The Health Care Games

Like the Hunger Games, in which leaders of the 1% connive to rig a contest so that a charismatic representative of the 99% is defeated, there’s lots of intrigue behind the US Supreme Court hearings on the federal health care law that begin today.

The ostensible issue before the high court is whether the universal health care system established by Congress in 2010 is constitutional. Like the systems in most other developed nations, that law requires all Americans to be covered – whether through their employer or by purchasing it directly. Now this is just plain arithmetic: you can’t have a solvent universal care program if participation is voluntary, because the young and healthy won’t bother to pitch in until they get sick, leaving the older and less healthy to cover most of the cost. Universal means everyone has to be part of it – both getting the medical benefits and paying for its cost.  Today, taxpayers end up bailing out people who don’t buy insurance and then get sick or in an accident.

But the corporate funded US Chamber of Commerce and other right wing entities, plus anti-government foes (including most of the Republicans candidates who want to run the government), argue it was unconstitutional for Congress to order everyone to pay for health insurance. My problem with that part of the law – known as the "individual mandate" – is that you have to buy the insurance from private insurance companies, and there is no limit on what they can charge you. That’s gotta be fixed, and a campaign is underway to do that in California. As everyone knows, however, Obama lifted his health care proposal from the law that Mitt Romney, then Governor of Massachusetts, enacted there in 2006. So its obvious that a big part of why the corporate Republican establishment opposes the law is that it was backed by a Democrat – Obama – and they don’t want him or any other elected Democrat to be able to claim any political victories.

There’s much more to the Supreme Court case than crass party politics, in any case. Many on the corporate right are hoping the US Supreme Court will issue a sweeping decision like they did in Citizens United, this time ratcheting back Congress’s regulatory authority across the board and therefore bolstering the power of big corporations – just as Citizens United did, in the guise of granting corporations a new right to corrupt elections under the First Amendment.

A decision limiting Congress’s power to regulate pollution would be a huge win for chemical manufacturers; drug and tobacco companies want to escape the Food and Drug Administration’s safety requirements; Wall Street wants taxpayer bailouts with no strings attached.  As I wrote a few weeks ago, the powerful elites in this nation think that the health care case is the Supreme Court’s best opportunity in decades to roll back constitutional rights to the deregulated era of excess that led to the First Great Depression eighty years ago. This will be done in the name of protecting Americans against the intrusion of government in their lives.

In the Hunger Games, the hundred thousand wealthiest people in “Panem” gather in their Capitol to watch as twenty-four randomly selected citizens fight each other to death. This is a yearly penance, we are told, imposed by the wealthy in response to an earlier, unsuccessful revolt by the 99%. The Games provide an excuse for a non-stop party for the powerful – like Mardi Gras only with unimaginable excess.  The citizens – known as “Tributes” – come two each from all twelve “Districts” in the country. Those Districts looked a lot like many parts of the United States. People trudge to poor-paying jobs and live in flimsy structures one step up from homelessness. They shop at flea markets where barter is common. They catch their own food. They help each other out because the Capitol has long since abandoned them.

There are other eerie similarities and ironies. In the Hunger Games, the entire game area is wired with cameras and the contest is continuously broadcast to the nation on enormous screens. This quickly turns to the disadvantage of the 1% in the Capitol, because the 99% become inspired by watching the heroine’s courage and humanity and start to rebel anew.  This is a lesson our Supreme Court has already learned: you can forget about seeing any of its hearings on the health care law on a screen of any size. Watching the Justices and corporate lawyers rework the Constitution into a weapon of the mighty might anger some Americans. So the Supreme Court has banned any video… but says it will release audio at the end of each day’s hearing.

It’s clear from the movie that the elites have powerful medicines that can instantly eliminate infections and heal wounds, but residents of the Districts have never seen that kind of health care. I guess the Panem Chamber of Commerce would argue that these citizens are fortunate to be “free from government interference in their lives.”

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 03/25/2012

Bipartisanship for dummies

Ever notice how all the dysfunctional wrangling in D.C. stops the minute our politicians need to do the 1 percent’s bidding?

When it comes to taking away your rights as an investor, consumer or citizen, politicians who can’t seem to agree on anything else seem to work together fine.

The latest proof that “bipartisanship” is a cynical gimmick is the so-called JOBS act, passed by the House with bipartisan support and now under consideration by the Senate, with the blessing of President Obama.

In this case, the bill’s original Republican sponsors came up with the idea of packaging a collection of measures that would weaken investor and consumer protections by the acronym JOBS, which stands for Jumpstart Our Business Startups.

After all, who could be against JOBS? Most Democrats in the House were happy to sign on – only 23 voted against it. Even Democratic representatives Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters voted for it.

Maybe these politicians thought the JOBS branding and the bipartisan marketing would conceal what the bill really was – the latest of several disastrous bills dismantling sensible financial regulation.

The JOBS act is the ugly stepchild of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Billey Act repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which kept banks from mingling federally-guaranteed banking activities from riskier activities, and the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act, a Frankenstein bill that kept credit default swaps deregulated and led to the Enron scandal in 2001.

Both pieces of legislation contributed directly to the 2008 financial collapse.

In the case of the JOBS act, it would gut many of the accounting reforms contained in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in the wake of the Enron debacle. The JOBS act would exempt emerging companies worth up to $1 billion from disclosure, reporting and governance rules. It would allow such companies to operate for 5 years without regulatory oversight.

John Coffee, securities law professor at Columbia University Law School, says it could be more accurately described as the “boiler room legalization act” because it would allow companies to raise money from small investors on the Internet, without any regulatory supervision, evoking the small operations that sold dubious investments over the phone using high-pressure tactics.

Arthur Levitt, former head of the SEC, told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Kathleen Pender the bill was “a disgrace.”

In a scathingly sarcastic column in the New York Times, Pro Publica’s Jessie Eisenger wrote: “Nigeria shouldn’t be the only country to benefit from the Web. Right here in America, the elderly are increasingly attractive to a variety of entrepreneurial spirits. If JOBS becomes the law, such innovators could flourish.”

Barbara Roper, the Consumer Federation of America’s director of investment protection suggested that “Republicans cannot believe they have suckered the Democrats into taking up their idea that deregulation is the way to promote job growth.”

I don’t think the Democrats got suckered. I think they know exactly what they’re doing. President Obama has been struggling in his fundraising because Wall Street and the big-money donors have lost their enthusiasm for him this electoral cycle.

But he’s showing signs of bouncing back, after his campaign manager, Jim Messina, issued a pledge that the president would stop demonizing Wall Street. In February, the president went on a fundraising blitz, raising $45 million, up from $29 million the previous month.

But it’s still far less than the $56 million he raised during the same month in 2008, when he was fighting Hilary Clinton in a bruising primary campaign. The president and his party have to deliver for their funders, and the JOBS act is a perfect gift to show the big donors what they can expect for their generosity.

But they all must take us for a bunch of clods if they think we can’t tell the difference between a nasty attack on our rights and real jobs promotion.

Call your senator today and remind them you can’t be fooled by an acronym.  Suggest you know how to spell jobs, and this awful piece of legislation doesn’t.

 

Congress / Derivatives / Jobs crisis / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 03/20/2012

“There Oughta Be A Law” – Want to Play?

I wrote last week that until we change the Constitution to permanently kick corporate money out of politics, we can forget about Congress protecting us from cell phone company contracts that strip consumers of their right to go to court.

I got a lot of interesting email on that post, because most people who read “Where’s Our Money” and other blogs think there “oughta be a law” of some kind. But no matter what you believe in or where you stand on the ideological spectrum, anybody who is trying to make America a better place for human beings is going to have a hard time overcoming the corrupting effect of corporate money on public officials and the democratic process.

Think I’m wrong? Here’s my challenge:

Name a policy issue that involves our power as voters, consumers, workers, taxpayers or even shareholders and I will show you how corporate money has derailed any serious progress on the matter.

If you don’t want to post it publicly, just ask that your comment remain private, or send me an email.

The same day I mused on our new status as second-class citizens courtesy of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, President Obama’s re-election campaign endorsed a constitutional amendment to reverse that ruling. "The President favors action—by constitutional amendment, if necessary—to place reasonable limits on all such spending," the Obama campaign said. This came in the context of a another controversial move: the President had decided to encourage supporters to donate to one of the Super PACs supporting him. “Super PACs” are the shadowy groups that the Supreme Court freed of restraints on political spending in Citizens United. Tens of millions of dollars, most of it from unidentified corporations and wealthy donors, have poured into the Republican primaries. But that’s just a fraction of what Super PACs are expected to spend to unelect Barack Obama in November.

In a stark example of biting the hand that has fed it, Wall Street has made it clear that it is offended even by the timid financial reforms mustered by the Obama Administration over the last few years. Now that the taxpayers have resuscitated the Money Industry, it wants to go all the way back to the insane deregulatory policies that pushed the nation into a depression in 2008.

There was a lot of critical commentary about the announcement, not just by hypocrite Republicans like John Beohner, but also by commentators on the left who feel Obama betrayed his commitment to campaign finance reform.

I for one can’t see how any candidate from either party can afford not to play by the deregulated rules of legalized bribery blessed by the Supreme Court. Like Obama’s campaign manager said, “unilateral disarmament” in the face of a massive attack of big money makes no sense. Our electoral system now assures the survival only of the financially fattest.

But will Obama really fight for the 28th Amendment? It’s one thing to endorse the concept and quite another to press for a change in the Constitution that would strip the corporate establishment of its power to elect candidates and dictate laws. The President has the bully pulpit and phenomenal power, but like the rest of us, he can't hope to pass any laws if corporations maintain a hammerlock over the legislative branch. No one knows better than he how the powerful insurance lobby turned health care reform into a corporate boondoggle. If President Obama thinks there oughta be a law, any meaningful law, in his second term, he's going to have confront Citizens United.

 

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court / Uncategorized - 02/13/2012

In new Hollywood role, former senator plays the heavy

Thanks to Hollywood lobbyist and former Senate banking chair Chris Dodd for telling it like it is.

Dodd warned that Hollywood’s big-money contributors, who have been very, very good to President Obama and his fellow Democrats, might withhold their cash after the president expressed reservations over a controversial Internet anti-piracy bill.

Who ever would have guessed it would be Dodd, who during his 21-year-long career in Washington collected more than $48 million in campaign contributions, much of it from the financial industry he was supposed to be overseeing, who would cut through all the lies and palaver to deliver the knockout punch to our Citizens United-poisoned political system?

“Candidly, those who count on quote  `Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd told Fox News. “Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

But who better than Dodd to make clear what contributors expect for their cash.  He knows exactly how the system works, from both sides of the revolving door.

It was Dodd, after all, who made sure that AIG executives got their bonuses in 2009 while taxpayers were bailing out the firm at the heart of the subprime meltdown. It was no coincidence that AIG executives had showered Dodd with  $56,000 in contributions.

Nobody knows this terrain as well as Dodd.

He was a “friend of Angelo,” one of those elected officials who personally got sweet mortgage deals – at below market rates– from Angelo Mozilo, the head of the Countrywide, the mortgage company that nearly sank under the weight of its subprime trash loans until Bank of America rescued it. (His colleagues on the Senate Ethics Committee dismissed a complaint against him.)

While he and his colleague, Rep. Barney Frank (House Financial Services Committee?), oversaw the watering down of financial reform legislation in the wake of the financial crisis, Dodd played the role of beleaguered public servant, wringing his hands in frustration over the army of lobbyists against whom he was claimed he powerless.

But now that’s he moved from Washington to Hollywood, he’s got a new script that calls for tough, public, bare-knuckled threats to the president of the United States.

And whatever he owes the American public for his perfidy as an elected official, we owe him a debt of gratitude for it. Because he has exposed the political system and the money that dominates it for what it is.

As Dodd has illustrated so eloquently, the Supreme Court got it wrong in their infamous Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to dump unlimited, unreported cash into our political system.

Money is not free speech. I don’t know whether Bob Dylan had Congress in mind when he sang nearly 30 years ago, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears,” but he was prophetic.

The impact of money in politics has put a curse on our democracy, and it won’t be lifted until we throw the corporations and the billionaires’ money out.

As Dodd’s remarks demonstrate, big money campaign contributions are a blunt force instrument, which corporate interests and the wealthy can use to control the politicians who depend on them for their livelihoods, as Dodd did when he was playing the part of the distinguished U.S. senator.

Rest assured, the people who gave him $48 million knew his real role was so serve them, whatever lines he was required to utter for the scene he was playing at the time.

 

 

AIG / Citizens United / Congress / Executive Pay / Financial Crisis / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column - 02/01/2012

Slamming the Door on Democracy

Revolving door just no longer cuts it to describe how large corporate interests have swallowed up the government officials that are supposed to be working in our interest.

First Street, a D.C. insiders’ guide to people, policy and influence peddling, recently published a guide to lobbyists. The highest paid lobbyists were former elected officials, with an average take of $178,000 a year, the next highest paid group was former staffers, with an average take of more than $144,000 a year. Both left the professional lobbyists far behind in their value to their clients.

In public, our corporate leaders use polite language describing themselves in glowing terms like “job creators.”  Republicans wring their hands over regulations; Democrats weep crocodile tears over the plight of the middle class. Meanwhile the politicians feast at the public trough and prepare for lucrative payoffs, I mean careers, in the private sector.

Revolving door implies that these officials are somehow going back and forth between serving the public interest and the corporate interests that lobby them, pay for their campaigns if they’re elected, and then hire them when they’re ready to cash out.

But that’s not what’s happening.

The door doesn’t revolve, it only swings one way. And what’s happening to our government deserves much stronger language than the description of a door.

We have to face up to the fact that under our present system, election to public office, or appointment to key regulatory posts, is for the vast majority is the entryway into a world of legalized prostitution, where major corporations wield nearly absolute power over our government.

At WheresOurMoney.org we’ve proposed a constitutional amendment, 28A, to undo Citizens United, the awful U.S. Supreme Court ruling that unleashes even more unrestricted and unreported corporate money into our political system. That won’t curb lobbying. But rallying around the reversal of Citizens United will focus attention on the culture of legalized corruption that has overtaken our government.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citizens United / Congress / Martin Column - 12/20/2011

9 For the 99 – Restoring the Real Economy

Remember how aggressively our leaders have talked about tackling unemployment and the housing crisis?

Remember all the strong action to make good on their promises?

Me neither.

Remember how all our leaders criticized each other for taking money from Wall Street and other powerful corporate interests?

Remember all the potent steps they took to rid our democracy of corporate money?

Me neither.

You’ve probably heard of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9-tax plan, the scheme he says will get the economy going. Do you think it will work?

Here’s our proposal to restore the real economy. Unlike the solutions proposed by our leaders, these proposals focus on the problems faced every day by most people, not bankers.

We’ll be offering it at OccupyLA in the next couple of days to complement their work.

  1. Support 28A, constitutional amendment overturning U.S. Supreme Court “Citizens United” ruling to stop the flood of toxic corporate cash poisoning our democracy
  2. Prosecute Wall Street crime, not Wall Street protestors
  3. Give citizens same right to borrow taxpayer money from the Fed at the same low interest rates that Wall Street got in the bailout
  4. Cap bank fees and interest rates
  5. Offer real foreclosure relief:  Require banks to provide principal reduction for underwater mortgages, including allowing judges to reduce home mortgage principal in bankruptcy court to encourage mortgage modifications
  6. Repeal unnecessary tax loopholes and other corporate subsidies (overseas tax breaks, local & state tax bribes for moving jobs from one community to another, make corporations pay taxes) and transfer savings to taxpayers and small businesses in the form of tax cuts.
  7. Repeal corporate-backed NAFTA-style trade deals, which export U.S. jobs overseas, reduce wages of American workers to that of laborers in foreign countries and weaken environmental regulation.
  8. Restore traditional separations between federally guaranteed consumer banking from other, riskier, financial business.
  9. Reform student debt, stop predatory practices.

 

 

For more information, check out http://www.wheresourmoney.org

On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/wheresourmoney

Twitter http://twitter.com/ - !/WheresOurMoney

Support 28A http://www.wheresourmoney.org/campaign-2011/

 

 

 

 

 

Action / Citizens United / Congress / Foreclosure / Martin Column / Supreme Court - 10/20/2011

What's Plan B For Jobs?

That’s the big question after the Republicans, true to their word, killed President Obama’s $447 billion jobs proposal.

In response, the president has pledged to break up his plan, which is already too small to significantly reduce unemployment, into even smaller chunks that the Republicans might swallow. It’s hard to find anybody who believes that’s a serious plan to put a dent in unemployment.

The only job the president seems to have a clue about preserving is his own, continuing to raise campaign cash at a record-breaking pace, raising $70 million for his own and Democrats’ reelection.

Meanwhile Republicans pursue their own single-minded agenda to enhance corporate power and their own – destroy President Obama, reduce taxes and cripple government regulation.

Unfortunately for Republicans, when you look at the facts, regulations don’t turn out to be much of a threat to jobs after all

The only legislation the two parties agree on are a handful of NAFTA-style trade agreements that most Americans fear will only lead to more outsourcing.

Where does that leave the 99 percent?

Out in the street.

That’s where they’ll be across the country and the globe today, to register their frustration with a political and financial elite whose actions created persistently high unemployment, plummeting home values, social service cutbacks and a world of growing economic uncertainty.

As OccupyLA states on its web site, “We have been giving away our representation to people who do not deserve it …”

Check here for a list of demonstrations around the world.

 

 

Congress / D.C. Disconnect / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 10/15/2011

News Flash: Giving Banks Billions Won't Create Jobs

Last year, President Obama signed into law the $30 billion Small Business Lending Fund as a way to stimulate job creation.

"It's going to speed relief to small businesses across the country right away," Obama said at the time.

It was supposed to help create 500,000 jobs.

Well, not so much.

Not only has the program been a dismal failure, with few banks applying to participate, but it turned into another giant taxpayer handout to bankers.

Only $4 billion was handed over to banks under the lending scheme. The bankers didn’t use it to boost small businesses, and it turned out they weren’t even required to. Instead the bankers used more than $2 billion to pay off their bailout debt to the Troubled Asset  Relief Program, according to a story in the October 12 Wall Street Journal (no link).

“It was basically a bailout for a 100-plus banks,” Giovanni Coratolo, vice-president of small-business policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Journal.

None of this should come as a surprise. Bankers said at the time that the problem was not that they didn’t have enough money to lend, but that demand for loans was weak because of the continuing bad economy.

“Until you start to see the economy improve and job growth you won’t see lots of loan demand,” Thomas Dorr, chief financial officer of Bank of Birmingham in Michigan, which received $4.6 million from the program, told Bloomberg. “You can’t force banks to lend.”

The lending program was either just another veiled handout to the banks or another lame attempt at trickle-down stimulus. Either way it contributes to the strong impression that our political leaders aren’t actually working on solutions, they’re getting in our way.

Congress / D.C. Disconnect / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / TARP - 10/13/2011

The Neanderthals and the Cave-Man

With 63% of Americans envisioning an apocalyptic future in which wages drop, homes devalue, costs soar and government becomes irrelevant, a new film considers what happens when the angry masses take to the streets. I’m talking about “Before the Planet of the Apes,” James Franco’s latest flick.

I found myself sympathizing with the beleaguered apes, genetically engineered to want more of the American dream but suppressed and betrayed by the corporate fat cats, until finally an outraged ape mob busts loose and seizes the streets of San Francisco. If the intent was to conjure a metaphor, it failed right there: so far, the middle class in this country remains a silent, if not somnolescent, majority.

On the other hand, the nation is deep into a depressing era of Paleolithic Politics.

Neanderthals still walk the earth, as proven by Texas Governor Rick Perry – so retrograde in his views, so far removed from the consensus view of what America stands for, that the comparison might actually be an insult to the Neanderthals. According to a review of his “thinking” in the New York Times, Perry believes that old people should work till they die or live in abject poverty: he considers Social Security a disease and a fraud. Global warming? Fiction…. (just like that crazy theory that a big asteroid killed off his buddies, the Dinosaurs, and led to the Ice Age). Gays? Don’t get the Texas tough guy started.  Presumably they’d be in for the same treatment Perry alluded to when, speaking of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, he said, “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

Who will shine the fierce light of five thousand years of knowledge, humanity and grace upon such as he?

Not, unfortunately, the Cave Man. As Drew Westen explained in the single most perceptive assessment of our President I have read, Obama doesn’t grasp “bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time.” There seems to be no line in the sand that Obama will not at once retreat from, whether it is being forced to wait an extra day to address Congress, or any of a dozen key campaign pledges that inspired so many millions to vote for him. Last week, he caved on protections against ozone pollution developed by his own administration that were meant to safeguard our kids’ health. Before that, he caved to  lobbyists and approved a $7 billion intercontinental tar sand pipeline – a bailout for the energy industry that is guaranteed to become a taxpayer boondoggle. Remember when Mr. Obama said he would only support a budget bill that eliminated gratuitous tax cuts for the super-wealthy? Or allow consumers to select a non-profit health care plan rather than force people to buy a private plan from insurance companies at an unregulated price? Law professor Elizabeth Warren, one of the few people in this country capable of protecting consumers against greed-driven banks and credit card companies, was the obvious choice to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – it was her idea to create it – until Wall Street vetoed her appointment by Obama.

Asked to respond to Perry’s intemperate comments, the President issued this gentle rejoinder: “You know, Mr. Perry just got in the presidential race and I think that everybody who runs for president probably takes them a little bit of time before they start realizing that this isn't like running for governor or running for senator or running for Congress, and you've got to be a little more careful about what you say. But I'll cut him some slack. He's only been at it a few days now.”

When he ran for President, Obama promised to bring a bipartisan spirit to D.C. This is one pledge he certainly kept. But the Republican opposition in Congress wanted none of it; their goal is to deny Obama any claim of success on any issue. They are after the Presidency in 2012.

This isn't some college debate. This is a fight over the future of our country. Obama is in it. He needs to fight back.

Congress / Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 09/07/2011

This is Not What Real Democracy Looks Like

Why is the work of the so-called Super Congress deficit panel going to be conducted in secret as if its members were planning a covert military operation?

Do you buy the idea that these decisions its members have to make, which are supposed to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years, are just so tough that if they do it in public they’ll just never get it done?

Do you think that secrecy is designed to protect your interests?

I don’t. The Super-Congress is just the latest example of the fear on steroids politics that our leaders have come to rely on when they shove something nasty down our throats. By now the formula is familiar: create a crisis, warn of dire consequences, limit information and debate.

Meanwhile behind the curtain the politicians can wheel and deal with the lobbyists and bankers who fund their careers. According to them, all theses issues are just too complicated for us common folk to contemplate.

The only thing this secrecy protects is the interests of the lobbyists and the politicians who want to cut their deals without the glare of publicity or the inconvenience of accountability when they sell out the interests of their constituents in favor of their corporate contributors.

The Super-Congress is a microcosm of all the issues raised by the infusion of massive corporate cash and influence into our politics, as well as the poisonous impact of the revolving door between Congress and the businesses that lobby it.

While the president has been railing about the influence of money in politics, his own party has made sure that their top fund-raisers have seats at the Super-Congress table, like Sen. Max Baucus (whose top fundraiser Jim Messina was so good Obama hired him away for his presidential campaign, and Sen. Patty Murray, who also happens to chair the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which means it up to her to lead the party’s fundraising efforts to maintain its Senate majority.

The Republicans have also deployed top money-getters like Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who’s vice-chair of the House financial services committees, a traditional money magnet, which has worked well for Hensarling, who since 2009 has snagged at least $35,000 from the giant auditing firm KPMG, another $35,000 from UBS bank and $32,500 from Bank of America.

Who do you think will have access to Baucus, Murray and Hensarling while the Super-Congress deliberates behind closed doors? Ordinary Americans, or those who can make significant contributions to Baucus and Murray’s fundraising efforts?

In response to these potential conflicts, the Project on Government Oversight and other open government groups wrote to congressional leaders urging maximum transparency.

As Bill Buzenberg summed it up in the Guardian, “Over the years, Washington has evolved into a highly oiled special-interest machine, plying candidates with money, on one hand, and grooming insiders to help close the deal, on the other. So far, this ethically corrupt system has proven extraordinarily resistant to reform.”

In response to these potential conflicts, the Project on Government Oversight and other open government groups wrote to congressional leaders urging maximum transparency so that the rest of us can see and read exactly what’s going on. Contact your representative and demand that the Super-Congress conduct our business in public view, the way democracy is supposed to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column / Outrage - 08/24/2011