The Vanguard blog has a response to the Time magazine cover story on "Why It's Time to Retire the 401(k)." The headline of the Vanguard post is "Bad facts, bad story," just to give you a flavor.

The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Obama and the New Yorker magazine as a model health-care delivery system, has announced it will stop accepting Medicare for primary care visits at one of its Arizona clinics, and that it will stop participating in Medicaid in Nebraska and Montana.

Just what were those monthly Bloomberg columns for which Gene Sperling, now an Obama Treasury official, was being paid $137,500 a year (or, to do the math, $11,458.33 a column, or, for an 800-word column, $14.32 a word)? My favorite appears under the headline "Subprime Mortgage Meltdown Renews Urban Blight," and begins, "There is no shortage of regret over the failure of regulators and the Bush administration to heed the warning signs about the extent of the subprime housing crisis." The column next discusses the plight of Lawrence, Massachusetts, once the arson capital of New England, then revitalized by homeownership, now threatened by foreclosure. The column ends "Gene Sperling, formerly President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and is advising Hillary Clinton in her bid for the 2008 presidential nomination. The opinions expressed are his own." There's no disclosure whatsoever that Mr. Sperling was earning $887,727 a year for advising Goldman Sachs on its charitable giving, in a year that Goldman was accepting tens of billions of dollars in federal backing. Had there been such disclosure, readers might have wondered why Mr. Sperling was blaming the subprime crisis on "the failure of regulators and the Bush administration," rather than, say, the failures of Goldman Sachs, which, as I note in the long Goldman post, paid $60 million to settle with the Massachusetts state attorney general for its role in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. The map downloadable from the Massachusetts attorney general shows that many of the loans affected by the Goldman settlement are in, sure enough, Lawrence.

Back in June, when Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote, "Without exception, the Obama people with responsibility for the private economy come from a lifetime in politics, public administration or academia," I quibbled: "it'd be a mistake to underestimate that private-sector experience, such as Lawrence Summers's $5.2 million a year, one-day-a-week job at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund, or Rahm Emanuel's two-and-a-half year, $16.2 million stint as managing director in the Chicago office of Wasserstein and Perella." (Incidentally, that post made the comparison between the bitter detractors of Obama and the bitter critics of Yitzhak Rabin more than three months before Thomas Friedman did.) Now comes Bloomberg News with an update of the private sector experience of some of President Obama's economic aides at the Treasury Department:

The Tishman Speyer-Blackrock partnership that bought Manhattan's Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town apartment complexes is nearing default, the Wall Street Journal reports. What's interesting is how much government backing there was for the deal. The Journal mentions $575 million of debt and between $100 million and $200 million in equity owned by the government of Singapore, which is not a free country, $500 million owned by Calpers, the California state employee pension plan, $250 million in equity owned by the state of Florida, and $100 million in equity owned by the California state teachers retirement plan. It's another glimpse into the workings of what one might call state-pension-fund capitalism or the government-financial complex that we wrote about earlier here and here.

In honor of the Senate Finance Committee's passage of the Baucus health care overhaul, today we bring you the second in our series of interviews with health-care policy experts. The first interview was with Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute. The second, presented here, is with Scott Gottlieb, who is a doctor, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs at the Food and Drug Administration.

The phone here at FutureOfCapitalism.com headquarters just rang with a caller identifying herself as calling on behalf of Philip Morris USA. She asked whether I would be for or against a ban on flavored cigarettes in New York City, then, when I said I'd be against it, she offered to transfer me to a New York City councilwoman's office to tell the councilwoman that. I declined. It turns out that there is indeed legislation pending before the City Council to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes.

The Los Angeles City Council, having already established "a moratorium on new openings of fast-food restaurants" within a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles, is now preparing a crackdown on convenience stores that "would prohibit such small neighborhood markets from being closer than one-half mile from one another unless they sold fresh fruit and vegetables," reports the Los Angeles Times. Link via the American Council on Science and Health.

Reports the Economist:

Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, feels that the real culture war in America today is not about gay marriage or abortion, divisive though those issues are, but about capitalism. Everyone agrees that Wall Street messed up last year, but many are disturbed by the expansion of government that followed the crash. Voters particularly dislike the way the state is using their money to reward deadbeats, says Mr Brooks. They themselves work hard and live within their means. They see their neighbour, who borrowed more than he could afford to buy a fancy house, getting a bail-out to save him from the consequences of his own poor judgment. They see reckless bankers getting bailed out too, and the ill-managed carmakers of Detroit likewise. And they resent it.

(Link via AEI's blog.)

Via James Surowiecki comes a link to the Powell Memo, a document written in August 1971 by lawyer Lewis Powell (soon to be elevated to the Supreme Court) for the Chamber of Commerce reporting that "the American economic system is under broad attack," "from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." It mentions a Wall Street Journal column reporting that General Motors is "in trouble." It goes on: "few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of 'lobbyist' for the business point of view before Congressional committees. Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen's views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to 'consumerism' or to the 'environment.'"

If venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity didn't create the credit crisis, who did? Some might blame banks or bankers, but a former president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, Bob McTeer, says most of the bankers are victims:

Most of the subprime loans were made by nonbank and unregulated mortgage brokers who sold them to major New York investment banks for securitization and resale as mortgage-backed securities. The commercial banks implicated in that process were mainly those who had previously merged with investment banks or mortgage companies. Citi and Chase come to mind. You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand.

"Saturday Night Live – the slayer of Sarah Palin – has turned its fire on President Obama, portraying him a do-nothing president," Gideon Rachman writes in the Financial Times, echoing Ross Douthat, who wrote Monday in his New York Times column of "the recent 'Saturday Night Live' sketch in which he was depicted boasting about a year's worth of nonaccomplishments." For those who are interested and missed it on television, a link to the Saturday Night Live video is here. The sketch features an actor portraying Mr. Obama saying that those who fear he is turning America into the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany are wrong. The character goes on: "When you look at my record it's very clear what I've done so far, and that is nothing. Nada." The sketch continues, "Almost one year and nothing to show for it." A checklist: "Close Guantanamo Bay, out of Iraq, improving Afghanistan, health care reform" -- all "not done." Another checklist: "Global warming, immigration reform, Gays in the military, limits on executive powers, tortue prosecutions" -- also all "not done." The sketch also notes that Mr. Obama has a majority in both houses of Congress. One bright spot: "The cash for clunkers program really stimulated the economy. Unfortunately it was the economy of Japan."

Back in August we faulted the Wall Street Journal for its editorial proposing special lax regulatory treatment for venture capital. The Journal has a follow-up editorial today that suffers from some of the same flaws. Says the Journal: "Barney Frank has rejected a Treasury plan to subject venture capital firms to 'systemic risk' regulation. Now he has to ignore the whining from hedge funds and private equity firms that want venture investors to suffer under the same regulation that Washington has in mind for them." Since when is it "whining" for successful, job-creating American companies to defend their interests in Washington? What the Journal calls "whining" is protected under the First Amendment as the right of speech and of petitioning the government for redress of grievances.

The Wall Street Journal has a detailed account of efforts by American businesses to fend off the Obama administration's proposal to increase taxes on overseas operations. FutureOfCapitalism.com had highlighted the issue earlier here and here. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Journal article was its recounting of a meeting between a group of Silicon Valley executives and the chief of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers:

Mr. Summers acknowledged that the government was desperate for new sources of revenue. .. Somehow, he said, the corporate sector had to help trim the rising deficit. "I need you to be patriots," he told the group, say several participants.

France isn't the only country where business is being blamed for suicide. In Japan, reports Bloomberg News columnist William Pesek, the financial services minister, Shizuka Kamei, is "blaming capitalism and Japan's biggest business lobby for increasing murder and suicide rates." The details: "He said at a business forum in Tokyo that companies have stopped treating people like human beings, leading to more murders and suicides. The Japan Business Federation, known as Keidanren, 'should feel responsible for this,' Kamei said."