Author Archives: Margie Burns

Note to Ed Shultz: PLEASE acknowledge that you also said ‘shakedown’

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Note to Ed Shultz: PLEASE acknowledge that you also said ‘shakedown’

This is getting slightly depressing. I am all for castigating Joe Barton, his oil donations, and the harmful policies he almost always espouses. But I’ve been listening–for the past few minutes–to Ed Schultz castigate Barton for calling the BP $20 billion escrow fund a ‘shakedown’. Regrettably, Schultz went on about Barton for several minutes without mentioning up front that he did the same (previous post).

Also regrettably, rightwing bloggers are picking this one up: See links here and here and here, for example.

To be fair, Schultz has previously defended his word choice, in a panel discussion elsewhere. But the buzzword is out there,and he seems to have helped legitimize it. This is no time to pretend that he didn’t say it, or to expect liberal audiences to suck it up and pretend the same.

The video clip of Schultz praising Obama for shaking down BP is linked here. MSNBC needs to do some homework here. Chris Matthews, on Nerfball, did a version of the same thing–going off about BP and Joe Barton, truly and applicably enough, without taking into account the cable-and-radio cross-transmissions that influenced this dialogue.

No wonder Rush Limbaugh is further demonstrating his eerie lack of shame by repeating and defending the ‘shakedown’ reference.

Rush Limbaugh: An Army of What?

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Rush Limbaugh: An Army of What?




Reading a book fast . . . 


Zev Chafets

Hearings on BP oil spill today; IG report faults Interior Dept

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Hearings on BP oil spill today; IG report faults Interior Dept

Congressional hearings begin today on the BP/Transocean/Halliburton oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Update: Side note here–BP is also being sued by its own investors, according to Natl Law Journal. The first lawsuit was filed in New Orleans on May 7. Plaintiffs allege that

“BP executives and its board of directors “recklessly disregarded accidents and safety warnings for years” related to the Deepwater
Horizon rig. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of breaching their fiduciary duties by, among other things, causing BP to violate safety and environmental laws, exposing the company to criminal and tort liability, and subjecting BP to adverse publicity and impaired earnings.”



Meanwhile, overwhelming evidence continues to mount that public policy, applied with feeling and thought, could have prevented this disaster. Even as many people labor to clean up the mess created by a combination of laissez-faire non-regulation and non-enforcement with corporate greed and unscientific wishful thinking, comes the release below.

It should be more than apparent by now that the brand of physics, chemistry and engineering applied by BP in our Gulf of Mexico was about on a level with curing warts by splitting them and burying them.

You heard it here first: The way to escape the fiscal burden of ‘foreign oil’ is not to ruin America’s shorelines. The way to escape the fiscal burden, and incidentally to escape the physical harms including state war and guerrilla war, is to use less oil. An intelligent public policy apparatus would have been supporting scientific research to that end for the past fifty years. From the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

“INTERIOR SCIENCE HAS INTEGRITY ISSUES, IG SAYS”
No Safeguards against Political Manipulation of Science despite Repeated Scandals

Washington, DC – The U.S. Department of Interior still lacks any policy to ensure the integrity of its scientific data, according to a new Inspector General report.  As a result, agency scientific findings remain susceptible to alteration or suppression in support of pre-determined political positions, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).  .


The report by the Interior Office of Inspector General (IG), dated April 2010, was quietly posted without announcement on the IG website late last week.  In recent days, Interior has been reeling from reports that it ignored both internal and external scientific warnings about the risk of oil spills and the lack of response capacity before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a major expansion of offshore drilling, just days before the disastrous BP explosion and spill.”

PEER lists the following examples:

 

  • Continued efforts inside the Minerals Management
    Service to stifle scientists who raise environmental concerns about
    offshore drilling, as documented in an April 2010 Government
    Accountability Office report;
  • Endangered Species Act positions taken by the U.S. that fly in the
    face of the overwhelming weight of agency science, on issues ranging
    from the Florida panther to the sage grouse.  As under Bush,
    conservation groups are able to prove in court that Obama agency stances
    are “arbitrary and capricious” for ignoring the best available science;
    and
  • Interior’s ongoing hostility toward whistleblowers and continued
    reliance on “gag orders” and other restrictions on specialists candidly
    discussing problems or sharing data.

“In March 2009, President Obama promised new policies that would both protect agency science from
political tampering and scientists from retaliation for doing their jobs but those policies never were promulgated,” Ruch added.  “Compromised
scientific integrity is not just a problem inside Interior; it is a government-wide phenomenon whenever technical data carries heavy policy implications.”

Contrary to the IG report, Interior claimed that it did adopt a scientific code of conduct back in 2002, but the agency did so via a press release and never put it into its official manual.  That code applied only to the scientists and not to managers and political
appointees who remain free to alter technical documents for non-scientific reasons.”

Main charge against fired Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers thrown out

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Main charge against fired Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers thrown out

In another setback for officials trying to justify the removal of former U.S. Park Police Teresa Chambers retroactively, a federal appeals court threw out the main charge against Chambers yesterday.



This message, summarizing the background in the case, passed along from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:

“Chambers, who had been the police chief in Durham, NC, was selected by
the Bush administration following a nationwide search in 2002 as first
female leader of the oldest uniformed force in federal service.  In late
2003, Chief Chambers gave an interview to the Washington Post in which
she confirmed dangerously low staffing levels.  Three days after her
interview was published, she was ordered to surrender her gun and badge,
placed her on administrative leave and ordered her not to speak any
further with the media.  After leaving her on administrative leave for 7
months, the Interior Department act to terminate her, citing her
interview as disclosing “law enforcement sensitive” information.”

In yesterday’s ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (D.C.) said that Chambers’ statements are protected under federal whistleblower law.

The remaining lesser charges in the case are remanded to lower court.

From PEER:

“”The Interior Department threw a kitchen sink of bogus charges against
Chief Chambers and one by one they are falling away,” stated PEER Senior
Counsel Paula Dinerstein, who argued Chambers’ winning appeal.  “This
ruling will help keep us safer as a nation by creating a legal shield
enabling other Paul Reveres to alert the public to hidden dangers.””

The CIA and the $3 million coffee table

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The CIA and the $3 million coffee table

Amidst other events in a week of losses, pain and gains, some good news on legal/security matters.

First, a remarkable case involving secret electronic surveillance and fraud against the court has been settled in DC.

When the CIA replaces your coffee table without your consent or knowledge, and you are a loyal employee of the U.S. government, sometimes the Agency has to pay. Plaintiff Richard A. Horn, a former Drug Enforcement Agency officer, sued the CIA and others for secretly bugging his home when he was stationed in Rangoon, Burma, in the 1990s. On March 30, plaintiff and CIA finally settled the lawsuit, Horn v. Huddle, for $3 million.

 

Richard A. Horn

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of D.C. District Court issued the final order. The case has dragged since its 1994 filing by plaintiff Horn, alleging that CIA and State Department personnel illegally wiretapped him.

One colorful detail from Horn’s lawsuit was the following:

“As evidence of his claim, Horn points to a cable transmitted by Huddle, which contains quotation marks and which Horn claims quotes him verbatim, as well as a suspicious entry into his apartment when, unsolicited, his government-issued rectangular coffee table was swapped for an oval replacement while he was out of town.”

 

The lawsuit was delayed under two administrations, terminated and revived, placed under seal but unsealed after convincing signs of fraud against the court, i.e. intentional misleading statements to the judge by government lawyers.

Rather than just deny swapping out Horn’s coffee table and other activities, CIA argued that the state secrets privilege protected it from having to come clean. Regrettably, the Agency also falsely told both the District court and the appeals court that the defendant CIA officer was covert. He was not. Both courts were jarred when this claim was retracted; as Lamberth noted in 2009,

“The new Department of Justice attorney in the case filed a notice with the Court that Defendant II’s identity was not actually covert—the declaration stated that Defendant II (Arthur Brown) had his covert status lifted and rolled back in 2002. Of course, no one from the Office of General Counsel for the CIA (which was actively working on this case) nor the defendant himself informed this Court or the Court of Appeals of that fact.”

Thus “defendant Brown and at least one attorney committed fraud on this Court and the Court of Appeals,” and the CIA officer was reinstated as a defendant.

 

Fraud against the court, or fraud on the court, is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “A lawyer’s or party’s misconduct in a judicial proceeding so serious that it undermines or is intended to undermine the integrity of the proceeding.” Examples include bribing a juror and introducing fabricated evidence.

Like other crime, fraud on the court does not pay. In January 2009 the judge referred the CIA attorney to the Court’s Committee on Grievances. Contempt motions were filed by plaintiff against others including former CIA Director George Tenet. Plaintiff also filed motions for attorneys’ fees. CIA threw in the table, and on the Pottery Barn principle—You replace it, you buy it—the two parties have settled, pursuant to court directions regarding any future filings, for $3 million to the plaintiff for damages, fees and other litigation costs.

In the process, the state secrets privilege also went over the side:

“This development demonstrated that Director Tenet’s assertion of the state secrets privilege was no longer accurate as to at least one material fact (the secrecy of Brown’s identity), and led the plaintiff and the Court to question what portions of Director Tenet’s assertion still were accurate and what information the government still believed was privileged.”

The judge rejected assertions of state secrets privilege in this CIA-related matter and also granted permission to file an amicus brief is to attorneys in a wiretapping lawsuit on the West Coast. The amici curiae brief by Al Haramain Foundation should be informative. The Al Haramain case is the last case still alive with evidence provided by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein that the telephone company participated with the NSA in extensive wiretapping.

 

(In an otherwise unrelated development, Norman Leboon, the off-balance Philadelphia man who made death threats against Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and his family, also attempted to sue his phone company over alleged wiretapping.)

 

More transparency would be a break in the case, from a public policy perspective.

As reported in law.com, in dismissing the case, the judge “ordered the Justice Department to notify him whether it will refer allegations of government misconduct to the Office of the Inspector General and to appropriate oversight committees in Congress . . .”


The judge said there is “disturbing” evidence in a sealed motion that “demonstrates the benefit” of notifying the oversight committees of Congress.”

Disturbing, indeed: Lamberth says that the sealed motion suggests that “misconduct occurred in the Inspector General’s Office both in the State Department and in the Central Intelligence Agency.” It would be illuminating to have the sealed evidence disclosed by the current Justice Department.

The watchword to go with transparency is accountability. In approving the settlement between the parties, the judge added that “it is not without some misgiving that the Court reaches this decision.” Despite the undeniable benefit of having a contentious 15-year case settled and out of the courts, Lamberth notes that another $6 million was awarded to an individual in the anthrax investigation. That would be Steven Hatfill, whose life was made miserable by berserk accusations about the anthrax mailings, and who was later exonerated. A defendant in the Hatfill case was Bush’s third Attorney General, Michael Mukasey.

As Lamberth writes, “It does not appear that any government official was ever held accountable for this huge loss to the taxpayer.” “Now,” the judge writes, “this Court is called upon to approve a $3 million payment to an individual plaintiff by the United States, and again it does not appear that any government officials have been held accountable for this loss to the taxpayer. This is troubling to the Court.”

Health care reform according to the Washington Post

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Health care reform impossible, according to the Post

–I’ve said it before: ‘Smart people’ living in places like Massachusetts–those would be the ones who did not vote in the special election–have no idea what President Obama is up against in Washington.

Quick fact:

Over the previous year, the Washington Post has run 1,642 articles, columns or editorials mentioning health care reform or health insurance reform. From March 22, 2009, to today, writers working for the Washington Post Company, or guest writers or columnists, have published articles on the legislative effort to reform health care over 1600 times.

Of these articles, at a conservative estimate over 90 percent have been negative.

Actually, only 73 of these hits according to the LexisNexis database pertained to “health insurance reform.” Something about the proportion of 73 to 1,642 indicates how dangerous a topic ‘insurance reform’ is for the WashPost. Not that the Post has made that transparent through its reporting, you understand, but it is conspicuous by its omission.

Previously taboo topic: Health insurance reform

A quick run-through gives a representative sampling. Long-time WP columnist David Broder has authored 32 pieces on health care reform over the previous year, all casting doubt on the legislation itself or on its chances of passing, or both.

A typical example: June 7, 2009, in “Obama’s Biggest Battle,” Broder wrote,

“Obama will have to carry much of the burden of advocacy himself–if outside events don’t intrude, as they did on Bill Clinton. The president has shown his willingness to bargain, signaling, for example, that he would now consider taxing some employer-provided benefits, an approach he denounced when John McCain endorsed it during the campaign.
But it will take much more than that to win what promises to be an epic struggle.”

Another typical example from Broder, Mar. 1, 2010; “Obama, Dems at crossroads on health care reform”:

“Nobody really expected much from President Barack Obama’s health care summit, and those expectations were fully realized.”

Be it noted that the last time Broder employed the term “insurance reform” in a piece was 1994. That was an article about the Clinton administration, jointly authored with Ann Devroy, no longer at WP.

Then there is George F. Will, as in a Jan. 20, 2010, piece titled “Massachusetts mandate shoves liberals off the cliff”:

“If the Democrats” congressional leaders are determined to continue their kamikaze flight to incineration, they will ignore Massachusetts’ redundant evidence of public disgust. They will leaven their strategy of briberies with procedural cynicism—delaying certification of Massachusetts’ Senate choice, or misusing “reconciliation” to evade Senate rules, or forcing the House to swallow its last shred of pride in order to rush the Senate bill to the president’s desk. Surely any such trickery would be one brick over a load for some hitherto servile members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, giving them an excuse to halt their party’s Gadarene rush toward the precipice.”

Like Broder, Will does not mention ‘insurance reform’ in print, although he has done so on air at ABC Television’s This Week, formerly with George Stephanopoulos.

Over the past year, Will has run nine pieces mentioning health care reform—including one calling Obama a modern-day ‘Huey Long,’—all opposed.

Unsurprisingly, he and Broder are joined by WP columnist Robert Samuelson, with seven pieces mentioning health care reform over the previous year, all opposed; Samuelson actually mentioned “health insurance reform” once (July 27, 2009) but only in quoting from a speech by the president.

Needless to say, the WP also offers up the wisdom of ultra-rightwing neocon and PNAC signatory Charles Krauthammer, as in this July 24, 2009, piece titled “Why Obamacare is sinking”:

“What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality.”

Krauthammer has run 18 pieces opposing current health-care reform proposals over the past year. This passage comes from Aug. 7, 2009, “Health-care reform: A better plan”:

“The administration’s defense is to accuse critics of being for the status quo. Nonsense. Candidate John McCain and a host of other Republicans since have offered alternatives. Let me offer mine: Strip away current inefficiencies before remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The plan is so simple it doesn’t even have the requisite three parts. Just two: radical tort reform and radically severing the link between health insurance and employment.”

‘Tort reform’ for Krauthammer means limiting plaintiffs’ ability to litigate. According to “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” in Parade Magazine, Krauthammer himself successfully sued a swimming pool manufacturer, after the swimming accident that sadly left the young Krauthammer injured.

For the past year, Krauthammer has been running columns with titles such as “Kill the bills: Do health-care reform right,” etc. Krauthammer has actually mentioned “insurance reform” four times, always to oppose the concept and to attack Obama.

There is no need to belabor the basic point here. For the past year, a time of extensive public discourse on health insurance reform, the Washington Post has mentioned “insurance reform” somewhat over 100 times in a crop of 1,600+ articles on health care. Most of those mentions occur either in the context of vote-counting, the politics horse race, in political reporting; or in hostile opinion columns by the right-wingers and corporatists above, joined by Michael Gerson, Fred Hiatt, and equally hostile guest columnists. As written previously, many of the horse-race pieces in the A section, purportedly objective and neutral, are actually spun to cast doubt on the legislation and on its chance of passing.

Note: None of the information contained in this post can be gleaned from today’s piece by Howard Kurtz, the Post’s ‘media critic,’ titled “Journalism’s slide into health-debate weariness.” Kurtz has not mentioned the Post’s opposition and hostility to insurance reforms.

 

[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

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Why Aren’t Insurers Pressuring the Auto Manufacturers?

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Why Aren’t Insurers Pressuring the Auto Manufacturers?
  –Surely, in the interest of preventing future payouts, the insurers have a motive to prevent accidents.

Right? Right? After all, we hear insurers declaiming their cost-consciousness all over the place, looking high and low for ways to save money, when it comes to preventing litigation via legislative ‘tort reform.’

So wouldn’t it behoove the same insurers to do everything in their power to head off accidents before they happen?

So, why, when we go to the IIHS website, why does the search term “unintended acceleration” produce ZERO hits?

“Jam through”? After a year?

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“Jam through”? After a year?
  -Truly amazing what they can get away with, sometimes. After a year of every kind of legislative foot-dragging ever contrived, after encouraging the synthetic tea partiers to disrupt and to derail genuine discussion, how at this stage can any officeholder say that Obama and/or Democrats in Congress are trying to ‘jam through’ health care legislation?

Sen. Lamar Alexander did it today, on ABC’s This Week, with Elizabeth Vargas this week.



They tried it during the Thursday summit gathering at Blair House, too.

Regrettably, Bob Schieffer on this morning’s Meet the Press set up–framed–the discussion in exactly the GOP way: “less government” versus “more government.” That wd be the GOP representing ‘less’ and Dems ‘more.’ Schieffer did not get around to mentioning that our enormous insurance companies are regulated only at the state level.

His GOP panelists, Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Sen. Tom Coburn, stuck to the same-old. Admittedly Blackburn said “look at starting again,” instead of just “start over,” but it’s the same thought.

There is no realistic possibility that ‘start over’ means anything but QUIT, of course. But the Repubs’ only proposal, aside from what they call tort reform–i.e. preventing any American from ever being able to sue any corporation over any injury–is to allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines. They tend not to mention that this is often prohibited precisely by the states whose regulation they are now busily touting.

Of course, they also don’t mention that Republicans in state governments, and the lobbyists who put them there, have spent decades and billions trying to prevent any viable regulation of the insurance industry at the state level.

White House health care summit 12:54 p.m.

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White House health care summit 12:54 p.m.
  –Rep. Louise Slaughter now making a plain and succinct statement, “Pre-existing condition [as a reason for denial of coverage] has got to go.” It is not entirely plain, however, whether prohibiting denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions is one on the short list of “commonalities,” as Rep. George Miller identified them, between Democrats and Republicans.

President Obama opened the meeting by calling on members to identify items on which they can agree, and to try to bridge differences where they disagree. After some back-and-forth over the morning, a rough consensus seems to have emerged on the former.

In regard to health insurance reforms–the topic for this section of the summit–items on which the two parties seemingly agree include the following:

1) Lifetime caps on insurance pay-outs should be abolished. A family faced with life-threatening illness should not suddenly discover that medical bills will no longer be paid by the insurer because the family has met its lifetime cap.

2) Annual caps on insurance pay-outs should be abolished.

3) Young people should be allowed to remain covered on their parents’ insurance plans, up to some age not yet determined.

A good start. As Miller pointed out, differences apparently remain as to 1) reviewing insurance rate increases; 2) denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions; and 3) establishing benchmark (minimal) standards for coverage.

They’re all necessary. The pre-existing conditions trap is particularly lethal. Harry Reid opened with an anecdote about a Nevada restaurant owner whose baby girl was born with a cleft palate. She had surgery; the dad, a policyholder, got the bills; and his insurance company denied the baby’s bills on the grounds of –what else?–“pre-existing condition.”

How do they get away with this? How could a newborn baby have a “pre-existing condition”? The baby didn’t even pre-exist.

In the face of thousands of similar anecdotes from across the country, Rep. Cantor, self-satisfied, pronounces once again that “Washington” should not be determining what is an acceptable level of coverage or of health care. Cantor’s talking point, and he seems to think it a good one, is that “Washington” should not be able to define what essential health benefits are.

That should be done by the insurance companies–the entities who try to define meningitis in college as a pre-existing condition.*

Cantor et al. don’t put it quite that bluntly, of course. Today they are talking up the states–some of which do try to rein in insurance abuses–but typically without help from the Cantors in public life. More generally, when any such consumer-protection attempt is made within a state, Cantor and his ilk rail about chasing business out of the state. It’s an open plea for donations. Thus it is interesting, in this context, to hear Republican congressmembers touting the virtues of state regulation. They tend to oppose exactly the same kind of standard–i.e. any consumer protection, however minimal–on the state level as on the federal level.

One argument for some version of the current legislation is that any version will make for more openness and transparency in insurance negotiations.

For now, we pretty much have to rely on campaign contributions to tell the story.

*As previously written, my own newborn had spinal meningitis. I did not know until today that one of the Obamas’ daughters also did, in babyhood.