This week's biggest health care story shouldn't even be making headlines: Democratic leaders in the Senate are finally pressuring the entire caucus to help bring a health care bill to the floor by sticking with the party on procedural motions. Astute readers will ask: "But aren't Senators supposed to stick with their party on procedural motions?" Yes, of course they are.
Health care reform is the Democrats' biggest political battle in two generations and the crown jewel of the president's domestic agenda. It's hardly unreasonable to demand that Senate Democrats side with their party to defeat a filibuster.
Democrats knew Republicans would filibuster a health care bill no matter what. So the central political question was how to thwart them. The options were: Pick off enough Republican votes to defeat a filibuster, pass the bill with a simple majority through budget reconciliation, or demand that all 60 Democratic senators vote as a bloc to defeat a filibuster. (These senators could still vote against the bill, if they so chose, but without a filibuster the bill would pass by majority vote.) The first strategy failed spectacularly, and the second was controversial and difficult to execute. The last option is the simplest and most obvious. It's scandalous that it took Senate leadership all summer to lay down the law.
At TAPPED, Mori Dinauer argues that "'moderates' who are holding out are uninterested in how their intransigence looks to the rest of the Democratic party, but knowing the pressure's on makes it all the more likely reform passes a floor vote." They don't care how it looks, but they certainly care if the party leadership is prepared to cut off their fund raising dollars to make a point.
A bill is beginning to seem like a fait accompli to some Democrats, but the opponents of health reform aren't giving up without a fight, reports Christina Bellantoni in Talking Points Memo. The GOP-allied Tea Party Express is undertaking a massive fund raising drive for "The Countdown to Judgment Day," which is one year to the day before the 2010 elections. The Tea Party Express is a major force behind the disruptive town hall health care protests.
In Salon, Mike Madden argues that the prospects for passing a bill with a public option are looking up as Democrats begin the horsetrading that will combine the various health bills passed by Congress into a single piece of legislation:
Congressional aides and outside activists say the White House is still pushing for the public option in private talks. A growing number of Democrats in the Senate say they think the bill will include some form of public option, including Majority Leader Harry Reid and health committee chairman Tom Harkin. "President Obama has said all along that the public health insurance option is his first choice" for making health insurance affordable, said Jacki Schechner, a spokeswoman for Health Care for America Now, a union-backed coalition that supports reform. "We want to make sure he gets his first choice."
Switzerland and the Netherlands are frequently cited as examples of countries that contain costs and cover everyone without a public option. However, as The Nation's Eyal Press explains, these countries have only managed to do so by eliminating for-profit health insurance, which in the American context, would be a far more radial solution than a public option.
In Mother Jones, James Ridgeway takes the New York Times to task for a story about the conflicts within the AARP over health reform. Members in their fifties have a different perspective on private vs. public health insurance than those over 65 who already qualify for Medicare. As Ridgeway explains, it's the status quo that's pitting Americans of different ages against each other. If Medicare covered everyone, age would cease to be a third rail in future health policy discussions.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The economy is still getting worse. Foreclosures are surging above last year's epic highs and the unemployment rate marches upwards every month. As the misery grinds on, Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in Congress are pushing hard to distract the public from the real causes of the current global economic crisis. Corporate America is trying to pin the blame for our empty pocketbooks on President Barack Obama and the phantom socialist menace, and cable news pundits are taking the bait.
As David Korten explains in a blog post for Yes!, this surge of distractions is a conscious political strategy designed to sabotage reform. "Wall Street's greatest fear is that the public might demand Congress and the president shut down the casino," Korten writes. "Any issue that shifts attention away from Wall Street and pins the blame for job loss and mortgage foreclosures on President Obama works in its favor."
The banking lobby is kicking and screaming over President Obama's plan to overhaul consumer protection in finance. As a result, the battle over the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) has become the most heated economic controversy in the nation's capital, even though the issue isn't controversial where ordinary citizens are concerned.
The existing hodgepodge of bank regulators completely failed to stand up for consumers as the housing bubble grew and burst. Our current bank regulators are charged not only with consumer protection, but safety and soundness regulation, which basically means making sure that banks don't fail. Preventing bank failures often means protecting bank profits, even when those profits come at the expense of communities. Instead of relying on the same inept and conflicted agencies, consumer regulation of credit cards, mortgages, student loans, payday loans should be funneled into a single, new agency with no other priorities: The CFPA.
As Greg Kaufmann details for The Nation, recent economic history isn't stopping Wall Street's favorite lawmakers from pushing against the CFPA. Kaufmann highlights some of the most outrageous comments from a hearing on the CFPA last week. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) claimed that if the CFPA had existed a few years ago, there would be no ATMs or frequent flyer miles. David John, a researcher from the Heritage Foundation, said that employees of the new agency would spend too much time trying to find their new desks to actually do any regulating. Bank lobbyist Ed Yingling tried to erase the last ten years with his claim that "no real case has been made" for better enforcement of consumer protection in banking.
These are not serious arguments. They are intentional distractions designed to kill an obviously productive policy. Kaufmann's headline says it all: "Do They Take us for Schmucks?"
But loudmouth Republicans like Hensarling aren't the only politicians we need to keep tabs on. Plenty of lawmakers on the Financial Services Committee won't stand up and make crazy speeches about ATMs, but will still go to bat for Wall Street behind the scenes. As I emphasize in a piece for AlterNet, with outsized Democratic majorities in both chambers of commerce, conservative, pro-Wall Street Democrats pose just as great a threat to our economic security as loony Republicans.
If you think that sounds pessimistic, consider Ralph Nader, who Matthew Rothschild profiles in The Progressive. Nader knows corporate America has its hands on nearly every lever in the U.S. political system. Lobbyists don't just hurl money at lawmakers, they spend tremendous sums on misleading advertisements to sway public opinion. Rothschild quotes from a recent speech Nader gave on his current book tour. He argues that progressives don't just need concerned citizens on our side. They need concerned citizens with money to counter the flood of corporate cash in the political system.
"There is a poignance in listening to Ralph Nader these days," Rothschild writes. "Here is a man who, for the last 45 years, has hurled his body at the engine of corporate power. He's dented it more than anyone else in America. But he knows it's still chugging, even more strongly than ever."
Even when lawmakers talk tough about Wall Street, it's not obvious what's really going on. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) recently rolled out an extremely ambitious plan to overhaul the bank regulatory system. It has very little common ground with Obama's plan, and in some respects would be an improvement. Obama's plan is very strong on consumer protection and not much else. But Dodd's plan is so ambitious, it seems like a politically impossible waste of time, one that could easily delay reforms into next year. Dodd wants to consolidate all four bank regulators into a single agency to prevent a race to the bottom and strip the Federal Reserve of all of its regulatory responsibilities. They aren't bad ideas, but they have absolutely no political momentum. Dodd has been holding hearings on the financial crisis since 2007-- he could have started pushing for this plan a long time ago. By introducing it so late in the process, major legislative delays seem inevitable. The longer it takes to pass a regulatory bill, the more time the bank lobby has to water it down. Writing for Mother Jones, Nick Baumann suggests this may be exactly what Dodd intends.
"Maybe getting it done by 2010 isn't the point. Dodd is up for reelection that November. If he manages to win by talking populist while raising money from Wall Street, he'll have plenty of time afterward to figure out what to do next."
For now, the economy is still absolutely horrible. Writing for In These Times, David Moberg translates the statistics from the government's most recent unemployment report and deciphers some recent polling on the economy. Things are bad, and people know it. Many economists believe the recession may have technically already ended. The Gross Domestic Product, a statistical measure of the country's economic output, may no longer be declining. But the unemployment rate keeps going up. It was 9.8% at the end of September.
Moberg notes that if the rate counted the long-term unemployed who have given up looking and people who want full-time jobs but settled for part-time work, the unemployment rate is a staggering 17%. Over one-third of the 15.1 million would-be workers encompassed by the 9.8% unemployment rate have been out of a job for at least six months. Voters overwhelmingly believe that government policies have helped Wall Street, while just 13% think the government has given a lot of help to the average working person.
Economics and politics are inextricably linked. To strengthen our economic foundation, we need policymakers who are willing to stand up to corporate America and corporate media and serve the citizens who elect them.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Yesterday, the powerful Senate Finance Committee met to debate two amendments that would have inserted a public option into the committee's health reform bill. Both amendments were defeated as key Democrats sided with Republicans and the insurance companies. David Corn of Mother Jones diagnoses what ails Senate Democrats. It's split personality disorder: "They are the best friends of the health insurance industry. They are fiercest foes of the health insurance industry."
Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) strong public option amendment was defeated 15-8 because senators Max Baucus (D-MT), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Tom Carper (D-DE) joined the committee's ten Republicans. In the next round of voting, Nelson and Carper backed Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) amendment, but Baucus, Conrad and Lincoln stuck with the GOP and voted it down. Ironically, as Corn observes, the Senate Democratic communications team was busy emailing blistering indictments of the insurance industry while key members of the caucus were doing the insurers' bidding.
John Nichols of The Nation worries that yesterday's defeat is a sign that Congress is backing away from a public option, which was itself a compromise alternative to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all type system:
Baucus, the insurance-industry representative who doubles as a Democratic senator from Montana, long ago rejected the notion that a robust public option might be a part of any healthcare reform measure that would pass the Senate.
The Senate Finance Committee went on to add tens of millions of dollars for discredited abstinence-only propaganda for teens, as Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports. Well, at least pseudoscience has a public option. If kids can learn this nonsense for free at school, maybe they'll ditch church, where you have to put your money in the collection plate to hear the sermon.
Chris Bowers of AlterNet argues that a public option still has 51 votes in the Senate. Which means that the Democrats could still pass a healthcare bill by majority vote in the upper chamber, if they decided to forgo their quest for a filibuster-proof 60 and pass the bill through budget reconciliation.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, claims to have the votes to pass a plan with a public option, Lynda Waddington reports in the Iowa Independent. Harkin believes that the full Senate should have the opportunity to vote on the public option, considering that it's part of four out of the five bills that have been approved so far.
The fight for a public option isn't over yet. To date, all of the other health reform bills that are out of committee include a strong public option. The next step is putting these bills together to create the final legislation for the House and Senate to vote on.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
The economic free-fall is finally slowing down, although nobody expects the recovery to be very pleasant. Job losses and foreclosures are expected to increase well into next year. But even if our economic system gets back to normal, it's important to remember that gross inequalities are embedded in the global order. At home, minorities face significant barriers to economic security, while abroad, children in poor countries are denied access to basic nutrition. This is especially disheartening in the wake of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, which demonstrated that the world's economic leaders are more focused on bailing out banks than eradicating global poverty.
Robert Reich sums up the domestic economic scenario succinctly for Salon. The stock market is humming along, even as most Americans are tightening their belts. It's a counterintuitive situation: Wall Street is celebrating an economic recovery, but the consumers that drive our economy are still cutting back. Reich explains that the government has stepped in to fill the hole caused by consumer spending. Business executives may scream "Socialism!" when the tax man comes around, but without massive government help, those same CEOs would be watching their earnings and companies collapse.
Without the jobs and tax cuts created by President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package, we'd see more red ink from just about every industry. The entire U.S. mortgage market is currently supported by the federal government via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while other special initiatives like the Cash for Clunkers program brought the auto industry out of its recession-induced coma this summer.
The trouble is, while a few programs have been good for ordinary citizens, most of the government's economic salvage operations are aimed at giant corporations. Of all the paradoxes in today's economy, the most significant can be found in the financial sector. Bank stocks are up, even though banks are in serious trouble. Their customers are broke, foreclosures are soaring, and analysts are predicting a fresh round of multi-billion-dollar losses on commercial real estate loans soon. So what makes an investor want to buy a bank stock right now? Nothing but the government's limitless willingness to bail out banks.
How much bailout money did the government actually spend? We've all heard about the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), but the real haul for bankers is much, much bigger, as Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes detail in a piece for The Nation. A whopping $17.5 trillion has been dedicated to subsidies, guarantees, below-market-rate loans, and other special perks for the financial industry. That's roughly one-fourth of the entire global economic output for a full year, and more than the entire annual productivity of the U.S.
Prins and Hayes make use of a clever thought experiment: What if, instead of spending the money on big institutions, the money had gone to a small-time gambler? It's an apt comparison. Taxpayer money went to financial speculators who used our homes and neighborhoods as poker chips in a global casino. The dozen or so bailouts the government has enacted seem absurd when we think of them as cheap financing for bets on the craps table. The number of programs is staggering. Bank executives love to proclaim that their banks didn't really need TARP money, they just accepted it because the government wanted them to. Next time you hear that boast (sometimes it sounds more like a whine), remember that every big bank in the country issued debt guaranteed by the government, then scored ridiculously cheap loans from the Federal Reserve while others got federal help through AIG, Fannie and Freddie.
"A fraction of the $17.5 trillion bailout could have been used to cut the principal of homeowners' mortgages (using homes, even devalued ones, as collateral) and cover student loans at zero percent interest," Prins and Hayes write. "Rather than pouring it into the top layers-the banks-a people's bailout would have cost less and been more humane. And it likely would have prevented the ongoing increase in defaults, foreclosures and general economic anxiety."
There are very good reasons to maintain a healthy financial sector, but only if banks actually do something useful. Banks are supposed to lend money to enable socially productive economic activity. This bailout money has not been spent on anything socially productive. Instead, it's covered losses from predatory lending and boneheaded speculation.
The dominant cause of the recession was the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble, which banks helped inflate with all outrageous loans. For decades, the value of a family's house was the foundation of most American middle-class wealth. When home prices took a nosedive, so did the spending power of every homeowner. Even borrowers who had affordable mortgage payments were hit hard. For borrowers stuck with expensive, predatory mortgages, the result was a wave of foreclosures. Writing for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll highlights a hard reality: Recovery in the housing market will not lead to middle-class financial security. It will be at least a decade before home prices reach pre-crash levels.
It's critical to remember how the recession is deepening existing inequalities, particularly along racial lines. In a post for In These Times, Michelle Chen explains how African Americans and Latinos are consistently paid less than whites during boom times, and are pushed even further down the ladder when things go bust. Communities of color are more likely to be targeted by predatory lending, which can devastate entire neighborhoods for generations. That means people of color are more likely to be foreclosed on, more likely to be laid off, and less likely to have access to basic necessities like health insurance.
The statistics are stark. In a story for New America Media, Christina Fernandez-Pereda, notes that while the overall unemployment stands at 9.7%, for minorities, the actual number is much higher. A full 15.1% of Blacks are unemployed, while unemployment among Asian Americans has doubled since early 2007. A full third of Latinos between the ages of 16 and 29 are unemployed.
The bank bailout has done nothing to improve the status of the global poor. The G-20 made grand promises to help those who need it most in developing countries this year, but so far, the talk has resulted in very little action. As Hayley Hathaway explains at Sojourners, only $50 billion has been dedicated to the 78 countries where humanitarian risk is greatest. As Hathaway notes, that's less than 25% of the TARP money received by the 20 largest U.S. banks.
Without major action, between 1.4 million and 2.8 million children will die of malnutrition in the next five years. Instead of pushing major humanitarian aid, the G-20 has promised $750 billion to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF was supposed to act as an international lender of last resort-if a nation's financial woes got really bad, they could get a loan from the IMF while they restructured. But IMF money ends up flowing to private-sector banks, and governments in need are forced to cut spending on programs that help the poor. When the G-20 met in Pittsburgh last week, a major topic of discussion involved giving developing nations a greater voice in IMF policies. But despite this talk, wealthy nations remain committed to the status quo, protecting the interests of their bankers eyeing future international bailouts.
For most people, it will be a long time before our economic recovery is a reality. But as the economy crawls out of the ditch, it's critical to build our future on a stronger foundation, one where we don't allow millions children to starve and where skin color does not determine economic security.
The public option remains in limbo. The Senate Finance Committee is fine-tuning the bill it unveiled last week, which does not include a public option. However, Brian Beutler of TPM reports that Democrats have already submitted three separate amendments that might add a public option.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) submitted what he calls a "level playing field" amendment, which would, incongruously, create a public option that couldn't set its own rates. A second amendment submitted by Schumer and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) would create a public option much like that outlined the HELP Committee bill. Finally, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) submitted an amendment that would create a robust public option, much like the one originally drafted in the House.
It's pretty clear that no bill containing a public option in its first draft will get 60 votes in the senate. However, as Beutler reports in a second TPM piece, the Democrats are seriously revisiting the prospect of using budget reconciliation to get a health care bill through the senate with a simple majority. However, Beutler explains that Democrats are reluctant to go the reconciliation route because senate rules restrict the kind of bill that can be passed through reconciliation. For example, only provisions that "materially affect" spending can be passed through reconciliation. But what qualifies as a material effect?
Meanwhile, President Obama continues to insist that the public option isn't dead yet, Steve Benen reports in the Washington Monthly.
In other news, women's health remains a hot topic in health care reform. To understand why health care reform is especially critical for women, Public News Service interviewed Dr. Susan Wood, a scientist who famously resigned from the Bush-era Food and Drug Administration over the politicization of the approval of Plan B. Since leaving the government, Wood has returned to academia to study women's health. Some of her key findings include:
About 20 percent of women under the age of 65 have no health care insurance; in some states, women are denied coverage if they have experienced domestic violence; and when women do have coverage, they are charged higher premiums and often see a long list of preexisting conditions that are excluded, with pregnancy sometimes on that list.
If there is a public option, will it cover abortion? Rep. Lois Capps has written an amendment addressing that question. She explains her proposal in her own words at RH Reality Check.
Uncertainty remains high as the senate inches towards a bill.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
While the Senate Finance Committee tinkers with the Baucus Bill, First Lady Michelle Obama is taking center stage in the health care reform debate. Obama's director of communications announced last week that the FLOTUS would be focusing on the health care needs of women and children. Mindful of the conservative backlash against Hillary Clinton's crusade for health care reform, Mrs. Obama is expected to steer clear of policy issues, according to Salon's Judy Berman.
Tying health reform to women's health is a smart political move. The far Right lured anti-choicers into a corporatist tax revolt with tall tales of tax-payer funded abortions. Now the White House is reminding Progressives that it cares, in a very general, non-policy kind of way, about women's health. While Progressives will appreciate the White House shining a spotlight on reproductive health, it won't mean much without policy specifics. It certainly won't make up for the President Obama's waffling on the public option.
The failure of the private insurance system has galvanized Dr. Willie Parker, an obstetrician/gynecologist active in Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, as a passionate advocate for health care reform. In RH Reality Check, Dr. Parker tells how the status quo falls short on women's health care:
I am not talking about withholding the latest, cutting-edge, exorbitantly priced medications or treatments. No-I've had patients whose health insurance doesn't cover such basic health needs as Pap smears and birth control prescriptions. And forget about having a baby-many insurance policies don't cover prenatal care or labor and delivery, or they treat pregnancy as a pre-existing condition.
In the Progressive, Mike Ervin reminds us that disability issues are also getting short shrift in the health care debate. Ervin takes aim at a Medicaid system that won't help until a person is completely destitute. He suggests that a robust public option might be a lifeline before disability erases the savings of a lifetime.
This week, expect the wheeling and dealing on the Baucus Bill to continue behind the scenes as the Finance Committee marks up the legislation before the final committee vote. But with Sen Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) 60th vote in doubt, there are rumblings about reviving budget reconciliation as an option for passing a health bill in the senate with a simple majority.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Last Saturday, veteran right wing watcher Adele Stan of AlterNet covered the Tax Payers' March on Washington (aka the 912 March or the DC Tea Party). About 70,000 conservative protesters converged on Washington to air their grievances, including opposition to President Obama's health care reform agenda. Protesters carried signs warning of death panels, tax-funded abortions, and healthcare for "illegals."
In this interview, Stan explains that while the event was billed as a grassroots convergence, it was in fact orchestrated by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and the right wing Americans for Prosperity. The rally also received massive amounts of free publicity from Fox News host Glenn Beck, coordinator of the 9-12 project. Stan describes how all the abortion-, immigration- and death panel-talk binds social conservatives, nativists, and big business interests into a cohesive rightwing coalition.
Stan says that ,while the tea baggers have cropped up recently, the leaders of the movement have been at this game since LBJ trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964.
To learn more, check out Addie's recent writing on the Tea Parties at AlterNet. The Wing Nut Code explains the significance of those creepy yellow snake flags and other right wing symbology; and The Same Old Faces explains how old guard Goldwater partisans are still pulling the strings for the right wing.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Opponents of health care reform are trying to pit the insured against everyone else. Conservative Republicans like Rep. Mike Pence warn that if we get a public option, millions of Americans will lose their private coverage because so many employers will stop offering private insurance. What Pence doesn't say is that right now, employers can stop providing insurance at any time and their workers will have nothing to fall back on. As costs rise, fewer and fewer employers are providing any health insurance at all.
Most insured people have no idea how fragile their coverage is under the status quo.
The Uptake carries President Obama's address on the uninsured, in which he hammered home the message that anyone under 65 can lose their coverage at any time. Luckily for those over 65, they have a popular public option, Medicare.
There are lots of ways to become uninsured, including job loss, employers cutting off benefits, or insurers kicking customers off the rolls. As Obama said:
Over the last twelve months, nearly six million more Americans lost their health coverage - that's 17,000 men and women every single day. We're not just talking about Americans in poverty, either - we're talking about middle-class Americans. In other words, it can happen to anyone. And based on a brand-new report from the Treasury Department, we can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years.
It's common knowledge that insurance companies drop customers with preexisting conditions and cut paying customers off when they get sick. It might surprise you to learn that domestic violence counts as a preexisting condition in many states.
Amie Newman of RH Reality Check reports that the insurance industry figured out what feminists have been saying for decades: Once a man becomes a batterer, chances are he'll continue to abuse his wife with increasing brutality. If you're a human being, that's an outrage and a tragedy. If you're a conscience-free health insurance provider, it's a big red flag to drop victims because their wounds will cost you money. This is the logic of for-profit health insurance in a microcosm: Identify the most vulnerable and purge them because they hurt your bottom line.
Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee is set to unveil its long-awaited bill today. The committee will vote on the bill next week. We'll examine the bill in tomorrow's Pulse.
After a seemingly endless quest for a bipartisan bill, Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) is signaling that he's prepared to move ahead without GOP support. Good thing, too. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) swears he's serious about bipartisanship, according to the Iowa Independent, but he spent the summer telling tall tales of death panels and fundraising as an opponent of "Obamacare." Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one potential Republican swing vote, now says she rejects the very idea of public/private competition, according to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly.
Finally, you can use the Washington Independent's new Public Option Scoreboard to keep track of every senator's position, based on their public statements.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Last night, President Obama laid out his vision for health care reform before a special joint session of Congress. The pillars of his plan are: i) Curbing the worst abuses of private insurance, ii) Requiring everyone to have insurance, iii) Insurance exchanges, which are basically government websites where customers can order insurance off a "menu" of plans, the idea being that if tens of millions of people order the #2 Combo, everyone's lunch will be cheaper.
The president made it clear that the country can't afford to wait for reform. Last night, he took on the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who claim that they oppose reform because it would increase the deficit. "Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close," Obama said. The president reminded the audience that each of us pays a "hidden tax" of $1000 dollars a year to subsidize charity and emergency care for the uninsured.
It was an impressive performance, but as John Nichols of the Nation observes, it was hardly a rousing, "to-the-barricades" oration:
Obama still talked about "options" and "choices." But he suggested that they would be offered mainly by insurance companies that would be enjoy "incentives"-i.e., new streams of taxpayer dollars-if they agree to abide by consumer-friendly regulations and come up with strategies for covering more of the uninsured.
The president expressed support for a very limited public option, a kind of welfare program that only about 5% of Americans would choose to join. This is not the public option his liberal supporters had in mind. It's non-threatening to the insurance companies, though. Private insurers love the idea of the government low-grading the insurance pool and taking on the sickest people who can't get coverage anywhere else. That means private insurers can make even more money off the remaining healthy, paying customers.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones is even less optimistic, "As for the public option, that's pretty clearly gone down the drain."
One GOP legislator decided that a joint session of Congress was basically a town hall with the president. Rep. Joe Wilson (SC) screamed "You lie!" when the president explained, for the umpteenth time that undocumented immigrants will not be covered. As with the town halls, Wilson's performance had a whiff astroturf about it. Sure enough, Sue Sturgis of Raw Story found that Wilson pocketed over $2 million in campaign contributions from the health care industry.
The president also reminded America that health care reform will not pay for abortions. (For more on myth-making around women's health, see Laurie Rubiner's excellent post at RH Reality.)
Instead of presenting a vision and asking Congress to line up behind him, the president stressed that he was synthesizing a compromise position incorporating ideas from the left and the right. Instead of a coherent vision, the president's scheme sounds more like a last-ditch compromise plan to enable him to declare victory. Like many Democrats, the president seems to be confusing the strategic with the expedient. If "reform" means saddling ordinary Americans with expensive mandatory insurance without a meaningful public option to keep costs in check he could doom the electoral fortunes of the Democrats for years to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Today, President Obama will spell out his vision for health care reform before a special joint session of Congress. The president's speech marks the final phase of health care reform. This is Obama's last chance to recapture the momentum that Democrats lost to corporate-backed town hall hooligans and misinformation during the August recess.
The Uptake asks movers and shakers in Minnesota what they want to see from the president today (video above). Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn) says he wants to see the president explain why the public option is necessary to hold down costs, and reassure them that the public option will not threaten private insurance or lead to cuts in Medicare. "It's going to be the biggest moment of his presidency," Ellison tells the Uptake, "I hope he makes it a Roosevelt moment, a Kennedy moment, a Lincoln moment, because I think he has the ability to do that."
Devona Walker of New America Media on what Obama needs to do today: Explain the plan clearly, enforce party discipline, and convince the public that reforming health care is the only way to reduce deficits in the long run.
Brooke Jarvis of Yes! Magazine offers a history lesson on why so many presidents have tried and failed to achieve universal health care:
In each case, says historian Beatrix Hoffman, "the relentless opposition of medical, business, and insurance interests pushed reformers to design health care proposals around placating their opponents more than winning popular support. In turn, ordinary people had trouble rallying around complex proposals [that didn't recognize] a universal right to health care."
The root of the problem, Hoffman says, was that the proposals came from elites who sought to compromise with interest groups, where they believed real power lay, rather than to ally with grassroots movements.
In the Progressive, Cristina Lopez argues that, while everyone needs affordable high quality health insurance, Latinos and women are most in need of a public option because they are at greater risk of being uninsured and unable to afford private insurance.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wonders if the Democrats are courting disaster by forcing people to buy heavily subsidized private insurance with no public option to reign in costs:
Am I the only one who thinks that if the Dems pass a bill with mandates and subsidies for poor and moderate income people to purchase it but no public option or competition with the insurers, that it will be pretty much a catastrophe for the Democrats in political terms?
You 'solve' the problem of the uninsured by passing a law forcing them to buy health insurance which, by definition, most a) cannot afford or b) are gambling they won't need because they're young and healthy. Either you end up with low subsidies which still leave it onerous to buy, thus creating a lot of disgruntled people, or you get generous subsidies, which cost a lot of money.
The health care reform battled has created deep divisions within the Democratic Party. Tonight, the president will pick his side. Will he stand with the progressives for a public option, or will he back the Blue Dogs and their watered-down, politically risky compromise proposal? Keep your eyes on tomorrow's Pulse for the post-game breakdown.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Big news broke over the weekend: Evidently, the president lit a fire under Max Baucus (D-Mont) and the Senate Finance Committee by unexpectedly announcing last week that he'd be laying out his own vision for health care reform this Wednesday. Just weeks ago, committee member Kent Conrad (D-ND) predicted the Finance Committee wouldn't have a bill until November. But Baucus circulated a legislative framework over the weekend.
Baucus's bottom line: There will be no public option. Instead, the government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the same old expensive, inadequate private insurance system that health care reform was supposed to reform. The insurance companies get 46 million new customers, and in return, they will pay higher taxes to offset the cost of the subsidies-a kickback to Uncle Sam.
Last week Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo and I sat down to discuss some burning questions in health care reform: What's the president's thinking on the public option? What leverage does he have over the progressives in the House who demand single payer and/or the Blue Dogs in the senate who reject it? Why is Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) the last best hope for bipartisanship? (The transcript of our discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
You said the [week of September 1] really stood out from the last month in terms of the health care debate. How so?
Maybe the last two days just stood out from the previous month. ... Obama's approval [rating] slid and popular support for the idea of healthcare reform slid. And August came to an end and the President's vacation is winding down, and suddenly the administration realizes that Congress is coming back and they are going to have to do something. And so, it seems they start leaking to a bunch of high profile reporters that they are going to perhaps ditch the public option as part of a grander move to regain control of the debate.
Are the anonymous leakers saying in so many words that they want to ditch the public option?
Well, it's unclear what they are actually going to do. The Public Option would die with dignity. [If] that is accomplished, the President could maybe win over some Republicans, grab the debate and spell out in clearer terms what he wanted [beyond] the public option. He could do this all in a big speech for Congress which is scheduled to happen Wednesday.
Isn't this just a repeat of what we saw during the week of August 20, when the White House seemed to be doing a good cop/bad cop routine where an anonymous aide would leak "to hell with the liberals and the public option" and then another adviser would say on the record how much the president loves the public option?
It could just be a replay. Once those stories came out, the picture sort of fogged up. [There were] secondary reports that the President was courting Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) again-as if maybe one Senate Republican would vote with him on health care reform. Snowe's idea [includes a] public option, but you attach it to a trigger mechanism so that it is only enacted if the rest of healthcare reform is unsuccessful at bringing down prices and expanding coverage. And that's sort of been unacceptable to reformers and progressives, but ... that might be the pound of flesh that she yields from the bill. It fits in with the picture that the leakers painted ... that the public option was no longer going to be one of the key features of the bill.
You wrote about how budget reconciliation could be used to get around the filibuster. How would that work?
The greater problem is the structure in the Senate, where legislation can pass with a majority vote-but only after Senators have debated the bill for as long as they want. As long as 60 Democrats aren't there to shut the minority up, debate can go on and on and on. [ED note: AKA filibustering.] And for every major piece of legislation you see. this happens. ...
There's this de facto 60-vote rule on most legislation, at least in this Congress and the previous Congress since the Democrats took it over. It's extremely difficult to pass a bill through just the regular procedure without either having to concede a bunch of substantive provisions ... or just give up on the bill entirely. [There are] 59 members of the Democratic caucus right now, and maybe 10 of them are mushy on the more progressive part of the President's agenda. Even if all of them are onboard, you're still one vote short of what you need to end debate. And that is why Olympia Snowe matters right now.
So the House would pass the bill and the Senate would pass a bill with budget reconciliation?
They could in theory. Budget reconciliation is sort of like a magic bullet. Every year, the Congress can pass what is known as a budget reconciliation bill. It sets new taxes, or moves money around within the federal budget to basically do what the Congress's budget lays out. It ... was made exempt from the filibuster because Congress [has to] set a budget. ... They need to make sure that money is there and can't have Senators filibustering it just because they're in a fit of peak. So that bill can't be filibustered, but at the same time, the legislation that can be passed in it has to be relevant to the budget, it has to move money around in some way.
So you can pass a lot of elements of healthcare reform in theory-you can pass subsidies to poor people and middle-income people. And you can pass Medicaid expansion, and you might even be able to pass the public option because the public option may need subsidies of its own and could drive down other costs and be a big moneysaver.
How might the president pressure progressives into accepting the bill?
My sense is that the President [will pressure] progressives to back off on the public option. But that could change. Trying to figure out what is going to happen is kind of like trying to move 23,000 moves ahead in a game of 17 dimensional chess. ...
[Obama can] say is that what he's planning will, while not perfect, help a lot of people make the healthcare system more progressive than it was. ... But it would really harm the democratic party and his presidency if the whole project failed and nothing passed. Obama doesn't have a tremendous amount of leverage. [Many] progressive members of Congress are progressive because they don't have viable challenges. They come from progressive districts, with constituents like them, approval ratings in the 60s, 70s, and they aren't going to lose to a member of the opposite party. So in that sense, they can do what they want.
How can Blue Dogs say that progressives should suck it up and vote for every bill when they are never prepared to do the same thing?
... It would at least be a good experiment, for the party and the country, for the [Blue Dogs] to be put on the spot. They believe that their jobs are on the line if they vote for controversial legislation. I don't know how those conversations go when political members of the administration confront these guys and say 'You got into politics to make the world a better place, not to just have a tenure job on Capital Hill. So you're going to vote yes on this and if you lose your jobs as a result, then you did the right thing and we'll make sure that the Democratic party infrastructure is there for you ... .' But that's not the way the party thinks. [It's a] game of building an unstoppably large coalition, and that becomes the goal in the end. And at some point you lose sight of why you are amassing this giant congressional majority and you're never willing to say, well we built this 70 whatever majority so that we could sacrifice some of these seats and do something really impressive and progressive for the good of the country.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Low-wage workers are struggling to navigate the current recession. A new study conducted by a team of academics reveals that the majority of workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have been shorted on their paychecks as recently as last week. But the compensation crisis looks very different on Wall Street, where excessive pay tied to risky activities helped set the economy on its crash course. Despite the resulting deep recession, pay for high-level U.S. financiers remains over-the-top, even as low wage workers struggle to navigate the downturn.
The U.S. has made a few gestures toward scaling back executive compensation for banks that it bailed out under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but the rules have amounted to little more than window-dressing, according to a paper published last week by the Institute for Policy Studies. The paper's authors, Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, found that ten of the 20 largest bailout banks have reported stock option compensation for 2009, and the top five executives at those companies have scored a full $90 million so far this year. That's just through stock options. The number gets even more obscene if you include bonuses, salary and other payouts.
As Anderson and Pizzigati explain in a companion piece published in AlterNet, bank executives collected huge bonuses based on the profits from subprime loans during the housing bubble. Since subprime mortgages were more expensive than traditional loans, profits were high-until borrowers stopped being able to pay back their predatory, unaffordable debt. Suddenly the banks were all busted, but the executives had already made a killing.
Katrina vanden Huevel emphasizes in The Nation that the U.S. government doesn't even try to tax this kind of income, much less regulate its connection to risk-taking. Billions of dollars in tax revenue are lost each year as financiers hide payouts in offshore tax havens, while on-the-books income from financial activities are taxed at arbitrarily low rates. Capital gains like stock price increases, for instance, are taxed at just 15%, while income from an ordinary paycheck is taxed at 35% for the wealthiest individuals.
While the U.S. dallies on executive pay, key leaders in Europe are moving to rein in risky compensation practices in the financial sector, as detailed in this video report over at The Real News. President Barack Obama will meet with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders of the G-20 in Pittsburgh later this month, and financial regulatory reform will be at the top of the agenda.
For ordinary workers, there are few positive signs in the current economy. The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen dissects the latest batch of unemployment numbers from the Labor Department. The good news is that the overall pace of layoffs seems to be abating. The bad news? The U.S. still lost a whopping 216,000 jobs in August. And broader measures of workplace woe are even worse. The unemployment rate does not include discouraged workers who have stopped looking for a job, and it doesn't include those who want to work full-time but have to settle for part-time employment. That statistic actually declined slightly in July, giving some economists cause for optimism. But the metric soared again in August, reaching the highest level on record.
And unemployment is not the only problem workers face. Both Tim Fernholz of The American Prospect and Elizabeth Palmberg of Sojourners highlight a New York Times story by labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, which details how low-wage workers are routinely cheated by their employers. According to a recent study, a full 68% of these workers report having experienced an illegal workplace abuse in the past week, such as being denied overtime pay or being required to work for less than minimum wage. On average, workers lost 15% of their weekly income as a result of this exploitation.
We have good laws to protect workers, but they just aren't being enforced. Companies have successfully intimidated their employees into not reporting blatantly illegal pay practices. The best way to resolve this situation is to expand unionization and give workers a stronger voice in the workplace, making it safe to speak out against abuses. And the best way to expand unionization is to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, which lowers barriers to creating a union. But the legislative process has been delayed by a smear campaign organized by executives and managers claiming that unions, and not corporate elites, are the actual source of workplace coercion.
"It ought to make your blood boil-especially as people decry union thugs 'intimidating' people into joining unions when that doesn't happen and most workers want to join a union," Fernholz writes.
The U.S. needs to get its economic priorities in order. We should be protecting low-wage workers from executive excess, not the other way around. President Obama will have an opportunity to coordinate that effort globally at the G-20 summit later this month. Let's hope he doesn't squander it.
Ed. note: The Weekly Pulse is becoming the Daily Pulse for September. Every weekday, we'll bring you highlights from the health care reform debate, including exclusive video interviews with leading experts and independent journalists each Friday. Even better, you can be a part of the conversation. Stay tuned to find out more!
A power shift is underway in Washington. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick announced on Monday that a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy would not take place until January 19, 2010. With Kennedy's seat empty, the Democrats no longer have the 60 votes they need to break a filibuster in the Senate. Up until this point, the White House was hoping for a compromise bill that the entire Democratic caucus, and maybe even a few Republicans, could agree on.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that the Gang of Six has made itself irrelevant. These powerful members of the Senate Finance Committee were in charge of hammering out a bipartisan health care bill. They forgot that they were only powerful if people believed a bipartisan compromise was attainable.
Talking Points Memo reports that the White House has given up on Republican gangster Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY). They finally got the hint when Enzi told a radio listeners that Democrats wanted to kill the elderly with comparative efficacy research. The White House should have cut its losses two weeks ago when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) repeated the "death panel" meme at a town hall meeting. Grassley has also been raising money campaigning against "Obama-care."
It's looking more and more like the Democrats will have to look to budget reconciliation, a special parliamentary procedure that could sidestep a filibuster and pass a healthcare bill by a simple majority vote.
America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's top lobby group, dispatched 50,000 employees to town halls to fight the public option. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones took a cue from Michael Moore in Sicko. She asks AHIP what kind of insurance their top lobbyist has. Mencimer says AHIP was so standoffish you'd think she had a preexisting condition.
In Mother Jones, Ben Buchwalter and Nikki Gloudeman take a closer look at the corporate megabucks behind the town hall brawls. Corporate enemies of healthcare reform are using front groups like FreedomWorks to organize angry mobs at town hall meetings. Zach Roth of TPM Muckraker reports that "legendary GOP bamboozler" Howard Kaloogian has launched a tea party bus tour to protest healthcare reform.
Speaking of frauds, you've probably heard about so-called crisis pregnancy centers that pose as abortion clinics in order to cajole women into having babies. Ever wonder what happens to those babies? In the Nation, Kathryn Joyce goes inside the world of high-pressure Christian adoption agencies that support desperate women, as long as they promise to give up their babies.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
After Ben Bernanke allowed an $8 trillion housing bubble to ravage the global economy and nearly destroy the U.S. financial system, President Barack Obama has decided he deserves another term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. (The UpTake has video of Obama's announcement here.) As the Fed Chair, Bernanke has more economic power than any other person on the planet. By heading the committee that sets interest rates, he can control the economy's rate of growth or contraction; as head regulator of the largest banks, Bernanke has more influence over the rules of the economic game than anyone else.
Why is the Bernanke reappointment a mistake? Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive turns to Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent democratic socialist from Vermont. Put simply, Bernanke is completely culpable for allowing an economic crisis to foment.
"Like the rest of the Bush administration, he was asleep at the wheel during this period and did nothing to move our financial system onto safer grounds," Sanders said.
Corporate media generally neglects to mention Bernanke's role at the Fed prior to 2008, and instead credits him with stopping a second Great Depression. It's true that the Fed has done everything possible to keep Wall Street from imploding, but Bernanke also repeatedly insisted that the subprime mortgage crisis would be "contained" as late as 2007 and made no plans for a situation that might prove worse than his rosy forecasts.
As William Greider explains for The Nation, it's a bit too soon to celebrate our economic salvation at Bernanke's hands. Small banks are failing at an alarming rate, job losses remain heavy and households are being squeezed by plummeting property values and growing credit card debt.
Greider emphasizes that Bernanke repeatedly bailed out financial giants without demanding anything in return, which bodes poorly for any future economic crisis. Kenneth Lewis remains Bank of America's CEO, even though the company has needed $45 billion in taxpayer funds to date, and high-level Fed officials think Lewis may be guilty of securities fraud. On the one bailout where the Fed did assume ownership of the company and discharge it's top-level management, AIG, the deal was structured to funnel no-strings-attached money to other Wall Street companies. Goldman Sachs raked in $12.9 billion from the arrangement. It's one thing to funnel money to financial firms in the name of economic necessity. It's quite another to allow executives at those companies to be paid like princes and subsidize their shareholders.
As economist James K. Galbraith discusses in a piece for The Washington Monthly, it's not clear if Bernanke and Co. actually saved the economy. Even if the financial system gets back to normal functioning, that stability has been purchased with massive taxpayer support. In order to do just about anything involving finance in the United States, a company now needs a very explicit government seal of approval to convince investors that they're safe to do business with. Just ask Colonial Bank, which failed earlier this summer after being denied bailout funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
But there has been secret support as well. Bernanke's Fed committed over $2 trillion in emergency loans to keep the financial system from collapsing during the crisis, and has refused to tell the public who got the money, and on what terms. We don't know who we saved, or at what the consequences of this massive bank support operation will be. Bernanke always believed that rescuing Wall Street would prevent major damage to the broader economy, but Galbraith questions whether the economy would be stronger if policymakers had focused more on direct aid to workers and homeowners, including an earlier, more robust economic stimulus package.
"Perhaps the right thing would have been less focus on saving banks, and much more on saving jobs, families, and homes."
Writing for In These Times, Roger Bybee profiles a new group called Americans for Financial Reform, which is pushing for changes on Wall Street and fighting against business-as-usual at the Fed. The bank lobby is probably the most powerful interest group on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong and consistent voice urging lawmakers to protect the entire economy, rather than the banks. The very structure of the Fed makes it more responsive to Wall Street interests than those of the general public. Private-sector banks like Citigroup and Bank of America are shareholders in each of the Fed's regional branches, while private-sector bank executives sit on the board of directors at each branch. Since the boards get to name the regional presidents, private-sector bank CEOs are given major power to name their own regulators. Regional presidents also rotate through positions on the Fed's monetary policy board, making decisions to set interest rates.
The Fed's institutional structure, and its reliance on mainstream economists overly acquiescent to the financial sector has helped fuel the boom-and-bust bubble economy, as the Real News explains in this video piece:
In addition to the turmoil surrounding the Bernanke appointment, the recent budget deficit projections have been receiving a lot of attention lately. By throwing around a lot of big numbers that end in "trillion," deficit hawks have created the impression of crisis where none exists. The government will have a $1.6 trillion shortfall this year, equal to about 11% of the U.S. economy. That's the highest such number since the U.S. economy started to soar in the years after World War II, high enough to mobilize CNBC pundits to warn of financial apocalypse and a bankrupt U.S. government.
But as Robert Reich notes for Salon, it's not really worth getting too worked up over the current deficit projections. In a recession, countries want to run a deficit: the government needs to fill hole created by the drop-off in private-sector economic activity. If the U.S. doesn't run a big deficit, it will shed millions of additional jobs. And the country is nowhere near losing control of its currency. The federal debt stands at about 54% of our economic output right now, and is projected to reach 68% by 2019. But Reich notes that in 1945, the number was far higher: 120%. This number shrank dramatically over the next few years, not because of draconian cuts to government programs, but because the economy grew so much that the debt burden became less severe. We are nowhere near a crisis with the budget that compares to the current unemployment crisis, so pulling back spending right now doesn't make much sense.
Bernanke has always argued that the Fed chair's only duty is to control inflation. But managing the economy means not only attending to inflation, but making sure the true engine of economic growth-financially secure households-isn't sacrificed to the short-term interests of a few Wall Street elites. Bernanke failed to block that economic predation early in his tenure as Fed Chairman. If Bernanke is going to be with us for another four years, President Obama needs to find other ways to restore our economic balance.
One of healthcare reform's greatest champions died last night. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. During his 46-year career in the senate, Kennedy's name appeared on virtually every major piece of progressive legislation from civil rights to economic justice, to healthcare. Kennedy called healthcare reform "the cause of my life."
Jack Newfield of The Nation remembers Kennedy as the senate's fighting liberal, the "best and most effective senator of the past hundred years."
We are left with weak, squabbling, visionless Democratic puppets and a President whose domestic reform policies are adrift-sliding towards the horizon with each passing day.
The loss is a blow to healthcare reform. Alex Koppelman of Salon notes that with Kennedy's passing, the Democrats have lost one of their most effective bipartisan deal-makers. Democrats will also be down a vote in the senate for the foreseeable future because Massachusetts state law doesn't allow for the appointment of an immediate replacement.
Naturally, with congress on vacation, wackos are rushing in to fill the media vacuum. Eric Boehlert asks in AlterNet why Republicans the only ones allowed to get angry about healthcare reform, or anything else. He notes that in 2003, the media decided that Howard Dean was too angry for prime time. During the Republican National Convention in 2008, SWAT teams were sent to raid the homes of suspected anarchist protesters. And yet, conservative demonstrators in Arizona are allowed to tote rifles just outside the security perimeter of a presidential event.
RNC Chair Michael Steele raised eyebrows by championing single-payer healthcare in an op/ed in the Washington Post framing the GOP as defenders of Medicare.
Odd that Steele has so much love for Medicare, but none for the nation's other leading source of government-run healthcare, the Veterans Administration (VA). This week, Steele accused America's other leading public insurance provider of encouraging veterans to commit suicide, based on a booklet published by the VA which explains living wills, advanced directives and other key concepts in end-of-life care, Rachel Slajda reports for TPM DC.
Progressives have been doing a great job debunking the death panel and death book myths, like this creative photo essay from TPM. But we're scarcely addressing the misconception that underlies them: The idea government-administered health insurance is inherently more prone to rationing than private health insurance.
Newt Gingrich and other prominent opponents of reform claim that a public option will restrict choices and deny care. What they don't say is that for-profit insurance is rationing. When your insurance company covers an old drug for your condition, but not a new one with fewer side effects, that's rationing. The company is restricting your treatment choices to improve its bottom line. When an employer or an insurer decides not to cover mental health care, that's rationing. The entire business model is predicated on charging people more and giving them less care so there's more money left over for the stockholders.
No health insurance can cover every treatment, no matter who runs it. But public insurance has two major advantages: 1) Public insurance tends to be cheaper to administer; 2) The tough choices about what to cover are ultimately in the hands of the voters, not health insurance bureaucrats with an eye on the bottom line.
The whole town hall concept is turning out to be a strategic blunder for the White House. The format makes legislators and the media sitting ducks for extremists and astroturfers who want to paint themselves as typical citizens. As Sandy Heierbacher of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation writes in YES Magazine:
[T]he town hall design sets the stage for activist groups and special interest groups to try to 'game' the system and sideline other concerned citizens in the process. As Martin Carcasson, director of Colorado State University's Center for Public Deliberation, recently pointed out, "the loudest voices are the ones that get heard, and typically the majority voices in the middle don't even show up because it becomes a shouting match."
How much more clear can the Republicans be? They are not interested in bipartisanship. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), supposedly the Senate's leading reasonable Republican on healthcare, couldn't even be bothered to rebuke a town hall participant who hinted about assassinating the president, as Raw Story reports.
If the Democrats want healthcare reform, they are going to have to go it alone. Let's hope they pass a bill that would make Sen. Kennedy proud.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
The U.S. economy may finally be bottoming out. But if the worst is really behind us, we are likely facing a painful period of "growth" that looks very much like the present. Without increasing unionization and mitigating racial inequality, our economic progress will prove as hollow as it is slow. While the economy may improve in a dry, statistical sense, the foundation for a productive economy has been decimated over the past three decades.
The economy has shown some encouraging signs of strength lately. Home prices have actually increased and the pace of layoffs slackened quite a bit in July. But that data doesn't signify a strong recovery, as Andrew Leonard notes in a pair of blog posts for Salon. Even in areas where there is some good news-housing and the job market-there is plenty of contradictory bad news. First, mortgage delinquencies are at an all-time high, and the souring loans are not just subprime. Even people with relatively affordable mortgages have problems paying when they lose their jobs, and with the unemployment rate at 9.4%, a lot of people are losing their jobs.
What's worse, Leonard notes, new claims for unemployment benefits escalated in August, suggesting that last month's job market improvements may have been a fluke. And while home prices may be ticking up slightly, they have been abysmal for the past two years. Since many households accumulated debt based on higher home values, the overall ratio of consumer debt to household net worth is perilously high.
Household net worth is a crucial statistic and is often overlooked by a focus on day-to-day measurements of worker well-being, like wage growth. While wages matter for paying the rent and buying groceries, our long-term economic security is defined not by what we make each week, but by the value of the things we own. In a piece for The American Prospect, economists Derrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. detail the massive racial disparities in household net worth in the U.S. While the median white family has roughly $90,000 to its name, the median Latino family has just $8,000, while the median Black family has only $6,000.
Centuries of discrimination have resulted in today's inequality, but Hamilton and Darity propose a simple, straightforward solution: The government should establish savings accounts for children born into poor families, and fund it with a relatively small amount of money. Children will not be able to access the accounts until they turn 18, but over the years, interest will accrue on the accounts to the point where children should have between $50,000 and $60,000 by the time they can withdraw funds. Since so many people of color are born into households with relatively low net-worth, establishing a policy to use government money to boost the wealth of those born without it would have the effect of promoting racial economic equality.
But we also have to worry about jobs. President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package has succeeded in creating or saving hundreds of thousands of jobs since going into effect earlier this year, but it is important to focus not only on creating jobs, but on creating good jobs. As Laura Flanders of GritTV emphasizes in a roundtable discussion with key academics and labor representatives, our increasingly hostile attitude towards unions has created major barriers to a sustainable economic recovery.
The legislation critical to ending this intimidation is known as the Employee Free Choice Act, one of the most important bills presented to Congress in decades, although it has been overshadowed by the debates surrounding health care reform and financial regulatory overhaul. Flanders' panelists include Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Columbia University Professor who wrote a recent paper for the Economic Policy Institute examining 1,000 attempts to establish unions all over the country, and found that employer opposition to unionization is more aggressive than ever. A full 30 million workers want to be part of an organized union, but only 70,000 workers successfully organize each year.
"It's always been hard to organize, but employers now have made it harder than ever. They've literally have said to workers that, 'If you try to organize, we will go after you in every way possible,'" Bronfenbrenner said. "They threaten workers, they harass them, one in every three employers fire workers for union activity . . . . There literally is a war on workers who try to organize."
Another panelist, Mark Winston Griffith, Director of the Drum Major Institute, notes that the decline of unionization has weakened the economy. In the 1950s, when one-third of all U.S. workers belonged to a union, the potential foundation for the economy was strong. Workers were well-paid and had excellent job security, which created a strong source of demand. With less than 8% of U.S. workers unionized today, our economic demand is fueled by household debt, which has left families struggling for financial security and has injected a heavy dose of instability into the entire economy.
Writing for The Nation, Sarah Jaffe details the difficulties faced by a group of security officers in Philadelphia trying to unionize under current labor laws.
But while the workers who form the foundation of our economy are gasping for air, the elite have almost never had it better. A recent study found income inequality to be deeper than any period since World War I, and this absurdity plays out in public policy. While workers struggle to get a fair shake from their employers, executives and managers evade taxes through elaborate international financial deception. Swiss banking giant UBS recently agreed to turn over the names of thousands of its clients who allegedly used the company's banking operations to skip out on the bill for Uncle Sam.
UBS has been caught with its hand in nearly every cookie jar labeled "bank scandal" over the past two years, from the subprime mortgage crisis to phony securities peddling to diamond smuggling. But as Robert Scheer explains at Truthdig, former senator and deregulation hawk Phil Gramm (R-Texas), has been an executive at the firm while the company has been destroying its reputation. Gramm helped pass some two key anti-regulation bills later years of the Clinton administration, and was unabashed about jumping to UBS immediately after leaving office. Scheer notes that the public knows almost nothing about Gramm's role at the company, including any potential involvement in its laundry list of scandals.
Real economic progress in the U.S. is impossible without a stronger base of unionized workers. But it's just as important to invest in our future by giving the children of poor families an even economic playing field.
President Obama is citing the Healthcare debate as a reason for postponing immigration reform until 2010. But in the interim, the White House is laying the groundwork foran enforcement agenda by expanding programs such as 287(g), Secure Communities and e-Verify, amidst a growing matrix of detention centers. Anti-immigration factions are taking advantage of the lull in legislative action to push their own agenda.
The Progressive takes the unequivocal stand that "President Obama is wrong to postpone immigration reform."Author Ed Morales makes it clear that while healthcare and economic issues are "understandably urgent," the choice to delay reform "de-prioritizes" people who have paid their taxes but have not been given a path to citizenship.
The problem is, immigration reform and healthcare reform are inextricably connected. WireTap cites a central tenant of healthcare reform's "artificially amplified 'public' opposition" to immigration, as reported by the Los Angeles Times: It's "the notion that 'Congress would give illegal immigrants health insurance at taxpayer expense.'"
Is the racially charged core of this "chameleon colored outrage" being purposefully left out of the general dialogue? The ugly facts are that a "third of all 'Hispanics' in the U.S., almost half of the undocumented, and a fifth of African Americans" lack health insurance today. And yet, only "one in eight whites" lack health care.
After all, "Not all immigrants are alike." New America Media's David Hayes-Bautista compares the experiences of two immigrants named Jean-Claude and Juan Carlos. Hayes-Bautista effectively illustrates the Good Immigrant/Bad Immigrant paradigm and asks "Why do some immigrants move quickly and swiftly up the educational and professional ladder, while others appear to remain stymied at the bottom?" Ultimately, "both segments of immigrants deserve to be included in the future healthcare system that their presence will help to fund."
But some clearly don't think with such a progressive bent, as the New Mexico Independent reports.Instead of trying to bring greater truth to the entire discussion, anti-immigrant factions are "using [healthcare reform] to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants," unsurprisingly claiming that they are "a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system."
At a Portsmouth, New Hampshire town hall where the crowd awaited the President's arrival, one "white-bearded protestor" suggested murder as a solution for "illegals." (Video via the Young Turks).
Judging from the agitated protestor's words, he, like others, views immigration through a fearful zero sum scarcity model in which one person's well-being equals another person's loss.There are better ways to approach this issue. New America Media reports on a more enlightened approach being employed in New Mexico. The Las Cruces-based Colonias Development Council (CDC), along with other community groups, recently held a series of meetings that discussed "living and working conditions in underdeveloped border-area communities,"but filtered the conversation "through the lens of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations back in 1948." Such a lens introduces not just political concerns,but concerns related to the "guarantees of healthcare, education, employment, and housing" as human rights.
Migrants, like those of the CDC, are exploring the truly progressive ideas that proclaim all humans deserving of certain rights. And when the White House takes immigration reform off the radar with one hand and clamps down punitively with the other, it sends a signal to companies like Yum! brands, which are implementing illegal policies. In These Times' Robin Peterson tells the story of a very unhappy KFC workforce where "No Match" letters have resulted in many lost jobs. No Match letters were introduced by the Bush administration. The idea is that your employer sends your Social Security number to a database, which returns a "match" that indicates valid citizenship."No match" equals no citizenship, and usually, no job. However, a judge ruled shortly after the legislation's introduction, that it was illegal to fire a person over an "unmatched" return.
"Time's up," writes Michelle Chen of RaceWire. While the President has made some "overtures" toward immigration reform, the White House has "generally adhered to the status quo set by the Bush administration." Not all involved are feeling so patient: "Faced with the news that immigration reform may have to wait until 2010, some organizations say their patience has run out." The Mexican American Political Association, for one, has called for direct action to make clear the urgent necessity for leadership on this issue:
We are taking the brunt of the attacks and suffering the immediate consequences of this misguided policy, therefore, our call is urgent to take to the streets on September 5th, the Labor Day weekend, and October 12th, not to ask but demand that President Obama stop the attacks on immigrants and that he fulfill his promise of immigration reform, that which we heard during the presidential campaign, but has recently been forgotten.
Increasingly, the White House appears to be backing away from its promises to important constituencies. The administration's inaction plays out with very real results on the ground, including increased tension, anxiety, and violence against immigrant communities. As we are a nation of immigrants, the effects of ignoring this pressing issue are widespread and will only grow worse in time.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration and is free to reprint. Visit Immigration.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Healthcare, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Healthcare.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Will healthcare reform include a public health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance? President Obama campaigned on the promise of a public option, but over the past week he and his top advisers have repeatedly signaled that they aren't willing to fight for it.
On Saturday, Obama told a town hall meeting in Colorado: "Whether we have it or we don't have it, [the public option] is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it."
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," an unnamed senior White House official gripes in this morning's Washington Post.
The White House is sorely mistaken if it thinks that the public option belongs in the "nice but not necessary" category. Josh Holland of AlterNet explains why the public option is the pillar of healthcare reform. Without it, there's little hope of containing costs or reigning in the power of insurance companies:
It may be just one "aspect" of health reform, but without it, the legislation promises to be a massive rip-off; a taxpayer give-away of hundreds of billions of dollars to an unreformed 'disease care' industry.
The industry would get millions of new customers thanks to generous government subsidies and a law requiring that (almost) everyone carry insurance. And that windfall would come without the structural changes needed to bend the medical "cost curve" in years to come -- without any provisions that might endanger the industry's bottom line.
In Salon, Robert Reich agrees. Competition between private insurance companies and the public option is the only hope to controlling costs. A public plan could bargain with providers to reduce costs and pass the savings on to taxpayers. The private insurance industry would have to slash its prices to compete.
Without a public option, "reform" would likely involve subsidies to private insurance companies, temporarily dulling the pain as premiums rise unchecked. That's the worst of both worlds.
Progressives shouldn't be surprised at the White House's noncommittal stance, though. Obama campaigned on a public option, but he has always framed it a darned good idea, not as a non-negotiable demand.
Why is it so difficult to get a healthcare bill through the Senate with the supposedly filibuster-proof majority? The simple answer is that the Dems need 100% of their delegation to cooperate in order to break a filibuster. So, the Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate but no way to advance their agenda without capitulating to the conservative Blue Dogs. The Republicans can be counted on to filibuster whatever the Democrats come up with. Which means that conservative Democrats like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) hold the balance of power.
As Ari Melber of The Nation explains, Baucus and his Republican counterpart Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also rule over the powerful and conservative Senate Finance Committee, which has been tasked with writing the Senate version of the healthcare bill.
Also in The Nation, Tom Geoghegan argues that it's time to break the stranglehold by abolishing the procedural filibuster. Unlimited debate in the Senate is enshrined in the constitution. In an old school filibuster, senators simply refuse to shut up until the session ends and the bill dies without a vote. In 1975, a group of liberals wrote a rule of Senate procedure that effectively allows senators to "filibuster" simply by saying they want to. In the old days, a filibuster was a grueling public ordeal. Senators slept on cots and spelled each other off. Today, "filibustering" means signing a form. It's private, easy and cost-free. The Republicans can, and will, filibuster all major Democratic legislation without having to stand in public and risk being branded as obstructionists.
As a result, 60 is the new 50 in the Senate. Since it's just a rule, the procedural filibuster could be abolished by a simple majority vote. Friends of the filibuster defend it as a bulwark against tyranny. Abolishing the procedural filibuster would discourage frivolous obstructionism, but keep the filibuster for cases when legislators actually care enough to lose sleep over it.
Ever wonder why the strongest public option, single-payer, was never on the table? Maybe because even the strongest proponents of the public plan are taking money from the insurance and biomedical industries. Mother Jones Rachel Morris wants to know why UNITEDHealth consultant Tom Daschle was on Meet the Press Sunday. A former Democratic senator, Daschle is a senior adviser to Obama on healthcare reform and a leading advocate of a public plan. However, he recently resumed a private consulting arrangement with UNITEDHealth, America's largest health insurer. Even public plan champion Howard Dean is a strategic adviser on healthcare policy to the lobby firm of McKenna, Long, and Aldridge. Dean won't disclose his clients, but McKenna represents a number of clients in the biomedical and health science industries.
The prospects of a public option are dimming, but not necessarily because of any rapid about-face by the White House. The Senate bill is in the hands of the Blue Dogs, who say they won't have legislation until November. Obama won't put the screws to the Blue Dogs, but there's still plenty of time to for citizens to make their voices heard.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
A new study by Economist Emmanuel Saez revealed this week that income inequality in the U.S. is more severe today than at any time since World War I, and the current recession is taking its heaviest toll on the worst-off members of our society. As our government rebuilds the financial sector using taxpayers' money, it's important to remember that both financiers and the government are responsible to our communities, not just bank shareholders. If we want to strengthen our country's economic foundation, we need to demand better wages for workers and an end to all kinds of predatory lending.
Saez's new data on income inequality is, as Paul Krugman put it, "truly amazing." Saez, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, found that the top 0.01% of U.S. earners had 6% of total U.S. wages, more than double the level in 2000. Earners in the top 10%, meanwhile, took home an astonishing 49.7% of all wages. That gap is larger now than during the Great Depression or the Gilded Age of the Roaring '20s.
"We're seeing Depression-era inequality again-only now it's slightly worse," writes Steve Benen for The Washington Monthly. Benen also notes that this level of inequality is not an inevitable consequence of a market economy: It's an extreme historical aberration. In the U.S., prosperity for much of the 20th Century was shared. But in 2007, at the economic bubble's peak, the wealthy simply got wealthier.
In that context, it is beyond absurd that the government is allowing 8-figure bonuses to be doled out by bailed out banks. Writing for Salon, Robert Reich dissects the policy implications of Citigroup's plans to pay its top executives an average of $10 million this year and award over $100 million to its top trader, a man who literally owns a castle in Germany. Citigroup was one of the most reckless U.S. banks during the housing bubble, a major subprime offender that received $45 billion in direct bailout money, as well as hundreds of billions in federal guarantees. How much is $45 billion? With the median U.S. home price at $174,100, that's the full market price of over 258,000 foreclosed homes. The company says that $10 million a head is necessary to attract and maintain top "talent," which Reich notes is a somewhat misleading term, given recent history. The problem is not just that Citigroup and other Wall Street firms are paying tons of money to a few people, it's that these people are being rewarded for the same kind of activities that got us into this mess to begin with: Risky, highly leveraged securities trading.
"Over the last several years Wall Street has exhibited a truly astonishing lack of talent," Reich says, noting that, "The Street is back to the same, relentlessly untalented tactics that made it lots of money before the meltdown-which also forced taxpayers to bail it out, caused the world economy to melt down, and tens of millions of people to lose big chunks of their life savings."
In truth, Reich argues, most large financial firms in the U.S. are much more like public utility companies than private-sector businesses. Even in good times, they depend on government guarantees and other support systems to function. In bad times, we bail them out. Instead of paying financiers tens of millions of dollars to reinforce a flawed system, Reich argues that we should impose rules that result in salaries similar to the public utilities sector, where top earners are generally restricted to 6-figure incomes.
The American Prospect features two pieces emphasizing problems in the current financial sector. Under a law known as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977 we require banks to make loans in communities where they collect deposits. The loans have to be to dependable borrowers and they have to be relatively inexpensive. The law works very well-institutions covered by it made only a tiny fraction of the high-interest subprime loans that brought down the financial sector, as National Community Reinvestment Coalition President John Taylor notes for the Prospect. But CRA only applies to actual banks. You know, the places where you deposit your paychecks. CRA does not apply to subcompanies owned by the same corporation, and it does not apply to giant Wall Street securities firms like Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. Taylor says we need to expand CRA to cover these other big players in the financial world.
Why? As Alyssa Katz details in a piece for the Prospect funded by The Nation Institute, many Wall Street firms are bidding on foreclosed properties and selling them at rip-off rates to low-income borrowers.
But as Mary Kane notes for The Washington Independent, banks have also devised several methods of making money without making a loan. By charging tremendous fees on borrowers for minor infractions, banks generate billions of dollars without producing anything of social value. One of the worst forms of abuse, Kane writes, comes in the form of overdraft fees. When you withdraw too much money from your bank account, the bank fronts you the money, and then charges you a fee for this "protection." The trick is, banks almost never tell you that this has occurred, and often play around with the timing of your charges and deposits to maximize the fees they collect. Banks are on track to collect $38.5 billion in such fees this year alone. The worst part is, the fees come from the poorest customers-rich people don't overdraw their bank accounts, because they have tons of money.
In the case of credit cards, banks routinely slap borrowers with outrageous fees and interest rate hikes when the borrowers are making payments on time. Over the years, banks have targeted younger and younger credit card customers, as Adam Waxman notes for WireTap. After years of declining wages for all but the wealthiest citizens, consumers have been turning to pricey plastic to finance basic necessities.
Sadly, corporate America does not seem very focused on helping workers establish their financial independence. The Real News talks with Richard Wolff, an economist with the New School who emphasizes that, while worker productivity has jumped in recent months, wages have not made the corresponding increases. Quarterly productivity numbers tend to jump around a lot, but the trend of not compensating workers for improved efficiency has been around for years.
In a consumer-driven economy, major problems can't be fixed by giving lots of money to a few people, especially if those few people are already rich. To support broad, meaningful economic growth, we need to tailor our policies that empower those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And when we bail out giant corporations with taxpayer money, we need to make sure those companies arrange their business to improve the lot of taxpayers.
This week's edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.
Here's the latest news on the healthcare front: Republicans and their allies are pressuring Democratic healthcare reformers at townhall meetings around the country. Addie Stan has a blockbuster piece in AlterNet that exposes the network of corporate funders and lobbyists behind the mobs.
The Progressive's Ruth Conniff explains the mobs' marching orders, as spelled out in a memo by Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer for the Tea Party Patriots, an anti-reform group with ties to former Republican Rep. Dick Armey's pressure group Freedom Works. MacGuffie instructs town hall protesters to shout at lawmakers and attempt to throw them off their game as they try to make the case for health care reform. So much for reasoned discussion.
As I reported in In These Times, the teabaggers are trying to scapegoat organized labor as the instigators of confrontations at town hall meetings. On August 6, a scuffle broke out in front of a town hall meeting in St. Louis. This video clip shows the last 10 seconds of a scuffle in which a man in an SEIU t-shirt lies prostrate on the ground. A 38-year-old conservative activist claims to have been severely beaten, but the video shows him apparently uninjured, darting around to different cops and trying to convince them that he was attacked. The man's lawyer claims that he saw his client get punched in the face and kicked in the head by SEIU members.
A spokesman for the St. Louis County police told me that the police hadn't reviewed the video because nobody had submitted it to them, despite a call to the public to turn over evidence for the investigation. The fact that the videographer hasn't turned over the video kind of makes you wonder if the teabaggers really take the "evidence" as seriously as they claim.
How's this for irony? According to Talking Points Memo, the activist was asking for money to pay his hospital bills because he's uninsured.
Finally, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that Kansas Now is calling upon AG Eric Holder to restore the Federal Marshall security detail of prominent late-term abortion provider Dr. Leroy Carhart, a friend and colleague of the late Dr. George Tiller. Carhart was placed under protection after Tiller was shot. But the feds didn't even wait for the trial of Tiller's alleged assassin to wrap before pulling Carhart's detail. Now he's on his own, just as the alleged killer's links to a broader coalition of violent anti-choicers are coming to light.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
