Corrente

Yves Smith and Bill Black have a post this morning describing the potential problems with the Brown/Vitter bill. There's a lot of detail and I won't try to summarize it, but there are two points I wanted to highlight.

The first is the concept of tight coupling. Basically, a bunch of extremely interconnected small institutions can pose as much systemic risk as a handful of behemoths, so a reform that turns the latter into the former is esentially a cosmetic one. The second is the concept of systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs. SDIs are institutions that are large enough on their own to trigger a cascade of failures if they themselves fail.

So there are two characteristics to be concerned with here: tight coupling and dangerous size. Why not tweak the nomenclature a bit to include both of those? We could call these institutions Systemically Tight and Dangerous, or STDs. That seems a bit more colorful and descriptive than SDIs, don't you think?

If it catches on, we could even end up with the bonus fun of seeing legislators try to come up with a bill title that's an acronym for penicillin. Read below the fold...

SILKKEN LAUMANN - House Of Common Problems

Read below the fold...

It can be difficult to write about activism in an open-ended effort like the one against fracking. It isn't like a campaign where all the activity is geared toward election day, at which point everyone will know who won and who lost. It's different even from an issue like the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a single (continent-spanning) contiguous piece of infrastructure, and which will ultimately get a definitive yes or no.

Fracking involves lots of activity in communities dotted across the nation. There are big shale plays in some parts of the west, some parts of the Midwest, some parts of the east, and so on. But nothing connects those dots, and that makes it hard to give the thing a sense of its nationwide scope. Coverage will tend to be on a smaller scale, which makes it easier to dismiss it as a purely local or parochial concern. Read below the fold...

HuffPost: Transcripts of Bradley Manning's trial have been heavily guarded and out of public reach. Alyona chats with Freedom of the Press Foundation about their efforts to raise money to hire a court reporter for the Bradley Manning trial. Read below the fold...

What could go wrong? Everybody knows health insurance companies are our friends! WaPo:

Budget request denied, Sebelius turns to health executives to finance Obamacare
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone hat in hand to health industry executives, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law. Read below the fold...

I first noticed "all payer" in a column by RJ Eskow; now here it is again, in an article by Jon Walker at FDL. In response to Jared Bernstein's "everybody into the pool" argument for ObamaCare, Walker responds: Read below the fold...

Normally, I wouldn't link to political (as opposed to financial*) right wing feverswamp of Investor's Business Daily, but this is the kind of logic they're good at, so herewith:

To review, under ObamaCare, employers who offer insurance will face a fine of up to $3,000 per worker who receives subsidies to buy insurance through the exchanges.

Read below the fold...

Via Vice (and do note the source*)

Pointing to the new monochrome structure adjacent to the Foundation Building that serves as home to Cooper Union's School for the Advancement of Science and Art—Victoria Sobel said she isn't buying Bharucha's story. Sobel, an art major who graduates this year, is a member of Cooper Union $O$, which planned and orchestrated the occupation. The window propaganda decorating the Foundation Building was her senior project, although the administration made her take down slogans mentioning Bharucha specifically by name. She accuses the president of continuing a trend established by his predecessors, that of “selling Cooper Union down the river.” Read below the fold...

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/05/cooper_union_rally_re...

At least five other schools have joined in support of Cooper's students and faculty, and are using People's Mic. (Thank you Occupy!)

Strong and eloquent statements, the likes of which we haven't heard in recent memory.

The Students: Read below the fold...

Kaiser Health News:

This week, [Colorado] became the first state to launch a public awareness campaign with television, print, radio and billboard ads that will cost $2 million and run two months. The TV ad shows a woman at her kitchen table scrolling through health plan information on the Connect for Health Colorado website. The voice over says the website lets people shop and buy a health plan online.

“When health care companies compete, there is only one winner: you,” says the voice over, as the woman jumps up and down as if celebrating a sports victory. The 30-second ad makes no mention that the new website is a result of the 2010 federal health law known to most Americans as Obamacare.

Branding problem, perhaps?

As for "When health care companies compete," that makes the 10 states where health insurance is "virtual monopoly" second class citizens. Anyhow, why would they compete when they can collude? Read below the fold...

The execreble Chris Bowers* writes a job ad:

Hey Kossacks, it's Chris Bowers, the Senior Campaign Director at Daily Kos. That means I manage the email and activism program here.

Right now, we have more activism and email work than we can complete, so we are hiring a new Associate Campaign Director to help out.

It's a pretty cool job at a pretty cool place. You get to work with the Daily Kos staff from the comfort of your own home, putting together actions that will make a difference on the stories that are of the most interest to the Daily Kos community. Further, it's high level stuff that allows you to regularly interact with other major progressive organizations.

My career in politics started just by being a diarist and commenter here at Daily Kos. What's more, my wife and several of my friends also launched their careers in politics by being amateur bloggers and commenters. This has made me a big believer that there is some serious political talent in this community, and that's why I am posting this job notice here four days days before I post it anywhere else.

Kossacks get first crack at this one. You can see the job description below the orange squiggly thing. If you want to come work as an digital organizer with Big Orange, please check it out and apply.

Hey, Chris! I take it all the Hillary supporters who had their accounts taken away won't be considered for the job? Read below the fold...

Kaiser:

A California law that created an agency to oversee national health care reforms granted it sweeping authority to conceal spending on the contractors that will perform most of its functions, creating a barrier from public disclosure that stands out nationwide. The degree of secrecy afforded Covered California appears unique among states attempting to establish their own health insurance exchanges under President Barack Obama's signature health law

Read below the fold...

(NYU is the place that gave Obama's slimeball Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, a $1.4 million reacharound in the form of a [cough] "loan.". So it makes sense the NYU students understand the corruption at Cooper Union.) Photos here. Read below the fold...

EXCERPTS

Andrew O’Hehir in “Guantanamo: It’s Obama’s disgrace now”

But as details about the conditions of detainment at Guantánamo began to leak, the place began to look not just abusive and nightmarish but also bureaucratic and buffoonish. Many of those who were being held captive in those egregious circumstances were low-level foot-soldiers, or even bystanders, who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. ...

snip Read below the fold...

What they did was pretty simple: The House passed a bill, the Senate passed a bill, and the President signed it. Civics 101: "How a bill becomes a law." And now the law is being enforced.*

So Hunter over at the Great Orange Satan (hat tip Atrios) writes this: Read below the fold...