[worry]

[worry]

This dude is literally an imbecile. http://www.google.co...626fc6331c98162

Romney says he likes parts of 'Obamacare' (AP) – 5 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who promised early in his campaign to repeal President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, says he would keep several important parts of the overhaul.

"Of course there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I'm going to put in place," he said in an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." ''One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage."

Romney also said he would allow young adults to keep their coverage under their parents' health-insurance.

Those provisions have been two of the more popular parts of Obama's Affordable Care Act.

"I say we're going to replace Obamacare. And I'm replacing it with my own plan," Romney said. "And even in Massachusetts when I was governor, our plan there deals with pre-existing conditions and with young people."

[HoosierDaddy]

Etch-a-Sketch it up Mitt!

[Terez]

This is great. What's really funny about it is that those are very nearly the only parts of the deal that Obama liked; the rest of it was pretty much compromise positions he was forced into by the GOP and the power players.

[worry]

Plus the "unpopular" segments (also present in Romneycare of course, because they are necessary) are all about paying for the popular ones...you know, fiscal responsibility. Both parties generally have trouble making the case for paying for things, cuz there's an endemic cowardice around the issue of taxation/revenues...and when someone tries to impart responsibility into a program of this size, the sharks smell blood, and that person gets demagogued across the head over it. But this issue's not just the problem of the politicians, as civilians are just as culpable. If your state has the initiative/petition process (as CA does) then you see this time and again, no notion of cause and effect. So in that sense I'm kinda proud that the DNC stuck by the ACA instead of skirting around it (though I do still feel like saying "too little too late", even if SCOTUS already gave us some relief on the issue).

This post has been edited by worrywort: 09 September 2012 - 09:41 PM

[worry]

That was fast.

http://m.motherjones...isting-conditio


Within Hours, Mitt Romney Takes Back Everything He Said About Preexisting Conditions
By Kevin Drum on Sun. September 9, 2012 5:01 PM PDT

On national TV this morning, with millions of people watching, Mitt Romney told David Gregory that there were parts of Obamacare he actually liked. In fact, he said, one of the goals of his healthcare plan "is to make sure that those with preexisting conditions can get coverage." A few hours later, with approximately zero people listening, a spokesman quietly "clarified" what he meant:

In reference to how Romney would deal with those with preexisting conditions and young adults who want to remain on their parents’ plans, a Romney aide responded that there had been no change in Romney’s position and that “in a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.”

As it happens, we already have a competitive market for individual insurance. In addition, we already have demand for coverage of preexisting conditions. And yet, the marketplace doesn't make policies available to people with preexisting conditions.

Why? Because policies that cover preexisting conditions are big money losers unless you charge premiums high enough that no one could afford them. Because of that, nobody bothers to offer them in the first place. That's how the free market works. It would be nice if Romney could explain how he intends to square this circle.

It would also be nice if the mainstream press reported the fact that Romney doesn't plan to make sure those with preexisting conditions can get health coverage just as loudly as they reported his original misstatement. I'm not holding my breath.

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

On a related note, Mitt's own website is also murky on what he means.

http://www.mittromne...ues/health-care

I thought that a pre-existing condition was one you had prior to to buying insurance, not one that comes up while you are under an insurance plan. Or is it standard in the US that your insurer can cut you off at renewal time if you have come down with something?

[Terez]

worrywort, on 10 September 2012 - 02:39 AM, said:

That was fast.

http://m.motherjones...isting-conditio

As it happens, we already have a competitive market for individual insurance. In addition, we already have demand for coverage of preexisting conditions. And yet, the marketplace doesn't make policies available to people with preexisting conditions.

Why? Because policies that cover preexisting conditions are big money losers unless you charge premiums high enough that no one could afford them. Because of that, nobody bothers to offer them in the first place. That's how the free market works. It would be nice if Romney could explain how he intends to square this circle.

Gwynn ap Nudd, on 10 September 2012 - 03:38 AM, said:

I thought that a pre-existing condition was one you had prior to to buying insurance, not one that comes up while you are under an insurance plan. Or is it standard in the US that your insurer can cut you off at renewal time if you have come down with something?

An article from the LA Times:

http://articles.lati...ess/fi-hiltzik2

And a quote from Griftopia, which has some personal significance for me since I was in the same boat as Gene Taylor (my then-Congressman) and Trent Lott (my then-Senator). Well, not exactly the same boat, since they at least had money. And they probably had the federal flood insurance referenced. (We didn't because we weren't in a flood zone; Katrina had an unprecedented storm surge and flooded many areas never flooded before. We did, however, have hurricane coverage, which is at least now called simply 'wind' coverage; that wasn't always the case.) This is from Chapter 6: "The Trillion-Dollar Band-Aid", which is all about Obamacare. (But this excerpt, from the middle, barely mentions it at all.)

Matt Taibbi said:

Almost everyone in America is familiar with the Sherman Antitrust Act, and most people have a fairly good idea of why it was enacted. The law was passed in 1890 (sponsored, ironically, by a predecessor of Max Baucus, a Senate Finance Committee chairman named John Sherman) and was designed to curtail the power of the monopolistic supercompanies that were beginning to dominate American business.

The original law grew out of an investigation into the practices of the insurance, coal, railroad, and oil industries in Ohio, where state officials had begun to see evidence of collusion and price-fixing among those firms, one of which was John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The truly amusing thing about the Sherman Antitrust Act (and the related state vanguard legislation, Ohio's Valentine Antitrust Act of 1898) is that most modern Americans look back at the period when powerful companies routinely got together and colluded to constrict supply and jack up prices as something out of the Stone Age, impossible to conceive of in the modern United States.

In the case of Rockefeller in Ohio, the old buzzard had arranged things leading up to the turn of the century so that his control over the oil supply into Ohio was almost absolute; he could therefore contract the oil supply on demand and escalate prices as he pleased. He was actually tried once in the Hancock County courthouse under the Valentine Act and in that case one of the jurors, a Mr. C.J. Myers, was twice offered a bribe of five hundred dollars to hang the jury, which was hot to convict Rockefeller. Unlike our modern congressmen, who would have taken the money without blinking, Myers refused the bribe and instead ratted out Rockefeller's henchmen, leading to new charges.

The Sherman and Valentine acts were mostly ineffective at first but ultimately were used to break up all of the famous monopolies: Standard Oil, which became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Amoco, among others; American Tobacco, which became R. J. Reynolds and Liggett and Myers; and the American Railway Union, which had forced the government into its business thanks to the Pullman fiasco of 1893.

George Pullman, the millionaire owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company, had decided to execute numerous wage cuts. The thing is, most of his employees lived in Pullman, Illnois, a town he virtually owned, meaning his employees were forced to buy from his stores, rent his houses, and so on. When he cut wages repeatedly without cutting other prices in Pullman, the workers flipped and, led by Eugene Debs, went on strike.

So Pullman did a brilliant thing and decided to attach U.S. mail cars to his Pullman trains. Without workers servicing the mail cars, the mail stopped operating and the strikers were suddenly criminals guilty of interfering with the delivery of the U.S. Mail. Grover Cleveland sent twenty thousand troops to break up the strike and get the trains running, and Debs got six months in jail.

On the flip side, however, the Sherman Act was shortly thereafter used to break up Pullman's authority. This was the sort of thing Congress used to have to do to make sure revered businessmen didn't act like antebellum plantation owners, and the fact that both Congress and a few presidents (most notably Teddy Roosevelt) fought hard to give these laws teeth and break up these companies provides a sharp contrast between what government used to be like and what government is like, well, now.

However, the Sherman story wasn't entirely rosy. It seems there was one important exception to the Sherman Act, and that was the insurance business, which by custom and in many cases by statute was simply not regarded as "commerce" under the trust-busting laws designed to regulate interstate commerce.

And for decades insurance companies basically had carte blanche to behave exactly as Rockefeller and Pullman did, until in the early forties a southern cartel of insurance firms went a little too far and got themselves dragged into the Supreme Court.

The case involved a group of insurance firms headquartered primarily in Georgia called the South-Eastern Underwriters Association, which were basically pulling all the same old shit Rockefeller pulled in Ohio, creating an impenetrable local cartel that dominated the whole market and then not only fixing prices but intimidating vendors and customers by threatening to walk away entirely if their price demands were not met (hold on to that thought—that theme will resurface in a moment).

The SEUA's lawyers in this case somewhat nonsensically argued that the federal government did not have the authority to regulate insurance as interstate commerce because insurance was somehow not commerce.

These appellants were backed by decades of congressional decisions affirming, if not always directly, their contention that the Sherman Act was not intended to apply to insurance companies. Hugo Black and a majority of other justices disagreed and threw U.S. v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association back in their faces, announcing once and for all that insurance companies operating across state lines were interstate commerce and therefore could be regulated by the federal government.

The Supreme Court had spoken, but the insurance companies weren't giving up. They immediately turned to the Senate, where they had an ally in an unbelievable asshole of a Nevada senator named Pat McCarran.

McCarran might have been the Joe McCarthy of his era if McCarthy hadn't been more of a press hound, though he did achieve another sort of fame. He was the model for the horny extortionist character Senator Pat Geary in The Godfather: Part II, whose great onscreen moment came when he tried to shake down Michael Corleone for a gaming license, saying: "I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family."

To which Al Pacino offered the classic reply: "Senator, you can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally."

In any case, in addition to being the inspiration for one of the great iconic corrupt politicians in the history of cinema, McCarran spent much of his career tilting at communist conspiracy windmills and with great fanfare got passed the McCarran-Walter Act, which imposed quotas on certain types of immigrants. He also passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which forced political parties like the American Communist Party to register with the federal government.

Despite his fetish for wielding federal power, McCarran had a very different opinion about its purview over business and worked feverishly to keep the government off the backs of the insurance companies. In 1944 he teamed up with Homer Ferguson, a Michigan senator who also had a flair for the anticompetitive, to pass the McCarran-Ferguson Act.

Hilariously, Ferguson too was the inspiration for a corrupt senator of cinema yore. If you've seen the underrated Jeff Bridges Movie Tucker, the Ferguson character is played by Lloyd Bridges; he's the federal heavy working with the big automakers to make sure the upstart automaker/inventor Preston Tucker spent his days battling phantom federal investigations instead of making cheap, efficient cars that might have challenged the big three, which incidentally are basically all bankrupt now. [2010]

Working together, these two dumbasses McCarran and Ferguson passed their law, which essentially invalidated the U.S. v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association Supreme Court decision and established the ground rules for decades of insurance robbery.

Even the way this unseemly mess of a bill was passed was an embarrassment to the whole concept of democracy. The bill that McCarran and Ferguson introduced to the Senate and which also passed in the House was originally written to maintain the authority of the states over the insurance industry, but it also expressly included a provision maintaining that the Sherman Act would apply if and when the state laws proved inadequate.

The original McCarran-Ferguson Act was also intended, quite explicitly, to be temporary, and according to the original text was supposed to expire in 1947. Because the bill as written did not seem all that controversial, and would in any case be temporary, it sailed through both the House (where it was passed by the Judiciary Committee without a debate) and the Senate with very limited discussion, to say nothing of opposition. Even Franklin Roosevelt, when he signed the bill into law, was absolutely explicit that it was designed to expire in the near future.

"After a moratorium period, the antitrust laws," Roosevelt said at the signing ceremony, "will be applicable in full force and effect to the business of insurance."

But here's the thing about Congress. No matter how much any bill is debated in either the House or the Senate, it can always be rewritten, even written to have an opposite meaning, in the conference committee process, which takes place after bills have been passed in both houses.

In this case, the McCarran-Ferguson Act emerged from conference with an important new clause added: it said that after January 1, 1948, the Sherman, Clayton, and Federal Trade Commission acts "shall be applicable to the business of insurance to the extent that such business is not regulated by State law."

In other words, instead of being a temporary moratorium designed to explicitly allow the Sherman Act to come into play when state laws proved inadequate, that law now was a permanent act that explicitly excluded the application of the Sherman Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act (an extension of Sherman that prohibited other forms of collusion and intimidation), and the FTC Act in any case where there were already existing state laws.

Thus the insurance industry was given a permanent license to steal. There were all sorts of ways in which insurance companies, freed of federal regulatory authority, could collude to manipulate prices. Among other things, they pooled loss information and were allowed legally to set prices through cartel-like organizations such as the Insurance Services Office (ISO).

The same sorts of corporate-crime activities that are outlined in great cloak-and-dagger detail in books like Kurt Eichenwald's The Informant—which described the high-stakes efforts of a group of agricultural conglomerates to evade the FBI and foreign police agencies while they surreptitiously colluded to set the prices of a feed product called lysine—are done openly and legally in the insurance world.

"If a bunch of construction contractors got together and decided to set the prices of bricks and mortar, they'd all go to prison," says Robert Hunter of the Consumer Federation of America, who served as a federal insurance administrator under President Ford. "But in insurance, it's all legal."

Insurance companies could also collude to threaten boycotts or worse, depending on (a) how big their market share was or (b ) how small a state they were dealing with, meaning how totally they had the local population by the balls.

A great example of the kind of bullshit that goes on all the time in insurance is the state of Mississippi, which became famous as one of the racketeering capitals of America even before Katrina.

Back in 2003 there was a much-ballyhooed malpractice crisis in which newspaper and TV reporters flooded the state to describe a tort system run amok, where patients in pursuit of big malpractice claims—what was called "jackpot justice" by groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and repeated by their stooges in the media and Congress—hit up doctors for bogus settlements. While some of this undeniably went on, what was far less publicized was the insurance industry's unique response to this crisis.

"We had a malpractice crisis in Mississippi," says Brian Martin, and aide to Congressman Gene Taylor. "The insurance companies basically said, 'We're going to stop issuing malpractice insurance to ob-gyns, neurosurgeons, and emergency room doctors, unless Mississippi passes tort reform.' "

Crucially, this wasn't one company making the threat, and the threat wasn't to pull insurance for doctors who'd been sued. This was a whole group of supposed competitors acting in concert, threatening to abandon whole classes of doctors, regardless of their records.

Taylor had been a state senator in Mississippi and in that capacity had actually supported tort reform to rein in excessive settlement awards, which he believed were a real problem. But once he reached Congress he started to notice a pattern.

"As soon as the stock market started going in the tank and insurance companies weren't making enough money, suddenly there was always a tort reform crisis," explains his aide Martin.

Then in 2005 Katrina happened, and that's where we really saw the fangs of the antitrust exemption. Government agencies determined that there were at least four hours of hurricane-force winds during the storm surge, and it was obvious to everyone in the area that wind accounted for much of the damage—I myself was in the Biloxi area shortly after the storm and saw houses miles inland simply blown down.

"You had people who were standing in their houses when the wind blew them down," Marvin Koury, a real estate adviser in Gulfport, Mississippi, told me back then, "and the insurance companies were trying to tell them it was flood."

Despite that fact and despite the fact that in larger, better-regulated states like Louisiana insurance companies paid out huge claims to home-owners for wind damage, in Mississippi the local insurance cartel—in this case an ad hoc union of State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, USAA, and many others—decided en masse to deny all claims for wind damage except for those that the homeowner could demonstrate took place separate from flood damage.

State Farm's statement right after Katrina went as follows: "Where wind acts concurrently with flooding to cause damage to the insured property, coverage for the loss exists only under flood coverage, if available."

Nationwide issued a similar statement, telling adjusters that "if loss is caused by wind and flood there is no coverage."

Why pass the buck from wind to flood? That's easy—there was a federal, taxpayer-backed program to cover flood damage! In this case the National Flood Insurance Program issued many ruined homeowners checks from Uncle Sam to repair their flooded houses. And in a supreme bit of irony, the federal government contracted out to private companies to issue those rewards, even as some of those same companies were denying their own wind coverage.

"So here's State Farm," explains Martin, "running around, saying, here's your $250,000 from the government for your flood damage, but oh, by the way, we don't see any wind damage."

Taylor's home was one of the ones State Farm decided not to cover, which was bad enough—messing with a U.S. congressman. But the insurers were so brazen they denied coverage to Trent fucking Lott, who at the time was not very far removed from being the Senate majority leader, undoubtedly one of the most powerful men in America (to say nothing of Mississippi).

What was State Farm's final offer to Trent Lott, who wanted this out-of-state insurer to pay the claim on his home? Its final answer was: "Nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally..."

And that's not even a joke. Lott ultimately was forced to sue State Farm for refusing to pay up for wind damage to his home. He later issued a statement:

"Today I have joined in a lawsuit against my longtime insurance company because it will not honor my policy, nor those of thousands of other South Mississippians, for coverage against wind damage due to Hurricane Katrina."

The thing of it was, neither Lott nor anyone else could do a damn thing, legally, about these sorts of moves by insurance companies. Way back in 1980, an amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act had been passed making it basically illegal for the federal government not only to investigate the insurance industry but even to conduct studies in that area.

That change had come about when the FTC had begun making noise about investigating the industry's practice of charging higher property and casualty insurance premiums based on credit scores. Almost immediately the industry had lobbied to preempt this investigation, and section 6 amending the FTC Act was passed.

In the report accompanying the amendment it was written that "under the amendment, the FTC's investigative and reporting powers [emphasis mine] are made explicitly inapplicable to the business of insurance."

Any industry that basically has government license to (a) fix prices and (b ) refuse to uphold legal contracts is going to make money almost without regard to the economic climate.

That helps explain why in 2005, despite the fact that it was blindsided by Katrina, one of the biggest natural disasters in American history, the property/casualty industry made an after-tax profit of $48.8 billion—a new record, beating out the previous year's record of $40.5 billion.

In 2006, with no hurricane to muddy the waters, the industry made a whopping after-tax profit of $68.1 billion. They were able to get away with this despite taking a dump on two sitting members of Congress, who found themselves with absolutely no way to successfully fight back.

The only way to get at this sort of crap was to overturn the entire McCarran-Ferguson Act. Fortunately, that crazy episode in 2005 in which the insurers decided to fuck with Trent Lott led to an unprecedented left-right coalition in Congress that was bent on repealing those antitrust laws. In 2007 Taylor teamed up with Oregon's Pete DeFazio and Louisiana Republican Bobby Jindal to propose a repeal of McCarran-Ferguson. In the Senate, Lott teamed up with Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Pat Leahy of Vermont to go after McCarran-Ferguson.

They failed. Not even the specter of poor Trent Lott getting up and personally telling his sob story about getting fucked around by State Farm could move the Senate to do something about the situation, not even out of corporate loyalty.† In fact, neither the House nor the Senate bill ever made it out of committee. The bill was opposed by basically every single insurance industry lobbying arm in the country. The insurance industry that cycle spent more than $46 million in political contributions. Notably, Pat Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee at the time, received a grand total of $4,500, in contrast to the $287,000 they gave to fellow committee member John Cornyn, who came out in opposition to the gambit.

Then Barack Obama got elected, with a strong mandate to reform American health care. Surely something could be done this time, right? After all, how was it even possible—theoretically—to pass a massive new federal health care bill giving the federal government regulatory authority over the health insurance industry without touching the insurance industry's antitrust exemption? Leaving aside for a moment the obvious point that including anything less than a full repeal of McCarran-Ferguson in a health care bill would be pointless, how could such an insane move even be accomplished logistically?

Well, Barack Obama and the Democrats figured out a way.

†Lott's weepy My house! They took my fucking house! speech on March 7, 2007: "It wasn't until after Hurricane Katrina that I gained a true understanding of the fact that the insurance industry had a blanket exemption from our antitrust law. And as I witnessed the reprehensible behavior of the insurance industry in their response to Katrina, I became curious about the history, rationale, and wisdom of such a broad exemption from federal oversight."

This post has been edited by Terez: 10 September 2012 - 04:08 AM

[Terez]

I just read this in the comments of the Mother Jones article Worry posted:

worrywort, on 10 September 2012 - 02:39 AM, said:

http://m.motherjones...isting-conditio

The article Mother Jones referenced has updated the campaign's official stance:

Quote

UPDATE: In reference to pre-existing conditions, a Romney aide responds, "Governor Romney will ensure that discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage is prohibited," and refers me to these remarks Romney made in Florida in June:

I also want to make sure that people can't get dropped if they have a preexisting condition. … So let's say someone has been continuously insured and they develop a serious condition and let's say they lose their job or they change jobs, they move and they go to a new place. I don't want them to be denied insurance because they've got some preexisting condition. So we're going to have to make sure that the law we replace Obamacare with assures that people who have a preexisting condition, who've been insured in the past are able to get insurance in the future so they don't have to worry about that condition keeping them from getting the kind of health care they deserve.

Whiplash!

[amphibian]

The Economist apparently dis-endorses Romney: http://www.economist...864?frsc=dg%7Ca

[Morgoth]

They haven't decided whom to endorse so far I think, but they seem little enamoured of their two choices.

[Vengeance]

Some members of the Media have been trying to pressure Nate into ignoring the convention bumps.

538


He has a very polite and nice way of telling them to fuck off.

[HoosierDaddy]

Fix your link, Venge. Take the "http" off the end of it. Results in a dead page.

Also, Bachmann only has a 2% lead right now. That'd be great.

[Terez]

amphibian, on 10 September 2012 - 11:55 AM, said:

The Economist apparently dis-endorses Romney: http://www.economist...864?frsc=dg%7Ca

I'm loving the comments on that article. The Romney supporters are few and far between, and when they show up they're incoherent.

[Vengeance]

Terez, on 10 September 2012 - 07:35 PM, said:

amphibian, on 10 September 2012 - 11:55 AM, said:

The Economist apparently dis-endorses Romney: http://www.economist...864?frsc=dg%7Ca

I'm loving the comments on that article. The Romney supporters are few and far between, and when they show up they're incoherent.

Terez how can you read the comments?

[Terez]

I always try to read comments on important articles. Sometimes it's difficult, but this time it wasn't. I like to gauge the electorate; 'who is voting for who' often doesn't tell the full story.

[Vengeance]

Terez, on 10 September 2012 - 08:04 PM, said:

I always try to read comments on important articles. Sometimes it's difficult, but this time it wasn't. I like to gauge the electorate; 'who is voting for who' often doesn't tell the full story.

Your a better person then me. I assume that people who comment on a article are either insane or a old person who doesn't want to spend time with their grand kids.

[Terez]

Vengeance, on 10 September 2012 - 09:18 PM, said:

Terez, on 10 September 2012 - 08:04 PM, said:

I always try to read comments on important articles. Sometimes it's difficult, but this time it wasn't. I like to gauge the electorate; 'who is voting for who' often doesn't tell the full story.

Your a better person than me. I assume that people who comment on a article are either insane or a old person who doesn't want to spend time with their grand kids.

I am one of those people that doesn't comment very often. Every now and then I do. Like, I tried on the Taibbi article, but 1) I got better responses here, and 2) the comments were too active to keep up with and the disqus direct links (email notifications) don't work for rollingstone.com. I have notifications for disqus because I tried to participate in my local (south Mississippi) newspaper forum, but that turned out to be a little much for me. There are only a few dozen regulars, and most of them are conservative trolls. Every now and then I go through and like all the local liberals' posts; they're in general pretty awesome and, as you say, better people than me for being able to handle that atmosphere.

[Terez]

Gnaw, on 02 September 2012 - 06:08 PM, said:

One I've read that appears to be a good companion to Taibbi's is The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis.
Lewis focuses on the (very) few who saw what was coming and made 10s and 100s of millions by betting huge that it was all going to come apart.

As I said earlier, I had already ordered this when you recommended it. It came in a couple of days ago (it was delayed by Isaac), and I've really been tearing through it. Like Taibbi, Lewis has the gift of narrative. I'm also reading Econned by Yves Smith, the Bogle book (The Clash of the Cultures), and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter. And also All the Devils are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. None of those are as easy to read as Taibbi and Lewis. I also got Taibbi's Spanking the Donkey just to have something light to read when I get sick of the other ones, but I'll probably finish Lewis today before I go back to the others (probably Yves Smith first). McLean and Nocera give a really good broad view of the details leading to the financial crisis, and it's definitely filling in some holes, but Yves Smith, while filling in some good details, rejects this approach (the standard approach on the crisis) to put it in the historical context of the rise of neoclassical economics. Some of the media reviews of the McLean/Nocera book say it's the most comprehensive version of the standard crisis-book approach, though, and from what I've read of it so far compared to other books I've read, that seems to be the case. But Lewis really hones in on the people who saw it coming and made money betting against it, and he's definitely the best source for that story, quite aside from being highly entertaining. Schumpeter is just one of those interestingly correct classical economists. His theory was that democratic socialism was inevitable not because the proletariat would demand it, but because the underlying principle of capitalism—competition—is inherently and inevitably self-defeating.

This post has been edited by Terez: 10 September 2012 - 11:14 PM

[Morgoth]

If you really want to visite the crazy parts of The Economist, check out the comment sections on any article discussing China.

Or even worse. Check out the comment section of any article discussing the relationship between India and China.

I despair for the future of the region.