Date: 2/22/2009
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Now for the hard part.
Even if the national credit card is maxed out and partisanship remains the rule for Washington’s political tribes, President Barack Obama and Congress are plunging ahead with a health care overhaul.
In the week ahead, Obama will start the dialogue on how to increase coverage, restrain costs and improve quality.
Whether a bill can get through Congress and to Obama this year is uncertain. For half a century, the track record on health care has been one of missed opportunities, spectacular failures and hard-won incremental gains.
Obama plans to stress the need for major changes in his address to Congress on Tuesday, administration officials say. He quickly will follow up with a budget that includes a commitment to expand coverage for the uninsured. A White House summit on health care is being planned in coming weeks.
“They don’t intend to blink. They intend to plow ahead,” said health economist Len Nichols of the nonpartisan New America Foundation. “Health reform is seen as essential to balancing the federal budget and economic recovery in the long run.”
People in the U.S. spend $2.4 trillion a year on health care, or about $7,900 per person. That’s more than twice as much per capita as in other advanced countries. But few would claim those dollars are buying good value. The costs are a staggering burden for taxpayers, employers and families, and the recession is leaving more people without insurance.
Yet even a self-described optimist such as Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., says he has doubts about prospects for overhauling health care. “It needs to be done up front and quickly,” said Enzi, the senior Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “I’m not so sure that we haven’t already lost that, with so many other things coming in and weighing us down.”
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton took the better part of a year to deliver a 1,300-page health care bill to Congress and later waved his veto pen at lawmakers who might have given him half a loaf. He got nothing. Obama has shown a tendency to be more pragmatic.
Administration and congressional officials say Obama will lay out a vision and see if Congress can make the details work. The Senate has gotten an early start and is shaping up as the proving ground for legislation.
“The Obama administration has said they are going to give the Senate a very wide berth,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who for years has tried to get Democrats and Republicans working together. “There are areas in which there is going to be spirited debate. But there are four or five major areas where there’s a lot of common ground.”
Polls show most people support coverage for all and believe government should help guarantee it. But what looks like consensus starts to break down once thorny details such as costs and the government’s influence on the doctor-patient relationship come into the picture.
Administration officials say Obama has made a down payment by expanding coverage for children of low-income working families and by providing subsidies to help people who lose their jobs keep health benefits.
As he moves forward, Obama will follow the plan laid out in his campaign.
It calls for government, employers, families and individuals to keep sharing financial responsibility for health care. The approach would overhaul the health insurance market, particularly for self-employed people and small businesses. It would set up a national insurance purchasing “exchange” through which people would be guaranteed access to private health insurance or the choice of a new public plan.
Obama sees coverage for all as a goal to be reached in steps. His plan would not require every individual to purchase insurance. The estimated cost is about $90 billion a year, to start with.
The plan might sound simple in a brief summary, but it’s not. Potential dealbreakers lurk at every turn.
Many liberals can’t get excited about doing battle for just a promise — not an immediate guarantee — of coverage for all.
Conservatives and insurance companies fear that a public plan offered to workers and their families could become the gateway for Canada-style government health care for all.
Employers, hospitals, doctors, and drug companies worry that the government’s already pervasive influence in health care will become stifling.
The initial work has fallen to the Senate, where Democratic Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts want to present a bill by the summer.
Baucus is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and taxes. Kennedy, who is under treatment for brain cancer, leads the Senate health committee. He has pursued the goal of coverage for all his entire career and doesn’t want this opportunity to slip away.
Baucus has already outlined a plan that differs in some key details from Obama’s. For example, it contemplates taxing some health insurance benefits to raise money for expanded coverage. That’s an idea Obama has rejected but one that certain Republicans favor.
It takes 60 votes to get a bill through the Senate, and Democrats don’t have them.
In the House, the effort seems to be moving more slowly. Senior aides from leadership offices and committees are talking. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is expected to take a leading role.
Some experts believe the issue is too complicated to try to accomplish in one year and one bill.
Watching and waiting are people such as Robyn Perry, 56, of Lake Worth, Fla., who recently lost a job with health benefits. She has struggled to find coverage now that she is self-employed. Private plans are either too expensive or won’t take her because she had a ministroke several years ago. A plan sponsored by local government accepted her, but won’t cover her outside her county.
“Something has to be done,” said Perry. “I work. I make decent money. But I still can’t get coverage. I would really like to find a normal health insurance plan that would cover me wherever I get sick, not just in Palm Beach county.”
___
On the Net:
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/health_care/
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Feds opens probe of cooling equipment makers
Date: 2/19/2009
By STEPHEN MANNING
AP Business Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Thursday that it has opened an antitrust investigation of the compressor industry, part of a global probe of possible price fixing and other anticompetitive practices at companies that supply the cooling parts for appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners.
Authorities in Europe and Brazil also raided offices of several compressor producers this week as they investigated a possible global cartel among companies that make the equipment.
In the United States, home appliance maker Whirlpool Corp. said Thursday that it received a grand jury subpoena earlier this week and that investigators visited company facilities in Brazil and Italy. Compressor manufacturer Tecumseh Products Co. said on Wednesday that it was subpoenaed by the Justice Department and received a request for information from Brazilian authorities.
Tecumseh said the requests related to pricing issues.
Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona confirmed that authorities were probing “anticompetitive practices” in the compressor industry and were working with foreign investigators. She did not provide any further details.
Compressors are part of the system that creates the cold air that keeps food fresh or frozen. It compresses cooling fluid then passes it through the network of coils commonly found on the back of refrigerators.
Both Tecumseh, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Benton Harbor, Mich.-based Whirlpool said in statements that they planned to cooperate with investigators and that no charges were pending against them or any employees.
The companies operate through subsidiaries in Brazil and do a substantial amount of business in the South American country. About 12 percent of Whirlpool’s 2007 sales were in Brazil, according to company regulatory filings. Tecumseh had Brazilian sales of $194 million in 2007, roughly 17 percent of the company’s global sales.
Tecumseh spokeswoman Teresa Hess said the company sells products to Whirlpool, including a small amount in the Brazilian market, even though the two are competitors.
Brazil’s justice ministry said in a statement that authorities seized documents in the southeastern state of Sao Paulo and southern state of Santa Catarina as part of an investigation of a possible cartel of companies over compressors used in refrigerators, air conditioners and water fountains.
The investigation began near the end of 2008 after one of the companies allegedly involved advised authorities of the cartel in exchange for administrative and criminal immunity. It includes Brazil’s federal police, the justice ministry and the Sao Paulo state prosecutor’s office.
The justice ministry statement said the unidentified companies allegedly agreed to raise prices and traded commercially sensitive information, hindering free competition. The negotiations allegedly took place through e-mails, phone calls and meetings, including at restaurants and hotels.
The Danish group Danfoss S/A said that it was being investigated by antitrust authorities in Germany, Denmark and the United States on suspicion that it was part of a global cartel. Investigators visited company facilities in all three countries, Danfoss said. The company said it was certain that top management was not taking part in any form of collusion.
European authorities did not identify the other companies under investigation.
Shares of Whirlpool fell $2.78, or 9.6 percent, to close at $26.15, while Tecumseh shares rose 24 cents to close at $6.84.
——
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By STEPHEN MANNING
AP Business Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Thursday that it has opened an antitrust investigation of the compressor industry, part of a global probe of possible price fixing and other anticompetitive practices at companies that supply the cooling parts for appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners.
Authorities in Europe and Brazil also raided offices of several compressor producers this week as they investigated a possible global cartel among companies that make the equipment.
In the United States, home appliance maker Whirlpool Corp. said Thursday that it received a grand jury subpoena earlier this week and that investigators visited company facilities in Brazil and Italy. Compressor manufacturer Tecumseh Products Co. said on Wednesday that it was subpoenaed by the Justice Department and received a request for information from Brazilian authorities.
Tecumseh said the requests related to pricing issues.
Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona confirmed that authorities were probing “anticompetitive practices” in the compressor industry and were working with foreign investigators. She did not provide any further details.
Compressors are part of the system that creates the cold air that keeps food fresh or frozen. It compresses cooling fluid then passes it through the network of coils commonly found on the back of refrigerators.
Both Tecumseh, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Benton Harbor, Mich.-based Whirlpool said in statements that they planned to cooperate with investigators and that no charges were pending against them or any employees.
The companies operate through subsidiaries in Brazil and do a substantial amount of business in the South American country. About 12 percent of Whirlpool’s 2007 sales were in Brazil, according to company regulatory filings. Tecumseh had Brazilian sales of $194 million in 2007, roughly 17 percent of the company’s global sales.
Tecumseh spokeswoman Teresa Hess said the company sells products to Whirlpool, including a small amount in the Brazilian market, even though the two are competitors.
Brazil’s justice ministry said in a statement that authorities seized documents in the southeastern state of Sao Paulo and southern state of Santa Catarina as part of an investigation of a possible cartel of companies over compressors used in refrigerators, air conditioners and water fountains.
The investigation began near the end of 2008 after one of the companies allegedly involved advised authorities of the cartel in exchange for administrative and criminal immunity. It includes Brazil’s federal police, the justice ministry and the Sao Paulo state prosecutor’s office.
The justice ministry statement said the unidentified companies allegedly agreed to raise prices and traded commercially sensitive information, hindering free competition. The negotiations allegedly took place through e-mails, phone calls and meetings, including at restaurants and hotels.
The Danish group Danfoss S/A said that it was being investigated by antitrust authorities in Germany, Denmark and the United States on suspicion that it was part of a global cartel. Investigators visited company facilities in all three countries, Danfoss said. The company said it was certain that top management was not taking part in any form of collusion.
European authorities did not identify the other companies under investigation.
Shares of Whirlpool fell $2.78, or 9.6 percent, to close at $26.15, while Tecumseh shares rose 24 cents to close at $6.84.
——
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Recession ups US demand for Third World-type loans
Date: 2/16/2009
By EILEEN ALT POWELL
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — When Amy Sokoloff and John Powell were trying to start their art restoration business in New York City, they needed some working capital. But banks weren’t willing to take a chance on them.
“We didn’t own anything — no houses, no cars, we had no collateral,” Sokoloff said. Powell added, “No one wanted to talk to us. They were not interested, and they were not nice about it.”
Sokoloff and Powell ended up on the doorstep of ACCION USA, a not-for-profit group patterned after the Third World microfinance institutions best known for providing money to Moroccan farmers for breeding chickens or to Bangladeshi women for weaving supplies.
The $15,000 loan they got in 2005— which they paid back in two years — got them the sunlit studio where their Chelsea Restoration Associates brings aged, damaged oil paintings back to life. Last fall, after the U.S. downturn began to cut into their business, they went back to ACCION USA for a $25,000 loan, “a tremendous help for cash flow” with an affordable 10.9 percent interest rate, Sokoloff said.
Sokoloff and Powell are among thousands of Americans using microcredit, a financing system originated in the Third World, to help open small businesses or get through rough spots. While the dollar amounts are much bigger in the U.S. than the tiny loans in developing countries — some for less than $10 — the principle is the same: a financial stake that lets people in need better their lives.
Now, with the recession deepening, U.S.-based microlenders say they are seeing an increase in inquiries from would-be borrowers, including startup entrepreneurs seen as too risky by banks and other traditional lenders.
And the still-small U.S. microcredit sector hopes for a boost from the new administration of President Barack Obama.
Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is a big supporter of microfinance, praising it during her confirmation hearing for its ability to “raise standards of living and transform local economies” overseas. Obama also has a personal link to the industry because his late mother, Ann Dunham, was involved in microfinance in Indonesia.
These connections gave raised hopes among microloan advocates that some money from the administration’s $789 billion economic rescue package will filter into their programs. U.S. microlenders already get support from the Small Business Administration and a special Treasury community development fund.
“We’re hoping for more funding” from the government, said Wendy K. Baumann, vice chairman of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, an advocacy group for microfinance based in Arlington, Virginia.
Microloans have been made in developing countries for more than 30 years. Bangladeshi economist Mohammed Yunis made the first one of about $27 from his own pocket to 42 women who needed to buy bamboo to make furniture. He later formed the Grameen Bank, which is now one of the world’s largest microlenders and shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the founder.
In 2007, microloans went to some 154 million people worldwide, according to the Microcredit Summit Campaign. Estimates vary, but there are believed to be some $25 billion to $30 billion in small business loans outstanding globally.
In the United States, by contrast, an estimated $100 million in microloans were provided to 13,000 clients by some 250 microlenders in 2007, according Elaine L. Edgcomb, director of an Aspen Institute project on the small loan movement. The average for these loans is about $8,000 in the U.S., she said.
Microlending groups estimated that defaults were a manageable 6 percent to 8 percent before the economy fell into recession but have grown since.
Gina Harman, president of New York-based ACCION USA, the largest of the microlenders in the United States, said that nonprofit groups like hers were “very hands on” with borrowers and admitted “we’re working harder these days to keep people current.”
Harman said that in addition to the unemployed and the underemployed, a big market for microloans in the United States is the immigrant community.
“Self-employment rises in importance for recent immigrants because their alternatives for jobs are limited,” Harman said. Many don’t know English and lack business connections, but come from cultures with strong entrepreneurial skills, she added.
Still, the growth of microfinance in the U.S. has been slow.
Jonathan Morduch, a professor of public policy and economics at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, says one reason is that it’s hard being an entrepreneur in America.
“It’s a lot easier to go to work for someone else, get health benefits and collect a salary,” Morduch said. “And starting a business can be especially hard in the United States because there’s a lot of regulation you don’t have in other places.”
Microfinance experts like Alex Counts, president and chief executive of the Grameen Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based microfinance support group, believe more could be done in America if more money was provided by foundations, wealthy donors and government agencies.
And many entrepreneurs need help getting started, he added.
“In a country like Bangladesh, the key constraint in capital,” Counts said. “In the United States, capital is also a constraint. But there’s also licensing and regulation … and exposing people to business contacts who can buy their products, sell for them.”
As a result, many of the most effective microfinance programs in America have a training component, he said.
“If you support people in developing networks and skills, say in going through the licensing process … then loans in the range of $1,000 to $3,000 are often enough to jump start a small business,” Counts said.
He said, for example, that such loans could help a woman laid off from a restaurant start a home-catering business, or a fired daycare worker start a home-based care service.
Baumann of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity believes more money will become available for microloans.
“Credit is tightening, and more people are coming to us,” she said, adding that this should prompt banks and other big financial institutions “to wake up and figure out how we can partner with them” to support small businesses.
Baumann, who heads the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corp. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said that about 70 percent of the group’s microloans are for startup businesses, with the rest going to small businesses that are expanding or facing cash-flow problems. Despite its name, about a quarter of borrowers are men.
“We fund a lot of service companies — child care, food-related businesses, restaurants,” she said. But there also are manufacturing and construction companies and community-based residential facilities for the elderly.
One recent borrower was Vasyl Lemberskyy, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine about seven years ago. He lost his first restaurant when the landlord sold the building it was in; a second restaurant failed.
Last year, he and his partners went to Baumann’s group and got a $57,000 loan to open the Transfer Pizzeria Cafe, which relies on local products for its 50-some varieties of pizza.
He was happy dealing with a microlender because he was treated so well.
“They care about new business coming to this city, they care about making a better business environment in Milwaukee, they care about you,” Lemberskyy said.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By EILEEN ALT POWELL
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — When Amy Sokoloff and John Powell were trying to start their art restoration business in New York City, they needed some working capital. But banks weren’t willing to take a chance on them.
“We didn’t own anything — no houses, no cars, we had no collateral,” Sokoloff said. Powell added, “No one wanted to talk to us. They were not interested, and they were not nice about it.”
Sokoloff and Powell ended up on the doorstep of ACCION USA, a not-for-profit group patterned after the Third World microfinance institutions best known for providing money to Moroccan farmers for breeding chickens or to Bangladeshi women for weaving supplies.
The $15,000 loan they got in 2005— which they paid back in two years — got them the sunlit studio where their Chelsea Restoration Associates brings aged, damaged oil paintings back to life. Last fall, after the U.S. downturn began to cut into their business, they went back to ACCION USA for a $25,000 loan, “a tremendous help for cash flow” with an affordable 10.9 percent interest rate, Sokoloff said.
Sokoloff and Powell are among thousands of Americans using microcredit, a financing system originated in the Third World, to help open small businesses or get through rough spots. While the dollar amounts are much bigger in the U.S. than the tiny loans in developing countries — some for less than $10 — the principle is the same: a financial stake that lets people in need better their lives.
Now, with the recession deepening, U.S.-based microlenders say they are seeing an increase in inquiries from would-be borrowers, including startup entrepreneurs seen as too risky by banks and other traditional lenders.
And the still-small U.S. microcredit sector hopes for a boost from the new administration of President Barack Obama.
Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is a big supporter of microfinance, praising it during her confirmation hearing for its ability to “raise standards of living and transform local economies” overseas. Obama also has a personal link to the industry because his late mother, Ann Dunham, was involved in microfinance in Indonesia.
These connections gave raised hopes among microloan advocates that some money from the administration’s $789 billion economic rescue package will filter into their programs. U.S. microlenders already get support from the Small Business Administration and a special Treasury community development fund.
“We’re hoping for more funding” from the government, said Wendy K. Baumann, vice chairman of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, an advocacy group for microfinance based in Arlington, Virginia.
Microloans have been made in developing countries for more than 30 years. Bangladeshi economist Mohammed Yunis made the first one of about $27 from his own pocket to 42 women who needed to buy bamboo to make furniture. He later formed the Grameen Bank, which is now one of the world’s largest microlenders and shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the founder.
In 2007, microloans went to some 154 million people worldwide, according to the Microcredit Summit Campaign. Estimates vary, but there are believed to be some $25 billion to $30 billion in small business loans outstanding globally.
In the United States, by contrast, an estimated $100 million in microloans were provided to 13,000 clients by some 250 microlenders in 2007, according Elaine L. Edgcomb, director of an Aspen Institute project on the small loan movement. The average for these loans is about $8,000 in the U.S., she said.
Microlending groups estimated that defaults were a manageable 6 percent to 8 percent before the economy fell into recession but have grown since.
Gina Harman, president of New York-based ACCION USA, the largest of the microlenders in the United States, said that nonprofit groups like hers were “very hands on” with borrowers and admitted “we’re working harder these days to keep people current.”
Harman said that in addition to the unemployed and the underemployed, a big market for microloans in the United States is the immigrant community.
“Self-employment rises in importance for recent immigrants because their alternatives for jobs are limited,” Harman said. Many don’t know English and lack business connections, but come from cultures with strong entrepreneurial skills, she added.
Still, the growth of microfinance in the U.S. has been slow.
Jonathan Morduch, a professor of public policy and economics at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, says one reason is that it’s hard being an entrepreneur in America.
“It’s a lot easier to go to work for someone else, get health benefits and collect a salary,” Morduch said. “And starting a business can be especially hard in the United States because there’s a lot of regulation you don’t have in other places.”
Microfinance experts like Alex Counts, president and chief executive of the Grameen Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based microfinance support group, believe more could be done in America if more money was provided by foundations, wealthy donors and government agencies.
And many entrepreneurs need help getting started, he added.
“In a country like Bangladesh, the key constraint in capital,” Counts said. “In the United States, capital is also a constraint. But there’s also licensing and regulation … and exposing people to business contacts who can buy their products, sell for them.”
As a result, many of the most effective microfinance programs in America have a training component, he said.
“If you support people in developing networks and skills, say in going through the licensing process … then loans in the range of $1,000 to $3,000 are often enough to jump start a small business,” Counts said.
He said, for example, that such loans could help a woman laid off from a restaurant start a home-catering business, or a fired daycare worker start a home-based care service.
Baumann of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity believes more money will become available for microloans.
“Credit is tightening, and more people are coming to us,” she said, adding that this should prompt banks and other big financial institutions “to wake up and figure out how we can partner with them” to support small businesses.
Baumann, who heads the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corp. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said that about 70 percent of the group’s microloans are for startup businesses, with the rest going to small businesses that are expanding or facing cash-flow problems. Despite its name, about a quarter of borrowers are men.
“We fund a lot of service companies — child care, food-related businesses, restaurants,” she said. But there also are manufacturing and construction companies and community-based residential facilities for the elderly.
One recent borrower was Vasyl Lemberskyy, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine about seven years ago. He lost his first restaurant when the landlord sold the building it was in; a second restaurant failed.
Last year, he and his partners went to Baumann’s group and got a $57,000 loan to open the Transfer Pizzeria Cafe, which relies on local products for its 50-some varieties of pizza.
He was happy dealing with a microlender because he was treated so well.
“They care about new business coming to this city, they care about making a better business environment in Milwaukee, they care about you,” Lemberskyy said.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
The recovery plan: shock & awe for a shaken nation
Date: 2/14/2009
By NANCY BENAC and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It’s the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets — and right out again.
The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.
The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn’t slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed.
“The one thing we’ll never know is what would have happened if we didn’t do it,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight.
It’s not FDR’s deal and these aren’t his times.
No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt’s day.
No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new.
“We’re not reinventing government,” said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling “Don’t Know Much About” series. “We’re modifying things that exist.”
Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington’s place in people’s lives.
“The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it,” says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. “It’s become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can’t do.
“If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do.”
To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the “Europeanization of America.” Others call it “Rooseveltian” or “generational theft” in reference to the debt passed on to the future.
They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers.
Obama said it’s about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt’s administration.
“We adapted, we changed,” he said about those days — and these. “President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity.”
In his radio address Saturday, Obama said he believed the country “will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future.”
Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress — three — saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape.
Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20.
Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early.
The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package’s costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.
It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, “you would make a blanket for Jupiter.”
The stimulus wasn’t just about throwing cash at the economy, though.
The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail — renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas.
“There are seeds in this bill for long-term change,” says Zelizer. “There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives.”
Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn’t need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was — and could become.
Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they’ve got solid grounds for their pessimism.
The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.
The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time.
Ready to buy another home?
Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing.
Buying a first home? You’re still in luck — the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November.
A new car? You’ll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not — as was initially proposed — your loan interest as well.
One day, the government proposed to pay 65 percent of the cost of health coverage for a year for jobless people who lose their workplace insurance. Days later, it was down to half. Ultimately, the subsidy zigzagged back up to 65 percent, but it expires before the end of the year.
Obama declared an end to pork-barrel politics, but legislators still managed to look out for favorite projects.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to point out that a big chunk of the $8 billion set aside to construct high-speed rail lines could go to a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., helped make sure $10 billion was set aside for the National Institutes of Health, a priority of his.
Long after the dust has settled from the horse trading, the government will be seen to have moved with unaccustomed speed on policies normally subjected to years of deliberation and gridlock.
Deficit hawks found their wings clipped as both parties reached for the treasury. Democrats mainly wished to spend; Republicans, mainly to cut taxes.
After last November, guess who got their way?
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly: “We won the election; we wrote the bill.”
The debate was both large and small. Negotiators considered the proper role of government — and how fast a business can depreciate its equipment.
Entering the 1930s, Americans mainly saw the national government as the entity that fought wars, ran post offices and enforced a ban on liquor. Federal spending was only 3.4 percent of the economy.
That more than tripled during the New Deal, topping 10 percent, because of the explosion of public works and other labor programs, rural modernization, bank support, and farm and industrial aid.
“It was a transformation of society in a way that hadn’t been done since the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery,” Davis said.
The government became the entity that guaranteed a minimum wage, controlled farm production, supported artists, set workplace standards, insured deposits in regulated banks and cast the first national safety net for the elderly and handicapped under Social Security.
“The whole scope of what Roosevelt was trying to do is different but the intent is clearly the same: relief and recovery during a time of economic stress,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The package won by Obama offers “very important but more subterranean changes in the way the economy works,” he said.
Federal spending as a share of the economy shot above 40 percent during World War II and has hovered around 20 percent most of the years since. That share was already projected to approach 25 percent before Obama’s stimulus plan.
To be sure, there’s still considerable disagreement about how much the New Deal helped to end a depression finally crushed by the humming factories of World War II.
Even FDR’s transformation of the federal government was not universally recognized at the time for what it was. It may be years before the full measure of Obama’s efforts are taken, too.
In 1936, The Economist magazine pronounced the New Deal a “striking success” in improving conditions that existed when FDR took office three years earlier.
But what of the legacy?
What legacy?
“If the criterion be Utopian, the achievements of the New Deal appear to be small,” the editors sniffed. “The great problems of the country are hardly touched.”
___
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By NANCY BENAC and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It’s the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets — and right out again.
The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.
The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn’t slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed.
“The one thing we’ll never know is what would have happened if we didn’t do it,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight.
It’s not FDR’s deal and these aren’t his times.
No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt’s day.
No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new.
“We’re not reinventing government,” said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling “Don’t Know Much About” series. “We’re modifying things that exist.”
Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington’s place in people’s lives.
“The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it,” says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. “It’s become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can’t do.
“If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do.”
To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the “Europeanization of America.” Others call it “Rooseveltian” or “generational theft” in reference to the debt passed on to the future.
They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers.
Obama said it’s about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt’s administration.
“We adapted, we changed,” he said about those days — and these. “President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity.”
In his radio address Saturday, Obama said he believed the country “will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future.”
Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress — three — saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape.
Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20.
Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early.
The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package’s costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.
It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, “you would make a blanket for Jupiter.”
The stimulus wasn’t just about throwing cash at the economy, though.
The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail — renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas.
“There are seeds in this bill for long-term change,” says Zelizer. “There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives.”
Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn’t need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was — and could become.
Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they’ve got solid grounds for their pessimism.
The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.
The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time.
Ready to buy another home?
Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing.
Buying a first home? You’re still in luck — the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November.
A new car? You’ll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not — as was initially proposed — your loan interest as well.
One day, the government proposed to pay 65 percent of the cost of health coverage for a year for jobless people who lose their workplace insurance. Days later, it was down to half. Ultimately, the subsidy zigzagged back up to 65 percent, but it expires before the end of the year.
Obama declared an end to pork-barrel politics, but legislators still managed to look out for favorite projects.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to point out that a big chunk of the $8 billion set aside to construct high-speed rail lines could go to a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., helped make sure $10 billion was set aside for the National Institutes of Health, a priority of his.
Long after the dust has settled from the horse trading, the government will be seen to have moved with unaccustomed speed on policies normally subjected to years of deliberation and gridlock.
Deficit hawks found their wings clipped as both parties reached for the treasury. Democrats mainly wished to spend; Republicans, mainly to cut taxes.
After last November, guess who got their way?
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly: “We won the election; we wrote the bill.”
The debate was both large and small. Negotiators considered the proper role of government — and how fast a business can depreciate its equipment.
Entering the 1930s, Americans mainly saw the national government as the entity that fought wars, ran post offices and enforced a ban on liquor. Federal spending was only 3.4 percent of the economy.
That more than tripled during the New Deal, topping 10 percent, because of the explosion of public works and other labor programs, rural modernization, bank support, and farm and industrial aid.
“It was a transformation of society in a way that hadn’t been done since the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery,” Davis said.
The government became the entity that guaranteed a minimum wage, controlled farm production, supported artists, set workplace standards, insured deposits in regulated banks and cast the first national safety net for the elderly and handicapped under Social Security.
“The whole scope of what Roosevelt was trying to do is different but the intent is clearly the same: relief and recovery during a time of economic stress,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The package won by Obama offers “very important but more subterranean changes in the way the economy works,” he said.
Federal spending as a share of the economy shot above 40 percent during World War II and has hovered around 20 percent most of the years since. That share was already projected to approach 25 percent before Obama’s stimulus plan.
To be sure, there’s still considerable disagreement about how much the New Deal helped to end a depression finally crushed by the humming factories of World War II.
Even FDR’s transformation of the federal government was not universally recognized at the time for what it was. It may be years before the full measure of Obama’s efforts are taken, too.
In 1936, The Economist magazine pronounced the New Deal a “striking success” in improving conditions that existed when FDR took office three years earlier.
But what of the legacy?
What legacy?
“If the criterion be Utopian, the achievements of the New Deal appear to be small,” the editors sniffed. “The great problems of the country are hardly touched.”
___
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
HHS candidate best known for health care cuts
Date: 2/10/2009
By KEVIN FREKING and ERIK SCHELZIG
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — Few governors know the pitfalls of soaring health costs better than Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, which helps explain why President Barack Obama is reportedly considering the Democrat for health secretary.
In 2005, Bredesen cut 170,000 adults from Tennessee’s Medicaid program, called TennCare. He reduced benefits for thousands more.
Critics describe Bredesen’s actions as the biggest cuts in public health insurance in the nation’s history. They believe he’s the wrong person to lead an effort to expand health insurance coverage, and they’re throwing support behind other candidates, including Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, widely viewed as near the top of Obama’s list of candidates to run the Health and Human Services Department.
However, some say Bredesen’s stand shows he’s willing to tackle the toughest of problems.
Before the cuts were made, TennCare’s growth rate was making it harder to pay for education, roads and other critical services. Tennessee led the nation in the percentage of its population on Medicaid and the percentage of its budget going to Medicaid. However, on a per-person basis, Tennessee ranked 48th in state and local tax collections.
Dennis Smith, now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was in charge of Medicaid at the federal level in 2005. He said Bredesen’s actions were “necessary and appropriate” because the program was out of control.
For example, almost every state has some type of system that allows it to approve the amount and types of prescription drugs that beneficiaries get. Tennessee didn’t have such controls. Eligibility rules were also much broader than those of other states, allowing for enrollment of adults who would not have been eligible for Medicaid elsewhere.
The most praise for Bredesen comes from conservatives. Obama has shown a willingness to consider their views in his appointments so far, while many of those on the left of the issue say Bredesen is the wrong choice.
Bredesen emphasized in an interview Tuesday that he hasn’t applied for the HHS job or campaigned for it. But he has launched a counterattack against health care advocates for what he calls a distortion of the events that led to the TennCare cuts in 2005.
“Your name comes out and the next thing you know, people are dumping cans of garbage on you,” he said. “So I’m interested in, first of all, setting the record straight.”
Bredesen said the move to cut the number of TennCare enrollees came after advocates “absolutely pushed me to the brink” by blocking other proposals to rein in the costs of the program that was expected to grow by $680 million in just one year.
“Their mantra was, you can do anything you want, but you can’t reduce any benefits and you can’t remove any people,” he said. “They fought me every step of the way on ideological grounds, and basically pushed us to the point where we had no alternative to take some drastic action.”
The governor also downplayed the potential problem of having to work with groups who so vigorously opposed him. More important players will include pharmaceutical companies, hospital, doctors and medical equipment manufacturers, he said.
“What’s going to have to happen is not putting together a coalition of liberal advocacy groups for health care, but a coalition of real people who are sitting here on one-sixth of the U.S. economy and try to find some common ground,” he said.
In some respects, Bredesen sounds like former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt when describing his philosophy for reforming health care.
“I certainly believe there’s an underlying right and the federal government ought to be financing a basic level of health care for everybody,” Bredesen said.
Bredesen’s emphasis is on the word basic. Leavitt repeatedly stressed the same emphasis. He listed as his top priority that “every American has access to basic health insurance at an affordable price.”
Bredesen met with Obama for the first time in his Washington office shortly after Obama announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2007.
Bredesen in 1980 founded a health maintenance organization called HealthAmerica Corp., which became the country’s second-largest HMO before he sold it in 1986 for about $400 million.
___
Associated Press writer Erik Schelzig reported from Nashville, Tenn.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By KEVIN FREKING and ERIK SCHELZIG
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — Few governors know the pitfalls of soaring health costs better than Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, which helps explain why President Barack Obama is reportedly considering the Democrat for health secretary.
In 2005, Bredesen cut 170,000 adults from Tennessee’s Medicaid program, called TennCare. He reduced benefits for thousands more.
Critics describe Bredesen’s actions as the biggest cuts in public health insurance in the nation’s history. They believe he’s the wrong person to lead an effort to expand health insurance coverage, and they’re throwing support behind other candidates, including Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, widely viewed as near the top of Obama’s list of candidates to run the Health and Human Services Department.
However, some say Bredesen’s stand shows he’s willing to tackle the toughest of problems.
Before the cuts were made, TennCare’s growth rate was making it harder to pay for education, roads and other critical services. Tennessee led the nation in the percentage of its population on Medicaid and the percentage of its budget going to Medicaid. However, on a per-person basis, Tennessee ranked 48th in state and local tax collections.
Dennis Smith, now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was in charge of Medicaid at the federal level in 2005. He said Bredesen’s actions were “necessary and appropriate” because the program was out of control.
For example, almost every state has some type of system that allows it to approve the amount and types of prescription drugs that beneficiaries get. Tennessee didn’t have such controls. Eligibility rules were also much broader than those of other states, allowing for enrollment of adults who would not have been eligible for Medicaid elsewhere.
The most praise for Bredesen comes from conservatives. Obama has shown a willingness to consider their views in his appointments so far, while many of those on the left of the issue say Bredesen is the wrong choice.
Bredesen emphasized in an interview Tuesday that he hasn’t applied for the HHS job or campaigned for it. But he has launched a counterattack against health care advocates for what he calls a distortion of the events that led to the TennCare cuts in 2005.
“Your name comes out and the next thing you know, people are dumping cans of garbage on you,” he said. “So I’m interested in, first of all, setting the record straight.”
Bredesen said the move to cut the number of TennCare enrollees came after advocates “absolutely pushed me to the brink” by blocking other proposals to rein in the costs of the program that was expected to grow by $680 million in just one year.
“Their mantra was, you can do anything you want, but you can’t reduce any benefits and you can’t remove any people,” he said. “They fought me every step of the way on ideological grounds, and basically pushed us to the point where we had no alternative to take some drastic action.”
The governor also downplayed the potential problem of having to work with groups who so vigorously opposed him. More important players will include pharmaceutical companies, hospital, doctors and medical equipment manufacturers, he said.
“What’s going to have to happen is not putting together a coalition of liberal advocacy groups for health care, but a coalition of real people who are sitting here on one-sixth of the U.S. economy and try to find some common ground,” he said.
In some respects, Bredesen sounds like former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt when describing his philosophy for reforming health care.
“I certainly believe there’s an underlying right and the federal government ought to be financing a basic level of health care for everybody,” Bredesen said.
Bredesen’s emphasis is on the word basic. Leavitt repeatedly stressed the same emphasis. He listed as his top priority that “every American has access to basic health insurance at an affordable price.”
Bredesen met with Obama for the first time in his Washington office shortly after Obama announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2007.
Bredesen in 1980 founded a health maintenance organization called HealthAmerica Corp., which became the country’s second-largest HMO before he sold it in 1986 for about $400 million.
___
Associated Press writer Erik Schelzig reported from Nashville, Tenn.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Obama reverses Bush effort in pollution case
Date: 2/6/2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is reversing a previous Bush administration effort on pollution, pulling back legal arguments in a lawsuit over mercury.
The case was soon to come before the Supreme Court. The Obama administration submitted papers Friday to the court asking for the appeal to be dismissed.
An appeals court last year rejected a Bush administration plan for regulating mercury emissions. It said the plan should not have included allowing utilities to purchase emission credits instead of actually reducing emissions.
Scientists fear mercury pollution leads to neurological problems in infants.
The power industry still has a separate petition challenging the appeals court ruling, which is unaffected by the Obama administration’s action.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is reversing a previous Bush administration effort on pollution, pulling back legal arguments in a lawsuit over mercury.
The case was soon to come before the Supreme Court. The Obama administration submitted papers Friday to the court asking for the appeal to be dismissed.
An appeals court last year rejected a Bush administration plan for regulating mercury emissions. It said the plan should not have included allowing utilities to purchase emission credits instead of actually reducing emissions.
Scientists fear mercury pollution leads to neurological problems in infants.
The power industry still has a separate petition challenging the appeals court ruling, which is unaffected by the Obama administration’s action.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Video: President Obama: Economic Recovery
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UxZNjqVT9M]
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Holder expected to review, change Bush policies
Date: 2/3/2009
By LARRY MARGASAK
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Eric Holder has won confirmation as the first black attorney general, but he’ll have little time to consider his role in history as he decides which Bush administration counterterrorism policies to reverse.
Holder was confirmed 75-21 Monday, with all the opposition coming from Republicans. He will be sworn in Tuesday by Vice President Joe Biden.
For starters, the new attorney general will learn the secrets of the Office of Legal Counsel, whose lawyers justified the use of controversial interrogation tactics and even declined to provide Bush administration documents to internal Justice Department investigators.
Holder will inherit a Justice Department wracked by Bush administration scandals over politically inspired hirings and firings. He has pledged to restore its reputation.
Holder also will play a major role in the future of terrorism detainees.
President Barack Obama, in a major policy shift, signed an executive order to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. He also created a special task force to review detainee policy; Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will serve as co-chairs.
That panel will look at options for apprehension, detention, trial, transfer or release of detainees and report to the president within 180 days.
Holder promised senators he would review why career prosecutors in Washington decided not to prosecute the former head of the department’s Civil Rights Division. An inspector general’s report last month found that Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the division, misled lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.
Another key question facing Holder is whether to reverse former President George W. Bush’s order that three of his former top aides — Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten — should not testify before Congress about firings of U.S. attorneys. Rove and Miers were former aides when Bush gave his order.
If Obama reverses Bush’s policy, it would create a new legal issue: whether a former president’s order against testifying would still be valid.
The Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program is certain to come under Holder’s scrutiny.
After a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks, Congress last year eased the rules under which the government could wiretap American phone and computer lines to listen for terrorists and spies.
Holder promised one senator that he would re-examine a ruling by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey that immigrants facing deportation do not have a right to government-provided lawyers. Holder said he understands the desire to expedite immigration court proceedings, but added that the Constitution also requires that proceedings be fair.
There also could be changes in conducting warrantless surveillance.
Holder’s chief supporter, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said the confirmation was a fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream that everyone would be judged by the content of their character.
“Come on the right side of history,” said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By LARRY MARGASAK
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Eric Holder has won confirmation as the first black attorney general, but he’ll have little time to consider his role in history as he decides which Bush administration counterterrorism policies to reverse.
Holder was confirmed 75-21 Monday, with all the opposition coming from Republicans. He will be sworn in Tuesday by Vice President Joe Biden.
For starters, the new attorney general will learn the secrets of the Office of Legal Counsel, whose lawyers justified the use of controversial interrogation tactics and even declined to provide Bush administration documents to internal Justice Department investigators.
Holder will inherit a Justice Department wracked by Bush administration scandals over politically inspired hirings and firings. He has pledged to restore its reputation.
Holder also will play a major role in the future of terrorism detainees.
President Barack Obama, in a major policy shift, signed an executive order to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. He also created a special task force to review detainee policy; Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will serve as co-chairs.
That panel will look at options for apprehension, detention, trial, transfer or release of detainees and report to the president within 180 days.
Holder promised senators he would review why career prosecutors in Washington decided not to prosecute the former head of the department’s Civil Rights Division. An inspector general’s report last month found that Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the division, misled lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.
Another key question facing Holder is whether to reverse former President George W. Bush’s order that three of his former top aides — Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten — should not testify before Congress about firings of U.S. attorneys. Rove and Miers were former aides when Bush gave his order.
If Obama reverses Bush’s policy, it would create a new legal issue: whether a former president’s order against testifying would still be valid.
The Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program is certain to come under Holder’s scrutiny.
After a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks, Congress last year eased the rules under which the government could wiretap American phone and computer lines to listen for terrorists and spies.
Holder promised one senator that he would re-examine a ruling by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey that immigrants facing deportation do not have a right to government-provided lawyers. Holder said he understands the desire to expedite immigration court proceedings, but added that the Constitution also requires that proceedings be fair.
There also could be changes in conducting warrantless surveillance.
Holder’s chief supporter, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said the confirmation was a fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream that everyone would be judged by the content of their character.
“Come on the right side of history,” said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
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