JABbering Stooge

That seems to be the motto of CIGNA, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, United Health Group and the rest of the major health insurers, according to Raw Story.

The healthcare industry is spending upwards of $1.4 million each day on average to lobby members of Congress on health care legislation, a report issued by Common Cause this week reveals.

Industry spending has nearly doubled since 2000. Healthcare interests contributed $94 million to Congress members during the 2008 election cycle alone — up from $40 million in 2000.

Common Cause’s report has received almost no treatment in the press — with a single article in Bloomberg News and one in the National Journal.

The industry is attempting to alter the course of Democrats’ plans to provide universal health coverage for most Americans.

You’d think that if they have this much money to bribe Congress with, surely they could spare some pocket change for, say, ACTUALLY COVERING POLICYHOLDERS. You’d be sorely mistaken. This story comes barely a month after the murder-by-spreadsheet industry responded to demands by Congress to stop culling the poor and minorities by spitting in Congress’ face en masse.

Talk about chutzpah.

* With apologies to Robert Goodloe Harper.

Oh, geez. Here we go again! (h/t, John Cole)

Investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital, are inventing schemes to reduce the capital cost of risky assets on banks’ balance sheets, in the latest sign that financial market innovation is far from dead.

The schemes, which Goldman insiders refer to as “insurance” and BarCap calls “smart securitisation”, use different mechanisms to achieve the same goal: cutting capital costs by up to half in some cases, at the same time as regulators are threatening to force banks to increase their capital requirements.

BarCap’s structures involve the pooling of assets from several clients into a secured financial product that can be sold on to other investors and rated by a credit rating agency, potentially reducing the capital allocated against the assets by between 10 per cent and 50 per cent.

These new mechanisms are in some respects similar to the discredited structured products, which were widely blamed for fuelling the financial crisis. But the schemes’ backers argue there are two significant differences. First, they involve the securitisation of banks’ existing assets, rather than of new lending. Second, bankers argue that the new products do not disguise the transfer of risk.

Have these morons NOT learned ONE DAMN THING from the subprime mortgage crisis? Or is it time to consult BartCop’s Second Law?

ANY time a person or entity makes a “mistake” that puts extra money (or power) in their pocket, expect them to make that “mistake” again and again and again.

I just hope the SEC is up to the task of going after these financial pirates…

Look, WaPo, I know that money’s tight and all, what with circulation being down — that’s what happens when you fire legit journalists in favor of Dick Whisperers and curmudgeonly psychiatrists — but that’s no excuse for pimping out your ever-shrinking stable of honest reporters and their government contacts to special interest groups whose aim is to spike the president’s most progressive policy proposals.

And in other news, bloggers can’t be trusted because they sometimes use foul language. And link to Wikipedia. Or so I’ve heard.

No seriously. They would rather see the dead litter the streets than force the murder-by-spreadsheet industry to actually uphold their contractual obligations.

According to Max Baucus (DINO), if you’re not his pimps in the health insurance companies, you belong in a psikhushka*:

Fuck you, Sen. Baka. Fuck you to hell.

* Cf.

The Bandit Kings of Wall Street who have royally fucked us over economically got KO’d in tonight’s Special Comment:

Bust the trusts. One would think that conservatives, being the self-proclaimed Sole Defenders of Capitalism™, would understand that monopolies and oligarchies are poisonous to the free market, producing sub-optimal value while appropriating to themselves ill-gotten gains the likes of which would make Attila the Hun green with envy. Sadly, no.

AIG CEO Edward Liddy.

Sidebar: Rep. Paul Hodes (D — NH) is correct in his assessment that AIG should stand for “Arrogance, Incompetence and Greed.”

Okay, Rick Santelli, we get it. You’re a whore for corporate crooks. Really. I think you’ve made that point crystal clear. You can stop being so flagrantly shameless about it, now.

* Lt. Charles Britain, kicking the giant dildo-shaped land mines that have overturned his entire squad’s tanks in the U.S. Manga Corps dub of Dominion: Tank Police. I swear, I Am Not Making This Up.

So I was on my lunch break about an hour ago, when I heard Pillz-E blaming Obama for the large volume of angry letters and death threats AIG executives have been receiving lately:

LIMBAUGH: A lynch mob is expanding: the peasants with their pitchforks surrounding the corporate headquarters of AIG, demanding heads. Death threats are pouring in. All of this being ginned up by the Obama administration.

Really, Rush? Obama’s to blame for the death threats? All he did was mildly criticize AIG’s embezzling of the bailout money to reward the corporate crooks who ran the company into the ground in the first place. If that’s all it takes to gin up death threats against against someone, then Erik Rush is in for a world of hurt.

And compared to what Chuckles Krauthammer and Morton Konracke were saying on the subject (Two Words: “Guillotine Party”), to say nothing of Sen. Charles Grassley (R — IA), it’s highly unlikely that POTUS would be the inspiration for any death threats.

So will the OxyMoron be condemning his ideological butt-buddies for their far harsher remarks on AIG? Better check the temperature in hell first.

Still not liberal.