Health Insurers Funded Chamber Attack Ads; Demand Investigation; Sign Petition

By Peter H. Stone
The National Journal
TUESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2010
Updated at 10:30 am 1/13/10

Just as dealings with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats soured last summer, six of the nation's biggest health insurers began quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress.

That money, between $10 million and $20 million, came from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint, according to two health care lobbyists familiar with the transactions. The companies are all members of the powerful trade group America's Health Insurance Plans.

The funds were solicited by AHIP and funneled to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to help underwrite tens of millions of dollars of television ads by two business coalitions set up and subsidized by the chamber. Each insurer kicked in at least $1 million and some gave multimillion-dollar donations.

"There's no question that AHIP has quietly solicited monies from their members which were funneled over to the chamber for their ads," said a source. The total donated by the health insurers, according to one estimate, was as much as one-quarter of the chamber's total health care advertising budget.

A spokesman for Kaiser said it contributed funds to AHIP last year for positive ads on health care reform, and that AHIP has told the insurer that none of its monies were sent to the chamber.

Last August was bruising for the health insurance industry: Obama and congressional leaders attacked its abuses and profits and AHIP President Karen Ignagni warned publicly that "the vilification strategy isn't going to get health reform passed."

Continue reading article here.

The Center for Media and Democracy is the only public interest group whose "core mission" is to stand up to the unlimited money disinformation campaigns being perpetrated upon us by the powerful aided and abetted by major media. Wendell Potter, former Vice President of CIGNA has rejected the insurance company PR and now works for CMD to expose it.

In a recent email to CMD subscribers and donors Wendell Potter said:

"Over the past several months--including during my Congressional testimony in both the House and Senate--I have talked about how health insurance companies and America's Health Insurance Plans, cannot be trusted, how they never intended to be the good-faith "partners" with President Obama and congressional leaders to enact reform despite their public assurances that they would be. I have disclosed how the industry has long conducted duplicitous public relations campaigns--one it wants the public to know about, the other that it goes to great lengths to hide from public view.

And, I have explained how the insurers work with its big business and political allies to disseminate lies and misleading information. One of the industry's biggest shills has long been the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It has funneled money through many other allies, including the Federation of Independent Business, which assisted the industry in killing the "Patient's Bill of Rights" reform legislation in the 1990s.

...First, I am asking you to please sign our petition to Congress demanding an immediate investigation of how much the insurance companies have spent trying to undermine reform and mislead the American people in the process.

I will be discussing this issue on Wednesday night when I return as a guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. Only with your generous support will the Center's work be able to survive and thrive."

You may Sign the petition here.

BEHIND THE VEILS OF POWER: HOPE FOR PROGRESSIVES

By Bernard Weiner
CrisisPapers in Editorials & Other Articles
Tue Jan 12th 2010, 01:04 AM

Pundits of all stripes are calling this past decade a thoroughgoing disaster, one of the worst in our nation's history. True, but there's another way of evaluating the CheneyBush era.

Sure, lots of horrific things happened in the years between 2000 and 2010: a massive terrorist attack, our country lied into a disastrous war in Iraq, the Administration colluding with corporations in looting the treasury and polluting the air and water, a great recession brought into being at least partially by refusing to enforce oversight regulations on financial institutions, eight years lost in the fight against global warming. Yes, all those things, and many more dark episodes, including the strengthening of a kind of native fascism, happened during the CheneyBush era.

But those shameful ashes of the past eight years can, Phoenix-like, also yield a momentous rebirth of American democracy, a more rational foreign policy, and economic justice. What leads me to this contrarian conclusion?

The essence of my guarded optimism rests on the Removal of the Veils.


THE RARE MOMENTS OF REVELATION

Stick with me here. Most of the time, governmental corruption, moral and ethical lapses, wrongheaded economic and foreign/military policies take place in secret, hidden behind the veils designed to keep the truth of what's really going on from the public. But once every 10 or 20 years, at least in America, the veils part a bit and we can see the scarefying reality of how our government really work: the Army/McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers in the early-1970s, Iran-Contra in the early-1980s, and the CheneyBush era of the past eight years.

Suddenly, the citizenry is permitted at least a long, partial glance at the true corporatist/extremist forces at work in our society. The pictures are not pretty. Historically, out of those revelations comes anger, activism, at least some reforms and, at least for a while, a new and often better crop of politicians. The GOP found out about that pattern in 2006 and 2008, when their misrule led to Democratic majorities. Now Obama's the object of anger. There is major anti-Administration activism coming from both the Left and the Right, including even a budding Know-Nothing party or faction forming on the tea-bagging extreme -- all signs that indicate the presence of major seismic activity under the tectonic plates of the American political process.

Let's use America's foreign/military policy as our first demonstration model for this Removal of the Veils:


"SOFT IMPERIALISM"

"Soft imperialism" -- using diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, political leverage, firm but gentle threats, etc. -- has characterized U.S. foreign/military policy for decades, under all presidents. But when the neo-conservatives took power in 2001, the CheneyBush regime felt that "soft" way of acting was liberal-sissy and wouldn't frighten anyone into acceding to American demands. And so, with the Soviet Union gone and the U.S. as the last remaining Superpower, CheneyBush were proud to reveal the iron fist of "hard imperialism" hidden inside the velvet glove of diplomacy. Read the PNAC documents that became official U.S. policy; it wasn't enough to threaten to attack, the U.S. was required to initiate at least one major war and, even better, two.

That's what blitzkrieg and "shock-and-awe" were all about. You resist us, we'll bomb you to smithereens. Don't push us, just do what we say and get out of our way. There was even a theological imperative behind such arrogance. Bush, a numbskull unable to keep truths from exiting his mouth, gave that cat away when he revealed God commanded him: "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq", and that his job as president was to "catapult the propaganda." You may also remember that Bush originally used the term "crusade" to describe the U.S. mission in that Muslim region.

That exceptionalist, neo-con philosophy, the basis for an astoundingly aggressive U.S. foreign/military policy from 2001 to 2009, is still the prevailing thinking in the GOP today. In some ways, these militarist policies continue under Obama, though he also seems open to returning the country to its "soft imperialism" mode.

Continue reading here.

Hope and Change at the Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division Voting Section?

By Brad Friedman
The Bradblog
January 11, 2010

Justice slowly returns after the reign of John 'Minorities Die First' Tanner, and under a new Administration


The BRAD BLOG is happy to have played an important role...

While criticism of Obama and Democrats is as easy as it is appropriate (as well as frequently engaged in here), their failures on the marquee items --- Afghanistan, health care, torture accountability, etc., ya know, the items Fox "News" and the other wingnuts like to talk about --- tend to obscure the very real differences between the current administration and the former one across a broader, and much less sexy (by cable news standards) level. That's just one of the reasons I reject the far too lazy "Democrats are just the same as Republicans" knee-jerkisms.

While on the big ticket items, as noted above, there is far less difference in real world results than all of us would like, but below the radar, in executive departments and policies, the difference has been, at times, and in some areas, like night and day.

Desi Doyen and I have made this point on a number of occasions in our Green News Reports --- most recently in last Thursday's edition, (see below) highlighting new, important and aggressive policy changes and initiatives at the EPA, federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Dept. of Interior.

"The racially hostile atmosphere - and for the most part, the politicization of the section - that had existed during the Bush administration dissipated with John Tanner's departure."
Now, some important changes at the DoJ's Civil Rights Division, and of particular note to long time readers of The BRAD BLOG, its Voting Rights Division, are beginning to show real change and significantly for the better, whether you hear about it on Fox and CNN and MSNBC or not.

Adam Serwer of The American Prospect highlighted some of that positive change late last week on the heels of an upheaval at the DoJ's Voting Rights Division over which The BRAD BLOG played a very direct and significant role in 2007....


--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---

'Green News Report' w/ Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen
January 7, 2010


Click to listen (or download)
More info on today's report here...

The Bogus Flight 253 'One-Way Ticket' Meme: Anatomy Of A Myth

By Justin Elliott
TPMMuckraker
January 11, 2010, 8:36AM

In a remarkable example of how bad information can travel far and wide, dozens of media outlets around the world have said Umar Abdulmutallab was traveling on a one-way ticket to Detroit when he allegedly tried to blow up Flight 253, even though that has never been substantiated and appears to be flat wrong.

Abdulmutallab's "one-way ticket" has been cited in recent days by the AP, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, even though the Nigerian government said Dec. 28 that Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket, and provided details to back it up.

The "one-way ticket" meme was originally sourced to anonymous U.S. officials and has since been recited as an undisputed fact.

Continue reading here.

White House Believes 'Liberal Angst' Over Healthcare Will Go Away

By Donna Smith
Common Dreams
Sunday, January 10, 2010

Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Better it is to be of humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.- Proverbs 16: 18-19, the Bible

My Grandma Delphia used to quote that Bible verse. I wonder if other folks heard the same from their grandmothers. I am pretty sure some folks at the highest levels in our government either didn't trust or honor their grandmothers' teachings or they just flat don't think rules of common decency and our shared humanity apply.


Many of us knew in 2008 what the Republicans had in store for us in the area of healthcare reform, and we firmly and overwhelmingly rejected those plans. Instead we took seriously the threat that a John McCain presidency meant taxation of our healthcare benefits and other healthcare horrors, and we overwhelmingly rejected those ideas. We had great angst about the potential that anyone would look at the suffering embedded in the U.S. healthcare system and allow it to continue and even grow worse.

Our angst moved us in another direction at the polls. We were promised by the Democrats that no one with an income under $250,000 per year would have any increase in taxes at all to cover healthcare reform, and we were also heartened to hear Barack Obama state firmly and without hesitation that healthcare is a basic human right.

Whew. Finally, we had firm, clear promises that seemed grounded in progressive, fair-minded ideals and common sense along with the vision of our shared humanity. Healthcare as a human right would not only be on the radar, we thought, but it would serve as the benchmark for any reform under such a leader as Barack Obama - and those elected officials who supported him.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association) and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

Continue reading here.

This excerpt below is from the California Nurses Association Press Release:

Read the entire California Nurses Association Press Release here

The excise tax on workers’ benefits is a central plank of the Senate version of the bill, and is supported by the White House, in contrast to the House bill which instead sets new taxes on the highest-income earners. Congressional Budget estimates say the tax would affect 19 percent of employer-paid plans, or 30 million Americans by 2016, a number that Citizens for Tax Justice says will soar to 58 million people by 2019.

“Advocates of the tax have made clear their intent: to force working people into cheaper, high deductible plans that provide less coverage and shift more costs to employees. The inevitable effect will be more people skipping needed medical care, enduring much higher out-of-pocket costs and risking financial ruin due to medical bills,” said NNU Co-president Karen Higgins, RN

A Towers-Perrin employer survey last September found 86 percent of employers would pass along their higher costs to employees, “an especially bitter pill for those working families who were assured that health reform would not undermine their present coverage,” said NNU Co-president Jean Ross, RN. “They will be saddled with higher costs and less coverage, while insurance companies will still have free rein to raise premiums, co-pays, deductibles, co-insurance and other fees, and continue to routinely deny needed medical care.”

Also see these articles: CBO Estimates Senate Healthcare Bill Could Impact 19 Percent of Purchasers of Employment-Based "Cadillac" Insurance Plans

U.S. Employers: 'We'll Pass Along Health Reform's Added Costs'

Kyl Blocking Treasury Nominees Because He Doesn’t Like Internet Gambling

By Pat Garafalo
ThinkProgress
January 8, 2010

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) evidently doesn’t like online gambling very much, and in 2006, he helped craft a law banning the processing of online wagers. The law and its corresponding regulations were supposed to go into effect last month, but the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve pushed back the start-date until June.

Kyl doesn’t like the decision and is making his displeasure known by placing holds on pending nominations to the Treasury Department:

Senate Minority Whip Kyl is blocking pending Treasury Department nominees with jurisdiction over tax policy and international finance in response to the Obama administration’s delay of new Internet gambling prohibitions, according to Senate aides…Kyl was among the few arguing against a delay.

Now, I don’t have much of a position on these internet gambling regulations, but suffice to say, a six month delay in implementing them doesn’t seem like the end of the world — and it appears that most of the Senate agrees. But Kyl’s action really does highlight how far conservatives have gone to prevent Obama’s appointed officials from doing their jobs.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker touched on this in a recent interview with Charlie Rose. “Here we are on Dec. 29, almost a year after the Inauguration, and there is no Under Secretary of the Treasury. That should be an important position. How can we run a government in the middle of a financial crisis without doing the ordinary, garden-variety administrative work of filling the relevant agencies?” he asked. Brad DeLong also noticed the problem, calling the lack of confirmations at Treasury “disgraceful and insane.”

Continue reading here.

Bill Moyers: Wall Street--"Tidal Wave of Bonuses, Surging Ocean of Greed"

PBS
Bill Moyers Journal
January 8, 2010

Bill Moyers asks guests, Mother Jones' political blogger Kevin Drum and Mojo columnist David Corn "What's their secret? How do the bankers pick our pockets so thoroughly with barely a pang of guilt or punishment?"
At the root of the problem, Drum and Corn point to "intellectual capture" and "Stockholm syndrome"





From the transcript:

KEVIN DRUM: Right. It goes beyond regulatory capture, where, say the banks control the S.E.C. That's one thing. Intellectual Capture means that essentially the financial industry has convinced us, you know, in the '50s what was good for General Motors was good for America. Now it's what's good for Wall Street is good for America. And they've somehow convinced us that we shouldn't ask about what's right or what works or what's good for America. We should ask what's productive, what's efficient, what helps grow the economy.

DAVID CORN: This is the Stockholm Syndrome. Where you're hostage starts identifying with the people holding them captive. Americans have been, you know, have been talk- said- told over and over again that if the Dow's going up, if Wall Street's making money, it's good for you.






WATCH VIDEO

The Other Plot to Wreck America

By FRANK RICH
OP-ED COLUMNIST

New York Times
January 9, 2010

THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin.

Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

The window for change is rapidly closing

Click here for links to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Continue reading much more here. <

NEA Action Alert: Absolutely No Excise Tax On Health Insurance Plans!

The United States Senate and House of Representatives are currently reconciling health care bills (H.R. 3590) - a health insurance reform bill that would pay for needed reforms by imposing a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance plans.

Although the tax would be paid by insurance companies and plan administrators (employers), not by employees, the ultimate result would be a dramatic reduction in benefits as the excise taxes payable would be so high that insurance companies and employers would do everything in their power to avoid paying it.

Tell Congress and President Obama to pass health reform that is paid for fairly and not on the backs of middle class families. Click here to send an email or printed letter to President Obama, Sens. McCain and Kyl and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Grijalva To White House: It's On You Now

By Brian Beutler | January 7, 2010, 3:06PM
Talking Points Memo DC

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), a leading House progressive says if the White House can throw its weight behind a controversial tax in the Senate health care bill, it can stand up for some of the House's priorities, too.

In an interview with TPMDC moments after a conference call with over 175 members of the House Democratic caucus, Grijalva said he was encouraged by what he heard from members--strong support for the House bill--but the President needs to get involved if their concerns will be met.

"The president is having his listening sessions, right?" Grijalva asked rhetorically. "After all we've been through at some point the administration can not be neutral players in this process."
Noting that the President stands foursquare behind the Senate's proposal to tax so-called "Cadillac" insurance policies to raise money, Grijalva put it to him to weigh in on some of the House's priorities. "How do you weigh in on a national exchange? How do you weigh in on a public option? How do you weigh in on the anti-trust exemption?"

The public option is a non-starter at this point, and House leaders, progressives, and key chairmen are pushing the White House to support other priorities, including organizing insurance exchanges at a national level, moving the implementation date for major reforms forward by one year, and, at least, diminishing the impact of the Cadillac tax.

"Watching the fight is not enough," Grijalva said. "The pressure shifts to the White House now."

Grijalva says he's putting the finishing touches on a document contrasting the House, Senate, and Congressional Progressive Caucus positions on health care reform. Speaker Pelosi has been given the document, and it will soon be delivered to Senate Majority Leader harry Reid and the White House. We'll shoot it your way when we get it.

Related TPMDC story.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Latest Health Care Flashpoint Strains Relationships Among Democrats
By Brian Beutler | January 8, 2010, 1:17PM

Last year's health care debate was dominated by a bruising--and ultimately losing--fight over the public option. But simmering on the back burner for weeks while the public option ran its course has been a battle among Democrats over how to pay for health care reform. And now, with the public option swept into the dustbin, the fight over taxes has come to the fore, and is testing relationships all the way up the Democratic ladder to party leadership and the White House.

At issue is whether expanding insurance coverage to over 30 million Americans should be paid for by wealthy Americans (as the House would like), or, as the Senate calls for, by people who have expensive health care plans--many of whom are middle class. The vast majority of House Democrats--and the public at large--oppose the Senate proposal. But the idea has one powerful ally: President Obama.

"The polling just hasn't moved an inch," Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) told me. Recent data indicates that the public opposes the Senate's so-called "Cadillac tax" plan by a two-to-one margin. "Frankly, it's the same polling that was there when Obama went after McCain on this."

According to Courtney many in the House believe that, after sacrificing the public option, Democrats should draw a line in the sand over the excise tax--including one Democratic leader.

Click here to read Rep. Courtney's letter

Click here to read a list of signatories. Gabrielle Giffords did NOT sign the letter.

Call Rep. Gabrielle Gifford's Tucson office 881-3588 to ask her to not to change her vote in support of the House measure that does NOT raise taxes on middle class Americans.

Click here to read a list of signatories.

Continue reading article here.

Playing for Change| Peace Around the World

Stand By Me

moogaloop.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object) - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Grandpa Elliott, of the Playing for Change project has just released a new album, Sugar Sweet

From Buzzflash Review
"Grandpa Elliott, one of the standout performers on the Playing for Change album Songs Around the World, has released his own album, Sugar Sweet. Full of charm and warmth, this is a great companion to the Playing for Change phenomenon."

For the remarkable and moving "Playing for Change" project and CDs:

"Bill Moyers called it a remarkable example of "the simple yet transformative power of music... to touch something in each of us." Variety acknowledged it as "a great showcase for just what incredible, thoroughly accessible popular music is being made worldwide. Utilizing innovative mobile audio/video techniques, Playing for Change (PFC) records musicians outdoors in cities and townships worldwide. They've travelled from post-Katrina New Orleans to post-apartheid South Africa, from the remote beauty of the Himalayas to the religious diversity of Jerusalem. Their talents are captured in myriad environments: under the sun and beneath the streetlights... in public parks, plazas and promenades... in doorways, on cobblestone streets, amid hilly pueblos. Their performances are subsequently combined in allowing them to collaborate - albeit separated by hundreds, or even thousands, of miles.

BuzzFlash:

What is remarkable about the "Playing for Change" project is how it turns the modern model of "celebrity music in a cookie cutter" on its head and simply records the remarkable street musicians from around the world to whom the like of Britney Spears and other assembly line packaged "singers" sound like cats in heat.

BuzzFlash recommends buyng the original "Playing for Change" anthology along with the sweet music of "Grandpa George."

Buy more progressive premiums to support BuzzFlash progressive news and commentary (we accept no advertising, corporate or otherwise to maintain our complete independence)by going to The BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

Extra, Extra--Read All About ACORN

by KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL
THENATION.COM
01/05/2010 @ 4:32pm


On Christmas Eve, buried on page A24 of my edition of the New York Times, was this story:

"The controversial community organizing group Acorn has not broken any laws in the last five years, according to a Congressional Research Service report released Tuesday evening."

Indeed, the CRS report--requested in September by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank--finds no instances in which ACORN "violated the terms of federal funding in the last five years," and no instances of individuals allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN "attempting to vote at the polls."

Good to see that the New York Times ran the story.

But the placement and the timing--after 18 months of screaming headlines and attacks vilifying the anti-poverty group--is reminiscent of the McCarthy era when individuals and organizations were ruined by allegations that ran as front page news, while later evidence that vindicated them was relegated to the back pages.

There was little accountability for the false accusations, little redemption for those whose lives had been shattered.

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing). A report by People for the American Way describes, for example, how "attacks on widely respected judicial nominee David Hamilton treated his one-month job as a canvasser for ACORN thirty years ago when he was 22 years old as if it had constituted a major portion of his career."

Continue reading here.