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Archive for December 8th, 2009

The Billionaires Behind The Hate

Posted by James O'Rourke on December 8, 2009

thinkprogress.org

RADICAL RIGHT

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama’s progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group “No Stimulus” launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply “pork” spending. The Cato Institute — founded by Charles — as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first “tea party” protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing “tea party” opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

STOPPING CLEAN ENERGY: David Koch presents himself as a champion of science. Next year, because of his donations, a wing of the Smithsonian will be named after him. Nevertheless, Koch has done more to undermine the public’s understanding of climate change science than any other person in America. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Koch finances the “Hot Air” tour, a nationwide roadshow using a balloon to depict climate change science as “hot air.” Despite the brothers’ extravagant wealth, Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has run populist ads mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats more concerned about their “three homes and five cars” than about economic conditions. In addition to its efforts to misinform the public, Koch Industries has spent nearly $9 million dollars so far on direct lobbying, much of it on climate change legislation. With a team of Koch-funded operatives going as far as attempting to crash the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week, the brothers may succeed in scuttling any prospect for addressing climate change.

STOPPING HEALTH REFORM: Much of the fierce opposition to health reform can be credited to Koch organizations. As the health care debate began, AFP created a front group, known as “Patients United,” dedicated itself to attacking Democratic health care reform proposals. Patients United has blanketed the country with ads distorting various provisions of the health reform legislation, particularly the public option. Patients United even centered a media campaign around Shona Robertson-Holmes, claiming she had a brain tumor the Canadian system refused to treat. However, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Patients United has been exaggerating Holmes’ case, and that she in fact had a benign cyst. In their quest to block health care reform, Koch-funded groups have fostered extremism. A speaker with the roving Patients United bus tour repeatedly compared health reform to the Holocaust while an eight-by-five foot banner at an AFP health care rally with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) read, “National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany” superimposed over corpses from a concentration camp. Although many were surprised at the level of anger AFP channeled into Democratic healthcare town halls in August, it wasn’t the first time Koch groups have helped to hijack the health reform debate. Back in 1994, Americans for Prosperity, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked closely with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to bring mobs of angry men to health reform rallies with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

A LONG HISTORY OF STOPPING PROGRESS: The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and George-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. So there are clear business-related reasons why Koch would want to block regulatory enforcement, clean energy, labor, and other reforms. But part of their opposition stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David and the company’s namesake, helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists. By presenting progressive reform as a capitulation to the Soviet Union, Fred Koch and the other industrialists bankrolling the Birch Society were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting their narrow agenda of cutting corporate taxes and avoiding consumer regulations.

Posted in *Healthcare Issues, Citizenship & Civic Responsibilities, Issues, Politics As Usual | Leave a Comment »

The medical bill you need to see

Posted by James O'Rourke on December 8, 2009

The Washington Post
By Ezra Klein
Tuesday, December 8, 2009

We’ve had a pretty good discussion this year on the public option and on “death panels.” But for all the hype over health-care reform, we have not done a very good job of talking about the health-care system itself — in particular, why our system is so expensive. As a result, we’re not doing a very good job of fixing it. There’s still time to change that, but not much.
The doomsaying is by now familiar: Left unchecked, health-care reform will bankrupt our nation. It will grow to consume every dollar of gross domestic product. And Congress isn’t contemplating anything nearly radical enough to avert the emergency.
The reason is not that people haven’t heard grim warnings about the future. It’s because they don’t understand what’s going on in the present. In 2009, the average employer-sponsored health-care plan cost a bit less than $13,500. But virtually no one cut a check for $13,500. Employers generally pay more than 70 percent of their employees’ health-care costs. To employees, that seems like a good deal, particularly given how fast costs are growing. A “benefit,” as it’s called.
But health-care coverage is not a benefit. It’s a wage deduction. When premium costs go up, wages go down. When premium costs go down, wages go up. Yet workers don’t know that. In fact, the information is hidden from them. That means that cost control seems like all pain and no gain, which makes it virtually impossible for Congress to pass. It’s like asking someone to diet when they don’t realize it will help them lose weight.
Cost control is not, in fact, all pain and no gain. It’s some pain in return for a fat raise. A 2006 study, for instance, by Harvard’s Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra used malpractice payments to estimate the effect of premium increases on wages. They found that a 10 percent increase in health-care premiums “results in an offsetting decrease in wages of 2.3 percent” and an increase in unemployment of 1.2 percentage points. Compensation is basically a set sum for employers, and they don’t seem to care much whether it goes into wages or into health-care costs.
Workers saw this in the 1990s. This was the era of the managed-care revolution, which most remember as a horrifying failure. Famously, audiences applauded when Helen Hunt broke out into a profanity-laden rant against HMOs in the movie “As Good as It Gets.” The popular backlash was so intense that by the turn of the century the managed-care experiment was virtually over. The problem with this historic failure? The data showed the experiment to be a tremendous success.
From 1989 to 1995, median wages actually fell a bit. Then, managed care kicked in. Annual growth in health-care costs fell from more than 10 percent in the early 1990s to less than 5 percent in the late ‘90s. Meanwhile, wages shot through the roof, rising more than 11 percent from 1995 to 2000. Then we ended the managed-care experiment, and health-care costs resumed their normal speed of growth. Predictably, wages slumped back down from 2000 to 2006. “By every observable indicator,” says Harvard’s David Cutler, “managed care was a huge success. It cut spending, cut the growth of spending and didn’t seem to kill anyone. And yet everyone hated it.”
Of course they hated it. They didn’t see its benefits, only its costs. They knew they were suddenly trapped in networks and being hassled by their insurers. As for their raises, those were nice, but why are you changing the subject?
When Americans rejected managed care, in other words, they didn’t know they were ending wage increases, too. But since 1990, wages have tracked changes in premiums more closely than they’ve tracked the growth of GDP. Maybe if more workers knew that, they would be more interested in efforts to control health-care costs.
One of the best reforms that could be made this year would be to give workers that information. So far, however, efforts have been unsuccessful. During the Senate Finance Committee’s negotiations, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) offered to give employees the option to reject their employer’s offerings in return for a voucher that would help them choose their own insurance on exchanges, which meant they would save money if they chose cheaper plans. Much more modestly, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) floated an idea to simply require employers to report their health-care spending on workers’ W-2 forms. Both were stymied by an odd-bedfellows alliance of employers and unions.
It’s not too late, though. Perhaps the easiest way to dramatize the issue for workers would be to attach health-care costs to each paycheck. If employers listed the cost of health care alongside the bite taken by payroll taxes, it would be much clearer to workers that health-care coverage was coming out of their wages, not out of their employer’s largess. That, at least, could help them see the costs of the system more clearly, which is, unfortunately, something that all the congressional debate isn’t helping anyone do.
Ezra Klein reports on domestic and economic policy for The Post. He blogs at http://washingtonpost.com/ezraklein.

Posted in *Healthcare Issues | Leave a Comment »

Trapped in the Senate

Posted by James O'Rourke on December 8, 2009

Matthew Yglesias

The House of Representatives has already given us a good climate bill and a good universal health care bill. They seem poised to vote out a financial regulatory package quite soon. In the senate, none of those things have happened. They’re closest on health care, but instead of voting on a bill on Monday morning they’ll be doing . . . additional procedural antics more suitable to an elementary school student council goofing off than a crucial public institution of what’s still the world’s leading power.

Steven Hill has a nice op-ed in the FT on how ridiculous the whole thing is:

For a start, this “representative” body hardly looks or thinks like the rest of the nation. Only 17 senators are women, while the US as a whole has more women than men. Only five senators are Hispanic, black, or Asian-American, whereas one-third of Americans now belong to ethnic minorities.

A senator’s average age is an elderly 63 and most are wealthy millionaires. A famous 19th-century aphorism said: “It is harder for a poor man to enter the United States Senate than for a rich man to enter heaven,” and things are hardly different today. The senescent senators already have great healthcare benefits themselves, even while tens of millions of Americans do not. This powerful legislative body debating healthcare for the entire country is a patrician gerontocracy more closely resembling the ancient Roman Senate than a New England town meeting.

He also observes that not only is it ridiculous that 41 senators can block action, but the GOP 40 only represents about a third of the population!

At any rate, it’s hard not to sympathize with the Democrats as they struggle with Judd Gregg’s obstruction manual. But on an important level, you really shouldn’t. They’re all a part of the same absurd farce and until they come to recognize that’s what the senate is—not the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” but a bizarre anachronism—nothing will be done about it. When wild-eyed right-wingers wanted to deploy the “nuclear option” in 2005 the stage was set to at least attempt a broad structural reform and a return to majority rules. But instead the Democrats were so eager to preserve the right to filibuster that they agreed to surrender on the actual substantive point at issue—Bush’s crappy judicial nominees. And with the partial exception of Bernie Sanders, I never hear any of them talking about reform. Whining about obstruction, maybe. And, fine, whine away. But the question is what path will be taken to do something about it.

Posted in *Congress, 111th Congress | Leave a Comment »

The Truth About Withdrawal

Posted by James O'Rourke on December 8, 2009

thinkprogress.org

AFGHANISTAN

During his address on Afghanistan policy last week at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, President Obama laid out his vision for the American mission there, establishing the necessity of the war while also conveying a clear expectation that Afghans will soon take responsibility for their own security. We will “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011,” he told the nation in his prime-time address. Administration officials clarified President Obama’s new Afghanistan policy on the political talk shows yesterday, re-emphasizing that July 2011 will be the beginning, not the end, of a gradual troop withdrawal. National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones explained on CNN’s State of the Union that the withdrawal date was not a “cliff,” but rather a “glide slope.” On NBC’s Meet the Press, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop dead deadline.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates stressed on CBS’s Face the Nation that while July 2011 will be “firm” start date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the pace of withdrawal will be conditions-based.

SENSE OF URGENCY: In a series of in-depth profiles of the behind-the-scenes conversations that took place in the lead-up to Obama’s Afghanistan pronouncement, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that after eight years of war in Afghanistan, the President wanted a strategy to get in and get out. “The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly,” the Times wrote. “He had asked for a plan to deploy and pull out troops quickly,” added the Post. Looking at a bell curve that laid out the timetable for the deployment and withdrawal of U.S. troops, Obama reportedly told his advisers: “I want this pushed to the left,” meaning that he wanted troops “in sooner, then out sooner.” Indeed, the vision Obama laid out in his speech last week emphasized a rapid deployment of new troops to Afghanistan – total American forces will reach nearly 100,000 troops by the end of May — in order to create conditions for a withdrawal as soon as possible. On Meet the Press yesterday, Clinton explained, “We want the Afghans to feel the same sense of urgency. We want them to actually make good on what President Karzai said in his inaugural speech, which is that by five years from now they’ll have total control for their defense.”

FEAR-MONGERING ABOUT WITHDRAWAL: While Republicans were generally pleased with Obama’s troop escalation, many on the right have criticized the administration’s emphasis on leaving Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban and al Qaeda will simply wait until U.S. forces leave, then restart their war with a weak Afghan government. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, has led the charge. Speaking on Meet the Press yesterday, McCain “hypothesized” that setting an end-date “could scare allies into providing fewer troops or dollars for the surge” and embolden terrorist groups. “I think they’re on the defensive,” McCain said. “And if we left, and allowed them to restore these safe havens without any threat,” America’s security and Afghanistan’s stability could be compromised, he added. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) echoed the charge, saying, “Setting a draw-down date before this surge has even begun is a mistake.” Rep. John Mica (R-FL) even suggested we need to be in the country for “centuries.” But Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) — who first proposed a timetable for withdrawal back in August — stressed, “Showing the people there and here that we have a sense about when it is time to leave is one of the best things we can do.” As Gates explained on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday, “The reality is the Taliban…know what popular opinion is in the United States. Whether you announce a date or not, they can tell…and they always believe that they can outlast us.”

LESSONS FROM IRAQ: Many of those criticizing Obama’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan were the same who fiercely opposed any timetable for exit from Iraq, using many of the same arguments they are using now. Despite the fear-mongering about setting benchmarks for leaving Iraq, the country has largely stabilized, even as American troops begin to withdraw. Obama has upheld his campaign promise to pull troops from Iraq, and a recently passed Iraqi election law means 120,000 U.S. troops can withdraw from Iraq early next year, leaving behind a small contingent of trainers. Alluding to President Bush’s surge in Iraq, former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove commented on Twitter this weekend, “Guess the message is they think [they] are smarter than Bush and ended up making the same decision as Bush.” But as New York Times’ David Sanger reported, Obama approached the “new strategy with his ears ringing with warnings” from lessons learned about the Bush surge and knowledge that “many of the conditions that made the Iraq surge work do not exist in Afghanistan.” As the Center for American Progress’ Sean Duggan noted in May 2008, “The Bush administration’s open-ended commitment has allowed the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to approve only token political benchmarks,” leading to an “open-ended military commitment to a dysfunctional and sectarian Iraqi government.” CAP’s Brian Katulis and Peter Juul and Center for a New American Security senior fellow Marc Lynch wrote in September 2008, “Without a U.S. military drawdown, Iraq will not be able to achieve the true internal consolidation of power necessary to advance U.S. security interests in the Middle East.” Mowaffaq Al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser during the surge, said last week that the drawdown of U.S. forces may have contributed more to stabilizing Iraq than the surge, noting that American casualties have fallen since the withdrawal from urban areas. As Clinton said yesterday on Meet the Press, “What we’re talking about is an assessment that in 2011, we can begin a transition…to hand off responsibility to the Afghan forces. That is what eventually happened in Iraq. You know, we’re going to be out of Iraq.”

Posted in Afghanistan, Politics As Usual | Leave a Comment »