The Country is Getting Mugged

There has got to be a way to make these fools pay for what they are doing!

Ask the Chamber of Commerce: Why is Too Much Not Enough?

By BILL MOYERS and MICHAEL WINSHIP

Living in these United States, there comes a point at which you throw your hands up in exasperation and despair and ask a fundamental question or two: how much excess profit does corporate America really need? How much bigger do executive salaries and bonuses have to be, how many houses or jets or artworks can be crammed into a life?   After all, as billionaire movie director Steven Spielberg is reported to have said, when all is said and done, "How much better can lunch get?" But since greed is not self-governing, hardly anyone raking in the dough ever stops to say, "That's it. Enough's enough! How do we prevent it from sweeping up everything in its path, including us?"

Look at the health care industry saying to hell with consumers and then hiking premiums - by as much as 39% in the case of Anthem Blue Cross in California. According to congressional investigators, over a two-year period Anthem's parent company WellPoint spent more than $27 million dollars for executive retreats at luxury resorts. And in 2008, WellPoint paid 39 of its executives more than a million dollars each. Profit before patients.

This week, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the health insurance industry's lobby, announced they'd be spending more than a million dollars on new television ads justifying their costs.

Speaking at their annual policy meeting in Washington - and without a trace of irony - AHIP's president and CEO Karen Ignagni declared, "The current debate about rising premiums has demonstrated that, in fact, we have a health care cost crisis in this country. Unfortunately, the path that has been followed is one of vilification rather than problem solving."

Beg pardon? You're lamenting a health care cost crisis and raising your premiums?  Isn't that like the guy complaining there's an obesity epidemic in America while ordering a double Big Mac with extra fries?

Of course, a million is a mere bagatelle in the shadow of the $544 million that was spent on lobbying by the health sector last year, plus more than $200 million in advocacy ads. And a million's just the curtain raiser to what will be spent in these final weeks of health care reform debate.   Two weeks ago, The Washington Post reported, "Washington interest groups have burst back into action in hopes of bolstering or defeating a new Democratic push on health-care reform legislation, sparking another wave of rallies, lobbying efforts and costly advertising campaigns."

This in spite of the projection that over ten years the Obama plan would plop an additional $336 billion into the insurance companies' pockets - in the form of subsidies given to those who can't afford to buy health insurance on their own.

Okay, this is getting weird: We're going to help the poor by enriching their exploiters?

But apparently even that won't satisfy big business' voracious appetite for more. On Tuesday, Employers for a Healthy Economy, a coalition of 248 business groups, led by the U.S Chamber of Commerce, and including construction and manufacturing interests, as well as health insurance companies, said that over ten days they will spend up to $10 million on ads aimed at putting the screws on members of Congress to vote against health care reform.

Goodness knows, it isn't just because their profit margins may dwindle. No, according to Neil Trautwein, vice president of the National Retail Federation, one of the trade associations involved, "These bills are job killers. Retail simply cannot afford any higher benefit costs or burdensome mandates."  (Never mind that extrapolating from baseline forecasts made by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment Projections Program, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, projects that health care reform possibly could create an average of as many as 400,000 new jobs a year.)

But beyond the health care fight, and perhaps far more significant in the long run, this effort is just one more example of life, Pandora-style. The Company has arrived, only it's called the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and it's got its sights on anything that moves, damn the natives, full speed ahead. During 2008, 86% of contributions from the chamber's political action committee went to GOP candidates. The conservatives have found their Avatar, AKA Frankenstein. 

Of course there is not actually a Chamber of Commerce, at least the way we might imagine it. This is no confederation of congenial, small town business groups that pass out maps of Main Street and souvenir key rings. The chamber in question is a front group.  Yes, yes, it reports a membership of three million businesses, but tax records indicate that in 2008 a third of its contributions came from 19 companies paying between $1 million and $15.3 million. Don't hold your breath: the chamber is not required to reveal who those 19 are.

The March 8 edition of the Los Angeles Times reports that "internal documents suggest the organization's treasury is filled in substantial part by contributions from a couple dozen major corporations most affected by Washington policymakers."

Got it? Predators who prey together stick together.

With all that cash, the Times notes, "The chamber spent more than $144 million on lobbying and grass-roots organizing last year, a 60% increase over 2008, and well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees. The chamber is expected to substantially exceed that spending level in 2010."

This elite organization of oligarchs has been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, which now allows corporations to spend freely on political campaigns right up until Election Day, and by the chamber's recent success contributing a million dollars for ads supporting Republican Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

What's more, writes the Los Angeles Times, "Using trade associations such as the chamber as the vehicle for spending corporate money on politics has an extra appeal: These groups can take large contributions from companies and wealthy individuals in ways that will probably avoid public disclosure requirements."

So with the spring comes anonymous greed run rampant. "In the past a lot of companies and wealthy individuals stood on the sidelines" of politics, a corporate lawyer at Washington's influential law firm Covington & Burling told the Times.

"That cloud has been lifted," he said.

As the sun sets on democracy.

No wonder demonstrators outside that health insurance meeting in Washington this week surrounded the hotel with yellow crime scene tape.

The entire country is being mugged.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Eight Lobbyist for Every Congress Critter

And we wonder what the hell happened to our democracy? Eight demons for every elected soul, that's what happened!

 Link

Excerpt:
 
A new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows that corporate interests attempted to exert  an unprecedented amount of influence in the health care debate over the past year. More than 1,750 companies hired about 4,525 lobbyists - eight for Congressman -  to influence health care in 2009. 

These groups included 207 hospitals, 105 insurance companies, 85 manufacturing companies, and 745 trade, advocacy, and professional organizations. Overall, "businesses and organizations  that lobbied on health reform spent more than $1.2 billion on their overall lobby efforts.
 
So every congressman is surrounded by eight millionaires trying to give him cash.
Meanwhile, the poor and middle class are shut out in the cold and can't be heard.

 
IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THIS MATERIAL IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. PELICAN BLOGS HAS NO AFFILIATION WHATSOEVER WITH THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS ARTICLE NOR ARE PELICAN BLOGS ENDORSED OR SPONSORED BY THE ORIGINATOR.

"VIEW SOURCE ARTICLE" LINKS ARE PROVIDED AS A CONVENIENCE TO OUR READERS AND ALLOW FOR VERIFICATION OF AUTHENTICITY. HOWEVER, AS ORIGINATING PAGES ARE OFTEN UPDATED BY THEIR ORIGINATING HOST SITES, THE VERSIONS POSTED ON THIS BLOG MAY NOT MATCH THE VERSIONS OUR READERS VIEW WHEN CLICKING THE "VIEW SOURCE ARTICLE" LINKS.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Lobbyist Line Up To Sabotage Obama and We, The People

By BRODY MULLINS and SCOTT KILMAN

WASHINGTON -- Industries from health care to agribusiness to mining that stand to lose under President Barack Obama's policy agenda are ramping up lobbying campaigns to derail or modify his plans.

The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.

More

• Complete Coverage: The Obama Budget

"What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed," former CEO Richard Scott said Wednesday, after announcing the creation of Conservatives for Patients Rights.

Now that's a real joke, Mr. Scott. What you really mean is conservative patient rights for the wealthy.

Mr. Obama's ambitious agenda -- ranging from expanding health-care coverage to cutting farm subsidies to cutting wasteful defense projects -- touches almost every part of the U.S. economy. It threatens to disrupt the business models of a broad swath of America's biggest companies.

Opinion polls indicate that Mr. Obama's broad goals enjoy popular support. But crucial details of the president's agenda will be decided in coming months by close-in legislative fighting, where big industries and the members of Congress that support them have plenty of clout. At the same time, threatened interests are gearing up to shape the coming debates with multimillion-dollar public-relations and lobbying campaigns.

(So when the price of everything goes up, we can thank the multimillion dollar lobbying P.R. campaigns. These CEO types really have no clue about how the people feel right now. Their "fear-campaigns" aren't likely to work this time, as they expect them to. Sooner or later, fear turns to anger. It's already happening and has been for some time, from what we are hearing. What's more, unlike during the Clinton administration, a greater mass of people know who is to blame for the nightmare in which we find ourselves.

Politicians would be well advised not to get involved with these greedy monsters on the now dangerous trail they tread.)

The agriculture lobby quickly recoiled Wednesday against President Obama's vow to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," though industry leaders and farm-state legislators weren't sure which government payments they'll have to defend.

"We were surprised President Obama included farm payments in his speech," said Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "But it is Congress where the rubber meets the road."

Newscom

Washington's K Street is a popular address for the nation's lobbying groups.

A plunge in commodity grain prices since last summer is shrinking profits across the farm sector, making it even more politically dicey for farm-state legislators to go along with any cuts in federal aid. Earlier this month, the U.S. Agriculture Department predicted that U.S. net farm income, a rough measure of profitability, will drop 20% this year to $71.2 billion from last year's record-high $89.3 billion.

The line in the president's speech about agribusiness seemed to merge two distinct ideas for overhauling subsidies. While the president didn't define "large agribusinesses," he favored as a presidential candidate limiting the amount of federal subsidies an individual grower can receive to $250,000, an idea that is included on the rural agenda of the White House Web site. The Senate voted down such a proposal as recently as December 2007.

The other idea floating around Washington is to scrap a type of subsidy check called the "fixed direct payment," which since 1996 has put about $68 billion into the pockets of growers. According to farm lobbyists, Tom Vilsack, the newly minted agriculture secretary, has been telling farm trade groups in recent weeks that fixed direct payments have outlived their usefulness.

Tom Vilsack

Meanwhile, an alliance of electric utilities, coal and mining companies said it will spend as much as $40 million to make sure Congress approves a global-warming plan with funding for technology to reduce emissions that includes carbon capture and storage at coal-fired plants. In his speech, Mr. Obama called for a $15 billion-a-year investment in clean-energy sources, including clean coal.

Joe Lucas, a senior vice president of communications for the industry coalition, says the industry is "winning the public-policy debate," but will continue funding advertisements in order to "continue to be out there in the public dialogue."

Even before Mr. Obama's speech, the defense industry had stepped up its advertising and lobbying efforts this week in response to the president's vow to crack down on defense-project cost overruns, and to separate proposals in Congress to cut off certain expensive weapons programs. Mr. Obama's criticism, industry officials fear, is a foreshadowing of deep cuts to come.

(The defense industry has been one of the biggest wasters of money in the U.S. for years. We all remember the $400.00 toilet seats and $99.00 hammers in the '80s. Nothing has changed, but it is about to.)

The Aerospace Industries Association of America has spent $2 million so far on an ad campaign urging that defense spending shouldn't be slashed to offset shortfalls in other areas.

Boeing Co. announced Wednesday new players in its Washington team, including a new top lobbyist, David H. Morrison, who hails from powerhouse firm Podesta Group.

(Podesta, eh? Some how, I think this just may prove our point, that seeing the nation in terms of Democrat and Republican is a false duality and a huge distraction from what's really going on.)

Defense companies have a wind at their back: the jobs they create, and the congressional support that goes with them. That could provide a boost to Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-22 Raptor, the Air Force's most advanced fighter, whose production line will have to begin shutting down if more jets aren't ordered soon.

Lockheed is mobilizing grass-roots Web efforts and traditional lobbying to keep the plane going, and the Air Force will ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates for more planes. But it's still not clear whether he will allocate money for more of the $143 million jets, which have been faulted for their high cost and for their origin as a Cold War-era system.

—Elizabeth Williamson and August Cole contributed to this article.

Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com and Scott Kilman at scott.kilman@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A4

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Let The Sun Shine In......