'Syndicated Reporting Project' Archive
Weekly Pulse: Healthcare industry already wavering on savings
That was quick: It took just three days for the titans of the healthcare industry to reveal the emptiness of their pledge to the Obama administration to save $2 trillion in healthcare costs over the next 10 years.
Last week, The New York Times proclaimed that Obama scored a “political coup” just by getting the industry groups and SEIU to the table. Maybe so, but writers featured in last week’s Pulse remained skeptical that the industry would make good on its unenforceable cost-cutting promises. Skepticism was the healthy response.
Three days after the promise, industry groups started accusing Obama of overstating their commitment. Health Czar Nancy Ann DeParle confirmed that the president garbled the stats slightly when he said that the groups had pledged to cut the rate of growth in healthcare costs by 1.5 percentage points per year. However, the outcry over the slipup is revealing. The groups are now scrambling to reassure their members that they never promised to reduce costs by any specific amount in any given year. Of course they didn’t. In order to keep that promise, they’d have to act right away–which they clearly have no intention of doing.
So, it comes as little surprise when Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly reports that Blue Cross/Blue Shield is crafting a PR campaign to trash the whole idea of a public plan, a key element of Obama’s healthcare reform agenda. One of the industry groups that signed off on the aforementioned $2 trillion pledge was America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Several members of AHIP’s board of directors work for Blue Cross or Blue Shield.
In The American Prospect, Paul Waldman notes that the same coalition of Republicans and big business that opposed President Clinton’s healthcare reforms 15 years ago are gearing up for a rematch. These folks, who might as well be called Americans for the status quo are trying to own the word “reform” under the tutelage of GOP message master Frank Luntz, according to Waldman.
Some people oppose healthcare reform because they fear a tax increase. That’s not a foregone conclusion, but healthcare is so expensive that reform could be a bargain even if we had to raise taxes to pay for it. In AlterNet, Dean Baker asks why his fellow economists are so complacent about the status quo where healthcare is twice as expensive and not quite as beneficial as it is in other developed countries. Baker argues that the extra costs are tantamount to a huge tax on the entire economy:
This is a tax that Americans pay without realizing it. Money that could be going towards pay raises is going to support ever-increasing insurance premiums, for those who are lucky enough to have health coverage through their jobs. It’s a tax that employers have to take into account when they decide whether to build a plant in the United States, or across the border in Canada where the government takes care of health insurance.
And last but not least, while you can’t get blood from a stone, you can get plasma from an overextended American consumer. Credit Solutions of America, a credit counselling service advised clients to sell their blood plasma to make ends meet, Moe Tkacik reports in Talking Points Memo. That’s especially ironic when you consider that medical bills cause over half of personal bankruptcies, according to a 2005 survey by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor who went on to become Obama’s the chief financial industry bailout overseer.
Weekly Pulse: Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer
This week, the White House teamed up with healthcare industry giants for a two-day PR blitz on health reform. A coalition of industry leaders sent a letter to president Obama over the weekend, pledging to help contain healthcare costs. The signatories include PhRMA (drug makers), Advamed (device manufacturers), the AMA (doctors), the AHA (hospitals), AHIP (health insurance), and SEIU’s Health Care project. The corporate signatories are the very same interest groups that have fought U.S. healthcare reform for generations. AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans, helped torpedo the Clinton plan in the 1990s with the infamous “Harry and Louise” TV spots.
Progressive healthcare writers are divided as to whether Obama’s rapprochement is a good sign. One school of thought is that the interest groups have finally seen the writing on the wall. Arguably, the industry realizes that some kind of healthcare reform is inevitable and they hope to get the best possible deal by cooperating. Another perspective, not necessarily incompatible with the first, is that this kind of “cooperation” will ultimately co-opt Obama’s reform program.
Mike Madden summarizes the main thrust of the industry charm offensive in Salon:
The letter itself offers few details as to how the industries will actually go about saving money. More to the point, there’s nothing forcing these groups to follow through on anything they’ve pledged to do.
Still, if you parse the platitudes, the industry is diverging slightly from Republican anti-reform rhetoric. The GOP has been crusading against comparative effectiveness research (CER) ever since the stimulus bill set aside a billion dollars to fund it. CER is just research to discover which treatments give the best outcomes for the money, but the GOP would have us believe that it’s a stalking horse for rationing. Whereas, the industry coalition’s letter talks about cutting costs by “aligning quality and efficiency incentives” and “adherence to evidence-based best practices”–basically, big words for “studying the evidence” and “trimming the fat”–the core of the CER agenda.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly thinks the new conciliatory posture is encouraging evidence that the Republican opposition to reform is in such disarray that the industry is prepared to make nice with the Obama administration:
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), also secured a seat at the table. As Ezra Klein suggests in the American Prospect, the fact that Stern is in the room is a testament to his skill as a coalition builder. SEIU represents millions of Americans, including many healthcare workers. Stern told Klein that the group had set itself a June 1 deadline to put forward concrete proposals that can be assigned dollar figures. The Finance Committee’s first bill drops in June, so the committee will have to work fast if they want to see their suggestions incorporated.
Josh Holland of AlterNet says we should beware of the healthcare execs’ blandishments. Holland notes that they promise to reduce the growth in costs to “only” 4.7% a year:
In Mother Jones, James Ridgeway agrees that the initiative is a mere publicity stunt, seeing as there’s nothing but the threat of public embarrassment to hold the group to any of its pledges.
Even if we do get healthcare reform this year, what would the end product look like? In the Nation, Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medicine reporting program at CUNY, takes a hard look at the messages the president has sent so far. She foresees a package that’s congenial to Obama’s corporate allies:
It’s becoming clearer that reform will include some or all of these options: requiring everyone to carry health insurance (an individual mandate à la Massachusetts); subsidizing a portion of the 85 percent of the uninsured who can’t afford to buy a policy; taxing some of the health benefits workers now get from employers to pay for insurance for the uninsured; letting people keep the coverage they have even though it’s likely to cover less as time goes on; shoving more people onto Medicaid; and trying to get insurers to insure sick people. There may or may not be a public insurance option–maybe like Medicare, or maybe not–that would compete with private insurers and theoretically reduce the cost of insurance.
All this conciliation is not cost-free. In the following video, economist Richard Wolff tells The Real News that Obama risks a grassroots backlash if he caters to corporate interests on healthcare. People want better healthcare, not just a choice of bad options. If the result of “reform” is an inferior public plan alongside the private system, employers will have an incentive to push their workers onto the public plan, and we’ll all be worse off.
The president may not support a true national healthcare plan, but don’t count the friends of single payer out yet. Doctors and other advocates for single-payer healthcare crashed a Senate Finance Committee meeting this week to protest their exclusion from a series of roundtable discussions on healthcare policy, as Laura Flanders reports on GRITtv. “Every lobbyist in America is at the table, when are the American people going to be heard?” shouted one activist. A handful of activists were arrested when they refused to come to order.
Weekly Audit: Time to Shake Off the Bank Lobby
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Immigration, Live From Main Street, Syndicated Reporting Project, Uncategorized
by Zach Carter, TMC MediaWire Blogger
While the national economy struggles under the weight of a massive bank bailout effort, the banking lobby’s ability to influence public policy is more problematic than ever. The too-big-to-fail bankers may be dependent on U.S. taxpayers for their survival, but corporate lobbyists still have members of Congress, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve asking the banks’ permission to bring the Big Finance behemoths under control. The relationship between Wall Street and the government is so out of whack that it’s difficult to distinguish the political players from the panhandlers.
In Mother Jones, Daniel Schulman and Jonathan Stein detail the ease with which important congressional staff switch careers and move into the banking sector. In recent years, dozens of key staffers for powerful Senators have left the political arena to work for as lobbyists for the financial sector, and policy gurus from both sides of the aisle are jumping ship for lucrative careers as influence peddlers on Wall Street.
“Financial firms seeking big bucks and favorable terms from Congress and the White House are deploying Capitol Hill aides turned lobbyists to win favorable treatment from the congressional lawmakers,” Schulman and Stein write. Many lawmakers, including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., are refusing to disclose whether they’ve had contact with former staff who now work for Wall Street. Small surprise, then, that so many of the recent bailout packages have allowed failed bank CEOs to stay in power and saved their shareholders from bad investments in inept, even predatory, companies.
Sometimes these reinvented bank defenders are even former Senators. Susan Douglas of In These Times highlights the career of former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, who is currently a lobbyist for UBS. The Swiss banking giant has been plagued by a seemingly endless stream of scandals over the past year, for everything from diamond smuggling to tax fraud. And Gramm helped push for looser predatory lending laws—including those pertaining to the now-decimated mortgage sector—while he on the UBS payroll.
This would be a shameful legacy for any former public servant, but for Gramm, Douglas notes, this behavior is particularly disgraceful: his two chief legislative “accomplishments” helped create and intensify the current financial crisis. Gramm co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which compounded the financial world’s too-big-to-fail problem by letting traditional commercial lenders like Bank of America and Citigroup buy up riskier, unregulated investment banks like Merrill Lynch. Gramm then pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 through in a midnight budget amendment, a tactic which made sure that “credit default swaps” were not subject to either securities regulations or gambling laws. Just eight years later, credit default swap gambling destroyed insurance giant AIG, to the dismay of taxpayers everywhere.
When lawmakers stop cowing to the bank lobby and start answering to their constituents, the result is a big boost for the entire economy. Last week, committees in both the House and Senate dealt the credit card industry a rare defeat by approving bills that crack down on abusive credit card billing practices. Even though Sen. Dodd insists keeping his lobbying contacts a mystery, he is capable of crafting responsible legislation. The bills were introduced by Dodd and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., but still face major uphill battles clearing the full House and Senate.
As Harry Hanbury details for the American News Project, conservative lawmakers and bank lobbyists are already hard at work watering down the legislative language to ensure that it will not actually curb any abuses if enacted. Take a look:
The bills would ban dozens of billing gimmicks that are as outrageous as they are common, including raising interest rates on credit card debt after it has been accumulated and hiking rates due to completely unrelated activity, like returning a library book late. The banking industry deploys a lot of clever words to mask the predation inherent in the tactics, and most common of all are the terms “price according to risk” and “risk-based pricing.” These phrases make it sound as if all the poor little credit card companies want to do is set interest rates at levels appropriate for a borrower’s credit profile. Of course, that’s not what’s actually happening: lenders are radically changing the terms of loan agreements for no other purpose than to gouge borrowers, and give borrowers no say in what happens.
It’s crazy that banks are legally permitted to raise interest rates on cardholders after they have charged debt to their credit card. If you pay full price for anything else—a shirt, a bag of groceries, a guitar—it would be laughable if the shop clerk demanded more money from you months later.
Banker apologists insist that banning these practices will restrict the flow of credit. But more credit cards will not fix a problem caused by massively over-indebted consumers. We need higher wages, not a fresh flood of predatory, high-interest debt.
But if taxpayers can win on credit cards, we can win on the bailout, too. Yes! Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder posted an open letter to President Barack Obama this week, citing half a dozen economic experts and urging him to change his bailout strategy before it’s too late. “Watching your appointees’ latest bank bailout makes me wonder if all your administration’s good work on health care, education, and jobs will be swept away by the extraordinary giveaway of trillions in taxpayer money to a group of powerful Wall Street operatives,” van Gelder writes.
And indeed, in other arenas of economic policy, the president has made significant steps in the right direction. While Obama’s proposed federal budget is less than perfect, it moves away from some of the worst trends of the past eight years. GritTV’s Laura Flanders details some of this progress in a roundtable discussion with Irasema Garza, President of Legal Momentum, former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, and New York City Coalition Against Hunger Director Joel Berg. By implementing robust job creation plans and a massive increase in anti-hunger and nutrition programs, Obama has signaled that the plight of those hardest hit by the recession cannot simply be ignored.
But these positive budget strides do not involve the banking lobby, which still maintains a stranglehold on any realm of U.S. public policy it can loot for a profit. Obama standing up to the financiers is not an improbable pipe dream, it’s a prerequisite for economic recovery and a necessary step toward rebuilding the integrity of our democracy.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Palin Wows ‘Em in PA
cross posted from The Huffington Post
YORK, PENN.–It’s easy to make fun of a vice presidential candidate who can’t seem to tell you what periodicals she reads, what Supreme Court cases she disagrees with, or who thinks the First Amendment to the Constitution assures her the right to not be criticized. But today, after seeing Sarah Palin address a rally in famously conservative York, Pennsylvania, I’m not laughing.
Palin was completely impressive, even when calling Obama a socialist.
At the end of the event, she spent at least a half hour shaking hands, walking the rope line. I asked her whether she’d be running for president in 2012.
She smiled sweetly and said, “I’ll be campaigning for John McCain’s re-election in 2012.”
Real National Security Begins at Home, Say Women Leaders
Bobbie Wrenn Banks of WAND’s Great American Pie campaign demonstrates what’s left for all other discretionary national spending after the Pentagon gets its piece of the pie. (Photo courtesy Arkansas
WAND)
Has defense spending become the new patriotism? Even as homeland security funds dwindle, the Pentagon now sucks up 54 percent of the federal budget. Yet politicians rarely challenge the current formula, fearful of being tagged as “weak.” Meet the leaders who say it will take women to fix our nation’s defense priorities.
Times are tough. Wall Street has tumbled, and Main Street is squeezed. As housing values plummet and people lose income, governments are also feeling the pinch. Despite it all, there’s one area of the federal budget that continues to grow: defense spending.
A growing chorus of women leaders are rising in protest, seeking to educate voters on the perils of a dangerously unbalanced set of priorities. From spending cuts in state budgets in such bread-and-butter areas as public health and sheltering the homeless, to a dangerous underfunding of port security and an exodus of first responders to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women are seeing the Pentagon’s growing share of the federal budget take a toll on the well-being of their own families. Yet an absence of women in the halls of power helps maintain the status quo, say activists, and a failure to enlist military women as allies in the cause of national security reform has held back the progressive funding agenda.
Women are paying attention to who’s getting federal dollars, says Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who leads Lake Research Associates. In focus groups, says Lake, “we do have women volunteering …that they wonder how we could find overnight all the money to fight a war and to bail out Wall Street, but we can’t find enough money to provide national health care reform. And there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of that.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, a consensus is building among defense experts that something needs to be done to straighten out those priorities for the very sake of what all that spending is supposed to buy us: real national security. While tax dollars are poured into the pockets of defense contractors for projects of debatable value or documentable waste, homeland security budgets are starved, leaving the nation vulnerable in the face of attack. Yet defense spending sops up more than half of the federal discretionary budget.
What’s pie got to do with it?
At Women’s Action for New Directions, field director Bobbie Wrenn Banks has taken to the road with a victual demonstration of the classic pie chart that WAND calls the Great American Pie project.
“We actually use a pumpkin pie – literally, a pumpkin pie,” Banks explains. “And we go into groups and we slice the pie; it represents the discretionary budget.” The discretionary budget is the piece of the federal budget that gets negotiated between the president and Congress (unlike such programs as Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are mandatory expenditures). “And over half of that pie – 54 percent of that pie – that slice goes to the Pentagon,” says Banks. “Then we have very small little slivers of pie that go to environmental concerns, income security, affordable housing…” And that doesn’t even cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Banks says. Add in the nearly $200 billion that taxpayers have anted up for the wars in this year alone, and “we’re spending nearly $700 billion a year on the military,” she says.
Banks’ pie show is headed this week to Mississippi, where she’ll visit the district offices of Sen. Thad Cochran, the Republican ranking member of the appropriations committee.
Absent a pie-bearing visit from Banks herself, she advises women to take a look at an effort at reform outlined in the Unified Security Budget proposed by the left-leaning group, Foreign Policy in Focus (part of the Institute for Policy Studies), which looks at how the budget is divided among various security needs. “[W]hen you look at the overall security spending pie, it’s just so staggeringly lopsided, because 90 percent of our security money goes to the offense, with a 6 percent slice of that pie going to… homeland security, and only a 4 percent slice going to (conflict) prevention.” Prevention includes diplomacy, foreign assistance in the form of infrastructure-building, and activities such as those done by the Peace Corps.
States starved for security
As president of the Women Legislators’ Lobby, Nan Grogan Orrock, a state senator in Georgia, knows all too well how the dearth of homeland security funding plays out on the ground. “You’ve got an array of issues around homeland security, around the railroads, and the freight containers, you know, the ports and the whole baggage and cargo screening,” says Orrock. “They need another $ 1.25 billion just to meet what are considered appropriate standards for cargo and baggage screening.”
Earlier this year, 339 women state legislators signed WiLL’s letter [PDF file] to members of Congress, asking them not to increase the Pentagon’s budget. “At least 22 states in the country have budget gaps, and 29 states…have had to cut their budgets to try to balance them,” Orrock says. “We have seen cuts to rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, cut anywhere from 38 to 42 percent of their state funding…and yet, under these Bush military budgets, we’re spending more than at any time on the military since World War II.”
But Lorelei Kelly, policy director for the White House Project’s Real Security Initiative and a member of the task force that put together the Unified Security Budget, cautions against riding roughshod on the military itself. “The first thing you shouldn’t say, always, is ‘Cut the military’s budget, cut the military’s budget,’” asserts Kelly, who co-authored, with Army Reserve Lt. Col. Dana Eyre, A Woman’s Guide to Talking About War and Peace [PDF file]. “Talk about the need for national security reform, and within that, that military’s budget has to change. And let’s not just go in with a bunch of hacksaws and blindly start whacking away at things.”
Members of the military, Kelly contends, can be progressives’ best allies when trying to enact reform. Too often, she says, progressives have lumped in with the institutional military everything bad about the military-industrial complex, alienating potential partners. Among the real culprits in the budget dilemma are the procurement process and the contracting out of work that used to be done by soldiers. “It’s appalling, the level of privatization that’s happened within the military budget, and of the service,” Kelly explains. “The institution itself has been very badly damaged in many ways.”
Service members, especially women, are often less than happy with the ways in which contracting and privatization affect their mission, and can be helpful to the cause of reform if asked the right questions in a respectful way, says Kelly. She notes a 2005 House hearing on possible exit strategies for the Iraq war at which former Air Force Under Secretary Antonia Chayse testified. In hearings convened by Sen. Byron Dorgan, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the highest-ranking civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers, blew the whistle on waste and fraud committed by contractors to the military in Iraq. In fact, if you scroll through the report issued by Dorgan’s committee, you’ll find that in the course of the last three years, many of the the whistleblowers on abuses by military contractors have been women.
Women could change the national security equation
One could argue that the lopsidedness in the federal budget that favors defense contractors exists in inverse relationship to the number of women in the halls of power. (Among the 188 countries listed in the International Parliamentary Union’s index of Women in National Parliaments, the U.S. ranks number 69 in its representation of women in the national legislature; Afghanistan’s rank is 27.) “While there’s nothing being biologically special about women being able to champion peace, I do believe that the life experiences and perspectives that women bring serve these issues well,” Banks says. When it comes to domestic spending, she says, women tend to lean to the progressive side.
Then there’s the matter of Iraq itself. “You have a pretty big gender gap on the war,” Lake explains, who co-authored, with Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, the book, What Women Really Want. “You have men thinking it was worth it to go in, women thinking it wasn’t — which is interesting, given that both men and women are against the war…”
In an August Lake Research Partners/Tarrance Group Battleground poll, likely voters were asked the question: “All in all, do you think the war in Iraq is worth fighting, or not?” Among men, 50 percent said the war was worth fighting, 45 percent said it was not. However, only 35 percent of women said it was worth fighting, while 57 percent said it was not – a double-digit spread on either side of the equation.
Even women in the military see the war differently from their male counterparts. As early as 2005, a poll by Military Times found that 63 percent of men among the active service members they surveyed “said they believe(d) the United States should have gone to war in Iraq, but only 42 percent of the women believe(d) that.” Less than half of the women service members said they approved of the way President Bush was “handling the war,” while 65 percent of the servicemen did.
If more women were in Congress, says Banks, you’d see a difference in the ordering of priorities. “Women in Congress vote more progressively on many issues,” Banks says. In the 109th Congress, WAND reports, women voted for progressive policies in 67 percent of those votes, compared to 48 percent for men. The votes WAND examined fell within the categories of national security, and legislation affecting children, women, and the environment.
Women are naturals at the sort of skills required to effect real security, Kelly asserts. In Afghanistan, the U.S. counterinsurgency plan calls for the creation of constituencies that have a stake in seeing democracy succeed, she explains. “Women are really good at creating stakeholder constituencies in the public,” Kelly says. “Doesn’t everybody know a woman who holds the neighborhood together? That’s a strategic security skill in today’s world.”
# # #
This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “Beyond Hockey Moms and Palin Politics: Women on Real National Security.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature a number of progressive women leaders, including Ports Commissioner Gael Tarleton; Erin Solaro, author of Women in the Line of Fire: What you should know about Women in the Military, Carol Kessler, director of Center for Global Security for Pacific Northwest National Lab and co-chair of Women in International Security; Rep. Maralyn Chase, Washington’s 32nd D;strict and Washington State director for the Women Legislators’ Lobby; Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of Moms Rising; Rosalinda Guillen, co-founder and executive director, Community to Community Development; Martha Burk, author and money editor at Ms. magazine; Sarah Van Gelder, executive editor at Yes! magazine.
This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, October 26, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. CDT/4:00 p.m. PDT in Seattle. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org. The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.
How to Save the Constitution, and a Few Other Things
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Often touted as presidential timber, Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin last year abandoned the playing field of the presidential contest to continue his mission as one of the Senate’s most outspoken defenders of civil liberties. Yesterday, the Senate passed into law the Protect America Act, a bill that expands executive power to spy on Americans and grants retroactive immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies who provide customers’ private records to the government. On June 26, just as senators were preparing for final debates on the bill, which eliminates many of the civil liberties protections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Feingold talked to Brian Beutler about civil liberties, John McCain, the worst thing President Bush has done — and what a President Obama should say in his inaugural address.
BRIAN BEUTLER: So starting on FISA (and the Protect America Act), a lot of people were impressed with the House Democrats’ performance back in February when they Senate bill (that extended the warrantless wiretapping program). In the interim, what happened? Where was the pressure coming from within the Democratic party to revisit this issue and not wait at least until there was a new administration in place?
SEN. RUSSELL FEINGOLD: This is just really amazing to me, because there’s always the pressure on this. There’s a very interesting thing that happens with these where people get fired up and people really have good instincts about civil liberties and would really prefer to be on this side. I think that’s what they really believe in. So you get kind of a head of steam, which I noticed happened with the blocking of the reauthorization of the Patriot Act for a while, until people caved. And it happened for a while even in the Senate on the PAA. But what was a surprise was what the House did. I mean that was really impressive that a group of people, including Steny Hoyer and others, stood up and said, “No, we’re not gonna do this.”
But the problem is that there’s this fear, that sort of grows over time, that somehow Democrats are gonna get hit over the head by claims that they’re soft on terrorism. And it always rears its head, especially when we’re heading into a recess period or an election period. What’s happening right now is that they claim that the problem is that the. We were able to make the argument early in the year that the orders were lasting for a year. So even if the law expired, the orders allowing the surveillance were still in place. Until August. Well, we’re coming up to August.
Now the truth is that we could simply extend the bill for a year, sunset it. We could extend the orders. But as you get closer to these deadlines, the administration uses these intimidation tactics, and far too many Democrats fall for it. They think that somehow the administration’s gonna win this argument. I don’t think that’s true. I think the Democrats did great the last few months when the House stood up to them. But there is this sort of inertia — if that’s the right word — that leads to ultimately the caving of very large numbers of Democrats, even voting for an awful piece of legislation like this. That’s the only way I know how to describe it. I don’t know, the day-to-day pressure — it’s like this constantly pulsating fear of being accused of being soft on terrorism.
BB: Following up on that, then. How, politically, does one change that mindset — that being tough on national security means that the Democratic party has to support wars and the erosion of civil liberties?
RF: I think you show people that those who stand firm on this do just fine politically. I like to think of myself as an example of that. There are many people like that. The truth is that if you properly articulate that you want to balance national security and make sure we protect civil liberties at the same time. And take the time to go through the arguments — which are very frankly easy to win — these are not hard arguments. When anybody really listens to it, they just kinda shake their head. Then you can prevail and show people that you don’t need to buckle at the knees on this. But it requires a little patience. It requires a little faith in peoples’ willingness to listen. And that’s how in the long run you prevail. And I’m hoping that a lot of people who run this time, unlike a lot of people who ran in 2006, are held accountable.
I’m sure many of our candidates are gonna say, you know, I was against immunity and I don’t like this bill. Well, they need to be held accountable when they get here. And that hasn’t really happened. We have a lot of Democrats, even some who voted to get us out of iraq, who aren’t voting properly on this, in a way that is, you know frankly, very damaging to our efforts to improve the bill.
BB: I understand. So you don’t think that (in the next administration) an Attorney General Feingold or a Director of National Intelligence Feingold would be crucial?
RF: I certainly don’t think it’s crucial, and I think that the place I am right now — where I sit on the intelligence committee, the foreign relations committee and the judiciary committee — gives me a really unique angle on this. I think I may be the only person that has that combination of committees that relates to all of these issues.
BB: That’s why I requested the interview.
RF: I think it gives me a rather unique opportunity to pursue these issues. In the Senate. So I think that might be the best place for it.
BB: Assuming this passes the Senate, what’s the fix? Is there one? And when?
RF: Hopefully, under President Obama he will acknowledge, as he has in the past, not only how outrageous this immunity is — although that’s gonna be very hard to deal with because the horse may already be out of the barn — but I think, even more importantly, he will have an opportunity to review these very expanded powers that are given to the government to surveil our international communications. And to say, look, we need legislation that has some sort of court review and mechanisms for control of this, because it’s completely lawless. Now, if he doesn’t do it it’ll be very sad. And, in fact, my feeling, of course, is: let’s not let this go through now. It’s much harder to pass something and change it after the fact. But you know, I’m hoping we’ll have both houses (of Congress) and I’m hoping Obama will understand how important this is. And that will be a golden opportunity for him to correct one of many things that needs to be corrected from this administration. So I’m hoping it starts as early as January 20th.
BB: ….If the (telecom) immunity provision (to the Protect America Act) does go through, the way I see it there are two possibilities for discovery of what exactly the Bush administration was doing with the Terrorist Surveillance Program (the administration’s name for its warrantless surveillance of Americans and others). One is with the inspector general reports that the bill authorizes. I know a lot of people make fun of the idea of the administration investigating itself. But Glenn Fine (inspector general for the Department of Justice) is an interesting character…
RF: Yeah, he’s been very independent and very credible. You can expect something very good from that in terms of credibility, I agree with that. There’s no question there, that you know that’s one small positive piece here.
BB: Can the Bush administration just ignore that or signing-statement it out of existence, and if the IG (inspector general) process doesn’t work, would you believe that a (President) Obama would reveal to the Congress or the country just what was happening back in the TSP days?
RF: I don’t know what he’d reveal. I do believe he’d take the IG provisions seriously if, for some reason, this administration does not. I do think he’d take any conclusions they’d come to seriously. So that’s the good news, is that I really do think that he would. And he would have no reason not to. It’s not his administration. He’s a person that has been very associated with the rule of law in his career. So a President Obama to me would be somebody who, if there is a failure to follow through on this, who may well help us have follow up on this.
BB: Would a McCain presidency mean the continuation of these sorts of–
RF: –You know, I think McCain would be better on this than the current administration, to be candid with you. There’ve been some remarks that he’s made about — even though he’s pulled back some on telecom immunity — he’s said that he would do no signing statements. I think he knows and his people know that this administration is just out of control and is just really, lawless. But the difference between Obama and McCain on the specifics would be significant. I think that Obama would be far more likely to insist on some court review and some protections against things like bulk collection of information, reverse targeting of Americans. There’s no question he would understand that and I would hope we’d have a much better shot at him trying to correct those problems than Senator McCain.
BB: And what about for the state of the broader national security state and civil liberties state? What would a McCain presidency mean beyond FISA? So, national security letters, torture, REAL ID –
RF: I think he’d be much better than the current administration, because he has sensitivity to issues like torture. He’s shown some sensitivity — not so much in his voting but in his comments — about some of the other issues. But again, Obama’s far more likely to take the viewpoint that I take across the board, which is that the range of these power grabs in this administration have to be pulled back. And I would urge him to make that very statement in the inaugural address.
I’ve written an op-ed that was published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this Sunday — this past Sunday — which says look, this new president, whoever it is, has to renounce these extreme powers, or its gonna start getting locked into our constitutional history. Right now the position of this administration is an outlier in the terms of our constitutional history. If this new president doesn’t renounce it and say, look we’ve gotta get this back in balance, then we will have altered the nature of our very Constitution. So this is a critical turning point in the constitutional history of America. All right. I’m running out of time.
BB: Do you have two more minutes?
RF: Okay.
BB: Okay…off the top of my head I counted several examples of the civil liberties and national securities state run amok. There was FISA, torture, national security letters, REAL ID, the border fence — it goes on and on.
RF: There’s a lot.
BB: There’s a lot. I mean obviously there’s a mindset in play here. But assuming that the mindset doesn’t change, what’s been the most egregious thing that’s occurred in the last seven years and what’s the most important to scale back.
RF: It would be, I think, the overall assertion that, under Article II of the Constitution, the president can look at a clear statute that’s been signed into law and ignore it because of his so-called commander-in-chief powers. Whether that means a justification for warrantless wiretapping, whether that means saying, look, I can do whatever I want on torture. That overall assertion is the thing that underlies many of the specifics, and that’s the one that needs to be pushed back to the Youngstown Steel case test articulated by Justice Jackson.
BB: Assuming that doesn’t happen, which is the most odious piece of legislation of the last seven years or the–
RF: –The legislation isn’t as much the problem as, for example, the warrantless wiretapping program…I would say the illegal warrantless wiretapping program (which was instituted by executive order).
BB: And the last question is a sort of procedural one. It’s about the filibuster (by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.) that you supported back in December. Why haven’t we seen more of that on certain issues, when controversial legislation has gotten to the floor…
RF: Actually I’ve been doing that consistently on issues for years and years, including this issue. I started working on this issue in December 2005. And I was out there trying to slow down the Patriot Act in the first place. I was the principle person using procedural techniques to prevent the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. I was equal partner with Sen. Dodd on the filibuster on this. I have tried to use it. Other senators are not as excited about it. But you know I have very strong views on these issues. And they do know that, at least with regard to my approach, they have to go through a fair amount of procedural stuff (such as being made to debate, as they did this week, the amendment Feingold offered with Dodd to the Protect America Act) if it’s something this bad. It should probably be done more, because, in the Senate, if you show that you’re gonna inflict a little pain in terms of time, sometimes you can, you know, get somewhere. Like we’re doing here. Well, this thing will still go through, but we’re making them realize that it’s not going to be easy, and that’s very important.
How to Think about Immunity
As has been widely reported, the House’s new FISA bill probably won’t be up for a vote in the Senate until after the July 4th holiday. But the bill continues to be subjected to a great deal of criticism on the left for its telecom immunity and surveillance provisions.
And for good reason! The bill allows for bulk collection of data on American citizens without warrants or oversight of almost any kind, and, for all intents and purposes, it requires civil lawsuits against the telecommunications companies that participated in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program to be thrown out of court. This, many would like us to believe, is some sort of compromise.
But there’s still the matter of the Inspector General reviews. The bill, as it stands right now, requires the IGs of all agencies involved in the wiretapping program to conduct reviews of a number of important things including:
(A) all of the facts necessary to describe the establishment, implementation, product, and use of the product of the Program;
(B) access to legal reviews of the Program and access to information about the Program;
(C) communications with, and participation of, individuals and entities in the private sector related to the Program;
(D) interaction with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and transition to court orders related to the Program; and
(E) any other matters identified by any such Inspector General that would enable that Inspector General to complete a review of the Program, with respect to such Department or element.
The way the law is written, the inspectors general of all the relevant agencies will convene shortly after the law is signed and name a Senate-confirmed designee to head the review process. (Senate-confirmed inspectors general are, at least in theory, more independent than politically appointed inspectors.) Over the course of the next year, each individual inspector general will examine his own agency’s role in the warrantless wiretapping program. At the end that term, the reviews will be turned into a comprehensive report and submitted to the relevant congressional committees in both classified and unclassified forms. Though the law lists no penalties for non-compliance (and so it’s hard to say why the administration wouldn’t just ignore these provisions) it does require the administration to expedite the process, and refrain from obstructing it (by, for example, dragging their feet on providing investigators with security clearances) in its own ways.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that All Will Be Revealed to the public. But it’s not nothing, either. People often scoff at the notion of the administration investigating itself and tend to regard calls for inspector general reports as inherently corrupt… until, of course, some inspector general releases some damning report detailing yet more corruption in the White House. A number of those reports have been written by Glenn Fine–who heads the IG office at the Department of Justice–and, if the bill passes, he will be one of the officials looking into the wiretapping program, and perhaps be in the lead.
This isn’t to carry water for congressional Democrats. But it is useful to look at what this provision and the immunity provision, taken together, mean as the bill’s written right now. For instance:
- If the fight over immunity is important to you because you want the telecommunications companies to pay for their crimes, or because you worry about the precedent the government is setting by providing amnesty to corporate criminals, then you’re basically out of luck.
- If the fight over immunity is important to you because you want the ins and outs of the illegal wiretapping program to be revealed in as much detail as possible, though, then all is not lost.
Obviously, it would be foolish to assume that Bush administration officials plan to cooperate with the inspectors general full stop. (You may have already noticed, but they have this tendency is to lie and obfuscate and stall when confronted with any sort of oversight, even oversight from within.) But in this instance they’re up against a deadline–and therefore some unusual incentives. If the FISA bill passes, say, a week from now, the White House will have about six months left in office, after which all of these agencies will undergo huge staff changes–particularly huge if Obama wins: no more Michael Mukasey, no more Robert Gates.
And it’s precisely for this reason that Bush et al may want to be a bit less intransigent with the inspectors general than they’d normally be, and get the reports out of the way while they’re still in office. Because if they do what they normally do and stand athwart the investigation, then a new administration will come in and the whole game changes, potentially drastically. One can imagine John McCain taking a page from Gerald Ford and continuing the obfuscation. But if Barack Obama wins the presidency (obviously still a big if) one can imagine a pretty thoroughgoing investigation and report. So in that sense, the administration might be inclined to be more helpful to the inspectors general than it normally is.
Some Capitol Hill Democrats are a bit more optimistic still. They think that no matter what approach Bush takes with the IG requirements, the reviews will take so long that they’ll bleed into a new (hopefully Democratic) administration no matter what.
But many still worry about a white wash. Or that the administration will provide the IGs with juuust enough information that the report will be completed quickly, but with the bare-minimum of disclosure. Possible, and unfortunate. But they might be at least somewhat chastened by the introduction of a new amendment from Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) If it passes (yet another big, big “if”) it will delay the provision of immunity until 90 days after the IG reports are submitted to Congress.
There are a couple ideas here. The first is that by making telecom immunity contingent upon the submission of the IG reports, Bingaman’s basically offering a guarantee that the IG reviews will be complete, and (at least in some cases) reported with some measure of credibility. The comprehensive report might not be a white wash after all. And if it’s extremely damning, the (new, more Democratic) Congress could–but probably wouldn’t–act in the intervening 90 days to amend the law and strip it of its immunity provision. Likewise, if the IG report does turn out to be weak, Congress could press for more.
Clearly, there are ifs, built on top of ifs, built on top of top of maybes here. But consider an alternative. If both the IG provisions and the immunity provision were to be removed from the FISA legislation in the Senate, and the lawsuits allowed to proceed during the Bush administration, it would set a better legal precedent, but there’d remain the risk that a great deal of information about the illegal wiretapping program would never make it out of the court house. No great victory for those interested in the discovery process. If, on the other hand, the IG and immunity provisions remain, and the Bingaman amendment fails (the most likely scenario), it’s a loss for the rule of law, but there’s still some chance that at least some of the details of the wiretapping program will be unearthed and made public.
Obviously, the ideal bill would allow the lawsuits to proceed and would require an IG report and would respect the Constitution, but our representatives–both Republicans and Democrats–foreclosed on that option.
Several months ago, the immunity battle was both an important moral fight and an effective way to derail a different extremely bad bill–one that lacked an IG provision altogether. At this point, with a different bad bill on its way to passage, immunity is pretty clearly not the grounds on which this bill is going to be stopped–if those grounds exist at all. In other words it might be time to learn to stop worrying about immunity and start pressuring Congress not to settle for a bleached IG process. And then to start thinking about how to undo all the other odious aspects of this legislation down the line.
John Yoo’s Attempt to Discredit a Critic
Last week’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, which featured special guests John Yoo and David Addington, drew a lot of attention for its rhetorical bombshells (Chairman Conyers: Could the president order a suspect buried alive?) and the tense back and forth between the witnesses and Democrats on the bench. But Addington and Yoo are both long-time lawyers–lawyers for politicians, no less–and as such their testimony revealed much, much less about the Bush administration’s torture regime than many hoped it would.
However, there was this peculiar exchange between Yoo and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), on the subject of author Philippe Sands’ new book, Torture Team which contains a number of startling revelations about the administration’s abandonment of the eighth amendment.
Yoo: Sir, I haven’t read the book. I did read Mr. Sands’ testimony before this committee, and I noticed in the testimony he said that he had interviewed me for the book. And I can say that he did not interview me for the book. He asked me for an interview and I declined. So I didn’t quite understand why he would tell the committee that he had actually interviewed me.
King: And with that answer, Professor Yoo then, I’m going to interpret that to mean that at least with regard to that statement that he had interviewed you, you find that to be a false statement, and that would perhaps reflect on the veracity of the balance of the book.
Yoo: I can’t tell what else is in the book, but I don’t understand why he would say that he interviewed me for the book. I can tell the committee that he contacted me once. He wanted to interview me for the book and I said I don’t want to talk to you. I wrote my own book, you can look at my own book. Everything I have to say is in my book. And then he told the committee that he’d interviewed me.
The idea, of course, is that someone who hates America so much that he’s willing to fabricate all sorts of untrue allegations about Yoo (and, perhaps, other administration veterans) is not to be believed. When I heard this interchange, though, I emailed Sands and asked him to clear the air. He was fairly unambiguous: “I never claimed to have interviewed him! As set out in my book: we debated. ” So who’s telling the truth?
Well, Yoo’s right about approximately one thing: Sands did testify before the very same House panel, on May 6 of this year. But that’s about the extent of it. In his prepared remarks, Sands submits that, “[o]ver hundreds of hours I conversed or debated with many of those most deeply involved. They included… the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at DoJ (Mr Yoo).” [Emphasis mine.]
You can read, as Yoo did, for yourself. Or you can watch, starting about 2 min 45 sec into the video.
And, indeed, Yoo and Sands did debate each other in October 2005. You can listen to that debate in full if you follow this link. One hesitates to throw the word perjury around (maybe Yoo… misread… Sands’ testimony). But it is safe to say that the goal here was to discredit a critic who’s brought to light a great deal of damning information about the Bush administration and its allies.
The Torture Taint
Even as they worked out the details of how interrogation techniques widely regarded as torture would be used on detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon officials sought to keep the blood off Defense Department hands.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Before the Pentagon’s detainee interrogation policy was finalized in 2002, military officials — both supporters and opponents of the controversial techniques it condoned — concerned themselves primarily with protecting their organizations from scrutiny rather than with preventing the techniques from being instituted in the first place. One senior Pentagon official even recommended removing detainees from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so that techniques that appeared to violate the U.S. Code of Military Justice could not be attributed to his agency.
On November 4, 2002, Sam McCahon, chief legal adviser to the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, raised objections to a legal opinion authored by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver of the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps that greenlighted a number of controversial interrogation tactics. In a memo to CITF Commander Brittain Mallow, McCahon wrote: “Any policy decision to use [techniques that could violate the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment] will be contrary to my recommendation.”
McCahon was particularly concerned about the harshest techniques outlined in the Beaver memo, including waterboarding, cold weather or water exposure, “the use of non-injurious physical contact,” or “scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family”.
“Nonetheless,” McCahon went on, “if the application of the requested measures is approved, I recommend the following actions to mitigate the adverse impact on the CITF.”
McCahon suggested first that detainees subjected to harsh treatment be interrogated at a facility other than Guantanamo. In addition, though, he recommended that those selected for harsh interrogations “not be a (sic) considered for referral to the Military Commission” in order to “reduce the risk that the more aggressive techniques used against a few detainees [will] be revealed.” His last request was that “CITF personnel should not participate in aggressive techniques… [to] preserve the integrity of our investigations [and] insulate CITF personnel from potential administrative or criminal liability.”
The goal, in other words, was to keep blood off CITF’s hands.
McCahon wasn’t alone in this thinking. On October 2, 2002, just one month before he sent off his own memo, military and government attorneys — including Beaver — met in Cuba with the official purpose of discussing what they called “counter resistance strategy” with Guantanamo officials. In reality, though, they negotiated the implementation and legality of a series of controversial detainee interrogation tactics that would soon become the official policy of the Department of Defense.
“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around,” Beaver told the group, according to minutes of the meeting. “It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques…. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention.”
The ICRC refers to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the conditions in which detainees at Guantanamo are kept.
Although Beaver, now retired from the military, was strongly of the opinion that the techniques under discussion were legally permissible, her advice echoed concern over the potential for a public relations disaster expressed by military and law enforcement officials who opposed the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
Bernard Barrett, spokesperson for the ICRC in Washington, DC, said leaders of his organization knew that the military was not providing the group access to all prisoners when they began meeting with detainees at Guantanamo Bay in January, 2002.
To maintain access to the detainees and a working relationship with the government, he said, the ICRC doesn’t divulge to reporters its findings or deliberations with officials. But, he added, “any attempt [on the part of the government] to mislead us is not conducive” to maintaining a cooperative relationship. He also said the ICRC is confident that the situation was rectified in September 2004 — almost two years after the harsh interrogation regime was first approved by the Pentagon.
Guantanamo officials weren’t the only ones hoping to distance themselves and their organizations from the so-called coercive techniques. A May 2008 Department of Justice inspector general audit found that senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation had raised concerns about detainee treatment as early as 2002, instructing FBI agents not to participate in questioning sessions alongside military or CIA interrogators using controversial techniques.
However, the FBI did not require agents to report incidents of abuse until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004. The IG report showed “a failure of leadership on the part of senior FBI officials,” according to Jameel Jaffer, national security director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Dodd and Feingold on FISA
Last night, Chris Dodd took to the floor of the Senate and made an impassioned plea to his colleagues not to support the House FISA legislation. The video, and text are available here.
Earlier today, Russell Feingold followed suit, in words that echoed his remarks in response to my question at a New America Foundation event on Monday. Here’s a snippet:
This legislation has been billed as a compromise between Republicans and Democrats. We are asked to support it because it is a supposedly reasonable accommodation of opposing views. Let me respond as clearly as possible: This bill is not a compromise. It is a capitulation. This bill will effectively and unjustifiably grant immunity to companies that allegedly participated in an illegal wiretapping program — a program that more than 70 members of this body still know virtually nothing about. And this bill will grant the Bush administration — the same administration that developed and operated this illegal program for more than five years — expansive new authorities to spy on Americans’ international communications. If you don’t believe me, here is what Sen. Bond had to say about the bill: “I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped to get.” And House Minority Whip Roy Blunt said this: “The lawsuits will be dismissed.” There is simply no question that Democrats who had previously stood strong against immunity and in support of civil liberties were on the losing end of this backroom deal.
I think it