Like the clear results on a pH test strip, the vote in the U.S. Senate this week on the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act showed Republicans’ true color: Red. Red for China.

Or Mexico. Or Indonesia. Or anywhere multi-national corporations get tax breaks for exporting American jobs. In this test of loyalty, every Republican in the Senate voted for corporate greed over American workers.

No fluke, this is a GOP pattern. The red party has consistently sided with giant corporations to the detriment of the American economy and American workers. In voting against health care reform, Republicans chose giant health insurance corporations over uninsured Americans. In opposing financial reform, Republicans embraced Wall Street over the taxpayers who bailed out the big banks and don’t want to do it again.

Republicans vainly attempted to rationalize those votes as opposing government regulation. There’s no regulation issue in the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act.

That Act would have removed tax incentives the U.S. government gives corporations to close domestic factories, fire American workers and move production overseas. And, conversely, the Act would have instituted tax cuts for corporations that return foreign employment to U.S. soil.

Every Republican in the Senate voted against the Act. They voted to continue forcing Americans to give tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The GOP said it is right and proper for U.S. citizens to subsidize corporate killing of American manufacturing. And Republicans said it would be wrong to do the opposite — to use tax breaks to encourage corporations to restore off-shored jobs to the U.S.

Democrats, whose first priority is American workers, are pushing a 17-bill Make it in America plan. The Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act is part of that effort to bolster domestic industry and employment.

With joblessness stuck at 9.6 percent and with the U.S. trade deficit destroying or displacing 5.6 million jobs — 70 percent of them good-paying manufacturing jobs — in just one year – 2007, Democrats developed this plan to preserve American industry and jobs. Recent surveys of likely voters suggest the Democrats’ Make it in American program is exactly what Americans want and believe the country needs.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this week, 86 percent of respondents cited corporate off-shoring of American jobs as the primary cause of the country’s continuing economic distress.

Similarly, a bi-partisan polling team that conducted a survey of likely voters for the Alliance for American Manufacturing in April found large majorities believe manufacturing strength is crucial to U.S. economic security and that the government should fortify American industry. These voters told the pollsters that they believe America no longer leads the world in manufacturing but could again with proper support.

That can-do-it attitude is realistic. Already some manufacturers are on-shoring. General Electric is moving production of its energy-efficient water heaters from China to the United States. Caterpillar and NCR, a technology company, are doing the same. A survey in June found 21 percent of North American manufacturers brought production into or closer to the United States in the previous three months and another 38 percent planned to research such a move.

Manufacturers gave USA Today numerous reasons for this repatriation. Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen. They cited poor quality foreign manufactured goods; theft of intellectual property; long product delivery times interfering with response to consumer demand, and benefits from providing engineers easy access to assembly lines.

The trade publication, Supply Chain Digest, quoted two experts in an August story about the on-shoring trend:

“George Stalk, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, has led research efforts showing the inventory benefits for high margin, fashion-oriented goods from bringing production at least back to North America almost always trump the value of lower manufacturing costs in Asia. Those benefits come from both not losing sales from being out of stock and not getting stuck with obsolete inventory that a company can’t sell or must mark down dramatically.”

And, the story quoted Jeremy Leonard, a consultant for Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI:

“A lot of companies who have gone there to take advantage of cheap labor are starting to tell us that if you (calculate) total cost and don’t just look at wages, it’s actually not worth it.”

Democrats sought to nurture and expand the repatriation trend. But like numerous Make it in America bills passed by the U.S. House, the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act died at the hands of Senate Republicans. Democrats had the majority with 53 votes for the measure, but Republicans, as they have all year, blocked passage by using a filibuster to require a super-majority of 60.

The next test for Republicans will occur Nov. 2. In the mid-term election, Americans red-in-the-face angry at the GOP for extending tax breaks to corporations for expatriating American jobs have the opportunity to show Republican politicians what it feels like to lose a job.

This post first appeared on Mother Jones Online.

A dying journalist. He has one final assignment: Find out if President Richard Nixon ordered him assassinated.

That’s what occurred at the end of the life of the infamous columnist Jack Anderson, one of the most influential Washington reporters of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. This intriguing and poignant tale is recounted by Mark Feldstein, a former investigative correspondent for CNN and ABC (and onetime Anderson intern) in his marvelous new book, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.

First, some background: After writing for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes during World War II, Anderson hit Washington, DC, and eventually became a “legman” for Drew Pearson, whose muckraking “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column was carried by more newspapers than any other column at the time. Over the course of the next three decades, Richard Nixon would be a constant target of the column as he rose from House member to senator to vice president to president. (Pearson and Anderson’s discovery of a Nixon slush fund in 1952 led to Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech.)

They subsequently reported that Nixon intervened with federal officials to help a millionaire Romanian exile obtain a large tax break. (They did not report the tip that Nixon had pocketed: a $100,000 campaign contribution from this fellow.) In 1956, the column noted that Nixon had used a Los Angeles gangster to collect campaign contributions “from the underworld.” Days before the 1960 election, Pearson and Anderson dropped a bomb on presidential candidate Nixon: Industrialist Howard Hughes had given a secret loan of $205,000 to Nixon’s brother, and Nixon was in on it. Nixon lost the election by a hair. He and his aides believed the loan controversy was partly to blame.

Eight years later, when Nixon was again the GOP’s presidential nominee, Anderson and Pearson revived their previous stories and reported more details about Nixon’s earlier efforts to bag campaign money from gangsters. The pair also came close to reporting that Nixon had previously been treated by a New York City psychotherapist—a story that could have ruined him, given popular prejudice at the time against such treatment. They had the story confirmed, but Pearson killed it at the last minute. Then days after the election, Pearson in a speech at the National Press Club revealed that Nixon had sought this treatment and that the psychotherapist had expressed concern about Nixon’s ability to contend with “great pressure.”

During the Nixon years, Anderson pursued the president like Ahab after the great whale. (Pearson died in September 1969.) He regularly published scoops based on leaked documents showing Nixon administration deception regarding US actions in Vietnam. He revealed that the White House was secretly assisting the military dictatorship of Pakistan during the India-Pakistan war. He took a cheap shot at Vice President Spiro Agnew with a column hinting that Agnew’s son was gay. In public, Anderson bragged that he regularly was leaked copies of Nixon’s private memos and minutes of confidential White House meetings. He broke the story of Nixon’s secret meeting with Elvis Presley (who asked the president to sign him up as a narcotics agent). Nixon and his aides despised Anderson and repeatedly railed against him. The president yearned to prosecute “that bastard.” His aides discussed blackmailing the columnist. The White House even sicced the CIA on Anderson—to no avail.

Then in 1972, Anderson unearthed a blockbuster story: a memo written by a lobbyist proving that Nixon had intervened in a giant antitrust case involving ITT, a telecommunications conglomerate, in exchange for ITT donating $400,000 to his re-election campaign. Another Nixon scandal erupted. In the middle of the hullabaloo, Charles Colson, a top White House aide (who in his current bio refers to himself as Nixon’s “hatchet man”), met with E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who had become a Nixon dirty trickster, working as part of the secret “Plumbers” unit that would soon be caught breaking into the Watergate. According to Hunt, Colson told him that Nixon was enraged by Anderson and that the reporter had to be killed in what should look like an accident.

To pull off this job, Colson recruited G. Gordon Liddy, who had recently joined the Nixon campaign as an operative. As Hunt and Liddy have acknowledged, the two trailed Anderson. They sought advice from a CIA physician who had been involved in the agency’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The duo considered various plots: placing poison in medicine Anderson was taking, placing LSD on the steering wheel of Anderson’s car (in the hope he would start tripping and crash his vehicle), staging a fake mugging in which Anderson would be fatally knifed. But before any plan was hatched, according to Hunt, Colson told him to call off the hit.

As Feldstein notes in his book, some Nixon aides have questioned whether the murder plot occurred—despite the fact that Hunt and Liddy in later years publicly discussed it in great detail. Hunt believed that the order to kill Anderson came directly from the president. Colson, who after serving prison time for a Watergate-related charge founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, has always claimed that he and Nixon had nothing to do with this lethal conspiracy.

But Anderson never believed Colson’s denial. Shortly before he died in 2005, while hospitalized for Parkinson’s disease, Anderson took a stab at nailing this story—and Nixon. As Feldstein writes:

The newsman passed word to Colson that he was dying and asked him to call out of Christian compassion. Colson did. “I told him I’d been at the hospital and was having a hard time,’ Anderson said, and that “no recovery was possible.” The two men exchanged pleasantries and flattery, and talked about old times. Anderson had once offered to loan Colson money before he went to prison, and Colson remembered the gesture with gratitude.

Eventually, Anderson nudged the conversation toward the murder plot. “What really happened?” he asked Colson. The conversation went from warm to chilly, as Colson issued the standard denial. Anderson assumed Colson, these days a leading Christian conservative, was still lying to protect Nixon. He still believed Nixon had been in on it. But he had failed to win this much sought-after confession. (After Anderson died, Liddy, now a folk hero on the right, sent an email to a former Anderson reporter: “too bad the plumbers didn’t get to that anti american traitor jackoff anderson, good riddance.”)

Feldstein’s work, an absorbing read that details Anderson’s many accomplishments and his many warts, chronicles the modern-day rise of spin and combative politics in the nation’s capital, showing how the dirty politics and media wars of today are linked to those of the Nixon era and, in some cases, perpetuated by once-young Nixonites (paging Roger Ailes). Moreover, the book once again reminds us that at a crucial point in US history—when war was being waged, when the society was divided over fundamental social issues—the man in charge of the government was a venal, dishonest, and essentially psychopathic thug, whether or not he ordered Jack Anderson killed. And that was a story that Anderson spent years exposing.

Millions of dollars in church and charity based income. A $350,000 Bentley. A $1.4 million dollar mansion. Even by the often lavish standards of high-profile megachurch pastors, Bishop Eddie Long’s lifestyle has appeared extravagant. Where does all the money come from? The members of his 25,000 member New Birth church near Atlanta? In part, yes, but As Talk To Action contributor Rachel Tabachnick details, in a new two part series [part 1, part 2], Bishop Long is spiritually authority over the pastors of a sprawling network of 275 churches across America, in 38 states including Alaska, and these pastors are instructed to all tithe to a network under Eddie Long’s control – The Father’s House.

American media treatment of religion is typically a mile wide and an inch deep, and coverage of Bishop Eddie Long’s roiling sex scandal is no different. Stories about the allegations that Long coerced teen and young adult males at his church-based Longfellows Academy into having sex have gained national traction. Try a Google news story search on “Eddie Long” – 3,840 search results and climbing.

But add to that search an additional word, “tithe” and you’ll get all of 6 search results. One might suppose all the cash sloshing around Eddie Long’s church and bank accounts might generate even a little interest. Apparently not, and the media neglect is especially curious because of the widely recognized truism that sex, money, and power tend to flow together.

As Tabachnick suggests, Bishop Eddie Long represents a gathering trend in American evangelicalism – the anti-democratic concentration of authority under fast rising church networks under the authoritarian control of self-made “apostles” :

Bishop Eddie Long may or may not be guilty of the charges of abusing his authority and having sexual relationships with four young men.  However, the current Dominionist trend results in congregations where members are supposed to submit to the almost absolute authority of their anointed leaders, a change that removes the congregation as a balance or check to the power of the pastor.  Long claims spiritual authority over more than his New Birth mega-church in Lithonia, Georgia.  He is the ‘apostolic authority’ over churches in The Father’s House  network, including 79 churches in Georgia alone.  Many evangelical churches are shifting away from their traditional democratically governed structures.  A model for making the transition was the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, formerly led by Ted Haggard (who defended Long in broadcasts over the weekend).  Haggard wrote his 1998 book The Life Giving Church as a guide to pastors in making the transition to what he and his colleagues dubbed ‘New Apostolic’ churches and networks.

[...]

Once a church has shifted to this model, the pastor can no longer be hired and fired by the membership but becomes the authority over his flock.  Only his overseers or spiritual authority figures can remove or discipline him.   In these networks an apostle (or bishop in some cases) provides spiritual or apostolic “covering” over others.

Their growing authoritarian nature and the concentration of power in these apostolic church networks has irritated and dismayed even some in the apostolic movement such as J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine (and a former apostle in C. Peter Wagner’s mammoth International Coalition of Apostles – ICA ) who blasted in a 2009 Charisma op-ed,

Some charismatic apostles became mini-popes who carved out their fiefdoms. Suddenly the independent charismatic movement had more invasive authoritarianism than the denominations these pastors abandoned 10 years earlier.

In some circles apostles demanded total allegiance from the leaders who were “under” them. Some required a policy of “tithing up,” creating a monstrous organizational structure similar to a spiritual Amway. So-called apostles with huge “downlines” made exorbitant amounts of money. One leader even offered pastors the opportunity to become “spiritual sons” by contributing $1,000 a month to his ministry.

If we can now make some informed guesses about where some of Long’s money comes from, Tabachnick’s second story segment highlight’s the ultimate agenda – political power:

Like the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and other Dominionist networks, Long does not believe in separation of church and state.  And similar to the NAR prophets, Long believes that God gives messages directly to him to pass on to his flock.  In his book Taking Authority he states,

God has strongly communicated to me His displeasure with our nation’s growing acceptance of the mythical “separation of church and state” heresy.  I am convinced this so-called separation was never the intent of our nation’s founding fathers – it is merely a device fraudulently created by an errant Supreme Court totally apart from historical precedent, tradition, or even the will of the people.

Also, like many other New Apostolics and Dominionists, Eddie Long is known for his extensive charitable work.  And also like the New Apostolics, this work is at least partially intended to provide access and gain authority over government as mandated in dominion theology.

In 2001 church growth specialist C. Peter Wagner announced the advent of the “New Apostolic Reformation” which, Wagner has continually stated, is at least as significant if not more so than the Protestant Reformation was. Wagner now heads what is possibly the biggest charismatic evangelical apostolic network on Earth (the ICA), but he’s also one of the apostolic movement’s leading strategists.

So where does Wagner see Eddie Long as fitting in? Tabachnick provides a striking quote from a Peter Wagner article titled “Let’s take Dominion Now!” –

In an article titled “Let’s Take Dominion Now!” (and also in his book Church in the Workplace), C. Peter Wagner describes Eddie Long as providing a model for city `transformation.’  Wagner quotes Long’s book Taking Authority,

    The New Birth congregation finances and operates vital support programs in the city and pumps large sums of money and thousands of volunteer hours into key areas such as youth offender intervention programs, public school programs, and support and outreach programs for homeless women and children. We are involved in every aspect of life, and we are making a major impact in the Atlanta metropolitan areas.

    This, in turn, is causing us to gain major footholds in the city infrastructure, . . . the criminal court system, public high schools, the Georgia State Senate, the United States Senate, and even into the White House itself. . . . When you are a politician in a major metropolitan area, it isn’t wise to dismiss or ignore a highly unified, committed, and motivated group of voters exceeding twenty-two thousand people representing almost every voting precinct in your city.

In light of the fact that Eddie Long’s church received a million-dollar grant from George W. Bush’s Faith Based Initiative, Wagner’s analysis is striking, and all the more so for the authoritarian and intolerant nature of the new apostolic movement Long represents. As Rachel Tabachnick details, Eddie Long’s teachings are both virulently anti-gay and also openly contemptuous of church-state separation.

Eddie Long and C., Peter Wagner are dominionists – they want to extend church authority over every sphere of society including the political realm. The strongly anti-democratic nature of dominionism comes out perhaps most strikingly in the doctrine of “spiritual fatherhood” that’s now in mainstream media parlance especially due to the fact that Eddie Long has been accused of coercing sex from his “spiritual sons.”

The “Spiritual Father” concept, as Tabachnick relates, is part of the “Discipleship and Shepherding” movement that erupted out of a small but astonishingly influential Ft. Lauderdale ministry during the early 1970’s.

The movement spread so explosively across America and grew so extreme that, as author Sara Diamond described in her groundbreaking 1989 book Spiritual Warfare, Pat Robertson, who along with his wife Dede had been close to the “Fort Lauderdale Five” who launched the Discipleship and Shepherding movement, became sufficiently alarmed that in 1975 he tried to squash it. As Diamond quoted Robertson’s internal 700 Club memos,    

“The so-called ’submission-shepherding’ cult is vastly worse than anything I could have conceived of…

    …In these cells, each member is under total domination by the shepherd.  The shepherd can forbid the husband and wife from living together….  When one man said he would not be under subjection to any man, he was told, ` you will be ruined spiritually, financially, and ruined physically.’ “

Leaving its coercive spiritual aspects aside, the Discipleship and Shepherding movement established the sort of pyramidal hierarchies of authority one would typically find in a military structure – “shepherds” could disciple “sheep”, or serve as “spiritual fathers” to “spiritual sons” but such “sheep” or “sons” could in turn take roles as shepherds or spiritual fathers to other Christians presumably lower in the spiritual pecking order. And so on down the line.

All of which brings us to a startling video Tabachnick showcases in her 2nd story segment, from a 2003 trip Bishop Eddie Long made to New Zealand, where he declared at a Wellington, NZ megachurch that powerful New Zealand megachurch leader Brian Tamaki (who has his own apostolic network of churches in his country) would in 5 years rule the nation of New Zealand: spiritually, economically, politically – total dominance.

Tamaki prophesied a church-based takeover of New Zealand would occur within five years and Eddie Long, whom Brian Tamaki has described as a “spiritual father,” lustily endorsed Tamaki’s theocratic vision,

“He made a declaration that in five years you shall be ruling and reigning in this nation. That means you control the wealth, that means you control the riches, that means you control the politics, that means you control the social order, that means that you are in charge. Touch your neighbor and say, `It happens because of order.’”

This post first appeared on Balloon Juice.

Here’s the best video I could find of Carl Paladino threatening the New York Post’s State Editor, Fred Dicker, saying he’ll “take out” Dicker if Dicker sends his “goons” again to take photos of Paldino’s ten-year-old daughter, who was fathered by Paladino when he had an extramarital affair. Dicker was asking Paladino to provide some proof of his allegation that Andrew Cuomo also had an extramarital affair. Here’s the Post story on the confrontation.

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Written by Amie Newman for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

One in eight couples uses in-vitro fertilization and other forms of assisted reproductive technology to have children, notes Dr. Ruben Alvero in a Denver Daily News article today.

Yet Colorado voters are being asked to pass the so-called “Personhood Amendment”, Amendment 62, which could essentially block couples seeking to have children from utilizing in-vitro fertilization.

Yesterday, physicians and families – especially those who have been helped immensely by the use of in-vitro fertilization, spoke up about the dangers of Amendment 62.

Jim Burness, the father of a 27-month-old daughter who was conceived through in-vitro fertilization, also shared his story.

“Right after our wedding, my father-in-law and my mother both passed away,” Burness said. “As a result, my wife and I had a strong desire to have a child that would have a biological link to those we lost. In this day and age, I am astounded how any group can think they have a right to dictate whether my daughter can have a biological sibling.”

Backers of the initiative have filed a lawsuit to change the language in the state voter’s guide (the “Blue Book”) as they believe the current wording shares misinformation about the impact of the measure. As Wendy Norris and others have covered extensively on RH Reality Check, the Personhood Amendment seeks to imbue fertilized eggs with the full legal rights of citizens. Theresa Erickson, writing on The American Fertility Association’s web site, notes

“…the groups backing the amendment are attempting to stop all abortions while effectively banning abortions for victims of rape and incest, banning abortions to save the life of the woman, banning certain forms of birth control (such as IUDs, which inhibit the implantation of an embryo), and banning in-vitro fertilization and other forms of medical research.  Furthermore, in its current form this amendment would effectively restrict a woman and her doctor the ability to obtain and provide proper medical care – instead, it could potentially criminalize the actions of the doctor and his or her patient.”

So, it’s odd, isn’t it, that anti-choice blogger and speaker, Jill Stanek, decries the wonders of in-vitro fertlization on her blog today? Stanek blogs about the story of Grace and Luke “frozen when they were 8 cell embryos” and adopted by a Christian couple who “had gestated and given birth to their other embryos” (huh?). Read more

Last night Jon Stewart pointed out that berating liberals and progressives may not be the best way for the White House to close the enthusiasm gap between Democrat and Republican voters.

Another bad idea? House Dems postponing the vote on middle-income tax cuts till after the election. Stewart’s explanation for why Democrats dropped the ball on popular legislation right before the midterms? “Because we suuuck. We came, we saw, we suck.”

Party down, Big Coal lobbyists! Give those Ameren utility dudes a raise.

After investing nearly $800,000 in political contributions, Big Coal utility giant Ameren just got confirmation that a pay off check for nearly $1 billion is in the mail, courtesy of US taxpayers.

Rock on, Energy Secretary Steven Chu!

All Ameren has to do is kinda sorta maybe refashion one of its coal-ash spewing World War II-era coal-fired and oil-burning plants into FutureGen 2.0–an infeasible, prohibitively expensive, accident and leak-prone, and chimerical scheme of oxy-combustion technology that will sorta kinda maybe capture, compress, pump and dump CO2 into Illinois’ aquifers and porous caverns.

Don’t worry: The company helping Ameren built the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, so they’re good to go.

And get this: Ameren is already sending its boys over to Illinois to soak the state’s taxpayers for a probable hike in utility rakes to cover any costs not bankrolled by the federal “clean coal” welfare program.

As business leaders in Mattoon, Illinois noted recently, after their town got shafted on the FUTUREGEN rollercoaster, they even question why anyone wants to “become the ‘dumping’ ground for other people’s waste.”

Good question. The answer, according to US Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) is a handful of jobs. After receiving over $135,000 in political contributions from Ameren and other Big Coal lobbyists, Durbin can now crow that he pulled in $1 billion in US taxpayer funds from the federal stimulus to create approximately “500 jobs, pipeline construction would add another 275, and there would be 75 new permanent jobs.”

Do the math: Those are some expensive government-funded and subsidized jobs.

According to energy analyst Rory McIlmoil at Downstream Stragegies, spending that billion dollars on clean energy projects would be a vastly better investment all around:

“There are other options available to the Department of Energy for investing in projects that would generate electricity while also reducing carbon emissions associated with that generation. For instance, $1 billion in energy investment using taxpayer dollars could be used to develop 500 MW of wind power or 125 MW of rooftop solar panels, and once these were installed, there would not be any fuel costs, carbon emissions, or risks related to the geologic sequestration of CO2. Additionally, investing public funds in solar or wind rather than FutureGen would prevent additional costs to human health and the environment that would result from the mining, processing, and burning of coal at FutureGen. Finally, while the FutureGen project would–according to the Alliance’s own estimates–create a total of 11,000 jobs nationally, research by the Political Economy Research Institute suggests that $1 billion in investment in solar or wind would create even more jobs than the proposed FutureGen project: 13,300 for an equal investment in wind, and over 13,700 for an equal investment in solar.”
“

Too bad the cancer-plagued farmers contaminated by coal slurry in nearby Illinois communities never received such compensation.

Too bad nearby farmers are now losing their ancestral farm houses and fertile rows of corn to longwall mining and more coal slurry is slated for their aquifers.

Too bad Illinois coal miners who are dying daily from black lung disease can’t get a little more of this pork.

FutureGen 2.0 is not even scheduled to sorta kinda operate on a commercial scale for a decade, so we don’t even need to note the issue of peak coal and FutureGen’s increased coal production needs.

No, today is party day for Big Coal and its utility partners, and Big Coal-bankrolled politicians like US. Sen. Dick Durbin.

This post first appeared in the Wonk Room.

McDonald’s is denying reports that it plans to cancel health insurance for almost 30,000 workers unless federal regulators loosen requirements for plans to spend 80 to 85 percent of premium dollars on health care costs. “Media reports stating that we plan to drop health care coverage for our employees are completely false,” a McDonald’s spokesperson told Politico’s Pulse. “These reports are purely speculative and misleading.”

But according to the Wall Street Journal, a senior McDonald’s official informed “the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain’s insurer” won’t meet the new requirements, called medical-loss ratios (MLR), since they are “unrealistic” for the kind of mini-med plans the company provides to many of its hourly restaurant workers. The plans, which often restrict the number of covered doctor visits or impose a relatively low maximum on insurance payouts in a year, have “high administrative costs owing to frequent worker turnover, combined with relatively low spending on claims“:

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Six Reasons Why Gen X & Gen Y Need Some Serious Financial TLC

• They’re scared: They’ve entered their adult years during a gut-wrenching economic and job market.  With unemployment over 9.5%, they’ve seen their parents struggle.  Over 7 out of 10 Americans are now living paycheck-to-paycheck.

• They are making poor decisions: As a result of that fear they are not making the best long-term decisions for their futures. A recent ICI study shows only 34% of investors under age 35 are willing to take substantial risk with their retirement money – the exact time in their lives when they should take that risk.

• Something as “simple” as a 20-year head start can give you 5x more money: Let’s take 2 people.  Jane starts saving $5,000 a year at age 25 for her retirement every year until age 65 and gets an average return of 7%.  Jane has a $1 million nest egg by retirement. Joe starts saving $5,000 a year at age 45 for retirement every year until age 65 and also gets an average return of 7%. Joe has $200,000 in his next egg. That 20-year head start gave Jane 5x more money. That’s why learning the basics of personal finance – how to budget, get out of debt, and save so you can get that retirement fund funded in the key early years is so vital.

• Young adults consume information differently so there’s a delivery challenge when it comes to education: Studies shows that young adults want their financial education delivered in a 21st Century way. They want it web-based with robust, interactive tools. And unlike their “I’ll do it myself” parents, these emerging adults want help and guidance.

• Nearly half of Gen Y has below average financial fluency: A study by The National Foundation for Credit Counseling showed that nearly half of this generation did not understand how to save and budget and that 45% of them have no savings!

• The financial world is geometrically more complex: Part of the reason for the above statistic is due to the fact that financial literacy is not taught in schools as a core life skill.  Young adults often rely on parents who were brought up in “financially simpler” times and aren’t equipped to help. They are also bombarded by so many more unrealistic media images about what “normal” lives are like.

So, what’s the solution?

If you or someone you love is a Gen X or Gen Y-er… encourage them to self-educate.  Here are five of my favorite personal finance sites – all of which I’ve either written for or read regularly myself:

• For everyone:  GetCurrency.com & SmartAboutMoney.org
• For women:  LearnVest.com and DailyWorth.com
• For men: IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com

What about you – any additional resources to recommend to Gen X & Gen Y?

Want more financial love? You can follow Manisha on Twitter at @ManishaThakor and sign up for her email updates here. Starting in Fall 2010, Manisha will teach an innovative online course on “Financial Literacy 101″ for women though www.Sympoz.com. Manisha Thakor, personal finance expert for women, can be reached via her website, www.ManishaThakor.com.

[This post first appeared at the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

Back in December 2007, I was visiting my home state of Iowa. The presidential primary season was in full flower. It seemed like you couldn’t make a run to the supermarket without bumping into Hillary. My brothers and I joked with a neighbor (perhaps the strongest Biden supporter in the precinct) that the future vice president had been so ingratiating that we expected to see him come over soon to personally shovel the snow off her sidewalk.

That month, I went out to see both John Edwards and Barack Obama stump. Obama gave a solid speech, but he was far less specific and unrelenting in taking on corporate power than Edwards. Instead, Obama stuffed his speech with a lot of filler. He savored lines such as, “I don’t want to be president of Red State America or Blue State America. I want to be president of the United States of America.”

OK, I get it. The line got a lot of applause. But I had a hard time taking that stuff seriously. After all, what politician doesn’t claim to want to transcend the fray, work as a diligent bipartisan, and be a “uniter, not a divider”? Far from shaking up the political status quo in Washington, such appeals to high-minded moderation are an ingrained part of business as usual. I guess some people view these pledges as refreshing; I think they are pretty cynical.

Obama’s line came to mind when I saw that Jon Stewart–an undeniably funny guy and often brilliant satirist–has announced a “Rally to Restore Sanity,” which is to take place in Washington the week before the midterm elections. His premise with the event (originally dubbed the “Million Moderates March”) is that politics has been taken over by the lunatic fringes on “both sides.” He believes that everyone needs to “be reasonable” and “take it down a notch.” As of this writing over 160,000 people on Facebook have vowed to attend, and the rally has garnered enthusiastic support from some political commentators as well.

I understand what Stewart is going for. Most Americans are fed up with the overheated hectoring of the political class. Glenn Beck’s posturing deserves to be challenged. And, sure, it’s possible to find examples of excess on both ends of the political spectrum. I’ve written against the “End of America” or “descent into fascism” thesis presented by folks like Naomi Wolf, and I strongly oppose 9/11 conspiracy theorists (although they are as likely to be right-leaning libertarians as leftists). Moreover, I didn’t like it when lefties carried signs comparing Dick Cheney or George W. Bush to Hitler; I think it reflected a lazy and unhelpful analysis. (On a side note, I’m currently in a debate at Dissent in which my interlocutors have invoked Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini in describing elements of the Latin American Left. I don’t think it has been particularly helpful in that instance either!)

But are the problems with American politics really a case of “both sides” equally going overboard? The Right has Fox News spouting extremist ideas about Obama on a 24/7 basis. The Left had…what? The people making equivalent claims about Bush tended to be very much on margins and got very little airplay.

My colleague Daniel Denvir, over at the Huffington Post, and Glenn Greenwald at Salon have each done a fine job of taking on what the latter author calls “the perils of false equivalencies and self-proclaimed centrism.” The two pieces are well worth a read.

Denvir writes:

As Jon Stewart has it, the problem is “loud folks” and a tone of political debate that has become untempered: too many crazies yelling and screaming, comparing people they don’t like to Hitler.

But yelling is not just a matter of loud noise expelled through the human throat. It matters what’s being yelled. When it comes to the Republican Party — and Democratic fellow travelers — they are shouting in favor of corporate exploitation and war.

The Tea Party far right leans on made-up things, also known as lies — “ground zero” Mosque, illegal immigrants purposely causing highway accidents, death panels killing grandma — to win political power. The left has a different problem. We could have used a little more hysteria in recent years, as Wall Street robbed Main Street and the most powerful military on earth invaded multiple countries. Instead, a real anti-war movement never materialized to challenge one of this nation’s most violent presidencies. The people “who have shit to do” that you cited as your fan base, Jon Stewart, should have been out in the streets protesting and putting our 1960s radical parents to shame. But we’ve got “shit to do.” On the Internet, I suppose….

Ironically, the Rally to Restore Sanity repeats the liberal establishment’s greatest error: when Republicans go on attack — either at home with lies or abroad with bombs — hunker down somewhere in the middle and plead for civility. This young century’s great problems are a government abetting ruthless misadventure at Wall Street and the Pentagon, not rudeness and rank partisanship.

Greenwald adds:

Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart’s examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn’t born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party. The claim that Bush is “a war criminal” has ample basis, and it’s deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one’s centrist bona fides.

It’s admirable to want to apply the same standards to both sides, but straining to manufacture false equivalencies doesn’t accomplish that; sometimes, honestly applying the same standards to each side will result in a finding that one side, at least in that regard, is actually worse. When that’s the case, a person engaged in truly independent, non-ideological inquiry — rather than the pretense of such — will expressly acknowledge the imbalance, not concoct an equivalency where it doesn’t exist….

One other point about this fixation on the “tone” of our politics. Political debates are inherently acrimonious — much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity — but far more important than tone, in my view, is content. For instance, Bill Kristol, a repeated guest on The Daily Show, is invariably polite on television, yet uses his soft-spoken demeanor to propagate repellent, destructive ideas; I don’t think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it’s usually the ideas themselves — not the tone used to express them — that are the culprits.

I’m not as hung up as Greenwald on defending the “Bush as war criminal” point. (I always thought that was a losing cause for the Left.) But I think Denvir’s argument about the Democrats’ tendency to run for the middle at the first sign of trouble is very important, as is Greenwald’s observation about the problems of fixating only on tone.

It was for this same reason that I was never particularly impressed by Jon Stewart’s famous takedown of Tucker Carlson on Crossfire.

Stewart argues that tone of the show was “hurting America” and that we need more “civilized discourse.” I’ll admit that it’s sort of satisfying to see him accuse Crossfire of “partisan hackery,” and that his refusal to play along with the hosts creates some rare and unsettling television. Then again, I’m not convinced his critique of the program is all too deep. Stewart says he wants less political “theater” and more “real debate.” But in my view he never gets beyond platitudes.

A lot of people loved the appearance, so I’m sure plenty of folks will disagree with me. Therefore, I’ll end with something around which we can all come together: in response to Stewart’s rally, fellow comedian Stephen Colbert announced that he would hold a counter-demonstration of his own. It’s called the “March to Keep Fear Alive.” Now that one is simply brilliant.