harikari.com

Speaking before a gaggle of very rich bankers at an American Bankers Association meeting this week that was held not long after Senator Dodd broke away from his fruitless efforts to draft a compromise reform bill with Republicans, House Minority Leader John Boehner belittled congressional staff members:

“I don’t know how they ever come to an agreement on some kind of a bill they can bring back to both houses and pass,” Boehner said.

Boehner’s comments come as bankers prepare to descend upon Capitol Hill to press for changes to the bank-reform legislation, which they wouldn’t support in its present form.  Boehner said he urged bankers not to be shy when meeting with the lawmaker staff members and to send a message that new regulations and taxes translates to into banks having less available for lending.

“Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you and stand up for yourselves,” Boehner said.  “All of us are hearing from our friends and constituents on lack of credit, you can’t get a loan, the more your government takes and taxes, the more regulations you have to comply with the more cost you have there and less amount you are going to have available to loan to customers.”

Representative Barney Frank, who knows a punk when he sees one and is much more respectful of Boehner than I choose to be, wrote a letter to the “The Honorable John A. Boehner” and demanded an apology:

I am appalled that a Leader of the House, who must know what good work is done by our staffs, would take such an inaccurate cheap-shot at these people, for the purpose of ingratiating himself with bankers or any other group.  As Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, I work closely with a large number of the staff members whom you are demeaning by this statement, and while I obviously have closer working relationships with the members of the majority staff, I am familiar with the work done by a number of the minority staff members as well, both for the Committee and on personal staffs.  Your reference to “punk staffers” trying to “take advantage” of people in the financial industry is wholly unfair to a lot of hardworking men and women, the majority of whom, in my judgment, could be making more money if they were working elsewhere, and working under less stressful conditions and shorter hours.  It is of course possible that you were misquoted, and if that is the case, I urge you to quickly make that clear.  But if Mr. Orol accurately quoted you in referring to the people who work so hard in the public interest as “little punk staffers,” I urge you to apologize to them.

I’ll be shocked if the beastly John Boehner, defender of greedy billionaire bankers that line his pockets with campaign contributions, offers an apology.

Last night’s Daily Showwas a little different.  Instead of the show starting with Jon behind his desk, he was stood center stage to do his impersonation of Glenn Beck and announce to the world that he was infected with cancerous progressivism.

After the introduction, he continued his Beck impersonation for another thirteen minutes complete with blackboard diagrams, nonsensical word dissections, and just the right amount of batshit craziness.

The accepted wisdom is that passing the amended Democratic health care bill will be an albatross around the necks of the party as it moves forward into the fall mid-term elections and beyond.  Republicans gleefully point to polls which suggest they will benefit from the electorate’s opposition to the bill and their own improved prospects for picking up seats in both the United States Senate and the House.

In the short term they may be right, but it’s not at all clear that health care will play much of a role in any losses sustained by the Democrats in the fall except with the GOP’s own base and some disaffected independents.  The electorate is generally grumpy with the state of the economy, primarily unemployment, and the size of the deficit.  The fact that the Democrats deserve credit rather than electoral punishment for the steps both the administration and Congress have taken to prevent a deeper recession, and to stimulate the economy through fiscal measures that were necessary but inevitably resulted in a higher deficit is, unfortunately, lost on many voters.

In the longer term, however, I am convinced that as Americans come to actually learn what’s in the health bill and see the benefits not only to the uninsured but to those who already have insurance or Medicare (the most fervent opponents to the bill), they will come to embrace it as they did Medicare and Social Security – two other additions to the social safety net that most congressional Republicans opposed.

I also think it’s why the GOP has mounted such a bitter opposition to the bill.  If they believed their own rhetoric one would think they would welcome passage of a bill which, according to every Fox News right-wing mouthpiece and Republican politician who’s given an opportunity to blab on-air, will mean Democratic Armageddon.  But they don’t and the reason may be that they fear that it will be a long term boost to both Obama and Democrats in general for the 2012 elections, and to their own detriment.

The misinformation and sound-bites have served the right well in what has been less a debate than a frenzy of vitriol and misleading talking points by the GOP and its Fox News cheerleaders.  Oh, and let’s not forget the Tea Baggers.

However, once the bill passes this campaign of obfuscation and misrepresentation will be much harder to sustain effectively, and the beneficial elements of the bill will start to speak for themselves.  In this situation Democrats will, in time, gain a strong advantage as the party of can-do and of positive, pro-active policy prescriptions in contrast to the GOP as the party of “NO-can-do.”

If Democrats can find the courage and the will to pass health care insurance reform, whether through parliamentary maneuvers or a straight vote, not only will the country have much reason to be thankful but also, I believe, the Democratic Party.

The Washington Post reports:

The firm, whose clients include labor unions and environmentalists, is seeking to enter the Republican primary for the 8th District seat held by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D).

The firm “wanted to run as a Republican because we feel the Republican Party is more receptive to our basic message that corporations are people, too,” Klein [the campaign manager] said, adding that his client has no particular beef with Van Hollen.

Van Hollen welcomes the competition. “The majority on the Court has made a mockery of our campaign finance laws, and Murray Hill is just mocking the mockers,” said Doug Thornell, a senior adviser to Van Hollen.

…

Murray Hill does face a couple of tiny problems in its effort to get elected to Congress.

For starters, candidates must officially register to vote as a Republican to run in a Republican primary in Maryland.  Late this week, the Montgomery County Board of Elections wrote to Murray Hill, informing the firm that its voter registration application had been rejected.

It seems the corporation does not meet the “minimum requirements” for voter registration, which include being a U.S. citizen and at least 18, according to Kevin Karpinski, a lawyer for the county elections board.

Just another case of The Man sticking it to Corporate America.

The odds are against Murray Hill, Inc.getting on the ballot, but I love the ad and I do think that somehow, someway, in the not-too-distant future, a corporation will find a way through the legal obstacles of registering a corporation to run for public office.  When that hapens, I can only hope it’s a corporation with the same goal in mind – to push the Supreme Court ruling to its limits, and get them to redraw the lines in a sensible way.  I’d start with the premise that corporations are not persons and should not have any rights to political speech.  In fact, they should not even be able to pay their damn lobbyists.  If we got them completely out of the picture, maybe we could get back to a country of people run by people for the people.

Oh, and yes… you can buy a campaign t-shirt.  I think I’ll order mine now.

Senator Harry Reid grew some balls today.  Big brass ones.  Here are some excerpts from his letter to Senator Mitch McConnell: 

Dear Leader McConnell:
 
Eleven months ago, I wrote you to share my expectations for the coming health reform debate.  At the time, I expressed Democrats’ intention to work in good faith with Republicans…
 
Obviously, the opposite has happened, as many Republicans have spent the past year mischaracterizing the health reform bill and misleading the public.  …

… 60 Senators voted to pass historic reform that will make health insurance more affordable, make health insurance companies more accountable and reduce our deficit by roughly a trillion dollars.  The House passed a similar bill.  However, many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we’ve made, the extensive debate and negotiations we’ve held, the amendments we’ve added (including more than 100 from Republicans) and the votes of a supermajority in favor of a bill whose contents the American people unambiguously support.

…

I know that many Republicans have expressed concerns with our use of the existing Senate rules, but their argument is unjustified.  There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about the use of reconciliation.  As one of the most senior Senators in your caucus, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said in explaining the use of this very same option, “Is there something wrong with majority rules?  I don’t think so.” 

…
 
As you know, the vast majority of bills developed through reconciliation were passed by Republican Congresses and signed into law by Republican Presidents – including President Bush’s massive, budget-busting tax breaks for multi-millionaires.  Given this history, one might conclude that Republicans believe a majority vote is sufficient to increase the deficit and benefit the super-rich, but not to reduce the deficit and benefit the middle class.  Alternatively, perhaps Republicans believe a majority vote is appropriate only when Republicans are in the majority.  Either way, we disagree.
 
Keep in mind that reconciliation will not exclude Republicans from the legislative process.  You will continue to have an opportunity to offer amendments and change the shape of the legislation.  In addition, at the end of the process, the bill can pass only if it wins a democratic, up-or-down majority vote.  If Republicans want to vote against a bill that reduces health care costs, fills the prescription drug “donut hole” for seniors and reduces the deficit, you will have every right to do so.
 
Sincerely,
 
HARRY REID
United States Senator

P.S.  Can you hear them clanging?

This is slide #31 from a PowerPoint presentation used at an RNC fundraising event in Florida.  The Obama caricature has been around for a while, and this is the first time I’ve seen Pelosi as Cruella de Ville, but Scooby Doo?  Harry Reid?  Really?

Politico reports:

The 72-page document was provided to POLITICO by a Democrat, who said a hard copy had been left in the hotel hosting the $2,500-a-head retreat, the Gasparilla Inn & Club. Sources at the event said the presentation was delivered by [Robert] Bickhart and by the RNC Finance Chairman, Peter Terpeluk, a former ambassador to Luxembourg under President George W. Bush.

…

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

“What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate…?” it asks.

The answer: “Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

Manipulating donors with crude caricatures and playing on their fears is hardly unique to Republicans or to the RNC – Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms – but rarely is it practiced in such cartoonish terms.

That’s probably because Republicans rarely even understand satire, so when they try producing it themselves, it turns out to be a failure – pretty much like everything else they do.  Although if obstructing progress counts as “doing something” they have turned pro in that regard.

From Evil GOP Bastards

and you’ve got to love this one

Hello readers.  Do you all remember this post from March of last year about how the richest of the rich in our country were taking the lion’s share of all the country’s income?  That post includes charts that shows just how much of the country’s growth in incomes from 2002 through 2006 the top earners kept for themselves.  You might want to go back and take a look at those charts, but be warned – they’re not pretty.

And 2007 wasn’t any prettier.  Some new IRS data was released this week for 2007, and guess what?  The rich got even richer!  From BusinessWeek:

Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — The average income reported by the 400 highest-earning U.S. households grew to almost $345 million in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, Internal Revenue Service statistics show.

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Each household in the top 400 of earners paid an average tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest since the agency began tracking the data in 1992, the statistics show. Their average effective tax rate was about half the 29.4 percent in 1993, the first year of President Bill Clinton’s administration, when taxes were increased.

The statistics underscore “two long-term trends: that income at the very top has exploded and their taxes have been cut dramatically,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that supports increasing taxes on high-income individuals.

So next time you hear a Teabagger going all crazy about huge deficits and high taxes, you might want to recite a few facts from this article and some more from last year’s post about how the wealthy are grossly undertaxed.  Had they not received trillions in tax cuts from the Bush Republicans, we might even have collected enough to pay for the two wars that are still going on. 

For more about how today’s deficit problems are the result of the tax-law changes enacted under the Bush Administration, read this article on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website:

Some of President Obama’s critics and political opponents have launched a line of argument that Obama is mostly to blame for the large federal budget deficits projected for the coming decade and that his Administration’s role in swelling deficits and debt dwarfs that of the previous administration. [1] The critics cite what they present as proof: the fact that the deficit this year and in the years ahead will be much larger than the average deficits under President George W. Bush and that the increase in the national debt thus will be much larger under Obama than Bush.

But asserting that the deficits that lie ahead are primarily the result of policies enacted since President Obama took office is Orwellian. It stands truth on its head.

Republicans have never had any regard for the truth.  They’ve always twisted things upside down, inside out, and backwards; and they’ve almost always gotten away with it.  They get away with it because they own all the mainstream media outlets, or because the American people are uninformed and very gullible.  Or both.  This time, don’t let them get away with it. Spread some truth around.

A couple of weeks after the far-right activist Supreme Court falsely ruled 5-4 that corporations have many of the same rights as living breathing citizens of this country, I finally found an article by Thom Hartmann that I remembered reading over seven years ago.  I found the article via an article on the Project Censored website. 

It was back in 1886 that a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) ostensibly led to corporate personhood and free speech rights, thereby guaranteeing protections under the 1st and 14th amendments.  However, according to Thom Hartmann, the relatively mundane court case never actually granted these personhood rights to corporations. (cut to Hartmann article)

[Excerpt from a letter penned by Abraham Lincoln] “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.  I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.”

Lincoln’s suspicions were prescient.  In the 1886 Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state tax assessor, not the county assessor, had the right to determine the taxable value of fenceposts along the railroad’s right-of-way.

However, in writing up the case’s headnote – a commentary that has no precedential status – the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, opened the headnote with the sentence: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Oddly, the court had ruled no such thing.  As a handwritten note from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis that now is held in the National Archives said:  ”we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.”  And nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.

Nonetheless, corporate attorneys picked up the language of Davis’s headnote and began to quote it like a mantra.  Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate on the issue), was quoting Davis’s headnote in subsequent cases.  While Davis’s Santa Clara headnote didn’t have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions its new doctrine of corporate personhood became the law.

… and from a few paragraphs earlier in the Hartmann article:

Corporations are non-living, non-breathing, legal fictions. They feel no pain. They don’t need clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, or healthy food to consume. They can live forever. They can’t be put in prison. They can change their identity or appearance in a day, change their citizenship in an hour, rip off parts of themselves and create entirely new entities. Some have compared corporations with robots, in that they are human creations that can outlive individual humans, performing their assigned tasks forever.

Isaac Asimov, when considering a world where robots had become as functional, intelligent, and more powerful than their human creators, posited three fundamental laws that would determine the behavior of such potentially dangerous human-made creations. His Three Laws of Robotics stipulated that non-living human creations must obey humans yet never behave in a way that would harm humans.

And from there I offer you two frames from today’s edition of This Modern World:

Click on the frames or here to read the whole comic.  Go on now…

While tens of millions of hard working Americans struggled to keep their jobs and pay their mortgages and ever increasing health insurance premiums, the for-profit health insurance industry increased their profits by billions over the last year.  From today’s Seattle Times:

WASHINGTON — As the nation struggled last year with rising health-care costs and a recession, the five largest health-insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion, up 56 percent over 2008, according to a new report.

Based on company financial reports for 2009 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the report said insurers WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Aetna and Humana covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the previous year.

The report also said three of the five insurers cut the proportion of premiums they spent on customers’ medical care, committing relatively more to salaries, administrative expenses and profits.

Prepared by Health Care for America Now, a coalition of liberal advocacy groups and labor unions, the report was aimed at bolstering the drive by Democrats to complete work on a health-care overhaul, which insurers have vigorously opposed.

Industry representatives criticized the report’s approach, noting that 2008 was a bad year financially across many industries, skewing the 2009 comparison.

“It is disingenuous to look at the profits at one company today compared to where it was in the depth of a recession,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s Washington, D.C.-based lobbying arm.

While all five companies indeed reported lower profits between 2007 and 2008, a Seattle Times review of financial statements shows that the profits of three of them — WellPoint, Cigna and Humana — were higher in 2009 than in 2007, before the recession.  Outside factors such as the sales of assets can affect those numbers, however.

…

Industry analyst Sheryl Skolnick, a senior vice president at CRT Capital Group, said many of the insurance companies likely would benefit from more customers.

But they are driven to increase prices for their products to satisfy investors, which in turn drives away more and more customers.

“It is a terrible thing to run your business for Wall Street,” Skolnick said. “It creates very bad incentives, and it ultimately prevents you from doing the thing that is in the best long-term interest of your business. … There is no way that as long as these businesses are publicly traded, they can have the best interest of their customers at heart.”

Sounds to me like the greedy corporate health insurance providers could use a little competition from a lower-priced, more efficient, government-run plan.  So why is the Public Option off the table? 

Only answer I can come up with is to make the rich richer.