Blog

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

America is facing historic choices that will shape our economy, our society and our democracy for decades to come, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said today.

Speaking at the prestigious Brookings Institution, he said, “Our nation does not have a debt crisis. We have a jobs crisis.”

America isn’t broke. Our nation’s basic promise—an ever-rising, ever-widening prosperity—is being broken.

It is being broken by three decades of a contradictory economic strategy based on low wages and consumption, he said. As a result, the rich have gotten much richer, the poor have gotten poorer and those left in the middle are struggling to hang on. U.S. trade policies have decimated our nation’s manufacturing base and our tax policies promote inequality.

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Learn more about the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (also known as Dodd-Frank) signed into law by President Obama a year ago today. Watch to find out more about the consumer protections and long term structural changes put in place by the historic act, and get the facts about the lobbyists and special interests who are trying to undermine it.

Marion Wright Edelman

By Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children’s Defense Fund

In 2010, there was finally good news for millions of uninsured children and families when the President and Congress took a major step towards ensuring affordable and comprehensive health coverage for millions of children and families in America. With the passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the Affordable Care Act), more than 35 million Americans including more than 95 percent of children will have access to the critical health coverage they need to survive and thrive. Among other important protections, the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from denying health coverage to children who desperately need it—those already sick with “pre-existing conditions.” Children like Katie H. in Texas who suffers from severe seizure-like attacks that last as long as 11 hours caused by an undiagnosed neuro-developmental disorder. Katie is also deaf in one ear, has a feeding disorder, and requires daily medication for asthma. In her short life, she has already made numerous visits to the emergency room and had several hospital stays.

When Katie lost her health coverage her father tried to buy private insurance through his employer but he couldn’t afford the nearly $1,000 a month cost, about 30 percent of his salary. No other private insurer would offer the family coverage for Katie due to her pre-existing conditions. Today millions of children like Katie will be able to receive the health coverage they need to grow up healthy or in less pain because of protections in the Affordable Care Act. In our wealthy nation no child should be born at low birthweight, at risk of future health and learning difficulties, because of preventable causes, or die in the first year of life because their mothers did not have adequate prenatal or postnatal care. Undiagnosed, untreated, and poorly managed health and mental health problems increase a child’s chances of falling behind in school or having disciplinary problems and lower a child’s chances of succeeding in and out of school. Without access to comprehensive, affordable health care, more children will do poorly in school at a time when we need to be improving our global competitiveness. Good health at birth and throughout childhood is essential for them as children and as productive future workers. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Glenn Beck has captured national attention with his caustic poison. The aging right-wing troubadours — Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly — still rouse the wingnuts and enforce discipline among Republican legislators. They’ve peddled the fantasies about ACORN and the all-powerful poverty lobby, and launched a search-and-destroy hunt for targets of opportunity in the Obama administration. Progressives have sensibly organized to question Beck’s advertisers, and even the president has called him out.

But it is worth remembering — Glenn Beck is not blocking the passage of a good health care bill. The old and new carny acts of the right aren’t undermining the energy legislation or frustrating financial reform. To focus on who and what is standing in the way — follow the money.

On health care, the lockstep opposition of Republicans in Congress is deplorable, but Republicans don’t have the votes to block progress. The president is forced to negotiate with Democrats who have 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House and could pass a good bill tomorrow if they unified.

The angry tea bag activists shouting slogans in town meetings in August provided drama, but the true opposition is writing checks, not waiving signs. They are wearing pin stripes, not jeans and t-shirts. They represent wealthy insurance company CEOs, not angry workers or small business owners.

The Washington media likes to paint the divisions as ideological. Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are said to be opposed to “big government,” cautious about spending, more concerned about deficits, reflecting more conservative districts and voters. Sure, there are ideological differences between the parties. And legislators do cater to the major interests in their districts. And no doubt, the Democratic Party is a big tent, with a broad range of political opinion.

But the president didn’t cut a deal with Big Pharma to sustain the ban that prohibits Medicare from negotiating lower prices on drugs because of ideology or a policy debate. He did it to neutralize one of the powerful lobbies standing in the way of reform. The deals with utilities and coal companies in the energy bill aren’t about ideology; they are about special interests and political clout. Republicans don’t mind government spending when pouring hundreds of millions into subsidizing insurance companies to compete with Medicare. Blue Dogs aren’t worried about costs when they oppose a public option that would help keep insurance companies honest.

The re-born McCarthy like conspiratorial fantasies of Glenn Beck should not go unanswered. His effort to discredit the administration by searching for appointees to target should be resisted and scorned.

But everyone should be clear. The president has called on the Congress to act on fundamental reforms that cannot be avoided. Our broken health care system is unaffordable and must be fixed. Moving to new energy is a national security, economic and environmental imperative, not a choice. Fundamental financial reform is necessary if we are to avoid a worse crisis in the near future.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans in Congress oppose these reforms. They want, as Limbaugh proclaimed, the president to fail. But they aren’t the major roadblocks to the change we need. What stands in the way is the organized power of the entrenched lobbies that have a direct stake in limiting change, and are willing to spend hundreds of millions to obstruct it. Their legions are less angry citizens, than sophisticated lobbyists, increasingly Democrats, many of them retired legislators. They deliver campaign contributions, not votes. They threaten negative campaign ads, not authentic citizen uprisings.

With literally billions at stake, progressives will never be able to match the money of the industries fighting off change. Our only chance is to make their money toxic — to expose the contributions, the lobbyists, the inside deals — and to make legislators understand the president was right when he said we can’t let the permanent lobbies define what is possible in the nation’s capital.

The struggle over health care reform is now reaching its climax. The backroom struggle over energy and financial reform is already fierce. It is time for Democrats to unite to get these done. It is time for the two or three Senate Republicans with any iota of independence to put country over party and be part of the solution. But most of all, it is time for us to follow the money, to track the contributions, expose the lobbyists, and challenge the legislators in both parties who hope to benefit by serving special interests rather than representing their constituents.

Check out opensecrets.org, where the Center for Responsive Politics tracks contributions. Take a look at their study with the Sunlight Foundation on the lobbyists undermining health care reform. Get angry, not cynical. Let your legislators hear from you — and join with your neighbors to demand that they represent you and not the interests that are writing campaign checks. The president has called on the Congress to deal with fundamental national challenges that can not be ignored (although his predecessors were happy to do so). We’ll not have a better chance to get vital reforms done. But to succeed, legislators in both parties will have to learn that voters aren’t going to put up with the cozy beltway business as usual.

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

A crisis that demands fundamental change. A president with a mandate to drive it. A Congress, controlled by Democrats, ready to act. Now comes the hard part – actually getting something real done.

These are salad days for Democratic lobbyists, because deep pocket interests – health insurance companies, Big Pharma, oil and gas and coal companies, the utilities and, of course, the banks – are buying them up to help harness the gale winds of change. Get ready to be dazzled – the strategies employed will reflect the imagination of Washington’s most clever operators.

For example, the health care lobby has employed one basic theme in trying to stop health care: scare the hell out of Americans by decrying a “government takeover” of health care. But in the age of Obama, they want to be seen as part of the solution, not simply part of the problem.

So last week, the leading health care trade associations – -the lobbies for insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, plus a union – stood with the president to pledge dramatically to “do our part” to reduce the rate of soaring health care costs by 1.5% a year over the next decade, a promise that if fulfilled would save some $2 trillion from the cost of care. Not surprisingly, the president – eager to show that his efforts to give everyone a seat at the table were bearing fruit – was happy to hail that promise.

The lobbies got national coverage that their clients were for reform and would make a real contribution to it. This bolstered their argument that while regulation might be in order, we don’t need a public plan like Medicare to provide a choice for businesses and individuals. Give us time to fulfill our promises (and for this reform moment to pass), they argue. If we fail, then consider a public plan (when the president may be less popular and the Congress more conservative). Word was Senator Grassley, a Republican Senator actually looking for bipartisan accord, thought that the argument made a lot of sense.

Outside the photo op, however, the reality was very different. A new report released today by Health Care for America Now, a leading citizens’ coalition pushing for comprehensive health care reform, put the industry claims in sharp relief.

The HCAN report shows that after 400 mergers involving health insurers over the last 13 years, concentration has gone up in local markets across the country. The single largest provider of small group coverage (for small businesses, for example) controlled a median market share of 47% in 2008. The AMA says 94% of insurance markets in the US are highly concentrated.

The result, of course, is soaring prices – with premiums up, on average, more than 87% over the past six years. Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies in 2007 rose from $2.4 to 12.9 billion (428%) from 2000 to 2007. The CEOs of these companies in 2007 alone collected an average compensation of $11.9 million each. Nice work if you can get it.

As then Senator Barack Obama said in September 2007, “These changes (mergers) were supposed to make the industry more efficient, but instead premiums have skyrocketed.”

Insurers use their position to pass rising costs onto the insured. And, not surprisingly, Medicare does better. A recent study by University of California professor Jacob Hacker for the Institute for America’s Future (which I co-direct) shows that from 1997 to 2006, private health insurance spending per enrollee grew at an annual rate of 7.3% while that of Medicare was at 4.6%, or more than one-third less.

The concentration of insurance markets and the lack of private competition provide compelling reasons for the Congress to establish a public plan like Medicare as an option for those seeking insurance. Give consumers a real choice. The public plan would provide both a benchmark for private plans and much needed competition in what are now perversely concentrated markets.

That certainly offers better hope for bringing down prices than the voluntary promises of the hospital, drug and insurance company lobbies, made without detailing how they would go about fulfilling those promises. (promises that many of them began to wiggle away from two days after the press conference when the TV lights were no longer on).

HCAN and other citizen groups are scrambling to counter the calumnies, claims and cash of the health insurance lobby – but of course, they can’t match the industry’s firepower. What they do have is the best moment for serious reform since the sixties when Johnson ushered Medicare into existence. And the possibility of rousing citizens to put their legislators on notice that they are paying attention, want real reform, and aren’t going to be distracted by the health care lobby.

Robert Borosage

Robert L. Borosage

Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

We are headed into the most ambitious era of progressive economic reform since the New Deal. The crisis leaves little alternative, as job losses mount across the country and the world. The Obama administration has hit the ground running, pushing to pass an $800 billion plus recovery plan, scrambling to put together a new plan for banks still on life support, and cobbling together an initiative to help millions of families on the verge of losing their homes.

But recovery, however daunting, is not enough. Even as the administration struggles to fend off a full-scale depression, it faces the task of constructing the foundations of the new economy out of the ashes of the old.

Republicans, still grousing about more tax cuts and less spending, are clueless. But even many Democrats seem to assume that if we just get the economy going, bail out the banks, add a dash of regulation, we can go back to business as usual.

But that is neither possible nor desirable. That old economy was founded on stagnant incomes and unsustainable debt. Families struggled to keep their heads above water by taking money out of their homes and assuming ever higher levels of student, car, credit card and consumer loans. The country served as the consumer of last resort for the world by borrowing staggering sums — $2 billion a day over the last years – from creditors abroad, largely Japanese and Chinese central bankers. That economy was floated on asset bubbles like that in housing which has now exploded in our faces. We can’t resuscitate the old economy – and should not want to.

The next economy must seek to provide a sustainable and a widely shared prosperity, one where the American dream remains in reach for working people. That will require new thinking and bold reforms. A group of progressive organizations have joined together to kick off this discussion. (For the first conference on “thinking big, thinking forward — already oversubscribed — go here.)

But many of the changes needed are clear — and the initial struggles over signature reforms are already teed up.

What is needed to insure to every person a job with a decent wage, a world class public education, affordable health care, and retirement with dignity? This is the pledge Franklin Roosevelt made when he laid out his Economic Bill of Rights in the midst of World War II. It was echoed in Obama’s inaugural address. Surely that new economy must include:

1. A new public social compact — affordable health care, pensions above Social Security — to replace the promises that the corporations have shredded. The signature fight over health care reform will begin this year. 

2. Sustained public investment in areas vital to a maintaining a high wage path in a global economy — world class schools, affordable college, 21st century infrastructure, cutting edge science, research and development. The first volleys of the signature battle — over whether we will sustain expanded public investment after the economy regains its footing or short-change it –are already being exchanged. 

3. A new global economic strategy — featuring a new industrial policy — that enables the US to balance its trade, while creating global rules that protect workers, consumers and the environment, rather than threaten them. The initial struggle over making the transition to renewable energy the centerpiece of economic reform is beginning. 

4. Restructuring and regulation of the financial sector, making banking a boring occupation again, devoted to making loans to the real economy, not hawking exotic instruments in operatic speculative ventures. The signature reform — taking over and breaking up the major banks that are on life support — is likely to be fought out in the next months. 

5. An aggressive wage policy that empowers workers to organize and bargain collectively, raises the minimum wage, and mandates basic benefits and safety standards. The donnybrook will begin this Spring over the Employee Free Choice Act. 

These are fundamental choices threatening entrenched interests. Health care reform requires taking on the drug and insurance companies. Sustaining public investment requires defeating the military lobby and the wealthy whose taxes will rise. A new global strategy challenges the multinationals that profit from the old order. Getting Wall Street under control threatens the largest political donors. The business lobby promises Armageddon if the Employee Free Choice Act moves forward.

President Obama has already signaled his intention to go forward with the core reforms in this agenda. So forget about a new era of bipartisan consensus and get ready to rumble. We’re headed into pitched battles that will succeed only with massive popular mobilization. We won’t have this opportunity again, and we dare not blow it.