Nancy Pelosi

The New York Times Trashes Single-Payer Health Reform

dlindorff — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:54:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined
“Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter
Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government
insurance for all with faint praise.

To begin her article, Seelye quoted from a 2005 episode of the NBC
drama “West Wing,” in which two presidential candidates, a Democrat
played by Jimmy Smits and a Republican played by the always loveable
Alan Alda, are discussing health care reform. The Smits character says
his “ideal plan” would be Medicare for all. “That’s crazy” counters the
Alda Republican. Then Seelye sequed to an opinion piece recently penned
by real-life one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern
(a noble figure who nonetheless has long-since been type-cast as an
out-of-touch extreme liberal loser), who favors expansion of Medicare
into a national single-payer system.

Turning to the real world, Seelye then trotted out several
economists, ostensibly to give a broad spectrum of arguments about the
idea of single-payer, but in fact carefully avoiding including anyone
who actually supports the idea of expanding Medicare.

As her representative liberal, she quoted Brandeis economist Stuart
Altman, an Obama adviser during the presidential campaign, who said
that while he is not “ideologically uncomfortable” with expanding
Medicare, such a move would be “disruptive.” Going then to what she
described as “the other end of the political spectrum,” Seeley quoted
Robert E Moffit, of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who claimed
Medicare would mean too much government power over heatlh care.”
Finally, seeking what she could call middle ground, Seelye turned to
Dartmouth economist Jonathan Skinner, who claimed that expanding
Medicare would be good because it would cover everyone, but bad because
it would mean tripling the Medicare tax, currently 2.9% of paychecks.
If we were looking at a political yardstick here, Seelye started at the
16” mark (Altman), then went to the 36” mark (Moffit), and finally went
to the 24” mark (Skinner).

But where was an economist from the real left end of the political
spectrum, over in the single digits of that yardstick? Altaman,
representing the private insurance-based Obama approach, was hardly it!

Seelye might have gone to her colleague, columnist Paul Krugman, a
Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, who has on a number of
occasions written and stated that a single-payer system such as
Medicare for all would be “far cheaper” than any private
insurance-based system. Krugman, at least, would be over by the 10” or
12” line on a political yardstick.

Never has the Times really analyzed the true costs and
benefits of the plan espoused in a bill, HR 676, authored by House
Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI), which would expand Medicare to
cover every American. Seelye mentions Rep. Conyers’ bill, but says
innocently that it is “going nowhere” in the House. In fact, his bill,
despite having been co-sponsored by 86 members of the House, has been
blocked from getting a public hearing in committee by Nancy Pelosi and
the House leadership, at the behest of the Obama White House, which is
dead-set against a single-payer reform of health care.

The reason the Times and the insurance industry-besotted
White House and Congressional leadership don’t want that analysis is
that it would show clearly that a single-payer system would mean vast
savings for all Americans.

Seelye quotes economist Skinner as claiming that Medicare expansion
to cover every American would mean a tripling of the Medicare payroll
tax—currently set at 2.9% of wages. But even if we accepted Skinner’s
math, it is meaningless without looking at the savings side.

Sure expanding Medicare would mean higher Medicare taxes, but what about the following:

Medicaid, the program that pays for medical care for the poor, and
is funded by federal and state taxes, would be eliminated, saving $400
billion a year.

Veterans’ care, currently running at $100 billion a year, would be eliminated.

Perhaps two-thirds of the $300 billion a year spent by federal,
state and local governments to reimburse hospitals for so-called
“charity care” for treatment of people who have no insurance but don’t
qualify for Medicaid, would be eliminated.

Individuals and employers would no longer have to pay for private insurance.

Several hundred billion dollars currently spent on paperwork by private insurers would be eliminated.

Car insurance would be cheaper as there would no longer have to be coverage for medical bills.

Federal, state and local governments would no longer have to pay to insure public employees.

In short, if every person were on Medicare, the overall savings
would overwhelm the small increase in the Medicare payroll tax of 5.8%.

The bottom line is that Canadians, who have Medicare for all,
devote 10% of GDP to health care. Americans, who have
private-insurance-based health care except for the elderly, devote 17%
of GDP to health care.

Seelye and the Times have never mentioned any of this. Neither does President Obama or the Democratic Congress.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

CIA’s Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt

dlindorff — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney
administration—that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on
Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security
Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a
campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while
asserting that the President didn’t even need to notify the courts or
the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an
American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an
“enemy combatant,” and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney
lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and
refused to be put under oath in their “interviews” by the 9-11
Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was
railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the
Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be
demanding answers regarding this mysterious program.

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Pelosi v. CIA

Bob Fertik — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:47:10 -0400

Dick Cheney's rabid dogs in the Corporate Media are drooling over the prospect of savaging Speaker Pelosi for daring to agree with Jonathan Karl's accusation that the CIA lied to her.

Surprise! A rightwing Rasmussen poll found a 43%-41% plurality siding with Pelosi, not the CIA!

How likely is it that the CIA misled Pelosi about the use of waterboarding when interrogating prisoners?

20% Very likely
23% Somewhat likely
19% Not very likely
22% Not at all likely
16% Not sure

As Greg Sargent notes,

this is almost completely at odds with the way the traditional news orgs have covered this dispute. Most have focused almost entirely on the doubts the competing claims of Pelosi and the CIA cast on Pelosi’s credibility, with very few giving anywhere near the same level of scrutiny to the ways in which the CIA’s credibility is now in question.

If this poll is to be believed, however, more people are focused on the latter, despite what the news orgs are telling them to think.

Update 1: Erica Williams of the Center for American Politics was on a rapid-fire debate on CNN about the Pelosi-CIA battle and appeared to side with the Torturers:

The American people right now are actually not interested in this sideshow and this discussion. The American people are interested in looking forward -- nobody is concerned anymore with what the Bush administration was doing and did. We decided it was torture. Conservatives may or may not disagree. None of that matters at this point and time.

Today she confessed that "A TORTURE APOLOGIST TOOK OVER MY BODY!"

Looking back at the quote, I’m honestly not sure how I could have said something so wholly inaccurate and misrepresenting of my own personal opinion and the work of my organization and “the American people”. Me? A black woman who proudly wears her “Where are my reparations T-shirt” every Black History Month? Would I really suggest that America look away from and excuse its very recent and inhumane past? I think not. And yet, it appears as if I did...

rest assured that if the torture apologist ever rears her ugly head around these parts again, aiming to trip up my words, I'll make sure to get rid of her swiftly and surely - especially before appearing on national tv.

Good on you, Erica!

New Evidence Refutes Cheney's Blackmail Campaign Against Pelosi

Bob Fertik — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:34:50 -0400

Dick Cheney's blackmail campaign against Nancy Pelosi hit another IED yesterday when Greg Sargent asked former Sen. Bob Graham whether he was briefed by the CIA about the torture of Abu Zubaydah in September 2002.

I do not have any recollection of being briefed on waterboarding or other forms of extraordinary interrogation techniques, or Abu Zubaydah being subjected to them.

Sargent adds,

Graham is the only other Dem aside from Pelosi to get briefed in 2002, so they are both in effect asserting that no Dem was briefed on the use of EITs that year. The date of the next briefing was in February 2003.

Marcy Wheeler adds,

Pelosi has said, a variety of times, that the opinions approving some interrogation techniques were discussed, but that they weren't told the techniques were going to be used or--much more importantly--had been used. Or to put it very simply for those who still don't get this, Pelosi has been saying that CIA briefed them on the legality of using torture, but did not admit (and may have specifically denied) that they had used these torture techniques. Pelosi is making a temporal claim as much as anything else.

But Graham is making a much more expansive claim, saying techniques were not discussed in the least.

And that means the CIA broke the law:

But the big news should be what it always has been--that the Bush Administration and the CIA did not give the legally required briefing on their covert ops to Congress.

Sorry Dick - your blackmail campaign against Nancy Pelosi just backfired and exposed your stay-behinds to criminal prosecution.

Cheney Is Now At War with Pelosi

Bob Fertik — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:18:07 -0400

Dick Cheney may be out of the White House, but he's still doing what he loves best - waging a secret war based on deliberately distorted "intelligence." But he's no longer waging a war on Terror. Instead, he's waging a war on Nancy Pelosi.

Why? Because he's trying to stop Eric Holder from investigating his War Crimes, but he has no way to stop him directly because Elections Have Consequences - including firing corrupt AG's like Michael Mukasey. So instead he hopes he can blackmail Pelosi into stopping Holder.

Will he succeed? No.

Cheney's whole blackmail campaign against Pelosi rests on the smear that the CIA briefed her about waterboarding on 9/4/02 and she approved.

Cheney's collaborators in his Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has been making that argument with greater or lesser specificity for weeks. We've heard it from Republicans in the Senate and the House, from rightwing pundits across the media dial, and from "journalists" like Rick Klein of ABC and Greg Miller of LA Times.

Unfortunately for Cheney, Pelosi adamantly denied the smear during her press conference on April 23:

"We were not, I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other interrogation methods were used. What they did tell us was they had some legislative counsel opinions. And if and when they would be used, they would brief Congress at that time."

But Pelosi's categorical denial hasn't deterred the Cheneyites at all, including their Corporate Media cutouts.

So when the CIA delivered its report to House Intelligence Committee chair Sylvestre Reyes yesterday, the Cheneyites immediately went to work looking for "proof" that "Pelosi knew." Rep. Pete Hoekstra leaked the report to Rick Klein and told him to zero in on the entry for the only briefing Pelosi attended, which was on 9/4/02:

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

Klein took that tidbit and spun it into a "scandal" by claiming it

appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding

Klein's key phrase - "appears to contradict Pelosi" - then magically and instantly appeared in a dozen articles on the topic, including Greg Miller's.

A coincidence? Hardly. Dick Cheney's torture-stained fingerprints are all over this smear.

Of course it's just another one of Cheney's Big Lies (TM), because the CIA did not tell Pelosi about waterboarding on 9/4/02, as Marcy Wheeler writes:

we have on the record statements from Pelosi and Goss (and I've had even stronger assurances elsewhere) that CIA did not tell Congress they were already in the business of torture. Their discussions of torture were all prospective, and they may even have stated clearly that they had not used these techniques yet, which (if true) would be a clear and direct lie to Congress.

And it would certainly be no surprise that the CIA lied to Congress on 9/4/02, because the CIA had already broken the law by failing to tell Congress about its new torture program in advance, as Marcy Wheeler keeps noting:

The real story is that the CIA was playing a bunch of games to be able to claim it had informed Congress, even while only informing some of Congress some things.

First, CIA has officially confirmed what I have been saying for weeks. The CIA first briefed Congress on torture on September 4, 2002, 35 days after CIA purportedly began waterboarding and much longer after we know CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah.

By law, the CIA is required to inform Congress before it starts any major new intelligence programs - which would include Torture.

So who are the key players in Cheney's "War on Pelosi"? We're seeing many familiar faces, led by Cheney himself and the men Cheney appointed to run the CIA - Porter Goss and Michael Hayden. We can assume Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, David Addington, Cathie Martin, Mary Matalin, and the rest of Team Cheney are quietly working behind the scenes.

But the key question is who his "stay behind" operatives are inside the Obama Administration, as Seymour Hersh said on March 31:

He’s put people back. They call it a "stay behind". It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a "stay behind" that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a "stay behind". He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.

Who are Cheney's "stay behinds"?

Corporate Media Lies About Pelosi Torture Briefings

Bob Fertik — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:19:06 -0400

Republicans (led by Dick Cheney) are fighting every effort to expose the Torture Scandal, with one glaring exception: they are moving at warp speed to "prove" Nancy Pelosi approved waterboarding.

Only she didn't. So they're lying. And so is the Corporate Media.

Abu Zubaydah was the first prisoner waterboarded by the CIA. He was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Pelosi received her first briefing on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EIT) on September 4, 2002. But the CIA didn't tell her they had just waterboarded Abu Zubaydah!

Here's what Pelosi said on April 23:

"We were not, I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other interrogation methods were used. What they did tell us was they had some legislative counsel opinions. And if and when they would be used, they would brief Congress at that time."

Here's the CIA's vague version of the briefing:

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

It's entirely possible the CIA is wrong when they say they briefed on "use of EITs." But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, which EIT's did they tell Pelosi about? It's a very long way from loud music and face-slapping to waterboarding. As Marcy Wheeler writes,

even the CIA never asserts it told any Democrat about waterboarding until after the 2004 IG Report came out.

So how on earth could Pelosi have approved something she knew nothing about?

Nevertheless, ABC's Rick Klein is calling Pelosi a liar:

The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques.

The report does not contradict Pelosi's statement because it does not say Pelosi was told about waterboarding in 2002.

Greg Miller of the LA Times peddles similar lies:

A chart compiled by the CIA shows that Pelosi (D-San Francisco) was briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, on the agency's interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, and that the session covered "the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed." The chart does not list the specific methods covered during the briefing. But during the preceding month, the CIA had used the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times, according to a Justice Department memo released last month.

Just because the CIA used waterboarding doesn't mean they actually told Pelosi about it! Does anyone at the CIA say they actually did? No! Miller relies entirely on assumption, not evidence.

Republican congressional officials familiar with the document and other still-classified records on congressional briefings said it would have been negligent for CIA briefers to fail to mention the use of waterboarding after Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to the method so extensively.

Just because it "would have been negligent" doesn't mean the CIA wasn't ... negligent! In the fall of 2002, the CIA was aiding and abetting Bush's flat-out lies about Iraq. Of course that's how the U.S. got sucked into the disastrous invasion.

Take action! Email greg.miller@latimes.com

Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?

dlindorff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:31:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out.
But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly
wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the
NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush
Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper
conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli
government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s
warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her
being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone
conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and
ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold
off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James
Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’
phone and internet communications.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly,
the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged
Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage
charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby
accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli
government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman
is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy
of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to
have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a
wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in California donate money to Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to
name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of
the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to
say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times,
which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI
to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom
the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program.

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary
glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the
centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments
to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for
members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were
doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli
government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning,
and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. Instead, they
flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as President Obama did almost
immediately upon winning the November election, and a large proportion
of both houses from both parties happily accept its campaign largesse.

A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA’s spying activities
themselves. According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep.
Harman inflagrante with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap—part
of an investigation into Israeli government spying activities. But even
if this is true—and at this point, we’re relying on what the government
is telling us about it—it shows how dangerous the broader unwarranted
monitoring program of the NSA has been, and remains. Back in 1978,
Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in
direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and
subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using
the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war
activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent such
police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA
legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of
top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to
consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret
electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens
abroad.

President Bush used the pretext of the 9-11 attacks to secretly
order the NSA to begin a massive compaign of surveillance without going
through the FISA Court for warrants, even secretly soliciting the
cooperation of the nation’s several telecom companies in splicing in
routers at their switching hubs to make it possible to monitor all
conversations moving across the wires and the internet. It seemed to
some observers, myself included, that the only reason the
administration could have had for bypassing the FISA court (which over
30 years of operation has been incredibly accommodating of government
spying requests) was that it was planning to engage in spying that
would outrage the public and the Congress and even the FISA judges. It
also seemed likely, given the Bush/Cheney administration’s public
stance that everyone was either “with us or against us,” and that
critics of the administration’s “War on Terror” or of its plans to
invade Iraq, were “unpatriotic” or “soft on terror,” that congressional
opponents of the administration would be obvious—and indeed
irresistible--targets of that surveillance.

Now that we have seen proof that the administration was not above
using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it
becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department
investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims
of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harmon were similarly
extorted or otherwise compromised.

The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the
integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that
politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public
interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control
the National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the
integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised
by NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.

The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation
into the NSA’s seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless
electronic eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in
the wake of the Harman episode, could well be an indication that the
political figure in question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or
worse, that she or he has been threatened by those who have the
records. Every citizen concerned about the fate of American democracy
should demand that his or her senators and representative promptly call
for such a public probe.

It is no longer a wild idea at all to imagine that our Congress has
been reduced to the status of a Potemkin legislature because of real or
imagined spying by the NSA.

_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Nancy Pelosi Is 'Very Serious' About Torture, Wiretaps, and Contempt

Bob Fertik — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:39:22 -0500

On Thursday, Newsweek's Howard Fineman broke huge news about Nancy Pelosi on Countdown:

the news based on talking to people around her and advisers to her just this afternoon after that story broke is that she is very serious about this.

The one part of it that Nancy Pelosi doesn‘t really want to mess with, I‘m told, is the evidence about the war in Iraq. Now, the whole question of the buildup for the war and whether lies were told about that and the reason for that is—she believes that she and other Democrats on the Hill knew that it was a phony deal, said so at the time, and she doesn‘t think there is any percentage of going over that particularly.

But yes on torture, yes on possibly the eavesdropping things, yes on Guantanamo, and certainly, especially yes on the question of coming before the Congress to testify. She is really determined on that point and seems very eager to try to haul Karl Rove and others into court for contempt.

Of course we all want to prosecute everyone in the Bush Administration who lied about Iraq, so we will not stop pushing for it. But it's huge news that Pelosi is "very serious" about investigating torture, wiretaps, Gitmo, and contempt of Congress.

Update 1: In the Countdown segment that followed, Jonathan Turley rightly warned against a whitewash instead of an investigation that would lead to criminal prosecution:

I would love to see this type of aggressive role of Congress in dealing with this. But I am very concerned about this idea of compromises and negotiations. Many of these things become sort of Capitol Hill kabuki of approved questions and answers. That‘s not what we want. And we certainly do not need another commission like the 9/11 Commission.

Auto Industry Bailout

music8200 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:54:07 -0500

Congress will take up the Auto Industry Bailout when they re-convene this week. There is no better time than this moment to PUSH for concessions from the Auto Industry. Time is short. Democrat.com, can you help us act NOW? Here's a copy of a letter I just mailed to Speaker Pelosi: Dear Madam Speaker,

Please make the FLEXFUEL component a MANDATORY requirement for any Auto Industry bailout.
IT ONLY COSTS $100 to install this component on a vehicle during the manufacturing process. The only EPA approved retrofit costs $1300. All cars sold in Brazil are flexfuel ready. All cars that GM sells in Brazil are flexfuel compatible. There is no excuse and there should be no delay in making all cars sold in America flexfuel capable.
THIS IS THE QUICKEST CHEAPEST EASIEST WAY to make rapid reductions in our foreign oil imports.
If ALL cars sold in the US were Flexfuel compatible, alternative fuel manufacturers would gear up without the need for incentives because they would know they have a market for their fuel products.
THEN please help remove the $0.54 a gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That would allow foreign ethanol products to compete in the American market. The American consumer would benefit. We could even lift the economies of Third World Countries by contracting them to grow switchgrass or sugarcane for ethanol fuel.
Ultimately, let's provide incentives for the production of flexfuel plug-in hybrids. These cars would get 500 MILES ON A GALLON OF GASOLINE! We would never need OPEC oil ever again! Perhaps no imported oil at all.
PLEASE PLEASE make the flexfuel component a MANDATORY part of any Automobile Industry Bailout.
If you want good references on this topic, read the testimony of Anne Korin (of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security) before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of May 22, 2008:http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/kor052208.htm(see in particular the section entitled "17x17")
read R. James Woolsey (former director of the CIA) and Anne Korin's article in the National Review:http://energy.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlmMjFjYWRjOWI3ZGI0MzUxZDJjYTBlMmUzOTc2Mzc=
or watch Anne Korin's lecture on CSPAN:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MVwL2PcCG8(highly recommended)
watch Robert Zubrin's FEW Keynote Address:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0O2YZwSkgM
Thank you and your staff for your time and attention,Scott Lawrence

Surprise! Congress Listened to the Voting Public!

dlindorff — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:43:24 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The most entertaining thing about this Wall Street crisis and the
refusal of the House of Representatives (not failure but refusal) to
pass a bailout bill negotiated by the Bush White House and the House
leadership is how shocked and upset those leaders and the pundit class
have been by the idea that members of Congress would actually heed the
wishes of their constituents!

The Founding Fathers always saw the lower house of Congress as
voice of the people—the elected body that, because its members had to
face the voters every two years, would be most responsive to public
sentiment.

Because of the power of money and the role of the corporate media
in filtering the information that voters get about what is actually
going on, that close connection between public and public servant in
the House has long ago broken down. This time, however, because the
crisis hit within five weeks of the national election, and because the
crisis involved something that everyone cares about—their money—it
worked.

The public is paying attention, and most of us got it. It was
obvious that Congress and the White House were out to screw us out of
our money in order to protect the millionaire and billionaire traders
and conmen who have been running the Wall Street casino for the last
decade and a half without any adult supervision.

Now that people are paying attention, it will be interesting to see
how these corrupt leaders, Democrat and Republican, will fashion that
bailout and get it passed. Once aroused from their TV-induced slumber,
the American public may not be willing to get rolled. If the anger
grows, and the calls and emails to Congress—which brought down the
Capitol website Monday and jammed the switchboard for several days
beginning last week—continue to flood in threatening an electoral
Armageddon for those who back a bailout, Congress may yet be unable to
pass a bill.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Now let’s make something clear. The stock market crash that
happened on Monday was no crisis. The market can rise and fall with
little or no significant impact on the broader economy, or even on
those who have their retirement income invested in equities. While
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and House
leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Minority Leader John Boehner may
point frantically to the falling Dow as a dire warning to members of
Congress to take action, it is all just scaremongering.

The real issue is not the stock market—it’s the credit markets. And
these have been shut down to borrowers—both individuals and
corporates—for months. Which means that there is no sudden urgency to
pass a lousy, rip-off bailout bill in days without proper hearings and
investigations into what is really needed.

The Bush Administration’s whole idea here from the start was to use
scare-mongering and high-pressure tactics honed in the 2002 campaign to
gin up a war against Iraq to get a bill through Congress that would
make a virtual dictator out of the Treasury Secretary, and to siphon a
trillion dollars or more out of taxpayers’ accounts and into the
pockets of the already stunningly rich financial class. It was to be
one final wrecking ball by the Bush/Cheney gang launched at the
American economic and political system, allowing the people who have
run the country into the ground over the last eight years, and their
financial backers to walk away with all the cookies.

It could still happen if the public doesn’t stay fired up and
angry. But for now, it’s at least exciting and deeply satisfying to see
the Administration, and the cowards who run the so-called Democratic
opposition in Congress, scrambling frantically to come up with a scheme
to get this ripoff passed.

What should happen? Congressional Democrats should put a hold on any action until after Election Day, which after all is only five weeks off. They should say that the voters must be heard on this critical national issue of how to rescue the economy and fix the financial system. Hearings should be scheduled in the relevant committees—oversight, banking, securities regulation, housing, the elderly, health and human services, etc. (yes, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is right in observing that given that most bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical emergencies, if the US had national healthcare, we wouldn’t have the housing foreclosure crisis)—and a special prosecutor should be established to look into the corruption behind all the recent financial sector failures. The real victims of the deregulatory orgy need to be heard, as do some of the 200 economists (including at least three nobel laureates) who have opposed this bailout. Then when the true nature and extent of the crisis and its causes have been laid out in clear public view, along with some real solutions for real people, appropriate legislative reforms should be drawn up, debated and voted upon, to be finally enacted into law.

No rush to judgment! No short-circuiting of the critical process of hearings!

The economy will survive this process.

What we cannot survive is a continuation of secret government, backroom deals and trillion-dollar bailouts.

BACK TO THE PHONES!
_______________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net