Tag: Punting the Pundits

At this point everyone knows about Fix the Debt. It is a collection of corporate CEOs put together by Peter Peterson, the Wall Street private equity mogul. Ostensibly they want to reduce budget deficits and the national debt, but for some reason their attention always seems focused on cutting Social Security and Medicare. While some in this group will allow for minor tax increases, budget cuts are explicitly a priority, with these two programs firmly in their crosshairs.

Given that the stated goal of this group is to reduce budget deficits, it is worth asking why taxes don’t figure more prominently on their agenda. After all, the United States ranks near the bottom of wealthy countries in its tax take as a share of GDP. It is also worth asking why one tax in particular, a financial transactions tax, never seems to get mentioned in anything the group or its members do.

Amy Goodman: Historic Tar-Sands Action at Obama’s Door

For the first time in its 120-year history, the Sierra Club engaged in civil disobedience, the day after President Barack Obama gave his 2013 State of the Union address. The group joined scores of others protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which awaits a permitting decision from the Obama administration. The president made significant pledges to address the growing threat of climate change in his speech. But it will take more than words to save the planet from human-induced climate disruption, and a growing, diverse movement is directing its focus on the White House to demand meaningful action.

Robert Reich: The Biggest Republican Lie

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) says Senate Republicans will unanimously support a balanced-budget amendment, to be unveiled Wednesday as the core of the GOP’s fiscal agenda.

There’s no chance of passage so why are Republicans pushing it now? “Just because something may not pass doesn’t mean that the American people don’t expect us to stand up and be counted for the things that we believe in,” says McConnnell. [..]

Perhaps most importantly, it advances the Republican’s biggest economic lie – that the budget deficit is “the transcendent issue of our time,” in McConnell’s words, and that balancing the budget will solve America’s economic problems.

Mark Weisbrot: Japan’s Fiscal Stimulus: Yes, There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch

Economists like to say there’s no such thing as a free lunch — this was even the title of a 1975 book by Milton Friedman. But sometimes there is a free lunch — in a vitally important sense — and now is one of those times for a lot of countries suffering from unnecessary unemployment and in some cases, recession.

Adam Posen doesn’t want to recognize that this is the case for Japan at present. Posen is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which is probably Washington’s most influential think tank on international economics. Posen is not an “austerian” economist — in the second half of the 1990s he supported expansionary fiscal policy in Japan; and more recently, as a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee from 2009-2012, he supported expansionary monetary policy, including quantitative easing and very low-interest rates.

So it is worth looking at his argument, because it may help us understand how the mainstream of the economics profession can sometimes be an obstacle to global economic recovery, as well as to important social goals such as reducing unemployment and poverty.

In an incendiary new report, “Rig the Vote: How a National Effort to Attack Voting Rights Landed in Wisconsin“, the Center for Media and Democracy and Citizen Action of Wisconsin Education Fund show how Republicans and rightwing groups across the country are working to undermine elections and ensure a Republican lock on electoral college votes in states that have historically voted Democratic.

Among the nefarious vote-rigging efforts explored in the report: Republicans hope to take their gerrymandered redistricting plans nationwide–changing the rules so that electoral votes in swing states are awarded based on Congressional districts, not popular vote totals.

This could guarantee that Republican candidates like Mitt Romney, even as they lose the popular vote, get enough electoral votes to become President against the will of the majority of American voters.

Marion Brady: A Real Paradigm Shift in Education

I envy Thomas Paine’s way with language. I’ve been searching for years for words that would have the impact of those he penned in his 1776 pamphlet, “The Crisis.”

Admittedly, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” and the words that followed, weren’t a howling success. Only about a third of the colonists agreed with Paine’s call for revolution. Another third wanted to stick with England. The remaining third were neutral or apathetic.

What Paine was able to do that I can’t do is sell an idea to at least enough people to make something happen. I need to convince not a third of readers but, say, a tenth, to call their legislators and tell them to dismantle the education “reform” machine assembled in Washington by business leaders and politicians.

Kimberly Halkett: US Food Industry Battles Against Regulation

Why are Americans getting fatter, and who’s to blame? It’s a question members of the US Congress need to be asking.

Like the war on tobacco decades ago, the US is now fighting a new battle on obesity. On one side are US public health officials advocating for their government to put in place better nutrition policies. But those efforts have met stiff resistance, in part because the $1 trillion US food and beverage industry is fighting regulation with a powerful weapon: its deep pockets.

It’s no secret the standard American diet is relatively inexpensive, convenient and satisfying. Whether it’s highly marketed fast food or highly processed, packaged foods in the supermarket, what Americans eat has changed dramatically over decades.

Donna Smith: Churning Isn’t Just for Butter Anymore

It isn’t often anymore that I learn a new word in the health care system discussion, but this week I did.  Churning.  I was at a meeting here in Colorado where I have taken on a new role in advocating and administering for a publicly financed, universal, single-payer system with Health Care for All Colorado.  And the definition of churning I learned is a sad commentary on a system that still allows access to care based on inequality of coverage that leaves so many people suffering and tens of thousands dying in America every year.

Churning is the policy wonk term for those who qualify and are covered by a public program like Medicaid and who then have access to a private insurance plan through a new job that offers it or through a family member’s coverage but who then lose that coverage and end up back on the public insurance for which they qualify.  They churn.  And they suffer.

Archaeologists of the future will sift through our newspapers, websites, and other ephemera and marvel at the inverted shape of our political debate. They’ll be particularly surprised to discover that, at a time when retirement security was being destroyed for an entire generation, politicians were posturing over how to make the problem even worse by cutting Social Security.

And they’ll marvel over how long it took us to agree on the right solution: Increasing Social Security benefits instead.

The concept of increasing Social Security has been around for a while. Strengthen Social Security, a coalition of 320 groups, reviewed the program’s ability to meet current and future needs and concluded that benefits should be increased rather than cut. The National Academy for Social Insurance proposed increasing benefits for vulnerable groups. The AFL-CIO has called for raising benefits. We got in the game, too, suggesting that a 15 percent increase in 2011 be included as part  of a forward-thinking progressive agenda.

Michael T. Klare: A Presidential Decision That Could Change the World: The Strategic Importance of Keystone XL

Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.  In the near future, President Obama is expected to give its construction a definitive thumbs up or thumbs down, and the decision he makes could prove far more important than anyone imagines.  It could determine the fate of the Canadian tar-sands industry and, with it, the future well-being of the planet.  If that sounds overly dramatic, let me explain.

Sometimes, what starts out as a minor skirmish can wind up determining the outcome of a war — and that seems to be the case when it comes to the mounting battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. If given the go-ahead by President Obama, it will daily carry more than 700,000 barrels of tar-sands oil to those Gulf Coast refineries, providing a desperately needed boost to the Canadian energy industry. If Obama says no, the Canadians (and their American backers) will encounter possibly insuperable difficulties in exporting their heavy crude oil, discouraging further investment and putting the industry’s future in doubt.

Robert REich: Why We Need an Investment Budget

Part of the President’s State of the Union message and of his second term agenda apparently will focus on public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D.

That’s good news. But how do we fund these investments when discretionary spending is being cut to the bone in order to reduce the budget deficit?

Answer: By treating public investments differently from current spending.

No rational family would borrow to pay for a vacation but not borrow to send a kid to college. No rational business would borrow to finance current salaries but not to pay for critical new machinery.

Yet that’s, in effect, what the federal government does now. The federal budget doesn’t distinguish between borrowing for current expenditures that keep things going, and future investments that build future productivity. All borrowing is treated the same.

Wendell Potter: Fixing Medicare: Start By Eliminating Drug Makers’ Sweetheart Deal, Not Benefits

It’s no surprise that American corporations spend billions of dollars each year on lobbying, trying to gain favorable treatment from legislators. What some may find a bit unnerving is the industry that’s leading the pack in these efforts.

You might think our nation’s defense and aerospace companies, which have legions of hired guns on Capitol Hill, are the leaders. Or perhaps Big Oil, which is perpetually fighting with environmentalists and consequently needs friends in Washington to block what it considers onerous legislation or regulations.

In both cases, you’d be wrong. It’s actually the pharmaceutical industry that spends the most each year to influence our lawmakers, forking over a total of $2.6 billion on lobbying activities from 1998 through 2012, according to OpenSecrets.org. To get some perspective on just how big that number is, consider that oil and gas companies and their trade associations spent $1.4 billion lobbying Congress over the same time frame while the defense and aerospace industry spent $662 million, a fourth of Big Pharma’s total.

The biggest problem with the recently disclosed Obama administration white paper (pdf) defending the drone killing of radical clerk Anwar al-Awlaki isn’t its secrecy or its creative redefinition of the words “imminent threat.” It is the revolutionary and shocking transformation of the meaning of due process.

Fortunately, as seen during John Brennan’s confirmation hearing for Central Intelligence Agency director, Congress is starting to notice]. [..]

The Obama administration’s apparent belief that due process can be satisfied in secret internal inside the executive branch is arguably a greater departure from precedent. It is a travesty of the very notion of due process. And to borrow a phrase from Justice Robert Jackson, it will now lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any administration that needs it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: A Choice For Corporate America: Are You With America Or The Cayman Islands

When the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the largest financial institutions in the United States took every advantage of being American. They just loved their country – and the willingness of the American people to provide them with the largest bailout in world history. In 2008, Congress approved a $700 billion gift to Wall Street. Another $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans and other financial assistance came from the Federal Reserve. America. What a great country.

But just two years later, as soon as these giant financial institutions started making record-breaking profits again, they suddenly lost their love for their native country. At a time when the nation was suffering from a huge deficit, largely created by the recession that Wall Street caused, the major financial institutions did everything they could to avoid paying American taxes by establishing shell corporations in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

Robert Kuttner: The Sorry State of Our Union

President Obama delivers his fifth State of the Union Address on Tuesday. Based on White House leaks, the president will emphasize rebuilding the middle class. He will invoke the importance of education, infrastructure, clean energy, and manufacturing.

These are terrific themes, economically and politically. The only problem is that rebuilding the middle class by the public investments that the society needs is out of the question — because of the downward drag of a budget politics that the president shares.

The administration is officially committed to the idea that we need another $1.5 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade — a rate of fiscal contraction half again as large as this year’s Sequester, and for 10 full years.

Robert Reich: Coming Tuesday (Hopefully): The State of the Union’s Economy

If you’re sitting in the well of the House when a president gives a State of the Union address (as I’ve had the privilege of doing five times), the hardest part is on the knees. You’re required to stand and applaud every applause line, which means, if you’re in the cabinet or an elected official of the president’s party, an extraordinary amount of standing and sitting.

But for a president himself, the State of the Union provides a unique opportunity to focus the entire nation’s attention on the central issue you want the nation to help you take action on.

President Obama has been focusing his (and therefore America’s) attention on immigration, guns, and the environment. All are important. But in my view none of these should be the central theme of his address Tuesday evening.

Two big biotechnology companies, Amgen and Genentech, are lobbying state legislatures to limit competition to their biological drugs that will lose patent protection in the next several years. Before taking any action, lawmakers should wait for guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that reviews all drugs and their generic versions for safety and effectiveness. [..]

American consumers, insurers and health care providers could potentially save billions of dollars a year by using cheaper versions of brand-name biologicals that now cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year per patient. States should not move to limit access to biosimilar drugs before the F.D.A. has issued final guidelines on how to ensure their safety. In their lobbying campaign, revealed by Andrew Pollack in The Times recently, the two companies have persuaded legislators to introduce bills that would restrict the ability of pharmacists to substitute cheaper biosimilars in filling prescriptions.

Matthew Rothschild: Brennan’s Obscene Testimony at Confirmation Hearing

John Brennan tried to elude his questioners at his confirmation hearing as CIA director.

On one question after another, he excreted octopus ink to dodge or obfuscate. [..]

While he denounced and renounced waterboarding, he refused to call it torture.

And he confirmed that “foreign partners” were holding most of the people the U.S. has under interrogation today, and that the CIA is involved in those interrogations, sometimes directly. “The CIA should be able to lend its full expertise,” he said.

That “full expertise” includes all sorts of techniques that are banned by the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Dave Johnson: Fix the Trade Deficit, Fix the Economy

Yet another report is out showing how the trade deficit is costing us millions of jobs and hurting our economy. This report has specific numbers: between 2.2 million and 4.7 million U.S. jobs, between 1 percent and 2.1 percent of the unemployment rate and a gross domestic product increase of between 1.4 percent and 3.1 percent.

These are real numbers that were carefully calculated. This is a real problem that is hurting people, hurting small and mid-sized companies, hurting communities, hurting our tax base and hurting our ability to make a living in the future. And there are real solutions available to fix the problem.

If you saw the movie Roger & Me, you saw what happened to Flint, Mich. when GM’s executives moved the jobs out of the country. That movie showed what a trade deficit does. Roger & Me came out in 1989 and was really only a small, local look at what was coming to much of the country. In the decades since then, the problem spread to entire regions. This is not some economic dislocation due to changes in the economy; this is regional and even national devastation that doesn’t have to happen and that no country should tolerate.

Mike Lux: TBTF, TBTJ: Too Big to Exist

I am really excited that the long overdue battle over immigration reform and a path to citizenship has finally begun in earnest. While I am heartsick at the reason, it is good news that common-sense gun safety laws are once again being discussed in this country almost two decades after we finally passed the Brady Bill. And the ongoing, never-ending budget fights remain urgently important in terms of stopping more damage to middle class and poor people in America. I know I will be engaging daily in the vitally important battles over all these issues, and I expect my progressive allies all over the country will be as well. [..]

And looming over these economic problems is quite literally the elephant in the room: these gargantuan Too Big To Fail, and apparently Too Big To Jail, Wall Street financial conglomerates. Because of their massive economic and political power, the financial sector swallows up more than 40 percent of the economy in this country, and because they can make more money doing speculative high-speed trading than by investing in manufacturing or infrastructure or making loans to small businesses, those sectors get starved for capital. Because of Wall Street’s obsession with short term profit, workers are not invested in and wages keep getting driven down. Because these banks’ accountants have figured out that their short-term stock prices will stay higher if they continue to show inflated housing assets on their books, they have been unwilling to work with homeowners to write down underwater debt. Because of tax policies such as low capital gains and the carried interest loophole that favor the financial sector, the federal budget is starved for resources, and because Wall Street wants to be able to speculate with senior citizens’ money, the pressure keeps building to cut or privatize Social Security, as well as state and local government workers’ pensions.

No, I am not kidding. Steven Davidoff has a DealBook column touting the fact that Hostess Twinkies are likely to survive as a product, even though the company that makes them has gone bankrupt. The Twinkie brand, along with other iconic brands owned by the company, will be sold off in bankruptcy to other companies who expect to be able to profitably market them. Of course there is no guarantee that they will restart the old factories and rehire the Hostess workers, likely leaving them out in the cold.

There are two major issues here. First, in the United States firms can in general fire workers at will. This means that if they can find workers elsewhere in or outside the country who will work for less, then they can dump their current workforce and higher lower cost labor. This happens all the time. Most other wealthy countries require some sort of severance payment to longer term workers, but the United States does not.

Robert Reich: The Economic Challenge Ahead: More Jobs and Growth, Not Deficit Reduction

Can we just keep things in perspective? On Tuesday, the President asked Republicans to join him in finding more spending cuts and revenues before the next fiscal cliff whacks the economy at the end of the month.

Yet that same day, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal budget deficit will drop to 5.3 percent of the nation’s total output by the end of this year.

This is roughly half what the deficit was relative to the size of the economy in 2009. It’s about the same share of the economy as it was when Bill Clinton became president in 1992. The deficit wasn’t a problem then, and it’s not an immediate problem now.

Yes, the deficit becomes larger later in the decade. But that’s mainly due to the last-ditch fiscal cliff deal in December.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Sen. Kaufman On JPMorgan Chase: Private Lawsuit Found Evidence the Feds Didn’t

Think of it as the story of two antagonists. One of them was an honest Senator who came to Washington to fight corruption. The other is an arrogant banker who’s so sure of his untouchability that he wore “FBI” cufflinks when he made a public appearance last month.

Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, whose epic struggle to bring Wall Street to justice was depicted in PBS Frontline‘s recent episode The Untouchables, made a striking observation on a press call today. “In a private case,” Sen. Kaufman said, the Dexia bank’s lawsuit “… uncovered reams of emails directly related to the fact that fraud was (allegedly) being committed by JPMorgan Chase.”

He was referring to headlines like “E-Mails Imply JPMorgan Knew Some Mortgage Deals Were Bad” in the New York Times and “JPMorgan Hid Reports of Defective Loans Before Sales ” in Bloomberg News. Sen. Kaufman added:

“It is just hard to believe that if the Department of Justice had made Wall St fraud a major priority, with the resources they have, they could not have found these same emails and brought these cases.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Republicans: Rebranding vs. Rethinking

Rebranding is trendy in the Republican Party.

Rep. Eric Cantor gave a major speech on Tuesday to advance the effort. Gov. Bobby Jindal wants the GOP to stop being the “stupid party.” Karl Rove is setting up a PAC (it’s what he does these days) to defeat right-wing crazies who cost the party Senate seats.

But there’s a big difference between rebranding-this implies the product is fine but needs to be sold better-and pursuing a different approach to governing. Here’s an early action report.

The corporate profit share of national income is near a post-World War II high. The share of income going to the richest 1 percent is almost at its pre-Depression peak.

These would seem like impressive accomplishments but the process of upward redistribution, from Joe Sixpack to Joe Six Houses, is a never-ending struggle. Toward this end, Louisiana Governor and Republican wunderkind Bobby Jindal has just proposed replacing the state’s income tax with a sales tax.

Sales taxes will generally be more regressive than income taxes for the simple reason that low- and moderate-income people will spend a larger share of their income than upper-income people. That means that the portion of income that wealthy Louisianans save will escape taxation, imposing a larger burden on low- and middle-income families in any revenue neutral shift.

Amy Goodman; Brennan and Kiriakou, Drones and Torture

John Brennan and John Kiriakou worked together years ago, but their careers have dramatically diverged. Brennan is now on track to head the CIA, while Kiriakou is headed off to prison. Each of their fates is tied to the so-called war on terror, which under President George W. Bush provoked worldwide condemnation. President Barack Obama rebranded the war on terror innocuously as “overseas contingency operations,” but, rather than retrench from the odious practices of his predecessor, Obama instead escalated. His promotion of Brennan, and his prosecution of Kiriakou, demonstrate how the recent excesses of U.S. presidential power are not transient aberrations, but the creation of a frightening new normal, where drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, assassination and indefinite detention are conducted with arrogance and impunity, shielded by secrecy and beyond the reach of law.

Robert Reich: The Real Debate Over American Citizenship

Sometimes we have a national conversation without realizing it. We talk about different aspects of the same larger issue without connecting the dots.

That’s what’s happening now with regard to the meaning of American citizenship and the basic rights that come with it.

On one side are those who think of citizenship as a matter of exclusion and privilege – of protecting the nation by keeping out those who are undesirable, and putting strict limits on who is allowed to exercise the full rights of citizenship.

On the other are those who think of citizenship inclusively – as an ongoing process of helping people become full participants in America.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Why the Government’s Lawsuit Against Standard & Poor’s Matters

Before we begin, let’s take a moment to ponder the absurdity of a system in which:

a) for-profit corporations are allowed to call themselves “agencies”;

b) the government — that is, us — has given these for-profit companies trillion-dollar influence over the financial system; and

c) these “agencies” are paid by the very financial institutions whose work they’re expected to review objectively — institutions who will take their business elsewhere if their products aren’t rated highly .

We gave these “agencies” all this power, along with a huge financial incentive to rate garbage as if it were roses. Then we, in the form of government regulators, looked the other way. And now we’re shocked — shocked! — that these for-profit companies were behaving… well, like for-profit companies.

American political history is usually told as the story of what political elites say and do. The twists and turns, advances and setbacks, wars, disasters and recoveries, are said to be the work of the founders, or of the presidents, or of the courts, or of the influence of a handful of great people who somehow emerge from the mass.

But this history can also be told as the story of the great protest movements that periodically well up from the bottom of American society and the impact these movements have on American institutions. There would be no founders to memorialize without the Revolutionary-era mobs who provided the foot soldiers to fight the British; no films about the quandaries of Abe Lincoln during the Civil War without the abolitionists and the thousands of runaway slaves; no Labor Day to celebrate without the sit-down strikers; no Martin Luther King to beatify without a movement of poor blacks who defied the Southern terror system.

Bryce Covert: Twenty Years After the FMLA, Our Family Leave Policies Are Dragging Us Down

Twenty years ago today, the US passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, finally codifying into law the right for most employees to take time off from work for the birth of a baby or to care for a seriously ill family member. Since then, workers have used it 100 million times to care for themselves and their families.

But this milestone, and all the good it’s done since, hasn’t been enough. We’ve fallen behind our industrialized peers on many key indicators since then. Only about 60 percent of workers have access to paid leave, putting a huge financial burden on new parents and those with sick family members. Our failure hits working families square on. But it’s a problem we all bear, because it’s also threatening our economic edge.

Nona Willis Aronowitz: In Whiter New Orleans, There’s a Gray Area

“The post-Katrina influx just made it harder for people who are from here and are not the right color,” says Tracey Brown, a 24-year-old black New Orleans native who has watched her city get whiter over the past decade. “I have to ask those transplants: ‘Are you working a job where everybody at your job is not only not from here, but also white? Why do you not question that?'”

It’s a well-known fact that behind New Orleans’ sunny story of rebuilding and revitalizing is a tale of a whitening city: Before Hurricane Katrina, the city was 67 percent African American; now that number hovers around 60. But the story isn’t so, well, black and white. As Ingrid Norton pointed out in GOOD last year, young, educated, black entrepreneurs are moving to New Orleans, too. That still makes them gentrifiers, in the cultural and economic sense, but their race affects the way they’re received by their new neighbors.

Ana Marie Cox: Obama Sounds Retreat on Gun Control but Declares War on Gun Crime

The president’s event in Minnesota suggests there is little chance of new gun control laws – but real hope of reducing gun violence

Observers billed Obama’s speech here in the Twin Cities Monday afternoon as the first stop for a White House road show promoting gun control legislation, but the event’s tone, its location, and, yes, even its content signal that the White House has chosen a circuitous route in pursuit of its goals. The goals themselves have changed, too, as the White House shifts our attention away from the specific horror of Sandy Hook to the more mundane living nightmare of daily gun violence.

The White House told reporters that the visit would highlight the strides Minneapolis has made in reducing youth violence – this alone shows an unremarked-on, easy change of lanes, in terms of goals. Minnesota has seen two school shootings in the past decade, including one that ended the lives of ten people, including the shooter; but neither the president nor the White House press team brought them into the conversation.

Edward Koch, who died last week at 88, figures prominently as an antagonist in “How to Survive a Plague,” David France’s excellent new documentary about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). The film opens with footage from 1987 of a reporter asking Koch, then New York’s mayor, why he called ACT UP protesters “fascists” but referred to them in a news release as “concerned citizens.” Koch replied, classically, “Fascists can be concerned citizens.” [..]

But “How to Survive a Plague” shows that ACT UP was a movement that worked effectively within the system at the same time that it worked noisily against it. ACT UP activists weren’t just angry about national apathy and inaction on AIDS; they also had specific demands and constructive ideas about how the government and drug companies could do better. Unlike a lot of protest movements, once they got to the stage where the targets of their protests said, “I’m listening. What do you want me to do?” they had concrete answers.

Wendell Potter: Why Americans Pay So Much for Health Care: Friends in High Places (Just Not Your Friends)

If you wonder why we spend more money on health care than any other country but have some of the worst health outcomes, you need look no further than the halls of Congress to it figure out. [..]

Drug makers have long had cozy relationships and outsized influence on lawmakers in Washington. That’s why Obamacare barely touches that industry. Big Pharma essentially blackmailed members of Congress and the White House by threatening to bankroll a huge PR and lobbying campaign to kill health care reform if serious consideration was given to allowing Medicare officials to negotiate for lower drug prices.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: As Public Makes “Hard Choices” On Social Security, Alan Simpson Ducks His “Moment of Truth”

Alan Simpson’s the lead pitchman for a billionaire- and corporate-funded initiative to slash Social Security that has subjected the public to years of nonstop haranguing and lecturing.

The lecturing’s gotten crude, too, as when Simpson insisted that anyone who disagrees with him is shoveling “bullsh*t.”

That’s tough talk, but it’s a funny thing: When the public makes tough decisions, as it did in a new National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) survey, the tough-talking Mr. Simpson is nowhere to be found.

Lee Fang: Meet Jason Rapert, the Koch-Backed Evangelical Steering Arkansas’s Radical Abortion-Restriction Effort

On Wednesday, the Arkansas legislature lurched forward with a radical measure to ban most abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected within six weeks of a pregnancy, a requirement experts say will force the state to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina to detect. [..]

Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, author of his own ideology he touts as the “Science of Liberty,” is famous for spreading his beliefs (and his business interests) through the aggressive use of political donations to candidates, think tanks, media outlets, universities, career-training institutes and dark-money attack-ad groups. But critics, including myself, point to the hundreds of state and federal Koch-backed politicians who seem to prioritize fairly authoritarian policies. Rapert’s transvaginal probes and government-forced pregnancies do not seem to cohere with any notion of individual liberty I’m familiar with.