Distributor Cap brings us Peggy Noonan as Mary Poppins (click here for larger):
"In every job that must be done, there is an element of greed. You find the greed, and - SNAP - the job's a game!"
Open Thread below....
It's not the fact that they're trying to stop health-care reform by any means necessary that gets to me. (After all, we're now a nation of greed and to the corporate victor goes the spoils.) No, it's the lies they use to manipulate and frighten people that make me despair, because they successfully bring out the worst in people - and keep other people from getting the help they desperately need.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has a heartbreaking tale that illustrates why our present system is the one that's breaking down families:
My friend M. — you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name — had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.
The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.
The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”
“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.
Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.
A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.
The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.
“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.
“I explored a lot of options with an attorney here in town,” she added. “The attorney said, ‘I don’t see any other options for you.’ It took about a year for me to do the divorce, it was so hard.”
So M. divorced the man she loves. I asked him what he thought of this. He can still speak, albeit not always coherently, and he paused a long, long time. All he could manage was: “It’s hard to say.”
Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.
A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.
M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.
“It’s just crazy,” she said. “It twists people like pretzels.”
Bill Moyers visited the set of Real Time, and had an honest discussion about why we're going to be lucky to see any real reform on health care with all of the money being thrown at both the Republican and Democratic parties from the insurance industries, big pharma, and Wall Street. Bill is exactly right here, and this needs to be looked at as a moral issue, and not what's in the interest of corporate profits or a good business model.
Just a reminder.
I know we've asked for a Truth Commission on torture over and over again, but what about the financial catastrophe the world just experienced? When will hearings be held to uncover the facts that led us and the world to financial ruin? I know we have many basic facts of what happened, but when will an actual hearing take place? If nothing is officially uncovered then how can we stop another one from taking place?
Being too big to fail should never happen again. If it's too big to fail,( Citi Group) then it shouldn't exist.
The S&L scandal wasn't a blip on the radar and more will come if nothing is exposed. How many times will a Senator like John McCain be given a new lease on life to remake himself after a financial scandal? It's just a matter of time. Greed by the CNBCers will always be too much for them to handle, but they will never have to pay for it. You know who covers the bill.
Charles Grassley is starting to sound as incoherent during his television interviews as he does in his Tweets. Grassley doesn't think we need more regulation. We just need more transparency. Yeah, that's going to make the finace companies behave. And when asked if the banks are in any position to protest if they're not going to make as much money, Grassley comes back with this:
Greed is human nature. We shouldn't blame greed any more than you'd blame gravity when a plane has an accident and goes down.
I'm sorry Senator, but I think we can blame greed for the mess we're in. Greed and the unwillingness of the government to put a check on it.
It's getting even more difficult to find good news these days, but I thought this was worth a mention. I don't know how much of a difference it will make, but I hope it does. Businesses would do well to seek out those graduates and hire them:
When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.
Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.
Only 20 percent? Oh well, at least 1 in 5 has scruples!
What happened to making money?
That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.
“We want to stand up and recite something out loud with our class,” said Teal Carlock, who is graduating from Harvard and has accepted a job at Genentech. “Fingers are now pointed at M.B.A.’s and we, as a class, have a real opportunity to come together and set a standard as business leaders.”
At Columbia Business School, all students must pledge to an honor code: “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The code has been in place for about three years and came about after discussions between students and faculty.
In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy — or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment — business school professors say that is not the case. Rather, they say, they are seeing a generational shift away from viewing an M.B.A. as simply an on-ramp to the road to riches.
Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers and the environment. And business schools are responding with more courses, new centers specializing in business ethics and, in the case of Harvard, student-lead efforts to bring about a professional code of conduct for M.B.A.’s, not unlike oaths that are taken by lawyers and doctors.
“I don’t see this as something that will fade away,” said Diana C. Robertson, a professor of business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s coming from the students. I don’t know that we’ve seen such a surge in this activism since the 1960s. This activism is different, but, like that time, it is student-driven.”
It's kind of ironic, in light of Harvard's present financial crisis.
Since this site devotes much of this center column to the goings-on in Washington, it's high time that we gave some real estate to some of the music that has provided the city's better pulse. There's no better place to start than Fugazi.
Fugazi is usually given a lot of credit for their unparalleled integrity and business ethics. All their shows were under six dollars. They didn't sell T-shirts. Their CD's cost eight dollars when all others were $14.99. They let local bands open for them. All shows were all ages. They refused to sign to a major label and instead sold millions of records on singer-guitarist ian Mackaye's own Dischord Records. When my friends and I bought a fake ticket (I thought it was real) to see them when I was 13, one of their crew told the band how we got duped and they let is in through the back door because they felt bad for us.
Anyways, that's what most screeds about Fugazi usually mention. They don't mention that had they been complete money-grubbing jerks a la Gene Simmons and built a commercial empire of emptiness and greed, they still would be one of the best and most intense bands of all time. I hope they end their hiatus soon.
President Obama (never get sick of typing that) has some strong words for the Wall Street companies who, per the New York Times' reporting, rewarded their incompetence with a whopping $18.4 billion in bonuses last year.
AP:
"Outrageous."
That's President Barack Obama's one-word reaction to a report that Wall Street employees got more than $18 billion in bonuses last year.
Said Obama: "That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful."
The president said he and new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will have direct conversations with corporate leaders to make the point.
Obama said there is a time for corporate leaders to make profits and get paid bonuses but now is "not that time."
"Outrageous" is precisely the word. The same people who two months ago came to Congress with hats in hand and took a boatload of taxpayer money are now doling out billions in "bonuses"? Bonuses? Aren't you supposed to get a bonus when you do something well?
