I recorded 6min of a great book for you guys. Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It's about the US overthrowing Iran's first democratically elected government in 1953... how we made them our enemy in the first place. Kick back and listen over tea.

God help the wealthiest nation that can't look after its old or infirm.

To the long list of reasons American companies aren't hiring — business losses, tight credit, consumer retrenchment — add the fact that many of their older workers are unable, or afraid, to retire.

In other parts of the developed world, people are retiring as planned, because of relatively flush state and corporate pensions that await them. But here in the United States, financial security in old age rests increasingly on private savings, which have taken a beating in the last year. Prospective retirees are clinging to their jobs despite some cherished life plans. -NYTimes

Reminds me of Mary Mornin and George Bush on his "Let's Destroy Social Security Tour," 2005:

MS. MORNIN: Okay, I'm a divorced, single [57 year-old] mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.

BUSH: Fantastic. First of all, you've got the hardest job in America, being a single mom...

MS. MORNIN: I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.

BUSH: You work three jobs?

MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.

BUSH: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)

MS. MORNIN: Not much. Not much.

In the past four days, I have slept for 3 hours twice, 18 hours once, and napped on a bus. I have done three all-nighters: two for work and one partying at a rooftop bonfire of an ultra-hip London flat. I have gotten Jude Law's autograph, stared down a microscope for 34 of 60 work hours, and stayed awake (in the liberal sense) through Hamlet at the Wyndham Theatre. During this time I also devised my 5-year plan.

Steeped in caffeine and with glomeruli burnt into my retinas, I needed to decompress before I could possibly sleep. This required a chocolate-filled breakfast pastry from a shop that didn't open until 7am, so you see my dilemma.

This all leads inevitably to the news. Obviously there was never a chance that I was going to miss Rachel Maddow and Tom Daschle take down Dick Armey and Nobodycares Coburn on Meet the Press.

Nor would I overlook Monday's NYTimes headline. This is fantastic. It's exactly what we need to get the left to make some noise for the public option, and it's working brilliantly. I believe (because I have to believe) that this is a Lincoln playbook strategy of a little hemming and hawing to spur the left to do the heavy lifting against the right-wing spin machine.

Spotlight refocus: check.

Basically, I would drink Anthony Weiner's bath water.

And Jay Rockefeller is finally getting plenty of screen time talking about why the co-op plan would be stupid. I'd take no health reform over a co-op.

Finally, screw you Kent Conrad. I'm so ashamed that the only Unitarian Universalist in the senate is selling out on health care. I don't know why the little oligarchic finance committee has been given the reins; America didn't put 50% Republicans and 50% Conservadems in charge. America voted for Obama's platform of a public option, and the majorities he needs to do it.

Here's a sweet little followup to my rage about the US gov't paying Big Pharma anything they want for Medicare drugs. Here's what happens when the gov't does garner a bulk discount. The US does over 1 million cataract surgeries per year, most on Medicare.

You want to buy a million cataract surgeries? Ok, we'll knock 95% off the price.

Gina Kolata, NYTimes:

A patient in Illinois was charged $12,712 for cataract surgery. Medicare pays $675 for the same procedure. In California, a patient was charged $20,120 for a knee operation that Medicare pays $584 for. And a New Jersey patient was charged $72,000 for a spinal fusion procedure that Medicare covers for $1,629.

Yeah, these are merely telling extremes and not examples of the median fees. These numbers were assembled by insurance companies who want doctors' fees to share some of the blame they're getting. The messages here:

1) The gov't already buys a lot of stuff, and gets great bulk discounts. We should get drugs at bulk discounts too, and that would be one thing that makes it possible to provide cheaper health care with a public option, the option of buying into something essentially like Medicare.

2) The gov't should receive a discount, but they should still cover the cost of Medicare/public services they receive. Hospitals shouldn't be making ends meet by ripping off spinal-fusion-guy at twenty times the price.

I confess that the bankrupt spinal-fusion-guy has my sympathies. But it's the numbers that break my heart. If we pay some of the spinal fusions through tax, then we're paying a little more tax, but much less overall from our wallets or through insurance. And anyone can go private and buy absolutely anything they want, just like in the UK. The UK has spinal fusion for all comers, and yet they spend half as much per person overall.

If you like the organs you have, you get to keep them. I will not be, as you may have heard, harvesting them for my 'Chicago friends.' -Stewart

The US government should not be running death panels. It is far too big and out of control to effectively run something that important. That responsibility should remain where it is now, with private insurance companies. -Samantha Bee

America is the wealthiest country in the world, yet nearly 50 million of our citizens have no access to death panels. That is a disgrace. Yet under Sam's plan here, there is still no public death panel option. Are you suggesting that hard-working Americans who have lost their jobs or fallen ill shouldn't have the same right to be put down in Obama's government death factories? -John Oliver

Universal single-killer shamanistic death panels just represent more Washington mission creep. -Samantha Bee

The problem with the proposed government-run death panels is that they are not universal. Only those 62 and older would be eligible for euthanasia. What about unproductive 55 year olds who dearly deserve to be put out of their misery? Why limit the government mandated mercy killing to those earning more than 50,000 dollars a year? You are deliberately excluding those who need it most. -John Oliver

The killings should be merit-based. Whiners, bored people. People with hairy birthmarks or outies. -Samantha Bee

Daily Show: 10th August 2009.
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PS: Rice University Prof Douglas Brinkley on last night! He was hawking The Wilderness Warrior about Theodore Roosevelt. Sounds good.

Edited from NYTimes' Timothy Egan.

Palin's first Facebook comments since quitting:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society' whether they are worthy of health care.

There is no basis for such a claim in any of the health care bills under consideration in Congress. One House bill has a clause that would pay for counseling for terminally ill patients. Another clause, added by a Republican, would support living wills.

On ABC's This Week, Newt Gingrich said, "you’re asking us to trust the government." By such reasoning the currency is worthless, you shouldn't call the police, and no one should join the military or enroll in a public school.

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The transcript from This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Those phrases appear nowhere in the bill. The only thing...

GINGRICH: But...

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but let me just explain what's in the bill and then get you to respond to that. The only thing in the bill is they would allow Medicare to pay for what they say is voluntary counseling on end-of-life issues.

GINGRICH: I think people are very concerned, when you start talking about cost controls, that a bureaucracy -- we don't -- you're asking us to trust the government. Now, I'm not talking about the Obama administration. I'm talking about the government. You're asking us to decide that we believe that the government is to be trusted.

We know people who have said routinely, well, you're going to have to make decisions. You're going to have to decide. Communal standards historically is a very dangerous concept.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not in the bill.

GINGRICH: But the bill's -- the bill's 1,000 pages of setting up mechanisms. It sets up 45 different agencies. It has all sorts of panels. You're asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in -- in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.

DEAN: Well, look, this is something Newt and I agree on. I don't want somebody in between the doctor and the patient. I don't want the possibility of losing your health insurance. I don't want people setting standards or denying care. That's all what we have now under the private health insurance system. That's what happens.

Look, I've practiced -- I've practiced for 10 years. My wife is still practicing. Never once did I have a Medicare bureaucrat tell me what I could or couldn't do for a patient, but all the time we have bureaucrats from the insurance companies calling up and saying, "We're not going to cover this, and we're not going to pay for that, and we're denying coverage of that."

The system we have right now is broken. We need to fix it. I think giving the American people some choices about how to fix it makes sense.

(Go Dean!)

But seriously? "You're asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in -- in establishing euthanasia." Outrageous. What the hell kind of logic is that? There "clearly are people in America who believe in" absolutely anything. We have a government to protect us from death panels. This is, you know, in the Constitution 'n stuff. We voted for the promise of a public option. We have never, will never, vote for death panels. (We buy them from insurance companies!)

Research by Skye Gurney (Time) surprised me on several points.

Percentage of over-15yos who smoke. (* denotes countries with increasing cigarette consumption from 2002-2006)

49% *Russia
36% UK
36% Turkey
32% China
32% France
32% *Germany
29% Japan
29% *Malaysia
26% Ireland
26% *Italy
26% Philippines
26% Bangladesh
25% Australia
25% Mexico
24% US
22% Canada
21% *Pakistan
19% India
18% South Africa
18% *Iran
14% Iraq
8% Congo
7% Nigeria
6% Ghana

The article was about how the tobacco industry is gearing up to try and addict Africa, which has largely avoided the kind of rates seen elsewhere.

n.b. About 2mil people die from HIV/AIDS per year, whereas nearly 6mil people die from smoking. (Nearly 8mil die from ischemic heart disease with 1mil of those attributed to smoking; 3mil die of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with 1.5mil of those from smoking, &c.)

The UK gets pretty much the best deals on pharmaceuticals of any wealthy country because they drive a hard bargain. Britain won't buy unless the price hits their required cost-benefit demand. You know what this means? We're subsidizing the UK health care system.

Pfizer et al. make a tiny profit margin off of Britain because they make up the difference on us. Britain gets the cheap rates they demand expressly because America has passed laws saying that we will pay any price Big Pharma asks. This is the famous Bush scam of giving the people popular stuff (drugs and war) by racking up debt for future administrations to deal with, funneling the invisible money to his industry buddies.

In July 2004, it was revealed that Thomas A. Scully, Medicare Administrator, had ordered Richard Foster, a Medicare actuary, to withhold information from Congress on pain of termination. Foster had projected that the [Medicare Prescription Drug Act] would cost at least 139 billion dollars more than the White House was claiming.

We should tell Pfizer that to get a seat at the table, American taxpayers won't be carrying the burden of making drugs cheap for the UK, nor will they be leached by industry for astronomical profits.

Further to my ObamaFail Tweet that the White House will not seek to negotiate prices with drug companies:

The [widespread problem of corporate control of politics] can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. [...] Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week [it was] confirmed that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span. - Frank Rich, NYTimes.

So, Obama. What the fuck are you doing cutting back-room deals with Tauzin?

And more importantly, why isn't anyone paying me to make commercials?

Conservative Democrat Ben Nelson wants Americans to pay ten times the real cost of prescription drugs... so the British can get them cheap. Is this the health care you voted for? Let Ben Nelson know that Americans want a fair deal from drug companies. _{^{PaidForByTheAllianceForSageAdvice.}}

I've been listening to Mahler's 5th on repeat, and it makes scenes from Russian Ark play in my mind. I saw that film in Tasmania in 2003 and haven't thought much about it since, but this symphony is an intense and romantic dance in my mind, a surreal murmured poem against soaring visuals, a fervid love story in movement. I've got a Chicago Symphony recording of it that catches the musicians' breathing, some page-turning as well, and it's like the breaths of the dancers, the spiral swishing of satin across a magnificent dance hall. It's balletic in some parts, but a ballet would be redundant to the narrative in the music. I wish I could describe this music or my relationship to it without adjective OD, but I reach to find something suited to the task. People must have started making up words once there was music to describe. Too bad no one ballroom dances to symphonies, because when I close my eyes to this one, it's all I can see.

Bill Powell of Time wrote an intriguing piece on China's economy. Here are some dull notes that don't do it justice:

Stats on China:

-China acted quickly on a stiumulus: $586bil, or 13% of GDP, over 2 years.
- China's economy grew 7.9% this quarter and will probably expand 8% or more this year.
- China's retail is up 16%.
- They were already in a shovel-ready infrastructure-binge when the crash hit: they spent $41bil on rail last year, and will spend $88bil this year. (God, imagine if we spend that on high speed rail. China, it was noted, has a culture of IMBY, while we're the NIMBY types.)
- From 2008-2010, China will account for 3/4 of the world's growth. (Holy shit, right?)
- 80% of Chinese growth will be attributable to gov't spending.
- A Wall Street newsletter (Grant's Interest Rate Observer) points out that some aspects of the Chinese economy mirror the credit boom and gush of lending ($1.1tril so far this year, more than 2008 total) that produced the US housing bubble that was key to this whole mess in the first place.
       - Shanghai exchange soared more than 80% this year.
       - Relatedly, 30% of China's new lending found its way
       into equities rather than new business, partially due
       to the sclerotic export-manufacturing sector which is
       suffering from low foreign demand.
       - Chinese companies have so much cheap financing that
       they're dumping proceeds into equity markets for lack
       of a better alternative.
- In 2007, only 3% of China's total bank assets were nonperforming loans.

So is China going to save the world? Answer: not yet. China's consumption is about that of France's, and no one's calling for them to save the world.

- US economy: $13tril (21% of global GDP)
- Chinese economy: $4.4tril (6.4% of global GDP)
- US consumer spending = 70% of US GDP
- Chinese consumer spending = 40% of China's GDP
- US annual per capita income: $39k
- EU annual per capita income: $33.4k
- China's annual per capita income: $6k

Some stats on US:

- US economy will contract ~2.6% this year
- Unemployment has hit 9.5% so far
- US savings rate went from 0 to 7% in 9 months (dude... that's a fat savings-account-baby.)