had as much brains as they do money, they'd have the sense to shut up and hide. But narcissists can never shut up and hide. They flaunt, they preen, they throw their contempt in our faces.

Nevertheless, I was shocked, shocked at the latest extreme demands that the heavy-hitting lobbying group known as The Business Roundtable are making of the  government they so obviously control. It used to be that the oligarchs worked behind the scenes and behind closed doors as they peddled their influence to presidents and congress members and treasury secretaries. No more. The BRT has come out with a public manifesto called Taking Action for America. It's just about as cravenly ugly as it gets. It's for the benefit of a very select few and to the detriment of the many. It's a veritable counter-attack against the Occupy Movement. It even parodies the Declaration of Independence and begins with: "We, the CEOs of America...."

In a nutshell, the kleptocrats of the BRT want what little taxes they do pay reduced, environmental regulations scrapped, laws governing humane working conditions for their employees relaxed, their contributions to workers' health care and pensions slashed, the already watered-down and delayed measures in Dodd-Frank financial reform to just go away, and Medicare and Social Security "reformed".

And here's the really scary part. They released their report after meeting with President Obama and receiving some encouragement. They were also slated to meet privately with Treasury Secretary Geithner to discuss the details and logistics.They're openly bragging about how they are working closely with Congressional conservative Democrats (and yes, they really do call them Blue Dogs) to get their legislation passed. They're crowing about how the Beltway corporate media  just love, love, love their ideas! As far as they are concerned, they have themselves a done deal. And they may be right.

Of course, the proposals are couched in the tried and true doublespeak linguistics  of "job creation" and "economy healing." The BRT aims to hook us with a long intro about how terrible the unemployment crisis is for all those poor workers out there, and how they can help. But it's really nothing more than a repetition of the mantra of voodoo Reaganomics. If the government will only release the millionaires and billionaires from their shackles, they will be free to trickle down their golden drops of beneficence on the rest of us!  Ummm -- haven't we already seen how well that theory has worked out?

True to form, these transglobal corporate heads just love to refer to themselves as "small businessmen" who are being inordinately hurt by such cumbersome anti-pollution regulations as the Clean Air Act. They provide a laundry list of regulations they want tweaked. For example, they reckon that it will cost them too much money to comply with proposed EPA guidelines for solid waste removal. And they are vehemently against a requirement making them divulge the toxic chemicals used in hydrofracking, their excuse being that forcing them to list the ways they poison our water will put a damper on "innovation" (translation: limitless profits). 

And make no mistake: the one percenters want to destroy Social Security by privatizing it. Of course, they don't say so in so many words. Their sanitized version goes like this: "Complex and burdensome regulations" such as forced FICA contributions "are slowing the recovery and hampering job creation."
The BRT would much rather help workers start individual retirement savings plans, and "educate" the doofuses on how to scrimp and save and plan ahead:

Ensure that requirements do not discourage retirees from continued work.... Enact reforms that bring Social Security into long term financial balance as soon as possible to minmize disruption and give Americans the lead time to plan appropriately.

Translation: People are lazily retiring too early! Kill Social Security and either make people work until they die or force them to purchase junk pension plans created by the private sector, all the while humanely forewarning them they will have to make do with much, much less. 

Democratic Lame Duck Rep. Heath Shuler, who is leading yet another secretive "Gang" effort in Congress to achieve a draconian Grand Bargain of safety net cuts, is quoted on the BRT webpage as simply loving these plutocratic ideas: "Taking Action for America is the right plan at the right time," he gushes. "America’s business leaders have detailed a jobs and growth strategy that will benefit American workers. I call on my colleagues to work with me, the Business Roundtable and all stakeholders to act this year." 

And Barack Obama also seems to be totally on board with his corporate cronies:

These are relatively modest adjustments that can stabilize our economy, give you the kind of business confidence you need to invest.That means working together to reform our tax system so that we are rewarding companies that are investing here in the United States, making sure that we are able to cut our tax rate here but also broaden the base," he said.

The president said more should be done on energy and providing educational and job-training opportunities for workers, in line with what the BRT outlined on Wednesday.

"I'm prepared to be a partner in that process," Obama said.

"But we're going to have to have everybody pulling together," he said. "The business community is going to have an important voice in how that moves forward."

Tell me again why some people still believe that this President's new-found campaign populism should be taken seriously. 





Co-Presidents Obama and BRT's Jim McNerney (of Boeing) Share a Tender Moment