A Measured Step Towards Health Care For All

Well, it’s finally happened. Congress has passed health care reform. Now what will happen? Truthfully, no one knows for sure. But that hasn’t stopped the right wing crazies and their enablers Fox News and Rush Limbaugh from telling us. They say that the passage of this socialist takeover of healthcare means we are on an inevitable path to communism. Uncle Sam will choose your doctor for you. The IRS will hunt you down and bankrupt you if you don’t sign up for health insurance. The American public will rise up in anger and throw out the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Has Armageddon arrived? Hardly. The dirty little secret is that many on the left are as dissatisfied with this bill as the right. This legislation is nothing like the single payer programs that Canada and Britain have. Healthcare in this country will still be mostly provided by employers, and through private health insurance carriers. The major change is that most people who now don’t have access to health insurance will be able to get it. Folks will no longer be denied coverage due to having a preexisting medical condition. Young adults will be able to stay on their parents’ insurance until they get their own coverage. As for the penalties for not getting health insurance, many worry that the penalties in the bill are so SMALL that many will simply pay them rather than comply.

The Obama health care bill is a compromise first step in making sure everyone has access to affordable health care. This law is actually very similar to the Republican proposal offered as the alternative to “Hillarycare” in the 90s. The process of passing it was ugly and sometimes distasteful. But it is a tremendous step forward in providing a higher quality of life for all Americans. The same criticisms made of this process were made of other dramatic improvements like Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights and Womens Suffrage. Many of the legislators who voted against those landmarks later wished they hadn’t. I applaud the 219 brave souls who put their careers on the line to vote in favor of real progress. Some of them may suffer at the polls this fall. But history will see them as visionaries.

Supreme Court Ruling on Campaign Spending by Corporations

In my view the recent Supreme Court decision on campaign spending by corporations is based on two false premises. One is that corporations are entitled to the same first amendment rights as actual persons. The second is that money equals speech. One cannot find support for either proposition in the Constitution or its Amendments. Can you possibly imagine Jefferson or Madison supporting giving artificial constucts like corporations full First Amendment rights? Any argument that the current majority are strict constructionists has gone out the window with this recent decision. Instead, we saw a wholesale abrogation of precedents in favor of one set of interests over others. Elections DO matter, for they result in this kind of outrageous miscarriage of justice. That whirring sound you hear are the founding fathers spinning in their graves. One day this decision will be overturned. May it be soon.

There's been a lot of theoretical talk about the impact this Supreme Court ruling may have. But, if you want a real life, actual example of how the system can be abused by this ruling, look at how the CEO of Massey Coal put $3 million into the race for a seat on the West Virginia Supreme Court. His candidate was elected and shortly afterwards voted in favor of Massey in an important case. Read all about it in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.

Free speech is something we should all support. But that doesn't mean that everyone's opinion is entitled to equal weight. Brian Bolig's Jan. 17 letter to the Harrisburg Patriot-News says that climate change is a hoax. He cites as his proof the fact that Hannibal used a pass in the Alps that is snow covered today. He doesn't name any scientists who support this "proof" of a hoax.

As far as I know, there are none. According to Bolig, everything in this world is politicized.

It seems that way, if all you watch is Fox News Channel and MSNBC. If Mr. Bolig would widen his search a bit, he will discover that the overwhelming scientific consensus supports the position that man is responsible for a substantial portion of our gradually warming climate.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, seven of the warmest years on record have occurred in the last 10 years. The consensus prediction is that the Arctic Ocean will become navigable in about 30 years. The snows of Kilimanjaro will be gone in less than a decade.

Mr. Bolig and others such as Rush Limbaugh can always find a lone gadfly scientist who will support their silly position. Meanwhile our earth continues to warm and our window of time to act continues to close.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News just ran an article stating that eighty-three employees connected to the state legislature pulled in six-figure salaries last year.

I think some of in the media are being somewhat irresponsible in covering this issue. I spent my entire career in the private sector working for large corporations. When analyzing how much a particular position should be paid, we looked at industry studies. Why aren't you comparing what, say, an accounting manager in the private sector is making as compared to state government. That is the only fair comparison. When the media doesn't look at the issue this way, they are playing into the hands of the anti-government firebrands who, I guess, think that there shouldn't be any government employees at all.

Shoes and Praise

It’s a good thing I wasn’t in Carlisle the other day when President Bush visited there. There might have been another shoe throwing incident like the one that occurred in Iraq recently. Mr. Bush told the crowd there that he is proud that another attack like September 11 hasn’t occurred during his Presidency. The vile attacks that day were conducted by terrorists mostly from Saudi Arabia and trained in Afghanistan. Bush and his crowd responded by insisting that we had to retaliate immediately, not at Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or even against the terrorists themselves, but by taking out a tinpot dictator who had nothing to do with 9/11. Even Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction turned out to be so much thin air. When people like Gen. Shinseki asked how much this adventure might cost, or how many troops we needed, or why it was even a good idea, they were called delusional defeatists. Bush bought off the rich by giving them tax cuts and the religious right by supporting their campaigns of terror and marginalization. Now we’re reaping the fruits of this folly. We’re stuck in a foolish war against the wrong enemy. Bush’s policies have played into the hands of Muslim extremists and marginalized the moderate voices there. Rather than building up surpluses in the good times to use in the hard times we are now in, his policies have resulted in record deficits.

We should be grateful to the brave men and women who have fought terrorism and perhaps kept them at bay over the last seven years. But Mr. Bush and his Administration should get no praise. Better keep your head down, sir. The shoes will keep coming.

The Race Card

I used to have a lot of respect for John McCain. During the 2000 campaign Karl Rove's buddies spread a vicious rumor in South Carolina that McCain had a biracial child out of wedlock. She is really his adoptive daughter. That slur probably cost McCain the SC primary in 2000.

How ironic that McCain and his supporters are now spreading the same sort of bile about his opponent. McCain is clearly allowing the race card to be played in his campaign. If he's not explicitly playing it himself, he is clearly allowing his surrogates and supporters to use race. All this stuff about "He not like us" and "He's really a Muslim" is code for one thing - "He's black." John McCain knows that and the McCain who ran in 2000 would never have allowed it.

Abe Lincoln, the Republican Party's first Presidential candidate, appealed to the better angels of our nature. Much has changed since then in the Grand Old Party.

The REAL Cause of the Financial Crisis...according to Faux News

Someone emailed me a link to a story that appeared on Fox News, which I am reprinting below.

Well, fact checking Faux News is so like (chose your metaphor, shooting fish in a barrel, taking candy from a baby) that it's almost unfair. But, here goes anyway.

I don't watch Faux News much. I prefer to get my news from outlets that at least take a stab at objectivity like NPR, CNN and NBC. I now see I've been making a big mistake. Those outlets say that there are plenty of factors that together resulted in the present financial crisis. These include too lax regulation of the financial services industry, new financial products that concentrated risk like credit default swaps, bankers who made liar loans and low doc mortgages, and individuals who agreed to loan terms that they didn't really understand. Faux News has removed the scales from my eyes. Our whole financial crisis was caused by a single gay Congressman.

However, it is interesting that Rep. Frank's problematic liason began in 1991 and ended in 1998. That's TEN YEARS before our current financial crisis. It's also before Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the major financial servises deregulation law, was passed in 1999. Also, Rep. Frank was a member of the minority party during the entire time he was involved with Mr. Moses. I guess the right wing is correct - those gays have incredible power over our entire society. Look for Faux News exposes in the near future showing how gays are also responsible for 9/11 and the War in Iraq.

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Lawmaker Accused of Fannie Mae Conflict of Interest

Friday , October 03, 2008

By Bill Sammon

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WASHINGTON —

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest. Critics, however, remain skeptical.

"It’s absolutely a conflict," said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. "He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?

"If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have - or at least what’s not in the stock market - that this would be considered germane," added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. "But everybody wants to avoid it because he’s gay. It’s the quintessential double standard."

A top GOP House aide agreed.

"C’mon, he writes housing and banking laws and his boyfriend is a top exec at a firm that stands to gain from those laws?" the aide told FOX News. "No media ever takes note? Imagine what would happen if Frank’s political affiliation was R instead of D? Imagine what the media would say if [GOP former] Chairman [Mike] Oxley’s wife or [GOP presidential nominee John] McCain’s wife was a top exec at Fannie for a decade while they wrote the nation’s housing and banking laws."

Frank’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gay member of Congress.

"I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus," Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. "On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover."

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."

Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector.

Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.

Three years later, President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank. Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis.

"I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," Clinton said recently.