This week, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The bill is expected to pass the House, where the GOP holds a majority, but stall in the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the meantime, the symbolic vote is giving both Republicans and Democrats a pretext to publicly rehash their views on the legislation.
At AlterNet, Faiz Shakir and colleagues point out that repealing health care reform would cost the federal government an additional $320 billion over the next decade, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The authors also note that despite Republican campaign promises to "repeal and replace" the law, their bill contains no replacement plan. Health care reform protects Americans with preexisting conditions from some forms discrimination by insurers. At least half of all Americans under the age of 65 could be construed as having a preexisting condition. No wonder only 1 in 4 Americans support repeal, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released on Monday.
Perhaps that explains, as Paul Waldman reports at TAPPED, why the White House is vigorously defending health care reform. The Obama administration is making full use of the aforementioned statistics from The Department Health and Human Services on the percentage of Americans who have preexisting conditions:
As the House prepares to vote on the "Repeal the Puppy-Strangling Job-Vivisecting O-Commie-Care Act," or whatever they're now calling it, the White House and its allies actually seem to have their act together when it comes to fighting this war for public opinion. The latest is an analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services on just how many people have pre-existing conditions, and thus will be protected from denials of health insurance when the Affordable Care Act goes fully into effect in 2014
Republicans are fuming that Democrats are "politicizing" a policy debate by bringing up the uncomfortable fact that, if the GOP's repeal plan became law, millions of people could lose their health insurance. As Waldman points out, the high incidence of preexisting conditions is an argument for a universal mandate. It's impossible to insure people with known health problems at an affordable cost unless they share the risk with healthier policy-holders. Hence the need for a mandate.
Anti-choice at the end of life
In The Nation, Ann Neumann explains how anti-choice leaders fought to re-eliminate free end-of-life counseling for seniors under Medicare. The provision was taken out of the health care reform bill but briefly reinstated by Department of Health and Social Services before being rescinded again by HHS amid false allegations by anti-choice groups, including The Family Research Council, that the government was promulgating euthanasia for the elderly.
As seen on TV
The Kansas-based anti-choice group Operation Rescue is lashing out at the Iowa Board of Medicine for dismissing their complaint against Dr. Linda Haskell, Lynda Waddington reports in The Iowa Independent. Dr. Haskell attracted the ire of anti-choicers for using telemedicine to help doctors provide abortion care. The board investigated Operation Rescue's allegations, which it cannot discuss or even acknowledge, but found no basis for sanctions against Haskell. Iowa medical authorities said they were still deliberating about the rules for telemedicine in general.
Salon retracts RFK vaccine story
Online news magazine Salon.com has retracted a 2005 article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. alleging a link between childhood vaccines and autism, Kristina Chew reports at Care2. The article leaned heavily on now discredited research by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. His research had been discredited for some time, but only recently did an investigative journalist reveal that Wakefield skewed his data as part of an elaborate scam to profit from a lawsuit against vaccine makers.
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This is the eleventh article in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.
Today, we examine Iowa's 3rd Congressional District, stretching from Des Moines to the Cedar Falls-Waterloo area. The district's economy is heavily agricultural, but also has a large financial and insurance sector component, with Des Moines referred to as "the Hartford of the West" for that reason. Since 1997, Democrat Leonard Boswell has represented the 3rd congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. This year, Boswell is being challenged by Republican State Senator Brad Zaun.
So far in this campaign, Boswell has strongly defended his record and has attacked Zaun for "his opposition to Iowa's biofuels industry, which employs thousands of farmers and factory workers in the state." For his part, Zaun has attempted to tie Boswell to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama, while running a series entitled, "Fourteen Reasons Why We Need a New Congressman."
On clean energy and environmental issues, Rep. Boswell has an excellent record. In 2009, for instance, Boswell received a near-perfect 93% rating from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), as well as a 100% rating from Environment America. Boswell voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), an extraordinarily important piece of environmental legislation which the New York Times described as "the first time either house of Congress had approved a bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change." At the time of his vote for ACES, Boswell said that the legislation "would harness the most innovative workforce in the world to create a clean energy future, creating millions of jobs in the process." Boswell added that "[e]nergy independence is vital to our national security and economic future, and this legislation advances this goal while confronting the serious challenge of climate change."
For his part, Brad Zaun received a mediocre rating of 42% on the environment from the Iowa Sierra Club in 2009-2010. In this video, Zaun declares, "I question global warming" and claims - incorrectly - that ACES will "cost businesses and all of us that have homes millions of dollars." In addition, Zaun claims that coal-fired power is far more economical than wind power (certainly not true if you count environmental and other "externalities"), brags that he's being "compared to this one lady that says 'drill, baby, drill,'" and argues that "we need to take advantage of our resources." On his website under "Energy and Natural Resources," Zaun argues that America "must increase domestic oil and gas supply by exploring and utilizing more of the energy resources we have at home." Message to Brad Zaun: we saw the results of that approach in the Gulf of Mexico this past summer!
On the other hand, Zaun has not joined most of his fellow Republican candidates this year and signed the Americans for Prosperity "No Climate Tax Pledge." Zaun also advocates "exploring alternative sources of energy...including nuclear, wind, solar and other alternative energies." And, Zaun says, "We must be careful stewards of all of our precious natural resources by always avoiding strategies which unnecessarily damage our landscape or environment or pose health risks to our citizens." That's all well and good. But advocating for coal-fired power, "drill, baby, drill," and global warming skepticism is a very funny way to accomplish those goals.
The NRDC Action Fund believes that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
The Iowa chapter of the
Sierra Club is pushing state
regulators to investigate two factory farms and a feed mill linked to
this summer's massive recall of salmonella-tainted eggs, Lynda Waddington
reports in the Iowa Independent. The Sierra Club sent a strongly-worded
letter to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller urging him to investigate
Wright County Egg, Hillandale Farms and the Quality Egg LLC feed mill. All
three firms were linked to the salmonella outbreak that sickened an
estimated 1200 people; and all three firms are linked to agro-baron Austin
"Jack" DeCoster.
Tom Philpott of Grist calls DeCoster a "habitual" environmental
offender and "one of the most reviled names in industrial agriculture." In
1996, the Department of Labor fined DeCoster Eggs $3.6 million for what
the then-Secretary of Labor described as "running an agricultural
sweatshop" and "treating its employees like animals." Over the years,
DeCoster enterprises racked up additional fines in other states. A
previous Attorney General of Iowa dubbed DeCoster a habitual offender for
water pollution. In 2002, five female employees at the DeCoster's Wright
County egg operation alleged that their supervisors had raped them and
threatened to kill them if they reported the crime. The company paid $1.5
million to settle the lawsuit.
Drowsy doctors
A coalition of public health activists is pushing the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to regulate the work hours of
doctors in training. New proposed guidelines would limit the shifts of
first-year residents to 16 hours, but more senior trainees could be forced
to work shifts up to 28 hours. The group, which includes the Committee of
Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare, the American Medical Student
Association, and Public Citizen, says that's not good enough to protect
doctors or the public. As I explain in Working In These Times, research
shows that sleep deprivation is a major
preventable cause of medical errors, which is why the coalition wants to
see shifts for all residents capped at 16 hours.
Insurance
premiums soar
A new report from the Kaiser Foundation
Family shows that health insurance premiums continued to climb with
employers shifting an ever-greater share of the burden onto employees. A
family health insurance policy costs about $14,000 a year, with employees
shouldering 30% of that cost. Michelle Chen reports in ColorLines that
families that manage to hang onto their health insurance can't expect relief through health care
reform any time soon. The major reforms don't go into effect until 2014
and the biggest early beneficiaries will be those who are currently
uninsured rather than those who are already paying through the nose for
lousy coverage. The ultimate goal of comprehensive health care reform is
to reshape the health care and health insurance systems to bring costs
down across the board, but that's small consolation to workers who are
struggling to stay on top of their premiums right now.
The results are an echo of Upton Sinclair's 1906 book, The Jungle on horrid and unsafe conditions in the meat packing industry. America, 104 years later:
# Manure piled so high (4 to 8 feet) that it forced open doors to manure pits under the hens, allowing "open access to wildlife or domesticated animals."
# Live mice in many of the egg-laying houses.
# Flies, both "live and dead" that were "too numerous to count," as well as "live and dead maggots" beyond counting.
Of the two, to my layman eyes, Decoster's factory appears much worse as there aren't nearly as many violations cited for Bethel's operation, but the bit near the end about a flowing river of chicken feces certainly indicates they're not getting an unfair deal being mixed up in this.
In 1980, the DeCoster operation was charged with employing five 11-year-olds and a 9-year-old by the Labor department.
Prior to 1993: Even before he built his first large-scale Iowa pig farming operation, Austin J. "Jack" DeCoster had already drawn the serious attention of environmental and labor law enforcement authorities. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection had brought a 14-count action against him for activities that were polluting both air and water. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had investigated DeCoster in connection with farm workers' reports that they had been exposed to lethal asbestos in DeCoster chicken houses. There had also been a federal suit brought against DeCoster under the Migrant Agricultural Workers Protection Act, based on workers' reports of unfit housing, and of illegal threats and harassment ongoing at DeCoster plants
There is a lot of discussion right now about how Senators from small states hold too much power compared to the percent of population they represent. There's a lot of truth to this. Alex MacGillis of The Washington Post wrote in an analysis column in their Sunday Outlook section, and David Sirota and Nathan Newman have done good pieces on the topic as well. The simple facts are that the key gang of six negotiating health care in the Senate Finance Committee represent less than 3% of the nation's population; that the 10 largest states are home to over half the country's population but represent only 20% of the Senate; the 21 smallest states together have less total population than California does.
It's good that people are raising these issues, and pointing out this unfairness. The plain fact of the matter, though, is that absent a constitutional convention suddenly being held, there is no changing this particular injustice. It would take 2/3 of the Senate, after all, to pass a constitutional amendment to restructure the Senate, and virtually all of the Senators from small states would vote against it. So we are stuck for now.
What we ought to be focused on instead are strategies that might work.
One year after the raid on a meatpacking plant netting 389 undocumented workers in Postville, Iowa, the town is dying. The plant, Agriprocessors has filed for bankruptcy, the town nears bankruptcy, and the population has declined by half.
Once a bustling small town, with two main streets, the town is trying to cope with the loss of hundreds of residents. Town revenue is down and businesses have been hit hard. Most have closed.
"Anybody that would tell you that (Postville) is in recovery, that's not true. We're holding on by our fingernails," said Trevor Seibert, a landlord with several local businesses.
"It's like you're in an oven and there's no place to go and there's no timer to get you out," said former ex-Mayor Robert Penrod, who resigned earlier this year.
In such a harsh economic climate, it's clear that these brutal raids help no one. Reactionary policies that force people into the shadows haven't worked, and they aren't consistent with out values. Those policies hurt all of us by encouraging exploitation and low-wage, under-the-table employment that depresses wages. We need policies that help immigrants contribute and participate fully in our society.
This week's roundup covers some state immigration news and a few book reviews.
The Migration Policy Institute released a policy paper on making U.S. immigration policy more responsive to changing economic and labor conditions while protecting workers' rights. MPI Senior Fellow and former Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Doris Meissner stated, "The current economic crisis brings into stark relief the inflexibility of the U.S. immigration system in comparison with the highly dynamic and constantly evolving global economy. Now, more than ever, the United States needs an immigration system that better serves U.S. economic and social interests by being sensitive to economic fluctuations, both up and down." The report can be found here (PDF).
In Rhode Island, lawmakers are considering a bill to require private companies to use E-Verify to check employees' immigration status. Immigration advocates argue that the system is flawed and discriminates against minority candidates.
Yesterday, was the 39th anniversary of Earth Day and to mark the occasion, President Obama was in Newton, Iowa to speak about clean energy. Newton is one of those towns where most of the residents are employed by one major employer, and until October 2007, that employer was Maytag. So when Whirlpool bought Maytag and shut down the Newton plant, over 12% of Newton’s 16,000 residents lost their jobs. If you didn’t lose a job, your husband, sister, or neighbor surely did.
But now Newton’s a shining example of what’s possible. Instead of dishwashers and washing machines, the people of Newton are making wind turbines. That’s why President Obama chose Newton and Trinity Structural Towers to argue that “the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.”
But towns like Newton aren’t just losing jobs, they are losing talent too. Young people have been hit hard by this recession. According to the Education and Labor Committee, of the 1.2 million jobs lost last year, 60 percent were held by workers under the age of 25. Mobile and in search of opportunity they are moving to bigger cities and mega regions that promise greater opportunity. Iowa, in particular, has been hurt by this “brain drain,” losing more college graduates than any other state in the country.
So while we replace dishwashers with wind turbines, and re-open empty auto manufacturing plants with solar manufacturing facilities, let’s also work to build truly whole communities. The communities that define themselves by one industry or one employer will be increasingly at risk. A healthy, 21st century economy demands that we become increasingly self-sufficient in the resources we use—the food we grow, the water and energy we consume, and the products we build. Revitalizing local living economies can create jobs, conserve energy, and keep young talent in the community.
In the wake of recent equal rights votes in Iowa, Vermont, and DC, Virginia 2009 state delegate candidate (and respected environmental blogger) Miles Grant today boldly proposed Virginia move in the same direction:
“With each passing day, Virginia’s harsh restrictions on marriage and even simple domestic partnerships are cast in deeper contrast to the steady march of progress we’re seeing across America. We take pride in Virginia’s policies that attract world-class businesses. But the best businesses in the world need the top workers in the world. What message are we sending about Virginia’s values when we tell some of those workers they’re not allowed to commit their lives to the person they love and start a family together?"
“It’s time to move our Commonwealth forward by repealing the Marshall-Newman amendment and recognizing full marriage rights for all Virginians. We’re not talking about special protections – these actions would simply ensure that all families receive basic rights, including financial protections, hospital visitation access and ability to adopt and retain custody of their children. As delegate, I’ll make it one of my top priorities to ensure civil liberties for all Virginians.”
Wouldn't it be nice if bold progressive like that actually got elected to office? Well, ahem, they can. Miles is running a great ground game in advance of the June 2009 primary. You can help him resource his campaign by chipping in here.
I just got back from my longest trip yet on my book tour promoting The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be. Outside of a quick trip to a Netroots Nation regional meeting in Denver, all of my book travel up until now has been to heavily Democratic cities on the east and west coasts, but this trip was right in the heart of the heartland: Missouri (a swing state leaning red), Kansas and Nebraska (2 thoroughly red states), Iowa (a swing state leaning blue), and the most thoroughly blue Midwestern state there is, Illinois.
Adam took some photos from the trip you can check out on our Flickr set here.
After this all-American, politically diverse, trip, I have certain things I can feel confident in reporting on:
• I continue to be heartened by the great response to the book's message - really good crowds, really responsive people, great questions, incredible passion about changing the country. There really is a movement building everywhere - yes, even in the red states - for big progressive change.
• The populist feelings about the banks are very strong. My biggest applause line every place I spoke was "If you are too big to fail, you are too big to exist." Even though I was speaking to strongly pro-Obama audiences, people were very troubled by his banking policies.
• In spite of the economy, people are still fired up enough to be coming to fundraisers. I was a speaker at three different fundraising events - for the Nebraska Democratic Party in Lincoln, the Iowa Citizen Action Network in Des Moines, and Citizen Action Illinois/USAction in Chicago. All of them were successes, with a combined crowd of over 400 people.
• People very much want to be involved in changing America. There was no sense at all that folks are passively waiting for President Obama to take care of things. Every single event I went to - every single one - someone asked a version of the question "What can we do to help change things?"
It was a great trip, and now I'm back in D.C. for a couple of weeks before heading out again. I look forward to continuing to spread the message about the history, and future, of the progressive cause in America.
Lots of people are showing up at the White House forums on healthcare and delivering a very different message from Beltway insiders about what the final bill should look like. In Des Moines Monday, registered nurses, doctors, and other healthcare activists, led by the California Nurses Association National Nurses Organizing Committee, Minnesota Nurses Association, Physicians for a National Health Program, and Healthcare Now, showed up outside the hall pressing the case for single-payer reform, and then took the theme inside the meeting.
Stingy credit markets and high regulatory hurdles have spurred Houston-based Dynegy to step back from new coal-fired power plant projects by ending a joint venture with LS Power Associates.
Dynegy will keep the right to expand its 27 existing coal, natural gas and oil-fired plants in 13 states, and it retains stakes in a pair of Texas and Arkansas coal projects.
But Dynegy will pay New York-based LS Power $19 million as part of the split and let it take full ownership of new projects under consideration in Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada.
Shares of Dynegy closed up 38 cents, or 19 percent, to $2.38 on Friday.
Dynegy Chairman and CEO Bruce Williamson said the power plant development landscape has changed since the company entered into the joint venture with LS in the fall of 2006. Funding new projects is much more difficult given the worldwide credit crunch and the possibility of new climate change legislation under the Obama administration.
"In light of these market circumstances, Dynegy has elected to focus development activities and investments around our own portfolio where we control the option to develop and can manage the costs being incurred more closely," Williamson said in a statement.
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