The Other Health Care Fires

The public option vote was expected, and we'll see a lot more wrangling and floor amendments and other votes before that's done. Supporters picked up Tom Carper and Bill Nelson, so progress was made, actually. I'd like to look at some of the other aspects of the bills moving through Congress, which also have important implications, and what the progress looks like on those fronts:

• Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad's colleague from North Dakota, will fight to stop the White House/Big Pharma deal from getting implemented. He's going to offer amendments to the final bill to allow reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada, at a savings of $50 billion dollars over 10 years. Surely the free-traders won't have a problem with that, and if they do, they can put a pool together and find the $50 billion that we're otherwise wasting by restricting such a common-sense measure.

• Jay Rockefeller is looking to extend the bill protections to "self-insured" health plans. I just found out about this a couple weeks ago. Apparently, 70 million people in America work for large corporations which self-insure. They have health insurance companies to administer the billing, but the corporation is taking on all the risk themselves. And, they reap the profits, too. These corporations have essentially turned their employee health care into a small profit center. And none of the regulations in the bill would impact these 70 million, simply based on who their employer is. Those employees should have the same protections, regardless of how "well" the self-insured market is working currently.

• In terms of pernicious amendments, anti-abortion activists want to block the exchanges from providing reproductive choice as part of their health care coverage. That would include private companies, and would represent the government telling private insurers what they cannot cover. That's fine to free marketeers because it would restrict legal medical services like reproductive choice. It's complicated, but the anti-abortion types want to use the Hyde Amendment to say that anyone getting subsidies to use the exchange couldn't buy a plan which covers abortion. Thing is, Jon Cohn writes that taxpayers already subsidize plans that offer reproductive choice:

Remember, the single largest tax subsidy in health care today is the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. If you have insurance through your job, then you're getting government assistance just as surely as if Washington wrote you a check. And if your policy happens to cover abortion services--which about half of you do, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual benefits survey--then the taxpayers are helping to subsidize it.

I'm not trying to accuse abortion rights opponents of hypocrisy or inconsistency. I'm sure they'd eliminate everybody's subsidy if they could. By trying to keep funding out of the exchanges, they're trying to hold the line--to keep more abortions from happening. I don't agree with their position, but there's nothing illogical about it.

But I suspect a lot of voters think the distinction makes sense for a different reason. They have mixed feelings about abortion, so they like the idea of supporting choice in principle while opposing taxpayer funding. The trouble is, it's not a meaningful distinction because of the employer tax subsidy, which (much to my regret, for unrelated policy reasons) is here to stay.

This is a larger attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade without going to court, basically.

• House Democrats will probably add the tax on high-dollar insurance plans into their funding mechanism for health care. Unions hate it, because they've given up wage increases for high-quality health care. But the employer deduction, as Cohn says above, is very pernicious and inefficient, and taxing insurance plans is a way to get at it. I would think that companies would welcome cash payouts over maintaining such high-price health care benefits. Hijacking health care reform to save parochial interests, when we should be moving away from employer-based health care entirely, doesn't make sense.

The Torture Of Corporate Tax Rates

So Grover Norquist associates corporate tax rates to waterboarding, which seems perfectly apt, right?

NORQUIST: The other tax cut you could do is cutting the corporate rate. The U.S. corporate rate is 35 percent; the European rate is 25 percent. Obama is a more international guy, so we should be close to the European average. We’ll stop torturing people, we’ll stop torturing corporations, and that will make us more like Europe.

Of course, he's talking about the terrible burden of the corporate tax RATE. The only burden this actually puts on corporations is that they have to hire creative accountants to get them to avoid those taxes. And they do an incredibly good job.

Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations -- including several that are receiving billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to finance their recovery -- have set up offshore operations that could help them avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits, a government study released yesterday found.

American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the companies that are getting bailed out by U.S. taxpayers while having subsidiaries in locations where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Of the 100 largest public companies, 83 do business in tax-haven hotspots like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, where they can move their income into tax-free accounts.

It is all legal, but it could come to an end, given the dire condition of the U.S. economy and President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to close this popular business tax loophole. The Treasury estimates that it loses $100 billion a year in tax revenue as a result of companies shipping their income off shore, and congressional leaders are vowing to introduce legislation forcing big companies to pay full freight.

I would be all too happy to lower the corporate tax rate if concurrently we ended every single loophole and tax credit and mandated exactly 25 of all income, or a lesser percentage of gross sales, to flow into the US Treasury. This actually would boost revenues, because as it stands now, most US firms paid no taxes in the 1990s and two-thirds paid none from 1998 to 2005. The statistics are astounding and they have led to the United States having the second-lowest effective tax rate in the world.

But I suspect ol' Grover wouldn't like that. Because he hates America.

"This is kind of like economic patriotism," (Sen. Byron) Dorgan said. "Americans were told you have to pony up some money to help these companies. And it's rather infuriating for them to find out now that those companies, when they were profitable, didn't want to pay taxes and found clever ways to hide their money overseas."

Yes, I questioned his patriotism.

Worm Turning?

Joe Lieberman is maybe starting to lose some support on Capitol Hill. Byron Dorgan called his actions unacceptable over the weekend. And one of the Senators making calls on his behalf, Tom Carper, thinks something needs to be done.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), a close ally of Sen. Joe Lieberman, said the Connecticut Independent should pay a price for his campaign attacks against President-elect Barack Obama.

"There need to be consequences, and they cannot be insignificant," Carper said in a Monday interview with The Hill.

I wouldn't put a lot into this. The vote tomorrow will be by secret ballot and it will be difficult after the fact to extract any sort of consequences from those who vote for him to retain the Homeland Security Committee. There are a few willing to make public statements, but most have clammed up, and I expect tomorrow to see a lot of go-along to get-along from Senate Democrats. And after the vote, there will be a lot of calls for calm, that the issue is a settled matter and we now must move forward with the new agenda. And you'll be more hard pressed to find a Senator who voted to keep Lieberman in charge of the committee than an African-American who voted for McCain. I agree with Josh Orton that it makes policy sense to put a Homeland Security Committee chair who actually seems to care about fulfilling his responsibility, but that's not how this will be decided. It's a political play and Senate Dems don't seem willing to expel anyone from their little club. It would be too nasty and partisan.

Presidency 2.0

While Barack Obama is likely to have to give up his Blackberry after being sworn in as President (owing mainly to a lack of email security, as well as record keeping under the Presidential Records Act), he will have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, a first. And he just finished up the first-ever Presidential YouTube address, which will become a regular feature.



It already has 630,000 views, probably 620,000 more than those weekly radio addresses which air at 4am. The even more interesting development is Valerie Jarrett's address at change.gov, a completely transparent update on who will be leading key agencies, which has NINETY-EIGHT THOUSAND VIEWS. This is a wonky and fairly dull address about ethics requirements and lobbyists, but because it's being made widely available and people are hungering for knowledge about the incoming Administration, it's getting widespread attention.

I find this to be very significant. Obama enters office with 3.1 million donors and an email list of 10 million. How these lists are put to use and allowed to engage with the Administration will signal how much the President-elect will live up to his expression that change begins from the bottom up. By using these Web tools, Obama can bypass traditional filters and deliver action items to his audience on issues can have relevance and immediacy.

"He can do a half-hour YouTube address every Saturday, addressing millions," Trippi said. "The networks would never give the president that much television time each week, but the press is still going to have to cover what he says on YouTube."

Aides say the Obama team will staff a robust "new media" operation out of the White House and plans a complete overhaul of the White House Web site to make it more interactive and user-friendly. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to use the Internet to make his administration more open, such as offering a detailed look at what's going on in the White House on a given day or asking people to post comments on his legislative proposals.

The Internet outreach team includes some really great people, and I'm sure they will push the technology (White House Twitter feed, anyone?) in the years to come. As for this nonsense that Obama has to be careful reaching his supporters in a partisan way, I think that's a deep misreading of his Internet fan base. My personal view is that an overwhelmingly substantial portion of his Web supporters are not just Democrats, but more progressive than he is. And not only that, they are not passive creatures who have to be told what to think and what to support. They were TRAINED in the campaign to be self-starters. It's going to be a bit less about how Obama wants to use these supporters and more how these supporters want to use the technology, whether to support policy or push Obama from the left.

The other very good outcome of a President who gets technology and its promise is that it makes him more likely to sign a net neutrality bill into law. Keeping the Internet open and free helped Obama win the White House - now he can return the favor by ensuring that freedom well into the future. Sen. Byron Dorgan plans to introduce a net neutrality bill in January - I'm hoping the Congress acts swiftly on it.

Can The Iraqis Save Iraq?

A unified front is forming in Iraq among Sunnis and Shiites, opposed to the terms of the draft of a long-term security agreement to keep US forces in the country. Muqtada al-Sadr tapped into a populist rejection of the US occupation and the Iraqi government, for now, is playing hardball.

Iraq's chief spokesman acknowledged differences with the United States over a proposed long-term security agreement and pledged yesterday that the government will protect Iraqi sovereignty in ongoing talks with the Americans.

Chief government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said that the Iraqi negotiators have a "vision and a draft that is different" from the Americans' but that the talks, which began in March, were still in an early stage.

"There is great emphasis by the Iraqi government on fully preserving the sovereignty of Iraq in its lands, skies, waters and its internal and external relations," Dabbagh said. "The Iraqi government will not accept any article that infringes on sovereignty and does not guarantee Iraqi interests."

If we reach December without an agreement, the US presence in Iraq would actually be illegal. And this is not just a Sadrist movement - Shiite clerics from Maliki's own party are publicly opposing the agreement.

While US negotiators claim that they have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq, the contract proposals that have been signed in recent weeks show the desire for a continuing presence, and it's not too hard for the Iraqis to catch on to this.

The contracts call for new spending, from supplying mentors to officials with Iraq's Defense and Interior ministries to establishing a U.S.-marshal-type system to protect Iraqi courts. Contractors would provide more than 100 linguists with secret clearances and deliver food to Iraqi detainees at a new, U.S.-run prison.

The proposals reflect multiyear commitments. The mentor contract notes that the U.S. military "desires for both Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense to become mostly self-sufficient within two years," a time outside some proposals for U.S. combat troop withdrawal. The mentors sought would "advise, train [and] assist . . . particular Iraqi officials" who work in the Ministry of Defense, which runs the Iraqi army, or the Ministry of Interior, which runs the police and other security units.

The mentors will assist an U.S. military group that previously began to implement what are described as "core processes and systems," such as procurement, contracting, force development, management and budgeting, and public affairs.

Mentors would have to make a one-year commitment, with options for two one-year contracts after that. As a reminder of what they are getting into, the mentors must supply their helmets, protective body armor and gas masks, according to the announcement.

The marshals service would be organized by the State Department's bureau responsible for developing rule of law programs in Iraq. It "has plans to create an Iraqi service to be known as the Judicial Protection Service (JPS), modeled to some degree after the U.S. Marshals Service, that will ensure the safe conduct of judicial proceedings and protect judges, witnesses, court staff, and court facilities," a notice published last month said.

State's plan is to hire a contractor as a judicial security program manager, who would work out details of how such a service could be put together for the Iraqis. That person or group would develop not only the mission, size and structure of an Iraqi JPS service, but also the personnel, budgeting and training materials necessary, plus "all other aspects of creating the new organization so that the project can be contracted out."

In short, State wants a contractor to put together all the elements so the department can contract the project to another contractor.

The occupation is big money. All these middlemen and contractors and sub-contractors are getting rich. Byron Dorgan is running a one-man crusade to try and put an end to the waste and the profiteering, but if the United States remains in Iraq, there will be big pots of money to be had by corporate interests. And in addition, there's clearly an effort to pry open Iraq's natural resources and allow the oil companies to come in and add to their fortunes. The only entity committed to putting a halt to this seems to be the Iraqi people.

US officials still expect to wrap up the negotiations by July, and I'm sure the cheerleader-in-chief is whispering entreaties like "Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!" in their ears. It's kind of sad that the Iraqis are standing in their way instead of the supposed opposition party in this country, which has slightly more ability to oppose.

The OTHER Proposed Massive Giveaway To Giant Corporations Today

Overshadowed by the Senate markup of the FISA bill including retroactive immunity for telecoms, Chris Dodd's noble hold on the bill, etc., is an item in today's New York Times that has just as damaging consequences for the future of American democracy. Apparently FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin is quietly planning to relax media ownership restrictions even MORE than they are now, an action that would prompt even more consolidation in the industry and control of the news and information media in even less hands. As it would increase the power of media conglomerates, the implications for all sorts of pernicious legislation, up to and including the destruction of net neutrality, are enormous.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

Among them are Samuel Zell, the Chicago investor who is seeking to complete a buyout of the Tribune Company, and Rupert Murdoch, who has lobbied against the rule for years so that he can continue controlling both The New York Post and a Fox television station in New York.

There's a 3-2 partisan split on the FCC, and the majority Republicans are down with repealing ownership restrictions. The Democrats are questioning it for now, Michael Copps is totally against it and Jonathan Adelstein is making less forceful statements, also to his credit, he called the proposal "awfully aggressive." The plan for Martin, clearly, is to woo Adelstein and call it a bipartisan approach.

Martin's predecessor, Michael Powell, tried the same thing three years ago, was taken to court over it, and lost:

Three years ago, the commission lost a major court challenge to its last effort, led by Michael K. Powell, its chairman at the time, to relax the media ownership rules. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, concluded that the commission had failed to adequately justify the new rules. Mr. Martin’s proposal would presumably include new evidence aimed at fending off similar legal challenges.

Mr. Powell’s effort, which had been supported by lobbyists for broadcasters, newspapers and major media conglomerates, provoked a wave of criticism from a broad coalition of opponents. Among them were the National Organization for Women, the National Rifle Association, the Parents Television Council and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The agency was flooded with nearly three million comments against changing the rules, the most it has ever received in a rule-making process.

What's forcing Martin's hand are some new major acquisitions by some of the biggest names in media. Sam Zell is trying to buy out the Tribune Company, and receive by proxy the "temporary waivers" that allowed Tribune to own a newspaper and a TV station in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Hartford. In addition, there's Rupert Murdoch's recent purchase of the Wall Street Journal, and his attempt to further consolidate the information market.

It can be argued that the media consolidation that we have already seen, dating from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, are in many ways directly responsible for the cheapening of information and the trivialization of American democracy that we witness today. We know that radio has become almost a two-owner game between Viacom and Clear Channel, and as a result talk radio in particular is grossly imbalanced and not reflective of the market. The lack of local participation in media management in particular has led to mass syndication and a depressing sameness around the radio dial, as well as an elimination of any local content. Consolidation has also led to a reliance on profit and meeting Wall Street expectations rather than reporting the news. Massive cuts in newsroom budgets and foreign affairs bureaus are a direct result of control from a corporation rather than anyone acting in the local interest. So newspapers rely more on AP wire stories, shared content with other papers in the conglomerate, syndicated content, and articles that are really press releases, while local broadcast "news" has cratered almost completely. People are turning to the Internet for their news and that has spurned something of an information revolution, but the vast majority of the public still gets their information from old-media sources, and that public is not being served.

A bipartisan coalition of Senators is trying to stop this in its tracks.

Chairman Martin’s secret plans were uncovered during a Commerce Committee hearing yesterday by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), one of the most vocal critics of media consolidation. Sen. Dorgan has co-authored a letter with Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to the FCC calling for a more transparent and open public review of the media ownership rules.

“We do not believe the Commission has adequately studied the impact of media consolidation,” wrote Sens. Dorgan and Lott. “The FCC should not rush forward and repeat mistakes of the past. The Commission is under considerable scrutiny with this proceeding. We strongly encourage you to slow down and proceed with caution.”

Later, Dorgan said, “If the chairman intends to do something by the end of the year, then there will be a firestorm of protest and I’m going to be carrying the wood.”

Chairman Martin has preferred to operate in secret and broker deals that benefit major media conglomerates at the expense of the public interest. It's not likely that you'll hear much about this in newspapers or TV stations owned by those same conglomerates (Kudos to the New York Times for printing this, even if it came out in a public Congressional session).

Free Press has more. This is a big deal, and with telecom companies increasingly trying to insert themselves into media distribution as well, all of these bills are interrelated. A telecom industry immunized from lawbreaking could soon be owning the media that you watch - and they could be charging Web content producers in exchange for speedier access. The drive to beat back media ownership, net neutrality, and all of these deprivations is a classic case of people versus the powerful who have no intention of working in the public interest.

The FCC has a contact page. They should hear from you about this.