Censored Whig Letters

703 Concord Avenue
Charlottesville, VA 22903-5208
(434) 984-4655 • (434) 984-2803 fax
http://www.virginia-organizing.org

Dear Friends,

Have you ever had really bad customer service? Then you will love this story…

I asked to speak to a representative of VOP’s health insurance company in person Friday and I got arrested for trespassing!

Last Friday, the last thing I expected was to get arrested. But there I was, a little after noon, getting my mug shot taken and being fingerprinted in the Henrico County Jail.

So what was my crime?

It all started last month when Anthem raised our health insurance premiums 14.1 percent — with no additional risks and no new health care services to justify the increase — and we also discovered that Anthem was spending millions of dollars to lobby Congress against health care reform.

We wanted to find out how much of our premiums were being used for lobbying, and ask for that money back.

So on Friday, I accompanied three VOP State Governing Board members in an attempt to meet with Anthem officials. But as we approached the building a little after 11 a.m., they locked the front door and would not let us in.

VOP Chairperson Jay Johnson called through the locked door, “We want to meet with someone about our rate increase.”

“We are your customers. Can someone meet with us?” I added. “We want to know why our rates were increased 14.1 percent.”

The two men inside told us to call our customer service representative. They were not going to let us in. They gave us the number and I took out my cell phone and called it. I told the woman who answered that we were an Anthem customer and we wanted to know why they increased our premiums 14.1 percent last month. She asked me to hold on, she needed to check. After about four or five minutes on hold, she came back and said she wanted to connect me to a Scott Holden, who we later found out is their public relations representative.

“OK, thank you,” I said.

Before we knew it, at least six police officers arrived. One of them got off his motorcycle and the two Anthem employees let him in the front door. Then they locked the door again.

Soon, the police officer came out and said we had to leave.

“But they told us to call the customer service representative and I am on hold,” I said.

“You have to leave or you will be arrested,” said another police officer.

Within minutes, my hands were handcuffed behind my back, and I was sitting in the front seat of a police cruiser, with the doors locked and the windows closed. Two police officers took a statement from an Anthem official as I waited. Boy, was it hot!

After my mug shot and fingerprinting, a magistrate eventually let me go, as long as I promised to show up on Monday morning for my arraignment.

On Monday, the judge set my trial date for September 22 at 11 a.m. I am charged with trespassing, which is considered a Class 1 misdemeanor and carries a possible jail sentence of 12 months and a fine of up to $2,500.

“As we reach out in support of health care reform, our own insurance company uses their increased premiums to lobby against it,” Jay Johnson said. “We pay over $25,000 in premiums every month to Anthem. We expect that our money will go to pay for health care and not for corporate lobbying.”

Not only is Anthem spending our premiums to directly lobby Congress, but they are trying to get their customers to do so as well. VOP recently received an e-mail asking us, as customers, to call our members of Congress to oppose a public health insurance option.

Getting locked out of the Anthem headquarters is an excellent example of the relationship the health insurance industry has with its customers. They don’t feel that they have to explain or account for anything. Anthem has little competition and they know their customers have few choices. Anthem and other health insurance corporations are spending $1.4 million per day lobbying Congress to make sure that Americans don’t have any other choice.

That is why we need a public health insurance option that forces the private health insurance industry to compete. The private health insurance industry has given us a greedy health insurance system where customers have to deal with skyrocketing premiums, denied claims, and even trespassing charges for asking to speak to a representative in person. We all deserve better than this.

The Virginia Organizing Project has been working hard to push for a public option. We have canvassed more than 140,000 doors all across the state, and four of five people tell us they agree that there is a real need for health care reform. We have held more than two dozen community meetings asking people to share their experiences with the current broken health care system. The horror stories keep coming.

So what can we do about it? There are two things you can do to help:

First, please call Senator Mark Warner and your member of Congress with this toll-free number:

1-888-436-8427

Ask them to support a public health insurance option that will provide quality, affordable health care for everyone.

Second, please donate to the Virginia Organizing Project so that we can expand our field staff and get more people active in the fight for health care reform. You can donate by going to:

http://www.virginia-organizing.org/donation.php#1

or by sending your donation to:

Virginia Organizing Project
703 Concord Avenue
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903-5208

Thanks for all your help.

Take care,

Joe Szakos

Executive Director

Virginia Organizing Project

434.984.4655 x222

szakos@virginia-organizing.org

P.S. You can see some videos of the events last Friday at Anthem headquarters by going to: http://www.virginia-organizing.org/.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________________________

July 24, 2009

CEA Releases Report on the Economic Effects of Health Care Reform on Small Businesses and Their Employees

WASHINGTON, DC – The Council of Economic Advisers released a report today that examines the challenges currently faced by smaller firms in the health insurance market and the likely impacts of health care reform on small businesses and the workers they employ.

During the weekly address, the President will ask for feedback from the small business community both through WhiteHouse.gov and, in an innovative outreach effort, through LinkedIn, a social networking community for professionals that counts twelve million small business owners and employees as members.

CEA Chair Christina Romer will answer some of those questions during a live online video chat on Wednesday.

The report is live at http://www.whitehouse.gov .

Key findings of the report include the following:

Small businesses are crucial to the economy

Small businesses are an important source of job growth in the United States. Firms with fewer than 20 employees accounted for approximately 18 percent of private sector jobs in 2006, but nearly 25 percent of net employment growth from 1992 to 2005.

Small businesses account for a large majority of jobs in start-ups, a key source of innovation and economic growth.

The current health care system is not working well for small businesses and their workers

The U.S. health care system imposes a heavy “tax” on small businesses and their employees. Due to high broker fees, fixed administrative costs, and adverse selection, small businesses pay up to 18 percent more per worker than large firms for the same health insurance policy. Some of these higher costs are passed on to small firm employees in the form of lower wages, and some eat into the profits of small businesses that could otherwise be used for research and development and for much-needed investments. This implicit tax disadvantages small firms in both the market for the best workers and the market for their products.

Because of their higher health care costs, small businesses are far less likely to provide health insurance for their workers than larger businesses. Only 49 percent of firms with 3 to 9 workers and 78 percent of firms with 10 to 24 workers offered any type of health insurance to their employees in 2008. In contrast, 99 percent of firms with more than 200 workers offered health insurance. Workers in small firms that do offer health insurance also tend to have less generous plans than their counterparts at large firms.

The fraction of small firms offering health insurance has been declining in recent years. From 2002 to 2008, the fraction of firms with 3 to 9 employees offering health insurance to their workers declined from 58 to 49 percent.
Health care reform as envisioned in the current draft legislation would reduce the current burdens on small firms and their workers

Small businesses that meet certain criteria would be able to purchase health insurance through an “insurance exchange” – allowing them to choose among a multitude of plans that would provide better coverage at lower costs than they could find in the current small group market.

Many small businesses that provide health insurance for their employees would receive a small business tax credit to alleviate their disproportionately higher costs and encourage coverage. The tax credit would be targeted to those firms with employees whose average wages fall below a certain threshold.

The current reform options provide financial incentives for medium- and large-sized firms to provide health insurance coverage through so-called “pay-or-play” provisions. Firms with payrolls or employment levels below a certain threshold, which would include the vast majority of small businesses, would be exempt from the pay-or-play provisions.

The creation of an insurance exchange would also provide better and lower-cost options for workers in small businesses that do not offer health insurance. Low-income individuals and families would receive sliding scale subsidies to help them purchase insurance. Additionally, health insurers would not be allowed to screen potential enrollees for pre-existing conditions.

The proposed reforms could help spur entrepreneurial activity by increasing the incentives for talented Americans to launch their own companies, and could increase the pool of workers willing to work for small firms.

Further, successful reform would reduce the phenomenon of “job lock,” in which workers are reluctant to leave a job with employer-sponsored health insurance out of fear that they will not be able to find affordable coverage. Small firms that are unable to provide health insurance for their employees bear the greatest cost of this phenomenon

Reductions in absenteeism and improvements in worker productivity resulting from better health outcomes because of expanded coverage would particularly benefit small businesses.

1 percenters enjoy unprecedented protection
by David Sirota • July 24, 2009

http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20090724/COLUMNISTS91/907240312

Here’s a truism: The wealthiest 1 percent have never had it so good.

According to government figures, 1 percenters’ share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1 percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms. And most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.

But what really makes the ultra-wealthy so fortunate, what truly separates this moment from a run-of-the-mill Gilded Age, is the unprecedented protection the 1 percenters have bought for themselves on the most pressing issues.

To review: With 22,000 Americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, Congress is considering universal health-care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 - that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1 percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1 percenters received from the Bush tax cuts. In fact, it is so miniscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year - or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul.

Nonetheless, the 1 percenters have deployed an army to destroy the initiative.

The foot soldiers are the Land Rover Liberals. These Democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink-ribbon lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion rights. However, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic interests. Hence, this week’s letter from Boulder’s dot-com tycoon Rep. Jared Polis, D, and other Land Rover Liberals calling for the surtax’s death.

Echoing that demand are the Corrupt Cowboys - those like Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who come from the heartland’s culturally conservative and economically impoverished locales. These cavalrymen in both parties quietly build insurmountable campaign war chests as the biggest corporate fundraisers in Congress. At the same time, they publicly preen as jes’ folks, make twangy references to “voters back home” and now promise to kill the health-care surtax because they say that’s what their communities want.

That fantastical fairly tale, of course, couldn’t exist without the Millionaire Media - the elite journalists and opinionmongers who represent corporate media conglomerates and/or are themselves extremely wealthy. Ignoring all the data about inequality, they legitimize the assertions of the 1 percenters’ first two battalions, while actually claiming America’s fat cats are unfairly persecuted.

Most brazenly, NBC’s Meredith Vieira asks President Barack Obama why the surtax is intent on “punishing the rich”?

For his part, Obama has responded with characteristic coolness - and a powerful counter-strike. “No, it’s not punishing the rich,” he said. “If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that’s part of being a community.”

If any volley can thwart this latest attack of the 1 percenters, it is that simple idea.

David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at http://www.OpenLeft. com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

Official Statement of Rep. Kratovil Regarding President Obama’s Healthcare Press Conference

Kratovil: “Getting this right is more important than getting this done by an artificial deadline.”

Date: 7-23-09 – For Immediate Release

Contact: Kevin Lawlor, 202 225 5311

Washington, DC – Rep. Frank Kratovil released the following statement in regard to President Obama’s press conference held last night on pending healthcare legislation.

“The President opened his press conference by stating, ‘If we do not control these costs, we will not be able to control our deficit.’ I could not agree with him more. I share the President’s views that for the sake of our nation’s fiscal future, we urgently need to pass comprehensive health care reform that expands coverage and brings costs under control.

“That’s why I was deeply concerned to hear the director of the Director of the Congressional Budget Office testify last week that the legislation now pending before the House would not adequately address the cost crisis, and would actually worsen our long-term fiscal outlook. While I agree with President Obama that skyrocketing costs and a lack of coverage signal a need to reform the health care system in our country, the CBO’s findings cast legitimate doubts as to whether the legislation currently before the House will accomplish these shared goals.

“At the very least, these legitimate questions about this bill’s long-term fiscal implications should highlight the need to be deliberative and thorough in reviewing this health care reform legislation. We should not rush any plan through Congress that has not been properly vetted. Getting this right is more important than getting this done by an artificial deadline.

“I realize that there are some in Congress who will oppose any type of reform, not based on merit but for purely political reasons. But for those of us who reject this obstructionism and are firmly committed to reforming our system the right way, it is imperative we spend the time to get this right. I have urged both the White House and leaders in Congress to make sure we have enough time to thoroughly review any proposal before a vote. I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing right, and I will not support any proposal until its impacts on costs, coverage, and rural access have been thoroughly examined.”

Rep. Frank Kratovil

###

Kevin W. Lawlor

Communications Director

The Office of Congressman Frank Kratovil

Maryland’s First Congressional District

(202) 225 5311

The Great Tax Con Job

by Thom Hartmann Page 1 of 3

http://www.opednews.com

Republicans are using the T-word - taxes - to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.

A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions - and will continue to be.

As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos blog recently [1], billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato?

The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there. Even though William Kristol’s publication is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers!), his association with the Standard was enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants, and a column with The New York Times. The Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to stardom.

“Fellowships” and other forms of indirect sponsorship of right-wing talk show hosts have made otherwise-marginal shows and their hosts ubiquitous, and such sponsorships of groups like Norquist’s anti-tax “Americans for Tax Reform” regularly get people like him front-and-center in any debate on taxation in the United States.

All so they could run a tax con on the American people, thus keeping Moon and Murdoch and Scaife and Anschutz (and others) richer than you or I could ever even imagine.

All of this money was spent - invested, really, since it’s been more than saved back in low income tax rates on millionaires and billionaires - to convince Americans that up is down and black is white when it comes to income taxes. Here’s how it works:

Rich Person’s Tax Effect

If a person earns so much money that he doesn’t or can’t spend it all each year, then when his taxes go down your income after taxes goes up. This is largely because there’s little to no relationship between what he “needs to live on” and what he’s “earning.”

Somebody living on a million dollars a year but earning five million after taxes, can sock away four million in a Swiss bank. If his taxes go up enough to drop his after-tax income to only three million a year, he’s still living on a million a year, and only socks away two million in the Swiss bank. His “disposable” income goes down when his taxes go up, and vice-versa. (Technically, the word is “discretionary” income for after-tax, after-living-expenses income, but “disposable” income has become so widely used as a phrase to describe discretionary income I’ll use it here.)

The Rich Person’s Tax Effect is the one that virtually all Americans understand - and, oddly, most working class people think applies to them, too (this is the truly amazing part of the con job referred to earlier).

But it doesn’t.

Working Person’s Tax Effect - version one

Most working people spend pretty much all of what they earn - their “disposable/discretionary” income is close to zero. Savings rates in the US among working people typically are small - one to five percent - and during the last few years of the W. Bush administration actually went negative. So the take-home pay that people have after taxes - regardless of what the taxes may be - is pretty much what they live on….

(Click on link below to read the rest of this column)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Great-Tax-Con-Job-by-Thom-Hartmann-090721-79.html

Don Monkerud: U.S. income inequality continues to grow
by Don Monkerud

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/458595

In June 2009, the U.S. economy saw its second steepest decline in 27 years. New jobless claims increased, business inventories fell and exports plunged as bad economic news persisted.

Will the once high-flying American wealth machine continue to produce the vast inequalities of the past?

Only two years ago, Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes magazine, declared 2007 “the richest year ever in human history.” During eight years of the Bush administration, the 400 richest Americans, who now own more than the bottom 150 million Americans, increased their net worth by $700 billion. In 2005, the top 1 percent claimed 22 percent of the national income, while the top 10 percent took half of the total income, the largest share since 1928.

In June 2009, the Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Report estimated the number of the world’s wealthiest people declined by 15 percent, the steepest decline in the report’s 13-year history. The number of millionaires in the U.S. fell by 19 percent to 2.5 million people.

Analysts tell us the economy is being restructured, but how will the disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor play out?

“The source of wealth has changed over the past 30 years; corporations have become the engine of inequality in the U.S.,” says Sam Pizzigati, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. “In the past, wealth came from ownership: Today it comes increasingly from income.”

The highest incomes come from executive pay at top corporations. In 2007, the ratio of CEO pay to the average paycheck was 344 to 1, lower than the record 525 to 1 ratio set in 2001, but substantial.

This year’s ratio is estimated to decrease to 317 to 1. In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, the average ratio fluctuated between 30 and 40 to 1.

Over 40 percent of GNP comes from Fortune 500 companies. According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, the 500 largest conglomerates in the U.S. “control over two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the industrial workers, account for 60 percent of the sales, and collect over 70 percent of the profits.”

Corporations systematically created a wealth gap over the last 30 years. In 1955, IRS records indicated the 400 richest people in the country were worth an average $12.6 million, adjusted for inflation.

In 2006, the 400 richest increased their average to $263 million, representing an epochal shift of wealth upward in the U.S.
In 1955, the richest tier paid an average 51.2 percent of their income in taxes under a progressive federal income tax that included loopholes. By 2006, the richest paid only 17.2 percent of their income in taxes. In 1955, the proportion of federal income from corporate taxes was 33 percent; by 2003, it decreased to 7.4 percent. Today, the top taxpayers pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as those making $50,000 to $75,000, although they doubled their share of total U.S. income.

“Over the past 30 years, the income of the top 1 percent, adjusted for inflation, doubled: the top one-tenth of 1 percent tripled, and the top one-one-hundredth quadrupled,” says Pizzigati. “Meanwhile, the average income of the bottom 90 percent has gone down slightly. This is a stunning transformation.”

Meanwhile, wages for most Americans didn’t improve from 1979 to 1998, and the median male wage in 2000 was below the 1979 level, despite productivity increases of 44.5 percent. Between 2002 and 2004, inflation-adjusted median household income declined $1,669 a year. To make up for lost income, credit card debt soared 315 percent between 1989 and 2006, representing 138 percent of disposable income in 2007.

According to Pizzigati, the wealth disparity is the result of corporations squeezing more profits from workers.
“In the past corporations laid off workers because business was bad,” Pizzigati says. “But over the past few decades, downsizing has been a corporate wealth generating strategy. Today, CEOs don’t spend their time trying to make better products: they maneuver to take over other companies, steal their customers and fire their workers.”

Progressive taxation used to prevent the rich from capturing a disproportionate share of national compensation, and the labor movement, which represented 35 percent of private sector employees and today represents 8 percent, once served as a political force to limit excessive executive pay. The Reagan backlash cut the top income tax rates, and saw the creation of right-wing think tanks that spent $30 billion over the past 30 years propagandizing for deregulation, privatization and wealth worship.

Bubble economies over the past 30 years helped CEOs pump up their income, and efforts to corral their pay are weak and ineffective. CEO pay may fall during these economic hard times, but disparity isn’t going away. Without a strong movement for change, the wealth gap will only increase in this downturn.

“There won’t be a restructuring of the economy unless we take on executive compensation,” concludes Pizzigati. “Outrageously large rewards give executives an incentive to behave outrageously. If we allow these incentives to continue, we will just see more of the reckless behavior that has driven the global economy into the ditch.”

Don Monkerud is a California-based writer who follows cultural, social and political issues. This column was provided by PeaceVoice.

Democrats Drop Key Part of Bill to Assist Unions

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: July 16, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/17union.html?_r=2&th&emc=th

A half-dozen senators friendly to labor have decided to drop a central provision of a bill that would have made it easier to organize workers.

The so-called card-check provision — which senators decided to scrap to help secure a filibuster-proof 60 votes — would have required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed cards saying they wanted a union. Currently, employers can insist on a secret-ballot election, a higher hurdle for unions.

The abandonment of card check was another example of the power of moderate Democrats to constrain their party’s more liberal legislative efforts. Though the Democrats have a 60-40 vote advantage in the Senate, and President Obama supports the measure, several moderate Democrats opposed the card-check provision as undemocratic.

In its place, several Senate and labor officials said, the revised bill would require shorter unionization campaigns and faster elections.

While disappointed with the failure of card check, union leaders argued this would still be an important victory because it would give companies less time to press workers to vote against unionizing.

Some business leaders hailed the dropping of card check, while others called the move a partial triumph because the bill still contained provisions they oppose.

The card-check provision was so central to the legislation that it was known as “the card-check bill.” Labor had called the bill its No. 1 objective, and both labor and business deployed their largest, most expensive lobbying campaigns ever in the battle over it.

“This is a very emotional issue,” said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican turned Democrat who had been lobbied heavily by both sides. “I cannot remember an issue this emotional in all my years in the Senate.”

Several moderate Democrats, including Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, have voiced opposition to card check, convinced that elections were a fairer way for workers to unionize. They were swayed partly by business’s vigorous campaign, arguing that card check would remove confidentiality from unionization drives and enable union organizers to bully workers into signing union cards.

Though some details remain to be worked out, under the expected revisions, union elections would have to be held within five or 10 days after 30 percent of workers signed cards favoring having a union. Currently, the campaigns often run two months.

To further address labor’s concerns that the election process is tilted in favor of employers, key senators are considering several measures. One would require employers to give union organizers access to company property. Another would bar employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union sessions that labor supporters deride as “captive audience meetings.”

Labor unions have pushed aggressively to enact the bill — formally, the Employee Free Choice Act. They view it as essential to reverse labor’s long decline. Just 7.6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, one-fifth the rate of a half-century ago.

Several union leaders interviewed took the senators’ move in stride. One top union official, who insisted on anonymity because lawmakers and labor leaders have agreed not to discuss the status of the bill, said, “Even if card check is jettisoned to political realities, I don’t think people should be despondent over that because labor law reform can take different shapes.”

While voicing confidence they have the 60 votes to pass the revised bill, labor leaders acknowledged an additional hurdle: two powerful Democrats, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, are seriously ill.

“This bill will bring about dramatic changes, even if card check has fallen away,” said an A.F.L.-C.I.O. official who insisted on anonymity.

The official said the revised bill achieves the three things organized labor has been seeking.

“Our goals,” the official said, “have always been letting employees have a real choice, having real penalties against employers who break the law in fighting unions, and having some form of binding arbitration to prevent employers from dragging their feet forever to prevent reaching a contract.”

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, a senior member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has led a group of six Democrats who have worked closely with labor to revamp the bill. The other senators are Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Charles E. Schumer of New York, and Mr. Specter.

Labor leaders voiced confidence that if Mr. Pryor backed the compromise, Ms. Lincoln and other moderates would do likewise.

Union leaders argue that under current law, unionization elections are often unfair because, they say, employers have a huge opportunity to intimidate and pressure workers during the lengthy campaigns that precede the unionization vote.

Business leaders say the current system is fair, asserting that unions lose so many elections because workers oppose paying union dues and do not feel they need unions to represent them.

Corporate lobbyists have indicated they would oppose fast elections, arguing that such a provision would deny employers ample opportunity to educate employees about the downside of unionizing, such as strikes and union dues.

Labor leaders counter that employers will have plenty of opportunity to fight unionization, noting that many companies begin plying employees with anti-union information the day they are hired.

Business also opposes the bill’s provisions to have binding arbitration if an employer fails to reach a contract with a new union. Companies argue it would be wrong for government-designated arbitrators to dictate what a company’s wages and benefits should be.

“Binding arbitration is an absolute nonstarter for us,” said Mark McKinnon, a spokesman for the Workforce Fairness Institute, a business group opposing the bill. “We see it as a hostile act to have arbitrators telling businesses what they have to do.”

Several union officials said that once the senators’ revisions became public, some union presidents who are card-check enthusiasts might attack the changes, call for scrapping the revisions and demand an up-or-down Senate vote on a bill with card check.

Kate Cyrul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Harkin, declined to discuss details of the bill. “Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to,” she said.

Union officials have urged the White House and Senate leaders to schedule a vote this month. But Senate leaders have told labor that the Senate is so preoccupied with health care legislation that September would be the earliest time to take up the pro-union legislation.
—————————————————————–

EDITOR’S NOTE: Any Senate Democrat who forced this dramatic weakening of the Employee Free Choice Act should not receive a dime of campaign money from any union member, union organization or any Democratic officeholder or potential candidate who ever hopes to receive labor support. This should apply to general elections and primaries. No exceptions.

Union activists should encorage primary opponents to these Senate Democratic incumbents. It is time to make the SOB’s pay for their betrayal of working Americans!

The GOP’s Young Hatemonger
by John Avlon

Audra Shay, accused of endorsing racism on Facebook, became head of the Young Republicans on Saturday. John Avlon uncovers new details about her disturbing online comments.

Thirty-eight-year-old Audra Shay’s campaign to become the next chairman of the Young Republicans went from obscure to infamous over the past week, after The Daily Beast revealed details of posts of her Facebook account. Specifically, a thread where one of her friends posts that “Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals,” and Shay responds eight minutes later with: “You tell em Eric! lol.”

“This is an outrage and I CAN NOT believe this nation has him as our leader! It makes me sick!” She posted a few minutes later: “My disdain for Obama is directly proportionate for his disdain of this country.”

Following those revelations, several Young Republican colleagues urged Shay to remove herself from tomorrow’s election at the group’s convention in Indianapolis—a request Shay, the favorite going in to the vote, has pointedly refused. Instead, she said that she was responding to an earlier post from her friend, and labeled criticism against her “political attacks” which “proves that my opponents will stoop to the lowest levels to steal this election from the jaws of victory.”

Now, The Daily Beast has obtained more troubling details about her online musings—despite clear attempts by Shay to scrub her social-networking pages clean. Specifically:

* In October 2008, in the wake of news that an effigy of Sarah Palin was being hung outside an affluent Hollywood home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shay replied, returning to the “LOL” style that she employed after the “coons” comment: “What no ‘Obama in a noose? Come on now, its just freedome [sic] of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol.”

She picked up the thread again the next morning with a clarification and a new insight. “Apparently I could not spell last night. I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.”

* Posting and endorsing a conspiracy-theory video that attempts to prove that Obama believes he can only “ensure his own salvation” and “fate” if he helps African Americans above whites, complete with Barnum-esque captions (“LISTEN AS HE ATTACKS WHITE PEOPLE”).

* Numerous posts in which Shay says that President Obama is “anti-American” and has “disdain of this country.”

Collectively her comments are products of an increasingly common GOP mind-set I call Obama Derangement Syndrome, the right-wingers’ version of a virulent strain of obsessive presidential hatred that many liberals exhibited during the Bush years. Symptoms include comparing the president to Hitler and ascribing to him every evil and unconstitutional intention imaginable. It is accompanied by the belief that such a partisan fever is patriotic…….

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-10/the-gops-young-hatemonger/

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HELP Is on the Way

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/opinion/06krugman.html?_r=1&hpw

The Congressional Budget Office has looked at the future of American health insurance, and it works.

A few weeks ago there was a furor when the budget office “scored” two incomplete Senate health reform proposals — that is, estimated their costs and likely impacts over the next 10 years. One proposal came in more expensive than expected; the other didn’t cover enough people. Health reform, it seemed, was in trouble.

But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.

And even if we didn’t have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured are disproportionately young adults, whose medical costs tend to be relatively low. The big spending is mainly on the elderly, who are already covered by Medicare.

Second, even now the uninsured receive a considerable (though inadequate) amount of “uncompensated” care, whose costs are passed on to the rest of the population. So the net cost of giving the uninsured explicit coverage is substantially less than it might seem.

Putting these observations together, what sounds at first like a daunting prospect — extending coverage to most or all of the 45 million people in America without health insurance — should, in the end, add only a few percent to our overall national health bill. And that’s exactly what the budget office found when scoring the HELP proposal.

Now, about those specifics: The HELP plan achieves near-universal coverage through a combination of regulation and subsidies. Insurance companies would be required to offer the same coverage to everyone, regardless of medical history; on the other side, everyone except the poor and near-poor would be obliged to buy insurance, with the aid of subsidies that would limit premiums as a share of income.

Employers would also have to chip in, with all firms employing more than 25 people required to offer their workers insurance or pay a penalty. By the way, the absence of such an “employer mandate” was the big problem with the earlier, incomplete version of the plan.

And those who prefer not to buy insurance from the private sector would be able to choose a public plan instead. This would, among other things, bring some real competition to the health insurance market, which is currently a collection of local monopolies and cartels.

The budget office says that all this would cost $597 billion over the next decade. But that doesn’t include the cost of insuring the poor and near-poor, whom HELP suggests covering via an expansion of Medicaid (which is outside the committee’s jurisdiction). Add in the cost of this expansion, and we’re probably looking at between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion.

There are a number of ways to look at this number, but maybe the best is to point out that it’s less than 4 percent of the $33 trillion the U.S. government predicts we’ll spend on health care over the next decade. And that in turn means that much of the expense can be offset with straightforward cost-saving measures, like ending Medicare overpayments to private health insurers and reining in spending on medical procedures with no demonstrated health benefits.

So fundamental health reform — reform that would eliminate the insecurity about health coverage that looms so large for many Americans — is now within reach. The “centrist” senators, most of them Democrats, who have been holding up reform can no longer claim either that universal coverage is unaffordable or that it won’t work.

The only question now is whether a combination of persuasion from President Obama, pressure from health reform activists and, one hopes, senators’ own consciences will get the centrists on board — or at least get them to vote for cloture, so that diehard opponents of reform can’t block it with a filibuster.

This is a historic opportunity — arguably the best opportunity since 1947, when the A.M.A. killed Harry Truman’s health-care dreams. We’re right on the cusp. All it takes is a few more senators, and HELP will be on the way.