Spitzer: Bank Regulators Lacked Will, Not Power.

All Things Considered, April 10, 2009

As New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer pursued the insurance company AIG and drove the company's longtime boss, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, out of his job.

Spitzer, who last year was forced to resign as New York's governor after news of his involvement in a prostitution ring, now writes about AIG and other Wall Street matters for Slate.com.

In a recent Slate column, Spitzer takes exception to the idea that federal regulators lacked the power to stop financial abuses before the crisis.

"An effort is being made to suggest if only the regulators had had more power, they would have found a, b and c," Spitzer tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "Whereas, in truth, what we have gone through is a decade where regulators had the power but not the will.

"Unfortunately, the loss of will was more fundamentally damaging to us, because they should have done things that were visible and reacted to things that were visible."

As for skeptics who may point out that Spitzer's own participation in a scandal has earned him his place on the sidelines of public life, Spitzer says people can decide whether they find his perspective valuable.

"I look back at the record we had when I was attorney general, and if it suggests that there are some useful observations I can make about our current economic crisis, I'm happy to provide them when asked," he says.

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Ex-FMLN Guerrillas Party Wins El Salvador Election.

Pby: Jason Beaubien

Morning Edition, March 16, 2009.
Listen Now



Ex-Guerrillas Win El Salvador Election.

For the first time in El Salvador, a left-wing party has won the presidency. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front formed in 1980 as a band of Marxist guerrillas attempting to seize power. They spent 12 years fighting in the jungle and almost two decades in political opposition — and they finally accomplished their goal Sunday night.

Salvadoran leftist president promises moderation - from: The Associated Press

A charismatic former TV journalist promised to build strong ties with President Barack Obama and promote investor confidence Monday as he took El Salvador into uncharted territory by being elected its first leftist president.

Behind Mauricio Funes is a party of former Marxist guerrillas that fought to overthrow U.S.-backed governments in the 1980s and whose rise to power has raised fears of a communist regime in the war-scarred Central American country.

Funes, who gave up journalism less than two years ago to become the presidential candidate of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, sought to quell those concerns after his historic victory Sunday.

"Nothing traumatizing is going to happen here," he said in an interview with local Megavision television. "We will not reverse any privatizations. We will not jeopardize private property. There is no reason at this moment for fear."

The FMLN, formed from five rebel armies in 1980, is the second former enemy of the United States to take power democratically in Latin America's lurch to the left. In 2006, Nicaraguans elected Daniel Ortega, two decades after his Sandinista government fought U.S.-backed Contra rebels, and his relations with Washington have remained tense under the Obama administration.

Among the 75,000 people killed in El Salvador's 12-year civil war were a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander gunned down by guerrillas and four Marines who died in a rebel attack on a restaurant. Ex-guerrillas will almost certainly form part of the Funes government, including Vice President-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a rebel-commander-turned-congressman.

The outgoing government party, too, is stained by memories of the war. It was founded by right-wing death-squad boss Roberto d'Aubuisson. His victims included the assassinated Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, according to a U.N. investigation.

Funes, who was a TV reporter during the war, has stayed away from the firebrand anti-U.S. rhetoric that characterizes Ortega and Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez. Instead, he has compared his message of change to Obama's.

Funes, who takes office June 1, promised in his victory speech that strengthening ties with the United States would be a priority. The Obama administration congratulated him Monday.

"We look forward to working with the new government of El Salvador," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood. "It was a very free, fair and democratic election."

The overture was a marked departure from the administration of former President George W. Bush, which suggested during the 2004 election that it could not trust an FMLN government.

The United States' current neutrality has deflated one of the major arguments of the conservative Arena party as it sought a fifth five-year term in power. Arena flooded the airwaves with ads showing Chavez railing against Obama and warning that Funes would turn El Salvador into a Venezuelan satellite.

Chavez's government congratulated Funes on his triumph Monday and said Salvadorans "showed their clarity and courage, defeating the campaign of lies, garbage and manipulation."

While the FMLN has long-standing ties to Chavez, Funes kept the Venezuelan president at a distance during the campaign. Last week, Funes told foreign reporters he admired Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for gaining the trust of the business class despite misgivings when the leftist first took office in 2003.

Critics who once questioned the sincerity of such messages gave Funes the benefit of the doubt Monday.

"Let Lula, and not Chavez, influence the direction of this country," wrote Fabricio Altamirano, executive director of El Diario de Hoy, whose pro-government leanings so angered Funes during the campaign that he refused to grant the newspaper interviews. "The president-elect has said it a million times and the whole country is waiting to see if he keeps his word."

In another conciliatory gesture, President Tony Saca — himself a former television sportscaster — said he will formally introduce Funes as El Salvador's future president at an April Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, which Obama will attend.

Funes needs the peaceful transition to last. He will be the untested leader of a country that has known only right-wing governments — all dictatorships until the mid-1980s — since its 1821 independence from Spain.

Arena's bureaucrats and policies have been entrenched for 20 years and the party is far from finished. It will have 32 seats in the next single-house Congress, compared to the FMLN's 35, meaning it could have the power to block key measures such as the budget and foreign debt approvals.

Still, Funes has made it clear changes are coming to El Salvador. He promises to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba and end what he calls government complacency with big businesses that evade taxes.

"The time has come for the excluded. The opportunity has arrived for genuine democrats, for men and women who believe in social justice and solidarity," Funes told a rally of roaring supporters.

————

Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Washington and Ian James in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR Study: Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare

March 6. 2009.
Proponents of popular policy shut out of debate.

Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform in the week leading up to President Barack Obama's March 5 healthcare summit rarely mentioned the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a new FAIR study. And advocates of such a system--two of whom participated in yesterday's summit--were almost entirely shut out, FAIR found.

Single-payer--a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada's current system)--polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.

Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of "single-payer" (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as "Medicare for all," or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer--none of which appeared on television.

Of a total of 10 newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Krauthammer's syndicated column critical of the concept, published in the Washington Post (2/27/09) and reprinted in four other daily newspapers, accounted for five instances. Only three columns in the study period advocated for a single-payer system (San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/26/09; Boston Globe, 3/1/09; St. Petersburg Times, 3/3/09).

The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it: conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (NewsHour, 2/27/09) and Republican congressman Darrell Issa (MSNBC's Hardball, 2/26/09).

In many newspapers, the only argument in favor of the policy has been made in letters to the editor (Oregonian, 2/28/09; USA Today, 2/26/09; Washington Post, 3/4/09; Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/27/09; Atlanta Journal Constitution, 2/26/09).

In contrast, the terminology of choice for detractors of any greater public-sector role in healthcare--such as "socialized medicine" and "government-run" healthcare--turned up seven times on TV, including once on ABC News's This Week (3/1/09) and five times on CNN. CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen has herself adopted this terminology in discussing healthcare reform, stating (CNN Newsroom, 2/26/09) that "if in time, Americans start to think what President Obama is proposing is some kind of government-run health system--a la Canada, a la England--he will get resistance in the same way that Hillary Clinton got resistance when she tried to do tried to do this in the '90s."

Particularly in the absence of actual coverage of single-payer, such rhetoric confuses rather than informs, blurring the differences between the Canadian model of government-administered national health insurance coupled with private healthcare delivery that single-payer proponents advocate, and healthcare systems such as Britain's, in which healthcare (and not just healthcare insurance) is administered by the government.

The views of CNN's senior medical correspondent notwithstanding, opinion polling (e.g., ABC News/Washington Post, 10/9-19/03) suggests that the public would actually favor single-payer.

Though more than 60 lawmakers have co-sponsored H.R. 676, the single-payer bill in Congress, Obama has not expressed support for single-payer; both the idea and its advocates were marginalized in yesterday's healthcare forum. But given the high level of popular support the policy enjoys, that's all the more reason media should include it in the public debate about the future of healthcare.

See FAIR's Archives for more on: Health and Healthcare

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.