If Democrats are disappointed by Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, they shouldn't be. Despite all of his past promises to support universal healthcare, nothing was more predictable than the Connecticut senator's fealty to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists.
Much the same can be said of Sen. Evan Bayh, who emerged from hiding on healthcare to announce that he too plans to filibuster against reform with the Republicans, regardless of what his constituents and Americans in general plainly want. Like Lieberman, his state is home to powerful corporations that want reform killed -- and like Lieberman, his wife has brought home very big paychecks from those same interests. . (UPDATE: A report published in a South Bend paper Thursday night says Bayh may now support a floor debate.)
The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.
At the time she joined the public relations and lobbying conglomerate in the spring of 2005, she expressed the touching hope that she would somehow be able to help those in need. "I have had a lifelong commitment to helping people gain better healthcare," she said in a press release. "I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented team at Hill & Knowlton to counsel a terrific stable of clients toward that same goal." Less than a year later, having pocketed $77,000 in salary, she quit without explanation -- just as her husband was facing a tough primary that he would eventually lose. Throughout the campaign, Hadassah Lieberman, her husband and their spokespersons explicitly refused to discuss her professional activities, except to note that she had not been required to register as a lobbyist.
But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them -- starting with nearly a decade in the "public affairs department" at Hoffman-LaRoche from 1972-81, followed by stints at Pfizer, where she spent four years as "director of policy, planning and communications," and APCO Associates, a major lobbying firm where she served as a "senior associate" in its large healthcare division before retiring in 1998.
She went back to work when she joined H&K, an outfit that became notorious for its billion-dollar defense of the tobacco industry. Not long after her contract began, Sen. Lieberman introduced legislation vastly extending patent protection for pharmaceutical companies -- notably including GlaxoSmithKline, a top client of his wife's firm.
The best that can be said about the Lieberman family's conflict of interest is that it appears to have ended in 2005 -- while the Bayh family continues to collect enormous amounts of money from the same health insurance and drug companies that will benefit from her husband’s actions. Indeed, the smell of ethical rot arising from the Bayh household is even worse than the self-serving aroma that surrounds the Liebermans.
Susan Bayh was invited to join the board of Wellpoint back in 1998, when the Indiana-based company was still called Anthem Insurance and had not yet completed the mergers that made it the largest health insurer in America (and gave it monopoly status in many regions of the country). According to her official biography on Wellpoint's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, her qualifications to sit on the board of a billion-dollar corporation were minimal, to put it politely. She was 38 years old, teaching law at a local university, with limited experience as a corporate attorney at Eli Lilly & Co., the big pharmaceutical company that is also headquartered in Indiana. But then her husband, Evan, after two terms as governor, had just been elected to the United States Senate.
Susan Bayh's compensation from Wellpoint, including the stock options that she has exercised repeatedly over the past 10 years, has reached an estimated $2 million, including last year's director salary of over $300,000. She is the only director who, according to the most recent SEC filing, actually owns no shares in the company, because she sells as soon as her options become available. In January 2007, she exercised her options to acquire 3,333 shares of Wellpoint for an estimated cost of $147,000 -- and sold them the same day for an estimated price of $260,000, netting a tidy sum of $113,000. She repeated the same process five months later for a net profit of $136,000, and then seven months after that, selling another 1,430 shares for $123,000. That represented profits of nearly $400,000 on top of her salary.
Evidently Susan Bayh is most interested in accumulating wealth, and so far she has done a fine job. The Bayhs are now worth somewhere between $5 million and $10 million, an amount that was not scrimped from Evan's salary in the Senate. In 2007 he reassured a Fort Wayne newspaper in sonorous tones that sounded Liebermanesque: "I can honestly tell you that if my wife did not have a job, none, I can't think of a single decision I've made that would be any different. I look at what's best for our state and our country and my own conscience. My integrity matters more to me than anything, so I always do what's right for the people who put their trust in me."
Compared with Bayh's lucre from Wellpoint and the other corporations whose boards she graces, the earnings of Hadassah Lieberman appear paltry. Yet even though she has retired, for now, from counseling the pharma and insurance industries, the devotion to public health she has long proclaimed is still tinged with hypocrisy. Upon leaving Hill & Knowlton, Hadassah joined Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s largest breast cancer charity, as a paid "ambassador." Again, it isn't clear what she does besides posing for photo ops in places from Brazil to Israel, but as a Komen advocate she is supposed to be trying to prevent women from losing their lives.
So perhaps someone should point out to her what will happen if her husband kills healthcare reform this year. Millions of uninsured and underinsured women will continue to delay or simply fail to get preventive medical care, including mammography, because they cannot afford those procedures. Thousands of them will die as a direct result of that foregone care, just as thousands die each year from lack of insurance. The swiftest way to save those women from breast cancer is health insurance reform -- and the filibuster will be their death sentence.
Urging the Justice Department to move the trial of al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices from Manhattan's federal courthouse to a more remote location, Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggests that he is merely talking common sense. Holding the KSM trial downtown will cost too much money, says the mayor, and "disturb" too many people.
Actually, Bloomberg was closer to the mark when he first commented on the pending trial last December. As he told reporters then: "It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered." As long ago as last November, he had received assurances from Attorney General Eric Holder that the federal government would not expect the city to pay the huge security costs of the trial.
But with the real estate industry, Sen. Charles Schumer and Wall Street demanding that the trial be moved -- along with the Republican congressional leaders and a host of right-wing blatherers -- Bloomberg quickly dropped his own instinctive principle. Why didn't he inflate the cost -- and ask the Obama administration to pay the estimated $200 million -- before he endorsed the Manhattan location? And why did he choose to blindside the president -- who helped him win an amazingly close election last year with a tepid endorsement of the Democrat? With his exploding cost estimates and subsequent flip-flop, Bloomberg looks unreliable, untrustworthy and unserious.
There happens to a strong argument for Bloomberg's instinctive first response, as Peter Bergen and Karen Greenberg pointed out in a highly perceptive CNN.com essay titled "Why the 9/11 Trial Belongs in New York." Bergen, a highly respected international expert on al-Qaida, and Greenberg, who heads New York University's Center on Law and Security (and lives and works about a mile north of ground zero), note that if necessary the trial could be moved to one of the other four boroughs -- or to Governor's Island, a former military base in New York harbor that is a short ferry ride from the downtown neighborhood ravaged on 9/11. They offer two compelling reasons:
"The courts in New York are unusually well-prepared to try Mohammed. Although the federal courts in general have a strong conviction record in trying terrorism crimes, New York's federal courts have won a 100 percent conviction rate on terrorism trials.
"Before 9/11 as well, New York courts successfully prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for life the likes of the 'Blind Sheikh' Omar Abdel Rahman; the al Qaeda bombers who launched the attacks on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the plotters of the first Trade Center attack five years earlier.
"And New York City is now preparing for the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an al Qaeda member allegedly involved in the 1998 embassies bombings who, unbeknownst to most New Yorkers, has been living in prison in the city for nearly eight months, without incident…
"... Most important of all, perhaps, is that the fearfulness of New York authorities feeds a sense of learned insecurity that has dominated the U.S. since 9/11. By contrast, the American military families posted to Guantanamo Bay chose to stay when they learned that suspects who they legitimately believed were the worst of the worst terrorists would be imprisoned there. They did this because they trusted U.S. troops to protect them.
"The backing down of the Obama administration ... signals weakness and fear. Rather than facing our enemies by showing confidence in ourselves as a nation that knows how to protect itself, our government leaders have let us know that they do not trust our institutions to protect us, an idea that should be intolerable to Americans."
There is also a strong argument for the Obama administration to stand up to Bloomberg and the rest of the fear chorus -- as Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism advisor to Presidents Bush and Clinton, noted in a brave Sunday News essay on the politics of terrorism.
The genuinely tough Clarke is not fazed by the bombastic rhetoric of the neoconservatives, who are trying to frighten New Yorkers so they can harm Obama -- even at the cost of humiliating the United States in the face of its enemies. As Clarke recalls, correctly, "There were numerous al-Qaida trials in Manhattan when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and the world did not end. Yes, Manhattan will become a target of al-Qaida if a trial takes place there. But it already is target No. 1 for al-Qaida; it can't get any more so.
"The evidence is clear that the GOP talking point machine, repeated by Fox television commentators and others, does not bother to learn the facts about terrorism before they leap to attacking the party in power's handling of the issue. They are wrong on the facts and they are wrong morally to attempt to make political gain on the damage inflicted by terrorism."
As the Republicans foment hysteria around the 9/11 trial -- and pretend that hiding KSM on a military base would somehow be more macho -- it is hard not to remember the old slogan from the authoritarian world of Orwell's 1984: Weakness is strength.
Back in early December, I suggested that the Obama "surge" in Afghanistan might not be exactly what it seemed -- and, in fact, that the president may seek a negotiated settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban, if he expects to meet his early deadline for withdrawal of American troops. Along the same line I noted that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s own report on the situation in Afghanistan had acknowledged, in passing, that the likeliest outcome of counterinsurgent warfare is negotiation and reconciliation rather than total victory.
No doubt such a settlement would mandate amnesty for Mullah Omar, the Taliban boss who escaped justice in 2001 along with Osama bin Laden, thanks to the incompetence of the Bush war cabinet. That is hardly a pleasing prospect. But the deeper question for American policymakers is whether the Taliban would agree to the U.S. bottom line: the expulsion of al-Qaida from Afghanistan and the renunciation of all ties with bin Laden.
Today, Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service reports on a team of four former high-ranking Taliban officials, who have served as intermediaries between the government and the rebels, and who believe such an agreement is not only possible but likely. The team includes the deposed regime’s former foreign minister and its former ambassador to Pakistan.
"The four Taliban mediators have been encouraging both Karzai and the Taliban leadership to begin with steps toward military de-escalation and confidence-building before proceeding to the central political-military issues that must be negotiated," writes Porter, who interviewed Arsullah Rahmani, a member of the mediation team who is also an elected member of the Afghan parliament, at his home in Kabul.
Rahmani said that President Hamid Karzai personally asked the four ex-Taliban officials to assist in launching peace talks. Porter, an American historian and journalist, also talked with Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the former foreign minister, who is another member of the team, who told him that the Taliban "are going to accept some of our suggestions."
These mediators and other observers in the region believe that the al-Qaida issue will not be difficult to resolve. Rahmani pointed to a statement released by the Taliban in early December, which offered to negotiate "legal guarantees" against "meddling" beyond Afghanistan's borders. Instead, the mediators say their main worry is a fluctuating American attitude toward talks with the enemy that reflects divisions within the administration.
"I don't understand U.S. policy," Rahmani told Porter. "Sometimes they say 'we will negotiate with the Taliban, and sometimes they say 'we must destroy them.'"
For worried Democrats, the sudden return of Social Security privatization as a fashionable nostrum among Republicans should lift their gloom. Or it would if only the Democratic leaders understood what to do when their opponents deliberately step into a messy dogpile again.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., a pair of the most outspoken conservatives in Congress, are trying to revive plans to transform Social Security into a system of private accounts (while cutting benefits for anyone under 55 years old). Speaking for Republicans on the House Budget Committee, Ryan proposes a “road map” for Social Security that strongly resembles the old Bush plan. The Ryan version would phase in individual accounts funded by an increasing portion of FICA taxes, limited to investments in a list of approved funds and "guaranteed" by the federal government. Meanwhile, Hensarling simply asserted on "Hardball" that "you can get better healthcare and better retirement security if you go to a defined contribution plan," which is the same idea.
Junking social insurance for private accounts is a Republican obsession -- and a Wall Street fantasy -- that dates back decades (see "The Raw Deal" for a history of the recurring right-wing campaigns to kill Social Security and their financing by the corporate elite). While there are many sound arguments to maintain the current system with a few actuarial tweaks, the most compelling is the disastrous corporate stewardship of the financial markets in recent years.
Did cheery Republicans like Hensarling somehow fail to notice the sickening fall of stock indexes between 2007 and 2009? The only annuity fully exempt from the economic ruin brought on by the investment banks and insurance giants was ... Social Security. Yet despite all the fresh evidence of greed, swindling and incompetence on Wall Street, the Republicans have renewed their calls for privatization. "We had this debate in Social Security a few years ago," Hensarling recalled a bit wistfully. "Now, ultimately we weren’t victorious ..."
No, they certainly weren’t. The privatization fiasco played an important part in the inexorable decline of President Bush’s approval ratings and the removal of his party from power. The plunge began as soon as the White House announced that Social Security privatization would be the primary domestic policy objective of his second term. Public rejection of that plan -- with more than 60 percent consistently disapproving in nearly every independent poll -- soon overwhelmed the multimillion-dollar corporate campaign behind it.
Bush’s own popularity never recovered. And then came the 2006 midterm election, also known as "the thumping," which smashed Karl Rove’s dream of a long era of absolute Republican domination. If that’s really what they want to talk about, then Democrats should accommodate them with a smile.
Evidently James O’Keefe and his boss Andrew Breitbart believe that the world will accept their excuses and complaints -- no matter how implausible -- if repeated loudly, brazenly and often.
Consider, for instance, O’Keefe’s thin explanation of what he and his chums were doing at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the New Orleans federal building on the day they were arrested. While he insists that reports in the mainstream media misrepresented their adventure as an attempt to set up a “wiretap,” his alternative version strains credulity.
According to O’Keefe, he and his associates were trying to find out whether the telephone lines were out of order at Landrieu’s office, following political uproar in Louisiana over her vote for healthcare reform. “I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for ‘weeks’ because her phones were broken,” he wrote on Breitbart’s Web site. “In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieu’s district office -- the people’s office -- to ask the staff if their phones were working.”
That isn’t what O’Keefe and crew were up to, however, according to the FBI complaint filed against them. O’Keefe himself walked into Landrieu’s office and waited for Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel to show up in their phone repairman costumes so he could videotape them. Rather than interview the Landrieu staffers about communications problems, the two phony phone guys said they had come to fix broken phones and asked where to find the telephone wiring closet. Informed that the closet was on a different floor in a General Services Administration office, both men left Landrieu’s office and went to the GSA location -- only to be busted when they claimed to have left their IDs in their truck.
Did O’Keefe or his pals ever actually “ask the staff” whether the phones worked? That will become clearer if and when the videos that are now in federal custody are released, but the FBI complaint doesn’t mention any such inquiry. The more pertinent question for now is why Flanagan and Basel sought access to the telephone closet. If they weren’t planning to install a listening device, what did they have in mind for Landrieu’s phones? The FBI believes they were plotting to tamper “maliciously” with the federal government phone system -- the “people’s phones,” as O’Keefe might say.
Perhaps there is some innocent explanation for their behavior, and their arrest is the result of a “huge misunderstanding,” as O’Keefe says. One theory that can be dismissed immediately, however, is Breitbart’s suggestion of a conspiracy by the Justice Department to “frame” or “smear” his employee O’Keefe, with the complicity of the media. When U.S. Attorney James Letten recused himself from the case, Breitbart immediately piped up to claim that this proved Letten was involved in a scheme to ruin O’Keefe, supposedly as revenge for the ACORN videos. Such imagined intrigues collide sharply with the reality of Letten’s career (and his reputation for probity). Appointed by George W. Bush, Letten is perhaps best known for putting Edwin Edwards, the colorful former governor of Louisiana, behind bars in 2000. Both Sen. Landrieu and Republican Sen. David Vitter supported Letten’s reappointment by President Obama, which may be the real reason that he recused himself from a case involving Landrieu’s office. (Or Letten may feel uncomfortable prosecuting Robert Flanagan, the errant son of U.S. Attorney William J. Flanagan in the adjoining federal district.)
Here is an example of "conservative journalism" at its worst, and a glimpse of Breitbart's character as well. When he claims to be victimized by a “smear,” be prepared for him to launch a nasty smear of his own -- even against a fellow Republican, if that will divert attention from his own embarrassment.
Tony Blair's widely panned appearance at last week's Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war reminded the world about the former British prime minister's role in that lethal fiasco. Like many of the Iraq war's instigators here in the United States, Blair has gotten a free pass while flaunting his lack of remorse. Indeed, the failure to hold him accountable resulted in his appointment as the special envoy of the "Mideast Quartet" in June 2007, charged with reviving the peace process on behalf of its members -- the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and the Russian Federation.
Blair has been serving as the Quartet's representative in the troubled region for well over two years without much protest or much impact. But his smug, self-serving testimony about Iraq -- filled with the same deceptions and evasions that irreparably marred his reputation -- may at last render that position untenable. According to the Guardian, moreover, he will be called to testify again sometime within the next few months about the precooked and plagiarized intelligence reports used by his government to prove that Iraq's mythical "weapons of mass destruction" posed an imminent threat.
During Blair's long-winded justification of his actions, he compared the current threat from Iran's nuclear program with the supposed threat from Iraq's supposed WMD arsenal no fewer than 58 times. "We face the same problem about Iran today," he said -- a call to war that sounded weirdly discordant coming from a man committed to encouraging peaceful negotiation.
Now many in the Mideast have lost patience with Blair, whose lack of achievement, focus on personal enrichment, and tactless commentary cancel out whatever prestige or influence he may still possess. When he was first appointed, moderate Arabs gave him the benefit of the doubt, despite the Iraq war and his perceived favoritism toward Israel. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, publicly welcomed his appointment.
The goodwill is gone. Over the weekend, the Gulf News -- an important English-language daily based in Dubai -- published a lead editorial titled "Blair simply isn't up to envoy job." Reviewing his tenure in scathing terms, it said that he has been "consistent in one thing since his appointment -- issuing statements that are filled with impractical suggestions, ineffective calls and hollow promises. Surely, Blair's uselessness and redundancy are ample reasons for the Quartet to dismiss him from his current post." Perhaps the foreign ministers of the quartet members will be smart enough to heed that advice before Blair embarrasses them again. It seems quite unlikely, based on his public displays so far, that he has the decency to resign.
Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page joined the chorus of usual suspects claiming the president lied when he said the following about the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United:
"I believe [that decision] will open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections."
Let's leave aside for a moment the obvious rejoinder, namely that neither the Journal's editorialists nor any of his other critics can possibly know whether Obama actually "believes" what he said or not. Instead, let's revisit the issue at hand, which is whether foreign interests will now be able to influence American elections.
The Politifact Web site, in a post that curiously described Obama's remark as "barely true," went on to quote legal experts who provided clear support for his concerns. Robert Kelner, chairman of the election and political law practice group at Covington and Burling, said: "Some people think that Kennedy's opinion in Citizens United logically leads there. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. We don't know for sure." Brett Kappel, who specializes in political law at Arent Fox, said the majority opinion "certainly could be read as declaring this provision unconstitutional, so I'd have to say the president's interpretation is correct -- but we won't really know for sure until a court rules on the issue."
Meanwhile Politico quoted Michael Dorf, a Cornell University law professor who doesn't oppose foreign contributions to American political campaigns: "It is a plausible inference from the court's opinion that [foreign] money can't be restricted," he affirmed.
Experts at two of the most respected nonpartisan organizations in Washington agreed on the likely impact of the court's ruling. J. Gerald Hebert, executive director and director of litigation at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, noted that the prohibitions on foreign contributions in current law do not control contributions from foreign-controlled domestic corporations: "With the corporate campaign expenditure ban now being declared unconstitutional, domestic corporations controlled by foreign governments or other foreign entities are free to spend money to elect or defeat federal candidates," he told the Center for Public Integrity.
Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, who is among the most experienced reform advocates, went further -- and his analysis deserves close attention for its lucidity and logic in exploring whether the Court opened the political process to foreign financial influence:
"Some have argued that this will not happen because there remains a separate federal law that prohibits contributions and expenditures to be made by any 'foreign national' in connection with any Federal, State or local election. The Court in Citizens United did not review this separate law - section 441e - and it remains in effect.
"Section 441e prohibits contributions or expenditures by any 'foreign national' - which is defined to include any corporation 'organized under the laws of or having its principal place of business in a foreign corporation.'
"Thus, a corporation organized in Germany, or with its headquarters in China, remains subject to a ban on spending in U.S. elections.
"But there are domestic corporations - those organized under state law in the United States - which are and can be controlled by foreign interests.
"Those kinds of corporations - domestic corporations owned by or controlled by foreign governments, foreign corporations or foreign individuals - are not in any way prevented by section 441e from spending corporate treasury funds to influence U.S. elections.
"Prior to the Citizens United decision, these corporations were prevented from spending their funds on expenditures to influence federal campaigns by the general prohibition on corporate campaign spending. But now that that prohibition has been struck down, these foreign-controlled domestic companies are free to spend their treasury funds directly to influence U.S. elections.
"Thus, there is no statutory prohibition against foreign-controlled domestic corporations from making expenditures to influence federal elections, following the Citizens United decision.
"The Federal Election Commission has a regulation in this area, but it is inadequate and does not provide effective protection for the public against foreign involvement in federal elections.
"The FEC regulation prohibits any foreign national from directing, controlling or directly or indirectly participating in 'the decision-making process' of any person, including a domestic corporation, with regard to that person's 'election-related activities,' including any decisions about making expenditures.
"The regulation does not prevent foreign owners from making their views known to their American domestic subsidiaries about the governmental and political interests of the controlling foreign entity; it just prevents them from directly or indirectly participating in the formal "decision-making process."
"Those who manage the domestic subsidiaries, furthermore, can be expected to know the governmental and political interests and needs of their foreign owners, and to be responsive to the needs of their owners, even absent any participation by the foreign owners in the formal 'decision-making' process regarding expenditures in federal elections.
"In other words, the existing FEC regulation is an inadequate and ineffective safeguard, by itself, to prevent foreign nationals from exerting influence on U.S. elections through the use of election-related expenditures made by domestic corporations which they own or control.
"Thus, following the Supreme Court's invalidation of the ban on corporate expenditures, section 441e does not address at all the problem of expenditures made by domestic subsidiaries of foreign companies or domestic corporations controlled by foreign nationals, and there is no statutory prohibition on foreign nationals being directly involved in expenditure decisions made by foreign owned domestic corporations.
"The only restriction here is an ineffective FEC regulation administered by an agency that is widely recognized as an abject failure in carrying out its responsibilities to enforce the nation's campaign finance laws."
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