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Weekly Mulch: What’s Missing from the New Clean Energy Agenda?

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

Nuclear power, biofuels, clean coal: These are the Obama administration's answers to climate change. The 2011 budget, released this week, promised new loans for the construction of nuclear power plants, and on Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), White House, and other departments detailed steps to encourage ethanol and clean coal production.

These initiatives may garner support from conservatives, but their ascendancy comes at a price. Support for renewable fuel sources, like wind and solar, has dwindled. President Barack Obama did encourage Senate Democrats to pass a climate change bill, but some moderates are bucking the cap-and-trade provisions that could tamp down carbon emissions. Those moderates are pushing for legislation that leaves carbon caps out entirely.

It hasn't been a good week for climate advocates. On top of the Obama administration's overtures to crusty, old energy industries, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has had to fend off pressure to resign. The IPCC published a report with a badly sourced fact about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting, and when scientists pointed out the error, Pachauri would not cop to the mistake. (If you missed the beginning of this to-do, Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard covered the controversy back in January.)

Given this country's weak efforts to tamp down carbon emissions, though, perhaps the IPCC's prediction that those glaciers likely will disappeared by 2035 will turn out to be accurate.

New nuclear plants—but at what cost?

Obama’s budget, as Sheppard reports at Mother Jones, is upping funding for nuclear plant development, even though previous nuclear projects have run wildly over budget. The president has always supported increased nuclear production. As an Illinois Senator, Obama had Exelon Corporation, the country’s largest nuclear operator, in his constituency. The company continued to support him as a presidential candidate. The proposed funding runs in the neighborhood of $54.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear projects. That's good news for an industry that’s in need of cash. As Sheppard explains, without governmental backing, these plants would have little chance of being built.

“Even as public opinion toward nuclear power has warmed, projected construction costs for new plants have soared, with a single reactor now estimated to cost as much as $12 billion,” she writes. “In fact, the outlook for nuclear plants looks so dire that even Wall Street banks have balked at financing them unless the government underwrites the deal.”

The Obama administration is also backing research into nuclear waste disposal, a prerequisite for nuclear expansion. No matter how "green" nuclear energy production might be, so far there's no safe, sustainable way to deal with its by-products. Finding a long-term solution for nuclear waste disposal will not come cheaply.

Biofuels move us backwards

The administration’s support for biofuels was bigger slap in the face to environmentalists, though. Just a few years ago, ethanol made from corn or switchgrass ranked high on the list of renewable fuels that could spring America from its Middle East oil addiction. In practice, however, biofuels have proven more environmentally destructive and less efficient than advocates had hoped. With farmers in the Midwest knee-deep in corn marked for ethanol production, though, backing away from biofuels is politically dicey.

The consequences are more than political, however. At Grist, Tom Philpott argues that support for biofuels will ultimately drive global carbon emission up, rather than down.

“As ethanol factories continue sucking in more and more corn, plantation owners in places like Brazil and Argentina will put more grassland and even rainforest under the plow to make up for the shortfall, resulting in huge carbon emissions,” Philpott writes. “That dire effect of our ethanol program, known as indirect land-use change, likely nullifies any scant climate benefits from ethanol.”

It’s not just corn and switchgrass that pose a problem, either. As Gina Marie Cheeseman reports at Care2, algae farms, another potential source of biofuel, face their own challenges. Algae demands high energy input and could release more carbon dioxide emissions that it would save, according to a new report from the University of Virginia.

There’s more research to be done before writing algae energy production off, however. In January, the Department of Energy said it would sink $44 million into work on algae pools. Industry players like ExxonMobile are also underwriting research on the subject, Cheeseman writes.

No room for innovation

Moving towards energy sources like nuclear power and ethanol does take the country a step closer to responsible energy production. But right now, the Obama administration is not leaving room for new or ambitious ideas that could do more. Wind and solar, which would form the best foundation for a sustainable energy future, have few advocates in Congress. They also seem to have no role in the near-term energy plan.

Ethanol was the Midwest’s first green industry, for instance, but there are other possibilities for juicing up the region’s clean energy production. In The Nation, Lisa Margonelli lays out the case for “gray power," which is recycled energy produced by the old, dirty smokestacks that ring cities like Cleveland.

In this vision, twentieth century industry can produce twenty-first century energy. Waste energy, Margonelli argues, “can be profitably "recycled" onto the grid to create power as clean as that from solar and wind but far cheaper.”

“In fact, energy now lost as steam and gases by the region's manufacturing plants, as well as municipal and agricultural waste, could create as much energy as sixty-nine nuclear power plants, according to figures commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency,” she says. “This power could strengthen the region's electrical grid and preserve jobs by making local manufacturing plants more economically stable, while making the region a leader in greener technology.”

A project like Margonelli imagines, however, would require significant commitment and vision from the federal government, both of which are lacking right now.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Weekly Pulse: Who Are Landrieu’s Alleged Phone Tamperers?

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

The four young men arrested last week for allegedly attempting to tamper with the phones at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have ties to Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, radical campus activists, and even the intelligence community.

It appears that Landrieu was targeted, at least indirectly, because of her stance on health care reform. Two of the men posed as telephone repairmen while a third taped them with his cell phone. A fourth alleged accomplice was arrested in a car a few blocks away.

Right wing operative James O'Keefe, famous for posing as a pimp to "expose" unethical behavior at the anti-poverty group ACORN, claimed that he and his crew were trying to expose a problem with the phones at Landrieu's office which were keeping constituents from reaching her.

Constituents getting a busy signal?

O'Keefe says they wanted to embarrass Landrieu by exposing whatever was wonky about her phones, but that justification strains credulity. Defenders of the four implied that Landrieu's people might have somehow disabled their own phones to avoid angry constituents. Supposedly, these citizens wanted to express their outrage at Landrieu's decision to vote for the Senate health reform bill in exchange for a line item to give Louisiana an additional $300 million federal health care dollars.

Some callers have reported trouble getting through to their representatives. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports that members of the Tea Party movement have complained to her about not being able to get through to their members of congress. She tried calling some senators and also had a hard time getting through to a real person.

Now that he's out of jail, O'Keefe is furiously spinning his activities as investigative journalism gone awry, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. O'Keefe told Sean Hannity in an interview that these tactics were standard journalistic tools. But let's be realistic, here. Impersonating a repairman to covertly access a Senator's phones is more Watergate burglar than Woodward and Bernstein.

O'Keefe's activist theater

O'Keefe and his buddies are political operatives who come out of the world of right wing campus organizing, as Dave Weigel reports for the Washington Independent. Over the years, they've earned notoriety by using various forms of political theater and media to advance their issues. O'Keefe and Ben Wetmore, a fellow activist who let the alleged tamperers crash at his house before the Landrieu operation, even got married to each other to illustrate that shady people can marry each other for benefits, just like with straight marriage. On his now-defunct blog, Countermedia, Wetmore urged conservative activists to target seniors with a health care robocall featuring a Barack Obama impersonator.

The Landrieu crew is no stranger to more traditional forms of conservative politics, either. O'Keefe and Wetmore both formerly worked for the conservative Leadership Institute, a group that funds political training for right wing activists. Fake repairman Robert Flanagan interned for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and a GOP congresswoman. O'Keefe was revealed to be on the payroll of the right wing news site Big Government at the time of his arrest.

The Landrieu incident is a continuation of their campaign to use guerrilla video for political dirty tricks. O'Keefe became famous last year for videos that appear to show him dressing up as a pimp and soliciting questionable advice from ACORN staffers. The video touched off a panic that led to ACORN's federal funding being yanked.

Links to the intelligence community

Maybe they hoped to make the news rather than break it. The men are charged with attempting to tamper with Landrieu's phones, not just observe them. As I reported for AlterNet last week, one of the alleged tamperers has longstanding ties to the intelligence community.

In 2008, Stan Dai was the deputy director of a recruiting program for aspiring spies at Trinity Washington University. As Sahil Kapur reported in Raw Story, this program was funded by a $250,000 grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Yesterday, Laura Flanders interviewed Dr. David Price and me on GRITtv about the links between O'Keefe's crew and the intelligence community. Dr. Price is an anthropologist who studies the relationship between the intelligence community and academia. He has been keeping a close eye so-called "centers of academic excellence" funded by the intelligence community on college campuses.

Right now, most of what we know about the incident comes from a single affidavit from an FBI officer and leaks from law enforcement. We'll probably learn a lot more about the men and their motives if they go on trial.

'Very, very close' to passing reform

In other health care news, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told participants on a conference call yesterday that Democrats are "very, very close" to passing health care reform. According to Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, who was on the call, Pelosi signaled that the House will not pass a bill until the Senate passes a list of modifications to be reinserted during budget reconciliation. Brian Beutler of TPM DC reports that progressives shouldn't get their hopes up for reviving the public option: Pelosi conceded that a public option lacks the necessary support in the Senate.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Don’t Let Citizens United Wreck Our Economy

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.

The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court's hubris in no uncertain terms:

The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.

Citizens United and the financial crisis

How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.

But over the past few decades, we've watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.

The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:

Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.

The bank lobby and the AIG bailout

In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets—if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.

CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG's betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.

"The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout ... is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government," Hiar writes. "The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG—including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing."

The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.

With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.

Redefining corruption

So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn't just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined "corruption" to give corporations—and anyone else—greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:

The most important line in the decision ... was this one: "ingratiation and access ... are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.

Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt—Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay's legislative agenda. The court's ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay's corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.

"Tom DeLay's view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,," Gibney says. "I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision."

Why citizens need to speak out now

So what can we do about this? As GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court's recent decision.

If you liked the bank bailouts, then there's plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn't, then it's time to speak up.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

GRITtv and Air America’s Domino Effect

If you're a progressive news junkie, you probably heard about the death of Air America Radio last week. (If not, check out this very sad web page.) The network closed after nearly six years, citing "the laws of economics." They are indeed immutable—unless, of course, you're too big to fail. Unfortunately, Air America wasn't.

The loss of Air America—like In These Times, a member of The Media Consortium—is bad enough, but its demise is affecting our favorite online video news outlet, GRITtv.

It turns out that viewer-supported GRITtv, hosted by Laura Flanders, a former ITT columnist, has broadcast from Air America's New York City studios since its launch in May 2008. Now they need a new home, and it won't be cheap: Sarah Jaffe of GRITtv says the move to a new home will cost nearly $50,000. Here's the call she sent out for donations:

We’re sorry to see our [Air America] friends and officemates go, and wish them the best. We’re also stuck in a tight spot. GRITtv has broadcast from the Air America studios from the start, but now have to find a new home. It’s not going to be cheap! We’re looking at nearly $50,000 in moving expenses, equipment purchases, and cost increases, and we have to raise it fast.

Every donation you make will be matched dollar for dollar by Free Speech TV, and will go to helping us move to new studio and office space to continue bringing you your GRITtv fix with as little interruption as possible. We know we are going to end up with even better space and an even better show for you all. We’ve got other new, exciting features coming soon as well.

Every contribution helps. We appreciate all your support in helping us make GRITtv even better.

You can donate to help GRIT here, and look at Facebook photos of an office in sudden flux here.

From everyone at In These Times, best of luck, GRITtv! Survival ain't so easy in the independent media world... and we would know, unfortunately. Hang in there.

Weekly Mulch: Climate Change On Obama’s Back Burner

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.

The Obama administration's attitude towards climate change still represents a remarkable shift from the Bush years, when global warming was treated as little more than a fairy tale. But in the past year, Congressional squabbling has stalled climate legislation, and international negotiators nearly gridlocked in talks over carbon admissions at the multinational Copenhagen conference. Without strong leadership from the president, work to prevent this looming environmental crisis will stall.

Obama did address global warming skeptics, saying that they should support investment in clean energy, “because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.”

“And America must be that nation,” Obama said.

No push for climate bill

Despite his combative language, the president did not challenge Congress to push for real solutions to ballooning carbon emissions and energy consumption. As Forrest Wilder of The Texas Observer notes, Obama “uttered the phrase 'climate change' precisely once.”

The Senate has already wait-listed the climate bill: Health care came first. With health care reform now in line behind work on jobs and bank regulation, climate legislation has little chance of passing the Senate in the coming months, let alone making it to the president's desk.

If Congress lets this work wait until after the midterm elections, the United States will show up at international negotiations in December 2010 as a leader in carbon emissions yet again, but with little in hand to show a way forward.

Clean energy, not renewable energy

When the president did bring up climate issues, he focused on their connection between climate reform and potential job creation. Obama highlighted areas for growth, not in renewable energy fields like wind or solar power, but in nuclear power, natural gas, and clean coal.

Yes, these fuel sources could decrease the country’s carbon emissions. But they are not solutions that will revolutionize energy production. Grist’s David Roberts was floored that the speech omitted renewable energy entirely and kowtowed to a more conservative litany of energy projects. "I suppose it was done to flatter conservative Senators that will have to vote for the bill Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham are working on," he writes. (The three Senators are working on a version of the climate bill designed to appeal to Republicans.)

"But the SOTU is not a policy negotiation," Roberts says. "It’s a bully pulpit, a chance to shape rather than respond to existing narratives."

Roberts argues that progressive supporters would benefit from a stronger message. If activists knew that the White House stands behind a real shift in America’s energy policy, they could use that prompt to drive action on climate change.

What was missing

While touting the virtues of off-shore drilling, Obama overlooked other policies that could broker real change. Although he admonished Congress to pass a climate bill, he did not pressure the legislature on what he’d like that bill to include. He did not mention cap-and-trade, the mechanism the House bill relies on to tamp down emissions and dirty energy use.

President Obama did touch on transportation reforms that could decrease the country’s use of fossil fuels.

“There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains,” Obama said. He cited a high-speed rail project that broke ground on Tuesday in Tampa, FL, as evidence that America could best the rest of the world in creating new energy-efficient technology.

But one or two high-profile projects won't be enough to challenge Europe's network of high-speed trains or China's investments in solar power. The White House could put the country at the forefront of sustainable technologies, but it'll take more money than the president has committed. In AlterNet’s ideal state of the union, projects like the railway would merit sustained attention and funding. Funding for the high-speed train came from this year’s stimulus bill, and there’s no guarantee that similar projects will find federal funding in the future.

“Continued support is still needed" for green jobs and clean energy, Alternet’s editorial staff argues. “It's unclear yet how Obama's new proposal for a three-year spending freeze will apply to this sector, but a boost is what is needed, not cuts.”

Green jobs

Michelle Chen argues for In These Times that the president is right to subordinate climate issues to economic policy. “The jobs angle is more than sugar-coating,” she says. A recent Pew Research Center poll put climate change at the end of Americans’ long list of cares, and a Brookings Institution study found that they’re no longer willing to pay as much for greener products.

Jobless workers need green in their pockets most of all, and so far politicians’ promises haven't made up for the slack economy.

“No matter how slick the marketing, confidence in green jobs may wilt even further absent real investments in the beleaguered blue-collar workforce,” Chen writes.

Copenhagen accord losing momentum

The small role that climate change played in the state of the union address only emphasized the downward momentum of the issue since the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen. Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes talked to six leaders in climate change activism, and none of them offered a different strategy than they had last year.

That same stasis is showing up in Europe, as well. Spain, which currently leads the European Union, proposed that the European Union’s negotiating position should remain the same as its position before the Copenhagen conference, according to Inter Press Service.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who’s working on climate change legislation in the Senate, offered advice to climate activists at a clean energy forum in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports that Sen. Kerry encouraged his audience to get angrier, louder, and more active, in the mode of the conservative Tea Partiers, who have earned plenty of attention. After his speech, he also recalled the tactics that pushed landmark legislation like the Clean Air Act through Congress.

If climate change is going to play a larger role in the next state of the union, the citizens and groups concerned about this issue need to do something to put it on the agenda. Otherwise, next year, the president may find it just as easy to skim over it again.

Weekly Pulse: Did Wiretappers Target Senator Over Healthcare Deal?

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

The conservative videographer who donned a pimp suit to embarrass the anti-poverty group ACORN was arrested in New Orleans, LA for allegedly conspiring to bug the office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

It's not clear why Landrieu was targeted, but many suspect that she was singled out because she played a pivotal role in advancing health care reform.

Filmmaker James O'Keefe and three other men have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. At RH Reality Check, Rachel Larris notes that, if convicted, the four could face up to 10 years in prison.

Like chum in the conservative shark tank

Landrieu, a conservative Democrat, negotiated an extra $100 million in Medicaid funds for Louisiana in exchange for allowing the health care bill to come to the senate floor. Accepting health care for the poor in the interest of health reform was like chum in the conservative shark tank.

Rush Limbaugh called her the most expensive prostitute of all time. "She may be easy, but she's not cheap," crowed Glenn Beck. It got so bad that Democrats call on Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) was called upon to denounce the chorus of conservatives attacking his fellow Louisiana senator as a prostitute. (Correction: Vitter did not call Landrieu a prostitute.)

O'Keefe must have realized that an exposé of Mary Landrieu would be a hot commodity.

"This is Watergate meets YouTube," said Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn said on MSNBC's Hardball last night.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Health care reform in limbo

The arrests could not have come at a better time for the Democrats. Health care reform is in limbo as congressional leaders plan their next move after losing their filibuster-proof majority. The bugging scandal is deflecting attention from tense internal negotiations.

Brian Beutler of TPMDC reports that the House Democrats are converging on a strategy to get reform done: The House will pass the Senate bill and the Senate will fix it through budget reconciliation.

The Republican counter-strategy

While the Democrats agonize over what to do next, that senate Republicans are honing strategies to thwart any Democratic attempt to pass health care reform through budget reconciliation, as Dave Weigel reports in the Washington Independent. The reconciliation process allows both sides to vote on unlimited number of amendments. GOP leadership is hinting that if Dems take the reconciliation route, they will be forced to vote on every politically embarrassing amendment the opposition can dream up.

The stakes are high. In the American Prospect, Paul Starr reminds progressives that there's till a lot worth fighting for, even without a public option. For all its faults, the Senate bill would still cover 30 million uninsured Americans, expand Medicaid, end discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and set up exchanges designed to keep rising insurance premiums in check.

A memo for reform

Finally, our sources tell us that Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly is making quite a stir on Capitol Hill with his memo advising the House Democratic caucus on the need to forge ahead with health care reform. In 1994, conservative commentator William Kristol wrote a health care memo to Republicans that became the backbone of their anti-reform strategy, even up to the present day. Benen hopes his memo will be a useful counterweight for Democrats. Benen warns the Democrats that it's far riskier to fail than to pass reform that doesn't please everyone.

Weekly Audit: Just Who Is Obama Fighting For?

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

Progressives have waited a year for President Barack Obama to roll up his sleeves and fight for serious financial reform. Last week, he finally jumped in the ring, telling weak-kneed Senators to stand up to Wall Street and endorsing a critical ban on risky securities trading.

But while it was good to see Obama start throwing financial punches against the banks, this week he also started throwing them at workers. His recent rhetoric on implementing a spending freeze to reduce the deficit is an economic catastrophe in the making. It indicates that Obama is willing to sacrifice jobs to try and win over Republicans.

A spending freeze would kill jobs

A three-year spending freeze is crazy talk. It's a right-wing ideologue's dream that accomplishes nothing and drives millions of people out of work. John McCain campaigned on it during his 2008 presidential run. Our long-term deficit problems are tied to the rising cost of health care. If you want to fix the deficit, fix health care. In the short-term, there is no deficit problem. In fact, the U.S. fiscal position looks very good compared to many European nations.

As Matthew Rothschild notes for The Progressive, a spending freeze would kill any legislation to create jobs. With unemployment at 10%, the economy desperately needs another round of government spending to put people back to work. While the abrupt policy reversal is clearly a political ploy, voters care much more about results than they care about ideology. If Obama actively sabotages the job market to win over conservative deficit-hawks, he'll be putting his political future in serious jeopardy.

And yet, as Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama's recent, ramped-up rhetoric against banks still marks a significant change in tone. For most of the year, Obama hasn't been involved in the financial reform debate at all, letting Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner capitulate to Wall Street and the politicians it owns. Benen highlights the end of Obama's speech announcing his new banking rules on Jan. 21. Obama says:

So if these folks want a fight, it's a fight I'm ready to have. And my resolve is only strengthened when I see a return to old practices at some of the very firms fighting reform; and when I see soaring profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms claiming that they can't lend more to small business, they can't keep credit card rates low, they can't pay a fee to refund taxpayers for the bailout without passing on the cost to shareholders or customers -- that's the claims they're making. It's exactly this kind of irresponsibility that makes clear reform is necessary.

Saving the CFPA

Katrina vanden Huevel lays out Obama's new financial reform agenda in a column for The Nation, praising a new $117 billion tax on the nation's largest banks, a plan to cap overall bank size, and a proposal to ban high-risk trading by economically essential commercial banks (more on that later).

But vanden Huevel also rightfully denounces recent indications that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) may cave to lobbyist pressure and drop the measure to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) from the Senate's financial reform bill.

The death of the CFPA would be a devastating blow to reform. Existing bank regulatory agencies see their primary job as protecting bank profits, meaning that any time the interests of the U.S. consumer conflict with those of bank balance sheets, the regulators have shafted consumers. Current federal banking regulators not only failed to enforce consumer protection laws, they went so far as to join the bank lobby in suing state regulators who were trying to protect households from predatory lending.

Fortunately, Obama isn't taking Dodd's bank lobby-induced cowardice sitting down. At Talking Points Memo, Rachel Slajda highlights a New York Times report that claims Obama met with Dodd and told him that the CFPA is a "non-negotiable."

Commercial banks are important

There's a lot to like in Obama's plan to bar commercial banks from participating in risky securities trading. As I emphasize in a piece for AlterNet, commercial banks form the backbone of the U.S. economy. They're the institutions that accept your paychecks as deposits and keep businesses moving with loans. They also form the core of the economy's payments system. Without commercial banks, nobody can pay anybody else for goods and services—the economy literally shuts down.

Nevertheless, in the late 1990s, regulators and lawmakers tore down the walls between commercial banking and riskier, complex securities trading, allowing these critical economic utilities to gamble in the capital markets like high-flying hedge funds. That kind of behavior puts the entire economy in jeopardy, and Obama's proposal to end such behavior is very urgently needed.

But, as vanden Huevel and I both note, Obama's cap on bank size is a little too timid. Obama indicated that he wants to prevent big banks from getting bigger going forward. That misses the point.

Bustin' up "too big to fail"

Financial giants like Citigroup and Bank of America are already much too big and pose an economic threat. That's why we refer to them as "too big to fail," and why the government had to devote over $17 trillion to saving them. Obama must cap bank size and break up our behemoth banks into companies that are small enough to fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. A good rule of thumb: 1% of gross domestic product.

Shouting down the bank lobbyists

In Mother Jones, David Corn emphasizes that Obama's credentials as a serious reformer depend more on his policy maneuvering than on his rhetoric. While it has been extremely promising see Obama finally demanding something serious from the financial giants that taxpayers saved, he'll have to shout down the bank lobbyists to secure meaningful economic—or political—gains. Corn writes:

If Obama aims to be widely regarded as a warrior for the middle class, he will have to take some mighty swings that cut through the clutter. Proclaiming 'I am a fighter' will not be enough. He will have to name his foes (financial institutions, insurance companies, Republicans, and perhaps recalcitrant Democrats) and truly exchange blows.

Obama's stance on the CFPA alone should be enough to get the lobbyists into a lather, but he'll have to keep up the fight on multiple fronts if he wants to protect our economy from the Wall Street recklessness that spurred millions of foreclosures and sent the unemployment rate soaring into double digits.

Last week, Obama finally told us he was willing to fight for economic change. Now it looks like he's going to attack anyone who is looking for a job. Let's hope he turns it around before it's too late.

Corporations, Corruption, and the New Supreme Court Ruling

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United vs. FEC that the government has no business regulating the campaign contributions of corporations and unions. Citing First Amendment rights to free speech, the court’s slim majority (5-4) agreed that corporations should be given the same rights as individuals.

That means that corporations (including unions; i.e., any incorporated organization) can now purchase their own campaign ads in support of candidates, so long as they aren't created by the candidates themselves. According to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, these "independent expenditures" are considered "political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate."

Surprise, surprise: The precedent-overturning decision has triggered significant protest within the progressive community. In an attempt to help individuals compete with corporations, MoveOn.org is circulating a petition to pass a bill to allow public financing of elections.

Mother Jones' Nick Baumann argues that Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues "can no longer avoid the label of "activist" judges. They've turned the political system upside-down." And, as The American Prospect's Heather Gerken explains, previous cases have already restricted the government's campaign finance regulations-- "this was just the final nail in the coffin." Gerken writes:

The truth is that the most important line in the decision was not the one overruling Austin. It was this one: "ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned. Justice Kennedy didn't say that the Court was overruling these cases. But that's just what it did.

Harper’s New Must-Read Article Allleging Gitmo Torture-Homicides, Cover-Up

If you have haven't read Scott Horton's brand-new blockbuster article challenging the U.S. government's official version of how three Guantanamo prisoners died in June 2006, you owe it to yourself (and your country) to do so right now. Like every Harper's investigative article worth reading, it's long, deeply reported and shocking.

Harper's actually published the online piece, titled "The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle," a full month before it will appear in print, presumably because a printing schedule shouldn't delay what obviously ought to happen immediately: Congress should launch an official inquiry to examine the events surrounding the deaths of Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, none of whom were ever charged with a crime.

If for some reason you're still reading this and not the actual article, perhaps these three paragraphs (which don't even touch on "Camp No" and shocking/shockingly confusing autopsy details) will persuade you to:

According to the [U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service], each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

And:

The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to “conduct a visual search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.

And:

[Guantánamo guard Christopher] Penvose, from his position at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between Camp 1 and the medical clinic—the path by which any prisoners who died at Camp 1 would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being moved from Camp 1 to the clinic. In Tower 4..., another Army specialist, David Caroll, was forty-five yards from Alpha Block, the cell block within Camp 1 that had housed the three dead men. He also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He likewise reported to Hickman, and confirmed to me, that he had seen no prisoners transferred to the clinic that night, dead or alive.

If U.S. government officials tortured the three men to death, it would quite easily equal, if not surpass, the Abu Ghraib prison fiasco in terms of human rights abuses and government power run roughshod over America's foundational moral and legal principles. And if the elaborate, high-level cover-up the article alleges is also true, this story would rank as the most disgusting act of government corruption during the Bush administration. Unless, I suppose, you count misleading the country into Iraq.

Weekly Diaspora: Does Coakley’s Loss Spell Trouble for Immigration Reform?

By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger

Professional pundits and Democratic politicians are in a frenzy over what Martha Coakley's senate seat loss to Republican Scott Brown might mean for American politics.

Immigration reform in jeopardy

As Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect reports, the loss of one seat probably won't derail heath care reform, but it does make the chances of passing immigration reform slimmer. Meyerson writes that immigration reform is "necessary to restore our economic vitality and political equality," and actually passing reform would benefit the Democratic faction. Unfortunately, that means that immigration reform will require 60 votes in order to pass the senate.

The Texas Observer's Melissa del Bosque writes about the slim chances of immigration reform passing in 2010. According to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a 2011 target date is "probably more realistic." del Bosque refuses to lose hope, reminding us that Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has assured the public that "the Obama administration promised to bring up the issue in 2010." Of course, bringing up an issue and actually passing reform are two very different animals.

Holding on to hope for 2010

In her daily roundup of Spanish-language media, Erin Rosa of Campus Progress also urges a positive outlook "despite the reorganization of the Senate." Rosa relays that Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) assured the media during a telephone conference that President Obama "remembers his promise well." While "most latinos" interviewed are impatient, they hold on to hope that 2010 is the year for reform.

TPS for Haitians

Haitian undocumented that are currently within U.S. borders will be given Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as Julianne Hing reports for RaceWire. The decision only applies to Haitian immigrants in the U.S. prior to January 12, 2010. Hing observes that it is unfortunate that it took "a disaster of this magnitude" to inspire the White House to offer TPS to Haitian immigrants, though it is "a great relief."

What will the recently granted TPS status mean for Haitians that are already in deportation proceedings? Such is the case of Haitian immigrant Jean Montrevil, as Aarti Shahani reports for New America Media. Montrevil came to the U.S. on a green card in 1986 to "make it big," but in his efforts, "got stupid," and caught up in selling drugs from his taxi cab. That was 20 years ago, and Montrevil has served 11 years in prison to pay for his errors. Montrevil is now a father of four and a community leader. The Department of Homeland Security considers his prison time proper cause to deport him. Many others feel he has done his time, and is a positively contributing member of our society. Democracy Now! also covered Montrevil's story recently, as noted in the Jan. 7 Diaspora.

Invisible to the first world

Why are countries like Haiti mostly invisible to first world nations like the U.S. until catastrophe strikes? Leonardo Padura asks, before the earthquake, "Who talked about Haiti?" for IPS News. Haiti desperately needs the emergency aid so generously given today, but the country has needed help for a long time. "Let us hope that tomorrow, when the tragedy no longer dominates the headlines, and the dead are buried," writes Padura, "we will not forget Haiti exists...."

Disappointingly, "U.S. corporations, private mercenaries, Washington and the International Monetary Fund" are remembering Haiti in a rather cruel and opportunist fashion, as Benjamin Dangl reports for AlterNet. At a time of crisis and great human need, Washington D.C. is "promoting unpopular economic policies and extending military and economic control over the Haitian people." This is disturbing, as a long history of economic exploitation helped render the country vulnerable to disaster. The recent earthquake has claimed roughly 200,000 lives so far.

Haiti in context

While borders and border cities bear the brunt of blame when migrants move, the cure won't be found in bigger bails of barbed wire, or harsh enforcement tactics that deny escape from economic desperation or dangerous conditions.

Jocelyn Barnes, reporting for The Nation, provides a much needed contextualization of Haiti. There are many related factors that weakened and harmed Haiti's ability to thrive, not the least of which have been storms and earthquakes. But the privatization of Haiti's infrastructure—which was "championed" by current envoy to Haiti in charge of "leading the quake assistance brigade" former president Bill Clinton—have definitely been instrumental in the country's fate.

Marching against Arpaio

Finally, given the recent holiday celebrating the life and efforts of civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr., we would be remiss in overlooking the January 16 march in Arizona protesting Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The event was organized by Salvador Reza, a respected Mexican American activist and community organizer in Arizona. Musician Linda Ronstadt, Co-Founder of United Farm Workers Dolores Huerta, and approximately 5,000 people marched from a park to Tent City, the name for the sheriff's makeshift detention center.

Arpaio is reviled by many in the Latino and undocumented community for his methods of racial profiling and humiliating treatment of detainees. Recently, Arpaio was compared to Bull Connor by an ad published in in the Arizona Republic by 60 black leaders and the Center for New Community.

King's vision was large and led to new horizons; it cannot possibly be contained to one era, or one day on a calendar. The struggle continues, every day, everywhere.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Weekly Pulse: What Does GOP Win in Mass. Mean for Healthcare Reform?

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Last night, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to fill Teddy Kennedy's senate seat in Massachusetts. Coakley's loss puts health care reform in jeopardy.

With Coakley's defeat, the Democrats lose their filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. However, as Paul Waldman explains in The American Prospect, Coakley's loss is not the end for health care reform.

Remember, the Senate already passed its health care reform bill in December. Now, the House has to pass its version of the bill. The original plan was for House and Senate leaders to blend the two bills together in conference to create a final piece of legislation (AKA a conference report) that both houses would vote on. Once the Democrats are down to 59 votes, the Republicans can filibuster the conference report and kill health care reform.

But if the House passes the same bill the Senate just passed, there's no need to reconcile the two bills. This so-called "ping pong" approach may be the best way to salvage health care reform. Some of the flaws in the Senate bill could still be fixed later through budget reconciliation. It would be an uphill battle, but nothing compared to starting health care reform from scratch.

The second option would be to get the bill done before Scott Brown is sworn in. According to Waldman, there could be a vote within 10 days. The House and Senate have already drafted some compromise legislation, which Waldman thinks is superior to the straight Senate bill. If that language were sent to the Congressional Budget Office immediately, the Senate could vote before Brown is sworn in.

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a statement last night that Brown won't be sworn in until the election results are certified, a process that could take two weeks. Historically, the winners of special Senate elections have taken over from their interim predecessors within a couple of days. If the Republicans were in this position, they'd use every procedural means at their disposal to drag out the process. The question is whether the Democrats have the fortitude to make the system work for them.

Remember how the Republicans did everything in their power to hold up the Senate health care vote, including forcing the clerk to read the 767-page bill aloud? They were trying to delay the vote until after the Massachusetts special election. If it's okay for the GOP to stall, the Democrats should be allowed to drag their feet on swearing in Brown.

Also, remember how the Republicans fought to keep Al Franken from being seated after he defeated Norm Coleman? For his part, Franken says he's determined to pass health care reform one way or another, according to Rachel Slajda of Talking Points Memo.

Incongruously, some Democrats are arguing that rushing to a vote would be a violation of some vague democratic principle. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) wasted no time in proclaiming that there should be no vote before Brown was sworn in. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), of all people, averred last night that the Democrats should respect the democratic process and start acting like they have 59 votes while they still have 60.

All this talk of "respecting the process" is hand waving disguised as civics. According to the process, Scott Brown isn't the senator from Massachusetts yet. According to the process, you have the votes until you don't.

Talk about moving the goalposts. It's bad enough that we need 60 votes to pass a bill on any given day. Now, they'd have us believe that we also need 60 votes next week. Webb and Frank are arguing that Brown's victory obliges Democrats to behave as if Brown were already the Senator from Massachusetts. Of course, if Webb won't play ball, it's a moot point. The whole fast-track strategy is predicated on 60 votes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly thinks that Webb effectively took the fast-track option off the table with his strongly worded statement.

Katrina vanden Huevel of The Nation argues that this historic upset should be a wake up call to President Barack Obama to embrace populism with renewed fervor. I would add that Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change. There is no better way to fulfill a promise of change than to reshape the nation's health care system and provide insurance for millions of Americans.

Ping pong, anyone?

Weekly Audit: Fighting Inequality in Haiti and at Home

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

Rampant poverty can't be written off as the result of historical accident or a worker's incompetence. It is actively cultivated by bad public policies that direct economic resources into the hands of a wealthy few. The resulting inequality creates unnecessary suffering all over the world, from the humanitarian crisis in Haiti to the alarmingly high poverty rate in the United States.

Systemic poverty in Haiti

The tragedy in Haiti is not only the result of a massive earthquake. As Richard Kim explains for The Nation, Haiti has long been one of the world's poorest nations, and that poverty has prevented the country from protecting itself against natural disasters. As Kim explains:

Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor—by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Kim details Haiti's struggles under the weight of colonialist debt that dates back to 1804, the year it won its independence from France. Soon after the revolution, the U.S. and France threatened a trade embargo against Haiti unless the nation of former slaves agreed to pay reparations to its former slave-masters in France. Haiti paid off this extortion with loans from U.S. and European banks. The country was still paying those loans back in the 1940s.

In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded that France repay Haiti $21 billion of these unjust payments. He was ousted by a military coup for his efforts. Even today, the emergency IMF loans that are ostensibly helping Haiti cope with the disaster are crippled by insane stipulations, such as raising electricity prices for Haiti's poorest citizens.

One-eighth of U.S. population receiving food stamps

The U.S. has been waging a quiet war against its own poor for decades as well. In a blog for Working In These Times, Akito Yoshikane highlights today's record level of poverty: One in four U.S. children are living on food stamps, while one-eighth of the entire nation is receiving them. That's over 38 million people, or more than four times the population of New York City. A poverty epidemic on this scale is a total affront to any concept of economic justice, liberal or conservative.

MLK and economic justice

Just economic policy was a critical concern for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But today's 13.2% U.S. poverty rate is actually higher than when King spoke out against it in 1968, as Rich Benjamin notes for AlterNet. The economic oppression of minorities continues to this day. While the overall U.S. unemployment rate is 10%, among black workers, the rate is an astonishing 16.2%, while Latino and Latina workers face 12.9% unemployment.

10% unemployment vs. multi-million dollar bonuses

It's impossible to tolerate 10% unemployment in any economy. But those high rates are especially cruel considering the multi-million-dollar bonuses being paid to bankers who were bailed out with U.S. citizens' tax dollars. Nomi Prins' fantastic interactive chart at Mother Jones reveals both the obscene executive pay levels and staggering federal bailouts that banks subsequently used to boost profits and banker pay.

Top bank executives scored regal paydays for nearly destroying the economy, and some of them even helped pervert the government into an enabler of banking excess. Need an example? Prins highlights Robert Rubin, who pushed through a host of radical deregulatory laws as Treasury Secretary in the 1990s, then left to take a job at Citigroup, where he reaped over $120 million before his company needed a massive bailout. There's no reason for policymakers to accept a 13.2% poverty rate while subsidizing paychecks for wealthy bankers.

What can be done?

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel convened to uncover the causes of the financial crisis, could play a key role in overturning the injustices embedded within the U.S. financial system. As Ruth Coniff notes for The Progressive, it's not simply that the bailouts saved the banks. It's that the banks are piggybacking on taxpayer-granted perks to score record profits.

Economic arguments are routinely deployed to excuse outrageous social injustices—the most common argument for the U.S. bank bailout claims that things would have been much worse for everyone if we hadn't thrown billions at the banks. There are grains of truth in the argument. If all of the banks had actually failed, the result would have been economic mayhem. But that bailout money should have come with major strings attached. There is no reason why bank CEOs, rather than taxpayers, should be reaping the rewards from profits that taxpayer funds generated.

In both global and domestic politics, severe inequality is often accepted as an economic fact, not a problem that must be solved. But the moral outrage prompted by the disaster in Haiti and the U.S. financial bailout is both real and justified. If we want to live in a just society, we cannot continue to subsidize the rich by exploiting the poor.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

MLK on Hate and Love

"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is always a good time to take stock of our struggle with racism and discrimination, and with Glenn Beck, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh slinging arrows of hatred daily at our first African-American president, it would seem we haven’t made much progress. But a closer look reveals the Beast is now parading around so ostentatiously in public that we may have a chance to cut out its heart (nonviolently, of course).

When we left Atlanta thirty years ago, we did so because we were weary of living in an ugly warp where race pervaded every moment of every day. Family gatherings were always erupting in racial disagreement. Friends of different races still couldn’t get served in most downtown restaurants. A staggering 15 percent of white voters would cross over the back alleys of our society and vote for a white candidate who consorted with known Negroes (I know, I found out the hard way). The election of our first black mayor had sent tens of thousands of white homeowners scurrying for the suburbs (my mom and dad among them). Those who stayed behind had ripped the financial and educational stability from our public school system by transferring their kids to elite private institutions and segregation academies.

We moved to Washington, DC, and discovered a city that, while not perfect, not only tolerated, but encouraged equal treatment of its citizens, black and white, gay, lesbian and straight, immigrants and Mayflower descendants alike. And we found in the labor movement a home, again far from perfect, where problems of race, discrimination, and bigotry were at least discussed and even occasionally addressed. We traveled the country, proselytizing not only for union members, but for like-minded souls with whom we could march, demonstrate, and agitate for better schools, a cleaner environment, health care for all, control over corporate excess, and always for equality of opportunity and freedom from discrimination.

Like so many of our comrades and colleagues, we blew the corks off our bottles when Barack and Michelle and their lovely daughters walked in the front door to the White House. But then it seemed the ugly dragons that had stalked them through the election began to slither again from their caves. The “birthers,” who masked their racism in nativist in claims that Obama wasn’t American born; the religious right, steadfast in smearing our new president as a Muslim (and denigrating Muslims in the process); the “teabaggers” who conjured up a facade of patriotism to conceal their bigotry against blacks, women, immigrants, the poor and the disabled.

By the end of last year, only slightly encouraged by Sonia Sotomayer’s ratification, I was flattened out in a funk, plotting out another location transition, maybe to Paris, where I fantasized reliving the days when liberal thinkers, writers, and artists of all races had allegedly been able to live out their lives in the joyful absence of oppression. Okay, Okay, could be Australia. Somewhere else.

Not a religious man, I shouted hallaleulyah when Glenn, Pat and Rush saved me the grief of ripping up my roots again by blowing themselves up like helium balloons. Beck took the gas first by labeling Obama a racist and costing himself viewers, sponsors and buck. Limbaugh, who’d long been pounding the same theme, waited until the earthquake that devastated Haiti this week to puff himself beyond redemption, trumpeting the baseless charge that Obama had exposed his racist bent by taking but a day to address the crisis in Haiti, after taking six days to respond to the Panty Bomber attack. He then launched a campaign to dissuade his Dittoheads from making contributions to Haiti relief charities. Robertson, bless his seedy little heart, conjured up a “true story” about how the Haitians had brought this on themselves by “making a pact with the Devil” many years ago to get rid of their French rulers.

Now the Beast is free and floating over our national values like a dirigible of discrimination, a giant, pungent bag of putrid air in a Macy’s parade. Glenn, Pat and Rush are finally up there for everyone to see and most to condemn. The lust they share is for money and attention, so we should quietly deny them both by tuning out their radio and television shows, and turning our backs to their advertisers. It’s a great opportunity to deliver an object lesson to the race-baiters, gay-bashers, and immigrant haters dwelling in our collective bosom: racism and discrimination are intolerable in a righteous nation; you play, you pay.

This post originally appeared on From the Left Bank of the Potomac, Ray Abernathy's blog.

Weekly Mulch: EPA, Clean Air Act Facing Opposition

Climate change legislation is off the table for now, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is still working to regulate greenhouse gasses. The organization is up against strong opposition from Republicans and some Democrats. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is heading the charge, with the assistance of Bush-era EPA officials, now lobbyists with clients in the energy industry.

The EPA and the Clean Air Act

In April 2009, the EPA found that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gasses pose a hazard to public health. This finding obligated the EPA to regulate these pollutants under the Clean Air Act, a responsibility the Bush administration fought to avoid. The power the agency now has to limit carbon emissions extends far beyond its usual scope, and the EPA's decisions will have a lasting impact on environmental regulation in this country. As the agency moves to act, everyone from Sen. Murkowski to the state of California is protesting the changes. Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones reports:

“The California Energy Commission last month sent a letter to the EPA asking it to slow down on implementation of regulations on greenhouse gas emissions….The CEC argues that phasing them in too fast could hurt efforts in the state to expand use of low-carbon energy.”

Opponents in Congress are taking action to shut down the EPA’s attempts to curb greenhouse gasses, Sheppard writes. Both Sen. Murkowski and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) have filed bills that would delay or stop the EPA’s regulatory process.

Attempting to 'gut the Clean Air Act'

Grist’s Miles Grant is also keeping a close watch on opponents of the regulation.

“At first it seemed like simply one bad idea from Sen. Lisa Murkowski,” he writes. “But now we know the real story—a tangled web of public officials, polluter lobbyists, and efforts to gut the Clean Air Act.”

It emerged this week that Murkowski had help in drafting her bill from EPA administrators from the Bush administration, as first reported by the Washington Post. These former officials now work in Washington as lobbyists and represent clients like Duke Energy and the Alliance of Food Associations on climate change matters.

“Every day it seems we’re learning more,” says Miles. “More about the revolving door between the Bush administration and polluter lobbyists; more about their influence with senators and their staffers; and more about who’s really pulling the strings on efforts to block climate action—Big Oil’s MVP, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK).”

Even the American Farm Bureau Federation...

Another opponent, as Care2 notes, is the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the country’s largest farm group. The organization approved a special resolution during its four-day convention on Sunday. The resolution supports legislation like Murkowski’s or Pomeroy’s that would “suspend the EPA’s authority to regulator greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”

During a speech, AFBF president Bob Stallman said that American farmers and ranchers “must aggressively respond to extremists” and “misguided, activist-driven regulation.”

“The days of their elitist power grabs are over,” he said.

More opportunities to improve climate policy

The EPA's new power is not the only opportunity that the Obama administration has to improve U.S. climate policy. David Roberts, also reporting for Grist, writes about $2.3 billion in new tax credits for clean energy manufacturing companies, announced last Friday.

“There were 183 projects selected out of some 500 applications; one-third were from small businesses; around 30% are expected to be completed this year. The winners are spread across 43 states,” Roberts reports.

Roberts calls it “better than usual industrial policy.” The credits are meant to give a boost to the new green energy economy.

But Roberts warns, “It’s also absurd that clean energy industries still depend on capricious, short-term extensions of tax credits. ... Obama has called on Congress to cough up $5 billion a year for these credits, but how enduring will yearly appropriations be the next time Congress changes hands?”

Iowa and the biodiesel tax credit

The answer likely depends on how much support these projects get from the representatives of states that will benefit from the tax credits. In Iowa, for instance, the state's three Democratic Representatives have asked the House leadership to prioritized a 2010 renewal of the biodiesel tax credit, as Lynda Waddington reports for the Iowa Independent.

“If members of the U.S. Senate do not act on last year’s program extension, however, it might be a moot point,” Waddington writes. The renewal has gotten stalled in the Senate, where both Iowa Senators are blaming the opposite party for delays.

From policy to people

When politicians jockey over regulations and renewals, climate change work in Washington can seem very abstract. But people like John Henrikson, a forester who’s committed to farming 150 acres of trees in sustainable ways, help ground lofty policy ideas down in reality.

“Henrikson’s approach embodies a new way of thinking about our relationship with forests. For years he has been processing his own trees into trim and molding, sold through a broad network of local businesses,” reports Ian Hanna for Yes! Magazine. “Five years ago he got his forest certified to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards, a global system for eco-labeling sustainably managed forests and the products derived from them. And, most recently, he’s developed a project to sell rights to the carbon sequestered on his property.”

Without strong policy coming out Washington, it’s harder for entrepreneurs like Henrikson to make green business a reality. If legislators like Sen. Murkowski and groups like the AFBF don't block them, the EPA's new rules are going to begin coming out in March. There's a major action to combat global warming that the U.S. can take before then, though—for example, we could officially commit to our promise to reduce emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020. The deadline for registering climate pledges under the new Copenhagen Accord is the end of this month.

A Chicago Torture Victim is Set Free, Thanks in Part to ITT Contributor’s Reporting

News of journalism's demise has been greatly exaggerated. Well, not really, which makes it all the more important to recognize the value of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting when a news article helps get a wrongfully convicted man out of prison—23 years after he was sent there.

In 2008, In These Times contributing editor Jessica Pupovac wrote a story for Alternet called "Justice Denied: Scores of Black Men Tortured by Chicago Police Still Await New Trials." It focused on a Chicago man named Michael Tillman, who in 1986 was found guilty of murder, aggravated criminal sexual assault, and aggravated kidnapping. Twenty years old at the time, he was sentenced to life in prison. He's always maintained his innocence, saying he confessed to murder only because he was tortured (another man was also convicted for the murder).

Jessica's story, which inspired the Peoples' Law Office in Chicago to re-examine Tillman's case, included this shocking paragraph:

According to Tillman's 1986 trial testimony, when [Tillman] arrived at the Area 2 police station in the predawn hours of July 22, 1986, Detectives Ronald Boffo and Peter Dignan took him to a second-floor interrogation room and pressed him for information about the murder of 42-year-old Betty Howard, whose body was found the day prior in the apartment building Tillman oversaw. When he told the detectives that he knew nothing about the murder, he says that Boffo and Dignan, along with three other officers, became abusive. Without ever reading him his Miranda rights, he says they handcuffed him to the wall, hit him in the face and punched him in the stomach until he vomited blood. During the course of what appeared to be three days, rotating pairs of officers brought him to the railroad tracks behind the station and held a gun to his head, suffocated him repeatedly with thick plastic bags, poured soda up his nose and forced him into Dumpsters outside of the apartment building, ordering him to search through the rubbish for a murder weapon until, according to Detective John Yucaitis, Tillman confessed to the crime.

This morning, Tillman walked out of Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse a free man. (Broadcast TV coverage can be found here and here.)

"Michael Tillman was not only innocent of the crime for which he was accused, but he is also a victim of systemic crimes committed by police officers entrusted with upholding the law and the Constitution,” said Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office, who represented Tillman. “Those detectives who tortured Michael...must be brought to justice.”

In These Times Senior Editor Salim Muwakkil has for years written about Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge's reign of torture between 1972 and 1992, most recently in this ITT column, which detailed the October 2008 arrest of Burge by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Burge, who was removed from the police department in 1993 after a police board found him guilty of torturing an accused murderer, will be in court this May for perjury and obstructing justice.

The incredible ending to Tillman's nearly quarter-century travesty of justice is due in no small part to Pupovac's reporting. Congratulations Jessica!

But, of course, there are other wrongfully convicted torture victims still behind bars. As Jessica mentioned in her story:

Tillman is one of at least 24 African-American men that the People's Law Office in Chicago claims are still serving sentences for crimes they say they confessed to only after enduring hours of torture at the hands of Chicago police officers... Although 10 of Burge's victims have been pardoned or given new trials after their illegally obtained confessions were exposed, the vast majority of the 100-plus cases have yet to be reviewed by the state of Illinois...

Justice delayed is justice denied. Let's hope there are other independent reporters out there digging through dozens of other case files...

Special Report: Haiti After the Quake

Over 100,000 people are believed dead after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday afternoon. The quake buried countless buildings, from shantytowns to the presidential palace. All hospitals in Port-au-Prince have been leveled or abandoned. The United Nations headquarters and the city's main prison have collapsed as well. Thousands of residents are homeless and without food, water, or electricity.

On the ground in Port-au-Prince

Haiti is in a state of chaos, as Kayla Coleman reports for Care2. "The streets...are flooded with the rubble of collapsed buildings and displaced people. ... The earthquake has destroyed much of the already fragile and overburdened infrastructure."

Because all hospitals have been destroyed, there is nowhere to take the injured. According to Coleman, the United Nations says it will immediately release $10 million from its emergency fund to aid relief efforts.

Haiti before the earthquake

And though Americans are now paying attention to Haiti in the wake of this disaster, little to no attention was paid to the "daily chaos and misery" that plagues the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, as James Ridgeway writes for Mother Jones. "It is hard to imagine what a magnitude 7 earthquake might do to a city that on any ordinary day already resembles a disaster area."

Ridgeway also cites a 2006 New York Times report that details how the Bush administration helped destabilize Haiti in the years leading up to the 2004 coup.

Ridgeway writes:

"For the most part, Europe and the United States have continued to sit by as Haiti has grown poorer and poorer. When I was there you could find the children just outside Cite Soleil, the giant slum, living in the garbage dump, waiting for the U.S. army trucks to dump the scraps left from the meals of American soldiers. There they stood, knee deep in garbage, fighting for bits of food. As for the old, they people every street, gathering at the Holiday Inn at Port-au-Prince in wheelchairs, waiting at the doorway in search of a coin or two. They have no social safety net. And nobody with any money—no bank, no insurance company, no hedge fund, no mutual fund—ever makes any serious investment in the country."

Will prevailing attitudes towards Haiti change?

At RaceWire, Michelle Chen writes that Haiti, a place "where buildings have been known to suddenly collapse on their own, even without the help of a natural disaster," was still trying to recover from the severe tropical storms last spring that leveled hundreds of schools and left tens of thousands homeless.

Now the situation is desperate. "There will be an outpouring of sympathy across borders, a spasm of humanitarian aid," Chen writes. But "will there be an attitude shift in the power structures that have long compounded natural disaster with politically manufactured crisis?"

'Supporting the right kind of aid'

For those in Haiti, outside help is crucial. The country is in need of search and rescue volunteers, field hospitals, emergency health, water purification, and telecommunications. To ensure that you are supporting the right kind of aid—"the kind that builds local self-resilience, strengthens the local economy, and fosters local leadership," as Sarah van Gelder details for Yes! Magazine—donate to one or more groups with a proven track record, such as Doctors without Borders, Grassroots International, Partners in Health, and Action Aid, among others.

Hip-hop artist and Haitian native Wyclef Jean has led efforts to help Haiti for years through his charity Yele Haiti. Jessica Calefati at Mother Jones reports that Yele spends $100,000 a year on athletic programs for Haitian children and helps feed 50,000 people a month with food donated by the UN. When Jean received word of the disaster, he immediately acted, sending a "flurry of tweets" for people to donate $5 by texting 501501. He has already returned to Haiti to help.

How you can help

For more details about how you can donate effectively, check out Yes!, Mother Jones, Care2, and The Nation's roundups. You can also watch Free Speech TV's action update video for more information.

GritTV aired a segment on Haiti featuring Danny Glover, Marie St. Cyr, and a performance by the Welfare Poets. The video (below) covers the devastation in Haiti after the quake as well as the state of the country prior to the crisis:

How not to help

For an example of how not to help in a time of crisis, take a look at televangelist Pat Robertson, who claimed yesterday that the quake was Haiti's payback for a "pact with the devil" that slaves made to obtain independence from French colonials. As a rebuttal, Afro-Netizen points out how Haiti's liberation greatly benefited the United States, and Tracy Viselli at Care2 writes that "if there is a god, Pat Robertson is one of the devil's pied pipers."

More coverage of the crisis

For more information about relief efforts in Haiti, what you can do to help, and some historical context, check out the below list of coverage by Media Consortium members.

Video from the Real News Network on how World Bank policies led to famine in Haiti.
Garry Pierre-Pierre of Inter Press Service reports on humanitarian efforts of Haitian-American leaders in New York.
Monica Potts explains why Americans should concentrate on our policies toward Haiti for The American Prospect.
Erin Rosa at Campus Progress writes about Ansel Herz, a young journalist that is on the ground at Haiti.
Video from The UpTake of President Obama's pledge to send aid.

This post is a special report on Haiti and features links to the best independent, progressive reporting by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. For more updates, follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Weekly Diaspora: Protecting Haitian Refugees Through Immigration Reform

By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger

On Tuesday, the worst earthquake in 200 years struck just off the coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as The Nation reports. Bringing "catastrophic destruction" to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, the disaster has spurred relief efforts worldwide. Crises like this are important reminders of how the treatment and protection of refugees must be a part of immigration reform.

Temporary protected status for Haitian refugees

In September of 2009—just one year after Haiti was decimated by four successive hurricanes and tropical storms that affected at least 3 million people—New America Media (NAM) made a prescient call to halt all deportation to Haiti, and grant Haitians temporary protected status (TPS) status in the U.S. "before more Haitians die or are impacted by natural disasters."

Andrea Nill, writing for NAM's EthnoBlog, reminds us it was only ten months ago, in March of 2009 that the Obama administration indicated it would "continue deporting undocumented Haitians," in spite of the critical situation on the ground. Yesterday, Nill argued that not granting Haitian refugees TPS at this point would be "inconsistent with the promises the Obama administration has already made to the people of Haiti." Later in the day, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano responded by stating deportations to Haiti would, indeed, be temporarily halted.

[ED. NOTE: Stay tuned for more coverage of Haiti and relief efforts. The Media Consortium will release a special report compiling our member's coverage of the crisis and ways to help later today.]

Legalize the undocumented; boost the economy

It's a fortunate confluence of circumstance, when doing the right thing could also help our faltering economy. Jorge Rivas of RaceWire highlights a new study on the beneficial economic effects of legalizing undocumented workers through comprehensive immigration reform. The study came about through a partnership between the Center for American Progress and Dr. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The research suggests that legalization would yield $1.5 trillion to the U.S. Gross Domestic Product over a 10-year period, generate billions of dollars in additional tax revenue, increase wages for all levels of workers in the U.S. (the "wage floor") and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Detention center cover up continues

RaceWire also reveals new developments in the horrific tale of corrupt immigration officials "desperate to conceal" multiple incidents of abuse in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. Violations of law include "covering up evidence of gross mistreatment, undercounting the number of detention deaths, discharging patients right before they die, and major efforts to avoid scrutiny from the news media." Reportedly, ICE has made great efforts to cover up detention conditions and cruelty. (Video below).

'Draconian' anti-immigration legislation passed in Mississippi

Rev. Jeremy Tobin of American Forum reports on a piece of "draconian" anti-immigration legislation passed in Mississippi in March of 2008. SB 2988 makes it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to work in the state. The bill includes a waivable fine for employers that cooperate with the prosecution of undocumented workers. SB 2988 oppresses immigrants and weakens the power of organized labor. According to Tobin, one frustrated legislator said that the bill was "making it a crime to work an honest job."

Tobin calls out various organizations that backed the bill. These groups "started out anti-civil rights" and have since "reinvented themselves to be anti-immigrant rights." He also notes that a "disturbing" number of Mississippi Democrats voted for SB 2988.

The Poverty of Punditry: Sarah and Osama

A new political tell-all book reiterates that Sarah Palin knows as much about the world as George W's pet goat. This as Fox News announced that Sarah the sagacious would soon be elucidating for the nitwit network (I heard she beat out Noam Chomsky for the job*).

To get the spin twirling, Bill O’Reilly invited her to refute the imputations of ignorance. He advised Sarah to say that the authors claim that she couldn’t tell North from South Korea was “a lie.” After a moment of fumbling and further prompting by O’Reilly, she crossed her fingers behind her back and agreed it was a lie.

Of course, he never asked her to settle the question by citing a difference or two between the Koreas. To be fair, I don’t think it was because he was covering for a fellow yahoo and Fox kit. Few, if any, mediatricians would have asked that obvious question.

Substance is rarely news in the news. It’s too dangerous. The job of our media is to create yarns suitable for selling stuff and keeping the public dumb and docile. The bare truth has a tendency to shock some people out of their torpor and is therefore regarded as volatile. So, if you watch and read carefully, you’ll notice that the media are far more often telling us what people say about events than about the events themselves.

Consider the fact that Osama bin Laden has been our diablo deluxe for a decade or more. In all that time, I can’t recall one of his rants being translated and transmitted by the major media. What, in his own words, is his weltanschauung? Or his particular gripe with us? He’s given us all this grief, why not give him 30 minutes to explicate the explosions? When I was a kid every public library kept Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in English, on their shelves. To find anything about bin Laden from bin Laden you have to brush up on your Arabic and dig into the nether reaches of the net. Instead we get pundits who don’t know a saalam from a salami telling us that Osama and his acolytes hate us because we’re a free and successful people. They’re pissed because we’re perfect. That’s all you need to know.

If a direct appearance by bin Laden sparked our curiosity to the level of interest we had about Stalin, or more likely Saladin, questions might be raised. Like, what about the business and personal relationships between the Bush and bin Laden clans? That would make a great “24” plot. Or what makes bin Laden so popular with the Arab masses? Meaning what exactly do they have against us? That might bring up our military occupation of their lands and our violation of their holy places. Or our stealing their oil. Or our picking and propping up their potentates for them. We don’t want to get into all that, do we?

In olden days, the ink-stained wretches of the press were smart enough to be cynical. In other words they knew they were bullshitting the readers. By contrast, Sarah is safely entering upon editorialism at at time when it’s a tossup whether the IQ’s of those in front of or behind the screen at Fox are closer to room temperature. She’ll stand out, if only because she’s not the blond shade of bimbo.

(*credit for that line goes to John Fugelsang)

This post originally appeared at The Karman Turn.

Weekly Pulse: Abortion Doctor’s Assassin Goes to Court

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

The man who admitted to gunning down Dr. George Tiller in church last May went on trial in Kansas on Friday. Tiller was one of a small number of doctors performing late term abortions in the U.S.

Scott Roeder admitted to shooting the Tiller, but he is pleading not guilty to murder, as Robin Marty reports in RH Reality Check. Yesterday, Judge Warren Wilbert shocked observers by allowing Roeder's lawyers to argue that their client is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not premeditated murder.

Kansas law allows the accused to plead "imperfect self-defense" if he had an "honest but unreasonable belief" that deadly force was necessary to protect innocent third parties. Roeder says he killed to protect the unborn. Pro-choice activists are alarmed that the judge allowed Roeder to use this defense. If he beats the murder rap, Roder could face just five years in prison. In the unlikely event that his legal gambit is successful, the precedent could be tantamount to declaring open season on abortion providers.

No doubt Nidal Hasan sincerely believed that he was protecting innocent lives when he murdered 12 soldiers at Fort Hood last November. Somehow, I doubt the Army will be as deferential to Hasan's crazy religious ideas as Judge Warren Wilbert has been to Roeder's.

In other health care news, Robert Reich of TAPPED asks whether the rich or the middle class will pay for health reform:

There’s only one big remaining issue on health care reform: How to pay for it. The House wants a 5.4 percent surtax on couples earning at least $1 million in annual income. The Senate wants a 40 percent excise tax on employer-provided “Cadillac plans.” The Senate will win on this unless the public discovers that a large portion of the so-called Cadillacs are really middle-class Chevys—expensive not because they deliver more benefits but because they have higher costs.

Reich cites a shocking statistic: Less than 4% of the variation in the cost of insurance coverage is based on differences in benefits provided. Most of the difference in price is based on the perceived riskiness of the beneficiaries. So, if you're in a high risk pool comprised of, say, retired autoworkers, you're going to pay a lot more for the same benefits than someone in a younger, healthier risk pool. When you look at it that way, it seems unfair to pay for reform on the backs of people who are already paying more for the same thing due to circumstances beyond their control.

President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are meeting with top labor leaders on the "Cadillac tax," as Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports. Obama and Sebelius are trying to hash out a compromise that would be acceptable to the unions, who so far, have been implacably opposed to taxing expensive health care plans. The unions are reluctant to give any ground on this issue because so many of their members have accepted expanded health care benefits in lieu of wage increases over the years. Taxing those benefits now would effectively erase some hard-won gains by workers. Obama and the unions are reportedly discussing some kind of grandfather clause proposal that would exempt existing plans and only tax new plans.

Elsewhere in our high-deductible democracy, it turns out that health insurers secretly steered more than $20 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose health reform while publicly professing to support the effort, according to Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones. The bagman was America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). While AHIP was soliciting donations to run attack ads, AHIP's top lobbyist, Karen Ignagni penned an op/ed in the Washington Post assuring the public that AHIP supported reform.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly hopes that the scandal will give ammunition to Democrats in the last big push to pass health care reform: "Policymakers struggling to resolve differences on the final reform bill may want to keep a simple adage in mind: Don't let AHIP's duplicitous campaign win."

Weekly Audit: Geithner, Bailouts, and the Financial Crisis

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

The AIG bailout is one of the largest redistributions of wealth from ordinary taxpayers to bigwig bankers in history, one in which current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner played a key role. Newly uncovered emails reveal that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's New York Federal Reserve office urged AIG to conceal key information about the bailout from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If Geithner was involved in those decisions, he could face charges of securities fraud. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, the quality of Geithner’s judgment is no longer in question—we already knew he committed plenty of errors while negotiating the AIG bailout as president of the New York Federal Reserve. The question now is whether Geithner needs to be prosecuted for misleading federal regulators.

AIG bet on the housing market with credit default swaps, a new form of financial derivative that helped the company score big profits during the housing boom. But when the market tanked, the company couldn’t cover its losses. AIG's housing market gambles were completed with help from some of the largest banks in the world, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and Citigroup. If AIG had filed for bankruptcy in September of that year, those banks would have been required to accept much lower payouts on those bets—as little as 10% of their face value.

Instead, when the government swooped in to save AIG, the banks ended up with amazing deals. As a chief negotiator in the AIG bailout, Geithner allowed Goldman and others to receive full payout at 100 cents on the dollar. That meant U.S. tax dollars were going to the banks with no strings attached. But Geithner refused to tell the public which banks were benefiting from the bailout for almost six months. He finally relented when the AIG bonus outrage boiled over in March.

Last week, we learned the most damaging development yet: Geithner's New York Fed urged AIG to keep the SEC in the dark about its sweetheart deals for the banks. Withholding key information from the SEC can be a criminal offense, and if Geithner was involved in the push to mislead the SEC, he must be held accountable.

For now, the Obama administration is standing by Geithner, saying that the decision to pressure AIG against cooperating with the SEC "did not rise to his level at the Fed" last Friday. But as Mike Lillis notes for The Washington Independent, that explanation strains credulity:

The federal government had recently bailed out AIG to the tune of $180 billion; AIG was funneling that cash to other (already bailed out) Wall Street giants; the New York Fed was telling AIG not to disclose those payments; and that decision didn’t rise to the level of the Fed chairman?

Lately, the government hasn't had a very good record on prosecuting financial crime. Prosecutors wouldn't have uncovered a massive tax evasion scheme at Swiss banking giant UBS without the help of whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld. And the tax fraud was indeed massive—the Justice Department believes that UBS illegally helped shield over 19,000 wealthy clients from paying taxes.

But, as Amy Goodman reveals for Democracy Now!, in return for uncovering the biggest tax fraud in history, the Justice Department has successfully pushed to have Birkenfeld jailed for more than three years. By contrast, almost everyone involved in the scam is getting off with fines, probation, or less. What signal do you think this sends to other potential whistleblowers?

The housing boom encouraged banks to pour money into speculative investments outside the traditional mortgage market, especially by making loans to property developers to build high-end condominiums. When the housing bubble burst, it became clear that there were far more fancy condos than anybody wanted. Today, most economists expect the loans that financed these developments to prove nearly worthless.

As Alyssa Katz details for The American Prospect, scores of those buildings are now nearly vacant in New York City alone. In order to create these useless towers, developers cleared the land by forcing out tenants in affordable housing complexes, and shut down productive businesses. If these spaces are to be used productively—say, for affordable rental housing—banks and developers need to acknowledge that their market has tanked, accept their losses and move on.

Instead, Katz notes, federal regulators are letting banks apply very optimistic accounting values to these commercial real estate projects. This accounting creates illusory short-term profits for banks and eliminates incentives to let the land go to socially useful enterprises. If regulators don't force banks to get serious about their commercial real estate losses, the government will effectively be subsidizing a rash of useless eyesores, allowing neighborhoods to decay in the process.

Subprime shenanigans from AIG, UBS and other banks helped tank the global economy. We're still feeling the job fallout from a financial crisis that banks triggered over two years ago. Last week, the government reported that the economy lost 85,000 jobs in December, while the unemployment rate held even at 10%. David Moberg explains why we desperately need the Senate to approve a robust jobs bill in a blog for Working In These Times. A $174 billion package passed the House last month, but it's a pittance compared to what the government has pledged to save Wall Street.

So how did we get here—saving the crooked jerks who created the mess while leaving everyone else out to dry? Kevin Drum's story in Mother Jones on the bank lobby offers critical insight into the operations of the U.S. democratic process, and also stands up as one of a handful of investigative journalism masterpieces that have stemmed from the financial crisis. In the last dozen years, elite financiers have secured government approval to shoulder greater risks and pay bigger bonuses, despite a series of near-catastrophic financial market failures. Drum details the financial industry's pervasive influence over lawmakers in Congress, key policymakers at the Federal Reserve and federal regulators in other agencies, influence often purchased outright with campaign contributions and massive lobbying efforts.

These days, the money still talks in American government. But the true economic coup is not financial. It's ideological: Bankers have convinced leaders of both political parties that what's good for Wall Street is always good for America, even if the cost of boosting the bottom line involves dismantling productive firms, ravaging neighborhoods with foreclosures or scamming poor people with massive overdraft fees.

"...There's more to the finance lobby than just money and political influence," Drum writes. "Their real power lies in the fact that they've so thoroughly changed our collective attitude toward financial regulation that sometimes they barely need to lobby in the traditional sense at all."

This is precisely how we got stuck with banker apologists like Geithner, a Justice Department that punishes whistleblowers while letting corporate crooks go free, and why we're allowing neighborhoods to rot away for no reason. We have to demand more from our government, regardless of which party is in power. If we don't, we'll get stuck with the same save-Wall-Street-first policies forever, regardless of the consequences for society.