Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1
An Online Dowser and Filter Of Important Information
Earlier this morning, I was on MSNBC, on Dylan Ratigan’s Morning Meeting program, discussing Iran. Although I didn’t know beforehand, the person charged with making the case that Iran is a Grave Threat was . . . Arianna Huffington. Also on the panel was Washington Post Editorial Page writer Jonathan Capehart. Here’s what ensued:
Just today, a columnist in Capehart’s paper, Richard Cohen, suggests we may have to attack Iran. Over the weekend, another columnist in Capehart’s newspaper, David Ignatius, beat his chest and roared: ”It’s hard to see how this one will end short of military confrontation if the Iranians don’t start bargaining for real.” Last week, Capehart’s Editorial Page published an attack-Iran Op-Ed from two former Senators (one from each party) who have spent the last year advocating a detailed plan for blockading, attacking, bombing and invading that country. The same day, Capehart’s boss, Editorial Page Deputy Editor Jackson Diehl, said that Israel’s so-called “success” in its attack on Gaza may/should create the view that “even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program [via an air attack] may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit.”
And, oh yeah — we’re currently occupying two Muslim countries on either side of Iran, having invaded them many years ago. There’s nothing Iran has done that we and our clients/allies haven’t done ourselves to a far greater extent. But remember: it’s Iran that is run by people with crazy, belligerent, fanatical, war-loving sentiments and is therefore a grave threat to world peace (imagine if Iran had invaded, bombed and then spent the last eight years militarily occupying Canada and Mexico, only for Iranian media elites to keep insisting that it was the U.S. that was the rogue state run by aggressive fanatics who threatened world peace).
A leading foe of healthcare reform owns a chain of clinics aimed at people who would benefit from a public option
By Tristram Korten
For months now multimillionaire healthcare entrepreneur Rick Scott has been at the center of the aggressive campaign to derail healthcare reform in Washington, D.C. Reprising the role he played nearly 20 years ago, when as the head of a national hospital chain he helped kill Clintoncare, the former hospital-chain executive founded the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, raising $20 million to fight Obamacare, including $5 million of his own money. The tall, lean Scott, whose shiny bald head swivels in exasperation at the idea of government involvement in healthcare, even stars in its nationwide ad campaign comparing Democratic proposals to socialized medicine. Through this group, he has fomented the conservative strategy to disrupt town hall-style healthcare meetings around the country by shouting down elected officials. (CPR sent schedules of the meetings to so-called Tea Party activists.) He can justifiably claim some of the credit for the Senate Finance Committee’s two votes Tuesday against a public option. But in Rick Scott the right has found a frontman whose baggage threatens to overwhelm his message.
A linchpin of Scott’s 2009 campaign has been the use of anecdotes from abroad — horror stories from Britain and Canada meant to illustrate how government-controlled healthcare systems “clearly kill people” by controlling their access to care, as he told Fox’s Sean Hannity in June. He even funded a documentary titled “Faces of Government Healthcare” cataloging the horror stories of British and Canadian patients who were purportedly denied medical attention for life-threatening illnesses until it was too late.
Yet even as Scott makes the rounds of Congress and talk-show green rooms, a wrongful death lawsuit has been working its way through the Florida courts against a doctor employed by the chain of walk-in clinics Scott founded. Scott has repeatedly bragged that the 27-clinic, Florida-based company, Solantic, is an example of the free-market ingenuity needed to fix our ailing medical infrastructure. The lawsuit, however, alleges a Solantic doctor misdiagnosed a patient’s deep-vein thrombosis as a sprained ankle, leading to a pulmonary embolism and death. That same doctor was reprimanded by the state for misdiagnosing deep-vein thrombosis in a patient who died two years earlier. It’s the kind of anecdote you’d expect to hear in Scott’s documentary — except that it condemns a free-market system where profit and patient volume may take precedence over care.
And this isn’t the first time that Scott’s warnings about the ills of socialist medicine have found an ironic echo in his own healthcare business. Scott argues that socialized medicine rations care and strangles competition, yet just after his first stint as anti-reform spokesman in the 1990s, while he was running the world’s largest healthcare company, he was accused of monopolizing markets and choking out the competition while slashing the chain’s costs to the point that it affected patient care. And while he asserts that two of the core principles of healthcare reform are “accountability” and “personal responsibility,” Scott ran a company that ultimately pleaded guilty to defrauding the government in one of the nation’s largest Medicare frauds ever. Two executives went to prison, the company paid almost $2 billion in fines, and Scott was pushed out of the company. Before he could retake the political stage, he had to build his healthcare business all over again.
In the end, Scott’s virulent opposition to Democratic healthcare proposals may simply be a business decision. The post-millennial incarnation of Rick Scott has plunged into several new healthcare businesses that could be adversely affected by reform. Among other healthcare businesses, Richard L. Scott Investments has invested in a pharmacy company, Pharmaca, where one of his employees sits on the board of directors. Drug manufacturers are opposed to a Medicare-type entity that could negotiate bulk purchases of drugs and drive down the cost of their products. More important, Scott’s Solantic bills itself as a low-cost alternative to people who would otherwise go to emergency rooms for their immediate care needs — i.e., the uninsured and people paying out-of-pocket expenses as a result of diminished insurance plans — the very people reforms are intended to cover.
So you, as a citizen, want to run for a seat in the House of Representatives? Well, you may be too late. Back in 1990, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website of the Center for Responsive Politics, the average cost of a winning campaign for the House was $407,556. Pocket change for your average citizen. But that was so twentieth century. The average cost for winning a House seat in 2008: almost $1.4 million. Keep in mind, as well, that most of those House seats don’t change hands, because in the American democratic system of the twenty-first century, incumbents basically don’t lose, they retire or die.
In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats in the House and 380 of them won. Just to run a losing race last year would have cost you, on average, $492,928, almost $100,000 more than it cost to win in 1990. As for becoming a Senator? Not in your wildest dreams, unless you have some really good pals in pharmaceuticals and health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying paid out in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), or oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat came in at a nifty $8,531,267 and a losing seat at $4,130,078 in 2008. In other words, you don’t have a hope in hell of being a loser in the American Congressional system, and what does that make you?
Of course, if you’re a young, red-blooded American, you may have set your sights a little higher. So you want to be president? In that case, just to be safe for 2012, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion dollars. After all, the 2008 campaign cost Barack Obama’s team approximately $730 million and the price of a place at the table just keeps going up. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.
Let’s face it. At the national level, this is what American democracy comes down to today, and this is what George W. Bush & Co. were so infernally proud to export by force of arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why we need to think about the questions that Arundhati Roy — to my mind, a heroic figure in a rather unheroic age — raises about democracy globally in an essay adapted from the introduction to her latest book. That book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, has just been published (with one essay included that originally appeared at TomDispatch). Let’s face it, she’s just one of those authors — I count Eduardo Galeano as another — who must be read. Need I say more? Tom
What Have We Done to Democracy?
Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
By Arundhati Roy
While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By “democracy” I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia… is that what you would prefer?”
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all “developing” societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy — too much representation, too little democracy — needs some structural adjustment.
By Norman Birnbaum
It is puzzling that obituary notices of Irving Kristol obviously intended to be positive designate him the “Godfather” of neoconservatism. Likening this group of thinkers and writers to a gang of Mafiosi may or may not be accurate; it is certainly not flattering. In fact, the neoconservative first generation around Kristol behaved no differently than any other group in joining to promote their own careers. Selflessness can be left to the saints, if any are around.
Kristol was not an original thinker and never claimed to be one. The actual origins of neoconservatism will provide material for historians for some time to come. Distinct streams of thought, in sometimes contradictory coexistence, made it up. Jewish Democrats with roots in the New Deal concluded that the Great Society had gone too far—especially with its programs of affirmative action for women and minorities. Technocratic skeptics like the political scientist James Q. Wilson thought that much government intervention failed and was socially counterproductive. Defenders of familial and religious values, often Catholic, thought that Americans should not trade their ethnic identities for what they saw as a sterile universalism. The theme of the superior wisdom of ordinary Americans triumphing over the unrealistic notions of educated elites was prominent. It contrasted with the views of the followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss, who did not think that citizenries could, or should, rule themselves. Yet they found themselves in the same movement.
The neoconservatives were at one with much of the nation in their backing of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. The Jewish members were strong partisans of Israel, and opposed to agreements with the Soviet Union unless it allowed Jewish emigration. A highly selective idea of “human rights” was voiced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was U.N. ambassador. The neoconservatives held that the United States was the authentic revolutionary power in the world since we had achieved our ideals, legitimating our claims to global moral leadership. George McGovern’s pathetic appeal, “Come home, America,” implied that our revolution was unfulfilled, that progress remained to be accomplished. It was derided as a symptom of inner uncertainty, indeed weakness. Later, Ronald Reagan claimed that the U.S. was “standing tall again.” Perhaps there was a double anatomical reference, in which claims of national strength were compensations for the potency anxieties bothering many American males. Kristol himself was notably free of hyper-patriotism. He treated it as he dealt with religion—something politically useful but not binding on a superior observer like himself.
To this was added, as the originally Democratic neoconservatives drew away from their party, the idea of the efficiency and justness of the market. That was a favored theme of Kristol—who appropriated the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Kristol was quite open in his appeals to American business to pay for the neoconservative advocacy of the sovereignty of the market. He warned bankers and industrialists that the money they gave to the colleges and universities was wasted—indeed, was used by academics critical of capitalism to depict the benefactors of the academy as asocial and rapacious, if not worse. Kristol taught for many years at New York University, but persisted in depicting American higher education in bitterly negative terms. He even declared that our institutions were so remote from American tradition that they ignored the Federalist Papers—an assertion falsified by a cursory glance at any college or university catalog. As for the anti-capitalism of the universities, it is singular that they produced economists who were, overwhelmingly and unthinkingly, partisans of the market.
By RICHARD WILNER
The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.
And worse, without a clear economic recovery plan aimed at creating entry-level jobs, the odds of many of these young adults — aged 16 to 24, excluding students — getting a job and moving out of their parents’ houses are long. Young workers have been among the hardest hit during the current recession — in which a total of 9.5 million jobs have been lost.
“It’s an extremely dire situation in the short run,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. “This group won’t do as well as their parents unless the jobs situation changes.”
Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.
“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”
There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.
“If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession,” Angrisani noted.
During previous recessions, in the early ’80s, early ’90s and after Sept. 11, 2001, unemployment among 16-to-24 year olds never went above 50 percent. Except after 9/11, jobs growth followed within two years.
A much slower recovery is forecast today. Shierholz believes it could take four or five years to ramp up jobs again.
By Nate Frentz
Younger voters — those in the under-30 crowd like me — invested an incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm in the 2008 elections. More of us came out to vote than ever before. We gave not just our votes but also our shoe leather and time as campaign volunteers. We showed up at campaign events by the thousands. And nearly one in 10 of us donated money to a presidential candidate. As young people, we are discovering a civic voice all our own, with unique perspectives on many of the challenges facing the country, and have become a powerful part of the electorate.
The Supreme Court, which begins a new term on Oct. 5, is working on a final decision in a case that could radically threaten our ability to make much difference in politics. In Citizens United v. FEC, the most important issue is whether the court will overturn rules that govern corporate electioneering — that is, ads that support or oppose a candidate. For decades, legislatures and the courts have sought to limit corporations’ and unions’ spending in elections. This is because these groups’ disproportionate ability to spend massive sums can distort the electoral process.
For decades, Congress has secured the integrity of our democracy by requiring that corporations and labor unions wishing to fund advertisements supporting or opposing candidates do so through political action committees. Instead of allowing corporations to funnel monies directly from company coffers into campaign war chests, PACs are funded through individual contributions. Campaign finance law makes it harder for corporate cash to crowd out the voices of groups — youth voters, grassroots activists, minorities — who are without ready access to reservoirs of money.
The Supreme Court has so far upheld this balance. The precedents in two cases, McConnell and Austin, that the court is currently considering overturning in the Citizens United case are only the latest in a long line of decisions regulating corporate expenditures in elections. But the most recent of those cases, McConnell, was decided in 2003, and the court’s composition has changed. With a new majority — specifically, with Samuel Alito and John Roberts replacing Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist — the Supreme Court now appears to be considering an about-face on the constitutionality of much of campaign finance reform. (A lower court just struck down some campaign finance reform in Emily’s List v. FEC.) If the court overturns precedent as radically as many fear, corporations and labor unions could be able to support or oppose candidates with funds right out of their treasuries.
Why does this concern younger voters like me? While our political idealism and passion run deep, our pockets generally do not. We do give what and when we can, but we certainly cannot afford to match the kind of massive expenditures corporations and unions can make. Even as it is, the financial contributions of younger voters to successful candidates often represent just a tiny part of what those candidates end up raising. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, all small donors of any age account for only 6 to 22 percent of the funds collected by Democratic and Republican senatorial candidates.
By Naomi Klein
On September 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment. To listen to a podcast of the full conversation, click here. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.- -The Editors
Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is, as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs.
Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall Street. Personally, I’m hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I’m just wondering how you’re coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for capitalism led by Glenn Beck.
Michael Moore: I don’t know if they’re so much revolts in favor of capitalism as they are being fueled by a couple of different agendas, one being the fact that a number of Americans still haven’t come to grips with the fact that there’s an African-American who is their leader. And I don’t think they like that.
NK: Do you see that as the main driving force for the tea parties?
MM: I think it’s one of the forces–but I think there’s a number of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The healthcare companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.
But the third part of this is–and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing: they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don’t really see that kind of commitment.
When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August–those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, Wow, it’s August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?
NK: Wasn’t part of it also, though, that the left, or progressives, or whatever you want to call them, have been in something of a state of disarray with regard to the Obama administration–that most people favor universal healthcare, but they couldn’t rally behind it because it wasn’t on the table?
MM: Yes. And that’s why Obama keeps turning around and looking for the millions behind him, supporting him, and there’s nobody even standing there, because he chose to take a half measure instead of the full measure that needed to happen. Had he taken the full measure–true single-payer, universal healthcare–I think he’d have millions out there backing him up.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category, Gordon Crawford, managing director of its largest shareholder, said during a presentation this week.
“Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they’re just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks,” said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.
“Now, they will make acquisitions … but they’re probably going to buy just stuff in their wheel house of those businesses. They’re not going to, I don’t think, go very far afield from their core competency.”
Crawford made the comments during a September 24 discussion at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication entitled “The Art of the Long View: The Media Company of 2020.”
Time Warner declined to comment on Saturday.
Time Inc’s magazines include popular titles such as People and Sports Illustrated. In the second quarter, revenue at Time Inc publishing, the largest U.S. magazine publisher, fell 22 percent to $915 million due to a 26 percent decline in advertising revenue.
By Greg Johnson, Contributor
It’s been four years since David Ramey fueled up his unmodified 1992 Buick Park Avenue with butanol derived from biomass and made a 10,000-mile road trip that took him from Blacklick, Ohio to San Diego and back.
The trip, which included stops along the way to court members of the media and environmental agency personnel, was conceived as a way to prove that “biobutanol” had inherent environmental and fuel-economy benefits over its better-known cousin in the green fuels family, ethanol.
Flash forward to 2009 and biobutanol still isn’t getting the respect that Ramey and other proponents say the fuel deserves. Ramey, for example, continues to make demonstration drives – he’ll fuel up a vehicle with biobutanol for the Fourth off July parade in nearby Gahanna, Ohio.
“There has been very little funding for biobutanol research over the past 30 years and we are simply in the infancy of this new technology,” Ramey wrote in a recent email to Green Car Advisor. “Many are talking about biobutanol but few are producing it.”
That situation is about to change, according to biobutanol backers who describe the fuel as a worthy challenger to ethanol. When properly formulated, they say, butanol burns cleaner than ethanol, has a higher energy density, can be transported in existing petroleum-product pipelines and won’t hurt seals, gaskets or other parts of internal combustion engines.
Ramey has worked for more than five years to raise funding needed to commercialize his company’s patented fermentation process for producing biobutanol. He said his privately held ButylFuel LLC is “looking for positive results in this next year.”
Englewood, Colorado-based Gevo Inc. is partnering with ICM Inc., the company that built most of this country’s corn-powered ethanol plants, on another advanced fermentation process that would allow ethanol plants to produce butanol.
Gevo has opened a 10,000 gallons-per-year pilot plant that produces 2-methylproponal (which is converted into butanol). The companies plan to have a commercial-scale plant operating by the end of the year that will produce more than 20 million gallons of 2-methylproponal and hydrocarbons per year.
Such big energy companies as BP Global and Dupont also are developing technologies that would turn biomass into butanol.
FINDING A VOICE by Ann Davidow
It has become increasingly obvious that our country is intellectually adrift. Debates about health care, national security and a myriad of social issues suggest that instead of seeking enlightenment people often embrace instead crackpot notions of patriotism and irrational fears about an over-intrusive government.
The Senate’s health-care deliberations are a gut-wrenching display of that chamber’s “collegial” atmosphere. Remarks that begin with “my good friend” are tributes those outside the beltway find hard to swallow without gagging. It’s as if something resembling a beauty pageant were in effect with senators vying for the congeniality award — a testament to the superficial nature of our political dialogue that may help to explain Sarah Palin’s success in some quarters.
Faced with difficult choices that demand the very best efforts of our very best minds, outrageous political claptrap reduces the prospect of ever breaching the partisan divide. Senators Grassley, Hatch and other Republicans say it’s important not just to do health-care-reform right away but “to do it right.” Clearly they are reading from the same script, and bi-partisan for them means operating as if there had been no election in November.
And as if their arrogance and stupidity hadn’t committed the country to two wars and serious economic distress, members of the Bush administration feel free, nonetheless, to criticize President Obama. Are they embarrassed their agenda has been so widely disparaged or that a new president has revitalized our image around the world? Isn’t it a kind of self-serving patriotism for Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and the ever chattering right-wing media creatures to suggest we may be attacked again because of decisions this president has made? What kind of message do allies or adversaries receive when such disrespectful and dangerous allegations are made by former office holders? What could be more damaging to the country than suggestions that our current leaders are unprepared to meet our security challenges?
John Bolton had a tsk, tsk, tsk, conversation with Glenn Beck on his show about how changing the kind of missile defense shield we would employ in Europe will be our undoing, Bolton adding that Obama’s warm reception at the UN was an indication of how far off-track he is. And in especially offensive mind-numbing mode, even for him, Beck recently attempted to co-opt Yom Kippur by asking viewers to observe a day of reflection on that most important Jewish holy day. Maybe around December 25th he’ll come up with some special birther stuff.
At a time of severe economic upheaval and social unrest Conservatives and critics of all descriptions insist we must address the deficit and essentially ignore the impact of an invasive, many faceted recessionary spiral that defies easy resolution. It is often said FDR’s advisors urged him to focus on balancing the budget during the Depression rather than continuing to develop government programs, a decision that stalled progress until WWII provided the final impetus for economic recovery.
by Will Bunch
There’s been a lot of hoopla about secret hidden-camera videos of low-level employees of the anti-poverty group ACORN lately — some of them quite embarrassing. I haven’t seen any video yet from “real reporters” James O’Keefe or Hannah Giles of an ACORN employee who works in the agency’s Charlotte, N.C., office by the name of Hector Vaca. And don’t hold your breath waiting for Vaca to appear on the Fox News Channel anytime soon, because he doesn’t fit the story line.
Vaca was one of eight ACORN employees in North Carolina who was just laid off because of funding problems — problems closely related to the recent exposes by the right-wing media. His work had nothing to do with what millions of folks with the time and the money to be sitting on a couch watching TV at 5 p.m. when Glenn Beck comes around think ACORN mainly does, i.e., advising garishly dressed prostitutes and pimps. Vaca was actually helping folks in Charlotte who are battling the worst economic crisis in our lifetime and fighting for them to stay in their houses, a project so “radical” that Citigroup and Bank of America (just the kind of folks you’d expect to partner with ACORN in its vast “socialist” conspiracy) are backing it. It is work that is so important that Vaca is continuing to do it now, even without a paycheck:
In Charlotte, head organizer Hector Vaca spent time this week driving through neighborhoods, visiting homeowners who are struggling with their mortgage payments. The program, in partnership with Citi, aims to offer free advice to residents who could be facing foreclosure. Vaca, 35, said he hands out fliers and will offer his cell phone, too, to homeowners who want to call for free assistance right away.
Vaca, who said he grew up poor as the child of an immigrant, has been an ACORN organizer for three years.”I love my job,” he said. “I get to help people who have never been able to get the help they need.”
This, in a (pardon the awful pun), nutshell, is what the ACORN scandal is really all about. Forget the videos, forget the “pimp.” The reason that Hector Vaca loves what he does is the reason that Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their dittoheads hate what Hector Vaca does. He is helping people who were have never been able to get the help they need…before he pulled up to their driveway.
Even in a media world where 24 hours of daily cable blather is so rarely tethered to the real-world concerns of Americans, the ACORN saga stands out as a story that everyone is talking about but no one is stepping back to even try and comprehend or place into any kind of rational perspective. The conservative dwellers of Glennbeckistan who’ve been flooding newsrooms across America — including here at the Daily News — with calls complaining that we’re not covering the ACORN story know next to nothing about the anti-poverty group other than their belief that it single-handedly elected Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States (it didn’t) and that it receives billions of dollars in taxpayer money (it doesn’t).
At the same time, I would encourage the handful of fellow progressives who see the story solely as a Fox News witch hunt to acknowledge this part of the bigger picture: That ACORN is a large non-profit that is very poorly run, and in need of some major reform. It would be good, in a way, if that’s what this story were really about — making things work better. But conservatives don’t want to reform ACORN, nor do they want another, better-run outfit to come along and do some of the things it does — helping the urban poor find better housing or increasing voter registration. They want to destroy ACORN and the things it does. Period.
A Colombian hitman recently disclosed to the Venezuelan government that over 2,500 paramilitary fighters are in the country, each chasing a $25 million bounty on the life of Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, according to Arab news network Al Jazeera.
The man, who is reportedly in the custody of Venezuelan officials, said the bounty was offered by Manuel Rosales, Chavez’s most prominent political foe, during a secret meeting 10 years ago.
Rosales allegedly said “that he would give $25 million to kill [Chavez], but that he himself would not give the money directly,” the man said, as translated by Al Jazeera.
Rosales fled into Peru in April after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He protested in the media, calling the corruption charges a political lynching.
“Right now, there are two thousand, five hundred paramilitaries from Colombia inside Venezuela with one objective: with the objective of taking down Chavez, with the objective of destabilizing him” a translator says on the video.
The network was unable to obtain comment from Rosales, and the Venezuela attorney general’s office would not confirm nor deny the veracity of the man’s claims.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, speaking to a South American newspaper recently, claimed the United States may have been involved in an attempted overthrow of Chavez’s regime.
“I think there is no doubt that in 2002, the United States had at the very least full knowledge about the coup, and could even have been directly involved,” he told El Tiempo last week.
Carter told El Tiempo that he believed Chavez was elected in a “fair” vote in 1999, had carried out necessary reforms for Venezuela and ensured that “those who are traditionally excluded are able to get a larger share of the national wealth.”
Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — If you doubt that U.S. banks long to return to the days of impotent regulation, you need only look at one of the financial sector’s top legislative priorities: killing a proposed new agency that would be dedicated solely to protecting consumers’ financial interests.
The Obama administration is asking Congress to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to regulate consumer financial products ranging from credit cards to mortgages, and to simplify disclosure about them all.
Though virtually every cause of the nation’s recent financial crisis was rooted in weak consumer protection, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is leading the fight against the proposed agency on grounds that it would make credit less available and more costly. The American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, and the Financial Services Roundtable also oppose the measure.
“We have no argument that regulation failed. Consumer protection is just one of the many areas where it fell down,” said David Hirschmann, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets, which opposes the panel. “It just simply adds a new layer of regulation without fixing . . . our outdated, broken regulatory structure that was a contributing factor in our crisis.”
The Chamber said it’s spending about $2 million on ads, educational efforts and a grassroots campaign to kill the agency. It said that the grassroots effort has led to more than 23,000 letters sent to Congress to date.
The Center for Responsive Politics said that for the 2010 election cycle, commercial banks have donated almost $3.7 million to lawmakers — 54 percent of it to Republicans. Companies that provide credit have given about $1.4 million, 59 percent to Democrats. Mortgage bankers and brokers have given $581,423.
“Maybe instead of making government BIGGER, we should focus on making government BETTER,” reads one Chamber ad.
The Chamber warns that the agency could morph into a monster regulator.
“If you look at this actual bill, the powers are so broad and so ill-defined that the scope of who is covered is incredible. They’ve managed to create a proposed new regulator for anyone who directly or indirectly provides credit to consumers,” Hirschmann said. “If you allow people to give gift cards for your store . . . you’ve got a new regulator. It’s amazingly broad in scope, scale and power.”
DEVLIN BARRETT and JEFFREY McMURRAY | 
WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery, and a law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word ‘fed” was scrawled on the dead man’s chest.
The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.
Investigators are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to his government job or to anti-government sentiment.
Investigators have said little about the case. The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, said Wednesday the man was found hanging from a tree and the word “fed” was written on the dead man’s chest. The official did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word.
FBI spokesman David Beyer said the bureau is helping state police with the case.
“Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved – and that’s part of the investigation – and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a census worker,” said Beyer.
Beyer declined to confirm or discuss any details about the crime scene.
Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau’s southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is “an apparent homicide” but nothing else.
Census employees were told Sparkman’s truck was found nearby, and a computer he was using for work was found inside it, she said. He worked part-time for the Census, usually conducting interviews once or twice a month.
Sparkman has worked for the Census since 2003, spanning five counties in the surrounding area. Much of his recent work had been in Clay County, officials said.
Questions are prearranged; ‘It was awful,’ one US delegate saysHONG KONG — Former US vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin said the US government was wasting taxpayers’ money and could aggravate poverty, said delegates at her first speech outside North America on Wednesday.
Palin, the former governor of Alaska, gave hundreds of financial big-hitters at the CLSA Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong a wide-ranging speech that covered Alaska, international terrorism, US economic policy and trade with China.
Her performance, which was closed to the media, divided opinion.
Some of those who attended praised her forthright views on government social and economic intervention and others walked out early in disgust.
“She was brilliant,” said a European delegate, on condition of anonymity.
“She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don’t get better. The rich will leave the country and the poor will get poorer.”
Two US delegates left early, with one saying “it was awful, we couldn’t stand it any longer”. He declined to be identified.
Palin, who shot to national and international prominence after Senator John McCain picked her as his running mate last year, stepped down as Alaska governor in July but has provided little insight into her future plans.
She is expected to write a book and has said she will travel the country campaigning for candidates who share her political ideology.
In the CLSA speech, which lasted about 75 minutes, Palin also tackled the recent US trade spat with China, a country she said the United States should have the best possible relationship with.
According to delegates, she said US President Barack Obama’s administration worsened an already difficult situation when earlier this month he slapped duties on Chinese tire imports blamed for costing American jobs.
They said she praised the economic policies of former US President Ronald Reagan and criticised the current administration for intervening too much during the recent financial crisis.
Although she touched on the threat posed to the United States by terrorism and talked about links with traditional US allies in Asia such as Japan, Australia and South Korea, one Asian delegate complained she devoted too much time to her home state of Alaska.
“It was almost more of a speech promoting investment in Alaska,” he said, declining to be named.
“As fund managers we want to hear about the United States as a whole, not just about Alaska. And she criticised Obama a lot but offered no solutions.”
Another said he was disappointed that she took only pre-arranged questions.
By Roger Shuler
Attorneys for former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman are requesting an evidentiary hearing, in part to determine if federal prosecutors committed crimes in their handling of the case. Siegelman also directly targets U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller, saying Fuller’s handling of the trial constitutes a “screaming violation of due process.”
Meanwhile, a central figure in the Siegelman story calls on Attorney General Eric Holder to step down from the case, because of conflicts related to his former law firm, and ask President Obama to appoint a special counsel.
A heightened sense of drama now surrounds the Siegelman case, and veteran attorney/journalist Andrew Kreig lays it out in a compelling overview piece at Huffington Post. Writes Kreig:
What we now face is as dramatic a moment as I’ve ever seen in 35 years as a professional in this field, first as a news reporter covering federal courts and more recently as an attorney and commentator.
At this point, the Justice Department is either going to help enforce silence about Judge Fuller and the others who are accused of official misconduct, or else DoJ will stop making preposterous arguments to prevent a public hearing on the evidence, and potential new trial before a new judge. Then the evidence will take its course, whatever that might be.
Siegelman’s latest court filing is filled with hard-hitting attacks against the Montgomery, Alabama-based judge and prosecutors who oversaw the trial. The complete document can be read here:
The filing focuses on what it calls a “smoking gun” e-mail provided by Justice Department whistleblower Tamarah Grimes:
The prosecution acts as if the “smoking gun” third email from District Ethics Officer and First Assistant United States Attorney, Patricia Snyder (later Watson) does not exist. But it does.
That email included the following:
“I wanted to let you know that Tami has agreed to work on the big case that Steve Feaga and J.B. Perrine are busily working up. Since this case has ACE potential, having her work on it is justified. Leura [Mrs. Canary] and Louis [Franklin (“Franklin”) who was supposed to be in charge of the Siegelman case after the alleged recusal] both liked the concept, and Tami is excited about it as well. Because of the large volume of documents involved.”
The e-mail could have criminal implications for federal prosecutors, the Siegelman team states:
If the facts show that the third email is accurate, attorneys and others in the Department of Justice and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama may have engaged in criminal conduct, as well as having violated a statute prohibiting conflicts of interest by employees of DOJ.
In a footnote, the filing cites criminal statutes that might have been violated:
18 U.S.C. 208 (a) (conflict of interest); 18 U.S.C. 3 (accessory after the fact); 18 U.S.C. 4 (misprision of a felony) among others.
Alleged threats to government witness Nick Bailey also could have criminal implications for prosecutors:
Again, all the evidence is not in, but if it turns out that the Government threatened witnesses, those who did so may have their own problems. 18 U.S.C. 1512 (Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant).
The filing saves its harshest language for Judge Fuller, who oversaw the trial involving Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy. Fuller was shown a postal-inspector report about the authenticity of alleged juror e-mails, and that draws considerable attention in the filing:
Murray Waas
murraywaas@gmail.com | HuffPost Reporting
The South Carolina Supreme Court has ordered an insurance company to pay $10 million for wrongly revoking the insurance policy of a 17-year-old college student after he tested positive for HIV. The court called the 2002 decision by the insurance company “reprehensible.”
That appears to be the most an insurance company has ever been ordered to pay in a case involving the practice known as rescission, in which insurance companies retroactively cancel coverage for policyholders based on alleged misstatements – sometimes right after diagnoses of life-threatening diseases.
The ruling emerges from a conservative Southern state with one of the most pro-business climates in the country. And it comes as progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill are pressing for health care reforms, such as a public insurance option, that reflect wariness about the private insurance industry’s motives.
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court’s verdict against Fortis Insurance, now known as Assurant. The trial jury had awarded the former college student, Jerome Mitchell, $15 million in punitive damages; the Supreme Court reduced that amount by $5 million.
Mitchell learned that he had HIV when, while heading to college, he donated blood. Fortis then rescinded his coverage, citing what turned out to be an erroneous note from a nurse in his medical records that indicated that he might have been diagnosed prior to his obtaining his insurance policy.
Before the cancellation of the policy, an underwriter working for Fortis wrote to a committee considering whether or not to rescind his policy: “Technically, we do not have the results of the HIV tests. This is the only entry in the medical records regarding HIV status. Is it sufficient?” The underwriter’s concerns were ignored and the rescission went forward.
In the ruling, Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal wrote: “We find ample support in the record that Fortis’ conduct was reprehensible … Fortis demonstrated an indifference to Mitchell’s life and a reckless disregard to his health and safety.”
An investigation this summer by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and earlier ones by state regulators in California, New York and Connecticut, found that thousands of vulnerable and seriously ill policyholders have had their coverage canceled by many of the nation’s largest insurance companies without any legal basis. The congressional committee found that three insurance companies alone made at least $300 million over five years from rescission. One of those three companies was Assurant.
Ryan Grim ryan@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting
Elizabeth Warren for Senate?
Some are pushing to draft the Harvard professor, consumer advocate and head of the committee overseeing the Wall Street bailout to take the seat vacated by the death of Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy.
Warren, during an interview on Fox Business, was asked several times Thursday if she’d rule out accepting an appointment to the seat. “I have a job,” she repeated.
But the blog post by Ethan Porter that prompted the question encouraged Warren to run for the seat outright rather than accept an appointment. The appointed senator would only serve until the beginning of next year, when an election is held, and Warren would need to give up her chairmanship of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has announced her bid for the seat and is considered the front-runner. Coakley has battled Wall Street, as well, but let Goldman Sachs wiggle out of a prosecution earlier this year. Goldman paid $10 million to the state and $50 million to hoodwinked homeowners in exchange for Coakley’s dropped prosecution.
Warren has a passionate following: “Warren in 2012!” occasionally pops up in HuffPost comments sections. Dylan Ratigan is a fan, too. “I love her. Love her,” the MSNBC host said Thursday. “Actually tells the truth. Actually wants to try to improve the system.”
Warren’s background in consumer protection work led her to propose a Financial Product Safety Commission that would restrict the type of unsafe financial products that led to the economic collapse of 2008. Since renamed the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, it’s destined for a vote in the House Financial Services Committee this fall and is fiercely opposed by banks.
Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) is an original sponsor of the legislation and credited Warren when introducing it. “I’ve called on Elizabeth Warren’s expertise repeatedly on bankruptcy and consumer protection issues. She is a serious scholar, but she sees issues through the eyes of struggling middle class families and she talks in language that ordinary Americans easily understand,” he said when asked about a Warren bid for the Senate.
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