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Wednesday
Aug032011

GOP and terrorists: our way or the highway

The main objection to negotiating with terrorists is that it encourages them to repeat their tactics, the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) explains in a policy brief dated March 2009. Dividing terrorists into two groups, contingent and absolute, each is distinguished by their end goal. While the contingent terrorist will negotiate with authorities to achieve the desired aim, an absolute one believes only in defending an ideal at any cost--no negotiations.

Recently Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa) have bandied about unfavorable comparisons between terrorists and the tactics of the Tea-wagged Republican majority in Congress. This after weeks of frustrating deal posturing between the house speaker and the president about the approaching federal debt ceiling deadline. Avoiding a catastrophic default be damned, the Tea Party wing asserted. Never mind that members of Congress like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) voted for Paul Ryan's debt inflating budget, yet no draconian budget cut would appease them enough to support raising the debt ceiling.

Last Dec. Sen. Bob Menendez expressed a similarsentiment about working with Capitol Hill Republicans on Bush-era tax cuts. To maintain tax cuts for the top 2% earners they were willing to tie down extending jobless benefits and the new START treaty with Russia to the tracks. No extended tax cuts, no deal.

In the stonewalling GOP you find a fanatic zeal shared with violent extremists of whatever political persuasion. With the determination of an absolutist and the contingentist's aptitude for favorable deal making, Republicans will most likely continue their assault on the consensus building aspects of the democratic process. When will voters summon the will and produce a mandate to end this nation's captivity?

Saturday
Jul302011

Beyond 'lesser of two evils'

Article first published as Beyond "Lesser of Two Evils" on Blogcritics.

No one needs a long lecture about how thoroughly the U.S. Congress has squandered “the consent of the governed.” It’s no secret that the current campaign finance system enables and reinforces Congress’s preferential treatment of wealthy donors and their corporate masters. The exclusive access and legislative consideration they enjoy are the expected ‘return’ on their investment. So, when push comes to shove about a crucial decision, voters can forget about their phone calls, letters or protests—they don’t stand chance against the tsunami of large donor dollars that fills an incumbant’s (or challenger’s) campaign fund every election season.

Even after a clear majority of voters have voiced their support for a balanced approach to resolving the debt-ceiling impasse, their showing wields no influence on legislators bent on forcing a national default. Indeed, Tea Party pol’s rush in... .

Given such dim prospects for fair, accountable representation, voters return to the polls every election with the task of choosing between ‘the lesser of two evils’—and regrettably they believe this is a cemented status quo, since this is how it has always been. To imagine and believe otherwise is where we should begin: to see and know that with enough effort and cooperation among voters we can elect representatives worthy of our trust; legislators whose decisions remain transparent and accountable to vigilant electors.

Toward that end it is worth mentioning one or two initiatives in politics just peering over the horizon. They present a couple of the best, though underdeveloped, prospects for  voter-responsive governance.

Calling the current U.S. tax code an “insanely complicated system of special favors to the richest and most powerful in our society”, former Louisiana governor Charles “Buddy” Roemer has recently re-entered the political arena to declare his candidacy for the 2012 presidential race.  Front and center to his platform is campaign finance reform.  To underscore his commitment to the issue he has sworn off PAC money as well as any individual contribution greater than $100.

While everyone should applaud his initiative, one of his arguments about election financing could benefit from some fine tuning.  Reform should not limit how much any donor can give, he asserts. Rather, every voter should contribute to the candidacy he or she favors.  Since Congress remains dependent on large dollar donors, “our first objective must be to remove this dependency by expanding the number of givers… .”  Doing so will “balance the system,” he suggests.

Keep in mind that almost sixty percent of the funds raised by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign came from donors who gave less than $1000. In spite of aggregating the majority share of Obama’s funding, one can trust that very few of those givers enjoyed the access and consideration granted to the likes of a Robert Wolf or Blair Effron. In spite of that small donor majority share in Campaign Obama’s 2008 victory, the president still went with the Wall Street- friendly appointees and economic advisors.

Another emerging reform phenomenon to take notice of is an organization called Americans Elect. So far it has signed up 1.7 million voters with the intent of qualifying in all 50 states to run a small-’i’ independent candidate for president in 2012. With plans for “THE FIRST EVER!” open  primary scheduled for June 2012, Americans Elect aims to give rank-and-file voters of any- or no- party affiliation, the chance to participate as delegates.

From a first glance, AE appears as a well-coordinated attempt to connect voters directly to the nominating process. However, its web site gives no information about the group’s leadership and funding. These omissions resemble the kind of secrecy that never bodes well for accountability to voters. (Paired with The Los Angeles Times profile of the group [dated 28 July] was an article with a link to its board of directors roster just recently distributed).

Looking at AE’s ‘About’ page, what neglected and downtrodden voter could dismiss seductive appeals like “A greater voice for all Americans, no matter their party. Every registered voter can be a delegate. Any constitutionally-eligible citizen can be a candidate”? Or a gem like “The power to choose your candidate in the 2012 election. Real issues. Real candidates. Real votes.”

Yet trouble abounds for this wired and well-oiled machine. Among a number of complicities that gum up its purported independence, most obvious are the organization’s disavowal of influence by any special- or corporate interests (thanks goes to Jim Cook’s Irregular Times, which has charted AE’s story from what appears its beginning). However, a significant fraction of its 50-member board of directors seats investment industry insiders; and--perhaps even more damning--includes the presence of Morton Meyerson, chairman of Alsbridge, who the company credits as an “innovator of a concept called outsourcing.” That alone should earn plenty of praise from the ‘vocationally-challenged’ community.

All complicities aside, the crucial element to campaign funding reform that Gov. Roemer and Americans Elect overlook is how influence is cultivated and wielded. It is only very recently that a critical mass of voters have begun to recognize the impact of PACs, large dollar donors and the lobbyist apparatus. It has had the effect of thwarting their physical, political and economic destinies.

It is doubtful that Roemer or AE would make a point to remind many voters of their own responsibilities as citizens in our democratic republic: to stay informed; to continually engage elected officials as well as one another.  Least of all would either candidate or organization impress upon Americans to vote only for candidates who refuse any donation greater than $200 per individual per year. That determination has to be self-realized.

The immense financial resources required of a campaign for public office no one underestimates. In place of the oceans of cash necessary to achieve “viability”--a motivated and organized class of voters could make known their solidarity for at least one goal: to eliminate money’s obligating influence upon an incumbent or challenger.

What if a plurality of voters within any congressional district committed to this citizen-imposed limit?  And while they’re at it, draft candidates willing to abide by this limit.  It’s the only campaign pledge of any merit with the most far reaching impact. Establishment candidates would seriously have to consider whether to embrace the campaign finance limit--or face losing the election. No matter which competitor won the election, all voters would be the winners for having the resolve to reassert their “consent”.

Thursday
May262011

Health care's incentives: running the right way?

 

Article first published as Debate over Health Care: Rationing of Intelligence Again on Blogcritics.

Health  care as a public policy issue again resurfaces as Republicans and Democrats spar over what measures to take to ease the federal budget deficit away from financial abyss. As elected Republicans and their party operatives tell it, the fix for our national debt is entitlement reform. Congressman Paul Ryan’s proposed 2012 federal budget, called “Path to Prosperity” (for whom? one may ask), includes an extreme  makeover of Medicare, scaffolded by such slogans as “freedom to choose,” “options,” and “market competition;” what any half-awake observer would call non-sequiturs when considering the factors that actually drive up the cost of medicine.

What is at stake in this debate is a prevailing assumption about the business side of meeting the basic need for physical wellness; one that few have dared to question. Addressing this assumption openly and honestly would force a confrontation with our values as individuals and as a nation.  Very much unlike the approach to health care favored by Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe; writing in a draft-Paul-Ryan-for-president mode, they urged readers of The Wall Street Journal  last week that, because of entitlements, America’s fiscal future hangs in the balance, and that “without substantial Medicare savings the budget cannot be balanced. Period.” Well, that settles it. 

Rather, it’s classic scaremongering misdirection from a couple of fellas who must have nodded off to sleep over the last ten years; while a Republican-dominated Senate, House and White House pushed through a series of unpaid-for tax cuts and borrowing for two wars, vaporizing what was once a federal budget surplus at the beginning of 2001. The non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently confirmed what actual numbers comprise the bulk of the staggering federal deficit. As of 2009, two thirds of the $1.4 trillion well of red ink came from the Bush tax cuts, war borrowing, TARP and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Not a whisper of reconsideration otherwise will you hear from Republicans bent on dismantling entitlements. And, oddly enough, not a word about the health care crisis afflicting the middle- and working classes; that is until Democrats in Congress finally plastered together enough votes last year to pass the ultra-mediocre Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act . Like a smothered echo of Obamacare, Paul Ryan’s budget scheme pantomimes concern about health care access and affordability, yet leaves the well-oiled health insurance industry untouched and intact.

Rep. Ryan’s remedy for the ills of our health care system is more of the same snake oil the Bush administration attempted to sell this country in 2005, then packaged as privatizing Social Security. The unqualified faith and devotion free marketeers like Ryan express for any accountability-free industry, such zealotry explains simpleton solutions featured in his Path to Prosperity plan:  “Give patients more control over the money this nation spends on health care, and so let competition in the marketplace control costs, improve quality, and expand access.” Indeed, more money in a patient’s hands means one less degree removed from the grip of the policy underwriter’s.

As the recently sustained spike in gas prices demonstrates, the marketplace has little interest in controlling costs. The only control happening is of a captive consumer class dependent on necessities like automobile fuel and health care insurance forced to shell out more of their stagnant salaries. Price structures that exploit such dependency should be labeled for what they are: gouging.

Speaking of gouging, how does raising health insurance premiums from year to year at least 100 percent sound? Personally I know of a private equity firm in Beverly Hills, a small-business client of Anthem Blue Cross, that endured this type of free market favor. The individual clients of the health insurer haven’t fared much better in recent years, seeing their rates rise almost 40 percent each year.

While the health care industry provides treatment and services that meet critical needs common to all citizens, where quality of life and life or death are at stake, it’s not too late to question how said treatment and services are delivered, and for how much.

As this debate illustrates a difficult turning point for this country, I am reminded of another turning point that took place over 40 years ago; a debate not unlike today's. Democrats and Republicans debated which path our nation’s health care system would take: a nationalized program providing care for all citizens or a system that would primarily benefit the medical industry and patient care underwriters. One pivotal moment was a conversation in the Nixon White House between the president and one of his policy advisers, John Ehrlichman. Mentioning a visit he had received  from Edgar Kaiser, CEO of the Kaiser Permanente HMO, Ehrlichman offered a key factor to the president’s “National Health Strategy,” announced on February 18, 1971, the  following day.  Describing Kaiser’s business model, the president’s adviser stated that the CEO was “running his Permanente deal for profit….  All the incentives are toward less medical care because the less care they give them, the more money they make.”

What irony President Nixon summoned the next day by criticizing traditional medical care delivery systems for having “no economic incentive for them to concentrate on keeping people healthy.”  An HMO would offer the alternative of “[a] fixed-price contract for comprehensive care [which] reverses this illogical incentive.” Yet, just the day before, Ehrlichman had sold the president on the idea of Kaiser’s incentives running “the right way,” meaning more revenue for less care.

And here is what has escaped the focus of our national consensus about the cost of medical care: the assumption that its value should be tethered to the impulse of profit making, as well as subservient to the demands of ultra wealthy shareholders and institutional investors. If nationalizing health care is not the means by which we manage to restrain the runaway costs of medicine, there must be other methods, through the tax code or industry regulation, to blunt their fierce momentum.

 

 

 

 
Tuesday
Apr052011

The sorcerer's willing apprentices

News from Japan's throttled nuclear reactor in Fukushima: the plant has had to unload 11,500 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific with assurances as to the liquid's "low" toxicity.

A necessary step, the site operator TEPCO asserts, to make room for the massive runoff of subsequently pumped waters used to combat reactor meltdown; toxic pools considered far more radioactive than the waters being released over the last couple of days.

This adds to a chain of calamitous events that followed the March 11 earth quake and tsunami hitting Japan, sending three of the plant's six nuclear reactors into partial meltdown; spewing radiation into the air, which prompted the government to evacuate citizens from a 12-mile radius of the plant. Just this past weekend a crack at the site had been discovered hemorrhaging radioactive water onto the shore, but appears for now to have been sealed.

As nuclear power industry defenders circle 'round the wagons to defend what they call a "safe" and "clean" source of energy, it's as good a time as any to think about the radioactive life span of nuclear waste and how there's no community insane enough to welcome its disposal. Radioactive wastes left over from the fissioning of atomic fuel (uranium 235) remain active--as in perilous to human health and life--for at least a thousand years.

Given our civilization's limited real-time experience tinkering with atomic energy and the length of generations-- in the tens of thousands--some of its by-products remain hazardous, how can you not see a race utterly unready to be responsible for the full magnitude of its power?

Thursday
Mar312011

Homeland Security, FOIA and the governing cult of secrecy

 

Of course no one would have dreamed of such a hearing the last time Republicans controlled the House of Representatives: 'Why Isn't The Department Of Homeland Security Meeting The President's Standard On FOIA? No matter the political leveraging behind the committee session On Oversight & Government Reform, President Obama's administration has proven itself not much more FOIA-friendly than George W. Bush's.

At said hearing happening today, the committee will listen to testimony by former Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan (an appointee of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano). As the official in charge of transmitting sensitive government files to political advisors for vetting before such documents can be released to the public, she confided to her then-deputy, Catherine Papoi, what a zealous ideological scouring they endured. "This level of attention is CRAZY," she wrote in a 2009 email, and expressed the hope that "someone [would] FOIA this whole damn process."

Perhaps such frank talk by a federal paper pusher may sound unbecoming, however, it may be an emblem of the extraordinary level of screening applied to the release of government records. Ms. Callahan would not be the first guest of the Oversight & Governement Reform Committee to suggest this.

William Leonard, current COO of the National Endowment for Democracy,  testified to the same congressional committee on March 14, 2006--when he was classification czar for the National Archives-- asserting the extreme lengths taken for secrecy's sake.  Yes, insufficient classification of military or government documents poses a potential threat to national security and can undermine diplomatic efforts.  "Conversely, too much classification, the failure to declassify information as soon as it no longer satisfies the standards for continued classification, or inappropriate reclassification, unnecessarily obstructs effective information sharing and impedes an informed citizenry, the hallmark of our democratic form of government."

More recently, as a panelist at the Criminal Law, National Security, and the First Amendment symposium held in Washington, DC in October 2010, Leonard said there was no defense for Wikileaks' unlawful disclosure of the Iraq and Afghan military diaries. Rightfully, governing officials have condemned such actions, he goes on, “…but I have yet to see any of our government leaders accept responsibility for what is directly under their control, and that is the reckless manner in which the critical national-security tool is applied.” Or one could argue, the reckless manner in which it isn’t applied.

As an example he pointed out that no classification distinction exists between a document reporting an auto accident and a document that records the identity of an Afghan national serving as an informant. Additionally, the former secrecy czar argues with blinding logic that in the case of a situation like Abu Ghraib, the abuse endured by captured enemy combatants or high-value targets, at the hands of U.S. ordered interrogations, isn't subject to classification because the experience itself isn't a secret to the victim of torture; nor are they required to sign a non-disclosure agreement should they be fortunate enough to be released.

From today's House hearing on Homeland Security's FOIA obligations, don't expect too much in the way of questioning that interrogates our government's prevailing paradigm of secrecy. To enable such a line of inquiry would require an open national debate about exactly what national security factors that merit privilege over civil and human rights.