Bad Deeds for 10-7-2009

Health Insurance Company WellPoint Sued an Entire State to Increase Profits – Netting $2.5 billion in profits last year wasn’t enough for WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance company. Now, WellPoint’s affiliate, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession.

UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley Makes $464,000 Every DayAre you sick of it yet?

If the insurance companies win, we lose. Fight back!

Glenn Beck Made Fun of Competitor’s Wife’s Miscarriage – When Glenn Beck had a falling out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market, Beck became known as “the king of dirty tricks,” for antics such as this:

“A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right — about he can’t even have a baby.”

The GOP’s New Foreign Policy: Undermine American Diplomacy – An interesting pattern has been emerging in the Republican Party’s handling of foreign policy: Individual GOP officials are now making a regular point of not only formulating an alternative foreign policy, to be presented to the American people and debated in Congress — they’re acting on it too, and undermining the official White House policies at multiple turns:

• Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is visiting Honduras in order to support the recent military coup against a leftist president, which has been opposed by the Obama administration and all the surrounding countries in the region. (Late Update: DeMint’s office says he is not taking sides during his visit to the current Honduran leadership, denying the New York Times reports that this was his intention.)
• Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will be going to the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, bringing a “Truth Squad” to tell foreign officials there that the American government will not take any action: “Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate.”
• House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) traveled to Israel, where he spoke out against President Obama’s opposition to expanded settlements. He also defended Israel on the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem, which had been criticized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
• Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) boasted in June that he told Chinese officials not to trust America’s budget numbers. “One of the messages I had — because we need to build trust and confidence in our number one creditor,” said Kirk, “is that the budget numbers that the US government had put forward should not be believed.” Since then, he has declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate.

Bush Administration Blocked Efforts to Prevent Housing Crisis – Federal regulators in the Bush administration blocked attempts by state governments to prevent predatory lending practices that resulted in the financial crisis now stalking the American economy, a new study from the University of North Carolina says.

In 2004, the Office of the Currency Comptroller, an obscure regulatory agency tasked with ensuring the fiscal soundness of America’s banks, invoked an 1863 law to give itself the power to override state laws against predatory lending. The OCC told states they could not enforce predatory-lending laws, and all banks would be subject only to less-strict federal laws.

Now, a research paper (PDF) from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Community Capital shows that those anti-predatory lending laws had actually worked. States that had stricter regulations on issuing mortgages were found to have fewer foreclosures.

“We believe that these findings are remarkable, since they suggest an important and yet unexplored link between [anti-predatory lending laws] and foreclosures,” the study’s authors state.

The study may be the first scientific evidence to back up claims made by many critics that the Bush administration and earlier administrations allowed last year’s financial crisis to happen by not enforcing common-sense regulations on lenders.

Conservatives Wrong About Cause of Housing Crisis – Many conservatives have blamed the housing crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, “intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations.”

However, University of Michigan Law Professor Michael Barr, a specialist in banking and finance law, flatly rejected claims that the CRA was “a significant factor in the current crisis. CRA was enacted more than 30 years ago. It would be quite odd if this 30-year old law suddenly caused an explosion in bad subprime loans from 2002-2007….Subprime mortgages were mostly made by mortgage brokers and lenders and securitized by investment banks — institutions not covered by CRA. CRA only covers banks and thrifts, and these institutions mostly have not suffered to the same extent or kind from bad lending as the non-CRA-covered institutions at the core of the current crisis. The problem here is not CRA. It is what the late former Fed Governor Ned Gramlich called ‘the giant hole in the supervisory safety net’ — bad lending by firms outside the banking sector’s rules for prudential supervision, capital requirements, consumer protection and yes, the CRA.”

Along similar lines, University of Oregon economist Marc Thoma also cited for the Huffington Post the long delay between enactment of CRA and the current crisis and the fact that only 20 percent of subprime loans were made by CRA-regulated lenders, adding two other points: that “subprime loans grew twice as fast in institutions that did not have to meet the conditions of the CRA” and that the scope of coverage of CRA was reduced in 2004 under the Bush administration, “but even though fewer banks were subject to CRA restrictions, the growth of the subprime market continued unabated.”

This idea of faulting the CRA originated in the anti-regulation wing of the far right, and the goal is to blame government intervention for the current economic meltdown, and to score political points by blaming Democrats.

Some Gun Show Vendors Will Sell to Anyone

The NRA likes to claim that “the gun show loophole is a myth.” However, a report produced by the New York mayor’s office investigation of gun shows — which, along with videos, reveals that 63 percent of the gun vendors approached by the team were willing to sell to a person who told them they couldn’t pass the background check.

At approximately 5,000 gun shows each year in 32 states, criminals and terrorists are allowed to purchase firearms from private gun dealers without an ID or background check. Although many gun dealers are federally licensed and therefore legally required to contact the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to ensure that a prospective purchaser is not prohibited from possessing firearms, private sellers have no such requirement.

In purchases attempted on 30 private sellers, the undercover investigator showed interest in buying a gun by asking about stopping power or by dry-firing the weapon. After agreeing on a price, the undercover would indicate that he probably couldn’t pass a background check. At that point, the seller is required by law to refuse the sale – but only 11 out of 30 sellers did so. Investigators found private dealers who failed these integrity tests at every show, including two sellers who failed at multiple shows. In total, 19 of the 30 private sellers approached failed the integrity test.

Homeless Man Sentenced to 15 Years for Stealing Box of Cereal – Here’s an example where the punishment doesn’t quite seem to fit the crime.

A Florida man was sentenced to 15 years in prison Monday for stealing a $4.99 box of Lucky Charms and a $1.59 can of evaporated milk. Remember, we said he was a cereal stealer, not a serial killer.

Last time we checked, those pots of gold and blue diamonds were made of marshmallows, not real jewels. It’s not like he kidnapped or killed the creepy little leprechaun.

The judge threw the book at Mark Anthony Griffin because he was a “prison releasee reoffender,” a weird way of saying he had been in jail before. The Lakeland Ledger reports Griffin was convicted in 2007 of burglary and grand theft.

Griffin is a homeless man, and while that doesn’t make what he did right, it’s hard to imagine that crime, which amounts to around $7 with tax, is worth the thousands of tax payer dollars it will take to house him in a state penal facility.

The judge who sentenced Griffin seems to agree, but said he was bound by the law to give the reoffender the mandatory minimum.

“Personally, I think the money could have been better spent in treatment rather than incarceration for 15 years, but that is not my decision,” Bartow Judge Donald Jacobsen said. “It seems to me that treatment would be a far better resolution of this.”

Sea Otter Playing Up Effects of Oil Spill According to Oil Company Executives 😉 – Executives from the Shell Oil Company blasted a floundering, oil-covered sea otter Monday, accusing the small aquatic mammal of grossly exaggerating the effects of last month’s hazardous petroleum spill.

According to Shell president Marvin Odum, the otter has been putting on “quite a show” in front of rescue workers and clean-up crews, and is making the 860,000-gallon, three-mile-wide toxic slick seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

“He’s fine,” said Odum, referring to the 40-pound sea creature, who was found washed ashore and appeared to be suffering from anaphylactic shock. “Trust me, before all of the cameras and reporters showed up, our little buddy here was having no problem at all cleaning himself off. Now, all of a sudden, it’s severe spastic convulsions this and complete kidney failure that.”

“Seriously, come on,” the Shell executive continued. “Talk about laying it on thick.”

On Saturday, Shell chairman Jorma J. Ollila issued a statement accusing the sea mammal of being a master manipulator, and said that what the otter really needs to do is grow up.

Ollila went on to praise a number of petroleum-soaked seals, pelicans, and sea turtles in the contaminated area, commending them for remaining absolutely still and silent, and not “making a big production” out of the environmental disaster when rescue and camera crews arrived at the scene.

Regards,

Jim