Evan Bayh on The Huffington Post

Evan Bayh Burnishes His Fake Budget Hawk Persona

2009-11-30T12:24:19Z

One of the things we re-learned on Sunday is that Evan Bayh is a big fan of pretending that the cost of the war in Afghanistan doesn't ever need to be reckoned with, as long as we steadfastly hew to platitudes.

Confronted by Fox News's Chris Wallace about the cost of simply escalating the war, and the proposal to raise revenue to pay for just this escalation, Bayh said, "I don't think it's a good idea, not at this point," adding:

First of all, you need to provide for the nation's security regardless of your financial situation, and there's no bigger deficit hawk in Congress than I am.

I think we need to start coming to grips with this. We're going to have a big vote coming up on the debt ceiling. I don't think we should vote to raise the debt ceiling until we have a strategy in place to get our deficits down.

So we've got to take the fiscal situation seriously, but, number one, national security comes first.

Number two, we've got to look at cutting spending in other parts of the budget before we even talk about raising taxes.

So, Bayh is a "big deficit hawk" whose idea of "coming to grips" with deficits is to blithely assert the primacy of a war that he can't build a case for -- at the expense of other programs in the budget that he won't build a case against, other than to suggest that they are getting in the way of paying for the war, the cost of which he's already bent on pretending doesn't exist.

Those deficits, I'm sure, are terrified of this man!

Glenn Greenwald has Bayh sized up correctly when he calls him the "perfectly representative face for the rotted Washington establishment," and "the pure expression of virtually every attribute that makes the Beltway so dysfunctional, deceitful and corrupt."

He's right! And what's more, he's really not the huge deficit hawk he claims to be. This is something that the children of America's multimillionaires already know full well!

See, literally gutting programs from the federal budget to pay for a war that the American people are beginning to tire of fighting is something that would potentially come at a political cost. That's why Bayh is doing his utmost to ensure that he won't actually have to make any tough choices. As previously mentioned, Bayh is part of a coalition of lawmakers who want the tough budgetary decisions to be outsourced to a brand new blue-ribbon commission on deficits. And to get their way, these lawmakers are making the "irresponsible threat" to refuse to vote to raise the debt ceiling if their demands are not met:

A bipartisan group of more than a dozen senators is threatening to vote against an increase in the debt limit unless Congress passes a new deficit-fighting plan.

"I will not vote for raising the debt limit without a vehicle to handle this. ... This is our moment," California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said.

She and nine other senators wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., asking that Congress create a special commission to make recommendations that then could be decided by an up-or-down vote.

Feinstein said it could be similar to the process for closing military bases, in which members must vote to take or leave the entire package. The senators who joined Feinstein are Democrats Evan Bayh of Indiana, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Mark Warner of Virginia, Bill Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and independent Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

I think Matt Yglesias got this precisely right:

Why not throw it back at this crew? Tell the Irresponsible Threat Caucus that instead of asking for a commission, they should just start calling themselves a "budget commission" and then they can specify their own proposed set of tax hikes and Medicare cuts.

Exactly. Why would a self-styled deficit hawk like Evan Bayh not want to sign his name on the line that is dotted? The reason is that Bayh is actually a "save-my-seat hawk," and he's figured out that avoiding responsibility for tough choices is an essential part of getting re-elected again and again and again, and cashing in on the cachet of office. So Bayh supports the creation of a blue-ribbon panel of "experts," at a remove from voter backlash, who will make all the tough choices for him.

I'm at a loss to explain what Bayh should be credited with as a legislator, other than manufacturing a tidy and lucrative career out of dodging his duty.

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Pete King Demands Probe Into Salahi Gate Crashing

2009-11-30T09:40:12Z

WASHINGTON — The couple who crashed the Obama administration's first state dinner communicated with a senior Pentagon official about going to the event, but the official denies that she helped the couple get in.

Michele Jones, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said in a written statement issued through the White House on Monday evening that she never said or implied she would get Michaele and Tareq Salahi into the Nov. 24 White House dinner.

Bob Cesca: Joe Lieberman Filibusters Health Care While Americans Suffer

2009-11-12T16:18:55Z

One of many classic episodes of Seinfeld was "The Opposite" -- the finale of season five. While George decides to ignore his instincts and behave in the exact opposite way he normally would, the B-story involves Elaine's boyfriend, Jake Jarmel, being hit by a cab. And instead of rushing to the hospital, Elaine stops at a movie theater concession stand and buys a box of Jujyfruits -- completely unfazed by the gravity of the situation.

When it comes to health care reform, Joe Lieberman is Elaine times a thousand.

So are Ben Nelson, Tom Carper, Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh. But let's focus on Lieberman since his emergence in this situation was dropped like a ton of bricks -- rubbery, fruity bricks -- seemingly out of nowhere, whereas the rest of these conservative Democrats have more or less been enemies of real reform since the process began.

With every month that goes by without health care reform, another 3,600 Americans die due to a lack of insurance. More deaths than 9/11 every 30 days. Every 30 seconds, another family slips into medical bankruptcy, potentially losing everything simply because they were unlucky enough to become sick or injured in a for-profit system that's gamed in favor of the house. There are nearly 300,000 uninsured American adults in Lieberman's home state of Connecticut alone, not to mention 53,000 uninsured children.

And Joe Lieberman, along with his conservadem friends, are stopping off for Jujyfruits. Political favors. Attention. Spotlight. Concessions -- literally and figuratively.

By shamelessly seeking attention via a filibuster threat against health care reform, Joe Lieberman is putting his own political ambitions ahead of American lives. This selfish acting out -- this pathetic, insufferable emergence of The Lieberman at reform's eleventh hour ought to further seal his legacy as one of the U.S. Senate's most greedy, self-serving political hacks.

Make no mistake. By merely threatening a filibuster, Joe Lieberman is, in effect, filibustering health care reform. It's not a threat. He's doing it right now. He's delaying reform and creating another unnecessary obstruction in a process that surely doesn't suffer from a lack of delays imposed by everyone from lobbyists to careerist political bastards.

So what's his gripe?

Lieberman's first, only and most ridiculous gripe with health care reform (so far) is that, somehow, reform with a public option will increase the deficit. This is, naturally, a lie. He's making it up because, as we're well aware, the CBO reported that the House bill, featuring a "level playing field" public option and no opt-out language, will reduce the federal budget deficit by more than $100 billion over ten years, with further deficit reduction in the subsequent ten years.

What makes this whole thing even more insane is that Lieberman actually supported the public option when he ran for president in 2004.

To date, he really doesn't have any substantive reason to be filibustering the public option other than this lie about the deficit. And so we're left with no other justification other than to peg his obstructionism as sheer hubris and drama queen posturing.

Elaine inappropriately delayed her rush to the hospital in order to stop off for Jujyfruits. Why? Because she likes Jujyfruits, and so Jujyfruits took precedent over her injured friend. It was about self-indulgence, and that explains everything Lieberman has done since 2006.

He's clearly a man who's grappling with irrelevance, so he needs to be needed -- as long as his vote becomes necessary for passing reform, he's relevant. For the wrong reasons, but relevant nonetheless. He's obstructing because he can. Meanwhile, Lieberman seems to have made it his mission to take a piss on the left whenever possible. And in doing so, he also believes he'll win friends on the right -- he's also attempting to out-flank Republican Olympia Snowe on the public option. Though beyond his comfy McCain-Graham orbit, he's trying to win acceptance in a Republican Party that's rapidly purging its ranks of anyone in the middle. So it seems like that path is a dead end as well.

He's admired by neither the left nor the right. He's that weasely kid from recess who would constantly pit one clique of friends against the other -- making friends with neither.

Meanwhile, every second that Lieberman performs this infuriating filibuster routine is another second without reform. Every second spent ameliorating the Lieberman filibuster -- massaging his ego with kid gloves and determining exactly what it is he wants -- is another second without reform. Instead of a comprehensive health care bill, we're getting a lot of unnecessary drama circulating around Joe Lieberman's masturbatory ego trip. He wins some press attention and lots of urgent calls from the White House and Harry Reid's office, while the rest of us are jammed with the medical bills.

All in all, there's no other way to peg Lieberman other than as a desperate hack who will thoughtlessly hurl thousands of Americans overboard for the sake of his unquenchable lust for attention, and his childish, vengeful hobby of tweaking the left.

Help us unseat this guy next time around, Connecticut. After all, he's playing politics with your lives. He's stopping off for Jujyfruits when he should be, you know, helping you. And there's no excuse.

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!

Senate "Moderates" Delaying Health Care Bill With Demands

2009-11-04T09:29:15Z

Moderate lawmakers are exerting their outsize influence in the divided Senate to secure changes to health-care reform legislation, potentially adding more delays to a bill that has already missed several announced deadlines.

Although they have yet to achieve the "gang" status accorded to previous centrist coalitions, a dozen or so moderate Democrats are emerging as pivotal to the fate of the health-care measure -- beginning with the procedural vote that Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) must win to launch the historic debate.

Senators Who Could And/Or Will Screw Up Health Care Reform

2009-10-27T15:27:37Z

The public option: it (sort of) lives (maybe)! Or so says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who boldly announced in yesterday's anxiously-anticipated press conference that the bill would contain something public option-esque. Since then, it has quickly become the fast-moving subject du jour.

Naturally, it's worth pointing out that Reid didn't manage to get behind the so-called "robust," chipotle-flavored public option that progressives favor. Nor is it the Chuck Schumer, "cool-ranch" version of the public option.

Instead, we get the "opt-out" public option, in which various states could choose to bail on the program after a year, if their public servants so desired. Political mavens are fascinated by the "opt-out" possibilities, because it flips the "Waterloo" script and dares Republicans at the state level to risk their political careers to deny their constituents this insurance option, potentially giving Democrats a brickbat with which to swat their opponents. Of course, also in the path of that brickbat: actual health care consumers! But hey! One poor working-class family's crisis is another man's winning election issue! Right?

Anyway, the matter at hand now is whether a reform bill that contains as limited a measure as the opt-out plan will survive the Senate. (The White House, as you know, would have settled for a lot less!) So, with that in mind, let's take a look at those senators who can, and probably will, completely cock up health care reform.

JOE LIEBERMAN, I-Conn.,
Well, let's start with the guy who has basically announced that he is going to wreck the bill. As reported by HuffPost's Ryan Grim, Lieberman says "that if a public health insurance option was in the final health care bill, he would join a GOP filibuster to prevent it from getting an up or down vote." This is not surprising: Lieberman lives to betray his colleagues. In the past, Lieberman has said that he'd support the even-more-useless "public option trigger," but who knows? Lieberman is basically the least trustworthy creature currently plying his trade in legislative politics. Anyone remember when this guy was going to be the vice president on the Democratic ticket? Wow. All that matters now is that he continues to garner the favor of the health insurance companies, headquartered in his state.

OLYMPIA SNOWE, R-Maine
There aren't too many Republicans relevant to this discussion, but Olympia Snowe -- best known for singing a magical siren song that has caused so many pieces of legislation to dash themselves to bits on the rocky shoals of bipartisanship -- is one of them. Now that Lieberman is signaling his desire to filibuster, the courting of Snowe is probably back on the table for Democrats who want to get the bill to an up-or-down vote. Snowe has said that she doesn't support the "opt-out public option," is more partial to the trigger, and, true to form, has maddeningly been working her typical "I'll probably filibuster it but who knows? Maybe I won't?" dance.

BEN NELSON, D-Neb.
The consensus on Ben Nelson is that he's not astute enough to outsmart a half-empty bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's, but somewhere along the way, some aide has convinced him that he can wield the most legislative power by staking out the most centrist position possible on every issue. In doing so, he doesn't do anything particularly smart -- he's basically one of those types of centrists who waters down the effectiveness of policy until it's just useless enough to get Republican votes. At times he seemed to support the opt-out, while at other times he seemed to favor the trigger, probably because he's too stupid to know the difference.

MARY LANDRIEU, D-Louis.
Landrieu is another one of these senators best known for behaving as if her intellect has been incapacitated by a mighty blow to the head. Two weeks ago, she was moronically blathering on and on about how "when people hear public option they hear free health care." Days later, she was telling the Associated Press that she wasn't "for a government-run, national, taxpayer-subsidized plan, and never will be," when in fact she is for all sorts of "government-run, national, taxpayer-subsidized plans." It's hard to say whether Landrieu is dumb or just inclined to mislead her constituents in return for lobbyist dollars. I'm guessing it's a little from column A, a little from column B.

KENT CONRAD, D-N.D.
Back in mid-September, Kent Conrad rather forthrightly predicted that the public option "was not going to pass" and that the only thing that had a chance in the Senate was the junk that made it out of the Senate Finance Committee. Conrad is the leading proponent of the useless, stupid health-care co-ops that won't work.

BLANCHE LINCOLN, D-Ark.
Blanche Lincoln has been signaling her non-commitment to any health care reform that even smells of "public option," and as recently as yesterday, told Greg Sargent that she "has not committed her vote" to anyone or anything, including bypassing a filibuster in the Senate. FUN FACT: As the chair of the Agriculture Committee, Lincoln has been given scads of money from polluters and from Wall Street, meaning she'll have a hand at screwing up derivatives reform and environmental policy as well.

HARRY REID, D-Nev.
Yeah, yeah, I know. He's the guy who's standing behind the public option, or what's left of it. But this is also the guy who said Roland Burris would not be sworn into office, so, if it's all the same to you, I'll report on Reid's balls when I've confirmed that both have dropped from his abdomen.

OTHERS:
Right now, I still don't entirely trust Max Baucus (D-Mont.). Sure, he's now basically telling anyone who will listen to him that he supports the public option, but he's fickle. Plus, his office is basically one big whorehouse funded by the health care industry. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) seems to be on board, but I'll remind you that Bayh is the founder of the Hyper-Timid Incrementalist Bullshit Working Group. Is the "opt-out public option" hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit enough? (Actually, probably yes. But still.) Also, let's recall that Roland Burris (D-Ill.) said that he'd vote against any bill that did not include the robust public option... we'll see if he holds to that.

But yeah, if it can get past all of these idiots, this watered-down version of health care reform is going to be just fine.

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Jessy Tolkan: Youth Vote 2010: Millennials Demand Clean Energy Economy

2009-10-20T15:38:10Z

If our leaders who are running for re-election in 2010 want to benefit from the youth vote that rocked Campaign 2008, they need to understand that creating new jobs through the development of a clean and independent energy future is a paramount issue for young people. The financial crisis, health care and our strategy in Afghanistan may be dominating news coverage as the country prepares for the holidays, but we also have incredible opportunities to win notable victories in the fight against harmful pollution and develop an aggressive clean energy policy. The question is: Will our representatives lead by example now or cover their tracks with vague promises on the campaign trail next year?

It's clear that America's youth don't want to wait.

This month thousands of these voters have turned out in Michigan, Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina as part of Regional Power Shift Summits to show the power and urgency of this youth led climate movement. These efforts aim to put key elected officials in these states on notice, like Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Evan Bayh (D-IN), as well as community officials in their neighborhoods. We want local and national leaders to use the fast-approaching United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on December 7th - 18th as a deadline to show leadership at home and abroad on climate and energy issues, and they want to see the creation of millions of jobs that could alleviate disproportionately high levels of unemployment affecting their peers.

Our message was clear:

The summits, organized by the membership of the Energy Action Coalition (of which I serve as Executive Director), began in Michigan and Indiana on Oct. 10 and traveled to Missouri and North Carolina over the weekend, and included insightful speeches from local change-makers, volunteer work for innovative community groups, and field training for organizers.

The events were part of 11 regional summits across the nation that will bring together thousands of young people through Nov. 8 to demand that President Obama and Congress create a climate and energy plan by December that rebuilds our economy, ends our dependence on dirty energy, and brings our communities lasting security. The summits were organized by young voters to push national leaders to take action on climate and energy by organizing rallies, events, protests, phone calls and meetings with elected officials.

When we said last year that we believed in change and the fierce urgency of now, we meant it. It's time to see if our leaders did too.

Peter Dreier: Who Should Pay for Health Insurance Reform?

2009-10-16T05:06:44Z

The escalating battle over health insurance reform is taking place on three fronts. The debate over "who should pay?" for reform has so far taken a back seat to the fight over the public option and the struggle over requiring insurance companies to end their practice of denying coverage to sick people. But the clash over "who should pay" will soon take center stage.

Most of the media attention over health reform has focused on whether Congress will embrace a "public option" - an expansion of Medicare that would compete with private insurance companies and give consumers more choices. This battle is still underway. Most Americans, and most Democrats in Congress, want it, but the insurance industry - and its allies among conservative Democrats - are opposed. As the grassroots movement for health care reform gains momentum, accusing these conservative Dems of being tools of the insurance companies, they will be under more scrutiny and pressure to accept a public option.

The health reform activists, led by Health Care for American Now (HCAN), have also exposed the insurance companies' outrageous practices of denying insurance to people with "pre-existing conditions," denying payment for treatments and medicines prescribed by doctors, and putting caps on payments for policyholders. Polls reveal that most Americans think that the government should require the companies to end these abuses. In exchange for a federal mandate that all Americans buy insurance, greatly expanding their pool of customers, the insurance industry reluctantly agreed to some of these demands, but it is still trying to insert loopholes in the bills to maximize their profits.

Health insurance reform is the moral issue of our time. There is no excuse for a society as wealthy as the United States to have so many people without health insurance and so many more people, including those with insurance, who face bankruptcy just to pay medical bills.

The U.S. is trying to decide what kind of society we want to be. Americans believe that some things - national defense, public schools, clean water and air, and fire safety - are investments worth making to insure our common well-being. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that we should add health care to this list - that the government should guarantee everyone basic health coverage. Whether we succeed in addressing this problem will define how we view ourselves and how the rest of the world views us.

The Congressional Budget Office recently released a report concluding that it will cost $829 billion over ten years to provide help for almost 38 million Americans to afford health insurance.

Who should pay?

The Bible (Luke 12.48) says: "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required." In a famous speech in 1961, President John F. Kennedy paraphrased this statement, observing that "For of those to whom much is given, much is required."

From any perspective, that is the principle of a decent society: We share a common interest. We're in this together. We're not just all on our own.

This is also the principle of progressive taxation.

As part of its health reform bill (HR 3200), the House has recommended a tax surcharge on the richest 1.3 percent of Americans - families with incomes over $350,000. The surcharge begins at 1 percent for families with incomes between $350,000 and $499,999; the surcharge applies only to the income over $350,000. It increases to 1.5 percent for families with incomes between $500,000 and $999,999. And it jumps to 5.4 percent for families with incomes over $1 million. This surcharge would raise $543 billion over the next ten years.

A married couple with an income of $351,000 would only pay an additional $10 in taxes (1% of the $1,000 over $350,000). A married couple with an income of $500,000 would pay an additional $1,500 in federal taxes. A married couple with an income of $1 million would only pay an extra $9,000. A married couple with a $2 million income would pay another $63,000 in taxes. This sounds like a lot to most Americans, but to the very rich, it is pocket change.

Glenn Beck, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and the Wall Street Journal would say it is unfair to take from the "haves" and give to the "have nots." But, in reality, this proposal takes from the "have a whole lots" and gives to the "have somes" as well as to the "have nots." The revenues raised from the rich would provide subsidies to help about 38 million Americans pay their premiums. Families with incomes below four times the poverty threshold are eligible. (The current poverty line is $22,050 for a family of four. Four times that figure is $88,200. Most people receiving subsidies, however, will be in the bottom half of that group).

Let's return for a second to that statement from the Bible: "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required." According to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the richest 1 percent of U.S. households reaped two-thirds of the nation's total income gains from 2002 to 2007. (This is the most recent data.) The top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928. The inflation-adjusted income of the richest 1 percent grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent. In other words, the economic growth of the Bush era did not trickle down - it trickled up.

To compound this widening divide, most of the $2.5 trillion in tax cuts (over 2001 to 2010) signed by President George W. Bush went to the richest Americans, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. The wealthiest one percent alone will have received almost $700 billion of that amount. That group - with incomes over $462,000, and with an average income of $1.6 million - gets an average tax cut of $92,000 a year, CTJ reported.

In other words, "much has been given" to those Americans at the pinnacle of wealth. So it is only fair that "much will be required" when it comes to helping pay for health insurance for Americans who can't otherwise afford it.

In every state - whether Blue, Red, or Purple -- the number of low-income and middle-class Americans who will benefit from health insurance reform vastly outnumbers those who would pay the tax surcharge, according to research by Health Care for America Now (HCAN). The HR 3200 tax plan requires Congressmembers to answer a simple question: which side are you on?

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) has to decide: Should he vote to increase taxes on the richest one percent of Montanans (only 3,670 households) in order to help 158,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) has to decide: Should she vote to increase taxes on the richest one percent of Louisianans (only 16,040 households) in order to help 711,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) has to decide: Should he vote to increase taxes on the richest .9 percent (less than 1 percent) of Indianans (only 20,710 households) in order to help 721,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) has to decide: Should she vote to increase taxes on the richest .8 percent (less than 1 percent) of Mainers (only 4,400 households) in order to help 125,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) has to decide: Should she vote to increase taxes on the richest 0.7 percent (less than 1 percent) of Arkansans (only 7,630 households) in order to help 509,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) has to decide: Should he vote to increase taxes on the richest 0.8 percent (less than one percent) of North Dakotans (only 2,000 households) in order to help 58,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) has to decide: Should he vote to increase taxes on the richest one percent of Nebraskans (only 6,340 households) in order to help 167,000 uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) has to decide: Should he vote to increase taxes on the richest 0.9 (less than one percent) of Ohioans (only 41,100 households) in order to help 1.2 million uninsured constituents who will gain insurance?

In the wealthier states, the proportion of households earning over $350,000 is slightly larger, but the trade-off - how many pay the additional tax versus how many benefit - is the same. For example, in New Jersey, 2.7% of all taxpayers (81,930 households) would pay an extra tax, while 699,000 people would get the benefits. In California, 2.2% of all taxpayers (249,920 households) would pay an extra tax, while 5.8 million people would get the benefits. In New York, 1.9% of all taxpayers (135,520 households) would pay an extra tax, while 1.7 million people would get the benefits. In Connecticut, the wealthiest 3% of all taxpayers (39,600 households) would pay an extra tax, while 681,000 people would get the benefits.

This approach is much more progressive and efficient than the plan approved this week by the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Senator Baucus, to tax so-called "Cadillac" insurance policies. The plan would impose a 40 percent excise tax on the value of insurance plans that exceed $21,000 for a family and $8,000 for an individual. Although these sound like expensive policies, a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund projected that the average family insurance premium would exceed $20,000 soon after 2015. Insurance companies would pass on this tax to middle-class Americans, including those without luxury plans, in the form of higher premiums. Thus, the Baucus plan would affect many more people than the House plan and be much less progressive. Employers would slash benefits and wages in order to pay the higher insurance premiums. Moreover, it would only generate $205 billion over ten years - much less than the House plan.

Many Democrats in Congress prefer the tax-the-rich plan to the Baucus plan. As the battle heats up, the debate over who will foot the bill will loom large. The public needs to weigh in on the question of "who will pay?"

As we hold our elected officials accountable for reforming our broken health care system - one in which insurance CEOs make outrageous salaries, and insurance companies make such huge profits that in the first six months of this year the industry increased its lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions to some $700,000 a day - let us remember another statement from the Bible (Mark 10:25): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

In other words, a progressive tax on the rich to pay for health insurance reform is good for America's soul.

Peter Dreier is Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. This is one of a series of his articles about the battle for health care reform. These can be found on his website.

Peter Dreier: Health Insurance Industry Exposes Its Insatiable Greed

2009-10-12T20:24:04Z

In the past few days, the health insurance industry's outrageous greed has been nakedly exposed.

After pretending for months to cooperate with the Obama administration and Democrats to secure a reasonable health reform bill, the industry's CEOs and lobbyists on Sunday double-crossed their one-time political allies by openly attacking a compromise bill crafted by Max Baucus, the conservative Montana Democratic who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. The Obama White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress were taken by surprise, and are angry at the industry's about-face on health reform.

"I'd spent a couple of hours with insurance industry folks last week, and yes I did feel blindsided," Nancy Ann DeParle, White House Office of Health Reform director, told NBC about the industry's stunt. "I did feel we were working constructively."

This could, ironically, help the reform cause, if the Democrats translate their anger at the big insurance companies into a tougher stance -- such as a stronger public option to compete with the private insurers and keep them honest with regard to profits, premium prices, and consumer neglect.

For months the Obama administration and Senate Democrats have been coddling the insurance industry giants, hoping to enlist their support for insurance reform. Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry trade association, has been orchestrating the industry's cooperative stance with the Democrats drafting health care legislation. The mainstream media have published glowing profiles of Ignagni, admiring her skill at coaxing the big insurance companies to try to co-opt, rather than confront, the Democrats. The media has contrasted the industry's collaborative approach with its more combative stance during the early1990s, when President Clinton sought to enact health care reform. Then, the industry was a highly visible opponent of reform from the get-go, including paying for the infamous "Harry and Louise" TV ads that helped kill the Clinton reform plan.

But since then the number of Americans without any health insurance, and the number who face bankruptcy due to sky-high insurance bills, has increased significantly. Recognizing Americans' pent-up anger, the insurance industry changed its tactics, but not its goals. What the insurance industry wants is for the federal government to require all Americans to buy private insurance and to provide subsidies to families who can't afford the premiums.

The industry has lined the pockets of the Senate Finance Committee members with huge campaign contributions in order to obtain their cooperation. Baucus, the committee chair, had essentially been a rubber stamp for the industry -- most prominently, by voting against Obama's proposal to include a public option in the committee's bill. Baucus and his industry bedfellows had been so close, in fact, that in August Business Week ran a cover story headlined, "Health Reform: Why Insurers are Winning."

Baucus' Finance Committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on the bill, which includes:

An individual mandate requiring all those without coverage to buy private insurance - in other words, tens of millions of new paying customers for the private insurance companies.

Subsidies for moderate income people to buy insurance.

No meaningful price controls on what insurers can charge in premiums, co-pays, deductibles, co-insurance and other fees.

No meaningful reforms on insurance denials of care recommended by doctors that the insurers don't want to pay for.

You'd think the insurance industry CEOs and lobbyists would be jumping for joy with this massive taxpayer subsidy for the already profit-soaked industry.

But you'd be wrong.

AHIP is upset that the industry companies aren't getting enough after the Senate Finance Committee adopted amendments reducing penalties for those who fail to buy private insurance. They want the government to impose onerous fines on people who can't afford the industry's sky-high premiums.

So on Sunday, AHIP threw a huge temper tantrum. In a surprise move, AHIP released a report it commissioned, warning that average family premiums will go up to $21,300 if the Senate Finance Committee bill is adopted.

Reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other papers acted more like stenographers than journalists, summarizing the AHIP report without challenging its lies and half-truths. For example, the AHIP report conveniently ignored the fact that the Finance Committee bill includes subsidies that would make insurance more affordable to anyone making up to 400% of the federal poverty level ($88,000 for a family of four).

AHIP's move exposes the industry's no-longer-secret agenda -- to kill any reform that doesn't increase its already outrageous profits. They obviously had kept the report, written by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, in their back pocket, ready to release if they needed to provide ammunition to Republicans to attack the Baucus plan and to frighten Democrats into increasing subsidies to low- and middle-income people so they can buy private insurance.

What happened to get AHIP to pull the trigger on its report?

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released its evaluation of the Senate Finance Committee proposal. The CBO estimated that it would cost $829 billion over the next 10 years -- less than the $900 billion President Obama had suggested -- and would reduce the deficit by $81 billion during that period. The industry isn't happy with even the weak provisions in the proposal that would "contain costs" -- which the insurance companies translate into "reduce profits." The reality is that the bill is a huge windfall for the insurance industry, but their greed knows no limits.

The CEOs of the major insurance corporations were particularly upset by Wall Street's reaction to the CBO's report. On Friday, stock prices of the largest health insurance companies fell. (Each company's stock was down except HealthSpring, whose business is nearly 100 percent with Medicare Advantage and Medicare drug plans, so it has little exposure to the impact of health reform).

Of course, this is just a one-day slide, but CEOs, as well as investors, can get panicky when they think the federal government might not give them everything they want.

Indeed, the CEOs own a lot of stock in their own companies, so for them, this is personal. For example, Cigna CEO Edward Hanway watched the value of his common stock fall from $128.2 million to $122.9 million -- a one-day loss of $5.3 million. United Health CEO Stephen Hemsley stood by helplessly as his common stock dropped by $2.1 million. Michael McCallister, Humana's CEO, found himself $1 million poorer on Friday than he'd been the day before -- at least on paper. And Angela Braly, CEO of WellPoint, lost $916,122 in common stock value.

These insurance CEOs and their counterparts don't need our sympathy. The reality is that the Baucus bill is a Christmas tree full of ornaments for the insurance industry. But Ignagni is now clearly under orders from the CEOs who pay her salary to squeeze every ounce of profit she can from Congress. That's why they pay her the big bucks. That's why they have increased their lobbying expenditures to $700,000 a day during the first six months of this year.

So on Friday they pushed the panic button, hoping to derail the Baucus legislation until the industry can get everything it wants rather than, say, 90 percent of what it wants.

They seem to forget that insurance premiums over the past decade have already gone up 138 percent, three-and-a-half times higher than family incomes. In addition, insurance deductibles, co-pays, and co-insurance have been skyrocketing, to thousands of dollars a year for families, especially those with the cheaper insurance plans. Despite rising premiums, the insurance companies continue to abuse their consumers, refusing to pay claims or delaying payments, both of which result in increased revenues for the insurance giants. Last year, even in the midst of a recession, United Health had $2.9 billion in profits. WellPoint had $2.5 billion, Aetna $1.4 billion, Humana $647 million, Cigna $292 million, HealthNet $95 million, Coventry $382 million, Molina $62 million, and HealthSpring $119 million.

Meanwhile, the number of uninsured Americans is up to 46 million. Millions more are under-insured -- they pay for plans that leave them vulnerable in the event of unexpected health emergencies. More employers are shifting costs to employees, or dropping coverage entirely. Medical bills are now the principle factor in 62 percent of personal bankruptcies. More than half of Americans, the majority of them people with insurance, are skipping needed care due to high out-of-pocket costs.

Many Democrats in Congress long ago lost their patience with the insurance companies. Many would like to create a Medicare-for-all system, similar to a Canadian-style single-payer approach. A larger number want a strong public option that would vigorously compete with the private insurance companies and provide consumers with more choices. Only a handful of Senate Democrats -- including Baucus, Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas), Evan Bayh (Indiana), Kent Conrad (North Dakota), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), and Mary Landrieu (Lousiana) -- have opposed the public option and served as the industry's servants in the health reform debate.

But this latest betrayal by AHIP may even get the Baucus Caucus so angry that they'll finally take a stand against the industry's insatiable hunger for profits.

In response to the release of the AHIP propaganda, for example, Scott Mulhauser, a spokesman for Baucus and the other Democrats on the Finance Committee, said: "This report is untrue, disingenuous and bought and paid for by the same health insurance companies that have been gouging consumers for too long. Now that health care reform grows ever closer, these health insurers are breaking out the same tired playbook of deception. It's a health insurance company hatchet job."

In the past month, the grassroots movement for health insurance reform has been growing -- and focusing more attention on the insurance industry's outrageous profits, abuse of consumers, and political influence-peddling. They've been warning Democrats not to get duped by the industry's pledges of cooperation.

"This is an outrageous threat by one of the richest industries in America," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the 86,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.

"This is a transparent attempt by the health insurance industry to sabotage reform," said Richard Kirsch, campaign manager for Health Care for America Now, the national coalition of consumer advocates, unions, religious organizations, and community groups that is waging a grassroots campaign for change. "Of course they're coming out with guns blazing at the 11th hour. They're out to protect their money and their power, and they'll go to any lengths -- including circulating fake information -- to stop real change."

AHIP's latest double-cross may be the wake-up call that the conservative and centrist Democrats need to develop some political backbone.

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program, at Occidental College. He has been writing a series of articles for HuffingtonPost about the health insurance battle.

Mike Elk: Key Senators, Krugman Call for Tariffs on High-Carbon-Footprint Imports

2009-09-23T18:25:13Z

Speaking Tuesday on a Campaign for America's Future conference call, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown said that the climate change legislation will not get 50 Senate votes if it does not place a tariff on imports that have unacceptably high carbon footprints.

For example, Chinese steel mills produce three times as much carbon emissions as American steel mills As a large body of research has pointed out, most of these savings come from weaker environmental standards and not labor costs, since labor accounts for less than 10 percent of the price savings.

U.S. steel companies spend around twice as much per ton of steel to control pollution than does the Chinese steel industry. Chinese industry is expending only about 3 percent of its capital expenditure budget on pollution control equipment, far less than the 17 percent the U.S. industry averaged for the last few years as it was improving its environmental controls. China and many other countries are able to make cheaper products because they cut corners on environmental costs.

The U.S. steel industry is the most sophisticated and efficient of steel producers, so advanced that when a group of bloggers toured a steel mill during Netroots Nation, we weren't allowed to take pictures out of fear that competitors could steal trade secrets from the photos. However, the American industry can't compete with nations like China and India who are allowed to cut costs dramatically by poisoning the air and the water at levels that are threatening to us all.

To enact strict emissions regulations domestically and not force other countries to do the same would be a tragedy for the American economy as industry would flee for these countries. For this reason, a group of 10 Democratic senators -- including Brown, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Al Franken of Minnesota -- sent a letter to President Obama that said they would not vote for any legislation that does not include tariffs on products with unacceptably high carbon footprints. As the Senators argued in their letter:

We must not engage in a self-defeating effort that displaces greenhouse gas emissions rather then reducing them and displaces U.S. jobs rather than bolstering them.

Indeed, if the U.S. adopts agreed-upon climate terms and other countries do not live up to their end of the bargain, we will see companies close factories in the U.S. and ship them to countries that allow unlimited harmful pollution.

As we have seen in the instance of the Chinese tire import issues, countries have again and again allowed big multinationals to violate their treaty obligations in the name of profits. By putting tariffs on products with unacceptably high carbon footprints, we can effectively combat global warming as many environmental organizations have advocated .

Even Paul Krugman, a typical defender of free trade, called for similar tariffs in a must-read piece entitled "the Empire of Carbon." Krugman dismisses those that cry that a tax on carbon dioxide is protectionism by saying:

As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn't do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.

Furthermore, globalization doesn't do much good if the global economy becomes unsustainable. Manufacturing is the backbone of any economy. If you don't make something, you are forced to borrow until you can't borrow anymore. With credit markets frozen, the American economy has reached that point we can no longer borrow and are unable to buy the world's products on credit.

We have seen that unemployment and poverty have risen around the world as a direct result of the global economic imbalance. Leaders of the labor union federations from the 20 countries have called on their leaders to make the economy more sustainable in their "Pittsburgh Declaration." According to their report, unemployment is slated to double over the next 18 months in the industrial countries, and continue to rise with rates over 10 percent well into 2011. Additionally, over 200 million workers worldwide will be pushed back into extreme poverty.

Creating a system of global trade that is sustainable and allows all countries including the United States to flourish is necessary for a global economic recovery. To do this, we must enact strong laws that don't allow one country to cheat the other by polluting their way to low prices.

Some argue that such measures, such as putting a tariff on products with a high carbon footprint are protectionists and harmful. However, as Steelworkers President Leo Gerard argues today in a must-read New York Times piece defending the decision of his union to call for enforcement of trade laws on tire and paper imports:

"Anybody who believes we have a rule-based system, but we shouldn't enforce the laws, they're the ones jeopardizing the global trading system."

Without a commitment to live up to -- and a precedent of enforcing -- agreements, any climate change treaty signed at Copenhagen or at future summits won't be worth the paper it is printed on.

In the wake of the China tire-import decision, we have heard a lot of rhetoric falsely labeling it as the beginning of a trade war. It is not. What is really happening is that workers around the world are engaged in an effort to protect themselves from the harmful effects of pollution and an unsustainable economy that hurts us all.

Peter Dreier: Citizens Confront WellPoint: Poster Child for Health Insurance Reform

2009-09-22T05:20:53Z

Citizens will pay a visit today to WellPoint's Indianapolis headquarters to protest the giant insurance company's abusive practices and its opposition to real health care reform.

The rally is one of a nationwide wave of protests today in about 150 cities -- including events outside the Cigna headquarters in Philadelphia and the United Health Group headquarters in Minneapolis -- to highlight the private health insurance industry's misdeeds and to call for reform that guarantees good, affordable health care and includes the choice of a strong national public health insurance option.

Activists also plan to rally in Milwaukee today, where WellPoint CEO Angela Braly will deliver the keynote speech at Marquette University's annual Business Leaders Forum luncheon at the Alumni Memorial Union on campus.

The Los Angeles rally will target WellPoint's California subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross, whose offices are located at 801 S. Figueroa St., starting at 11 am.

The national day of protest is sponsored by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a broad coalition of community and religious groups, unions, MoveOn.Org, and others. HCAN expects that today's events, and those in subsequent weeks, will re-energize a grassroots movement and push Congress -- including several conservative Senate Democrats now resisting a public option -- to enact significant reform.

WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance company in terms of membership, has become one of the poster children for why reform is needed.

With 35 million customers, one of every nine Americans is a member of a WellPoint health plan. Its annual sales of $60 billion netted corporate profits of $2.5 billion last year.

WellPoint is one of the insurance industry giants leading the charge against President Barack Obama's plan to create a "public option" -- essentially an expansion of Medicare for working families -- to create more competition and give consumers more choices.

Ironically, WellPoint is one of a handful of insurance companies that have a virtual iron grip on the insurance market in almost every state. The American Medical Association reports that 94 percent of insurance markets in more than 300 metropolitan areas are now highly concentrated. WellPoint runs Blue Cross-Blue Shield plans in 14 states. In Maine, for example, WellPoint controls 78% of the health insurance market. It dominates the market in Missouri, with 68% of the business, as well as in its home state of Indiana (60%), Georgia (61%), New Hampshire (51%), Kentucky (59%), Connecticut (55%), Virginia (50%), Ohio (41%, with the next largest company garnering only 17% of the market), and Colorado (with 29%, larger than runner-up United Health Group, with 24% of market share). In New York and California, WellPoint ranks second, with 21% and 20% of the health insurance market, respectively, in those two huge states.

These near-monopolistic conditions -- where one or two companies dominate the insurance market -- allow big corporations like WellPoint to drive up premiums, restrict coverage, and take advantage of consumers. Nationwide, health insurance premiums have been rising much faster than family incomes. No wonder WellPoint wants to quash potential competition from a public option.

To thwart such competition, and to limit government regulation of its practices, WellPoint has spent millions of dollars -- dollars it gets from the families and businesses paying sky-high premiums -- to wield political influence.

According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, WellPoint employees and associates have contributed more than $922,000 to federal political campaigns over the past two and a half years. And the corporation has spent $7.8 million lobbying Washington policymakers over the same time period.

Not surprisingly, these legal bribes aren't given out randomly. The top recipients are key members of the Senate and House with influence over health care policy, including Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a leading opponent of the "public option" in health care reform.

Moreover, WellPoint is a seasoned player in the Washington "revolving door" game. For example, WellPoint's former Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs, Elizabeth Fowler, now serves as Senior Counsel to Baucus. Fowler's predecessor in Baucus' office, Michelle Easton, currently lobbies for Wellpoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, & Young, a well-connected lobbying firm.

Leading the charge against health care reform is WellPoint CEO Angela Braly, the company's chief lawyer before moving up the corporate ladder to the top job in 2007. Last year WellPoint paid Braly $9.8 million. She lives in a 16,013 square foot mansion at 832 Alverna Drive in Indianapolis, valued at $1.98 million, according to the county assessor's office. She serves on the board of directors of America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's powerful lobby group.

According to Forbes, Braly's top priority is to "keep WellPoint a money machine." To help her, Braly has the backing of a powerful board of directors. The 16 other WellPoint directors have a web of corporate and political connections that supplements the company's campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

One is Susan Bayh, wife of Evan Bayh, the Democratic Senator from Indiana. She is a former attorney with the giant Indianapolis-based drug company Eli Lilly & Company. She is also a director of Curis (a drug company), Dendreon (a biotechnology company), Dyax (a biopharmaceutical company), and Emmis (a media corporation that owns radio stations and magazines). In the last two years, according to the Indianapolis Star, she has earned more than $2 million serving on the boards of these corporations. Her husband recently told an Indiana newspaper that he is an "agnostic" regarding the public option. That means he's sitting on the fence, trying to decide which side he's on -- the insurance industry or the majority of people of Indiana.

Another WellPoint director is William "Bucky" Bush, younger brother of former President George H.W. Bush, and the uncle of former President George W. Bush. He is chairman of the board of Bush-O'Donnell & Company, a St. Louis-based investment management firm, and former chair of the Missouri Republican Party.

Donald W. Riegle Jr. is another WellPoint director with political connections. He is a former Democratic Senator from Michigan (1976-1995). Since 2001 he has been chairman of government relations for APCO Worldwide, a DC-based lobbying firm that has been working secretly for years for AHIP, the insurers' trade group. He was also, until earlier this year, a director of Stillwater Mining Company, based in Montana, Baucus' home state.

Larry C. Glasscock, Braly's predecessor as WellPoint CEO, remains chairman of WellPoint's board and is also a director of Sprint Nextel (the giant telecommunications corporation) and Zimmer Holdings (an Indiana-based manufacturer of artificial hips and knees). William G. Mays is the CEO of Mays Chemical Company, based in Indianapolis. He also is on the board of Vectren, an energy company serving Indiana and Ohio. Ramiro Peru is chief financial officer of Saint Corp., a holding company of Swift Transportation Co., and previously CFO of Phelps Dodge, a mining company. Peru is also a director of Tucson Electric Power Co., and Unisource Energy Services, a utility based in Arizona. Warren Jobe, like Peru, is on the boards of both WellPoint and Unisource. Until his 2001 retirement, Jobe's day job was senior VP of Southern Company, a huge Atlanta-based utility. He is also on the board of the Atlanta-based HomeBanc Corp. and chairman of the board of trustees of Oglethorpe University.

William Ryan is CEO of Banknorth, a Massachusetts-based financial services company. He is a director of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, and Maine Machine Products. Victor S. Liss, retired CEO and now vice chairman) of Trans-Lux Corporation (an electronics company), also serves on the boards of BNC Financial Group, the Bank of Fairfield and Honey Hill Care Center (nursing care facility) and a trustee of Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut. Jackie M. Ward sits on the boards of the Bank of America, SYSCO (a Houston-based food service company), Flowers Foods, and Sanmina-SCI Corporation (a San Jose-based global electronics company). She served as CEO of Computer Generation Inc . George A. Schaefer Jr. retired last year as chairman of the board of Directors of Fifth Third Bancorp, based Cincinnati, Ohio. He sits on the board of Ashland, a chemical company based in Covington, Kentucky.

Sheila Burke, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and a veteran of the George W. Bush adminstration, also sits on the board of the Chubb Corporation, one of the nation's largest property and casualty insurance companies. John Zuccotti, is co-chairman of Brookfield Properties, a real estate firm based in Toronto, and senior counsel of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, a global corporate law firm based in New York City. He also sits on the board of Emigrant Savings Bank and the Dreyfus Investment Corporation. Julie Hill (a California real estate entrepreneur), Jane Pisano (president of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and a former executive at the University of Southern California), and Lenox Baker, Jr. (a heart surgeon and president of Mid-Atlantic Cardiothoracic Surgeons in Norfolk, Va.) also sit on the WellPoint board.

These individuals -- and their counterparts on the boards of the other major private health insurance companies -- are not evil people. Many serve on the boards of various charities and are civic leaders in their communities. But in their roles as board members of WellPoint, they serve the interests of the company and thus against the interests of the majority of Americans who want and need health insurance reform.

Forbes wrote that Braly "is trying to put a kind face on this controversial business." Braly gets paid big bucks to defend what is indefensible -- WellPoint's slimy practices that put profits over people.

In 2007, for example, WellPoint "settled lawsuits with 10 patients who claimed that their policies were canceled after an injury or diagnosis," according to Forbes. (WellPoint had argued that the patients had concealed preexisting conditions -- in other words, that they were sick!)

Parvin Mottaghi's doctors determined, after cardiology tests and laboratory results, that her breathing difficulties resulted from a heart problem, according to the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR), now called Consumer Watchdog. WellPoint's California subsidiary (now known as Anthem Blue Cross) authorized open heart surgery to repair a defective heart valve. Her doctors performed the surgery at Cedars Sinai on September 1, 2005, but on March 21, 2006, the insurance company rescinded her coverage, leaving Parvin with about $100,000 in medical bills.

Another victim, Michael Norris, was left with $15,000 in medical bills when the insurer retroactively canceled his son's coverage following a surgery.

"WellPoint is getting fat by breaking its promises to patients. Overturning insurance coverage after patients get sick is a devastating abuse that must stop," said Jerry Flanagan of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. "These illegal retroactive cancellations make a mockery of health insurance." The company ended up paying $10 million, reinstating policy holders' plans and covering their accrued medical expenses.

In 2007, California brought charges against WellPoint's California subsidiary, alleging that the company retroactively canceled health insurance policies of more than 6,000 policyholders. The class action suit ended in a settlement, including a $1 million fine

Forbes also noted that "doctors in several states have filed class actions claiming WellPoint plans withhold payments." In addition, Forbes observed, WellPoint was "the only health insurer in California actively opposing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to provide everyone with health insurance."

On September 2, Consumer Watchdog accused WellPoint and another insurance giant, UnitedHealth Group, of pressuring employees to lobby against healthcare reform in Congress in violation of a California law against coerced political activity, according to the Los Angeles Times. The group asked California Attorney General Jerry Brown to investigate its claim that the two corporations. pressured workers to write their elected officials, attend town hall meetings, and enlist family and friends to lobby for an industry-friendly bill.

On Tuesday, employees at WellPoint's headquarters at 120 Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis will be able to meet some of the victims of the insurance giant's greed. Several hundred people will rally at noon, including clergy, doctors and nurses, members of labor unions and community groups, and everyday citizens fed up with the health insurance industry's efforts to thwart much-needed reform. Like their counterparts at rallies around the country on the same day, people wronged by WellPoint will share their personal stories. In some cities, protesters will read the stories of those who are no longer alive due to insurance company abuses.

In Milwaukee, Marquette students, members of SEIU, AFSCME, and other unions, MICAH (a coalition of religious congregations), 9-to-5 (an organizing of working women), Wisconsin Citizen Action, and others will start picketing at 11:30 am outside the building where WellPoint CEO Braly will be speaking at a $400-per-table business luncheon. The goal is to "expose WellPoint's shameful business practices and abuse of patients," explained Brian Rothgery, Wisconsin coordinator for Health Care for America Now.

At all rallies around the country -- under the slogan "Big Insurance: Sick of It" -- protesters will demand that Braly and other health insurance company CEOs pledge to do the following:

• Not stand between a doctor and a patient when it comes to deciding what care that patient needs.
• Not deny coverage or raise rates for individuals or businesses based on a pre-existing medical condition and end arbitrary caps on payments for necessary medical care.
• Terminate any policy or incentive that rewards employees financially or otherwise for denying care and rejecting claims.
• Not use any resources -- including funds, employees, and facilities -- to lobby against or oppose any aspect of the health reform proposals supported by President Obama and being considered by members of the U.S. Congress, including but not limited to a national public health insurance option

"The health insurance companies are spending $641,000 a day to oppose reform because they profit by keeping the system exactly the way it is," said Richard Kirsch, HCAN's national campaign manager. "They take our money and then deny claims; raise premiums, co-pays, and deductibles at will; fabricate pre-existing conditions; and refuse to cover the treatments our doctors prescribe. Enough is enough. We're holding these events to tell big insurance we're sick of it. We need a guarantee of good coverage we can afford, and that includes giving us the choice of a strong national public health insurance option."

"The current health insurance system makes us sick -- as a country," said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, one of the cosponsors of the national day of protest. "If the health insurance industry wins in the health care reform debate, we will all lose. Health care reform with a strong public health insurance option will help lower skyrocketing health care costs and expand coverage to millions of Americans, but the health insurance industry opposes it because they are more concerned with protecting their sky-rocketing profits. It's time they got the message that we need real reform, now."

Peter Dreier teaches Politics and directs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College in Los Angeles

Reid Confident On Eve Of Health Bill's Debut

2009-09-15T16:51:12Z

A day before delivery of the Senate's long-awaited healthcare bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday struck a cautiously optimistic tone for its passage and began to offer the first details on how it will be debated.

Democratic Senators Summoned To White House

2009-09-10T15:09:37Z

ABC News has learned that President Obama will be meeting with 16 Democratic senators (and one "Independent Democrat") this afternoon at the White House.

Peter Dreier: "Go Out And Make Me Do It"

2009-09-10T02:10:53Z

President Barack Obama's address to Congress Wednesday night was not just a litany of policy prescriptions. It was a call to action.

His approach took a page out of President Franklin Roosevelt's playbook.

FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for bold legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, "You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it."

Even in the middle of the Depression, Roosevelt understood that the more effectively people created a sense of urgency and crisis, the easier it would be for him to push for progressive legislation -- what we now call the New Deal. FDR used his bully pulpit, including radio addresses, to educate Americans about the problems the nation faced, to explain why the country needed bold action to address the crisis, and to urge them to make their voices heard.

Having a president who inspires people to act collectively on their own behalf can make a difference. It gives people hope and courage to defy obstacles.

In his speech, Obama, the one-time community organizer, gave health care reform activists the signal to accelerate their grassroots organizing campaign to push for a bold plan that includes a public option and requires insurance companies to act more responsibly.

Over the summer, especially during the August Congressional recess, an unholy alliance of insurance industry muscle, conservative Democrats' obfuscation, and right-wing mob tactics stole Obama's thunder and put his health reform plan at risk. In his speech, Obama grabbed the initiative back. His fighting words changed the tone and shifted the momentum.

But he now understands that winning a victory on health care reform will require more than good ideas and inside-the-Beltway maneuvering with Congress. It will require a mass movement with a moral message, voter mobilization, marches, prayer vigils, stories of everyday people damaged by insurance industry practices, testimony by doctors and nurses frustrated by the insurance companies' priorities of profits over patients, and media savvy.

Part of Obama's speech was meant to reassure Americans that he did, in fact, have a real plan to fix the insurance mess. The President provided more specifics about his plan than he has in the past, explaining its key components, its benefits for people whose insurance policies cost too much or don't provide the services they need, people who don't have any insurance, and businesses for whom health insurance costs are a significant burden.

But what was especially impressive about Obama's speech was its moral vision, his insistence that in a country as great as the United States, health care should not be a privilege. This is a responsibility of a decent society.

He read from a letter he had just received from the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who asked that it be delivered after his death. Kennedy wrote: "What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

Moreover, Obama took aim at the right-wingers - the talk show fanatics, the tea-party mob who disrupted town meetings, and their allies in Congress - who have been spreading " bogus claims" and "whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost."

These are the extremists who have been spreading fear and confusion by warning that Obama's "socialized medicine" plan would create "death panels," subsidize illegal immigrants, pay for abortions, and force people to drop their current insurance.

Obama did not mince words. He called their claims "a lie plain and simple." This was the first time that the President used the word "lie" to describe the disgusting distortions that the extremist echo chamber -- Glenn Beck, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Sen. Jim Demint (R-S.C.), Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Betsy McCaughey, RNC Chair Michael Steele, and their ilk - have been spreading.

He challenged the right-wingers' obsessive efforts to demonize all government action as stepping stones to socialism. Obama both defended government and acknowledged its limits.

"You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem," he said. "They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited."

Equally important, Obama finally took off the gloves and came out swinging against the insurance industry as the major obstacle to significant reform.

"As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most," Obama declared. "They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of- pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies."

Obama explained that a public option is needed to challenge the insurance companies' near-monopoly. And he did so by invoking the conservative principle of competition.

"My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there's choice and competition," Obama said, "That's how the market works."

He continued: "Unfortunately, in 34 states, 75 percent of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. In Alabama, almost 90 percent is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down. And it makes it easier for insurance companies to treat their customers badly -- by cherry-picking the healthiest individuals and trying to drop the sickest; by overcharging small businesses who have no leverage; and by jacking up rates."

Speaking to senior citizens whom right-wingers have tried to frighten by claiming that Obama's proposal would weaken Medicare, Obama said, "don't pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut -- especially since some of the same folks who are spreading these tall tales have fought against Medicare in the past -- and just this year supported a budget that would essentially have turned Medicare into a privatized voucher program."

"The only thing this plan would eliminate," said the President, "is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies -- subsidies that do everything to pad their profits, but don't improve the care of seniors."

No doubt the top executives of the major health insurance companies -- such as HealthNet, WellPoint, CIGNA, Aetna, United Health Care Group, and Humana -- were listening closely to Obama's speech. They've spent tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying to thwart Obama's plan. The President avoided attacking them personally, but chose instead to indict the system which they oversee.

"Insurance executives don't do this because they're bad people," Obama observed. "They do it because it's profitable. As one former insurance executive testified before Congress, insurance companies are not only encouraged to find reasons to drop the seriously ill, they are rewarded for it. All of this is in service of meeting what this former executive called 'Wall Street's relentless profit expectations.'"

"Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business," Obama said. "They provide a legitimate service and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors. I just want to hold them accountable. And the insurance reforms that I've already mentioned would do just that, but an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange."

"The driving idea behind reform," Obama said, "has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage available for those without it."

For those progressives worried that Obama's address would turn into a concession speech, abandoning his core values to pass any watered-down bill, the President proclaimed: " I will not back down on the basic principle that, if Americans can't find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice."

With those words, Obama issued a challenge to the American people and, in particular, to the activist organizations -- the labor unions, community groups, faith-based groups, seniors groups like AARP, netroots groups like MoveOn, Organizing for America (the group created by his campaign volunteers), and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the key coalition spearheading the grassroots citizens campaign for health care reform. (People interested in having their voices heard should connect with HCAN).

Obama was letting them know that even the President of the United States can't reform the health insurance system on his own. To get Congress to adopt his plan - especially to get the conservative and centrist Democrats like Senators Max Baucus (Montana), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) - Obama needs an army of ground troops to join the battle. Only a grassroots movement can transform people's anger, frustrations and hopes into focused public action, creating a sense of urgency equal to the health insurance crisis facing the country.

"Now's the time to deliver on health care," Obama insisted.

Obama reminded the members of Congress that "a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I've proposed tonight." But Obama understands that powerful special interests - particularly the insurance industry - can offset public opinion unless the public is organized and mobilized.

Tonight, Obama was telling the American people that he shares their desire for bold health care reform, but he was asking for their help to change the political climate so Congress will respond to what most Americans - not the insurance lobbyists - want.

Echoing FDR, Obama was saying, "Go out and make me do it."

Peter Dreier teaches Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Ari Melber: Obama Organizing Advisers Rap Health Care Push

2009-08-31T15:40:24Z

Two former advisers to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, famed labor organizer Marshall Ganz and urban policy expert Peter Dreier, are now publicly criticizing Obama's health care reform strategy.

In a frank op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday, they contrasted Obama's campaign promises of organizing and confrontation with the sometimes middling approach to mobilizing health care reform:

Throughout the campaign, Obama cautioned that enacting his ambitious plans would take a fight. In a speech in Milwaukee, he said: "I know how hard it will be to bring about change. Exxon Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter. They don't want to give up their profits easily."

He explained what it would take to overcome the power of entrenched interests in order to pass historic legislation. Change comes about, candidate Obama said, by "imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, what did not seem possible before." ... But in the battle for health-care reform, the president and his allies are ignoring his own warning. The struggle for universal medical insurance... is in trouble.

For months the president insisted that any significant reform of the health-care system include a "public option" ... Republicans have made it clear that they won't support any plan that competes with the insurance industry ... In the past few weeks, Obama has hinted that he might settle for reform without a public option, thus assuaging the Baucus caucus and the insurance industry but angering many of his progressive supporters. At the same time, Obama's readiness to compromise hasn't mollified members of the small but vocal right-wing Republican network... If the unholy alliance of insurance industry muscle, conservative Democrats' obfuscation and right-wing mob tactics is able to defeat Obama's health-care proposal, it will write the conservative playbook for blocking other key components of the president's agenda -- including action on climate change, immigration reform and updates to the nation's labor laws.

The article goes on to apportion the blame widely -- not simply knocking Obama or OFA management, but also unions, liberal advocacy organizations and "netroots groups" -- and it credits conservatives for wielding stronger organizing tactics this summer. That's an especially significant argument coming from Ganz, a progressive organizing guru who has worked with everyone from Cesar Chavez to Howard Dean to Obama, including recording an endorsement for the Illinois Senator at the inception of the presidential campaign (video below). Here's the key criticism:

Once in office, the president moved quickly, announcing one ambitious legislative objective after another. But instead of launching a parallel strategy to mobilize supporters, most progressive organizations and Organizing for America -- the group created to organize Obama's former campaign volunteers -- failed to keep up. The president is not solely responsible for his current predicament; many progressives have not acknowledged their role.

Since January, most advocacy groups committed to Obama's reform objectives (labor unions, community organizations, environmentalists and netroots groups such as MoveOn) have pushed the pause button. Organizing for America, for example, encouraged Obama's supporters to work on local community service projects, such as helping homeless shelters and tutoring children. That's fine, but it's not the way to pass reform legislation...

Meanwhile, as the president's agenda emerged, his former campaign volunteers and the advocacy groups turned to politics as usual: the insider tactics of e-mails, phone calls and meetings with members of Congress. Some groups -- hoping to go toe-to-toe with the well-funded business-backed opposition -- launched expensive TV and radio ad campaigns in key states to pressure conservative Democrats. Lobbying and advertising are necessary, but they have never been sufficient to defeat powerful corporate interests.

In short, the administration and its allies followed a strategy that blurred their goals, avoided polarization, confused marketing with movement-building and hoped for bipartisan compromise that was never in the cards. This approach replaced an "outsider" mobilizing strategy that not only got Obama into the White House but has also played a key role in every successful reform movement, including abolition, women's suffrage, workers' rights, civil rights and environmental justice. Grass-roots mobilization raises the stakes, identifies the obstacles to reform and puts the opposition on the defensive. The right-wing fringe understood this simple organizing lesson and seized the momentum. Its leaders used tactics that energized their base, challenged specific elected officials and told a national story, enacted in locality after locality.

Of course, it's easier to mobilize against something than to develop an outsider-insider strategy supporting an incumbent legislative proposal and, in the case for many Obama-friendly progressives, simultaneously trying to strengthen the proposal along the way.

MoveOn, to take one example, has been trying a two-track approach. Politically, the group has largely backed the White House on health care. Meanwhile, organizationally, MoveOn staff have been working with their members on "Public Option NOW" events. If you believe that Obama adviser who said he was "shocked and surprised" to see a progressive fallout over the public option, however, then those efforts have not been very influential on the inside track.

Finally, it does seem like the August doldrums are renewing the progressive appetite for pushing Obama -- even the House Progressive Caucus is starting to channel its inner Evan Bayh and actually threaten to withhold votes. Just as Ganz and Dreier took their strong criticisms public, there is always the prospect that many other Obama supporters may get more vocal. Michael Huttner, who heads ProgressNow, a 2-million member netroots organization focused on state issues, has a new book out this week that aims to mobilize Obama supporters into taking more concrete action to help and push the administration during this governance period. If progressive Obama agitation moves beyond a few critics and into the broader engagement of supporters around the country, well, that's the kind of mass action that Ganz and Dreier have in mind.

--

From The Nation.

Peter Dreier: Turn Up the Heat on the Insurance Industry

2009-08-23T22:37:32Z

It is time for health care reformers to turn up the heat on the major obstacle to Congress passing a good policy -- the private insurance industry.

Few Americans know the names of the nation's largest health insurance companies or their CEOs. That has to change, quickly.

The political muscle of the insurance industry is the major reason that seven conservative Democratic Senators -- led by Max Baucus (Montana) and including Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas), Kent Conrad (North Dakota), Jeff Bingaman (New Mexico), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) -- are blocking President Obama's proposal for a public option to compete with the private insurance companies.

Here is a list of the country's largest health insurance companies, according to Fortune magazine. They are: United Health Care Group, WellPoint, Aetna, Humana, Cigna, HealthNet, Coventry Health Care, WellCare Health Plans, Universal America, Amerigroup, Centene, Molina Healthcare, Medical Mutual of Ohio, and HealthSpring.

Anyone can click on each corporation's website and find the names and affiliations of the companies' boards of directors, including their CEOs, as well as the addresses of their headquarters -- in case anyone is interested in organizing a protest rally. Anyone can go to the Center for Responsive Politics website and find out how much each company's PAC and employees spend on influence-peddling, and which members of Congress received the industry's largesse. Wait a few paragraphs and we'll start naming names.

As Obama recently said in his weekly radio and YouTube address: "Every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got. They use their influence. They use their political allies to scare and mislead the American people. They start running ads. This is what they always do." He said that the current health care system "works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people." We need, he insisted, to "pass health insurance reform that finally holds the insurance companies accountable."

The right-wing fanatics who are disrupting the town meetings are a diversion. These Limbaugh lunatics would never vote for Baucus or any other conservative Democrats, whether they support Obama's plan or not. But by creating a ruckus, lying about Obama's plan (calling it "socialism" and warning that it would create "death panels"), and getting more media attention than they deserve, these Republican extremists are doing the insurance industry's dirty work. In fact, there's evidence that the insurance industry is funding some of these right-wing groups to cause chaos.

In a recent cover story, Business Week declared that the industry industry has "already won" the health reform battle, but that assessment is premature. The majority of Americans want health care reform and don't trust the private insurance industry.

President Obama, and the major grassroots groups that are pushing for reform -- including faith-based organizations, unions, community groups, netroots groups like MoveOn, and Organizing for America, the organization formed by Obama's campaign volunteers -- can still win the fight if they focus public attention on the insurance industry and their lackeys in Congress. And George Lakoff, the well-known linguist and political advisor, has provided reformers with a new way to frame the debate to put the industry and the Baucus Caucus on the defensive.

So let's pay attention to the health insurance industry behind the curtain.

This year alone, the industry has spent over $34 million to hire 923 lobbyists to influence Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The industry has also spent almost $16 million in campaign contributions in the past two years.

The industry's trade association, called America's Health Insurance Plans, is one of the country's most powerful lobby groups, representing almost 1,300 corporations. Although health insurance companies compete with each other for customers, they work together -- through this lobby group -- when it comes to resisting government rules that require them to be more efficient and socially responsible. This year alone, America's Health Insurance Plans has already spent $3.9 million in lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Its Washington, D.C. headquarters is at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, South Building Suite 500. Its board is comprised of the CEOs of the largest health insurance corporations.

During her campaign for president, then-Senator Hillary Clinton accurately observed that insurance companies "spend tens of billions of dollars a year figuring out how not to cover people" and "how to cherry-pick the healthiest persons, and leave everyone else out in the cold."

What does the industry want? The big health insurance companies actually want the federal government to require every American to have health insurance. That would expand its customer base. The industry would also like the government to provide subsidies for people and families who can't afford insurance. To get that, the industry is willing to live with one of Obama's key selling points -- a ban on insurance industry discrimination against sick people, especially those with "pre-existing" conditions.

What do they object to? What the insurance companies don't want is another key component of Obama 's plan -- a "public option" that would compete with them for customers and provide Americans with more choices. A public option would provide insurance for those who don't get it from employers or can't afford private premiums -- similar to the current Medicare program for seniors. The high cost of U.S. health care is due in large measure to the outrageous greed and costly inefficiencies of the insurance industry that requires so much paperwork that its bloated administrative costs push up the cost of premiums, compared with the much lower administrative costs of Medicare. By competing with the private insurance companies, a public option would keep them honest.

Not surprisingly, the health insurance industry has been excercising its political muscle to thwart a public option. Not a single Senate Republican supports a public option. But Obama doesn't need any Republican votes if he can get all 60 Senate Democrats, and most Democrats in the House, to support his plan.

The insurance industry knows that, too. That's why, according to a recent report by the Center for Responsive Politics, and a recent article in the Washington Post, the industry has focused much of its campaign contributions -- America's version of legalized bribery -- on the conservative Democrats in Congress known as the Blue Dogs.

The industry has been particularly generous to Baucus, the Montana Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee that is drafting a version of the legislation. According to the Washington Post, Baucus "has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus's political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, when he began holding hearings and making preparations for this year's reform debate."

In 1993, when President Clinton proposed an overhaul of the health care system, the insurance industry was the visible opponent of reform, running the infamous "Harry and Louise" television ads that warned of a government takeover that would get between patients and their doctors. They used their political clout to derail any reform.

Today, the situation is much worse. Many more Americans (at least 47 million) have no health insurance, because many employers have stopped providing it for employees, because families can't afford the cost of premiums, or because insurance companies won't offer it to people with "pre-existing" health conditions. In addition, many more Americans who do have insurance discover that it doesn't cover many things they need and forces them to make costly out-of-pocket expenses. Not surprisingly, health care costs are the nation's number one cause of personal bankruptcies.

What would it mean to expose and target the health insurance industry?

Let's look, for example, at WellPoint, the nation's second-largest health insurance corporation. With a few clicks, you can discover that last year WellPoint had profits of $2.5 billion. WellPoint's headquarters is located at 120 Monument Circle in Indianapolis. Its corporate phone number is (317)488-6000.

This year WellPoint has spent over $2.4 million in lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. WellPoint's parent, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, has spent over $9.5 million to lobby Congress. In the last two years, WellPoint's political action committee made $1.8 million in campaign contributions to Republicans, Democrats, and other lobby groups, including $3,900 to Baucus. In addition, WellPoint employees -- mostly its top executives, including CEO Angela Braly -- contributed over $154,000 to Congressional candidates in the past two years.

The 17 members of the WellPoint board of directors have a web of corporate and political connections that supplements the company's campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

Angela Braly is WellPoint's CEO. She was paid $4.2 million last year. Braly also serves on the board of America's Health Insurance Plans, the powerful lobby group.

Larry C. Glasscock, the prior CEO, still serves as chairman of WellPoint's board and is also a director of Sprint Nextel (the giant telecommunications corporation) and Zimmer Holdings (an Indiana-based manufacturer of orthopaedic products).

Susan Bayh is a former attorney with the giant Indianapolis-based drug company Eli Lilly & Company. She is also a director of Curis (a drug company), Dendreon (a biotechnology company), Dyax (a biopharmaceutical company), and Emmis (a media corporation that owns radio stations and magazines). In the last two years, according to the Indianapolis Star, she has earned over $2 million serving on the boards of these health care corporations. She also happens to be the wife of Evan Bayh, the Democratic Senator from Indiana. Sen. Bayh recently told an Indiana newspaper that he is an "agnostic" regarding the public option. That means he's sitting on the fence, trying to decide which side he's on -- the insurance industry or the majority of people of Indiana.

Donald W. Riegle Jr is another WellPoint director with political connections. He is a former Democratic Senator from Michigan (1976-1995). Since 2001 he has been chairman of government relations for APCO Worldwide, a DC-based lobbying firm, and was also, until earlier this month, a director of Stillwater Mining Company, based in Montana, Baucus' home state.

William H. T. Bush, a WellPoint director since 2004, is chairman of the board of Bush-O'Donnell & Company, a St. Louis-based investment management firm. He is the younger brother of former President George H.W. Bush, and the uncle of former President George W. Bush

William G. Mays is the CEO of Mays Chemical Company, based in Indianapolis. He is also on the board of Vectren, an energy company that covers Indiana and Ohio.

Ramiro Peru is CFO of Saint Corporation, a holding company of Swift Transportation Co., and previously CFO of Phelps Dodge, a mining company. Peru is also a director of Tucson Electric Power Co., and Unisource Energy Services, a utility based in Arizona.

Warren Jobe, like Peru, is on the boards of both WellPoint and Unisource. Until his 2001 retirement, Jobe's day job was senior VP of Southern Company, a huge Atlanta-based utility. He is also on the board of the Atlanta-based HomeBanc Corp. and chairman of the board of trustees of Oglethorpe University.

William Ryan is CEO of Banknorth, a Massachusetts-based financial services company. He serves as the director of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, and Maine Machine Products.

Victor S. Liss, retired CEO and now vice chairman) of Trans-Lux Corporation (an electronics company), also serves on the boards of BNC Financial Group, the Bank of Fairfield and Honey Hill Care Center (nursing care facility) and a trustee of Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut.

Jackie M. Ward sits on the boards of the Bank of America, SYSCO (a Houston-based food company), Flowers Foods, and Sanmina-SCI Corporation (a San Jose-based global electronics company). She served as CEO of Computer Generation Inc .

George A. Schaefer Jr., , retired last year as chairman of the board of Directors of Fifth Third Bancorp, based Cincinnati, Ohio. He sits on the board of Ashland, a chemical company based in Covington, Kentucky.

Sheila Burke, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who served in the George W. Bush adminstration and also sits on the board of the Chubb Corporation, one of the nation's largest property and casualty insurance companies.

John Zuccotti, is co-chairman of Brookfield Properties, a real estate firm based in Toronto, and senior counsel of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, a global corporate law firm based in New York City. He also sits on the board of Emigrant Savings Bank and the Dreyfus Investment Corporation.

Julie Hill (a California real estate entrepreneur), Jane Pisano (president of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and former executive of the University of Southern California), and Lenox Baker, Jr. (a cardiac and thoracic surgeon and president of Mid-Atlantic Cardiothoracic Surgeons, Ltd. in Norfolk, Virginia) also sit on the WellPoint board.

These individuals -- and their counterparts on the boards of the other major private health insurance companies -- are not evil people. Many serve on the boards of various charities and are civic leaders in their communities. But in their roles as board members of WellPoint, they serve the interests of the nation's second largest private health insurance company and thus against the interests of the majority of Americans who want and need health insurance reform. A few hundred people serve on the boards of the nation's largest health insurance companies. As President Obama noted, they, the industry they serve, and the politicians who do their bidding, need to be held accountable.

Bob Cesca: Bipartisanship Porn

2009-08-19T17:11:40Z

There are many kinds of porn. In the modern vernacular there's "food porn," which describes gastronomic perfection so delicious, it's practically obscene. There's also "torture porn," made famous by Mel Gibson's movies, Rob Zombie's movies, 24, Fox News Channel and, of course, the Bush administration. And then there are the too numerous to list forms of regular old "porn" porn.

I'm not so thrilled to announce that there's a new kind of "porn" in town. What we've been witnessing during this health care reform process can easily be defined as "bipartisanship porn." It's a display of bipartisanship so obscene and excessive that it borders on perverse. But unlike most of the other forms of porn, it's not even fun to look at chiefly because it involves the shriveled mugs of Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus.

Today, following a killer 12 hours of fresh air in which it looked like bipartisanship porn was dying, Robert Gibbs let fly in the White House press room:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration remains committed to drawing Republican support for the bill, particularly in the Senate.

"I don't know why we would short-circuit that now," Gibbs told reporters.

He said the White House believes some Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee "are still working in a constructive way to get reform through the Senate and ultimately to the president's desk."

After everything that's gone down this month? Sheesh. Get a room.

Gibbs has dropped these comments on the same day when Rahm Emanuel finally admitted that the Republicans aren't at all interested in voting for health care reform.

It's the same day when the New York Times reported that the congressional Democrats are prepared to jettison the Republicans once and for all in order to pass a real health care reform bill.

It's within the same week when both Grasshole and Jon Kyl made it perfectly clear that the Republicans will not vote for any health care reform bill short of something that abolishes Medicaid, privatizes Social Security and replaces Secretary Sebelius with Carrie Prejean.

And it's following several weeks when the entire Wingnut-Industrial Complex injected numerous lies, distortions and actual firearms into the health care debate. This succeeded in scaring the white plastic belts and warm-up suits off scores of old people and convinced a supermajority of Fox News viewers that affordable, reliable and portable health insurance is somehow the Fourth Reich (because we all know how much neo-Nazis love mixed-race liberal politicians).

During the battle over the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we observed that the Republicans were only interested in sabotaging the president's agenda. Their goal was to play along with this notion of bipartisanship just enough to find gap through which they could drop their psycho-bombs into the legislation and dash away -- brazenly shouting "So long, suckers!" as they went. Like the well-known fable about the scorpion and the frog, it's their nature. This is what they do. Their only path out of exile is to sabotage anything and everything in the Democratic agenda. When the Democrats fail, the Republicans rise again. They've been perfectly honest and up front about this, too, as evidenced by the famous "fail" remarks from their impotent de facto leader Mr. Limbaugh.

So why are they being allowed to do it again, this time with something as critical as health care reform?

The answer can be illustrated by outlining the three biggest bipartisanship porn fetishists, if you will. The White House, centrist Democrats and the establishment press.

The last group first. The establishment press, the Villagers, believe that the only path to seriousness is bipartisanship. It's a leading ingredient in the conventional wisdom cocktails served at various inside-Washington media mixers. It goes without saying that this is a standard reserved for Democrats only. When the Republicans controlled Washington not so long ago, the establishment press was all about fetishizing Republican virility -- how masculine their packages looked in a flight suit and how easily the Democrats could be clubbed over the head with its sheer bulbous-ness. Now that the Democrats are in power, however, bipartisanship is mandatory for being considered "very serious." It's why very few members of the Progressive Caucus have managed to sneak onto a Sunday show. Not bipartisan enough and therefore not very serious.

The centrist Democrats, meanwhile, are obsessed with bipartisanship porn because it helps them to look more like Republicans. This has a dual benefit in that it attracts the establishment press, it appeases their more conservative states/districts and it calms the nerves of their financiers in the various lobbies and PACs -- in this case, the health care industry. I would lump Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, the Nelsons and Joe Lieberman into this category.

And finally, there's the White House.

While they appear to be leading the charge in terms of keeping bipartisanship porn alive today, I'm not sure how genuine they really are. It's difficult to believe that they're this blind to what the Republicans are up to. Rahm Emanuel appears to understand the scorpion-ish behavior as evidenced by his comments today. And the president is too smart not to see it. So what's their motivation?

There's no way they'd deliberately allow this legislation to fail altogether. And a crappy, watered-down reform bill would haunt their legacy for decades to come. I mean, if we're not looking at significant relief in how we deal with health insurance by 2012, there's no amount of campaign platitudes that will ameliorate the continued pain and anger. After all, there are experts who are good at math and they'll be able to track whether the reform bill allowed health care prices to continue to skyrocket, further subsidizing the health insurance mafia, or whether the reform bill actually did something, you know, positive.

The only justification I can see for what Gibbs said today and, to a certain extent, what the president and Secretary Sebelius said over the weekend is that with or without the public option, the White House doesn't have 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster.

Unless Senators Kennedy and Byrd are well enough to turn up for two floor votes several months from right now -- one to break the filibuster of the reconciled Senate bill and another to break the filibuster of the conference report -- the White House will need two Republicans to flip and vote against their own party's filibuster. Twice. And this scenario depends on zero Democrats voting with the Republicans (they'd be insane to do that). Ultimately, the only way to get those two Republican votes for cloture is if the White House at least attempts to seem "bipartisan." This possibly explains the continued posturing amid all of the obvious crazy. (Reconciliation is a way around, but, by some accounts, reconciliation would blow giant holes in the bill, perhaps taking the public option with it.)

At this still early stage I'd like to think that the White House's express preference for bipartisanship porn is purely tactical and not reflective of what can only be described as political ignorance and stupidity. If it's the latter, the White House will have ultimately succeeded in its utter self-destruction -- limping across the threshold with a health care reform bill that's been brazenly cut to pieces by marbled-mouthed Glenn Beck disciples like Chuck Grassley.

I sincerely hope this is the last time I write about porn and Chuck Grassley in the same essay.

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!

Democratic Senators Send Obama Climate Bill Warning Letter

2009-08-07T15:32:49Z

A group of 10 moderate Democrats sent a letter to President Obama on Thursday saying that they will not support any domestic climate change bill that did not protect American industries from competition from countries that did not impose similar restraints on climate-altering gases. The senators who signed are all from states whose economies are dependent on polluting industries.

Mike Elk: Banks Still Cheating People Out of Their Homes

2009-08-05T13:22:46Z

Many of the nation's banks are failing to do their part to solve the nation's housing crisis, and are therefore obstacles to economic recovery. On Monday, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., called them out on it.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Durbin noted that the housing crisis wiped out over $14 trillion in household value as result of dangerous Wall Street gambling and speculation, the greatest loss of financial wealth in American history. A family loses its home to foreclosure every 13 seconds. The Center for Responsible Lending estimates by 2012 that at least 9 million families will be forced from their homes as a result of foreclosure. Indeed, more than 9 million families could be forced from their homes as a result of dramatically rising unemployment.

In the face of this, the Home Affordable Modification Program -- which depends on the voluntary participation of banks -- has done little to help families facing the heart-wrenching experience of losing their homes. The program was intended to help 4 million of the families expected to face foreclosure this year to stay in their homes. However, so far the program has only served 200,000 families, and only 9 percent of loans have been modified to keep families in their homes. Several banks such as PNC Bank and American Home Mortgage have yet to modify a single loan due to the voluntary restrictions.

If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it's that you can't trust Wall Street to put corporate greed before helping regular people. In fact, a recent Washington Post article highlighted that banks actually make more of a profit by foreclosing on a home than attempting to work out a way to keep a family in a home even with the financial incentives of the Home Affordable Mortgage Program. Indeed, several mortgage lenders, according to Durbin, have used the opportunity to modify people's loans to give them even more predatory loans because they can make more money off of it when the loans fails.

Durbin called for forcing any bank that received money as part of the bailout to be required to implement loan modification plans. He called for funding for mandatory arbitration programs, which provide families with financial counselors so that they can fairly renegotiate the terms of their contract. Furthermore, he said families that could not find a way to pay for their mortgages should be allowed to stay in their homes and be allowed to pay rent for an extended period of time.

The most important thing that is needed is to give families the ability to renegotiate mortgages that are worth more than the value of their homes. "There is growing consensus that principal reductions are the key to sustainable modifications that won't redefault, since a homeowner who has equity will fight harder to make the mortgage work," Durbin said.

If the banks failed to take proactive measures to help families to stay in their home, Durbin said he would fight once again to pass "cramdown" legislation that would empower judges to force down mortgage rates for families struggling to make payments on mortgages worth more than the values of their homes. Last April, the banking industry spent $42 million to defeat this bill, leading Durbin to proclaim that the banks "frankly own the place." Twelve Democratic Senators paid off by Wall Street voted against this sensible measure.

Durbin was optimistic about the vote, however, noting that he had received more votes on the cramdown legislation this year than had when he had introduced the measure previously. Durbin recounted how one senator told him he was forced to change his vote after seeing the misery that families were suffering from losing their homes.

It is now up to us as a movement to demonstrate to our elected officials the measure and deep pain that families demonstrate when they lose their home. In order to force the banks to act we must take to the streets to as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said "to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. To so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." When a family loses a home, they lose more than just losing a piece of property or the money invested in it. They lose a backyard where children can play in the afternoons and the family can have barbecues on a hot summer night. They lose a living room painted in their favorite color and adorned with cherished memories. They lose a sense of not just being in a community, but being part owners of it. They lose, in a real way, the foundation of their lives.

We can't allow Wall Street to go on cheating people out of the most important possession of their lives -- their home.

Bob Cesca: Republicans Lying to Old People About Euthanasia, Robots

2009-07-29T17:39:11Z

There appears to be a simple two-pronged strategy for killing health care reform.

One of those prongs involves, of course, delaying reform until it's too late. If it's not passed by the end of the year, there won't be the political balls to do so because of the fast approaching 2010 midterms when members of Congress will be much more focused on raising money (health care industry money) and pandering to voters.

Another reason for delaying health care reform is it gives the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats plenty of extra time to inject their special cocktail of mind-bending crazy into the discourse and make it stick, furthering both the current delay while also eroding any voter impetus to pick up the issue again after the midterms. That'd be prong number two.

Not a single dose of the aforementioned "mind-bending crazy" actually holds up when run through even the most cursory fact-checking scrutiny, and, in every statement, the obstructionists trafficking in these lies further underscore their already obvious contradictions and ideological hypocrisy.

Regarding the latter, I can't recall, for example, this degree of nipple-twisting from Republicans and Blue Dogs about spending and fiscal responsibility when the Bush administration was pitching a blank check invasion and occupation of Iraq on the heels of invading Afghanistan -- all during a recession -- while also passing a $1 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest one percent the year before.

Yet affordable, accessible health care for everyone is a bridge too far, right? (My blood pressure kicks up into the red zone whenever I hear Republicans today suggesting that they were against the Bush administration's spending habits when, in fact, they supported each program individually. After all, opposing the commander-in-chief in wartime emboldened the enemy, no? Not any more apparently since we're still at war and the heretofore "patriotic" far-right won't even admit the president is an American citizen. Consistent of them.)

Back to the mind-bending crazy. I detailed some of these attacks last week, and my friend Michael J. Elston (Washington, DC radio's "Buzz Burbank") hit some of the arguments in his new Huffington Post blog as well. But who knew they would top themselves this week with an attack so simultaneously absurd and shameless that it easily fits comfortably in the Birther/Truther wackaloon syllabus.

This is of course the notion that the president's health care reform plan includes a mandate to kill old people.

First, here's Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Cuckoo's Nest) on the House floor:

It'll make sure we bring down the cost of healthcare for all Americans, and that ensures affordable access for all Americans, and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

And the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh:

According to Politico:

Sean Hannity believes it. So does House Minority Leader John Boehner. Talk show host Fred Thompson calls it "the dirty little secret" of the health care reform debate.

Yes, if you believe what these cranks are selling, the Obama administration is engaged in an elaborate plot to rid the nation of its burdensome population of old people. All this fluff about a public option, all the debate about reducing costs and making health insurance more affordable is merely subterfuge in the White House's scheme to impose a final solution to the nation's obvious elderly problem.

Seriously, this is a legitimate argument being used in mainstream Republican circles right now. This is an idea being circulated by the same party that Max Baucus, Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh and Mary Landrieu want to negotiate with and capitulate to, all in the name of their fetishistic obsession with bipartisanship porn.

How many more examples of GOP insanity must we enumerate before the aforementioned Democrats stop taking seriously the nincompoopery on the right? Is there no level of ridiculousness too intolerable before enough is enough? At what point does Harry Reid finally overcome his low-T, call bullshit on these jokers and figuratively pummel their soft skulls using a sledgehammer with the number 60 burnished into the handle? Soon, I hope.

The reality:

House bill that would provide Medicare coverage for an end-of-life consultation once every five years. If a person falls ill with a life-threatening disease, more frequent sessions would be allowed.

Put another way, the bill would actually provide an additional and very optional benefit for senior citizens to consult with their doctors about end-of-life decisions -- decisions we'll all have to make. It's a consultation which is usually an out of pocket expense for the elderly, but now it'll be covered under Medicare. Again, it's an optional benefit for Medicare recipients to meet with their doctor. I repeat: optional benefit. Optional, as in "choice." Benefit, as in something "good" or "helpful." O-p-t-i-o-n-a-l. B-e-n-e-f-i-t.

Furthermore:

"This measure would not only help people make the best decisions for themselves but also better ensure that their wishes are followed," AARP Executive Vice President John Rother said in a statement. "To suggest otherwise is a gross, and even cruel, distortion -- especially for any family that has been forced to make the difficult decisions on care for loved ones approaching the end of their lives."

Why do the old-people-haters at the AARP want to kill old people?

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, House minority leader John Boehner and most other congressional Republicans are taking this wingnut conspiratorial position outlined by Rush Limbaugh. Because naturally they're a very serious political party -- so much so that the Blue Dog Democrats want to work with them rather than laughing them off the floor. Oh the relationships $1.3 million-a-day in healthcare industry lobbying can buy.

You know what this is? The Republicans are trying to trick senior citizens into buying Old Glory Robot Insurance.

The GOP is lying to senior citizens by convincing them that the Obama administration is going to strangle them with their robotic Obama claws -- and when President Obama grabs you with his metal claws, you can't break free. Because he's made of metal. And President Obama is strong.

I can't emphasize enough that this is an actual argument from the mainstream of the Republican Party.

And they're getting away with it because, despite their utter lack of seriousness, they continue to be granted untold latitude and legitimacy through this inexplicable Democratic bipartisanship deference (not to mention a wide berth from the establishment press), while peddling an obvious lie. And then, next week, there will be another one. And another one. Until healthcare reform is dead in the water.

UPDATE: ThinkProgress assembled a compilation video documenting this deception:

Another serious question here is: Are the Republicans knowingly lying to senior citizens, or are they just morons who believe anything they hear on the Rush Limbaugh show? (Answer: Both.)

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!

Shawn Healy: Lots of Smoke, Little Fire

2009-07-15T15:57:15Z

They're at it again. In the midst of a devastating economic recession, and on the heels of a budget-busting stimulus package and annual spending plan, our elected officials in Washington have decided to put national health care and cap and trade legislation on hold to deal with more pressing matters, specifically their biannual attempt to diminish the 45 words of the First Amendment via a flag desecration amendment.

Twenty-four senators have joined Senator David Vitter (R-LA) as co-sponsors of Senate Joint Resolution 15. Two of them are Democrats, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Evan Bayh of Indiana, nixing the characterization as a partisan ploy. If passed by a two-thirds vote of both the House and the Senate, and then ratified by three-quarters of all states, the 28th Amendment would read: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, demolished the case of those who argue that judicial activists have "twisted the original meaning of the First Amendment to protect such symbolic acts as flag burning." Citing English common law, Blackstone's "Commentaries," James Madison's original draft of the First Amendment, and early 20th Century case law, Volokh makes a compelling argument that symbolic expression was equated with speech from the outset.

This assumption taken as a given, we turn next to whether flag desecration constitutes symbolic expression protected by the First Amendment. The 1968 Supreme Court case U.S. v. O'Brien set forth a test by which we may judge whether flag desecration prohibitions abridge freedom of speech. It centered on a Vietnam era law that prohibited the destruction of draft cards. Congress defended its merits on grounds that they conveyed critical information between the government and its citizens during wartime mobilization.

The Court sustained the law, and held other instances of "speech plus," which contain speech and non-speech elements, to the following parameters. One, the government regulation must be within its constitutional power. Two, it must further an important or substantive government interest. Three, the regulation is not related to the suppression of expression. Four, the incidental impact on expression is no greater than necessary to further that interest.

The O'Brien test was considered by the Supreme Court in the context of flag desecration in the 1989 case Texas v. Johnson. At issue was a Texas law that forbade defacement or damage to the American flag with knowledge that it will "seriously offend one or more persons likely to observe or discover his action." The 5-4 majority found insufficient the state's interest in preserving the flag as a symbol of nationhood and national unity.

Specifically, it failed the third prong of the O'Brien test prohibiting the suppression of expression. Those who wished to burn flags during "respectful ceremonies" were free to do so at will, yet the same action as a form of protest was criminalized. Congress answered immediately with federal legislation to replace the fallen state statutes, but one year later the Court struck down this law too under the Johnson precedent in U.S. v. Eichman.

The Eichman decision was the final nail in the coffin for those who would prohibit flag desecration by statutory means, thus the regularly scheduled pony show of patriotism otherwise known as the flag desecration amendment. Critics were alarmed during their second-to-last attempt three years ago when 66 senators voted in favor of the amendment, but its likelihood of passage was always slim. Then-Minority Leader Harry Reid was able to pare off enough Democratic votes to protect those in his party in the midst if a tough re-election battle in a swing state cognizant of the fact that he would peel them away one-by-one should the required two-thirds majority materialize.

Given the now solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, this shell game installment will also come up empty, and it thus begs to question why our elected officials continue to waste their time and ours while they go about the "people's business."

Mike Lux: An Easy Choice on Health Care

2009-07-10T11:25:29Z

The internal debate on health care strategy for Democrats can be boiled down to this: do we choose the approach whose specifics are more popular with the public and will almost certainly work better in practice once it gets passed, or do we want to go with something that has some bipartisan support and may avoid an all out war with the insurance industry?

The first approach is currently being championed by President Obama (although not always by his Chief of Staff), Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and 4 of the 5 committee chairs responsible for bringing the legislation to the floor. The second approach is strongly favored by Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, Tennessee Rep. (and co-killer of health care reform in the Clinton years) Jim Cooper, and a few conservative Democrats in the Senate.

Seems like a damn easy choice to me.

The first thing to understand in all this is the consequences for the Democrats for the next generation and probably longer if they pass some convoluted, complicated, unworkable compromise that doesn't change the abusive patterns in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and doesn't begin to control health care costs. If they pass a compromise that doesn't meet regular people's needs, folks will figure it out very quickly, as most people deal with the health care system all the time. If the Democrats twist up this bill to make insurance companies and their Republican allies happy, it is end of story for this generation of Democrats -- our party will not recover from screwing up health care.

The second thing to understand is that wealthy, powerful elements of the health care industry, along with the entire right-wing message machine, will oppose any health care reform bill. Democrats trying to avoid a fight should just get over it: they will get one no matter what.

Here's the other thing: having a clear, clean fight -- Obama and the Democrats take on the insurance companies -- is an easier message to win with than the mushy "we're all in this together, we're all partners in solving this problem" thing Obama has been doing so far. Having enemies helps define this fight in Obama's favor, especially when the enemies are as unpopular as the insurance companies.

So face your fear, Max Baucus. Tell you health industry allies no, Jim Cooper. Work through your fear of commitment, Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu. Let's put together a bill that actually works and move forward sometime soon, in our lifetimes preferably. It's time to get this done.

Matthew Filipowicz: BizarrObama's Backwards Health Care Strategy

2009-07-07T16:39:43Z

Despite having the support of 72% of the American public, a robust public health care option is looking less and less likely by the day.

Sadly, the main figures who will likely end up blocking the plan are actually not Republicans, but a small handful of Blue Dog conservative Democrats in the Senate.

Given that fact, you'd think that President Obama would be ratcheting up the political pressure on those few obstructionists. Trying to get them to support his plan. But instead, he appears to be setting his sights on a different target. His supporters.

The Washington Post reported that Obama "complained that liberal advocacy groups ought to drop their attacks on Democratic lawmakers and devote their energy to promoting passage."

He then went on to say:

"We shouldn't be focusing resources on each other... We ought to be focused on winning this debate."

Except the problem is, the people that need convincing, are the same people Obama is protecting. We don't have to convince the Republicans in the House or Senate. We don't have to convince the public. The public already wants it. We have to convince these few Conservadem clowns who are in the pocket of the insurance industry.

So, why would Obama use his resources to attack those who are fighting for him? There is, in fact, a perfectly rational explanation. That man is not Barack Obama and this is not our world. Clearly, he is BizarrObama, and we have obviously entered the Bizarro World. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the following press conference.

That has to be it, right? Why else would you attack those who are fighting for you, while giving a free pass to those who are fighting against you?

The only other explanation is that Obama, as a politician, is not willing to take the lead on what was supposed to be one of the signature goals of his administration.

Adam Green wrote

Advisers like Rahm Emanuel operate out of fear -- like it's 1994 -- instead of operating like people who just won a huge mandate in 2008. They obviously haven't mastered the bully pulpit yet, which is a shame since Obama is a master communicator. If Obama insisted on the public option and held rallies in Montana, Nebraska, and Louisiana, it would happen.

The sad fact is, if Obama is not willing to fight for this, he's probably not going to fight for anything. Which is all the more reason for liberals, progressives, and advocates not to cease our attacks, but make them louder. You want us to stop? Mr. President, we want you to start.

Maria, Maria! Washington's Maria Cantwell Voted 'Sexiest Senator' (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2009-06-26T08:46:38Z

Last week we asked you to select the sexiest senator on Capitol Hill.
Nearly 40,000 of you voted, and although many of you wrote in former Illinois Senator Barack Obama and some of you bemoaned your options, we do have a conclusive winner: Senator Maria Cantwell (not to be confused, of course, with the Maria of recent Governor Sanford infamy) of Washington.

Kirsten Gillibrand of NY was second, followed by Evan Bayh of Indiana, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, John Thune of South Dakota and Mark Warner of Virginia.

Here's a closer look at Maria:

Here she is talking about energy independence at 2008's Democratic National Convention:

From Maria's wikipedia entry:

Cantwell was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was raised in a predominantly Irish neighborhood on the south side of Indianapolis. Her father, Paul F. Cantwell, served as county commissioner, city councilman, state legislator, and Chief of Staff for U.S. Representative Andrew Jacobs, Jr.. Her mother, Rose M., was an administrative assistant.

She attended Emmerich Manual High School and was inducted into the Indianapolis Public Schools Hall of Fame in 2006. After high school, Cantwell went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Administration. She moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1983 to campaign for Alan Cranston in his unsuccessful bid for the 1984 Democratic Presidential nomination. She then moved to the Seattle suburb of Mountlake Terrace because it reminded her of Indianapolis, and led a successful campaign to build a new library there.

In 1986, Cantwell was elected to the Washington State House of Representatives at the age of 28. In her campaign, she embarked on an extensive door-knocking movement in her district. As a state representative, she helped write Washington's Growth Management Act of 1990, which required cities to develop comprehensive growth plans, and she negotiated its passage. She also worked on legislation regulating nursing homes.

In 1992, Cantwell became the first Democrat elected to the United States House of Representatives from Washington's first congressional district in 40 years. During her first term, she helped convince the Clinton Administration to drop its support of the Clipper chip, she voted in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and she supported President Clinton's 1993 budget. Republican Rick White used that vote to narrowly defeat her in the Republican landslide year of 1994.

After her defeat, Cantwell vowed to leave politics. Political ally Rob Glaser offered her a job as vice president of marketing for RealNetworks. Among her accomplishments was the live (Internet streaming) broadcast of a Mariners-Yankees baseball game in 1995. (Cantwell is an avid Mariners fan.)

In 1998, the company faced heavy criticism because privacy groups alleged that the RealJukebox software program incorporated spyware to track unsuspecting users' listening patterns and download history. In response, RealNetworks amended its privacy policy to fully disclose its privacy practices regarding user listening patterns. Subsequently, RealNetworks submitted to independent outside audits of its privacy practices. Several lawsuits regarding the alleged privacy violations were settled out of court. This has in part informed her views on privacy and thus her opposition to the Bush Administration's post-9/11 policies.

Cantwell became a multimillionaire with the stock options from RealNetworks. In August 2000, during her Senate campaign, Cantwell sold 110,000 shares of RealNetworks stock at about $44/share.

And don't forget -- she's single!

Check out who else looks good in D.C.: Reggie Love, our White House Hottest winner and Rep. Aaron Schock, our Hottest Freshman In Congress.

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Glenn Sacks: New Obama/Bayh/Davis 'Fatherhood' Bill Helps Bureaucrats, Not Dads

2009-06-23T14:45:13Z

With support from President Obama, Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL) introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2009 for Father's Day, a bill cosponsored by then-Senator Barack Obama in the last Congress. Obviously Bayh and Davis have to contend with DC political realities, which work against fathers and make rational legislation to help them politically difficult. Still, this Responsible Fatherhood bill will help bureaucrats and others far more than it helps dads, and in some ways it will hurt fathers.

According to Bayh's press release, the legislation will:

1) "Ensure that child support payments to families do not count as income and result in loss of food stamps."

That's nice for low-income mothers, who can probably use the help, but it doesn't directly help the noncustodial fathers who are paying this child support.

2) "Restore cuts in federal child support enforcement funding to help state and local governments collect $13 billion in additional payments for single parents"

This hurts low-income men who, unable to make the unrealistic payments demanded of them, are already harassed and jailed by the multi-billion dollar child support apparatus. Obama/Bayh/Davis want to increase funding for child support enforcement, even though the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement’s own data show that two-thirds of “deadbeat dads” earn poverty-level wages, and only 4 percent earn even $40,000 a year. This situation has been made far worse by the recession.

This measure won't help mothers either, because there's little money to collect from most so-called "deadbeats" anyway. What this measure does is help keep and expand employment for child support enforcement bureaucrats. To learn more, see a newspaper column I wrote about child support enforcement funding here.

President Barack Obama's new economic stimulus package already provided $1 billion for fattening up child support enforcement's bloated budget. The standard argument in favor of this is superficially convincing -- "More than $4 was collected in support for every dollar invested in the program."

It is true that federal figures show that over $20 billion in child support is collected nationwide yearly, and that only $5 billion is spent on enforcement. However, the vast majority of the funds collected are not done through enforcement tactics -- they're simply the payments already being made by law-abiding noncustodial parents. These payments will continue to be made regardless of the cuts.

The $4 for $1 myth was created by incorrectly counterposing total collections with expenditures on enforcement. To give child support enforcement credit for all child support collections is like the collections department at Target being credited every time a customer buys something and pays at the register. The mainstream media has largely declined to discuss this Enron-style accounting.

3) "Require states to send 100 percent of all child support payments to the single parent within five years, rather than letting states take a portion of money for administrative costs."

Currently many noncustodial fathers—particularly African-American and Latino fathers, upon whom Obama often focuses—are required to pay their child support to the state to reimburse the cost of public assistance, instead of to the children’s mothers. This new measure helps low-income mothers, and that's a good thing. It's also a modest positive for fathers -- paying "child support" that doesn't go to your children is demoralizing for low-income men struggling to make a difference in their kids’ lives.

4) "Fund programs designed to protect the families who have been affected by domestic violence."

Protecting battered women is important, but domestic violence laws and programs have also made it easy for unscrupulous mothers to drive fathers out of their children's lives by making false accusations of domestic violence. As many prominent family law professionals have noted, this is a major problem, particularly as it applies to domestic violence restraining orders, which are issued almost automatically. To learn more, see my column Restraining Orders Can Be Straitjackets On Justice (Newark Star-Ledger, 7/28/08).

The bill does have a few provisions which actually pertain to fathers:

1) "Fund job training programs and community partnerships to help parents find employment."

Although often these programs' real purpose is to bring fathers into the system so they can pay child support, it can still be a good thing for fathers, if it's run properly.

2) "Fund financial literacy programs and budgeting education, employment services, and mediation and conflict resolution for low-income parents."

This helps mothers at least as much as fathers but is a good idea, if the programs are effective.

3) "Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to increase the incentive for full-time work and fulfillment of child support obligations."

Fathers pay child support out of after-tax dollars, whereas mothers receive child support tax free. If this program helps ameliorate that, it's a good thing.

While some fathers voluntarily remove themselves from their children’s lives, many seek a greater role. Most child custody arrangements provide fathers only a few days a month to spend with their children, and fighting for shared parenting is expensive and difficult. Custodial mothers frequently fail to honor visitation orders, and there is no system in place to help enforce visitation orders. The Obama/Bayh/Davis "Fatherhood" bill does little to address the real problems separating fathers from the children who love them and need them.

Glenn Sacks is the Executive Director of Fathers & Families, the nation's largest family court reform organization. Fathers and Families, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, improves the lives of children and strengthens society by protecting the child's right to the love and care of both parents after separation or divorce.

Sexiest Senators: Who's The Hottest On The Hill? (SLIDESHOW, POLL)

2009-06-18T08:57:55Z

The 100 members of the U.S. Senate are constantly in the public eye, so we couldn't help but notice that from the legislative floor to D.C. nightlife, there are certain lawmakers who always look good. We've picked the six sexiest senators on the Hill. Cast your vote for your favorite below. And, as always, let us know who we should add to our roll call.

Looking for more? Check out the Hottest Congressional Freshmen and the White House's Hottest staffer.

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