There Could Be a Real Solution to Our Broken Economy. It’s Called Universal Basic Assets.

Resilience

There Could Be a Real Solution to Our Broken Economy. It’s Called Universal Basic Assets.

By Marina Gorbis, originally pub. by Medium.com – October 16, 2017

Institute for the future

“The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe,” says author and Institute for the Future fellow Douglas Rushkoff. “It’s not nature. It’s a game, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes.”

Over the past 100 years such rules have fostered unprecedented economic growth. However, today they are also producing deeply damaging social and ecological outcomes.

The numbers are striking. In 2010, 288 of the richest people in the world collectively owned as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people. Last year, according to a recent study by Oxfam International, just eight people owned as much wealth as half of the world’s population.

In this moment of massive wealth inequality, we urgently need to develop a new model for society to deliver both social and economic equity.

The answer may be in the concept of Universal Basic Assets (UBA), which in my definition is a core, basic set of resources that every person is entitled to, from housing and healthcare to education and financial security.

It Can Get Worse

The social instability caused by vast economic disparities is likely to only grow deeper under the pressure of two forces.

The first is the unrelenting progression of global warming that is already driving massive migrations of climate refugees due to wars, water and food shortages.

The second force — rapid advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning — is undermining traditional sources of income for vast swaths of populations in developed and developing countries alike.

A whole set of new technological tools, from networking to machine learning to robotics, are making it possible to produce goods and services in abundance without employing large numbers of workers. Growing numbers of people are making livelihoods in various types of flexible yet precarious employment arrangements rather than in stable, well-paying jobs that come with essential social benefits and risk protections.

As a result, the system that worked relatively well under conditions of scarcity is poorly suited to fulfill the needs of many when products and knowledge can be produced in abundance by relatively few.

In a healthy society, every person has the right to resources to safely live, learn, heal, and grow into the best version of themselves. These are Universal Basic Assets.

A Framework for Equity

We urgently need to design a new framework that delivers greater social and economic equity. Some economists and activists are proposing Universal Basic Income, a guaranteed minimum payment for everyone, as a way to ensure a guaranteed minimum for people to live on. We believe that a universal basic income is only the first step in making our economic system more equitable.

French economist Thomas Pikkety, author of the best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, documented that in this point in history, it’s impossible for a person simply earning a salary to see the same economic returns as investors and capital owners secure through their assets.

Such disparities are likely to grow ever larger as the result of automation. An enterprise with fewer workers can reward owners with larger profits. As a result, solutions to economic inequality need to address more equal access to primary assets that generate better economic and social outcomes.

New Assets, New Rules

In designing Universal Basic Assets we take into account access to traditional physical and financial assets like land and money, as well as the growing pools of digital assets (data, digital currencies, reputations, etc.). We also recognize and assign value to exchanges we engage in as a part of maintaining the social fabric of our society but that do not currently carry with them monetary value (caring, creative output, knowledge generation, etc.).

In essence, we need to look at the concept of assets in its broadest sense, considering three classes of assets: private, public, and open.

Private Assets

Private assets are resources that we own individually. Housing, land, personal money, and retirement accounts fall into this category.

Since the 18th century, thinkers across the political spectrum have been advocating for equitable access to private assets, with some focusing on redistribution of incomes in the form of various types of taxes in order to achieve greater economic equity (Universal Basic Income comes under this umbrella). Others frame the issue around equal access to opportunity — that is, giving people a more equal starting point for achieving economic and social mobility. In this latter category, legal scholars Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, for example, propose creation of The Stakeholder Society by granting a one time lump sum payment of $80,000 to everyone upon reaching the age of maturity. The UK’s Child Trust and efforts to create Individual Development Accounts (IDA’s) in the U.S. similarly aim to give children a head start while helping them understand personal finance and the importance of saving for and investing in the future.

Public Assets

Public assets include resources collectively owned by the public and are managed by different types of government bodies on their behalf. They can include everything from national parks to mineral and cultural resources to critical parts of physical or digital infrastructure.

The four countries that have consistently been at the top in global rankings of social mobility are Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada. What they have in common is a high level of access to public resources like education, healthcare, and transportation.

If you are born to a poor family in Denmark, your chances of attaining economic success are not that different than those of your peers born into wealthier household.

Access to a whole variety of public assets makes it possible for children in countries like Denmark and Finland to move up the social and economic ladder independent of where they start.

In the United States, by contrast, your socio-economic status at birth is a big determinant of how well you will do as an adult.

Within the U.S., access to public resources accounts for regional differences in socio-economic mobility. Children born to families at the bottom fifth of the income distribution, have a 10 percent chance of reaching the top fifth of income levels during their lifetime if they live in San Francisco, New York, or Boston. The chance for the same children living in Charlotte, Columbus, or Atlanta is 5 percent, and for those from Memphis, only 2.8 percent. This is largely due to lower access to public schools, transportation, healthcare, and, of course, well-paying jobs. Being born poor dooms you to staying poor.

Open Assets

Open assets are resources that are owned and managed neither privately or by a government. They are open to anyone and governed by a defined group.

Open assets are created in what MIT Media Lab researcher and IFTF affiliate John Clippinger calls the “open sector.” According to Clippinger, in the open sector, a group of “founders” create a set of initial conditions from which rules emerge through the interactions of participants.

Clippinger cites the example of the British Common Law, a basis for America’s legal system, which evolved from customs and norms, and was eventually codified into constantly evolving laws. “It wasn’t top-down. It was constantly reinventing itself around the circumstances, and there was no single point of control,” he says. This is how the open software community operates today. Wikipedia is another familiar example of a community bound by common practices and principles that has established an architecture and a set of practices for entering and editing information, which in turn, has made it possible to create an open resource used by billions of people worldwide.

In the analog domain, we find examples of open systems for value creation in physical communities such as Burning Man or Freespace, where no money is allowed. People choose to come together freely and exchange or gift each other anything from physical goods to knowledge and services. This model is probably the form of existence most familiar to us as a human species as this is how many of our human ancestors lived before we invented money and market capitalism.

However, we don’t have to participate in the open-source software movement or go to Burning Man to experience non-monetary, non-profit-based economies — we participate in them on a daily basis in many ways. We don’t pay for love, for dinners at our parents’ homes, for our child’s affection, for art and music and other creative outputs that have become invisibly woven into the infrastructure of our daily lives (if we are lucky). As we transition to new forms of value creation we have opportunities to enlarge our pool of open assets and reconsider how and what we assign value to.

In the face of rising economic inequality in a society where those with capital get richer far faster than those who labor, we need to focus attention on more equitable distribution and access to a variety of assets. This would ensure not only greater socio-economic mobility for individuals but also help sustain the social fabric of our society.

Let us not forget that high levels of economic inequality come at a price not only for the poor but also for the extremely wealthy themselves. Some are building protective bunkers on secluded islands as they prepare for the inevitable social upheavals. Historical research shows that any concentration of wealth and power requires investments in vast networks of expensive security institutions leading to what Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld calls privilege violence. Such violence stems from a “power structure that allows or enables violence against some citizens as the price for maintaining extreme privilege.”

Creating a new kind of economy based on Universal Basic Assets can enrich all of our lives. Without it, the future may be a much poorer place for everyone.

For more on this topic, please read the IFTF working paper “Universal Basic Assets: Manifesto and Action Plan” (PDF)

New health deal falls flat with GOP

The Hill

New health deal falls flat with GOP

By Peter Sullivan October 17, 2017

Trump signals support for Obamacare deal TheHill.com

A bipartisan Senate deal that would extend critical ObamaCare payments to insurers for two years got the cold shoulder from Republicans on Tuesday, suggesting it faces a rocky path to become law.

The chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House dismissed the offering from Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) as an affront to GOP promises to repeal President Obama’s signature legislation.

“Anything propping [ObamaCare] up is only saving what Republicans promised to dismantle,” said Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), who leads a group of more than 150 conservatives.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stopped short of promising to bring the bill to the floor, and while Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) offered some praise, not a single Senate GOP conservative offered strong public support for the compromise.

Senate Democrats, in contrast, hailed the deal, and pressed GOP leaders to quickly bring it to the floor.

They also touted “anti-sabotage” measures they said they had included in the deal that would prevent President Trump from taking ObamaCare apart — language that appeared aimed more at winning a messaging war over the health-care law than actually advancing a legislative compromise.

“The president had been sabotaging [ObamaCare] and the agreement would undo much of that sabotage,” said Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.). “So overall we are very pleased with this agreement.”

While Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) did not release a statement on the deal, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did, hailing it as “good news for families across America.”

The deal forged by Alexander and Murray, who have been working on and off on legislation for months, would fund payments to insurers meant to help poorer people afford healthcare.

President Trump announced the end of the payments just last week, arguing the previous administration never had the authority to make them given Congress’s control over the nation’s purse strings.

Trump offered measured support for the compromise when he was asked about it during a press conference Tuesday with Greece’s prime minister, calling it “a short-term solution so that we don’t have this very dangerous little period.”

But Trump’s endorsement was hardly ringing, and it did not appear that Republicans were highly excited about the measure.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said there were elements of the Alexander-Murray compromise that could be built upon, but that “much more work needs to be done.”

He mentioned including lower-cost, short-term health insurance plans and expanding health savings accounts as elements that could be added to the deal.

The basics of the deal worked out by the two senators — who are the chairman and ranking member on the Senate Health Committee — would exchange the payments to insurers for increased flexibility for states to change ObamaCare regulations. It would allow states to change rules that insurers must meet under the health-care law as long as consumers are still offered “comparable” affordability.

The measure would also allow people to buy lower-cost, less generous “copper” insurance plans. And it would speed up the process for states to apply for a waiver for ObamaCare rules, for example by letting a governor apply without waiting for the approval of the state legislature.

It would not change the minimum standards that an insurance plan must meet, and would restore $106 million in funding, cut recently by Trump, for outreach to sign people up for ObamaCare. A GOP aide said the money would go to state governments, rather than be spent through the Trump administration.

Alexander acknowledged the legislation faces a tough road, but pointed to the support from Trump as promising.

“I’m encouraged by the consensus of support I’ve received, and that includes President Trump,” Alexander said. “He’s called me twice over the last two weeks saying he doesn’t want people to be hurt in the interim.”

He also pitched his plan as just an interim step.

“This takes care of the next two years. After that we can have a full-fledged debate on where we go long term on health care,” Alexander said. “This is a small step. I would like to undersell it, not oversell it.”

Even with Trump’s support, the bill seems like a long-shot in the House. Just last month, Ryan told the Senate that an Alexander-Murray deal is “not viable” for the House GOP.

The way forward might be to attach the health-care legislation to another bill — such as the legislation needed to keep the government open at the end of the year. That vehicle is also seen as a target for immigration measures — including legislation that might shelter young immigrants known as “Dreamers” from deportation.

At the same time, that sets up a complicated negotiation at the end of the year that could involve trade-offs on high-profile issues that would raise risks for both political parties.

Alexander said he would be working to attract Republican co-sponsors for the measure this week.

“Hopefully we will be giving Sen. McConnell and Sen. Schumer legislation co-sponsored by a significant number of Republicans and Democrats later this week, and then we can see where it goes from there,” he said.

A reporter finally asked Trump to just explain his health care plan. His response was a train wreck.

ThinkProgress

A reporter finally asked Trump to just explain his health care plan. His response was a train wreck.

A simple question. A disastrous answer.

By Aaron Rupar October 17, 2017

CREDIT: SCREENGRAB

During a joint White House news conference with the prime minister of Greece on Tuesday, President Trump was asked an extremely basic question about his health care plan. He responded with a lengthy, incoherent word salad.

Trump was responding to Fox News’ John Roberts, who noted that Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act through legislation have failed, and then asked him, “I’m wondering, at this point, what is your health care plan, sir?”

Without addressing the question, Trump immediately attacked insurance companies.

“Well if you look, ah, insurance companies, and you take a good strong look at the numbers, you’ll see since the formation of Obamacare they’re up 400 percent, 450 percent, 250 percent, 300 percent — they’ve made a fortune, the insurance companies,” Trump said. “So when I knocked out the hundreds of millions of dollars a month being paid back to the insurance companies by the politicians, I must tell you, that wanted me to continue to pay this, I said I’m not going to do it. This is money that goes to the insurance companies to line their pockets, to raise up their stock prices, and they’ve had a record run, they’ve had an incredible run, and it’s not appropriate.”

Trump then pivoted to attacking Obamacare.

“Obamacare is a disaster. It’s virtually dead, as far as I am concerned it really is dead, and I predicted that a long time ago — it is a concept that doesn’t work, and we are very close,” Trump said. “We feel we have the votes, and as soon as we’re finished with taxes, John, we really feel we have the votes to get block grants into the states where the states can much better manage this money and much better take care of the people, rather than the federal government. The state block grants — we’ll do massive block grants into the various states so that the states can run the program.”

Before he was done, Trump attacked Democrats (“they have no good policies”), decried that his judicial appointments aren’t being approved more quickly (“it’s a very disgraceful situation”), and touted his tax plan (“the largest tax cuts in the history of our country”).

After nearly three minutes of ranting, Trump finally stopped talking. But at no point did he actually explain what his health care plan is. So after Trump finished, Roberts interjected, “So is Graham-Cassidy still the plan, sir?”

“Yeah, essentially that would be the plan, yes,” Trump said. “Block grants.”

The Graham-Cassidy plan Trump mentioned would result in 32 million Americans losing coverage and has already been rejected by a critical mass of Republican senators.

Trump has repeatedly proven himself unable to talk about the details of policy. While he was pushing Obamacare repeal over the summer, Trump did an interview where he indicated he thinks health insurance cost $12 annually. Following a June meeting during which Trump tried to persuade Republican senators to vote in favor of a repeal bill that provided huge tax breaks to the wealthy, one supportive senator told the New York Times that Trump “did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.”

“Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added,” according to The Times.

And it’s not just health care. Public comments Trump has made in recent weeks indicate he is confused at best about how the national debt works, and about what the concept of “wiping out debt” entails.

While Trump may not understand his own policies, the steps the Trump administration has taken to sabotage Obamacare independently of Congress have already resulted in substantial rate increases.

The Old, Hidden Pipeline at the Bottom of the Great Lakes

EcoWatch

By Sierra Club October 12, 2017

The Old, Hidden Pipeline at the Bottom of the Great Lakes

By Conor Mihell

At dawn, I launch my kayak and paddle into a velvety expanse of turquoise water. Here, in northern Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac, Great Lakes Michigan and Huron meet like the middle of an hourglass. To the east, the rounded form of Mackinac Island is the centerpiece of an archipelago in Lake Huron.

According to an Ojibwe creation story, this is Mishee Makinakong, the Great Turtle, whose surfacing shell became a refuge for plants and animals as floodwaters surged in the days before time. Today, droves of ferries buzz to and from the island, a bustling summer tourist destination replete with kitschy fudge shops and horse-drawn carriages.

I’m paddling south, dwarfed by the Mackinac Bridge, a monolithic five-mile-long ribbon of green steel and gray concrete that connects Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. Lake Michigan sprawls westward. Its watery horizon shows the telltale dance of rising winds just as a wave splashes over my deck, reminding me to put away my camera. This isn’t a place to multitask.

Currents deflect my course as I approach a towering bridge support. It’s like paddling on the ocean, with steep waves and a strengthening tidelike flow. I angle my bow to compensate. Whitewater reflects from the concrete pillar, and eddies swirl in its wake. Even on this sunny June morning, the conditions hint at a destructive violence that makes me nervous.

Almost directly beneath my kayak runs Enbridge Line 5, twin 64-year-old pipelines at the bottom of the lakebed. Line 5 transports 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids daily for 645 miles through Wisconsin and Michigan to Canada. Enbridge, the Canadian oil transportation giant, operated Line 5 inconspicuously until 2010; that’s when its sister pipeline, Line 6B, ruptured, pouring a million gallons of tar sands bitumen into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. It was the largest land-based oil spill in U.S. history. Suddenly, the peril posed by vintage infrastructure carrying petrochemicals through the heart of North America’s greatest supply of freshwater loomed very large.

University of Michigan hydrologist Dave Schwab has concluded that the Straits of Mackinac is “the worst possible place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes.” At any given time, one million gallons of petroleum products are contained in the 20-inch pipes that run along the lakebed. If one ruptured, oil would disperse with the currents that slosh back and forth through the straits. In Schwab’s worst-case scenario, 720 miles of lakeshore would be devastated.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts that in the event of a spill, no more than 40 percent of the oil could be recovered by deploying booms and “in-situ burning”—lighting surface slicks on fire, a technique used in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The success rate would plummet in the winter, when the Straits of Mackinac are sheathed in feet of ice. This apocalyptic vision was enough to convince more than 60 municipalities and all 12 of Michigan’s Native American tribes that Line 5 should be decommissioned. Even Republican state attorney general Bill Schuette called for a timeline to shut down the pipeline.

“We know that Line 5 will ultimately be decommissioned,” said David Holtz, the Sierra Club’s Michigan Chapter chair and the coordinator of Oil and Water Don’t Mix, a grassroots coalition of pipeline opponents with 30,000 supporters. “The only question is, will it be decommissioned before or after it ruptures?”

Line 5 is a product of the post–World War II construction boom, when oil companies installed pipelines across the country to fuel an increasingly global economy. “Michigan was the shortest path to get oil to market,” Holtz explained. “We get all the risk; Enbridge gets the reward.”

For Enbridge’s part, spokesperson Michael Barnes said that Line 5 is “vital to the people of Michigan, who need energy to heat their homes and power their industries.” (Holtz contends that the company has never documented this claim.) In the five years following the Marshall disaster, Barnes said, the company spent nearly $5 billion on maintenance, inspection, and leak detection: “This is the largest, most comprehensive and sophisticated maintenance and inspection program of any pipeline system in the world.”

As for the underwater pipelines at the Straits of Mackinac, Barnes said, “Recent inspection reports show that Line 5, from an engineering and integrity perspective, is like new and in excellent condition.”

Retired Dow chemical engineer Ed Timm has taken it upon himself to debunk such rosy claims. Timm, a resident of nearby Harbor Springs whose dark ponytail and youthful swagger belie his 72 years, started studying the pipeline and checking out Enbridge’s claims out of curiosity. He dug up early construction journals documenting the hasty process whereby pipelines were “pulled,” as the engineers called it, across the straits. He plotted modern imagery alongside original blueprints to show how lakebed sediments have shifted drastically over time, placing stress on sections of pipe. And he tabulated modern-water-current data to prove that the Straits of Mackinac are capable of producing double the 2.25-mile-per-hour currents envisioned by the original plans.

Timm also discovered a 2016 technical report that he calls a “smoking gun.” The operating-easement agreement for Line 5 between Enbridge and the state of Michigan mandates that there be no unsupported spans longer than 75 feet. According to engineer Mario Salvadori, who reviewed the design, “The pipe must not be allowed to span a valley of more than 140 feet.” But the 2016 report, conducted by the Ohio-based engineering firm Kiefner and Associates, mentions unsupported spans of up to 286 feet, indicating that over time the pipeline has shifted from its moorings. Timm showed me a graph of how the pipeline’s resiliency diminishes across increasing lengths of unsupported spans. Just like a bent paper clip, he said, a pipeline with inadequate support will become fatigued as it flexes back and forth in moving water. “At that distance a steel pipeline basically turns into a noodle.”

For Native Americans in the Great Lakes region, Line 5 touches a cultural nerve. The area a spill might affect coincides with tribal fishing areas and encompasses the watery heart of the indigenous creation story.

On Lake Michigan’s east shore, the Grand Traverse Band operates a couple dozen boats, whose captains and crews make their livelihoods fishing year-round, said Desmond Berry, the band’s natural resources manager. Fish is a staple of the indigenous diet and is recognized in the tribe’s traditional clan system. “We are a fish nation,” Berry said.

The Grand Traverse Band is one of five Chippewa and Ottawa tribes with commercial operations in the Mackinac Straits area. They harvest more than three million pounds of whitefish and lake trout annually. Commercial and recreational fishing on the Great Lakes contribute $2.5 billion to Michigan’s economy, with tourists spending $660 million annually in the counties straddling the Straits of Mackinac, supporting 7,500 local jobs. “If there were a spill,” Berry said, referring to the slogan on the state’s license plate, “‘Pure Michigan’ would cease to exist.”

Safeguarding freshwater was at the core of efforts to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and is also at the root of Native American opposition to Line 5. Little Traverse Bay Bands member Jannan Cornstalk takes her responsibility as a water protector seriously. “Women have the ability to bring life into the world through our bodies,” she said. “An embryo is held in a sack of water inside of us. That’s our connection to the water.”

Cornstalk was shocked when she learned about the sunken pipelines at Mackinac Straits. Since 2015, she’s organized Labor Day demonstrations to coincide with a popular Mackinac Bridge walk, which includes canoe and kayak flotillas and, this year, an arts and culture festival. “I believe our water is in crisis,” she said, pointing to the contaminated drinking water in Flint, which led to a federal state of emergency in 2016. “Clean water is a basic human right. Without it we are nothing.”

The water calms and my mind wanders as I paddle back to shore. After the flood in the Ojibwe creation story, Sky Woman, the mother of humanity, settled on the Great Turtle’s back and summoned the animals to help rebuild the earth. One at a time, the strongest swimmers—Beaver, Fisher, Marten, and Loon—plunged into the water, diving deep in search of soil. Each returned to the surface empty-handed and ashamed.

Then diminutive Muskrat volunteered. The other animals snickered, but Muskrat dove in anyway and stayed underwater an exceedingly long time. “The Muskrat floated to the surface more dead than alive, but he clutched in his paws a small morsel of soil,” recounted the late Ojibwe historian Basil Johnston. “Where the great had failed, the small succeeded.”

Sky Woman spread the modicum of soil on the turtle’s back and infused the new world with the breath of life. Turtle Island grew, teeming with grasses, flowers and trees. Finally, Sky Woman gave birth to the first Anishnabeg—the people—whom she instructed to live in harmony with all of creation, living and yet unborn.

The Mackinac area exerts an energy that pulls at the conscience of indigenous people and newcomers alike. A 2016 poll revealed that nearly two-thirds of Michigan voters do not support oil pipelines in the Great Lakes. Holtz hopes the state government will soon have a moment of reckoning like he did five years ago, when he represented the Sierra Club in an initial meeting to discuss Line 5 with other environmentalists. Holtz had recently retired from a career in media and “wasn’t looking for a fight.” Then he spent an autumn weekend alone at the straits. “I drove across the bridge and looked over the water,” he recalled. “I decided I didn’t want to be responsible for not stopping an oil spill in a beautiful, wonderful place that I love. I don’t want that to be my legacy.”

Reposted with permission from our media associate SIERRA magazine.

#NotOnePenney in tax cuts for the rich

This Republican Farmer from Kansas is Calling for #NotOnePenny

Meet Mike – a Republican farmer from Kansas who has experienced first-hand what happens when the GOP cuts taxes for the rich. Now, he's calling for #NotOnePenny in tax cuts for the wealthy: notonepenny.org.

Posted by Tax March on Monday, October 16, 2017

This Republican Farmer from Kansas is Calling for #NotOnePenny

Learn More

notonepenny.org

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill May Be Largest Since 2010 BP Disaster

Bloomberg Business

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill May Be Largest Since 2010 BP Disaster

By Nico Grant October 16, 2017

LLOG reports as much as 9,350 barrels spilled last week

Release dwarfed by multimillion-barrel Deepwater Horizon spill

Photographer: Kari Goodnough/Bloomberg

An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last week may be the largest in the U.S. since the 2010 blowout at BP Plc’s Macondo well that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig.

The Delta House floating production facility about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of Venice, Louisiana, released 7,950 to 9,350 barrels of oil from early Wednesday to Thursday morning, according to closely held operator LLOG Exploration Co. That would make it the largest spill in more than seven years, data from the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement show, even though it’s a fraction of the millions of barrels ejected in the 2010 incident.

The LLOG spill was triggered by a fracture in a flowline jumper, Rick Fowler, the company’s vice president for deepwater projects, said in an email. That’s a short pipeline used to connect nearby subsea structures. Multiple barriers placed on either side of the fracture stopped the release, but the the flowline jumper hasn’t yet been repaired, Fowler said.

Oil production from Delta House dropped to around 57,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day from more than 90,000 before the spill, he said. The subsea system affected by the fracture was shut in, though nearby connected systems weren’t. The fracture wasn’t caused by Hurricane Nate and there were no associated injuries, he said.

BSEE, the federal agency which regulates offshore energy and mineral extraction, started a five-member panel investigation into the cause of the spill, according to an online statement. The members, including inspectors, engineers and accident investigators, will issue their findings and make recommendations.

“This panel investigation is a critical step in ensuring BSEE determines the cause, or causes, of the incident and develops recommendations to prevent similar events from occurring in the future,” Lars Herbst, BSEE’s Gulf of Mexico region director, said in the statement.

The Delta House platform, floating in 4,500 feet of water, came online in April 2015 with peak capacity of 100,000 barrels a day of oil and 240 million cubic feet a day of national gas. Its oil output enters the Heavy Lousiana Sweet crude pool.

The 2010 blowout and explosion at the Deepwater Horizon ultradeep-sea drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana left 11 workers dead and set off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. BSEE, an agency of the Interior Department, was established in the wake of the incident as part of reforms designed to separate federal regulatory responsibilities from lease sales and revenue generation.

Values Voter Summit is the type of right-leaning entity that cannot continue to be called Christian.

AM Joy on MSNBC

October 15, 2017. Rev. Dr. William Barber just told AM JOY that in his view the Values Voter Summit is the type of right-leaning entity that cannot continue to be called Christian.

Rev. Dr. William Barber just told AM JOY that in his view the Values Voter Summit is the type of right-leaning entity that cannot continue to be called Christian. Leave your thoughts on his explosive commentary below.

Posted by AM Joy on MSNBC on Saturday, October 14, 2017

Trump’s Obamacare Sabotage Is Doing Real Damage To American Health Care

HuffPost

Trump’s Obamacare Sabotage Is Doing Real Damage To American Health Care

Jonathan Cohn, HuffPost October 14, 2017

The damage is not catastrophic. But it is real and it will linger.

That was the conclusion many health care industry officials and analysts had reached by week’s end, following a pair of blows that President Donald Trump delivered to the Affordable Care Act ― and, indirectly, to the millions of people who buy private health insurance on their own.

The first blow came on Thursday, in the form of an executive order designed to undermine the new rules that “Obamacare” has placed on insurers. The 2010 health care law famously prohibits carriers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. It also requires that all plans cover a set of “essential” health benefits including mental health and maternity care.

With the executive order, Trump instructed three federal agencies to carve out some exceptions to those rules. The result could be a parallel market full of plans that don’t have all of the essential benefits and, in some cases, that are available to people only in relatively good health.

At an Oval Office ceremony to sign the order, Trump boasted that the new plans would offer cheap alternatives to the millions of consumers struggling with high premiums today. And that is true. But, as experts have warned, anybody buying one of these plans would be rolling the dice, because the plans wouldn’t necessarily cover the costs of a serious injury or medical problem. At the same time, these skimpy plans would draw the youngest and healthy customers away from the comprehensive policies, making it ever more difficult for insurers to sustain those plans financially.

But Thursday’s order turned out to be a prelude to something bigger. Literally hours after the president signed it, the administration announced that it was carrying out a threat Trump had made for months. The federal government would be cutting off a set of monthly payments to health insurers operating through HealthCare.gov or one of the state-run marketplaces. The change was effective immediately, the administration later confirmed, meaning the payments that these insurers got in September could turn out to be their last.

This is not how the architects of the Affordable Care had intended the program to work. The law promises these payments to insurers, so that insurers can, in turn, reduce deductibles and copayments for some of their lowest income customers. (The payments are thus not a “bailout,” though Trump describes them that way.) But Congress never formally appropriated the money, creating a legal dispute that is still winding its way through the courts ― and leaving payment, in the interim, to the discretion of the president.

Former President Barack Obama had kept the payments going, which, perhaps, makes it surprising that Trump waited nine whole months to stop them. Advisers warned him against taking this steps, according to a Washington Post report, but in the end they couldn’t stop him ― perhaps because Trump has become so frustrated with his party’s failure to get repeal legislation through Congress.

“This is confirmation that the Trump administration has no interest in making anything on the individual market work,” David Anderson, research associate at Duke University’s Margolis Center for Health Policy, said on Friday.

How Insurers Are Reacting To Trump’s Latest Moves

Once Trump pulled the trigger, a frenzy of crisscrossing emails and phone calls ensued, as industry officials, analysts, and public officials (and, yes, journalists too) tried to figure out exactly what would happen next. Even now nobody seems quite certain of the answers, although at the moment it looks like most insurers had already prepared for the possibility Trump would cut off those payments.

Either on their own or at the behest of their regulators, those insurers filed rates for 2018 assuming the insurer payments might stop. And in the states where insurers expected the payments to continue ― Sean Mullin, senior director at Leavitt Partners, told HuffPost he thinks it’s about a dozen total ― insurers and regulators are now hastily making plans for last-minute revisions.

Whether insurers made the plans previously or whether they are making them now, the gist of the response is the same: The carriers are raising premiums to make up for the money they’re no longer getting from Washington ― and to account for any other steps the Trump administration might take to depress enrollment or otherwise weaken the program. Charles Gaba, the Michigan-based data nerd who runs the well-respected website ACAsignsups.net, has estimated that insurer anxiety over Trump’s management account for about two-thirds of next year’s premium increases.

It raises doubts about whether you want to partner with the federal government going forward Chet Burrell, CEO of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield

Gaba’s conclusion is consistent with what insurers have reported individually. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana, for example, is requesting an average increase of 23.1 percent for its individual health plans next year, company spokesman John Doran told HuffPost on Friday. About three-quarters of that, he said, represented uncertainty over the Trump cutoff.

As usual, the majority of people who buy coverage through HealthCare.gov or one of the state exchanges won’t feel the impact of these increases, at least not right away. That’s because the Affordable Care Act uses tax credits to put a ceiling on premiums for consumers with incomes below 400 percent of the poverty line, or $98,400 for a family of four. No matter how high premiums go, they won’t pay more. Some insurers have gone a step farther, and structured their premium increase for next year in ways that shield even wealthier people from the impact of the cuts.

Because of the formula the federal government uses to calculate financial assistance, some people will be able to get better plans for less money. Of course, the federal government will be picking up the extra costs, which is one of the many ironies of Trump’s action Thursday: The likely result will be more government spending, not less.

But some upper-income consumers are going to pay more ― in some cases, a lot more. It so happens that these are also the people who frequently struggle the most with premiums today, because their incomes are just a little too high to qualify for the tax credits, but they don’t have money to spare and are basically paying one-fifth of their income on health insurance premiums.

Presumably some of them will simply stop getting insurance altogether, and presumably it will be people who feel like they can take that risk because of their relatively good health ― thereby making the system’s risk pool problems, already pretty severe in some parts of the country, even worse.

Why The Real Story May Be What Happens After Next Year

By itself, that won’t cause health insurance markets to implode. Implementation of Thursday’s executive order won’t have that effect either. But this week’s actions are merely the latest steps in a campaign to undermine the Affordable Care Act that began on literally the first day of the Trump presidency, when he made a big show of signing a symbolic executive order instructing agencies to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation” of the law’s rules and regulations.

Since that time Trump has slashed the program’s advertising budget, cut funding for so-called navigators who help people enroll, used government funding to finance anti-Obamacare propaganda, announced unexpected downtime for HealthCare.gov, and delayed a planned step-up in enforcement of the individual mandate.

On a conference call Friday, Chet Burrell, president and CEO of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, noted the cumulative impact of these steps ― not just on enrollment, which the Affordable Care Act needs to survive, but also on the psyche of insurer companies like his, which is among the dominant carriers in Maryland and Virginia.

The Affordable Care Act has been a fragile program from the beginning, Burrell noted, and it has serious flaws that still need fixing. But the program has also insured millions, he explained, and it has the opportunity to strengthen with support from Washington ― only now that support is gone. “We’re worried,” he said. “It raises doubts about whether you want to partner with the federal government going forward.”

Maryland is among the states where carriers are hurriedly preparing new rate requests, because they had assumed insurer payments would keep flowing. Burrell said he was working closely with state and federal officials and was optimistic they would find a way to get it done, although he said there’s already talk of pushing back Maryland’s open enrollment, now scheduled to start on Nov. 1, by at least a few days to give it a bit more time.

Around the country, insurers were expressing similar sentiments ― to stick with the program, at least through this year and most likely next as well, even though the cutoff of those funds means some serious financial losses for some of them. That commitment to stay with the program is no small thing, because their contracts would appear to allow them to withdraw if the federal government pulls back on planned payments.

But the issue is really more about what happens after next year. Insurers will have to begin planning for 2019 this coming spring and, after what is likely to be a rocky open enrollment period, the decision whether to participate could be a difficult one.

The insurers who stuck it out this long, despite all of the Affordable Care Act’s problems, did so in part because they knew they were dealing with president committed to making the program work. Today they are dealing with a president bent on making it fail ― in many cases, by seeking out the weakest parts of its edifice and attaching a stick of dynamite.

Of course, Trump continues to promise that once Obamacare is gone the American people will be better off ― that they will have “great, great” health care, as he put it once again this week. Burrell, in his conference call, was among the many leaders working in health care who have come to the opposite conclusion. “If you wanted to have a great health plan for the American people,” he said, “you wouldn’t be doing this.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said that insurers will have to begin planning for 2018 in the spring. They will be planning for 2019.

Is Donald Trump ‘Obsessed’ With Barack Obama?

Newsweek

Is Donald Trump ‘Obsessed’ With Barack Obama?

Harriet Sinclair, Newsweek October 14, 2017

President Donald Trump is obsessed with his predecessor, according to a number of pundits who believe many of the Republican’s policies are all about “blowing the former president’s legacy.”

Speaking on his CNN show on Saturday, following Trump’s attempt to roll back the Iran deal, Don Lemon asked the question: “Does President Trump have an Obama obsession?” and suggesting the Republican was “making it his mission to undo every last bit of the Obama legacy.”

Political analyst David Gergen told Lemon he believed the recent announcement on the Iran deal, as well as Trump killing Obamacare subsidies, was “more about blowing up the former president’s legacy than anybody wants to admit.”

Then-President Barack Obama meets with Donald Trump, who was then president elect, to discuss transition plans in the White House Oval Office, November 10. President Trump got a small bit of good news in the polls, but he’s more than a dozen percentage points behind where Obama was in 2009. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

“Anything which has the name Obama on it automatically becomes a target for Donald Trump and he’s trying to reverse as much of that as possible,” he added, warning that the tendency of presidents to reverse domestic policy set by their predecessors was now rolling into foreign policy.

Indeed, back in August, a European diplomat reportedly told BuzzFeed anonymously that in his dealings with President Trump, he had noticed the Republican was driven more by a desire to scrap Obama’s policies than to enact his own.

“It’s his only real position,” the diplomat told BuzzFeed. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.’ He won’t even want to listen to the arguments or have a debate. He is obsessed with Obama.”

Also over the summer, Trump previously shared a poll that showed he was “a better president of the United States than Barack Obama,” with the unverified results of the poll showing 61% of responders believed Trump was a better president and just 31% backing Obama.

In addition, his actual policy aims, which include his campaign pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare, but also the Iran deal, Trump’s attempt to scrap the Obama-era DACA program, and repeal of federal legislation allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, suggest the president may have an eye on targeting Obama’s policies specifically.

Indeed, Obama was the reason Trump was initially propelled into the political sphere; as one of the strong voices of the racially charged birther movement that falsely suggested Obama was not born in the U.S., Trump suddenly found himself speaking about national politics, announcing a run for office several years later.

Trump Sabotages Obamacare by Ending Subsidies That Help Lower Costs

Mother Jones

We want to make it harder for the powerful to lie.

Trump Sabotages Obamacare by Ending Subsidies That Help Lower Costs

Payments may stop almost immediately.

Win Mcnamee/Pool/CNP/Zuma

Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn October 12, 2017

The Trump administration announced late Thursday night that it would no longer provide key health insurance subsidies that are intended to keep costs down for lower-income Americans. The move, widely viewed as an effort to sabotage Obamacare, has the potential to disrupt insurance markets. The subsidies, which are paid to insurance companies, help cover the cost of providing affordable coverage.

“The bailout of insurance companies through these unlawful payments is yet another example of how the previous administration abused taxpayer dollars and skirted the law to prop up a broken system,” the White House Press Office said in an emailed statement. “Congress needs to repeal and replace the disastrous Obamacare law and provide real relief to the American people.”