Invisible health panel could help Ky., if it had money and met

A panel charged with helping devise solutions to the nation’s health-care workforce crisis, which includes ensuring rural areas have enough health-care providers, is having a workforce crisis of its own: It hasn’t been funded, and it’s never met, writesKyle Cheney of Politico. 

The National Health Care Workforce Commission was created by Congress nearly three years ago under the Affordable Care Act, the panelists were appointed, but that’s about it. The lack of action was noted at a hearing Tuesday of a subcommittee of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, convened by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging.

Sanders issued a report estimating that 57 million Americans lack ready access to primary care. Since  millions are expected to gain coverage when the reform law goes into full effect next year, there is a looming concern over whether there are enough doctors, physicians' assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses and so on. Most of the worry relates to the lack of primary-care providers in underserved areas, which could be a huge problem for Kentucky.

In addition to exploring the health workforce needs in rural and “medically underserved” settings, the commission was supposed to address the capacity of the nursing workforce, graduate medical education policies, education and loan programs for health-care professionals and the “mental and behavioral health care workforce capacity,” writes Cheney.

Since the 15-member panel was appointed in September 2010 by the U.S. comptroller general, 10 members’ terms have expired, and they’ve been reappointed for another three years each, Cheney reports. No funding has been approved, although both Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama have proposed $3 million funding packages.

“In order for the promise of expanded coverage passed into law by ACA to become a reality, the provisions designed to reach those goals must be fully funded and implemented,” Sanders said. “We need to make sure that our health care system has the infrastructure in place to provide the care necessary to prevent diseases and improve the health of all Americans.” (Read more)

McConnell helped Amgen delay price limits on dialysis drug

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whose public statements usually emphasize the need to cut federal spending on entitlement programs, as they did in Lexington Friday, apparently passed up an opportunity to rein in Medicare spending when he signed off on a big favor for a significant campaign contributor in the fiscal-cliff deal.

The deal delayed for two years price controls on a class of drugs including Sensipar, used by kidney-dialysis patients and manufactured by Amgen, "the world's largest biotechnology firm," Eric Lipton and Kevin Sack of The New York Times reported Jan. 19.

"The news was so welcome that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts," the Times reported. "But it is projected to cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period. Dennis J. Cotter, who studies the cost and efficacy of dialysis drugs, told the newspaper, “Everybody is carving out their own turf and getting it protected, and we pass the bill on to the taxpayer.”

McConnell spokesman Robert Steurer said the senator did not push for the provision. The Times story did not focus on McConnell, saying "Supporters of the delay, primarily leaders of the Senate Finance Committee who have long benefited from Amgen’s political largess, said it was necessary to allow regulators to prepare properly for the pricing change." And it noted the firm "also has worked hard to build close ties with the Obama administration." It did note that former McConnell chief of staff Hunter Bates is among "a small army of 74 lobbyists for Amgen, which was "the only company to argue aggressively for the delay, according to several Congressional aides of both parties."

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzes lobbying and campaign contributions, Amgen's political action committee gave McConnell $7,000 during the 2011-12 election cycle, an amount exceeded by only seven other senators, none of them in the Senate leadership. McConnell was the main negotiator on the fiscal-cliff deal with Vice President Biden.

UPDATE, Jan. 25: Writing on BillMoyers.com and then on Salon, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship report that since 2007, "Amgen employees and its political action committee have contributed $73,000 to Senator McConnell’s campaigns," almost $68,000 to Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Finance Committee, and $59,000 to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. They also note that Republican Rep. Richard Hanna R-N.Y., and Democratic Reps. Peter Welch of Vermont and Jim Cooper of Tennessee have introduced a bill "to repeal the half billion-dollar giveaway to Amgen. The story includes Moyers' video interview with Welch.

Fiscal-cliff deal revives program that helps rural hospitals dependent on Medicare; 200 in nation, 10 in Kentucky

Even though most of the hospital industry wasn't happy with the fiscal-cliff deal that will only pay half the $30 billion needed to avoid a 27 percent Medicare fee cut for doctors, the deal gave about 200 rural hospitals, including 10 in Kentucky, reason to celebrate. It extends a program that pays hospitals up to several millions of dollars a year because they have fewer than 100 beds, are located in rural areas and have a high percentage of Medicare patients, Phil Galewitz of Kaiser Health News reports.

The Medicare Dependent Hospital Program was created in 1990 and is one of several payment programs designed to help small, rural hospitals deal with financial challenges that larger hospitals don't face. The program is based on the idea that "some rural hospitals have such a high percentage of Medicare patients they are unable to get enough money from higher paying privately insured patients to make up for the lower government reimbursements," health lawyer Eric Zimmerman told Galewitz.

The program has come under scrutiny. Congress allowed it to expire in September 2012, but two senators from New York and Iowa made sure $100 million for the program made it into the budget deal. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission said hospitals in the program will receive about 25 percent higher reimbursements as a result of the funding. (Read more)

The Kentucky hospitals in the program are Clinton County Hospital, Fleming County Hospital, Harrison Memorial Hospital, Jewish Hospital Shelbyville, Logan Memorial Hospital, Monroe County Medical Center, Parkway Regional Hospital in Fulton, Rockcastle Regional Hospital, Taylor Regional Hospital and Westlake Regional Hospital in Columbia. The Appalachian Regional Hospital in Williamson, W.Va., is also considered a Kentucky hospital in the program.

Haynes: Medicaid case managers threatened, and more bumps ahead, but state beginning to see advantages of new system

By Al Cross
Kentucky Health News

Some Medicaid case managers' lives have been threatened because they have tried to get Medicaid patients to go to primary-care doctors instead of emergency rooms, Health and Family Services Secretary Audrey Haynes said today.

Haynes, right, and two key legislators talked about managed care, the possible expansion of Medicaid under federal health-care reform, and the insurance exchange being set up under the law, at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce's annual policy conference in Lexington.

The case managers work for insurance companies that oversee Medicaid under contracts with the state. Haynes said the cases of threats have been reported to police.

One key to making managed care work is more prevention, Haynes said, but "People want to go to the emergency room." She mentioned one case of a Medicaid recipient who had gone to emergency rooms 57 times in 30 days.  Under federal law, hospital emergency rooms generally cannot refuse to treat patients who present themselves.

"They will abuse the emergency room because that is the system they know," said Republican Sen. Tom Buford of Nicholasville, chairman of the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee.

Haynes said, "Our people are getting sicker, especially folks on Medicaid, and we can't allow people to use high-intensity . . . high-cost services."

Haynes, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear, and her cabinet have come under fire for not putting more pressure on managed-care companies to make timely payments to hospitals, doctors and other providers. She was not asked about that, but alluded to it: "There have been lots of bumps in the road, and some of them may continue."

But she said the state is only beginning to see what can be gained from the new system, which is supposed to save hundreds of millions of dollars. "We were one of the last states to look at managed care," she noted.

Buford said "I don't disagree with anything she has said," but said the Beshear administration rushed into managed care. "I don't think there's much we can do. We are in this lady's hands on this issue and we'd better support her."

Buford predicted that Beshear would try to expand the Medicaid program to households earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level, a key part of the federal reforms but one the Supreme Court said must be optional for states, not mandatory.

"It will be difficult for him to say no to the expansion of the Medicaid rolls," which the federal government would entirely cover in the first two years, Buford said. That would be reduced to 90 percent by 2020, but Buford predicted that the federal government will ask the states ot accept less because it won't have the money.

Haynes said Beshear would like to expand Medicaid, and a "deep-dive economic analysis" is being done now, with the help of the federal Department for Health and Human Services, to establish the financial parameters. "We probably won't know for several months because we're still getting a lot of guidance from HHS," she said.

Haynes said expanding Medcaid would bring $10 billion to $12 billion to the state, having a significant economic impact, and the managed-care companies came to the state expecting the expansion.

She said HHS is calling the state's effort to set up the insurance exchange, a marketplace for health coverage, a model for other states.

However, Buford said the Senate, which has 24 Republicans and 14 Democrats, in a state that voted against President Obama by a similar margin, will probably allow Beshear to re-issue the excutive order creating the exchange rather than adopting it into law. "That would be impossible to make it through the state Senate in the next two years," he said.

Buford said he favors a federal exchange as "the best bang for your buck on premium costs," but said the state is too far into its own exchange to do that now. However, when the grant funds being used to create it run out, "I don't know what this exchange will be," he said, indicating that the legislature would not authorize the fees on insurance companies that the exchange plans to levy to finance its operations.

Buford made many criticisms of the reform law, but Rep. Susan Westrom, chair of the House Health and Welfare Committee, asked, "If this is such a horrible thing," how would it be passed by Congress and "upheld by the Supreme Court?"

Lame-duck Congress could cut funding for critical access hospitals; more than two dozen in Kentucky

Critical access hospitals, which in most states are rural facilities with fewer than 25 beds, may be under attack in the lame-duck session of Congress, former national rural-health director Wayne Myers writes for the Daily Yonder. President Obama's "budget proposes to revoke CAH status and special payments for any such hospital within 10 miles of another hospital, and to cut the extra 1 percent payment for all of the critical access hospitals," Myers writes. (Census Bureau map of CAH locations)

This would "have enormous consequences," Myers writes. "Of the hospitals that lose CAH designation probably most will close or merge with another hospital. I've seen no estimates of numbers. There are more than a few congressional budget hawks in both parties who would like to eliminate the special payments to Critical Access Hospitals entirely. If these small hospitals dodge the bullet during the lame duck session, they'll continue to be targets in the next Congress. If they are successful in reducing payments to CAHs, the net effect will be to move health care capacity and jobs from smaller to larger towns."

The issue is complex. Rural areas have less political clout than ever, because of declining population, and many rural people use urban hospitals over CAHs, even for ordinary care. "Those who do use CAHs say their experience there is just as good as that in urban hospitals, even if the quality of care isn't as good as in larger facilities," Myers writes. "Elderly patients stay at CAHs because they know the nurses and doctors and their families live close by."

Issues for CAHs arise out of how Medicare payments are made to them, Myers writes. "A long list of arcane, special funding arrangements has accumulated to try to fit small rural hospitals into a Medicare payment system designed for large city hospitals." The largest program is the "Disproportionate Share Program," or DISH, which gives $15 billion a year to states to hand out to CAHs. The program is being phased out between 2014 and 2020, along with several other programs, as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (Read more)

Rural hospital coalition urges Congress to spare Medicare programs that shore up rural health care

A coalition of rural hospitals are lobbying Congress to keep two Medicare programs that the National Rural Health Association says are vital to keep hundreds of smaller hospitals going. The Medicare Dependent Hospital designation and the Low-Volume Hospital Adjuster, which date to the 1980s, help keep low-volume rural hospitals' doors open with the Medicare payment adjustments they provide, according to the NRHA.

Both programs could end Oct. 1 without Congressional action. "Rural facilities do not have the financial background to weather all of these cuts," said Lance Keilers, NRHA president and administrator of Ballinger Memorial Hospital in San Angelo, Tex., told Brendon Nafziger of DOTmed News, an online magazine serving the medical and medical equipment industry.

More than 200 hospitals have the Medicare Dependent designation. To qualify, a hospital must have fewer than 100 beds and Medicare patients must make up 60 percent of its inpatient days or discharges. Low-volume hospitals must be at least 15 miles from another hospital and provide care for fewer than 1,600 Medicare beneficiaries a year. (Read more)

The Good, The Bad And The Blue Dogs

As Andrew Rosenthal writes in the Times:  "Whatever you think about the House Republicans, you have to admit they stay focused. Yesterday, while the rest of the country was distracted by the Supreme Court decision on the most important piece of social legislation in generations, the House Republicans were concentrating on the big picture – the personal and political destruction of President Obama."  (See more here.)  Unfortunately, the response from the Democrats was typically muddled -- some were inspired, others less so, and then there were the 17 craven Blue Dogs who  crossed over to the other side. -- Lovechilde

Jerk Democrats And Face-Palm Democrats Undermine Principled Democrats In Contempt Resolution Vote

By Meteor Blades, cross-posted from Daily Kos

There were three sets of Democrats in Thursday's contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder in the House of Representatives.

First—huzzah!—there were the 100+ inspired by the Congressional Black Caucus to walk out of the chambers rather than give the resolution any respect whatsoever. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Whip Steny Hoyer were among those who left rather than cast their votes. It's a rare, rare day that such a move is justified. But today was one of those. Because, what the Republicans did was unprecedented, unconscionable, unpardonable and unhinged. The Democrats filing out the doors were precisely the rebuke deserved by the representatives who plunked that outrageous resolution into the hopper.

Then there were the 65 Democrats who voted against the resolution. That, of course, under normal circumstances, would have been the appropriate choice. Shoot down the resolution or, at least, stand unified against whatever nonsense or worse that the GOP had cooked up to impose on us.

But it was clear when the Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved the contempt resolution last week which direction the wind would blow. No way would this not pass. And no way would its passage get any traction when sent to the federal prosecutor. Such matters expire with the end of the Congress that okays them and this one is going to be on a slow six-month track to nowhere. Which the Republicans knew full well from the get-go.

In other words, it was all theater. Even more than usual. The walkout, though a principled move, was counter-theater. Treating the vote seriously, respectfully, by participating, even with a "nay," was useless and stupid. Especially given that the House leadership not only gave Democrats the stamp of approval for joining the walkout, they themselves boycotted the vote. Think of the imagery, the headlines, if those Democrats who stayed at their desks to push the "nay" button had added their numbers to the power of solidarity. Since their votes could not change the outcome anyway, what was their rationale for sticking it out? What statement were they making? Was it simple laziness? Did they decide to show solidarity with the two Republicans who broke from the jackal pack to oppose the resolution? Whatever the case, they went astray.

Finally, there were the 17 Democratic "aye" votes. What a fine crew that is. Our plague. Yes, yes, they are mostly in reddish districts and more liberal candidates could never get elected there, so we have to put up with them because better they than a Republican, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Even if one agrees that Blue Dogs and their ilk are the price of a Big Tent party, what good are they when they can't be counted upon to have the backs of fellow Democrats under a rancid assault whose only foundation is raw partisanship?

What good are they if they won't stand up against even the most extreme efforts of the National Rifle Association? That organization's grip on gun policy in Arizona and elsewhere lubricates the trafficking of tens of thousands of firearms into Mexico and makes the job of interdicting this lethal flow next to impossible. An organization whose string-pulling and budget-obstructing has frustrated the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives so much that it led to experiments like "Fast and Furious" in the first place.

These 17 Democrats didn't just suck up to the NRA. They didn't just turn their backs on colleagues. They provided the GOP the okay to say that even-some-Democrats agree Eric Holder is involved in a cover-up of a program that led to the death of a brave U.S. Border Patrol agent. By unspoken implication, of course, Obama is also involved. Providing Republicans with that kind of campaign ammo goes waaaay beyond any apologies that can be made for trying to make oneself a viable incumbent Democrat in a reddish district. Being that kind of turncoat screws other Democrats by helping to mobilize the nut-jobs to turn out in greater numbers at the polls.

Despicable, pathetic, myopic.


Every Democratic Rep. who voted for the contempt resolution should be a target for replacement in the coming years until they've all been retired. If they cannot be counted on to stand with fellow Democrats on a matter of principle so fundamental, how exactly is it that they fit in the Big Tent?
•••
The roster of 17 (asterisk indicates a Blue Dog):
Jason Altmire (PA-04, lost primary in PA-12) *
John Barrow (GA-12) *
Dan Boren (OK-02, retiring) *
Leonard Boswell (IA-03) *
Ben Chandler (KY-06) *
Mark Critz (PA-12)
Joe Donnelly (IN-02, running for IN-Sen) *
Kathy Hochul (NY-26)
Ron Kind (WI-03)
Larry Kissell (NC-08) *
Jim Matheson (UT-02, running in UT-04) *
Mike McIntyre (NC-07) *
Bill Owens (NY-23, running in NY-21)
Collin Peterson (MN-07) *
Nick Rahall (WV-03)
Mike Ross (AR-04, retiring) *
Tim Walz (MN-01)

The Affordable Care Act Survives

DonkeyHotey

Before the Obama Administration embraced individual mandates as a compromise to push through health care reform, it was a Republican idea (endorsed, of course, by then-Governor Romney).  And when Republican state Attorneys General began challenging the constitutionality of the law their actions were viewed with derision by most legal scholars.  And prior to oral argument in the Supreme Court, it was widely assumed that the law would be upheld.  Since then dire predictions about the fate of the law, of health care for Americans, and of President Obama's re-election prospects have dominated the media.

It was perilously close -- another 5-4 decision -- and it took Chief Justice Roberts to side with the majority in upholding the Affordable Care Act because the usual swing vote, Justice Kennedy, dissented.

From Scotusblog:

Salvaging the idea that Congress did have the power to try to expand health care to virtually all Americans, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld the constitutionality of the crucial – and most controversial — feature of the Affordable Care Act.   By a vote of 5-4, however, the Court did not sustain it as a command for Americans to buy insurance, but as a tax if they don’t.  That is the way Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., was willing to vote for it, and his view prevailed.  The other Justices split 4-4, with four wanting to uphold it as a mandate, and four opposed to it in any form.

As Greg Sargent explains:  "The court ruled that the mandate is defensible as a 'tax.' In so doing, it supported the administration’s argument that it’s within the proper scope of federal authority to incentivize the purchase of health insurance, in order to expand coverage to millions of Americans who have been left behind by the private market."

Democrats will breath a sigh of relief while Republicans plot their next move to gut the law.  Which brings up a fascinating point about the entire debate on health care:  how our polarized politics have radically altered what used to be a bi-partisan consensus on at least the ultimate goal --  providing health care to all Americans.

Ezra Klein explains that there was not always such a stark divide between Democrats who are committed to "provide every American with health insurance" and Republicans who are committed to "prevent any American from being forced to have health insurance."

Democrats and Republicans used to argue over how best to achieve universal coverage, but both agreed on the goal. The first president to propose a serious universal health-care plan was Harry Truman, a Democrat. The second was Richard Nixon, a Republican. In the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was arguing for a national health-care system based on an employer mandate, Republicans were arguing for one based on an individual mandate.

In the 2000s, Romney used the individual mandate to make Massachusetts the first state to actually achieve near-universal coverage. On the national level, Republicans as diverse as Newt Gingrich, Lamar Alexander and Lott joined him. Republicans sometimes like to present their support for the individual mandate as a youthful indiscretion, but as late as June 2009, Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, was telling Fox News that “there is a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate.” 

As Klein concludes:  "The battle over the Affordable Care Act has largely distracted voters from this tectonic shift in the Republican Party. Yet unlike in past elections, in which even the most conservative Republicans argued that we should 'ensure that all Americans would have affordable, quality, private health coverage,' voters this year will choose between one party that supports universal health care and one that doesn’t, with health insurance for as many as 50 million voters hanging in the balance."

Darryl Issa's Contemptible Actions

DonkeyHotey

Darryl Issa, a California Congressman, made his fortune manufacturing car alarms and used his wealth to fund the recall of California Governor Gray Davis, who was succeeded by Arnold Schwarzenegger.  (Issa reportedly intended to place himself on the ballot before Schwarzenegger jumped in.)

As chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darryl Issa has called President Obama "one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times."  He declared he would hold "hundreds of hearings" to uncover wrongdoing in the Obama Administration.  But, as Alex Seitz--Wald details, Issa "often ended up shooting blanks."

His investigations into WikiLeaks, Fannie and Freddie, the FDA, and countless others have failed to expose any massive wrongdoing by the administration and after a year and half, he has little to show for them. . . .

Other investigations bordered on fringe absurdism, like when he asked the Department of Justice to investigate ACORN more than a year after it went extinct. There was also the hearing he held probing the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, which famously included a panel featuring zero women.

But yesterday, as Seitz-Wald reports, Issa "finally got his big trophy and moment in the cable news sun today when his committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, following nearly seven hours of testimony on the ATF’s botched “Fast and Furious” gun scandal."

Meteor Blades at Daily Kos has the background:

The issue that spurred the committee's vote is Holder's unwillingness to release documents and internal communications at the Department of Justice regarding the operation known as "Fast and Furious." That operation, run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed guns bought in the United States to cross into Mexico. The idea was to nail straw purchasers of weapons in United States and also high-level members of Mexican drug gangs that obtained the weapons.

According to the 2011 report Fueling Cartel Violence prepared for Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), hundreds of firearms made their way into the arsenals of three of the largest drug cartels: Sinaloa, El Teo and La Familia.

Mexican authorities have claimed that as many as 150 people have been killed by these firearms in an ongoing war that has taken the lives of more than 50,000 people since 2006. Some 2,000-plus firearms are said to have made their way into Mexico as a result of "Fast and Furious." A U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, was also killed with one of the weapons, an AK47-style firearm. Among the weapons allowed to leave the states were .50 caliber sniper rifles that may have made the difference in battles between cartel members and Mexican police.

As Jeremy Leaming at American Constitution Society explains:

U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) told The Times the administration was forced into invoking privilege because of the Issa-led committee’s “unreasonable insistence on pressing forward with contempt despite the attorney general’s good faith offer.”

The Department of Justice has provided Issa’s committee nearly 8,000 documents for the congressional investigation into the tactics used in the federal government’s efforts to stop violence related to drug smuggling along the southern border.

But Issa and other Republican members on the committee have feigned disbelief, arguing that much more is needed to complete their work.

I'm not particularly comfortable defending this -- or any -- Administration's invocation of executive privilege but Issa's relentless pursuit of the president, culminating in this investigation of a trumped-up scandal is nothing more than cynical political theater.

As Kevin Drum notes, this is a "fairly ridiculous invented controversy that Republicans care about only because (a) it involves guns, and (b) it involves the Obama administration."  Indeed, Issa "more or less admitted the fever swamp origins of tea party outrage over Fast & Furious when he told Sean Hannity that Obama was using the program to 'somehow take away or limit people's Second Amendment rights.''  This mad notion was seconded by Newt Gingrich on on CNBC last night.  According to Steve Benen, Gingrich "argued, with a straight face, that the so-called "Fast and Furious" controversy was part of an elaborate ploy to enact gun control."

Crazy, right?  "And yet," as Benen sums it up, "this nuttiness has been fully embraced by many House Republicans, many Senate Republicans, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, the NRA, and some deeply strange folks on far-right blogs and talk radio. To put it mildly, it's disconcerting."

 With the contempt citation going to the full House next week, you can take action by calling (202-224-3121) or emailing your representatives and urging them to oppose this politically motivated witch hunt.

GOP Obstruction's Latest Casualty: Paycheck Fairness For Women

By Radhika Raman, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future


Senate Republicans this afternoon voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 3220), yet another petty political move designed to stick it to the Democrats and eject President Obama from the White House.

Let’s be honest though - it isn’t some Democratic senator on the Hill who is going to feel the effects of this block. Not even Barack Obama himself will directly feel the effects of the Republican Party’s refusal to address important issues such as pay equity. It is ordinary working families who will be hit hardest by this latest example of Republicans turning a blind eye to issues that affect working Americans the most. 

The Paycheck Fairness Act prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who discuss their salaries with their colleagues, closes loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, rewards employers who have fair and equitable pay practices, and helps small businesses adopt equal pay policies.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women who work full time on average still earn only 77 cents to every dollar men earn. The statistics are even worse for women of color. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also pointed out that 77 percent of Republicans support the Paycheck Fairness Act, along with 80 percent of men. He blamed Senate Republicans for being the only ones recalcitrant on the issue. Even Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney didn’t want to talk about equal pay. 

Republicans insist time and time again that their party is not waging a war on women. They insist that the pay gap is a myth. Perhaps they fail to realize that women constitute over half of the country’s working population. Women’s earnings support families, buy groceries, pay for mortgages and college expenses. >

"To those of our colleagues who claim to be so concerned about the economy and the middle class, now is your chance to prove to your constituents that you really mean what you say," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. during debate. 

Perhaps the vote to block the Paycheck Fairness Act was proof of how Senate Republicans truly feel about their women constituents. Last month Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, issued a statement calling the Paycheck Fairness Act “another election year distraction that will harm job creators,” a talking point that was repeated by Republicans on the Senate floor. It is clear that to Republicans on the Hill, women are a political “distraction” and not a living, breathing political constituency that deserves fair treatment in the economy.

The Planet Wreckers

Climate-Change Deniers Are On the Ropes -- But So Is the Planet

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from TomDispatch

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich -- after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards -- but also a little pathetic.  A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them -- and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That -- have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with.  Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp.  That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot.  Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.


He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children -- still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people... may even be more efficient while killing -- and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you -- because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.
Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age -- he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry -- plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance.  Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore.  In it he explained that he agreed with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again.  His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.”  Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in fifty years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican party on the issue.  This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming.  Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.
It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years.  He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stone earlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue.  Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the President clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated.  In fact, a spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years.  The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block -- at least temporarily -- the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast.  In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything -- if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history -- one that will last for geological epochs.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

The Biggest Climate Victory You Never Heard Of

The fight against coal in the U.S. has achieved great success due to activists' passion and commitment. 

By Mark Hertsgaard, originally published at Al Jazeera

Coal is going down in the United States, and that's good news for the Earth's climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012. That amounts to a staggering 20 per cent decline from one year earlier. And the EIA anticipates additional decline by year's end, suggesting a historic setback for coal, which has provided the majority of the US' electricity for many decades.

Even more encouraging, however, is the largely unknown story behind coal's retreat. Mainstream media coverage has credited low prices for natural gas - coal's chief competitor - and the Obama administration's March 27 announcement of stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. And certainly both of those developments played a role.

But a third factor - a persistent grassroots citizens' rebellion that has blocked the construction of 166 (and counting) proposed coal-fired power plants - has been at least as important. At the very time when President Obama's "cap-and-trade" climate legislation was going down in flames in Washington, local activists across the United States were helping to impose "a de facto moratorium on new coal", in the words of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, one of the first analysts to note the trend.

Another surprise: most of these coal plants were defeated in the politically red states of the South and Midwest. Victories were coming "in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you'd expect environmental victories", recalls Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, which provided national coordination for the local efforts. The victories in Oklahoma were particularly sweet, coming in the home state of Capitol Hill's leading climate denier, Senator James Inhofe.

Of course the activists had help: the falling cost of natural gas and a decline in electricity demand following the 2008 financial collapse made coal vulnerable. But it was grassroots activism that turned this vulnerability into outright defeat, argues Thomas Sanzillo, a former deputy comptroller for the New York state government who has collaborated with Beyond Coal. "If the activists hadn't been there talking to government regulators and newspaper editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet," Sanzillo explains, "the plants would have gone forward, because the utility companies would say, ‘We can handle the costs,' and those [government] boards are often good ol' boy boards."

Stopping new coal

In contrast to mainstream environmental groups' lobbying on Capitol Hill for cap-and-trade, the Beyond Coal movement's strength was grounded in the unsung work of retail politics: activists talking with friends and neighbours, pestering local media, packing regulatory hearings, protesting before state legislatures, filing legal challenges and more. Nor was the anti-coal movement comprised solely of the usual suspects. In addition to environmentalists, it included clean energy advocates, public health professionals, community organisers, faith leaders, farmers, attorneys, students and volunteers like Verena Owen, a self-described "permit nerd" from Illinois, who proved herself so capable that she was recruited to serve as Hitt's co-director for the Beyond Coal campaign.

Stopping new coal may be "the most significant achievement of American environmentalists since the passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act" in 1970, says Michael Noble of the Minnesota environmental group Fresh Energy, one of Beyond Coal's key activists.

The health benefits alone are enormous. "Every year, coal-burning power plants... cause more than 200,000 asthma attacks nationwide, many of them affecting children," New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said in July 2011, citing data from the US Environmental Protection Agency. "Coal pollution also kills 13,000 people every year and costs us US $100bn in medical expenses," Bloomberg added.

Which helps explain why the billionaire mayor has pledged $50 million of his own money to support the next phase of Beyond Coal's work: shifting from blocking proposed coal plants to shutting down existing plants and replacing them with clean energy. "Our goal is to shut down one third of America's [roughly 500 existing] coal plants by 2015 and to stop coal worldwide by 2030," says Bruce Nilles, the senior director of the Beyond Coal campaign at the Sierra Club, which houses the campaign.

Meanwhile, the moratorium on new coal amounts to the biggest victory against climate change yet won in the United States. Measured by the volume of greenhouse emissions averted, the moratorium will likely have a greater impact than the cap-and-trade bill congressional Republicans rejected in 2010. Assuming, generously, that the cap-and-trade system would have worked as well as claimed, that bill would have cut US emissions by a scientifically meager 4 per cent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. Scientists have said that reductions of 25 to 40 per cent are required to provide a reasonable chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. By contrast, blocking 166 coal-fired power plants will, without question, keep an estimated 32.25 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere (assuming a typical 50 year lifespan for the blocked plants) - an amount greater than the entire world's emissions in 2010.

Nevertheless, this landmark achievement in the climate fight remains unknown, not only outside of the United States but to most Americans as well. Why? Mainly because the US media and political class view public issues through the lens of official Washington. There, conventional wisdom held that the cap-and-trade bill was the absolute limit that the US political system could tolerate. When even that supposedly realistic option was rejected in 2010, many observers - including some inside-the-Beltway environmentalists - concluded that the US was simply incapable of taking meaningful action against climate change. Corporate polluters were too strong, went this argument, the political system was too dominated by money, the public was too confused and apathetic.

Not so, insist Beyond Coal's activists. The moratorium on new coal shows that Americans don't "have to wait for Washington to get the country on the right climate track," Hitt argues. "This campaign has demonstrated we can do this state by state, plant by plant, town by town. Not just that we can do it, but we are doing it."

The big picture

The genesis of Beyond Coal was a confidential meeting of clean energy activists and philanthropic donors held in Wisconsin in 2003. The advocates confronted a harsh truth, recalls Noble: They had been working the wrong problem, focusing on renewable energy while all but ignoring the climate crisis. "What does it mean that we celebrate the construction of a $100 million wind farm in Minnesota when at same time a 900 megawatt coal plant was being built in [Iowa]?" asks Noble. "That's called losing. If you looked at the problem through the lens of carbon, all the work we had done was undone by a single [coal] plant, a plant that wasn't challenged by a single environmentalist."

The Midwest was the most coal-dependent region in the US; it got 60 to 90 per cent of its electricity from coal. At subsequent strategy sessions, Nobel joined Nilles - at the time, a Sierra Club activist in Wisconsin - in arguing that henceforth every proposed coal plant in the Midwest should be challenged. "We didn't know how we'd oppose [them all], we just knew we had to," says Nilles.

But there was disagreement within the ranks. A program officer at one of the Midwest's largest philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation, disputed Nobel and Nilles' idea of opposing every coal plant. It made more sense, the philanthropist argued, to mount tightly focused, legally based challenges to a few marquee coal plants and then leverage those victories into a broader offensive.

The test of the dueling approaches came in 2005. In opposing a proposed plant in Wisconsin, the Joyce Foundation "put all their chips on a big bucks legal strategy, with no politics, and [they] lost at the state Supreme Court by one vote," recalls Rick Reed, a program officer at the Garfield Foundation who helped launch the anti-coal campaign. "That taught us a lesson: you'll never be able to beat these things without an integrated strategy that includes real people who are affected by these plants, who'll reject the economic argument publicly."  Tom Sanzillo, the former New York state deputy comptroller, saw the value of such an integrated strategy in one of the first fights he handled for Beyond Coal.

Two large coal plants were scheduled to be built in eastern Iowa. Carrie Le Seur, an attorney with the non-profit group Plains Justice, recalls getting phone calls from local people who "didn't like the idea that there would be these big belching coal plants in the midst of prime farmland, and big transmission lines as well." Le Seur began submitting legal challenges to the plants. Meanwhile, Sanzillo appeared before the Iowa Public Services Commission to warn the regulators, "You can't build [these plants] for the costs the companies say... and the costs will keep going up."

Reinforcing that message, activists met with legislators, Governor John Culver and the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, which ended up editorialising in favor of investing in wind power rather than coal. The activist pressure was critical, Sanzillo argues, for it convinced the state regulatory board to limit the total amount of money the proposed coal plant could cost consumers. Forced to risk their own money, rather than ratepayers', the company cancelled the project.

This approach - hard numbers plus grassroots pressure - became the model Beyond Coal followed in state after state: Ohio, Florida, even Kentucky, the heart of coal country. In South Carolina, another Deep South state, says Sanzillo, activists "put me in touch with small business associations and I was able to explain how big industrial interests historically got treated better on these things than small businesses. That was smart, because it got the small businesses fighting with the big industrials, which was just the fight we wanted: a business fight rather than an environmental fight."

A bigger battle

The new phase of the Beyond Coal campaign will be more challenging: There is a big difference between fighting a proposed plant and seeking to close one that is already providing electricity, jobs and tax revenues. But Beyond Coal has already helped broker a deal in Washington state that could become a model for other plant closures.

When environmentalists first targeted the state's only coal plant, they ran into opposition not just from its owner, the Trans-Alta company, but also from the union that represented the plant's workers, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. As a matter of long-term strategy, Beyond Coal was committed to working through any disagreements with labour, so compromises were made. "We wanted a five year timeline for closing [the Trans-Alta plant] and we settled for 10," Nilles recalls. "Not because of the company but because of IBEW."

The agreement was hammered out behind closed doors in a Seattle hotel during negotiations requested by Washington governor Christine Gregoire. Keith Phillips, a senior aide to the governor, spent two days shuttling between rooms containing representatives from the Trans-Alta company and Beyond Coal, but not the IBEW. That left the environmentalists to argue labour's case - which they did. They insisted that the plant's workforce be retained throughout its closure and transition to a greener facility; that workers be trained in the technologies that would replace coal, especially energy efficiency; and that the company, not the taxpayers, subsidise the transition. Trans-Alta agreed, pledging $55 million that will be controlled by the affected communities to fund economic development and clean tech. "A lot of the money will pay for insulating schools and other public buildings," says Bob Guenther of the IBEW, who signed off on the deal in a subsequent meeting.

Fundamental change

Beyond Coal's successes offer "a fundamental message about how to make change in this country," says Mary Anne Hitt. What happens in Washington, DC, is important, Hitt acknowledges, but it is not necessarily the best arena to target. The effort to pass climate legislation focused on Capitol Hill, a battlefield where the power of money rigs the system.

Then, to satisfy inside-the-Beltway definitions of what was politically realistic, mainstream environmental organisations embraced a policy - cap-and-trade - that was incremental in its remedy (a 4 per cent emissions cut by 2020) and incomprehensible in its mechanism. "We can't go out in the streets about that," one grassroots activist complained. "Most people can't even understand it." These strategic choices made it impossible to build the kind of public pressure that could overcome the deep pockets and political muscle of the fossil fuel industry.

The Beyond Coal campaign, by contrast, organised people locally around tangible targets: their air, their water, the climate their children would inherit. It eschewed middle-of-the-road messaging in favour of a simple, clear demand - No New Coal - that ordinary people could rally around. This approach enabled it to appeal to a broad coalition of supporters (public-health advocates, even unions), beyond the usual environmental allies. Finally, Beyond Coal targeted not the federal government but rather local and state governments, where elected officials can be personally lobbied - and more easily voted out of office - by ordinary citizens, thus counteracting the power Big Money enjoys in Washington.

Like the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Beyond Coal campaign has shown that the status quo is not all-powerful. When large numbers of people unite around a compelling critique of the existing order and build political power at the local level, they can change the world. And perhaps even the planet.

Mark Hertsgaard is a Fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and the environment correspondent for The Nation. He is the author of six books that have been translated into sixteen languages, including, most recently, HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

Memorial Day Thoughts On National Defense

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.

But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt Romney’s proposed budget does the same.

Yet even if the scheduled cuts occur, the Pentagon is still projected to spend over $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.

At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation’s security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces.) 

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free. 

Obama administration spent $25 million on health-care law publicity campaign, part of it exaggerating, McConnell complains

The Obama administration spent nearly $20 million on mailings to seniors touting the federal health-care reform law and another $5 million on postcards to small business owners informing them of a tax credit under the law, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a floor speech today. He said the Government Accountability Office found that the mailing to seniors "overstated the law’s benefits."

"These are just a few of the way the administration is quietly promoting its own failed policies; how it's trying to change people's minds about the president's policies with their own money," McConnell said. "The larger point is the fact that we've got a nearly $16 trillion debt, the largest tax hike in history right around the corner, chronic unemployment, and sky-high gas prices, and this President things it's a good idea to spend $20 million to promote Obamacare."

McConnell's remarks can be heard in their entirety by clicking on the video above.

House Passes Weak, Flawed Version Of Violence Against Women Act After Orwellian Debate

The Violence Against Women Act provides critical funding and training to curtail domestic violence, including funding for police training to handle cases involving sexual assault.  The legislation became law in 1994, and was an unmitigated bi-partisan success, with incidents of domestic violence against women having dropped by over 50 percent.

The Senate had already approved by a 68-31 vote an expanded version of the Act that would provide protection to the LGBT community, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans.  House Republicans will have none of it.

As Steve Benen reports, the House gutted the Senate version and replaced it with "burdensome, counter-productive requirements that compromise the ability of service providers to reach victims, fails to adequately protect Tribal victims, lacks important protection and services for LGBT victims, weakens resources for victims living in subsidized housing, and eliminates important improvements to address dating violence and sexual assault on college campuses. Among the most troubling components of this bill are those that jettison and drastically undercut existing and important, long-standing protections that remain vital to the safety and protection of battered immigrant victims."

Laura Clawson described the debate in the House as "Orwellian," with "members from both parties extolling the importance of cracking down on violence against women even as they disagreed bitterly on the bill in question."

The Orwellian flavor stemmed from the fact that the Republican bill excludes or weakens protections for LGBT, immigrant and Native American victims of violence—a Republican manager's amendment purported to address some Democratic concerns, but that did not adequately do so. House Republicans argued that passing this bill is very important and should be done in a bipartisan fashion, even as they refused to consider the Senate's actually bipartisan Violence Against Women Act—coauthored by a Republican and passed with 15 Republican votes.

Republicans repeatedly emphasized the bipartisan support for VAWA without acknowledging that their bill does not enjoy bipartisan support and that they have rejected a truly bipartisan bill. They also repeatedly insisted that their bill protects and supports victims, ignoring the opposition of a wide swath of domestic violence organizations, law enforcement groups and faith-based groups.

Democrats first opposed a rule prohibiting amendments, then offered a motion to recommit in an attempt to keep confidentiality protections from being gutted, with Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin detailing how as the victim of a violent rape in the 1970s, she felt put on trial as a single mother who must have invited her rape. Republicans, while rejecting bipartisanship and claiming that immigrant women use fraudulent allegations of abuse to get citizenship, wailed extensively about Democrats allegedly playing politics.

But, at least the watered-down version won the endorsement of the National Coalition for Men, as Jeremy Leaming notes.  This is a group devoted to raising “awareness about the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys" whose primary concern with the Violence Against Women Act is that too many men are arrested on “false accusations” of domestic violence.

JP Morgan: Bank Or Casino?

Robbie Conal

The New York Times reports that JP Morgan, "which emerged from the financial crisis as the nation’s biggest bank, disclosed on Thursday that it had lost more than $2 billion in trading, a surprising stumble that promises to escalate the debate over whether regulations need to rein in trading by banks."  Its CEO, Jamie Dimon, blamed “errors, sloppiness and bad judgment” for the loss, which stemmed from "a hedging strategy that backfired."

Surprising?  Hardly.  As Travis Waldon writes at ThinkProgress, these are the kind of errors that "could have been prevented were it not for extensive lobbying efforts from banks like JPMorgan, which has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying since the beginning of 2011 (including nearly $2 million already this year)."

Robert Reich reminds us that Dimon has incessantly argued against government regulation of Wall Street:

Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

And since then, Reich continues, "J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule — creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown."

As Waldon writes, "Thursday’s events prove that Wall Street hasn’t learned its lesson from the last crisis, and that America’s 'too big to fail' institutions are too irresponsible to avoid failure. The Volcker Rule, watered down as it may be, is aimed at preventing that. Unfortunately, Dimon and his Wall Street colleagues remain committed to making sure it won’t."

Matt Taibbi explains why we should care "if some idiot trader (who apparently has been making $100 million a year at Chase, a company that has been the recipient of at least $390 billion in emergency Fed loans) loses $2 billion for Jamie Dimon."

Because J.P. Morgan Chase is a federally-insured depository institution that has been and will continue to be the recipient of massive amounts of public assistance. If the bank fails, someone will reach into your pocket to pay for the cleanup. So when they gamble like drunken sailors, it’s everyone’s problem.

Taibbi concludes:

 If J.P. Morgan Chase wants to act like a crazed cowboy hedge fund and make wild exacta bets on the derivatives market, they should be welcome to do so. But they shouldn’t get to do it with cheap cash from the Fed’s discount window, and they shouldn’t get to do it with money from the federally-insured bank accounts of teachers, firemen and other such real people. It’s a simple concept: you either get to be a bank, or you get to be a casino. But you can’t be both. If we don’t have rules to enforce that concept, we ought to get some.

Death's Double Standard

By Tony Platt, cross-posted from his website, GoodToGo

It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the US became a signatory in 2010.

The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases. There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the U.N. Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites – maybe as many as one million – were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce. There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.



During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy. This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and – in the case of California – genocide.

In widely read treatises – such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) – the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions. A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the US exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company – following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 – produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat.  The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

•    The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”

•    In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.

•    An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than thirty years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment. 

•    A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy. Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities. However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.