Censored Whig Letters

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/opinion/29herbert.html?_r=2

The New York Times

December 29, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist

A Less Than Honest Policy
By BOB HERBERT

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care.

The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.

Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do.

The tax would kick in on plans exceeding $23,000 annually for family coverage and $8,500 for individuals, starting in 2013. In the first year it would affect relatively few people in the middle class. But because of the steadily rising costs of health care in the U.S., more and more plans would reach the taxation threshold each year.

Within three years of its implementation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax would apply to nearly 20 percent of all workers with employer-provided health coverage in the country, affecting some 31 million people. Within six years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would reach a fifth of all households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. Those families can hardly be considered very wealthy.

Proponents say the tax will raise nearly $150 billion over 10 years, but there’s a catch. It’s not expected to raise this money directly. The dirty little secret behind this onerous tax is that no one expects very many people to pay it. The idea is that rather than fork over 40 percent in taxes on the amount by which policies exceed the threshold, employers (and individuals who purchase health insurance on their own) will have little choice but to ratchet down the quality of their health plans.

These lower-value plans would have higher out-of-pocket costs, thus increasing the very things that are so maddening to so many policyholders right now: higher and higher co-payments, soaring deductibles and so forth. Some of the benefits of higher-end policies can be expected in many cases to go by the boards: dental and vision care, for example, and expensive mental health coverage.

Proponents say this is a terrific way to hold down health care costs. If policyholders have to pay more out of their own pockets, they will be more careful — that is to say, more reluctant — to access health services. On the other hand, people with very serious illnesses will be saddled with much higher out-of-pocket costs. And a reluctance to seek treatment for something that might seem relatively minor at first could well have terrible (and terribly expensive) consequences in the long run.

If even the plan’s proponents do not expect policyholders to pay the tax, how will it raise $150 billion in a decade? Great question.

We all remember learning in school about the suspension of disbelief. This part of the Senate’s health benefits taxation scheme requires a monumental suspension of disbelief. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, less than 18 percent of the revenue will come from the tax itself. The rest of the $150 billion, more than 82 percent of it, will come from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans.

Can you believe it?

I asked Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., about this. (Labor unions are outraged at the very thought of a health benefits tax.) I had to wait for him to stop laughing to get his answer. “If you believe that,” he said, “I have some oceanfront property in southwestern Pennsylvania that I will sell you at a great price.”

A survey of business executives by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, found that only 16 percent of respondents said they would convert the savings from a reduction in health benefits into higher wages for employees. Yet proponents of the tax are holding steadfast to the belief that nearly all would do so.

“In the real world, companies cut costs and they pocket the money,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America and a leader of the opposition to the tax. “Executives tell the shareholders: ‘Hey, higher profits without any revenue growth. Great!’ ”

The tax on health benefits is being sold to the public dishonestly as something that will affect only the rich, and it makes a mockery of President Obama’s repeated pledge that if you like the health coverage you have now, you can keep it.

Those who believe this is a good idea should at least have the courage to be straight about it with the American people.

Polls Suggest Republicans May Not Gain as Much as They Think

by: RDemocrat

Hillbilly Report.org article link

With the state of the economy and the healthcare fight, Republicans all over the airwaves see themselves as poised to make huge gains in the House and Senate late next year in the mid-term elections. However, here in the real world, a place that seemingly does not exist in the Republican mindset the numbers may tell a different story. While President Obama and the Congress have lost some of their shine and popularity, it appears as if the American people simply despise the Republican Party, their leaders and tactics.

Over at Kos they have partnered with Reasearch 2000 to keep a running poll of the approval ratings of the President, Congress and both parties and the numbers are quite telling this time around.

President Obama still remains mostly popular as his Approval rating is at 54% with disapproval at 41. I think had he fought for his Progressive base and not lost many of them those numbers would be higher.

http://www.dailykos.com/weeklytrends

In the Congress, Democrats are not faring quite as well. Nancy Pelosi comes in with a 42% approval and 50% disapproval. Again, I think this can be linked to Progressives showing disappointment in their leadership and abandoning ship somewhat.

More proof of that comes with Harry Reid’s numbers. It is almost a concensus among Progressives that Reid and the body he leads in the Senate quite simply sold us down the river. His numbers, more than Pelosi’s reflect that. He chimes in at 31% approval while a whopping 59% disapprove. Again, the abandonment of our base has cost him dearly.

Overall Congressional Dems have 39% approval and 55% disapproval and the Democratic Party as a whole has 41% approval and 54% disapproval.

Now, all these numbers do suggest an opening besides Obama’s but when you look closer maybe not so much. You see, the GOP’s standing among Americans is worse than terrible.

Looking at their Congressional leadership both Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are at a whopping 17%. 65% disappove of McConnell while 63% disapprove of Boehner.

In the Congress, the GOP fares even worse with only 15% of Americans approving of their tactics. At 69% disapproval almost seven in ten Americans cannot stand them. The Republican Party as a whole barely have one in four Americans in their corner at 28%. 62% of Americans oppose them.

So while Democrats have been taking a hit, the Republicans are less popular than ever. Their policies have been proven failures and the American people have not yet forgotten how bad the messed the country up when they controlled government. It seems to be a concensus in America that Republicans simply cannot be trusted to govern. Let us hope they keep doing exactly what they are doing.

As for the Democrats I have a bit of advice for the coming year. Stop abandoning your base and fight for us if you want your numbers to improve. Quit fighting for Corporate America and “reaching out” to Republicans and Democrats that should be and give us a real choice. Fight for the average, working American like the Democratic Party has long been depended on to do.

If Democrats do this I actually predict they will lose very few if any seats and may actually gain a few in 2010. It is really up to the President and our leadership at this point whether they will stay in a huge majority or not.

The Need to Help Labor Radio Survive

In these terrible economic times, it is hard to keep the bills paid for most working families. We all are struggling to stay in our homes, keep our old cars on the road and food on the table. Americans are certainly worried with good reason about keeping their jobs and affording healthcare. All of these problems can be traced more or less directly to excessive corporate power in America both economically and politically.

The current healthcare insurance reform debate has highlighted for everyone how much the balance of power has shifted in terms of public debate against the interests of American workers and towards the interests of giant corporations. Corporate media has not given a real voice to labor leaders who represent the millions of American workers most heavily impacted by this issue. Right Wing talk radio has distorted elements of the issue, the process and relevant facts beyond all recognition. Most of the opposition to real change from the American public comes from not hearing the truth. Lack of balance in this debate reveals the one-sided nature of corporate media.

Why was single-payer, universal healthcare deemed “off the table” when it is the norm in nearly every other industrialized nation in the world? It was corporate power! The corporate media deemed it “radical” and working Americans had no effective voice in framing the debate. We will all suffer as a result.

Corporate power killed the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting. This means that the public airwaves are solely being used even in political terms for private profit. Since corporations have huge spending advantages over their workers’ organizations (labor unions), workers have been effectively shut out of the public debate. It has impacted politics, government policy and American working family living standards for decades.

The relative lack of effective working families-oriented media has resulted in awful government policies that have ruined American manufacturing, killed Americans in unjustified wars and by denying healthcare, gutted pensions, legalized predatory lending, polluted our environment, weakened civil liberties, curtailed voting rights and given the wealthiest of the wealthy near veto rights over government policy. Instead of government acting as a check and balance to international corporations it far too often has become a tool of them. The ruination of the American economy has assisted the excessive concentration of wealth in our nation and weakened American democracy.

We cannot reverse this anti-working family, anti-American democracy course without getting our message to the American people. We must create a media network to help offset one-sided corporate media. Labor radio certainly will play a key role if it survives!
Progressive organizations and individuals inside and outside organized labor must find a way to help struggling labor radio programs survive the current economic crisis. Will they? I do not know the answer.

Labor radio heroes, like Rick Smith of the Rick Smith Show and Charles Showalter of The Union Edge, already have given the cause thousands of hours and thousands of dollars personally trying to fill the void. This writer has done the same for 9 years with my own Democratic Talk Radio program (although I would never call myself a hero) by donating tens of thousands of hours and spending around $40,000 personally.

Currently, the Union Edge is taking a short break from the airwaves do to the lack of financial support. Democratic Talk Radio may have to do the same. It is time for those able to assist to step up.

Progressive groups should shift part of their advertising to progressive media outlets instead of channeling nearly all of it into corporate media outlets. Advertising and/or underwriting the right kind of media will multiply many times over the impact of each dollar invested. As a movement and as individuals, we must get smarter in how we use our very limited resources.

Support should go to progressive magazines like the Progressive, the Progressive Populist, the Nation and similar publications. Vitally important blogs and Internet sites like Buzzflash.com, Truthout.org and OpEd News.com will play key roles in creating an alternative non-corporate media.

Labor radio and progressive radio are only going to survive if labor unions, union activists and progressives fund the shows. Some of the best labor radio shows are:

Workers Independent News (Live)
Building Bridges
The Rick Smith Show
America’s Workforce
The Union Edge
Democratic Talk Radio
AFGE “Inside Government”
Heartland Labor Forum

Anything that you can do to support and build these radio shows, Internet sites and publications will help balance excessive corporate power. Like building the labor movement by joining a union, each individual action is small but working together will help everyone. The game is rigged against us as working people but doing nothing means remaining forever the victims of excessive corporate power.

Each little individual action is a small victory for economic and political justice that makes it easier to win the next one.

Written by Stephen Crockett (host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.mid-atlanticlabor.com ). Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: demlabor@aol.com .

Feel free to publish or re-print without prior approval.

Howard Dean: ‘Kill the Senate Healthcare Bill’

http://trueslant.com/erikkain/2009/12/15/howard-dean-kill-the-senate-healthcare-bill/

Personally, I am in complete agreement only adding that we need to defeat in Democratic primaries all the elected Democrats who have made themselves obstacles to real healthcare reform (including a robust public option) and all Republicans opponents in general elections!

Small Business Owners and Their Employees Stand To Gain Under Senate Health Bill

The steady erosion of the share of working people whose employers provide health insurance coveragehas been most acute among the half of adult workers employed by businesses with 50 or fewer employees.

The chief reason for this disparity is that small businesses are charged much higher premiums than large ones are for each covered employee – nearly one-fifth more for the same coverage. The predictable result is that just over one in three workers at firms with fewer than ten employees now has employer-provided coverage, while almost all workers at firms of 200 or more employees are covered.

The reform package proposed by the Senate on November 18 would go a long way toward rectifying this inequity. A new issue brief titled “Senate Health Bill Scores Big for Small Business,” published today by the Economic Policy Institute, explains how. Elise Gould, EPI’s director of health policy research, and researcher Alexander Hertel-Fernandez point out the roadblocks that are putting health care coverage further out of reach for small businesses and explain how the Senate’s approach would help overcome those obstacles.

The higher costs to small businesses are a byproduct of the way that insurance rates are calculated and the fact that small businesses, by definition, do not have a large enough pool of employees to spread out the costs and enable them to qualify for more advantageous rates. What’s more, the report shows, small businesses also have a much smaller number of insurers to choose among, and they pay much higher administrative costs – from 20 to 25 percent of premium costs, as opposed to 10% paid by larger firms. The smaller pool of employees also means that if one or more suffer serious illnesses, premiums can rise substantially, making it difficult if not impossible for employers to anticipate what their costs will be from one year to the next.

“The current health care insurance system creates a sizeable penalty for small businesses that want to offer coverage to their employees,” said Gould.

Gould and Hertel-Fernandez find that the vast majority of small businesses stand to gain from the legislation currently being considered by the Senate and that small businesses as a group are some of the largest winners from health reform.

“The Senate’s proposal would provide small businesses with the opportunity to purchase quality coverage at stable, affordable rates,” said Hertel-Fernandez.

Major improvements cited by the authors would include:

Insurance coverage will become much easier to purchase for small firms with the creation of new regulated insurance markets.

Insurance costs will become much more stable and predictable for small firms, even if one or more of their workers requires medical care or their workforce number or composition changes from year to year.

Very small, low-wage firms would see considerable reductions in their premiums due to new tax credits, with savings averaging 8-10% of total premium costs according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Firms with fifty or fewer workers are not subject to any penalties if they choose not to provide health insurance to their workers.

About EPI

Hyperlinks
If the hyperlinks (above) don’t work, copy and paste these addresses into your browser:
Issue Brief: http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib268/
Elise Gould: http://www.epi.org/pages/economist/#gould
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez: http://www.epi.org/pages/economist/#hertel
EPI Newsroom: http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/newsroom_index
Describing EPI: http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/newsroom_describing_epi

America Needs a Jobs Bill, and the Federal Deficit Shouldn’t Stand in the Way

by Robert Creamer

Last month’s drop in the unemployment rate and continued reduction of job losses is certainly good news. It indicates that the U.S. economy may have finally stopped shedding jobs. But without additional government action there is little likelihood that the economy will return to anything resembling full employment in the near future.

There are two reasons why it is critical that Congress pass a major new jobs initiative – one economic, and one political.

Job Creation and Deficits

The recent CBO report concluded that 600,000 to 1.6 million jobs have been created or saved to date by the effects of the first Obama stimulus package – and that’s before a large percentage of total stimulus spending has even taken place.

That means that when the report was released, up to 1.6 million people would have been unemployed had Congress failed to pass the stimulus bill.

It is quite clear, as economist Paul Krugman wrote, that the stimulus bill was too little of a good thing.

In fact, at times of economic downturn, no entity other than the government can lead a recovery. And in the case of a recession as deep as the one President Obama inherited from George Bush, that is particularly true of job creation.

So if the first stimulus bill worked to create or save jobs, why not do it again? What stands in the way is the perception on Capitol Hill that the deficit is out of control.

Of course we’ve seen this movie before. During the Great Depression, the efforts of the Roosevelt Administration to use government fiscal stimulus – and direct Federal Jobs programs like the WPA – were interrupted by a similar concern for “controlling the deficit.” Even before they were interrupted, these efforts were relatively modest, given the size of the economic problem. But when Roosevelt’s stimulus programs were cut back out of fear of the growing federal deficit, the country saw a new increase in joblessness.

Recessions – or in the worst case, depressions – represent an imbalance in the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services on the one hand, and the demand for those goods and services on the other. There is too much supply and too little demand. There is a demand deficit. This deficit is ever so much more important than the federal budget deficit, because it means that we have more ability to produce wealth –the goods and services made by the economy – than consumers have the ability to buy. Since farms and companies can’t sell as much product as they can produce, they cut back that production and lay off many of people who are employed to produce it.

When workers and plants lie idle, they represent wealth – and well-being – that is simply never created – that we lose forever. That means that we have to get by with less food, less clothing, less entertainment, less education – less of everything that determines the well-being of our society – and each and every individual within it.

The worst disaster for our economy is the waste of idle plants and idle workers, because for every day a worker is idle, we all lose wealth – and standard of living — that we will never recoup.

This deficit between what we have the ability to produce on the one hand, and economic demand on the other, is the deficit we should really worry about.

During the 1930’s Roosevelt was never able to convince Congress to pass a stimulus program large enough to enable America to recover fully from the depression and achieve full employment. It took Japanese Emperor Hirohito to do that. The attack on Pearl Harbor created a national emergency that justified deficits unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Those deficits financed a full employment economy and a massive explosion of the American Military that together finally ended the Great Depression once and for all. That economic mobilization provided the economic foundation for the longest period of widespread economic growth in our history – which, with a few minor interruptions – continued until the early 1970’s.

Economically, this full employment mobilization did not require a war. World War II simply generated the will to make it politically possible.

Luckily, President Obama’s first stimulus, and his actions that prevented a complete meltdown of the financial system, avoided another Depression. But three lessons stand out from the Depression experience:

1). If we want long-term growth, the most important element is the full utilization of our work force.

2). A relatively large deficit created in pursuit of full employment does not endanger long-term economic growth.

3).Allowing concern for the deficit to constrain our pursuit of full employment can endanger economic recovery.

From an economic point of view, Congress needs to pass a large scale jobs program that focuses on spending, that directly puts people to work. Given the massive neglect of the public infrastructure over the last eight years, there is an enormous amount of productive work to be done – either by directly paying contractors or by funding a federal public works program like the WPA.

In addition, the Federal Government should use its ability to “deficit spend” to fill in the massive holes in state and local budgets. One recent study showed that if it does not, up to 900,000 additional jobs may be lost – both from the direct unemployment within state and local governments, and the loss of jobs among government contractors.

To be effective, such a program should not mainly focus on incentives for job creation. Tax incentives and other inducements to create jobs simply are not as effective on a dollar-for-dollar basis and their impact is much more difficult to track. It should focus on programs that directly create jobs.

Congress must act as soon as possible, to build on the momentum of the first stimulus, and avoid a “double dip” recession. It must also take action soon, for important political reasons.

The Politics of Jobs

If the job picture has not begun to significantly improve by next November’s elections, voters will be in a “throw the bums out” sort of mood. This will be especially true if Congress fails to pass portions of the Obama program – health care reform, financial reform, clean energy legislation and immigration reform. But even if we have passed the key elements of this critical domestic agenda, if we have not made progress creating jobs, we are likely to see many more Republicans in Congress starting in 2011.

That result would not only represent a setback for the overall Progressive agenda – it would also make it even less likely that we can get the votes to pass the measures we will need to sustain long-term economic growth. It will increase the ranks of the Party of “No” and the Party that has now raised fear of federal deficits to an article of religious faith.

Let us remember that the Republicans never hesitated to create deficits when they were in charge. They generated deficits to finance their wars and their tax breaks for the rich without blinking an eye. Unfortunately, they created deficits at exactly the time in the economic cycle when you should be building up surpluses and paying down debt.

Deficits are certainly not always a good thing. They are a good thing when you need to stimulate the economy, not when the economy is growing briskly.

Nor are federal deficits inevitable. Remember that President Clinton handed Bush and the Republicans a growing Federal surplus. With their wars and tax breaks for the rich, Bush turned those surpluses into long term structural deficits. And that’s not all.

The Republicans inherited an economic expansion and turned it into the current economic disaster by siphoning all of the fruits of growth to the top 2% of the population. The effect was a stagnant and declining standard of living for ordinary people even as the economy expanded. In the absence of growing disposable consumer income – a massive explosion of consumer debt developed and kept the economic engine going until the house of cards came tumbling down when the huge speculative bubble at the very top of the economy finally burst.

One year into the Obama Administration, we are still living with the recession caused by Wall Street’s reckless risk-taking. We are also living with deficits that were created by the Right — quite intentionally — to constrain the growth of the public sector. The Republicans created a “Catch 22” that both caused the recession and then limited our ability to end it. We can’t allow ourselves to be caught in this Republican trap.

The polling – and actual voter behavior – makes it clear that voters don’t vote against incumbent Members of Congress because of “deficits.” Deficits have far too diffuse an effect on individual voters to have any real impact on voter decisions. To the extent “out of control deficits” becomes a real issue in a campaign, it is a proxy for a more general level of discontent about the economy – a sense that the economy itself – and the voter’s individual economic circumstances – are out of control.

What drives voters are their perceptions about their own individual economic prospects and those of their children. The prices of health insurance premiums, wages, housing prices, mortgage rates, personal income growth – and the ability to get a job – drive these perceptions, not concern about “deficits.”

The bottom line is this: the top priority for Democrats who want to make sure that our candidates do well in 2010 is to do everything we can to create jobs. The Federal deficit should not be allowed to stand in the way.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” available on www.amazon.com.

ACORN Scores A Victory

http://www.delawareliberal.net/2009/12/11/acorn-scores-a-victory/#comments

By Unstable Isotope
ACORN has scored a court victory, successfully arguing that Congress’s defunding bill was a bill of attainder:

A judge has put an injunction on Congress’s ban on ACORN funding.

U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon today ruled to put a preliminary injunction on the Congressional resolution that barred ACORN or its affiliates from receiving federal funds, according to a press release from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who blasted the move.
Congress had acted in the wake of the scandal in which ACORN employees were caught on camera giving advice on how to break the law to two people posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

ACORN has sought to overturn the ban, arguing that it’s a Bill of Attainder — a bill designed to penalize a specific person or entity — and therefore unconstitutional.

ACORN has had a pretty good week this week. First there were the revelations from the independent review that the infamous pimp-prostitute video had been heavily edited and now a court victory. Of course, our media is completely ignoring the story. I guess it’s just not as interesting as having young Republicans dressed in costume.

Immediate Release: December 7, 2009
Contact: Kevin Whelan, (612)-388-8026 / kwhelan@acorn.org

Harshbarger report on ACORN videos: No illegal conduct
ACORN leaders embrace recommendations of “roadmap for reform and renewal”

An independent report examining the undercover videos filmed in offices of the national anti-poverty group ACORN states the employees portrayed in the videos did not engage in any illegal activity.

The report by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger calls for the organization to take nine steps to strengthen its management and oversight structures as part of a “roadmap for reform and renewal” in order to regain public trust shaken by the video controversy.

“The report is part vindication, part constructive criticism and 100% roadmap to the future,” ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis said. “ACORN’s leadership is pleased that this evaluation shows even the low-level employees portrayed in the videos did not engage in any illegal activity or seek to encourage it,” Mr. Harshbarger was tough but fair in examining where ACORN has been and what we still need to accomplish in having the most effective possible organization to fight for the interests of the communities we represent–low and moderate income, African American and Latino families across America.”

Harshbarger’s report states: “While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers (pg 2 -3).”

The report contains nine recommendations (page 3) for improving ACORN’s management and six comments on the videos (page 12). The report notes on page 11 that “The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.”

The recommendations include a simplified organizational structure, a return of focus to its “core competency – community organizing and citizen engagement empowerment, with related services” and recruitment of additional management and legal staff.

“The following nine (9) recommendations…are neither an epitaph nor an absolution for ACORN, but are a roadmap to reform and renewal, if implemented in their entirety in concert with other measures to regain the public’s trust,” Hashbarger’s report states (on page 3).

The report notes that since June 2008, ACORN has pursued a significant effort to evaluate and reform its financial and governance structures. “It has implemented, or is implementing, the recommendations made by these consultants,” the report states (on page 6).

“The ACORN Board, management and Advisory Board will be reviewing each of the nine recommendations in detail. We are committed to achieving the goals they set out as rapidly as possible,” Lewis said in a statement.

The full report can be downloaded here:
http://www.proskauer.com/files/uploads/report2.pdf

For more information, including Lewis’ full statement visit:
www.acorn.org

###

About ACORN: ACORN, the nation’s largest grassroots organization of low- and moderate-income families has organized chapters in dozens of cities nationwide working on neighborhood improvement campaigns. ACORN’s 500,000 member families are vocal advocates for health care reform and have worked for decades to promote homeownership for working families. The organization raised early alarms about predatory lending practices by financial institutions and has helped thousands of families avoid foreclosure across the country. ACORN successfully sued FEMA to extend housing benefits for hurricane Katrina survivors and recruited volunteers to clean out and preserve thousands of homes in New Orleans.

ACORN’s large-scale voter registration drives in African-American and Latino communities drew the attention of Karl Rove, who dismissed at least one U.S. Attorney for failing to prosecute the group, and rhetorical attack from Sen. McCain and Governor Palin in 2008. ACORN has helped families prepare 150,000 free tax returns and obtain $190 million in tax refunds in the last five years.

Roosevelt Understood the Power of a Public Option

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opinion/01Tue4.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

By ADAM COHEN
Published: November 30, 2009

As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt crusaded for “public power,” government-owned electric plants. He was outraged by the high prices that monopolistic utility companies were charging and by their refusal to bring electricity to rural parts of the state, which, they said, could not be done economically. Public plants, Roosevelt said, could bring power to those who needed it and serve as a yardstick for measuring and keeping in check the prices charged by private power companies.

Many decades later, a major point of contention in the debate over health insurance reform is the so-called public option, a government-run program that would compete with private insurers. Critics have tried to paint it as a wild-eyed experiment, but it echoes F.D.R.’s battles for public power — in fact, the entire New Deal he later created. The argument Roosevelt made — that a government program could fix the flaws in a poorly functioning private market — applies with even more force in health care.

In the early 20th century, electricity was a hot political issue. It was expensive and did not reach many parts of the country. To Roosevelt, it was an important social justice issue. “When he talked about the benefits of cheap electricity he did not think in terms of kilowatts,” a top adviser said. “He thought in terms of the hired hand milking by electricity, the farm wife’s pump, stove, lights and sewing machine.”

When he ran for president in 1932, Roosevelt made public power a cornerstone of his campaign. In a speech in Portland, Ore., he explained that it could be a “birch rod in the cupboard,” which the citizenry could use to punish private power companies that were gouging the public or not providing good service. Critics accused Roosevelt of Bolshevism, but he was not deterred. Public power was no more radical, he said, than the public mail.

F.D.R. championed public power as president. During his first 100 days in office, he backed a bill to create the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal authority that brought affordable electricity to an impoverished 40,000-square-mile stretch of the rural South.

Roosevelt had hoped to create other projects like the T.V.A., to establish yardstick pricing power on a national scale, but it proved to be a heavier logistical and political lift than he expected. In 1935, he brought government into the electricity business in another way. By executive order, he created the Rural Electrification Administration, which used federal money and local farm co-ops to lay electric lines in parts of the country that private companies had no interest in serving. The R.E.A. drove down electricity prices and helped bring lighting, sewing machines and radios to the 90 percent of rural Americans who were without them.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market. The Farm Credit Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Act used government funds to save farms and homes of Americans who would have been foreclosed on by private lenders. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation saved the private banking system by insuring savings accounts, which made the public willing to put money back in private banks. Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.

A public option for health care could work much like the yardstick Roosevelt envisioned public power becoming. A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.

Private health insurers and their allies in Congress argue that government is too inept to run a health insurance program and that it will be too costly. Actually, government already does that — for the military and in Medicare and Medicaid. As for cost, opponents of the public option may fear it would work too well — that to compete, private insurers would have to keep their prices down and the quality of their services up.

The private insurers and lawmakers who oppose the public option also claim it would be a radical break from how things have been done in this country. In reality, it follows directly from the New Deal tradition that created many of the mainstays of American society.