Great Article on Flash Trading

Whatever it is, flash trading of stocks is pretty certainly bad, as I pointed out earlier. This article in Asia Times has the best explanation I've read. I don't understand the problem enough to know if his proposed tax solution is the best one, but I would certainly support it while we look at other options.

Sen. Coburn Approves Killing Poor Babies

Yesterday on "Meet the Press" Sen. Tom Coburn said the following:

We talk about neonatal mortality. Where’s the neonatal mortality? It’s not in the private insurance plans, it’s in Medicaid. Well, here’s the government-run program that is failing us in terms of neonatal mortality, and yet we use as an indicator neonatal mortality to say we need more government rather than less.

Rachel Maddow replied, "That is so disingenuous, that's unbelievable."

Rachel is right, although she didn't get to explain why. Medicaid is not a federal government insurance program. It's a joint state/federal program to provide last ditch assistance to people without health insurance to allow them to get treatment rather than die in the streets. Many of the 45 million people without health insurance probably benefit from Medicaid if they have a serious illness, or have a baby. So the people on Medicaid are the people targeted by the new program exactly to do things like allow them to have regular visits to a doctor while they are pregnant, rather than seeing a doctor for the first time when they go to the emergency room to give birth. If it weren't for Medicaid, many more poor babies would die, because mothers would get no medical care at all.

Coburn is basically saying that since people on Medicaid are poor, he doesn't care if their babies die. He would join Sarah Palin in calling for babies of trailer park trash to die so that Palin's Trig and other rich babies can live.

It's the same selfishness expressed in the town hall meeting protests that say, "Don't mess with my Medicare." They worry that their "socialist" government provided health care would suffer if the government tried to provide similar coverage to more people. They are saying I want those other people to die rather than give up my free health care.

Decent, loving people (which should certainly include people who call themselves Christian) would frame the issue as follows: We would like to have decent health care for everybody, not just me. How can we best do that, and how much can we afford? The latter question might also be phrased, how much am I willing to give my neighbor so that he can continue to live.

People screaming, "Don't touch my Medicare," are clearly not Christians.

Will Jobs Ever Recover?

Everybody is celebrating that the number of people who lost their jobs last month was smaller than the number for previous months, and the unemployment figure fell from 9.5 to 9.4 per cent unemployed. Meanwhile the stock market is going through the roof. What this means to me is that in the competition between labor and capital, capital is winning.

The consensus is that businesses are earning more money despite lower sales because they are cutting costs, which mainly means laying off workers.

The laid-off engineers and skilled mechanics may eventually get jobs, but many of them will end up working at McDonald's, Wal-Mart, or in similar unskilled jobs that pay considerably less. This is good news for Wall Street, where executives will hire replacements for them in India or China for much less, thus cutting the bottom line as they begin rehiring at the end of the recession. The recession has been a great opportunity for American business to get rid of higher paid American workers forever, not just during the recession.

Uneven Playing Field: Flash Orders and Oil

The obscene profits and compensation at Goldman Sachs and other banks indicate that the stock and commodity markets are not level playing fields. The big firms have an unfair advantage and they use it. The only argument in favor of allowing them to use this advantage is that they continue to take such huge trading risks that if they were to fail, as many small investors do, they would once again threaten to destroy the world as we know it, as they did at the end of the Bush administration.

Two examples of their unfair advantage have come to light in th4e last few days: flash or high frequency trading orders, which is under investigation by the SEC, and manipulation of the oil futures market, which is under investigation by the CFTC. The fact that both of the matters are under investigation is a welcome change from the Bush administration Of course Goldman Sachs is in the forefront of both of these questionable practices. Matt Taibbi did an excellent job of reporting Goldman’s role in the spike of gas prices last year; now they are at it again.