Oh. My. God. In the "richest country in the world". There are no words for how unacceptable this is:

Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Your neighbor may be using some of these programs but it's not the kind of thing people want to talk about," Rank said.

The analysis was released Monday in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The authors say it's a medical issue pediatricians need to be aware of because children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty.

"This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children," Rank said.

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My brother is an elementary school teacher in a mostly minority area, and we've talked about this before. He told me that the school lunch program is often the only meal many children at his school get each day. And we know how healthy those meals are. My brother (and other teachers) have taken to buying fresh fruit out of their own meager salaries to make available to these kids.

The ramifications of this heartbreaking demographic will reverberate over decades: in health statistics, in education levels, in our economy, in crime statistics. And it's a situation for which no one should be complacent.

Paul Krugman explains why we can't settle for stabilizing the economy, and says unless there's a bigger economic stimulus package, high unemployment is here to stay for a long, long time:

The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us. Solid growth will continue only if private spending takes up the baton as the effect of the stimulus fades. And so far there’s no sign that this is happening.

So the government needs to do much more. Unfortunately, the political prospects for further action aren’t good.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

But can we afford to do more? We can’t afford not to.

High unemployment doesn’t just punish the economy today; it punishes the future, too. In the face of a depressed economy, businesses have slashed investment spending — both spending on plant and equipment and “intangible” investments in such things as product development and worker training. This will hurt the economy’s potential for years to come.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

O.K., I know I’m being impractical: major economic programs can’t pass Congress without the support of relatively conservative Democrats, and these Democrats have been telling reporters that they have lost their appetite for stimulus.

But I hope their stomachs start rumbling soon. We now know that stimulus works, but we aren’t doing nearly enough of it. For the sake of today’s unemployed, and for the sake of the nation’s future, we need to do much more.

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Amazing, how concerned bobbleheads become about the deficit right after the Republican administration that created it has left the scene of the crime. As people like Paul Krugman keep reminding us, there are obvious economic reasons the deficit cannot be the priority during a major recession. But those facts seem to elude David Gregory during this NBC News’ “Meet the Press” interview with Tim Geithner:

DAVID GREGORY: Let me talk about the deficit and the debt. These are alarming numbers. You've said they are. Let's look at the deficit-- since inauguration day. $1.2 trillion, now $1.4 trillion. It's up 17 percent. The overall debt, inauguration day, $10.6 trillion, now, $11.9 trillion. What's it gonna be a year from now?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well, it's gonna have to come down now. It's-- it's too high. And I think everybody understands this. You know, we got these two central imperatives. Restore growth, create jobs. But make sure people understand we're gonna have to bring those fiscal deficits down as growth recovers. First growth, though. Without growth, you can't fix those long term fiscal problems. But you're not gonna have a recovery that's gonna be strong enough unless people are confident we're gonna have the will to go back to living within our means.

DAVID GREGORY: How do you bring it down, though? Do taxes have to go up?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well, we're gonna have to do-- we're gonna have to make some hard choices. But we're not really at the point yet, David, where we're gonna know what's gonna be the best path forward. The President's very committed to bringing down these deficits. He's very committed to doing so in a way that's not gonna add to the burden of people-- people making less than $250,000 a year.

DAVID GREGORY: I mean, I think a lot of people - I think its fair to say - what are hard choices? I mean, what hard choices have been made so far? Are you gonna raise taxes?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: We're gonna have to bring our resources and our expenditures more into balance.

DAVID GREGORY: So, it's possible.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well-- again, the President's committed to make sure we get this economy back on track. We'll bring down deficits over time. And--

DAVID GREGORY: But Mr. Secretary you talked about hard choices. So, why can't you give a straight answer as to whether taxes have to come up, when you have a deficit this big?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Because David, right now we're focused on getting growth back on track. Okay? And we're not at the point yet where we have to decide exactly what it's gonna take. And I just want to say this very clearly. He was committed in the campaign to make-- he said in the campaign. And he is committed to make sure we do this in a way that is not gonna add to the burden on people making less than $250,000 a year. Now, it's gonna be hard to do that. But he's committed to doing that. And we can do that.

DAVID GREGORY: You can do it. But it's still a chance that you'd have to raise taxes and go back on that, if you've got a debt this big?

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Bob Herbert, who so often sees what everyone else in the Village misses, writes about how young, promising grads are being shut out of the workforce:

As jobs become increasingly scarce, more and more college graduates are working for free, at internships, which is great for employers but something of a handicap for a young man or woman who has to pay for food or a place to live.

“The whole idea of apprenticeships is coming back into vogue, as it was 100 years ago,” said John Noble, director of the Office of Career Counseling at Williams College. “Certain industries, such as the media, TV, radio and so on, have always exploited recent graduates, giving them a chance to get into a very competitive field in exchange for making them work for no — or low — pay. But now this is spreading to many other industries.”

And let's not forget: This is how the media Village stays homogeneous. Only someone from a well-to-do family (and thus, unlikely to be a threat to the Establishment) can afford to take such internship opportunities.

Lonnie Dunlap, who heads the career services program at Northwestern University and has been advising young people on careers since the mid-70s, said today’s graduates are experiencing the worst employment market she’s ever seen.

“There’s a sense of huge emotional anxiety among our students,” she said. The young people are not only having trouble finding work themselves; many feel a sense of obligation to parents who are struggling with job losses and home foreclosures.

“In the past two years,” said Ms. Dunlap, “we have seen a huge uptick in the number of recent alums coming back for services because they still haven’t found work, as well as midcareer alums who have been laid off and need our help.”

Like Mr. Noble, she mentioned the growing use of interns versus paid employees and said she can see the value of such unpaid work for some recent graduates, “though, of course, not everyone can afford to do that.”

Despite the expansion of the gross domestic product in the quarter that ended in September, there is no sign of the kind of recovery in employment that would be needed to bring the American economy and the economic condition of American families back to robust health. It would be nice if some of the politicians and economists so obsessed with the G.D.P. would take a moment to look out the window at what is happening with real people in the real world.

They might see Laura Ram, who graduated from Baruch College in New York in May 2007. She was laid off from a full-time job almost exactly a year ago and hasn’t worked since. She’s been diligent about submitting applications and showing up at job fairs and so on, but nothing has come close to panning out.

“I haven’t gone on a single interview,” she said, “which manages to shock just about my entire family.”

These recent graduates have done everything society told them to do. They’ve worked hard, kept their noses clean and gotten a good education (in many cases from the nation’s best schools). They are ready and anxious to work. If we’re having trouble finding employment for even these kids, then we’re doing something profoundly wrong.

Is it really as simple as "I don't know anyone like that"? Because this is a huge crisis for millions. The longer the Republicans bottle up the unemployment benefits extension (for no other reason than they can), the more people without other options fall off the unemployment rolls.

You'd think someone in the media might see that as an important story. But maybe when journalists started getting hired from Ivy League schools, they lost any interest in what happens to the paycheck class.

Gee, I hope not. But I'd love to see some evidence to the contrary. The media should be out front, shaming these people:

In a conference call with reporters today, three Democratic Senators charged Republicans with obstructionism in all aspects of public policy, particularly stopping the Senate from passing a bill that would extend unemployment to millions of Americans, at a time when 7,000 Americans a day are losing their benefits.

Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) vowed to move forward with a motion to proceed on the unemployment bill, tied up with non-germane amendments (about things like ACORN funding and E-Verify which have already been voted on in the Senate in other forms) from Republicans that “amount to a political agenda” in Stabenow’s words, as soon as tomorrow. “The votes are there to pass this bill,” said Shaheen. Stabenow said that the bill could have passed a few weeks ago.

Asked by Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent, who has a writeup on this up, why the Senate cannot just plow forward on this bill, given their 60-vote majority in the Senate, Stabenow answered that “you can only do this one at a time.” She countered that Republicans have slow-walked practically all critical legislation since 2007, forcing cloture votes on ordinary measures to take up floor time and generally obstruct the legislation. Obstructionism in the Senate is not limited to filibusters, but also procedural actions when filibusters can be overcome. The result is a slow crawl that creates anxiety among Democrats and liberals and emboldens Republicans to claim that Democrats are running a “do-nothing” Congress. It’s a neat trick.

Democrats hope for a final vote on this bill by the end of the week.

Matt Taibbi says we should run Elizabeth Warren for president in 2012, and the more I read about how the since-appointed members of the Obama administration handled the financial crisis, the more I like the idea:

Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- In the months leading up to the September 2008 collapse of giant insurer American International Group Inc., Elias Habayeb and his colleagues worked nights and weekends negotiating with banks that had bought $62 billion of credit-default swaps from AIG, according to a person who has worked with Habayeb.

Habayeb, 37, was chief financial officer for the AIG division that oversaw AIG Financial Products, the unit that had sold the swaps to the banks. One of his goals was to persuade the banks to accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar, according to people familiar with the matter.

[...] Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps -- insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations.

CDOs are bundles of debt including subprime mortgages and corporate loans sold to investors by banks.

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.

The New York Fed’s decision to pay the banks in full cost AIG -- and thus American taxpayers -- at least $13 billion. That’s 40 percent of the $32.5 billion AIG paid to retire the swaps. Under the agreement, the government and its taxpayers became owners of the dubious CDOs, whose face value was $62 billion and for which AIG paid the market price of $29.6 billion. The CDOs were shunted into a Fed-run entity called Maiden Lane III.

[...] A spokeswoman for Geithner, now secretary of the Treasury Department, declined to comment. Jack Gutt, a spokesman for the New York Fed, also had no comment.

One reason par was paid was because some counterparties insisted on being paid in full and the New York Fed did not want to negotiate separate deals, says a person close to the transaction. “Some of those banks needed 100 cents on the dollar or they risked failure,” Vickrey says.

In other words, Geithner used taxpayer money from one big disaster to paper over the fact that all the other parties were bankrupt, too - and probably still are, no matter what you read in the papers. Wait until the commercial market crashes. Wheee!

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Via Raw Story, the heartwarming news that bankers aren't getting to celebrate in peace at their annual conference:

The annual American Bankers Association meeting in Chicago is not going as planned.

Besieged by activists from the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO and Americans for Financial Reform, the leaders of America's financial sector were interrupted Sunday night as a throng of protesters poured into the conference area and began to chant.

The meeting, scheduled to continue through Tuesday, will feature "[exceptional] speakers like FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and political commentator George Will," the ABA's site announced.

"All we wanted to do was deliver a letter to the Wall Street bankers to let them know how much they've hurt our communities - and what they need to do to clean up their act," the SEIU's blog declared. "They wouldn't listen to us. They kicked us out. But the bad news for them is that we'll be back.

Instead of delivering a letter, they shouted their message. "Bust up big banks!" activists chanted. When police confronted a senior who was damning the ABA over a loudspeaker, the crowd shifted into cries of "Shame on you! Shame on you!"

When police finally got around to pushing them out, cheers of "We'll be back" shook the hotel's lobby.

"Our demand is simple: stop taking our tax dollars and squandering them away on billion dollar bonuses and massive lobbying campaigns against financial reform," the SEIU said.

Who could have guessed? Apparently all those people losing their homes are helping the economy recover faster than expected. So let's look on the bright side of all those homeless, helpless families:

The pain of millions of people across America losing their homes hardly inspires confidence in the future. But in a brutal way, it could be restoring the financial health of the U.S. consumer faster than many recognize.

One of the biggest clouds on the economic horizon is the vast amount of debt U.S. households took on during the boom years. The Federal Reserve puts total household debt, including mortgage debt, at about $13.7 trillion, or 125% of annual after-tax income, a burden that many economists believe will take several years to pare down to what they see as a more sustainable level of 100%. During that "deleveraging" process, the logic goes, U.S. consumers -- whose spending makes up more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy and about one-fifth of the global economy -- won't be able to play a leading role in any recovery.

The gloomy forecasts, though, miss an important point: Debts have value only to the extent that they are being paid, and a rapidly rising number of U.S. households aren't doing so. Those defaults are leading to losses at banks, a wave of foreclosures, trouble for neighborhoods and strife for families. But they are also providing an immediate, albeit radical, form of debt relief.

"It's not ideal, because it carries other costs," said Karen Dynan, a consumer-finance specialist at the liberal Brookings Institution think tank who recently served as a senior adviser to the Federal Reserve. But it is "going to help get household balance sheets back to the right place."

If one accounts for defaults, U.S. households' debt burden is shrinking a lot faster than the official data suggest. First American CoreLogic, which tracks the performance of mortgage loans, estimates that some 9.3% of the nation's 52.4 million mortgage holders were 60 or more days behind on their payments as of July. That represents relief on about $1.2 trillion in loans. The official data miss most of that, because the Fed doesn't erase debts until banks have foreclosed, sold the homes and taken the loans off their books, a process that can drag out for more than a year.

As a result, some economists are expecting a sharp improvement as widely watched indicators of consumers' finances catch up to reality. Joseph Carson, director of global economic research at AllianceBernstein, expects the share of households' after-tax income that goes to pay loans, rent and other financial obligations to fall to 16.3% by the middle of next year, well below the average for the 20-year period leading up to the housing boom. As of June, it stood at 18.1%.

"It's part of the cleansing process of a downturn," he said. "And it's happening a lot faster than people realize."

Cross-posted from Mouse Musings

Since the Bush administration’s legacy left the country suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the number of unemployed has increased by 7.6 million to 15.1, and the official unemployment rate is just under 10%, For so many, just having a job – any crappy, horrible, badly-paid job – is better than no job at all. So few people are paying much attention to what is happening, and has been happening for quite some time, to those who are employed in what should be ‘good’ jobs; the increasing pressure on workers to work longer and harder, for less and less. Or else.

But sometimes the ‘or else’ isn’t just about losing your job. Let’s face it; there are some jobs where chronic fatigue and burnout are more hazardous than others. Flying for an airline for one. A few days ago, Northwest Flight 188 from San Diego to Minneapolis overflew the airport by more than 150 miles, out of radio contact with air traffic controllers for 80 minutes. Something sure as hell went very wrong 37,000 feet in the air with 147 unsuspecting passengers sitting in the back seats, and speculation is running rife about how two experienced and highly qualified pilots could possibly fly past their destination without either noticing. The chatter on just about every airline pilot forum is the same – suspicion falling on the most likely reason – the pilots simply… fell asleep. Luckily, no one died, except possibly two pilots’ careers.

Would be nice to think this was a one-off aberration. It’s not. A couple weeks ago, a Delta 767 with 195 passengers and crew landed in Atlanta on a taxiway instead of the runway, and investigators suspect fatigue as a factor; the crew had flown 10 hours and was landing at night. The third pilot, doing a checkride, had become ill during the flight, and was being cared for in the cabin as the other two pilots, distracted and tired, landed the jet on the wrong strip of asphalt. Not exactly the checkride they were hoping for.

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On November 3rd, there will be a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot in Ohio. This is no ordinary ballot initiative. Its very existence and marketing has been bought and paid for --to the tune of millions--by national and international agri-business corporations, such as Pioneer Hi-Bred International (owned by DuPont, a "developer and supplier of advanced plant genetics"--healthy!--and grantee of 100K to the effort),the National Pork Producers Council (113K), and the United Egg Producers (200K!).

(Join our Facebook Group and help us stop this travesty!)

Now why, you ask, would these Big Agra players get involved in a state issue, and to support a campaign that is for touchy feely things like "food safety" and "local control?" I'm not sure, but it might be that this corruption of Ohio's Constitution will provide "food safety" much like George W. Bush provided "healthy forests," "clear skies" and a "mission accomplished." In other words--and I know this will shock you--they're lying. And they're lying with millions of dollars they've acquired, by being, like their "products," pigs at a trough.

So what is Issue 2, what will it do, and why should you care about it if you're not a resident of the Buckeye State? It's simple: Issue 2 was put on the ballot overnight by state legislators bought off by Big Agri-Business and their mouthpiece here, the Ohio Farm Bureau. Why? So that they can corrupt Ohio's Constitution to give the Governor the power to appoint a board of unaccountable agri-business cronies to make decisions in smoke-filled rooms about all farming practices in Ohio.

I know what you're thinking. Unaccountable, corporate-influenced governing has worked out so well with TARP money and preemptive war, we might as well try it with farm policy.

With Issue 2's passage, those only interested in their bottom line can (and you can bet will) stuff millions more animals into smaller and smaller crates together, increasing the likelhood of H1N1 and E. Coli outbreaks and mutations and their capacity for animal cruelty. They can ignore the waste caused by big factory farms that contaminates the water we drink. They can allow workers to be exploited and placed in situations that endanger their health, while putting family farms--held for generations--out of business.

And why should you care if this passes in Ohio? For all the reasons above, but also...because you're next. This amendment was a reaction to successful efforts to rein in their greedy, dangerous and abusive practices in California (Prop 2), Arizona and Florida, among others. If they can use the camouflage of bought off Democratic and Republican Establishments, millions of dollars in lies, and an off-year low-turnout election to enshrine their corporate malpractice into state constitutions, they can fly under the radar while endangering our health, undermining the people's right to petition (another amendment would be needed to overturn it if passed, as the new board's decisions would supersede ballot initiatives, legislative decisions and opinions by the State Department of Agriculture) and spiking their profits.

How can you help? Well, we only have 10% of their budget. But we have the grassroots energy. We have you.

So please join our Facebook group. Tweet this. Blog it. Call and email everyone you know in Ohio. And be prepared when this garbage dressed up as a gift inevitably makes its way to your state.

(Watch this video for more on this - the 1st minute and then from 5:22 on)

Full Disclosure: I am proud to be a consultant in the effort to beat back Issue 2 in Ohio

While new unemployment claims rise again and Americans are losing their homes because they can't find work - work that doesn't exist, Republicans obstruct the passage of extended unemployment benefits by adding "poison pill" amendments aimed at ACORN and at providing yet another tax cut.

We won't forget. And we won't let you forget.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The number of first-time filers for unemployment insurance rose last week, snapping two weeks of significant declines, according to a government report issued Thursday.

There were 531,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Oct. 17, up 11,000 from an upwardly revised 520,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in a weekly report. The week included the Columbus Day holiday.

A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected 515,000 new claims.

"[The initial claims figure] is somewhat surprising," wrote Jim Baird analyst at Plante Moran Financial Advisors, in a research note. "Excess slack in the system and employers' hesitance to ramp up hiring appear likely to weigh on the labor markets for some time."

[...] The government said 5,923,000 people filed continuing claims in the week ended Oct. 10, the most recent data available. That was down 98,000 from the preceding week's ongoing claims, and would -- if not revised -- mark the first time since late March that continuing claims were below 6 million.

But the slide in continuing claims may signal that more filers are falling off those rolls and into extended benefits.

Continuing claims reflect people filing each week after their initial claim until the end of their standard benefits, which usually last 26 weeks. The figures do not include those who have moved to state or federal extensions, nor people who have exhausted their benefits.

I get tired of asking this question, but I'll ask it anyway: Should this happen in America? Should you have to tear yourself away from your family when they need you most - just to get necessary health care?

When so many other countries manage to take care of their citizens, why can't we?

56 days . . . 55 days . . . 54 days . . .

Chelsea Caudle began signing her text messages this summer with a countdown. At 14 years old, she knew no better way to express what was coming. Day Zero was to be Oct. 7, the day Dad left for Army basic training in Fort Jackson, S.C. He was moving 950 miles from their home in Watertown, 950 miles from Mom.

He was leaving, even though Mom was sick with ovarian cancer. Even though he had been at her side through two long, miserable rounds of chemotherapy. Even though she now faced the likelihood of a third.

In fact, Dad was leaving because Mom was sick.

In March, he was laid off from his job as a raw materials coordinator for a plastics company called PolyOne, where he'd worked for 20 years. His severance package had provided several months' salary, but by August the paychecks were winding down. Soon the cost of his family health coverage was going to triple, then a few months after that, nearly triple again. They needed coverage so Mom could fight her cancer.

Dad's solution: a four-year hitch in the Army.

So Chelsea counted down the days to his departure. When the countdown reached 49, the text message signature began to annoy and depress her, so she stopped. High school was beginning, her freshman year.

In the first week of class, one of the teachers asked: What do your parents do?

The question jolted Chelsea back to the shifting ground of her family. Mom was working part time at a Culver's restaurant, preparing for more chemo, worrying about how to pay the bills. In less than six weeks, Dad would enter the Army and her care would be covered.

The tradeoff was that he would be far away when Mom needed him home, when Chelsea needed him, too. He would miss all of her high school years. The band performances. Prom.

Chelsea thought of all his absence would mean.

When she sent her next text message, she resumed the countdown.

36 days.

Continue reading »

Insurance companies come up with all kinds of clever ways to take your money and give nothing back. Gender discrimination is one way in which they'll try to screw you. (Even if you're a rape victim.) Imagine being told to get sterilized so they don't have to pay for another C-section! Are you going to take it?

We sent more than 10,000 letters to Congress in response to Peggy Robertson's story. Her insurance company had required that she get sterilized if she wanted to receive health insurance.

Members of Congress heard about it. The media reported on it. But we wondered, do our friends, family and neighbors realize how insurance companies have turned being a woman into a pre-existing condition?

Take your ticket for gender equity. Get yours, here: seiu.org/ticket

Women want equal coverage for the equal premiums they pay - plain and simple. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is leading the charge, but we've got to get the word out. We built a tool to do just that - to demonstrate that it's time to deliver on health insurance reform. When you take your "deli counter ticket," you'll receive a unique number. Post the number, along with this automatically-generated status update on gender equity in health care to Twitter, Facebook, or in emails to friends: I'm [your number] against discrimination by health insurers. Women deserve equal coverage for equal premiums. http://seiu.org/ticket #fem2 #hc09

Right now, millions of American women aren't involved in the health care debate. They haven't called or written Congress. They haven't thought about health insurance reform much at all. But they're dealing with the health insurance system every day - paying more and getting less.

Women pay 30-40% more on the private insurance market as men. Common pregnancy and c-sections are considered "pre-existing conditions." And in some states, insurers can even deny coverage to victims of domestic violence.The bills before Congress will guarantee, once and for all, that women are treated fairly and equitably by insurers.

Amazing. They don't know why people are angry - and their feelings are hurt. All over the country, people are losing their homes, their life savings and their jobs - and they're upset that the Obama administration is criticizing them over the latest round of million-dollar bonuses.

I think the word I'm groping for here is "narcissists":

WASHINGTON — The Wall Street giants that received a financial lifeline from Washington may have no compunction about paying big bonuses to their dealmakers and traders. But their willingness to deliver “thank you” gifts to President Obama and the Democrats is another question altogether.

Mr. Obama will fly to New York on Tuesday for a lavish Democratic Party fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel for about 200 big donors. Each donor is paying the legal maximum of $30,400 and is allowed to take a date. Four of the seven “co-chairs” listed on the invitation work in finance, and Democratic Party organizers say they expect that about a third of the attendees will come from the industry.

But from the financial giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup that received federal bailout money — and whose bankers raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama’s election — only a half-dozen or fewer are expected to attend (estimated total contribution: $91,200).

Part of the reason, several Democratic fund-raisers and executives said, is a fear of getting caught in the public rage over the perception that Wall Street titans profiting from their government bailout may use their winnings to give back to Washington in return. And the timing of the event, as the industry lobbies against proposals for tighter regulations to address the underlying causes of last year’s meltdown on Wall Street, has only added to the worry over public appearances.

“There are sensitivities there,” said Scott Talbot, a lobbyist for the industry’s Financial Services Roundtable. Political contributions “can make a donor a target,” Mr. Talbot said. Many involved, though, say the low attendance from those Wall Street giants also reflected a broader disenchantment with Mr. Obama over the angry language emanating from the White House over the million-dollar bonuses and anti-regulatory lobbying.

“There is some failure in the finance industry to appreciate the level of public antagonism toward whatever Wall Street symbolizes,” said Orin Kramer, a partner in an investment firm who is a Democratic fund-raiser and one of the event’s chairmen. “But in order to save the capitalist system, the administration has to be responsive to the public mood, and that is a nuance which can get lost on Wall Street.”

Krugman points out (again) that the administration should have nationalized troubled banks. They didn't, and the under-regulated, undisciplined banking industry is hurting everyone else as a result:

Ask the people at Goldman, and they’ll tell you that it’s nobody’s business but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.

So who was this thundering bank critic? None other than Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s chief economist — and one of the architects of the administration’s bank policy, which up until now has been to go easy on financial institutions and hope that they mend themselves.

Why the change in tone? Administration officials are furious at the way the financial industry, just months after receiving a gigantic taxpayer bailout, is lobbying fiercely against serious reform. But you have to wonder what they expected to happen. They followed a softly, softly policy, providing aid with few strings, back when all of Wall Street was on the ropes; this left them with very little leverage over firms like Goldman that are now, once again, making a lot of money.

But there’s an even bigger problem: while the wheeler-dealer side of the financial industry, a k a trading operations, is highly profitable again, the part of banking that really matters — lending, which fuels investment and job creation — is not. Key banks remain financially weak, and their weakness is hurting the economy as a whole.

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