Not So Hopeful News

Update 12/9: Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders and others insisting on a strong health care reform bill were speaking this morning in favor of the compromise. So maybe it's good news after all?


There was some good news Tuesday. The U.S. Senate decisively defeated an amendment to the health care bill that would have added a provision that for all practical purposes repeals Roe v. Wade. And President Obama spoke about jobs and the economy, outlining plans to tap into TARP for more job creation. The LA Times story (and video) is here, and the White House statement with more details is here.

But on our two fateful topics, some news was not good at all. The AP is reporting that the Senate has reached a compromise eliminating the public option in the health care reform bill. The CBO has been asked to score the compromise, so it isn't public yet. But other "news" or "rumors," suggest it's even worse than it sounds. There's been discussion of a Medicare buy-in but it may be so narrow and limited as to be meaningless. There's disquiet about whether the bill will really save people money, or just indenture them to the same insurance companies, but this time with force of law.

Reporting since then suggests it isn't quite as bad as that, although it's hard to call it good. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid insists the public option is still part of the bill, but other reporting suggests it's on a hard-to-pull trigger. We'll see, but probably not until the CBO scoring (for its financial impact) is done in a few days.

There's also talk that there won't be a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate bills, but a straight up or down vote in the House of the Senate bill. While conventional wisdom has been saying that the Senate was unlikely to pass a public option, the hope was that it would be restored in conference.

Bad news coming out of Copenhagen, too, of a leaked draft of a proposed agreement backed by major nations that disses the developing world in several significant ways, so that, according to the Guardian (which broke the story) "The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations."

Perhaps the most sinister element in this proposal is to bypass the UN and give power over major climate provisions to the World Bank. The same World Bank that enforced the "Shock Doctrine" on developing nations, destroying their social infrastructure, devastating their economies and enslaving them to pay debt to rich nations and institutions. The last thing we need is a Climate Crisis Shock Doctrine.

But the good news about the bad news is that both stories are in process. Nobody actually knows what the Senate compromise is, nor do they know whether the climate agreement draft that was leaked really represents what big nations (including the U.S.) intend or ever intended to propose. So stay tuned.