Tag Archives: corruption

Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis

The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis has a new report, Climate Action: Building a Clean Economy for the American People. It has a laundry list of the kinds of measures that are needed and that the next Congress could choose to act on. What is really interesting though is the last chapter, which is called Dark Money. It takes solid aim at the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to misinform, disinform, and buy political influence, especially following the Citizens United decision. On the page introducing this topic is a picture of our Supreme Court justices.

The Democratic Senators blame Republicans, of course, but the cirampaigns need to be funded too. They pretty much admit here that big business owns Congress, and the Supreme Court made that happen. Well, remembering my high school civics, the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, but Congress wrote the Constitution and Congress can change it.

how to fix the U.S. Constitution

John Davenport, a professor (of philosophy?) at Fordham University, has some proposals to fix parts of the U.S. Constitution that he says are outdated. I am 100% on board with cleaning up election finance and clarifying the speech rights of corporations. Others I hadn’t thought about as constitutional amendments, but I think all these ideas are worth considering.

  • Changes to how we do elections: “rotation of early primaries among all our states, automatic runoffs on ranked-choice ballots, fair district lines, and uniform federal requirements for election integrity”
  • “overturning the Citizens United precedent through an amendment that establishes voter-owned elections with public financing of campaigns, very strict limits on all private donations, and requirements for candidates in all federal races (and all cabinet appointees) to disclose ten years of tax records. The amendment should include a clear statement that corporations—whether for-profit or nonprofit —do not have the same rights to spend on “speech” as real persons. Political advertising by corporations and large PACs should be strictly limited.”
  • 10-year gap between serving in Congress and working as a lobbyist, restrictions on all federal officials going to work for industry they were regulating (he doesn’t say how long), restrict access of lobbyists to federal officials, and use tax law to further limit lobbying (he doesn’t say how)
  • get rid of the Senate filibuster, and allow 55% of House members to force a vote (maybe, but consensus is a worthy ideal, and you can’t have 55% of the population voting to gas the other 45%)
  • 18-year term limits in the Supreme Court, which would mean exactly two appointed during each 4-year presidential term. If a justice retires or dies during their term, he suggests picking a lower federal judge by lottery to serve out the remainder of their term. Congress would also be required to vote on judicial appointments within six months (or what, they are automatically confirmed?)
  • Now to limit future Presidents: clarify what constitutes an illegal campaign contribution, treason, contempt of Congress, what justifies impeachment, and require blind trusts.
  • 10 year terms for the Attorney General and director of the FBI, and dismissing them requires agreement between the President and three-fifths of the House
  • limits to appointing family to government positions
  • naturalized citizens qualify for any office after 20 years

This all sounds pretty good. I think we have an enormous amount of inertia built into the system though because any individual or small group of politicians who support the campaign finance measures would pretty easily be ousted by those who do not. It’s like disarmament – everyone giving up the weapons all at once is the best solution for everyone, but those who can trick the rest into doing it while they hold on to theirs would then be able to blow up the others. Corporate and special interest money are the electoral weapons of mass destruction that all parties should give up simultaneously as the best outcome, but instead of arms talks we seem to be in an arms race with no end in site. We’ve had a couple relatively strong leaders make a push on this (Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders) and they’ve come up short. The “mainstream politicians” always argue that it would be nice to give up the weapons, but the other side won’t do it and we have to win before we have any chance to reform the system from within. Then they get elected, and the cycle repeats.

There is also the small matter of the U.S. Constitution being our king and god. Seriously, we don’t have a sovereign ruling by divine right, so we treat the Constitution almost as a holy text that should be changed infrequently and only with a damn good reason. And there is some advantage in this – constitutions have come and gone in almost all other countries since 1783, while the U.S. form of government has proven pretty stable. The flip side of stability is resistance to change. The system was intentionally designed that way, but maybe we have gone so long without tightening a few screws here and there to keep it from wobbling, and now big structural changes are needed to keep it from collapsing.

I would also get rid of the electoral college and the states, by the way. Or if I didn’t get rid of the states entirely, I would make it much easier to carve out new ones from bits and pieces of the old ones. State borders have zero cultural, economic, or physical significance. Their time has come and gone and they are holding us back.

private equity and surprise medical billing

This article from Center for Economic and Policy Research (I admit I don’t know much about this organization) claims that private equity firms have bought up medical practices and intentionally insert out-of-network doctors into teams treating you at your in-network hospital. Members of Congress have introduced legislation to curb this, but the financial lobby has been too powerful to beat.

Private equity-owned physician staffing firms grow by buying up many small specialty practices and “rolling them up” into umbrella organizations that serve health care systems across the United States. KKR-owned Envision Healthcare with 69,300 employees, and Blackstone-owned TeamHealth with 20,000 employees, dominate the market for outsourced doctors’ practices. A team of Yale University health economists examined what happened when private equity-owned companies EmCare (part of Envision Healthcare) and TeamHealth took over hospital emergency departments.5 They found that when EmCare took over the management of emergency departments, it nearly doubled its charges for caring for patients compared to the charges billed by previous physician groups. The researchers also found that TeamHealth took a somewhat different tack. It used the threat of sending high out-of-network surprise bills for ER doctors’ services to an insurance company’s covered patients in order to gain high fees from insurance companies as in-network doctors.6 This avoids the situation where a patient gets stuck with a large, surprise medical bill, but it raises premium costs for everyone. In both cases, healthcare costs increase when outsourced emergency rooms and other physician services are owned by private equity firms.

My take: Campaign finance reform and Medicare for All, baby!

July 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

Citizens United caused John Paul Stevens to have a stroke

This article in Abovethelaw.com (quoting the New York Times) says that John Paul Stevens suffered a mini-stroke the day the Citizens United decision was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, legalizing unlimited campaign contributions and essentially legalizing corporate bribery of politicians.

I found this quote interesting:

his missteps that day led him to seek medical advice and after learning of the stroke, he made the decision to quit. Justice Stevens made the responsible move under the circumstances, because if Citizens United tested his health — and he tells Liptak that he views that opinion along with Heller and the whack-a-doodle reasoning of Bush v. Gore as the three worst mistakes for the Supreme Court in his tenure — one can imagine how he’d have reacted to some of the doozies to come out of the Court since 2010.

I looked up Heller and it was a gun control case.