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'Grand Bargain' Charade a Scheme to Protect Corporate Welfare |
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Thursday, 15 November 2012 14:46 |
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Nader writes: "Congress is still talking about a 'Grand Bargain' that 'balances' far more spending cuts than tax increases ... Don't buy it!"
Ralph Nader on Meet the Press. (photo: NBC)
'Grand Bargain' Charade a Scheme to Protect Corporate Welfare
By Ralph Nader, Common Dreams
15 November 12
 ongress is still talking about a "Grand Bargain" that "balances" far more spending cuts than tax increases. That is another way of saying that you - the consumer of Medicare and Medicaid services, the recipient of Social Security, and the average taxpayer will take the brunt of the spending cuts, while the wealthy get their income taxes restored, not raised, to their pre-Bush modest levels. Don't buy it!
There are two ways to cut Medicare and Medicaid. The right wingers want to cut benefits. Consumers want to cut vendor fraud, the overcharging and the immense over-diagnosis, over-treatment and erroneous or unnecessary procedures and prescriptions documented so often by, among others, the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Don't think this is small stuff. The waste and fraud amount to hundreds of billions of dollars a year! Americans pay the highest prices for drugs in the world even though most of them were developed in the U.S. significantly based on government research, development and with tax credit subsidies for Big Pharma. Even Mr. Obama's 2013 budget recognizes savings from excessive drug industry pricing.
The nation's leading expert, Harvard's Malcolm Sparrow, has estimated that computerized billing fraud and abuse is anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the nation's health bill. This adds up to $270 billion to $650 billion a year. A big slice of that fraud is taken out of Medicare and Medicaid.
A single-payer, full Medicare for all system - formerly supported by President Obama, Hillary Clinton and many members of Congress, before Mr. Obama took it off the table in 2009 - would cut present administrative costs in half. Canada's system, which allows patients to freely choose their doctor and hospital, covers everyone for half of the $9000 per capita that Americans will pay this year. Our system leaves 50 million people uncovered of whom 45,000 will die this year alone due to lack of coverage, according to a peer-reviewed study by Harvard Medical School researchers.
Longer range savings come from reducing medical malpractice, hospital-induced infections and plain errors that annually cost 200,000 lives, and more injuries and sicknesses. Some hospitals are proving these savings can come quickly with common sense solutions: better sanitation, checklists and stronger internal peer reviews.
The trilogy of health care fraud, waste and abuse requires public discussion, along with the vastly greater returns from better funded policing of the healthcare system. Yet pundits and columnists ignore reaping savings from the bloated healthcare industry and assume the cuts must overwhelmingly come out of people's hides - namely benefits.
As economist Dean Baker has written, we don't need to cut Social Security benefits (already solid for the next 25 years) whether in money or later age eligibility.
Congress could also simply raise the social security tax on incomes above $115,000, increase the minimum wage, inflation adjusted, to that of 1968! And adopt other long-overdue improvements such as disability enforcement efficiencies. The initiatives will move the trust fund to sustainability for the next 75 years.
The deep bias of public dialogue here, whether in such reborn deficit-reduction commissions as Simpson-Bowles or in the general media is revealed in the use of the word "entitlements." It is only used to apply to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which involve recycling peoples' tax dollars. It is not used to describe the massive corporate entitlements shoveled out daily to business welfarists in the form of subsidies, bailouts, giveaways, tax loopholes, debt revocations, loan guarantees, discounted insurance and other aid to dependent corporations. Why? Power produces privileges.
When 30 large companies, such as Verizon and General Electric, make a total of $160 billion in U.S. profits from 2008-2010 according to the Citizens for Tax Justice and pay NO federal income taxes there is a substantial loss of revenue to the U.S. Treasury. Two thirds of corporations pay no income tax on their profits under the Swiss cheese tax code.
Moreover, the corporate welfare they receive in various modes, including free research, development, and inflated government contracts (a disguised subsidy) is hardly a recycling of their taxes.
Just taxing corporations at the rate paid in the prosperous nineteen sixties would bring in hundreds of billions of dollars yearly. Another great revenue producer is a tiny Wall St. speculation sales tax, a far tinier rate than what you pay in sales taxes.
What about taxing capital gains and dividends the same as ordinary income? That was the case under Ronald Reagan. Then there is the bloated military budget, so full of redundancies, waste, boondoggle weapons programs such as the F-22, endless weapons cost over-runs, contracting fraud and boomeranging Empire expenditures as to boggle the minds. Even retired high military officers condemn giving the Pentagon such blank checks.
Anyone who has been in the armed services has seen the runaway expenditures, especially those that hugely outsourced contracts inflict on American taxpayers.
It is hard to remember when the last thorough Congressional investigation of the Pentagon budget occurred. Why, Congress can't even get the Department of Defense to provide accountings so as to be auditable by the Congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Defense budget is half of the entire U.S. government's operating expenditures and it is not even auditable!
So enough already of the twisted, evasive talk of the Grand Bargain on your backs. The Grand Bargain should be both Parties paying close attention to corporate welfare, corporate tax escapes, and corporate crime, fraud and abuse before unraveling the most meager social safety net in the western world.
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FOCUS | The "Fiscal Cliff" Mini-Deal |
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Thursday, 15 November 2012 13:26 |
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Reich writes: "Want to know what's going to happen to January's fiscal cliff? Just remember: Political deals move the same way water goes down hill - following the path of least resistance."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
The "Fiscal Cliff" Mini-Deal
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
15 November 12
 ant to know what's going to happen to January's fiscal cliff? Just remember: Political deals move the same way water goes down hill - following the path of least resistance.
Here, the path of least resistance is for congressional Republicans and the President to agree to kick the can down the road - keeping everything as it is (current spending, the Bush tax cut) until a date in the not-too-distant future - say, March 15.
As a sweetener, Republicans will have to agree to lift the debt ceiling again when a vote is needed to do so, probably in late January.
This mini-deal will give the new Congress and the White House time to craft a "grand bargain" on deficit reduction without going over the fiscal cliff.
It also enables the White House and Democrats to retain their trump card: The Bush tax cuts will automatically expire at the end of the negotiation period (in my example, March 15) unless an agreement is reached. So the top marginal tax rate automatically rises to 39 percent.
The downside of the mini-deal: Financial markets will remain uncertain about the ultimate deal. That means another several months of Wall Street gyrations. And certain industries - military contractors, drug companies, and other sectors dependent on government spending - may delay expansion or hiring until a grand bargain is struck.
But it's far better than going over the cliff.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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Hit 'Em Again, Harder |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=21753"><span class="small">Clancy Sigal, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 15 November 2012 09:08 |
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Excerpt: "Go for the jugular, please, Mr President. Do not fall, as you hint you may, for a 'Grand Bargain' that will raise the age at which citizens earn Social Security."
President Barack Obama delivers remarks during a rally in Largo, Maryland, 03/15/12. (photo: Getty Images)
Hit 'Em Again, Harder
By Clancy Sigal, Reader Supported News
15 November 12
 n college we had a football cheer when our UCLA team was scoring big: "HIT 'EM AGAIN...HARDER! HARDER!" Exactly right. For the second time in your presidential career, Barack Obama. you have a chance - the popular vote (61 to 58 million) is too close to call it an actual mandate - to do the right thing. This means, sir, no compromise, no conciliation, no "hands across the aisle" and no more blather about "nonpartisan" and "we're all Americans now".
For the moment you have the Republican crazies on the run. Go for the jugular, please, Mr President. Do not fall, as you hint you may, for a "Grand Bargain" that will raise the age at which citizens earn Social Security. And don't you dare take a single step back from sustaining, and improving on our current Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Our welfare net - bluntly, what keeps many of us alive - is the chief target of the dominant Tea Party wing of the GOP - and, more importantly, its Wall Street paymasters whose life's ambition is to drain the public treasury by channeling our payroll tax-cash into their private pockets.
Do not use us as bargaining chips to prove that you are "everybody's president". You are not. Right now you are OUR president. You belong to the temporary voters' coalition of America's blacks and Latinos and gays and women and union members many of whom worked their tails off to keep you in the White House. Who do you think won you Ohio and Michigan - and thus the presidency? You owe us.
The ballyhooed "fiscal cliff" and "deficit crisis" are smokescreens behind which temporarily shellshocked rightwing strategists like Karl Rove and Paul Ryan and their super-rich bankers (the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson etc) will, I promise, revive and maneuver to take advantage of your notorious weakness for conciliation (i.e. surrender).
Their slogan is "Fix The Debt"; meaning, fix us good and proper. Already, as the Financial Times reports, under various rubrics, such as the Simpson-Bowles Commission, The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Third Way, Concord Coalition etc., the same corporations that poured hate-money into Romney now are amassing a new $30 million war chest to re-attack our benefits as a "threat to the nation". To them we're fiscal terrorists just by accepting what we paid for.
For the moment, sir, we Obama voters have kept the barbarians from the gate. (Incidentally, I don't include all Tea Partiers in this category. Some libertarian Tea Party members helped win liberal pro-marijuana measures in Colorado and Washington states. Is it merely a wish-dream that, on specific issues and a smarter approach they, too, can be won over to the side of the angels?)
But true vampires never die. They'll be back literally with a vengeance. Like Jack Nicholson smashing at his wife's door with his axe in "The Shining", they're stoppable (see recent election results) but relentless. They never give up, it's in their history and nature, almost in their genes, to sabotage America's skeletal safety net. Traditionally they hate welfare-and-health programs because they fear and hate the people (us) who are the beneficiaries of these "entitlements" we pay for in our taxes. With his 47% gaffe Romney spoke from the beating heart of capitalist America: they truly believe we are moochers picking their overstuffed pockets. (And let's hear it for the anonymous kitchen helper who hid the video recorder at the Florida fundraiser where Mitt dug his grave, courtesy of Mother Jones magazine.)
Paul Ryan & Co. and the hardest-line Tea Party poujadists, and their corporate backers, change form but hardly ever change. In one shape or another they've been with us since at least the 1930's when Franklin D.Roosevelt cursed the ultra-rich Liberty League as "economic royalists" and joyfully welcomed their hate. John Kennedy had his Birchers. The ever-compromising Bill Clinton had his Vince Foster-suicide conspiracy nuts. At this month's election we all saw how the wealthy knuckledraggers went hysterically ape, with their Obama-the-Muslim-socialist-Godless-traitor-illegitimate-Kenyan venom, all synonyms for attacking us - the unrich, luckless, poor, workingclass and under-water middle class Yahoo racism failed ... just.
It's a truism that the Republicans lost because they were in denial about a demographically changing America. But I wonder if we're not in denial too - denying just how strong we are - strong enough to firmly, and with fire, reject deals with people who mean us harm..
The signs are not good, sir. Harry Reid, the leader of your Senate Democrats, immediately signaled his willingness to surrender, "It's better to dance (with the other side) than fight." Who says? Arch-reactionary John Boehner, the weakened House Republican leader and a sworn enemy of everything we want Obama to stand for, preaches, "Mr. President, this is your moment...We're ready to lead, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans." Kumbaya.
All too predictably, from Monday's New York Times, "(This week), Mr. Obama will meet with corporate executives at the White House as he uses the nation's fiscal problems to start rebuilding relations with business leaders. Though many of them backed Mitt Romney, scores have formed a coalition to push for a budget compromise similar to the one the president seeks. He hopes to enlist them to persuade Republicans in Congress to accept higher taxes on the assurance that he can deliver Democrats' votes for future reductions in fast-growing entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid." Here we go again, with those damn "entitlements."
There's always talk on the left of "building a grass roots movement" to apply pressure on you the President. We'll wait till the cows come home. The only such movement comes together - and it's magnificent - only once every four years at election time when and if people feel their personal lives at risk. Until such a Jerusalem is built in this green and pleasant land, let's at least summon the George Orwell in all of us to decode language designed to hurt us.
The most dangerous word in the American dictionary? Bi-partisan.
Hit em again, harder, harder.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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How the Democrats Can Make the Republicans Pay |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Thursday, 15 November 2012 09:01 |
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Pierce writes: "The public has tumbled to the fact that the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats, trickle-down palaver has been a scam all along."
The US Capitol building in Washington. (photo: EPA)
How the Democrats Can Make the Republicans Pay
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
15 November 12
 esides associating myself with this morning's remarks from Professor Krugman, I'd also like to say that behaving as though you are operating out of a panic ginned-up by financiers, pundits, and people who still want your head on a stick is no way to celebrate stomping a mudhole in Willard Romney's privileged ass. The president on Friday afternoon shouldn't just give a "statement about the action we need to take to keep our economy growing and reduce our deficit." The president should call a press conference and calmly explain that giant winged lizards from hell will not rise from fissures in the earth if we hold the matter of the Gentle Fiscal Incline over until after the holidays and that, in the meantime, if the best the Republican "leadership" can do is what it's doing - to denigrate the beating they took (Mitch McConnell) or suggest that, now that Willard Romney's has had a mudhole stomped in his ass, the best way forward is for both parties to join hands and agree to implement the basics of Willard Romney's economic plan (John Boehner) - then it's probably best if we wait until cooler heads have had a couple of egg nogs and we all come back and develop a consensus that one side, you know, actually lost on Tuesday. Any questions?
It long has been my opinion that, sooner or later, it is the responsibility of the Democratic party to the future of the republic and the political commonwealth to beat the Republicans so badly in so many areas that the Republicans are faced with a choice of either historical irrelevance, or wringing the craziness out of their party by enforcing a set of party orthodoxies that does not include creationism, gay-bashing, anti-science lunacy, and the crackpot economic theory that has infected the party ever since Arthur Laffer found that cocktail napkin in the airport bar. Until that glorious day when we have proportional voting, viable third parties, and sparkling white unicorn ponies, like it or not, the Democratic party is the only political institution capable of doing that job. That it largely has shirked that job ever since the first time somebody yelled "peacenik!" at it in the late autumn of 1972 does not make the job less real, or the urgency of doing it less immediate.
Because the Republican economic vision for the country lost as decisively on Tuesday as Todd Akin did, and for the same reason. The economic principles of Paul Ryan are no less nutty than Akin's views on the magical contraceptive powers of the potions within the ladyparts. They are a recipe for oligarchy for the few and dystopia for the many. And, in case anybody missed it, the zombie-eyed granny-starving "budget" geek's home state went for the president in a very big way, and he only won re-election to his House seat by 11 points, the lowest margin of victory he's ever had.
The project should begin with the economy, because the choice of historical irrelevance or wringing out the crazy on other issues is going to take care of itself. Demographics are going to force the choice on the Republicans as far as immigration goes, and also on issues relating to the reproductive freedom of women. The country as a whole has shown that it's going to force the choice on them as regards gay rights. The ocean is going to make the choice for them on climate change. It is the economic issues, then, on which that choice will have to be forced on them by the Democrats directly, and within the framework of political negotiation.
In short, and on the pure politics of it, there's really nothing to negotiate. The public wants a more progressive tax code with fewer loopholes for the wealthy. (The carried-interest loophole is a disgrace to an evolved democracy.) The public wants programs like Social Security and Medicare strengthened, but not by "reforming" the guaranteed-benefit part of them out of the equation. The public wants more regulation on Wall Street than even Dodd-Frank has given us. The public has tumbled to the fact that the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats, trickle-down palaver has been a scam all along. You know what happens with a rising tide if you don't have a boat? You drown.
But, thanks to our old friend Mr. Madison, budget bills have to originate in the House, which means we have to involve the Speaker, which means we have to take into account the fact that he presides over a hatchful of boobies. We take that into account. One, two, three. Okay, we done? It is then explained to Mr. Boehner that the Romney economic plan is not going to be the rock on which we build the church. It is then explained to Mr. Boehner that, henceforward, there will be more punishment for obstructionism than there will be a reward for it. The Bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000 are as dead as Richard Mourdock's political career. The payroll tax cut goes on. How he explains it to the people in the House is his own business, and he can take as much time as he wants to do it, but there will be no hostage-taking this time around. What was done to Willard Romney can be done to John Boehner. He can be loyal to his caucus, and the clamorous hallelujah chorus of wingnuts urging them on from the cheap seats, or he can be loyal to the people of his home state, which did, after all, clinch the election for the president.
I will stipulate, under severe coercion, that the president has an obligation to govern the country with Republicans, even the toweringly awful Republicans who hold a majority in the House. But he is under absolutely no obligation to make John Boehner's life easier politically, nor is he under any obligation to soften the hard choices that the Republicans have backed themselves into after three decades of encouraging the crazy in all aspects of our public life. Here is Exhibit A. Choose, Mr. Speaker. Those people, or a part in actually helping to govern the country. There's no third alternative. Not any more.
(Has Mr. Needham there ever been in an actual war? Of course, not. If he had, he might've learned that, when you lose as badly as his side lost on Tuesday, you sue for terms or you get overrun.)
One of the real problems in this country has been that the Republicans have taken extreme positions and paid no lasting political price for them. They've lost election, certainly, but elections are not the only place where a political price must be paid. It must also be paid within the everyday negotiations within which the government functions. It is time to make John Boehner choose between being a responsible constitutional officer, or being the creature of all the bats and flying things that have so damaged the country, and that have so scoured the soul of his party. That's his problem. The president should give him until after the first of the year to think about it.
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