Back in the good ol’ days, you’d merely text your old pal I.B. Loaded, CEO of Amalgamated Rules Bender Inc. Loaded’s given you tons of cash over the years for your campaigns. He, his wife and children, his employees, his vendors — all have seen the wisdom of slipping dough to you, your official campaign committee, and, of course, your “Leadership PAC.”

And, of course, Loaded would have his Gulfstream V (I mean, rather, his corporate-owned private jet) fly into Reagan National to pick you up (after, of course, a taxpayer-paid car and driver deposited you, your luggage, and golf clubs there). Loaded himself would be on the plane to entertain you and see to your every need. After you’d both consumed a few hits from Loaded’s stash of 40-year-old Glen Garioch, he’d probably steer the conversation into an arcane tax-policy issue that would likely benefit Amalgamated Rules Bender Inc. to the tune of millions of dollars.

You’d be the only passenger on a sophisticated jet costing $59 million with an hourly operating cost of about $7,000. Yet, before 2007, you’d only pay the cost of first-class airfare to LA — maybe a grand or less, depending on discounts. Then Congress shut the door to corporate-provided air travel by passing the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

And this week, those idiots at the Federal Election Commission reopened the door.

The act plainly states “a candidate for election for Federal office … may not make any expenditure for a flight on [a noncommercial] aircraft unless … the candidate, the authorized committee, or other political committee pays … the pro rata share of the fair market value of the flight.”

But the FEC changed that by redefining when a member of Congress is or is not a “candidate.” Here’s the explanation from The Campaign Legal Center:

Yet the FEC today adopted a final rule nonsensically declaring that a candidate is not a “candidate,” for the purpose of this statute, when that candidate “is traveling on behalf of another political committee (such as a political party committee or Senate leadership PAC).” Instead, where a candidate claims to be traveling “on behalf of” their own leadership PAC, or one of the many committees controlled by their political party, or any other political committee—the old rules apply, allowing that candidate to pay the price of a commercial air ticket instead of the price of the private plane the candidate is actually flying on.

To make matters worse, FEC Chairman Walther published a statement explaining his decision to provide the necessary fourth vote for the final rule put forth by his three Republican colleagues on the FEC. Preposterously, Chairman Walther cited comments filed in the rulemaking proceeding by the Campaign Legal Center, together with Democracy 21, suggesting that we support this new rule gutting HLOGA. Chairman Walther wrote: “The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 agreed and indicated their support for ‘retain[ing] the existing reimbursement rate structure for non-candidate travel.’” (emphasis added). While we did support retaining the old rate for non-candidate travel, nowhere in our comments did we suggest that candidates should be considered to be engaging in non-candidate travel through the simple expedient of claiming that they are flying “on behalf of” their leadership PAC or other federal political committee. Chairman Walther should know better.

Candidate travel is candidate travel—period.

The FEC’s new rule illegally contradicts the plain meaning of the statute. Unfortunately, gutting or ignoring federal law—that Commissioners would have written differently themselves—has become a recurring habit for the FEC. In an earlier rulemaking, the FEC gutted the intent of another key aspect of HLOGA, allowing lobbyists to easily evade required reporting of bundled campaign contributions.

Provision of non-commercial travel by corporations (and unions) to members of Congress or federal candidates is simply more legalized corruption.

So I wonder how long it will be before enough members of Congress step up to close this loophole by updating the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. Days? Weeks? Next century?

As we all know, the nation has been alive with discourse of all flavors over the current state of the health care system and the insurance industry. Recently, Senator Baucus has brought forth his proposal, dubbed by some critics (rightly so, in my opinion) the “Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.”

Please listen: The very reason we need the government to intervene is because millions of us have a Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. Private industry has already proven that it cannot be trusted to look out for its bottom line and simultaneously safeguard and maintain the health of the American people, even if some of us are misguidedly rallying in the streets against our interests at the urgings of their preferred Chicken Littles of media and industry.

It is my belief that what needs to be accomplished is the affirmation of every American citizen’s right to a basic level of health, security and well-being above a private company’s right to make a profit, which it currently does in part by conveniently discounting and disregarding its customers’ human rights at its whims. Private insurers need to know, as my mother would say, that “your rights stop where another one’s starts.”

Legislation that hands millions of new customers directly over to health insurers, who have made clear that they give their profit motives precedence over honoring their commitments to their policyholders, sometimes with deadly consequences, is simply a conversion of taxpayer money into more income for the industry and a tacit acceptance of its horrific business practices.

As a taxpayer, I have no qualms about the cost of health care reform–I consider it our duty to one another as citizens, as a community, and as a nation. How do you think it looks when Washington puts us all further in hock frivolously throwing money down the toilets of the banking industry, tax cuts for the rich, and Iraq, to cite a few recent examples (our last president tried to flush Social Security as well), and then tries to tell us that we’re not entitled to a health care system that won’t be tainted by continued rewards to an industry with no reservations about flipping us the middle finger and leaving us for dead when we dare get sick? Why are regular people being taught to accept the ever-growing obligations to war, to creditors, and to failed industry, and at the same time not to make an across-the-board investment in one another as this nation’s human capital: workers; thinkers; doers; entrepreneurs; taxpayers; human beings?

I am free to help pay your medical bills, and those of my grandparents, and for those of us in states of extraordinary need, but not for a system that’s going to be there for me, free from the tentacles and inflated costs of private interests, even if I don’t have the right job, the right friends, a trust fund, a winning Powerball ticket, or the good fortune to remain healthy and free of accidents between now, at the age of 29, and my 65th birthday, should I find myself again without income or coverage?

Is continued corporate captivity the thanks we are going to get from our representatives for supporting them with our votes and paying for their salaries, benefits and pension plans? We not only sacrifice our own salaries, benefits and pension plans (and for many of us, our homes) for others’ bad decisions and greed, but now we can expect to be groomed to accept some compromise from Capitol Hill that may or may not improve our lives while the jackpots continue to flow upward?

A hostile climate has been created for every working person in this country. We have been told for years by the powerful, privileged and obscenely well-compensated that we are going to have to do things like “tighten our belts” and “weather the storm” (or, as some have called it, the “rough patch”). We’ve individually and collectively been subjected to repeated assaults on our financial well-being, our employment opportunities, our civil rights, our health and our futures by an ever more demanding section of the population so far insulated from what we are truly facing. One can turn on the television and at any given time watch a politician, executive, “industry expert” or news reporter talk about our right to access affordable health care, even though they themselves would never fathom or accept such treatment, as though United States citizens were no better than numbers on a balance sheet or some rogue band of freeloaders trying to burgle the upper class.

We all know who is really being burgled.

Let me tell you something: I don’t care to hear what anybody in a position of privilege has to say unless they have truly done their homework or they have first-hand life experience to back it up. I don’t care if some insurance executive is going to have to postpone the construction of his exact replica of the M.C. Hammer mansion in Dubai if he doesn’t get some additional payoff from the American public. I’ve got skin in the game here, too, and you and the rest of our representatives have the opportunity to come through with flying colors for me and for my fellow citizens. We’re all counting on you, even those of us who don’t know it or won’t admit it because it wouldn’t fit their politics or their way of thinking to do so.

We as Americans need to join the rest of the West in providing each other, across income, party and racial lines, with a guarantee of basic care not as some so-called “middle-class entitlement,” as I have heard wafting condescendingly out of the windpipes of more than one multimillionaire, but as a long-overdue recognition of our needs and our rights, and perhaps the making of amends over the treatment so many of us have endured from entities that have been allowed growing and crippling control over the quality, course, and length, of our lives.

If a strong stand is not ultimately taken on our behalf, it will be a damning and ominous indicator of what this country truly thinks of me, my neighbors, my family, my friends, and the rest of my fellow citizens. I implore you: Keep an irrevocable public option on the table and stick to your guns on it. To be blunt, some of your colleagues absolutely will do their best to beat you over the head with whatever you do, so you might as well make it worth doing in the first place and roll with the punches so that we, as a nation, will come out better for it. I don’t want something for nothing, as the elites would put it–I want something better for what I have put in and will continue to put in, and the people of this nation have more than paid for it in service to their employers, their families, their communities, their country–and some with their lives.

Thank you,
A. N. Cargo
Denver, Colorado (CO-01)

You’ve been taking a beating in the local press recently. Your lack of town hall meetings on health care reform during the August recess appears to be unpopular.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t paid a tremendous amount of attention to the health care “debate”. It’s summer. I’m busy. And frankly, i’ve assumed from the start that the final product will be well less than this nation needs. It won’t be a national health care plan, the solution that’s at least 50 years too late already. GM may not have needed to be bailed out/purchased if we had a health care system like every other developed nation, but we all knew that such a system wasn’t a possible result, so why bother getting worked up by whatever result we get?

I’ve assumed that the best i can hope for is to be required to buy an over-priced, under-covered private insurance plan. (Please feel free to prove me wrong, and i realize that you’re not capable of producing the result single-handedly.) Major American industries set to be reformed have an amazing track record of coming out ahead in the process. Honestly, i have better things to do than wait around for a kiss in this type of situation.

But if i were you, i wouldn’t be holding any town halls gone wild on the matter either. I don’t know what kind of ignorant insanity has gripped this nation, but i fear that it could be contagious. Apparently, a three-cornered hat, a Chinese made “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and a Glock strapped to your hip is all you need to channel the wisdom of the founders. And over health care reform no less. Where was this when PATRIOTs I and II were passed, or FISA, or the fool’s errands in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the give away of the treasury to a certain bank which shall remain nameless?

We’re not seeing patriots defending their freedom. I’m not really sure what we’re seeing. I keep hoping that it will turn out to be a Monty Python sketch, but i fear that Franklin’s statement to the Convention is closer to the truth.

“Socialism” is the watch word. The fear of socialism is enough to turn what should be open communication between constituents and representatives into the political equivalent of professional wrestling. It’s enough to bring out the guns. I suggest that you propose a bill that requires every recipient of Social Security, disability, unemployment, WIC, the Bridge Card, Medicare, Medicaid, and government subsidies of any sort to write a 1500-word essay before the checks are sent. The essay will define socialism; compare and contrast it with other systems; provide current and historical examples; and examine ways in which socialism may (or may not) co-exist with democracy, capitalism and free markets.

And that’s my compromise position. In the world of Tyrannous Lex, such an exercise would be required for even conversational use of the word.

You’re probably not getting many “keep up the good work” letters these days. But this voter completely understands your position on this matter. As they say on the internet, don’t feed the trolls.

Best of luck on your return to the fetid swamp of philosophical depravity that is our nation’s capitol,

Lex

According to The New York Times, former Sen. Daschle has been spending quality time in the White House holding forth on health-care reform. Reports The Times: “He still speaks frequently to the president, who met with him as recently as Friday morning in the Oval Office. And he remains a highly paid policy adviser to hospital, drug, pharmaceutical and other health care industry clients of Alston & Bird, the law and lobbying firm.”

He says he’s not a lobbyist. He says he’s a “resource” for his clients and former legislative colleagues. “I do not tailor my views to any specific group or client.”

How believable — or unbelievable — is that claim?

The 900-lawyer firm he works for has received more than $5 million in lobbying fees so far this year, much of it from companies and associations with an abiding interest in influencing the outcome of health-care reform efforts. From 2005 (when the firm’s lobbying revenues nearly tripled) to 2008, the firm’s lobbying fees totaled $24.2 million, according to the lobbying database of the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Mr. Daschle joined the K Street firm after losing his Senate re-election bid in 2004 to Sen. John Thune. Mr. Daschle is an expert in health-care matters; Alston & Bird has numerous clients interested in health-care reform; and the firm’s annual lobbying fees skyrocketed. Surprise!

The Washington Post pegged Mr. Daschle’s salary at $2 million. He also received $2 million last year from business partner Leo Hindery, whose gift of a car and driver led to Mr. Daschle’s withdrawal from cabinet consideration.

“We know that many power brokers never register as lobbyists, but they are every bit as powerful,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation watchdog group.

Over his congressional career, Mr. Daschle has enjoyed considerable financial support from the health-care industries. Since 1998, he has received $1,517,020 in campaign contributions from PACs and individuals associated with the health-care fields.

After amending his tax returns for 2005 through 2007 for failing to disclose income (the car and driver) from Mr. Hindery, he paid $101,943 in back taxes plus interest. Then he withdrew from consideration for secretary of Health and Human Services. In this post, he would have served as point man for the president’s health-care reform plans.

But, reports The Times, he appears to have sufficient access to the president’s ear to be an effective advocate on health care. But for whose benefit?

White House officials say they appreciate his help. “He is one of a number of people that provides outside advice to the White House, and the president greatly appreciates that advice and Tom’s friendship,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the White House who previously worked for Mr. Daschle. Mr. Pfeiffer added that the former senator was “a recognized expert on health reform who knows more about the legislative process than just about anyone.”

Critics, though, say his ex officio role gives Alston & Bird’s health care clients privileged insights into the policy process. They say Mr. Daschle’s multiple advisory roles illustrate the kind of coziness with the lobbying world that Mr. Obama vowed to end. If he had been confirmed as health secretary, Mr. Daschle would have been subject to strict transparency and ethics rules. [emphasis added]

Mr. Daschle has not registered as a lobbyist. Nor does he have an enviable track record of disclosing the health-care clients in his portfolio when addressing public-policy issues — as he failed to do on Aug. 16 on NBC’s Meet the Press. He told host David Gregory this:

Well, David, I guess the, the basic question is, are we building this new system for the American people or for the insurance companies?  I mean, that’s really the key question.  How will they be better served?

But, complains Time’s Michael Scherer:

Left unmentioned was the fact that Daschle, in his capacity as a high-paid consultant at the law firm Alston and Bird, is once again working closely with lobbyists for UnitedHealth, the largest U.S. industry player, aiding the company’s effort to convince moderate Senate and House Democrats to, among other things, kill the public option and keep company profits high.

(BusinessWeek’s Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein think the insurers have already won.)

Here’s how his employer describes Mr. Daschle’s role:

Senator Tom Daschle is a Special Public Policy Advisor in Alston & Bird’s Washington, D.C., office, and is a member of the Legislative & Public Policy Group. As a non-attorney, Senator Daschle focuses his services on advising the firm’s clients on issues related to all aspects of public policy with a particular emphasis on issues related to financial services, health care, energy, telecommunications and taxes. In addition, he advises on trade and international matters. He spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.

Mr. Daschle could not formally lobby for a year after leaving the Senate because of ethics rules. Five years later, he has not registered as a lobbyist. Yet he maintains a portfolio of health-care industry clients, gives paid speeches to health-care industry groups, and has, apparently, unlimited access to the White House and its decision makers — including President Obama.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Mr. Daschle should register as a lobbyist.

• ACCCE hired Bonner, but didn’t notify Congress of forgeries when they were discovered
• Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate
• National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation
• Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

Before the House voted on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) earlier this year, someone hired Bonner & Associates (hereafter Bonner) to manufacture some grassroots opposition against ACES. At least one employee did so by forging letters from non-existent people to Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. These letters were discovered, Bonner claims to have fired the employee, and a partner at Bonner apologized to the two minority groups from which the letters were supposedly sent. The apologies were, it’s fair to say, emphatically not accepted.

Since the Bonner story broke last Friday, there have been a lot of new information about who hired them, whether there were other Congresspeople who received forged letters, the legality or lack thereof, and an official response from a House committee with subpoena powers.

We now know that Bonner sent at least 12 letters to three different Congresspeople – the aforementioned Rep. Perriello, Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, and Rep. Christopher Carney, both of Pennsylvania. We also know that these 12 letters were identified by Bonner and brought to the attention of the clients. And, as of Wednesday, we also know that two more letters have turned up in Rep. Perriello’s office – these forged on letterhead belonging to the Jefferson Area Board for Aging and the American Association of University Women. We don’t presently know if these two additional letters are part of the 12 discovered by Bonner or whether they represent two additional letters, for a total of 14 forged letters.

We also know that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was the end client (via another PR company, the Hawthorn Group, which has released its own statement) who had hired Bonner to create the grassroots backlash against ACES – they admitted so in a statement by ACCCE president Stephen L. Miller on their Website. It reads, in part:

We are outraged at the conduct of Bonner and Associates. Bonner and Associates was hired by the Hawthorn Group – our primary grassroots contractor – to do limited outreach earlier this year on H.R. 2454. Based upon the information we have, it is clear that an employee of Bonner’s firm failed to demonstrate the integrity we demand of all our contractors and subcontractors. As a result, these egregious actions led to falsified letters being sent to Members of Congress.

ACCCE has always maintained high ethical and professional standards. In this case, the standards and practices that we require for grassroots advocacy outreach were not adhered to by Bonner and Associates. In this sense, the community groups involved, the Members of Congress who received the fraudulent letters, as well as ACCCE, were all victimized by this misconduct.

However, we also know that the ACCCE knew about the forgeries at least two days before the House vote and did not inform Congress of that fact. This comes from an ACCCE document describing the relationship between the ACCCE and Bonner:

Based upon information ACCCE received from the Hawthorn Group, it was Bonner & Associates’ own internal that identified these false letters and it was Mr. Bonner who first brought this to the attention of the Hawthorn Group. ACCCE was then made aware of the situation by Hawthorn on July 24, 2009.

The House Roll Call vote on ACES occurred on July 26, 2009.

The Sierra Club announced on Monday that it had mailed a letter to Attorney General Holder asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Bonner’s actions were legal or not. The letter from Patrick Gallagher, Sierra Club Legal Counsel, reads in part:

First, the Department of Justice should ascertain whether forged letters were sent to other Representatives or Senators…. Second, the Department of Justice should investigate whether other community organizations were similarly misrepresented…. Finally, the Department of Justice should pursue criminal charges against Bonner & Associates.

At a minimum, Bonner & Associates, acting through its employees or representatives, appears to have violated 18 U.S.C. 1343 (”Fraud by wire, radio, or television”) and 19 U.S.C. 1346 (”Definition of ’scheme or artifice to defraud’”).

Representative Edward Markey, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a letter to Jack Bonner with a list of 14 questions to be answered by August 12, 2009. S&R obtained a copy of the letter – you can read it here. Some of the more interesting questions from the letter can be summarized as follows:

1. Who did you do your lobbying for, is your client a registered lobbying firm, and how much did did they pay you?
2. Did Bonner lobby other Congresspeople on ACES and for what clients?
3. Give us details (compensation, contractor vs. employee status, etc.) about the employee you claim to have fired.
4. If you script your employees, give us copies of those scripts.
5. We want copies of all faked letters Bonner sent to any Congressperson, and we also want to know how you got ahold of actual letterhead from the two minority groups from which letters were forged.
6. Explain how you caught the fakes and what methods you used to ensure that you found all the faked letters and their recipients, and if you destroyed anyting, we want to know that too.

Rep. Markey has also sent a letter to the ACCCE demanding answers to questions similar to those posed to Bonner. S&R has also obtained a copy of this letter and you can read it here. It says, in part:

Press reports indicate that ACCCE may not have told the other affected offices that they too had received fraudulent letters until Monday, August 3, 2009.

The deliberate inaction prior to the House vote and the extended silence after the House vote – some 40 days after the ACCCE knew what had happened – raises serious concerns.

This story is still developing, and S&R will bring you periodic updates as the become available.

———-

Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate

According to an Associated Press article, Cash for Clunkers (C4C) has not had an appreciable effect on U.S. consumption of oil or its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the article, C4C reduced oil consumption by about 72 million gallons of gas per year, or the amount of gasoline consumed by Americans every 4.5 hours. Similarly, the GHG savings equates to about saving 57 minutes of GHG emissions per year.

The problem is that the estimated number of clunkers removed from the roads is only 250 thousand, compared to at total of approximately 260 million cars in the U.S.

There are certainly benefits to this program, but according to the individuals interviewed for the AP story, the benefits aren’t GHGs. Instead, the benefits are to the economy as a whole and the reduction of standard pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. But two climate experts interviewed for the article had this to say about it:

“As a carbon dioxide policy, this is a terribly wasteful thing to do,” said Henry Jacoby, a professor of management and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. “The amount of carbon you are saving per federal expenditure is very, very small.”

and

“It’s not that it’s a bad idea; just don’t sell it as a cost-effective energy savings method,” [Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,] said. “From an economic standpoint it seems to be a roaring success. From an environment and energy perspective, it’s not where you would put your first dollar.”

It’s also entirely possible that these complaints are actually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. As S&R reported last month, GHG and pollution emissions vary with the total lifecycle of that transportation method. For this reason, replacing “clunkers” that aren’t truly clunkers could actually increase GHG and pollution emissions as a result of the emissions created in the process of manufacturing the new vehicle.

Whether this is actually so remains for someone else to determine.

———-

National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Methods for Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the National Research Council sent NASA administrator Charles Bolden a letter expressing their support for the replacement of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) that failed to reach orbit earlier this year. The letter says that a replacement OCO is necessary for independent verification of carbon emissions reports that are presently self-reported by nations on an irregular basis.

National emission inventories, required under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are self-reported and are not required regularly for all countries. Verification requires checking these self-reported emissions estimates. However, independent data against which to verify the statistics used to estimate CO2 emissions, such as fossil fuel consumption, are not available.

In addition, while the Japanese GOSAT has the ability to monitor CO₂, the letter claims that GOSAT’s spatial resolution is too low and it’s accuracy insufficient to measure the emissions of a power plant against the background CO₂.

The letter points out that, while OCO’s short on-orbit lifetime and poor global coverage makes OCO unsuitable to observe trends, but that OCO would be an ideal testbed for the technologies that could monitor the entire globe for years or decades at a time. And given the significant limitations of terrestrial monitoring of GHGs, satellites will be necessary to confirm the self-reported national emissions.

———-

Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

It’s long been a tenet of climate disruption that increasing global temperatures will result in a wider range for tropical diseases and thus greater incidence of disease. But a feature article in Conservation Magazine asks a number of questions about the accuracy of this understanding and ultimately concludes that there are too many unknowns at this point to really know how diseases will respond to a warming world.

The basic problem is this: when there are so many other possible factors in the spread of disease, how can you accurately attribute the wider spread of a disease to climate disruption? The examples provided in the article illustrate this difficulty.

According to the article, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) increased in the Baltics at the same time that the region warmed up significantly. But the Soviet Union collapsed over the same period as well, and the rate of poverty rose as a result. Since poorer people are less likely to get vaccinated and are more likely to forage for food in areas where ticks are more common, TBE researcher, Sarah Randolph concluded that “the disease surge probably had far more to do with human actions than planetary changes.”

Mosquitoes are some of the most prolific disease vectors in the world, spreading malaria and West Nile Virus among dozens of other pathogens and parasites. According to the article, West Nile cases in the U.S. appear to have more to do with the lifecycles of the mosquitoes that carry the virus than with climate change. Specifically, in the western U.S., West Nile cases spike the year after a dry year, while West Nile cases spike in wet years in the eastern U.S. These differences result from the relationship between different mosquitoes and their predators. Hot years in the West kill off mosquito predators and the mosquitoes recover before the predators do, leading to an increase in mosquitoes and accompanying West Nile cases. In the East, however, mosquitoes breed in standing water (water-filled tires, for example), and so rainier years produce more mosquitoes and more West Nile cases.

However, the data is only over a few short years, and whether this relationship holds for longer periods is, as yet, undetermined. But the observed reaction of West Nile to precipitation and heat illustrates that whether the disease gets more common and widespread or not will vary from region to region.

The questions are not limited just to human disease and parasites – how animal parasites, and the animals afflicted, will change as a result of climate disruption is also uncertain. According to the article, monarch butterflies are often afflicted by a parasite that makes the butterflies less able to fly long distances. Because so many monarchs migrate to Mexico, the migrating butterfly population remains healthy. But non-migrating monarchs in Florida have a much higher incidence of parasite infection than the migrating monarchs do. And so it’s possible that, if monarch wintering sites move further north out of Mexico and into Texas, the incidence of parasitic infection in monarch butterflies could rise.

But other parasites, such as those that infect musk ox in the Arctic, may respond differently, according to the article. The parasites infect the musk ox via accidental ingestion of slugs. If climate disruption kills off the slugs, then musk ox may actually get healthier as a result of climate disruption.

At this point there’s not enough information to know.

Image credits:
PhotoCarsOnline.com
NASA/JPL

At $1B of funding, the program can help towards the purchase of roughly 220,000 vehicles (assuming that everyone gets the full credit). Even in a cataclysmic sales year like 2008, that’s a drop in the bucket. It won’t be adding a third shift or overtime at auto plants. It will help people who were thinking about buying a new vehicle in any case, and as such it probably counts as some relief for America’s middle class. But let’s be honest in a way that Congresspeople can’t really comprehend. People don’t drive beaters because they’re cool; they drive them because they can’t afford anything better. $4,500 is not going to change that situation. Consequently, the worst vehicles will still be on the road.

But wait, there’s more…

As the program stands, cars traded in under CARS will be destroyed (block shot and the rest of the parts sold). So the person who might have gotten a better vehicle than he was driving through the wonders of the used car market is out of luck. Lack of long-term, big-picture thinking must be a prerequisite to be a “lawmaker”.

The rules are, well, Congressional. The automobile to be traded in must be EPA rated at less than 18 mpg. In other words, the credit is mostly designed for those who purchased a giant SUV for no good reason and the few that have been keeping an old car running. If you plan on purchasing a “light duty truck” the new vehicle must be rated at 18 mpg or better; a 2 mpg improvement over your trade-in qualifies you for $3,500 and a 5 mpg improvement gets you $4,500. Should you choose a passenger car it must get at least 22 mpg; a 4 mpg improvement gives you $3,500 and a 10 mpg improvement qualifies you for the $4,500 credit.

This household consists of one 1987 Toyota Pickup (4×4) and one 2000 Pontaic Grand Am GT. The former would only be traded in after it was pried loose from my cold, dead hands. But it doesn’t matter because the Toyota doesn’t qualify. That’s right, a 23 year old vehicle with no modern emissions controls and a carburetor is not a Congressional clunker. I’d trade the Pontiac in for a Focus faster than you can say “Government Motors”, but it doesn’t qualify either. (Note: the ’09 Focus is EPA rated at 28 mpg, but i just spent 1300 miles in a rental that averaged better than 36 over the course of the trip…and that was with me making 300 miles in 3.5 hours for one leg of the trip. Yes, the EPA is full of governmental shit.)

So those of us who would gladly participate and improve the mileage of our vehicle dramatically are out of luck. Moreover, there have been reports of EPA ratings mysteriously rising above 18 mpg overnight for some vehicles. (The EPA says that they lowered some too.) Nor does the EPA take into account that a 15 year old vehicle does not, generally, perform as well as it did when it was new. Your real world results do not matter…probably because this is Congress we’re talking about, a group of people wholly divorced from real world results. And like the much-acclaimed new fleet mileage standards put forward by the Obama administration, the whole project is clearly designed to push consumers and manufacturers towards hybrids and the new class of kinder, gentler SUV’s that go by the name of “crossover”.

The ratings required of “light-duty trucks” are significantly lower, making it much easier to qualify for the full credit. What constitutes a light-duty truck/SUV is laughable. Chevy’s HHR is a “truck”. Toyota’s Venza and Rav4 are both trucks. The Ford Flex and Edge are trucks. And half of Subaru’s lineup (Forester, Outback and Tribeca) are considered trucks. Only in America would we define “truck” to include station wagons. You may remember how the SUV was a very profitable tool for auto makers to get around earlier versions of the CAFE standard. The crossover is the same trick with a new name, and it works wonderfully for the Cash for Clunkers program.

You’ll be hard pressed – unless you drive a king hell, PoS beater – to trade your passenger car in for another, non-hybrid, passenger car and receive the full credit. You could get that stupid Expedition out of your driveway and replace it with a passenger car, but many of us only feel safe in a vehicle that weighs 4,000 lbs or more. The solution is to trade the Expedition in for another, slightly less bloated rolling abomination and get $4,500 for doing so. Congratulations on gaming a system designed to be gamed.

So will you be participating in CARS? More importantly, when will we be able to trade Congress in for $4,500? That surely exceeds their combined resale value.

At Open Left, Chris Bowers writes: “This is like some beautiful dream come true.” Furthermore, he explains, Reid and Majority Whip Dick Durbin are “now pressing all Senate Democrats to stick together on ‘procedural votes’ [to rule out] Republican filibusters. … Doing so would mean Democrats only need 50 votes to pass legislation.”

According to a new poll by the Employee Benefit Research Institute:

Between 68 percent and 88 percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat support health reform ideas such as national health plans, a public plan option, guaranteed issue, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, and employer and individual mandates. …

While 14 percent of Americans think the health care system needs a major overhaul, 51 percent agree with the statement “there are some good things about our health care system, but major changes are needed.”

Conservatives are using this poll to show Americans are generally satisfied with their health-care. But it seems evident from the results that while Americans may not support health-care reform wholeheartedly, few oppose it in its entirety.

Meanwhile, at the Hill, Jeffrey Young labeled the following refrain Obama’s “mantra”: “If you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don’t want you to have to change.”

Who exactly, aside from the super-rich, is happy with his or her health care? The EBRI poll also reports: “Only a small minority rate it excellent (6 percent) or very good (10 percent).” Where does this mythical beast reside?

Sure, you’ll find those who claim to cite concerns about big government and fear that taxes will be raised. Others parrot the line about how Canadians are forced to wait six months to see a specialist. But that doesn’t mean they’re happy — more likely, they just find their health-care plans fair.

But I think I figured it out. Americans who are happy with their health-care plans are those vestigial few who pay low premiums. Yes, citizens who pay $25 to $100 per month on plans where their employers spring for the rest still exist. To them, exorbitant co-pays (like $50 in the emergency room on mine) are a small price to pay, as are deductibles. (Why Americans accept these two practices when they give the appearance of double-dipping — it feels like we’re paying the insurance company twice – is an ongoing puzzle.)

Like those who still receive pensions, those paying low premiums are dinosaurs. For them to draw the conclusion that their good fortune applies to the rest of the country requires an obliviousness breathtaking in its scope.

What then will a public option knock off the exorbitant health-care premiums we pay? A couple of hundred dollars per month? Not much, but at least then the “second rent” (or mortgage, as the case may be) that we’re currently paying might be reduced to the equivalent of a second car payment.

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.”

Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College, a small liberal arts school in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. He’s written some forty books, including a series of successful “alternative history” novels with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

His most recent novel, One Second After, outlines his nightmare in chilling detail.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the electro-magnetic pulse—the EMP—generated by the explosion.

Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get amplified way beyond anything a typical circuit breaker could handle.

“This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.”

And if the power goes, everything goes.

“Everyone remembers the aftermath of Katrina,” Forstchen says. “It covered fifty-thousand square miles, but it was basically a local event. An EMP would be a nation-wide Katrina-like event.”

Some experts predict the resulting casualty rate could be as high as ninety percent by the end of the first year.

“This will raise a lot of moral questions, too,” Forstchen says. “Are we going to let people out of maximum security prisons? Do we triage off the elderly?”

The scenarios Forstchen envisions in the book aren’t necessarily fictional, either. “I didn’t want to turn this into some kind of Mad Max thing,” he explains.

Forstchen drew on his background as a historian to look for scenarios of desolation and desperation that would fit his post-EMP world. The WWII sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad provided a terrible bounty of examples: tiered rationing, bread with sawdust baked into it to make it more filling, vicious bands of murderous thugs, communal graves.

His visit to the cemetery outside of Leningrad proved especially haunting. “There were six-hundred-thousand dead after the siege,” Forstchen says. “And the Russian have a tradition of putting laminated photos of the deceased on their tombstones. I will never be able to shake that.” That trauma, he says, is still on the Russian soul.

And, the novel argues, America would suffer trauma even worse if an EMP strike hit us.

“I imagined my daughter being in that (post-EMP) world,” says Forstchen, a single parent. “I imagined my daughter being ill in that world.”

As a result, he says, “it got really bad for me” writing novel. “I will never be able to shake that.” Other parents who’ve read the book have had similar reactions. “’I saw my kids in the middle of this,’ they’ve told me,” Forstchen says. “Any parent who reads this, it’s going to hit hard.”

But for most people, the threat of an EMP attack is so abstract and remote, it’s hard to get them to take an interest. “Some people look at it and think it’s too big: ‘I don’t want to think about it,’” Forstchen says. “Well, we have to think about it.”

Forstchen has worked with Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Denny Thompson (D-Miss) to educate other lawmakers about the potential threat of EMPs, but he admits the going has been tough. Even the House Armed Services subcommittee that was studying EMPs was disbanded. “Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen says.

One reason he wrote One Second After, he says, was to “put a voice” to the issue. So far, the strategy seems to be working. The book peaked at number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list and is being developed by Warner Brothers into a film.

“I’m more optimistic than I was six months or even a year ago, when I was working on the book,” Forstchen says. “Lawmakers are starting to get the word again.” In late June, Forstchen met with a group that included members of Congress and intellectuals from various political think tanks to again press his argument, which suddenly has new urgency because of missile testing in North Korea.

“Look at North Korea and Iran,” Forstchen says. “Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits.” It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack, he adds.

But even beyond the national defense reasons, Forstchen points out that there are significant environmental reasons for protecting ourselves against EMPs. The biggest reason, he says, hangs high above us in the sky every day.

In late August of 1859, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun with such magnitude that they burned out telegraphy grids across Europe and North America. Similar solar storms have taken place in 1921 and 1960. According the Forstchen, research suggests that we’re heading into a period that could see another, similar upswing in solar activity.

“We built this delicate, elaborate infrastructure without thinking about how vulnerable it is,” Forstchen says. “We need to get off the stick and do something about our infrastructure.”

Just one percent of the money allocated in the recent bailout package could be enough to create a survival infrastructure, Forstchen says. “It wouldn’t save the entire system, but it could be used to create nodes of infrastructure that could be quickly built upon. Otherwise, what good is a bailout of there’s no country to bail out?”

Most importantly, Forstchen says, individuals should learn to prepare and protect themselves. “What’s the big lesson from Katrina: Don’t wait for the feds,” he says. His website offers a variety of simple, precautionary things people can do. It also offers tips on how to recognize an EMP should one occur.

“People need to think on three levels: on the level of citizens of America/citizens of the world, the personal level, and the community level,” Forstchen says. “Eight, ten, fifteen people thinking together can do a lot. We have to learn how to think together.”

Forstchen realizes he may sound like “a crazy old crank” for sounding alarmist. (During his first-ever radio interview on the book, the first caller rang it to accuse him of being a paranoid right-wing survivalist.) “I just want to see bipartisan action on this,” he says. “I don’t care who gets the credit. We’re all Americans. We need to get by the partisan bickering, at least on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to be on the same sinking boat the next day.”

Forstchen urges people to contact their congressmen about EMPs. “If enough people do, suddenly the issue has legs, and something can get done about it,” he says.

And that, Forstchen says, will definitely help him sleep easier.

S&R will feature a review of Forstchen’s book, One Second After, on Tuesday.

It’s been entertaining watching American public “discourse” since the election. (I use that word in its broadest, most ridiculous sense, since nothing that hinges so completely on self-absorption, rank ignorance and pathological dishonesty can be accurately characterized by such a noble word. But indulge me. I’ve been working on my irony lately.)

On the one hand you have conservatives fainting dead away that we’re now in the clutches of a “socialist” president. Never mind that these folks wouldn’t know a real socialist if he was gnawing their balls off. Never mind that most of these folks think “socialist” is the French word for Negro. Never mind that Obama demonstrably is to socialism what Joe the Plumber is to brie-sucking Northeastern intellectualism. As arch-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert says, “this is a fact-free zone.”

On the other you have the righteous outrage of the progressosphere, which feels six different kinds of betrayed by a president who promised them the moon and stars and has now left them to what looks like at least a four-year walk of shame. If I might borrow from an old fraternity joke, imagine the following scene from the Oval Office:

Barack: Hey everybody, what’s the difference between a progressive and a toilet?
Rahm: I give up, Mr. President.
Barack: The toilet doesn’t follow you around after you use it.
[Entire Cabinet]: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

A few days ago Chris Bowers, one of the progressive blogosphere’s smarter and more influential voices, announced that he was becoming a conservative Democrat. His reasoning was compelling. Let me sample a bit for you (and encourage you to go read the rest as soon as you’re done here).

You can “endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes” to keep you in the Party. “You get ten times the media mentions that one gets being a progressive.” You get “more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors.” You can “hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want” with no consequences at all. “You get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own.” If you bitch about it you get “threats about never hearing from the White House again.” You’re “far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama’s cabinet by 7-1.” And that’s not nearly all.

Okay, so maybe Bowers isn’t really abandoning his fellow progressives. Maybe he was just being a smart-ass to make a point. I can’t say I approve of such tactics, but hey, my old pal Jonathan Swift was known for the occasional snark, so who am I to judge?

The point is that progressives have a beef with the new fauxcialist administration, and regardless of what you think about their issues, their analysis or their personal hygiene, a review of the facts certainly justifies their pique. Think about it.

• Obama the Campaigning Man was pretty clear in his disdain for the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama the President has apparently decided that gay rights can wait. (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Don’t bother.)
• Candidate Obama was balls-to-the-wall about greening the economy, and I mean yesterday. President Obama, whose favorability rating is running better than 2-1 for, seemed unable or unwilling to expend some of that political capital on the just passed ACES bill, which many experts think will accomplish diddley (or worse). (Again, whatever the eventual reality about this bill turns out to be is irrelevant – the point is that Obama did not act in accordance with the more progressive stance he had taken earlier.)
• And what about health care? A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for “a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” How overwhelming, you ask? Overall 72% were in favor of the “public option,” and 57% said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to get it. Hell, 50% of Republican respondents want it. So, you have very high approval ratings. And you certainly have a significantly greater mandate than George the Conqueror did after nipping John Kerry in 2004. You have significant majorities in both houses of Congress. You have overwhelming popular support for a public option. And you can’t get it done? Seriously?

I’m sitting here trying to figure out why corporate America, which would stand to benefit tremendously from having the burden of insuring the citizenry lifted from its shoulders, isn’t in open revolt. (That part of corporate America that doesn’t include the insurance industry, I mean.)

It has been observed that the Republicans seem to be more effective with a minority than the Dems are when they have the entire country by the balls. GOPpers derail the train by threatening a filibuster, but the Democrats can’t seem to head off a bad idea with a damned-near buster-proof majority. How the hell is this possible?

This, of course, is what’s known as a “rhetorical question.” The butt-obvious answer is that the contemporary Democratic Party is not really a party, at least not in the same way that the GOP is. Instead, it’s a bizarre amalgam of progressives, “moderates,” bipartisan fetishists, “New Democrats,” DINOs and opportunistic Republicans (see Specter, Arlen). The median at present lies significantly to the right of Richard Nixon, who despite the recent revelation that he was in favor of abortion in the case of half-breed fetuses, posted a record that would make him pretty darned progressive by 2009 standards. (Good thing you dodged that bullet, huh Mr. President?)

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence. As far as the “responsible” centrists are concerned, progressives are the late-date with no self-esteem, the unwitting fat chick at the pig party.

So, what to do?

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

I’m no expert on the rules of the American legislature, so I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing. Nonetheless, I imagine the Republican wing of the Democratic Party would wet itself. And in the short term this could be very good for the GOP, which would find itself in the plurality.

Longer-term, though, it seems like the progressives can make an argument – and one that is supported by some actual evidence – that they represent the will of a goodly slice of the American public. Even better, given how the youth vote seems to be trending, they can also argue that their hand is going to strengthen over time. Are these premises accurate? Hard to say. But they are testable hypotheses, and the posit is certainly plausible enough to be worth examining.

Maybe the remaining Dems respond by making the reality of the situation official and decamping for the GOP. Maybe the Blue Dogs and the “moderate” wing of the GOP abandon those pesky snake-handlers on the right and form a new “centrist” coalition. Who knows. If that did happen, however, America would at least have the refreshing luxury of an opposition party that, you know, opposed. We could get all that corporatist DC clutter, which thrives because it dominates both parties, up for a real referendum. What a campaign hook – America vs. the Beltway.

Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but I thought I heard you promise not to use supplemental war funding bills any more. Apparently, according to PoliFact, I misheard (thank Bush for only funding Iraq and Afghanistan through September, 2009, instead of the whole year). But still, I’d really like to know how those programs are related to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, that’s right. They’re not.

I’ve railed against emergency supplemental war funding bills for several years now. After all, we’ve been in Iraq for just over six years and in Afghanistan for nearly eight – you’d think we knew how much they were costing us every year. To his credit, Obama claims that he’s going to regularly fund the military in Iraq and Afghanistan via the normal appropriations bills starting in fiscal year 2010 (as of October 1, 2009). We’ll see. But there’s no way that a cash-for-clunkers program has anything to do with a war supplemental.

My issue isn’t that the IMF money and preparations for flu pandemic don’t qualify as emergencies. Depending on how serious the CDC and WHO think the pandemic will be come the start of this year’s flu season, supplemental funding for pandemic flu preparations may be an excellent idea. And if the IMF needs more money to keep the rest of the world from falling even deeper into recession and, not incidentally, dragging down the US with it, then by all means, procure supplemental funds for the IMF too. But don’t attach it to a “war funding” supplemental. Be honest about what you’re doing, come clean with the taxpayers and voters, and do it with different supplementals – one for the occupations of two sovereign nations, one for IMF funding, and a third for flu pandemic preparedness.

Sure, it’s less efficient – but it’s also more honest because it allows each of the supplementals to pass or fail based on their own merits, rather than on the merits of “funding the troops.” And attaching a non-emergency spending provision like the cash-for-clunkers program to a “must pass” bill is about as honest as attaching an amendment opening up national parks to people carrying loaded and concealed firearms to a credit card reform bill.

Oh, that’s right, Congress already did that.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve concluded that it’s just not worth driving myself crazy trying to determine whether ACES is “better than nothing” or whether it “sucks so bad it must be killed.” We’re less than a week into a process that could make ACES unrecognizable by the time it’s done, and so tearing my hair out over whether it’s enough today is an exercise in futility.

The GOP wants this bill dead – just looking at the insane list of amendments the GOP offered makes that abundantly clear. There’s seven supposedly different “jobs offramp” amendments job counts for Colorado alone, eight for California, five for Kentucky, and so on – all of which would automatically shut down the law if 1000, or 2000, or 10,000 or more jobs were lost in a state as a result of ACES. These aren’t serious amendments in the spirit of “lets make this bill better,” they’re “poison pills” specifically designed to make the bill so stupidly bad that even Waxman and Markey themselves would vote against it.

The fact that the GOP wants ACES dead is a good thing, actually, just as the fact that Greenpeace can’t support it because it doesn’t go far enough is a good thing. Generally, I figure that if both the left and the right hate the same legislation, that’s probably a good sign that the bill strikes the right compromises.

But this time I’m not so sure.

You see, the bill as it is today is almost certainly as strong as it’ll ever be. After passing E&C, it’ll probably go on to Ways and Means since that committee has jurisdiction over government debts, tariffs and so on. After Ways and Means, however, ACES may go through any or all of the following House Committees: Agriculture, Appropriations, Budget, Foreign Affairs, Natural Resources, Science and Technology, and/or Transportation and Infrastructure. Maybe those committees offered their input between the draft hearings and the official introduction on March 18, but then again maybe not. I certainly hope so, considering how much weaker the introduced version of ACES is than the initial draft version was.

And that’s all before ACES hits the House floor, where anyone who hasn’t already offered amendments on it will have the opportunity to do so in an attempt to weaken ACES even further.

Then the bill hits the Senate. Does anyone really think that, after going through as many as ten more committees, ACES will be strengthened in the Senate, especially given the number of conservative and moderate Democratic Senators that have to be mollified to reach a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority? If you do, I’ve got an collateralized debt obligation you could take off my hands too. (The ten committees I think could have jurisdiction over ACES are as follows: Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Appropriations; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Budget; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Energy and Natural Resources; Environment and Public Works; Finance; Foreign Relations; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.)

After some form of ACES passes both the House and the Senate, there will almost certainly be a conference committee to work out the differences. It’s theoretically possible that the bill could be made stronger here using the same kind of bullshit measures the GOP used to screw with legislation during the Bush years, but I doubt it. Not because I think the Democrats too moral or ethical to try the same tricks, but rather because doing so will probably make the final form of ACES unpassable in the Senate.

And so, when all is said and done, the ACES that gets to President Obama will probably be even more bloated than it already is and will probably be significantly weaker than the version that just passed out of the E&C committee.

Whether I’ll support it by that point is impossible to predict. Will it still be better than nothing? Probably. Will it still be woefully insufficient as compared to what the science says is necessary? Almost certainly.

So I’m taking a wait and see approach. If ACES stay’s in the “better than nothing” column, great – I’ll publicly support it and suggest that everyone else do the same as well. If ACES finds its way into the “sucks so bad it must be killed” column, however, I’ll publicly oppose it and suggest that everyone else also do the same.

Until then, however, writing letters to your congresscritters asking them to strengthen ACES is probably a good idea. After all, there’s definitely a very slim chance that I’m totally off base and the bill can be made stronger through the legislative process instead of devolving to the least common denominator as I expect.

Right now it’s impossible to know. Well, impossible without a MisterFusion and flux-capacitor-equipped DeLorean, anyway….

Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images, via NYTimes GreenInc blog

That’s the conclusion of three University of Kansas professors who undertook an empirical analysis of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to study rates of return for money spent on lobbying, reported The Washington Post in an April 12 story by Dan Eggen.

This law — this shady excuse for a law with a name only charlatans could love — allowed companies that had earned profits overseas to inexpensively bring that money back into the States. The customary tax rate on such profits was 35 percent. But this elegantly named process — repatriation of profits — gave companies a one-time chance four years ago to haul the money home, paying only 5.25 percent.

The act was a tax holiday sought by a coalition of companies, primarily big pharmaceutical and high-technology corporations, all because they sought to pay little or no taxes on profits generated overseas — and they concocted a successful scheme to pull it off.

Mr. Eggen summarized the Kansas professors’ study:

The largest recipients of tax breaks were concentrated in the pharmaceutical and technology fields, including Pfizer, Merck, Hewlett Packard, Johnson & Johnson and IBM. Pfizer alone repatriated $37 billion, representing 70 percent of its revenue in 2004, the study found. The now-beleaguered financial industry also benefited from the provision, including Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, all of which have since received tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout money. [emphasis added]

Critics argued that the act would benefit multinational corporations to the detriment of domestic firms, reported Jonathan Weisman of the Post in August 2005. Even the Bush White House was dubious over the alleged economic benefits of the bill:

“There will be some stimulative effect because it pumps money into the economy,” said Phillip L. Swagel, a former chief of staff on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, which had opposed the tax holiday. “But you might as well have taken a helicopter over 90210 [Beverly Hills] and pushed the money out the door. That would have stimulated the economy as well.”

In 2006, Washington Post business columnist Allan Sloan wrote of Ford Motor Co.’s abuse of the misnamed act:

It’s almost enough to make you laugh — bitterly, of course. Here was Ford Motor Co. announcing yesterday that it had cut 10,000 jobs last year and that it will cut up to 30,000 more. But shedding jobs at muscle-car acceleration rates didn’t stop Ford from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of the American Jobs Creation Act. … Hello? How can you simultaneously cut jobs and benefit from the American Jobs Creation Act? Welcome to the wonderful world of Washington nomenclature. [emphasis added]

Mr. Sloan estimated that Ford saved $850 million in taxes, not the $250 million the company suggested in its press release.

So how did corporations that don’t believe in paying their appropriate share of taxes finagle this?

Here’s one story, as reported by Mr. Eggen:

The provision was championed in part by the Homeland Investment Coalition, a group of companies and trade associations that was formed to push for the repatriation holiday. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), one of the disbanded coalition’s members, said in a statement Friday that “repatriation of profits provided a new source of investment for American companies.”

“PhRMA supported the legislation four years ago as part of a broad business coalition because of the additional economic benefits the bill would provide,” senior vice president Ken Johnson said. “It meant jobs and skilled training for American workers, as well as a shot in the arm for local economies.” [emphasis added]

This coalition of multinationals had worked on getting its profits home earlier— and falsely articulated its intent regarding jobs. In 2003, seeking support for the then-named Invest in the U.S.A. Act of 2003, the coalition sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Max Baucus, ranking member. The letter said that “The $135 billion currently offshore that would be invested in America would benefit the U.S. economy by increasing domestic investment in plant, equipment, R&D and job creation” among other benefits, including investments in emerging technologies, funding for pension plans hurt by stock market declines, and, especially:

“[i]mproving the long term financial strength of U.S.-based companies by reducing domestic debt loads, strengthening corporate balance sheets, and lowering corporate bond rates; increasing dividends to shareholders (which can be productively redeployed); and raising equity market valuations by increasing funds available for share repurchases.”

Parse it any way you wish — creating jobs was the intended political cover for any member of Congress to sign on as a co-sponsor of the legislation.

But did the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 actually lead to a net gain in jobs? Nope. Did it provide “a new source of investment for American companies”? Not even close. And supporters of this tax holiday tried to get another such tax break. Reported Mr. Eggen:

… the Congressional Research Service and others have since found that many companies cut jobs in the wake of the tax break and that nearly all the money was used for stock buybacks or dividends. Supporters failed in a bid to include a similar tax break in this year’s stimulus legislation, and a Senate subcommittee has launched an investigation into how companies used their tax savings under the 2004 program. [emphasis added]

Any congressional investigation lags reporting by The New York Times by four years. An August 2005 Times editorial said:

A month ago, Hewlett-Packard announced it would lay off 14,500 workers by November 2006. Meanwhile, the company is about to repatriate $14.5 billion in profits it has in overseas accounts at a measly tax of 5.25 percent — an 85 percent discount off the normal corporate rate. The cut-rate repatriation, offered by Congress to American companies that bring profits held in foreign lands home in 2005, was sold to the public as a one-shot deal to generate cash for new hiring. But as its critics warned, the tax cut is functioning instead as a handout for America’s most profitable companies.

Hewlett is just one example. Normally, the tax on a $14.5 billion repatriation would be about $5 billion. Because of the bargain rate in 2005, Hewlett expects to pay roughly $800 million. Hewlett also expects its layoffs to cost the company about $1 billion. Thus, in Hewlett’s case, the tax holiday has not only failed to create jobs, but has also more than covered the cost of cutting workers from the payroll.

Dozens of other companies are also bringing billions home with no mention of new hiring. [emphasis added]

Drug companies especially needed to bring the overseas profits home — but not, as the act’s name suggests, to create jobs. They had big financial problems looming. Patents on brand-name drugs worth billions in sales were about to expire, leading to competition by companies producing generic versions.

Upcoming patent expirations for [Pfizer] include Lipitor in 2011, ‘the little blue pill’ Viagra in 2012, and the allergy medicine Zyrtec in 2012 as well. The loss of these patents would see Pfizer losing more than $14 billion in revenue. [emphasis added]

During the last six months of 2004, as the bill was manuevered successfully through Congress, the stock prices of drug companies were falling, in part because of scandals over the safety of drugs that had long been approved by the FDA. For example, government regulators said Merck & Co.’s arthritis drug Vioxx may have led to more than 27,000 heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths before it was pulled from the market in October 2004.That happened just two weeks before the American Jobs Creation Act was signed into law by President Bush. Merck badly needed its overseas profits, if only to deal with what might be a litigation bill of $10 billion to $15 billion.

Merck, like other companies, also had developed what Motley Fool columnist Robert Steyer in February called

a version of Pfizer’s “Lipitor disease” — a best-selling drug with limited remaining patent life accounting for a huge percentage of revenue:
• Merck lost protection on Fosamax early last year.
• Merck is seeing protection disappear by 2012 on the two drugs that made up 40 percent of revenue through the first nine months of 2008 — Cozaar/Hyzaar and Singulair.
• Bristol-Myers’ Plavix, creating 27 percent of 2008 revenue, gets chopped in 2011.
• Lilly’s Zyprexa, bringing in 23 percent of last year’s revenue, is also done for in 2011.

Big Pharma knew long before 2004 it needed to get every last dollar of overseas profits back into the States — at the lowest tax rate possible. It had to shore up declining revenues and dividends to stockholders — and to fuel big mergers, which it saw as the best cure for Lipitor disease.

But job creation? Merely a fig leaf for public consumption to make this tax holiday palatable to politicians. Jobs were lost, not created.

By August 2007, as the AP graphic shows, pharmaceutical companies had announced thousands of jobs cuts just two years after the repatriation of overseas profits.

Four years ago, Mr. Weisman of the Post reported others were lining up at the tax-break trough:

Procter & Gamble Co. intends to bring home $10.7 billion, and Johnson & Johnson Inc. has an $11 billion plan. Schering-Plough Corp. could bring back $9 billion. This week, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced it will repatriate $14.5 billion in the second half of the year, mainly for “strategic acquisitions,” said Ryan Donovan, an HP spokesman.

Strategic acquisitions made possible by a jobs creation act? More than 800 companies took advantage of the tax break.

Here’s another way to examine passage of the 2004 act. Cui bono politically?

Apparently, the congressional sponsor and 40 co-sponsors did. Let’s look at how just one member of the coalition — the pharmaceutical industry — sought to influence members of Congress through donations to their campaigns.

The Ways and Means Committee, by constitutional fiat, is the chief tax-writing committee of the House of Representatives. The 2004 bill was primarily a creation of the House.

Former congressman Bill Thomas (R-Calif) served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the run-up to the bill’s passage. He’s listed as the prime House sponsor of the American Jobs Creation Act. During his congressional career, the pharmaceutical industry gave his campaign more than $407,000.

The bill had 40 sponsors. All but one were Republicans. A review of the campaign contributions records of these 40 men and women aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that since 1998, the pharmaceutical industry has given their campaign committees $4.49 million. Of those 40 co-sponsors, 14 served on the Ways and Means Committee: They have received, since 1998, $2.5 million from Big Pharma.

Recall that, thanks to the act’s tax break, Pfizer repatriated $37 billion.

Former Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, Democrat of Connecticut (where drug-maker Pfizer has a significant research and development presence), received more than $692,000 from Big Pharma between 1998 and her departure from office. She is now a senior public policy adviser (er, lobbyist) for Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz and serves on the Pfizer U.S. Health Advisory Board.

The bill had no serious opposition in Congress. The Senate voted 69-17 on the bill; The House, 207-16. Their acquiesance allowed an average rate of return of 22,000 percent for the corporations who lobbied for this bill, say the Kansas professors.

If $1 invested in lobbying earns a $220 return, as the Kansas study suggests, then the pharmaceutical industry has invested, for the 41 sponsors and co-sponsors of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, about $4.5 million. That’s a return of $990 million. That’s pretty good ROI for buying only 7 percent of the members of Congress.

– Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

A new world order began when the Berlin Wall came down in late 1989. The next new world order began when the U.S. Army staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue after the fall of Baghdad in late 2003. A brave new world order, the one we’re now in the early stages of, began in late 2008 when the U.S. economy dropped down a rabbit hole that may go all the way to China. The trajectory should look familiar; it traces a path taken by hegemons throughout the ages, straight to the cliff they fell from. As with great powers before us, the military might that created our empire has become became the instrument of its downfall.

Niccolo Machiavelli, who served as secretary to Florence and had extensive dealings with the infamous Caesar Borgia, is probably history’s premier political scientist. Machiavelli insisted that “A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline.” So we can see that the guy was no hand-wringing peace pansy. Conversely, however, he said of war that, “a well established republic or kingdom would never permit its subjects or citizens to employ it for their profession.” Machiavelli asserted that, “…as long as [the Romans] were wise and good, never permitted that their citizens should take up this practice as their profession.” It was only when Pompeii and Caesar established the institution of Emperor as professional warrior that Rome’s republic began to erode. Eventually the army’s elite Praetorian Guard “became formidable to the Senate and damaging to the Emperor” and “gave the Empire and took it away from anyone they wished.”

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned America to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the “military industrial complex” for the same reason Machiavelli cautioned heads of state of his day to beware of advisers who “in times of peace, desire war because they are unable to live without it.” In ’61, Eisenhower admonished that the “economic, political, even spiritual” influence of America’s new war industry was “felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” A decade into the new American century, militarism has woven itself into the very fiber of our society. Political careers and regional economies are wholly dependent upon it. The defense industry has transformed America into warfare welfare state, and it doesn’t bother making a secret of it.

Witness the recent uproar over Secretary Robert Gates’s proposed defense budget “cutbacks” that are actually an increase. Lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman led the protest over Gates’s refusal to expand the F-22 stealth fighter purchase. At $360 million a pop, the F-22 is a cold war albatross that was designed to go toe-to-toe with the Russkies in the skies over Europe. Now, its mission involves air-to-air combat against jumbo jets armed with box cutters; but it’s built in Joe’s state of Connecticut, so it’s of vital importance to national security.

Even more deplorable than the persistence of Lieberman and other congressional war mongrels at investing in what defense analyst William Lind calls “a military museum” is their willingness to let the Pentagon dictate policy. From the beginning of our Mesopotamian mistake, the generals, supposedly, were calling the shots. When then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseky said we weren’t taking enough troops into Iraq, then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld handed him a Purple Heart for the bruise he got where the door hit him on his way out. From then on, all the generals said we didn’t need any more troops in Iraq than we already had there, so we didn’t need any more troops in Iraq.

Then the GOP lost the 2006 election, and Rumsfeld got his Purple Heart. Young Mr. Bush decided it was time to go on a surgin’ safari, and General David Petraeus signed on to play Bwana. Even the once credible Thomas E. Ricks, who has done more than anyone to exalt Petraeus, admits that his idol has been pulling a confidence game on the American Congress and public since he assumed command of forces in Iraq. In a February 2009 Washington Post article, Ricks wrote that Petraeus’s agenda was “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” Congress, the public, and Petraeus’s critics in the military largely failed to recognize what he was up to, mainly because he patently misled them when he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “We’re after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.”

He was, in fact, after conditions that would never allow his soldiers to disengage, at least not during his lifetime, and possibly not during theirs. Throughout his tenure in Iraq—first as commander in Mosul (where he made his reputation as a counterinsurgency “genius” thanks to Ricks’s fabrications), then as the general in charge of training Iraqi security forces, and finally as commander of international forces in Iraq—Petraeus has achieved short term results by handing out guns to everybody and bribing them not to use the guns against U.S. troops or Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s forces. As a result, Ricks admits, “we have poured “a lot of gasoline on the fire,” and if we leave, “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.” So we can never leave.

What Petraeus deserves for his perfidy would cauterize his exit ramp. He has been, instead, elevated to five-star deity status. David Petraeus is the Douglas MacArthur of the 21^st century—a general so dangerous that he challenges the commander in chief’s constitutional authority. As MacArthur did with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, Petraeus poses the threat of challenging Barack H. Obama for his job come the next general election. Don’t think for a minute that a Petraeus/Palin ticket is too absurd to come to pass. Look what’s happened so far in the new American century.

In April 2008, Mr. Bush announced that his “main man” Petraeus would be the decider of when and how U.S. troops would withdraw from Iran, and “King David,” now in charge of Central Command, has been the de facto commander in chief of the U.S. military ever since. Now, President Obama’s decisions must be sanctioned by Petraeus and the rest of the long war generals.

Petraeus, his pet ox Ray Odierno and Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen all publicly opposed withdrawal timelines (and the Obama candidacy) during the 2008 presidential race. Individually and as a group, they have waged an information campaign to desensitize the American public to the reality that their country may always be ensnared in counterproductive wars. Babe Odierno is on record as wanting to keep more than 30,000 troops in Iraq until 2015 or so. If you’re watching, you’ll see that they’re blaming the resurgent violence in Iraq on the pending withdrawals from Iraqi cities, i.e. the “timelines.” When the 2012 political season rolls around, the reasons we’re still in Iraq will be as slippery and amorphous as the reasons we invaded in the first place.

The Petraeus patrol is steering us into the same trap in the Bananastans, and President Obama either doesn’t see that the road ahead looks identical to the one in the rear view mirror, or he figures he’s powerless to reverse America’s vector toward self-immolation, or he’s dumber than he looks, or he just doesn’t care.

These generals of ours, whose authority is too formidable for either the president or the Congress to oppose, don’t have a clue how to win their wars. They don’t know their centers of gravity from their elbows, but that’s okay. They’re not supposed to win their wars. In fact, that would be counter to the real objective: to keep the gravy boat afloat and the cash caisson rolling along for as long as they possibly can. That they’re leaving tire tracks all over the Constitution they took an oath to support and defend by subverting the president’s authority matters little to them. Whether they’re Manchurian Candidate true believers, or Orwellian double thinkers, or simply take the Machiavellian position that ends justify means, I just can’t say. I knew officers of all those flavors during my career. I also knew officers of genuine moral vision and clarity (as opposed to the Ann Coulter/Pat Robertson version of moral vision and clarity), but few of them were invited into the generals’ club, and the few who managed to sip past the doorman have by now earned their Purple Hearts the way Shinseki did. The generals we have left lie like other people eat, sleep and go to the bathroom, all for the sake of preserving an institution that will never again have a peer competitor and will never be capable of defeating an ism of any kind.

I believe we still have a window of opportunity to become the “kinder gentler nation” and that “shining city on the hill” of a brave new world order, but the window is dwindling rapidly. Our generals, openly disdainful of their commander in chief and the legislature, have stolen our country. The zombie Republicans in Congress think it’s patriotic to back the generals against the president, and the Democrats have folded like the Chicago Cubs in August.

Obama needs to step up to the plate, fire all of his four stars and that bureaucratic dimwit Gates, and take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

What follows is a series of key quotes from Gingrich’s prepared remarks that illustrate his deceptions.

Gingrich’s claimOur current energy import strategy is entirely a function of our own government’s anti- domestic energy policies. The United States government blocks the development of new energy sources and inhibits the use of existing energy and then explains that we will have a shortage of energy. It is an artificial, government imposed shortage not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

This is a gross distortion of reality. Our import strategy is mostly a function of the capitalistic nature of our oil industry, not of domestic energy policy. When oil prices were high, the oil industry lobbied hard (and largely successfully) for drilling subsidies and the opening of the outer continental shelf (OCS). But now that oil prices have fallen well off their peak, oil companies are stopping their domestic drilling in order to focus on more profitable foreign sources.

Put simply, oil companies and low oil prices are the reason that there’s not much domestic energy production.

Gingrich’s claim Make no mistake about it: This bill amounts to a $1-2 trillion energy tax levied on a struggling economy, which is destructive and wrong.

Carbon capitalism is not a tax. Gingrich is repeating a GOP talking-point that declares capitalism is taxation in the hopes of scaring people into believing that black is white and the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

In addition, Gingrich didn’t even read the entire Waxman-Markey bill and admits to that fact before even starting to read his written testimony (The statement is at about 2 minutes in the CSpan video of Gingrich’s testimony. He stopped at around page 230 of a 600+ page legislative draft – when the portion about carbon capitalism starts on page 322.

Gingrich’s claim [E]xpect utility bill increases up to $3,128 per year per household.

This is a lie for a number of reasons. The most important is that the MIT study from which this wrong number was calculated was conducted in 2007, and paper author Dr. John Reilly has not updated the conclusions for the details of of the Waxman-Markey ACES draft legislation that Gingrich was testifying about. Furthermore, Dr. Reilly had the following to say at Climate Progress: “it is inappropriate to draw conclusions on the costs of Waxman-Markey.” After all, ACES has a number of cost-containment provisions specifically designed to prevent revenue gained from carbon capitalism such as offsets, public investment in energy efficiency, and an unreasonably low estimate of fuel prices for 2030 between $2.10 and $2.40, while the EIA estimated in it’s 2007 Annual Energy Outlook that gasoline prices would be $3.20 in 2030.

It also doesn’t help that the wrong GOP number would only be correct if you turned all that money into a giant bonfire.

Using an out-of-date study to tarnish current legislation is a misrepresentation of the MIT study at best, and an attempt to mislead Congress and the American people at worst.

Gingrich’s claim According to the Heritage Foundation, the cost of cap-and-trade, with even only a small percentage of allocations being auctioned, would be $1.9 trillion.

While Gingrich is accurately reporting what the Heritage Foundation’s study found, Heritage has a history of misrepresenting economic data and faulty logic as applied to climate, and as such their analysis cannot be trusted. The EPA has analyzed the carbon capitalism portions of the ACES draft and found that the total cost to the national economy is only $22 billion in 2015 and between $54 and $64 billion in 2030. The increase in household energy cost (excluding gasoline) over a reference projection for “business as usual” is 9%, or approximately $200 per year. In addition, the EPA analysis contains a literature review at the end that points out that the Heritage study doesn’t even define the baseline from which it projects the supposed $1.9 trillion, making the results of the analysis and the underlying assumptions impossible to verify.

Gingrich’s claim In a recent paper for the Tax Foundation, Andrew Chamberlain concludes that the costs of this energy tax would be “disproportionately borne by low-income households, those under age 25 and over 75 years, those in Southern states, and single parents with dependent children.”

The effects of energy price increases on struggling households would be a serious concern if it weren’t for one very important fact: everyone who studies carbon capitalism is aware of this problem and so writing legislation and/or regulations to correct for the disparity will actually be quite simple. In other words, this is a non-issue and an attempt at fear mongering.

Gingrich’s claim A recent estimate from the Tax Foundation shows that cap-and-trade could cost America 965,000 jobs, and reduce economic output by $136 billion per year.

This isn’t a false claim by Gingrich so much as it’s a false claim by the Tax Foundation repeated by Gingrich. However, economist Kristen Sheeran, Ph.D., of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has addressed this directly: “[The Tax Foundation] report assumes that in a cap-and-trade system, there are no carbon revenues recycled back to households to offset the impacts of higher energy prices…. [A] cap-and-trade system where all permits are auctioned will generate a revenue stream that can be recycled back to households in these ways. This is well established in the literature, and the Tax Foundation report makes no reference to this literature at all.” (quote via 1Sky).

Gingrich’s claim The United States government failed to regulate Wall Street correctly, and the result has been trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to clean up the mess that politicians and bureaucrats created.

The U.S. government did fail to regulate Wall Street properly, but to claim that “politicians and bureaucrats” created the problem is a lie. In fact, a number of economists suggest that one of the men most directly responsible for regulatory failures of Wall Street was former GOP Senator Phil Gramm, author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that overturned many of the financial regulations that had maintained financial stability since 1933.

Gingrich’s claim Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were charged with managing mortgages, and in 2008 we saw a collapse of the United States housing market.

This is a lie that the GOP has stated repeatedly – and that S&R has exposed repeatedly. See the links for a more detailed deconstruction of the lie itself, but put simply, deregulation of the financial system was the cause of the housing market bubble and subsequent meltdown, not the number of mortgages insured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and economic data supports this conclusion.

Gingrich’s claim The first good thing in it is a provision that restricts the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating carbon, which the EPA is currently positioning itself to do. This would be a power grab of staggering proportions….

This is a lie. The Supreme Court of the United States decided on April 2, 2007 in Massachussets et al v. Environmental Protection Agency et al that the “EPA has statutory authority to regulate emission of such gases” due to the the fact that the definition “includes ‘any air pollution agent … , including any physical, chemical, … substance … emitted into … the ambient air … ,’ §7602(g) (emphasis added)—embraces all airborne compounds of whatever stripe. Moreover, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are undoubtedly ‘physical [and] chemical … substance[s].’”

In addition, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the EPA could choose not to regulate: “Under the [Clean Air] Act’s clear terms, EPA can avoid promulgating regulations only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.”

In other words, the EPA not only has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs), the Clean Air Act requires that the EPA regulate GHGs if they’re a public health hazard via the effects of climate disruption. When Congress requires that the EPA act on a pollutant, then it’s false to claim that following the law is a “power grab of staggering proportions.”

Gingrich’s claim Before anyone gives the Department of Energy sweeping new powers they should consider the absolute failure of the Department of Energy to keep its 2003 commitment to build an innovative “green coal” pilot project [FutureGen] by 2008.

The FutureGen program was canceled in 2008 by the Department of Energy (DoE). However, it’s interesting to point out that the failure Gingrich is complaining about happened under President George W. Bush. Painting the Obama Administration’s DoE with the same brush as the Bush era DoE is inaccurate at best.

Newt Gingrich was also caught in a bind by Representative Inslee when the latter pointed out that only two years ago, Gingrich had been a strong proponent of cap-and-trade:

Media Matters also has some interesting quotes further supporting Inslee’s point.

In his testimony before Congress, Newt Gingrich did what he always does – distorted facts, manipulated data, proved himself a hypocrite, and outright lied. If this was the best that the minority of the House Energy and Commerce Committee – Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment could do, then the draft version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is well on its way to becoming part of the U.S. Code.

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US.

There are perhaps reasons for optimism. Politics in America can be cyclical, and by that thinking our current reactionary hegemony may have run its natural course. The Millennial Generation, which is between 75-100 million strong and extremely active socially and politically, skews heavily away from the policies that have defined the nation since Reagan. And some believe that Obama is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime charismatic who, like John F. Kennedy, can redirect the course of the culture through sheer force of vision and will. If any or all of these things are true, then there is room for … hope.

But while hope is an occasionally helpful frame of mind, it’s no substitute for intelligence, insight, planning, hard work and cash.

As I consider the state of the Republic some 49 days into the Obama era, I find in that formulation a variety of reasons to worry. For starters, it strikes me that very few people – very few, even, of the most visible lights in the progressive firmament – truly understand the magnitude of the conservative climb to power or the nature of the strategy employed. It’s not well understood how long it took, for instance, or how complex the effort was, or how deeply the foundation was poured, or how much it cost. The shallowness of our popular history is a dangerous condition in an age of instant gratification, when winning a skirmish is all-too-easily mistaken for winning the war, and it’s nothing short of terrifying to think that some saw January 20 as the end of the struggle instead of the beginning.

Yes, it was a triumph, and we were right to pause and celebrate, to mark the achievement of a critical milestone, but afterward the collective sigh was nearly audible. I don’t want to overstate the effect, though. I’m not suggesting that a majority of American progressives think the hard part is over, that we can put our society on cruise control and that the wicked Republican Nosferatu is dead once and for all, because that’s simply not the case. Instead, I’m suggesting that we may not sufficiently understand the nature of our opponent and that the failure to stake it through the heart now, while it’s down, assures that it will rise from its all-too-shallow grave to terrorize us once more. The landscape has changed, for sure, but the fundamental engines that propelled the modern reactionary right to power in the first place are alive, well, and already hard at work plotting their resurrection.

The Long War Against America

Let’s take a second to understand a few of the relevant facts regarding the war that still rages around us.

1: The conservative revolution was a generation in the making. Those who laid the groundwork for the eventual ascent of the Republican kwisatz haderach took a long view – an astoundingly long view by American standards – and accepted the occasional tactical setback so long as the eternal march of the faithful continued. One of the godfathers of the movement, Daniel Bell, published his foundational The End of Ideology in 1960, and his intellectual contributions to the landscape we now inhabit can hardly be overstated. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), for instance, he gushed about the coming “information age” and painted a rather rosy picture of the life of the “information worker.” This new post-industrial age would be marked by certain significant shifts in axial principles, and among his more powerful claims was the assertion that growth in the information sector resulted necessarily in prestigious knowledge-based employment. Information sector jobs were depicted as automatically better-paying and more fulfilling.

Krishan Kumar’s 1978 retort (Prophecy and Progress: the Sociology of Industrial and Post-industrial Society) aptly demonstrated the fallacies in Bell’s reasoning. Information-based enterprises, like the industrial sector enterprises which preceded them, have a set of basic operational needs which are neither information nor expertise-based. A software operation, for example, requires the same custodial services as a manufacturing operation. Bell’s rhetoric, however, counts such menial employment by the same standards it uses for programmers and managers. In many practical respects, though, the daily operations of service sector businesses differ little from the industrial sector, and claims that a shift in the type of “product” offered from goods to services equals a change in the fundamental structure of employment ought to be greeted cautiously.

So, there you have a pointed exchange from Daniel Bell and Krishan Kumar, two men that you’ve probably never heard of. But ask yourself, which of the perspectives strikes you as rhetorically familiar? Which argument have you heard, and in service to what kinds of policies?

Right. And here’s how complete the rout was. The most enthusiastic parroting of Bell’s construction I’ve ever run across came from Al Gore when he was Vice President. The Democratic Vice President. Take this snippet from a 1994 speech to the International Telecommunications Union:

Approximately 60% of all US workers are “knowledge workers” — people whose jobs depend on the information they generate and receive over our information infrastructure. As we create new jobs, 8 out of 10 are in information-intensive sectors of our economy. And these new jobs are well-paying jobs for financial analysts, computer programmers, and other educated workers (Gore 1994).

One assumes “knowledge” companies don’t need janitors. Regardless, when we reach the point where our “liberal” leaders are reading directly from the script authored by conservative intellectuals, it’s safe to say that the progressive possibility is in deep, deep trouble.

2: The conservative revolution was built on a strong intellectual and academic foundation. (I do not, by the way, use the term “intellectual” to signify correctness or moral righteousness – one can be intellectual while being wrong and evil.) Given how effectively conservatives have kneecapped education in America, it’s remarkably ironic how important academics were to empowering the movement. Daniel Bell is noted above; he and other intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and those associated with a host of conservative “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution worked diligently to re-engineer the very DNA of America’s popular ideology. They sought to understand the collective psyche in ways that could be shifted, altered and exploited, and their efforts to deconstruct and re-encode our shared vocabulary is among the grandest achievements in the history of human propaganda. Turning “liberal” into a dirty word was barely the beginning.

These efforts mattered more than it is possible to quantify. As the neo-Marxist scholar Stuart Hall explains, the “battle of signification” is everything. Whoever wins the struggle to dictate to vocabulary used will win the debate.* Think about the abortion “debate” and the clever, almost-always unchallenged construction of “unborn human life.” If that phrase is allowed to stand, the pro-choicer has nearly zero chance of winning the argument.

3: The conservative movement was incredibly well-funded. And still is. One source estimates that between the late 1970s and late 1990s alone 12 major conservative foundations funneled hundreds of millions of dollars – at least – to think tanks, policy organizations, individual scholars, media apparatuses, legal organizations, advocacy groups and more. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations and the Adolph Coors Foundation are five of the biggest donors.

In 1988, the Olin Foundation alone distributed $55 million in grants. The Scaife family has donated more than $200 million over the years. Million dollar annual grants to individual think tanks are routine.

These Foundations have also been instrumental in creating the most famous think tanks. The Heritage Foundation, considered the leading think tank in America, was created in 1973 with $250,000 in seed money from brewery mogul Joseph Coors. The Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian think tank, was founded in 1977 by the Koch family foundations. )

….
According to the Center for Policy Alternatives, the major conservative think tanks in Washington had a combined budget of $45.9 million, while the major progressive think tanks had a combined budget of $10.2 million. What this means is that far-right think tanks are better able to publicize their findings, stage more conferences, lobby harder for their policies, and present more and better-packaged information before Congress.

Not too put too fine a point on it, but conservative interests have a lot of cash and they’ve proven conclusively that they’re willing to invest it in programs that assure their continued political, social, cultural and economic domination.

And while I hate to oversimplify complex dynamics, it must be said that the points I have just made go a long way toward explaining the last 30+ years of American political history. Yes, there are other factors, but subtract the cash and the intellectual groundwork it bought and our current landscape would look dramatically different. Whether that’s a good thing I’ll let you decide for yourself. My opinion is probably obvious, but I’m not a billionaire.

What Must Be Done

In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman does a meticulous job of explaining how we got here from there – “there” being the New Deal society that stands today as the Golden Age of American prosperity. Toward the end he sounds an optimistic note, suggesting that some of the factors that played key roles in the rise of movement conservatism are waning – racism, for instance – and that without their broad mobilizing power the conservatives are in deep kim-chee. There is ample evidence supporting his claims, so perhaps he’s right. I certainly hope so. But if I might return to my vampire metaphor from earlier, when you have the soul-sucking undead bastard down, you don’t stand around hoping. You drive a stake through its evil, demonic heart.

Right now, almost 50 days into the Obama administration, we have Dracula on the canvas. And this is where you, my friends, come in. The way we assure an enlightened future for our nation is to act, and act resolutely, to make sure that movement conservatism stays down. In order to accomplish this, we need to proceed along the following fronts:

We must empower progressive intellectuals the way the Right has empowered theirs. As researchers like George Lakoff have demonstrated, much of the conservative success emerged from how they framed issues and re-encoded the very language we all speak. Political lingustics is an important field – as noted earlier – and if we can successfully keep the English language from being transformed into Newspeak we will hamstring the conservative noise machine in a meaningful way.

However, Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute recently closed its doors and various of its brightest lights are currently seeking to find funds to build on its work. Put simply, the bright lights on the Right are living well while our brightest and best are, as is so often the case, struggling to survive.

We must restore credibility and integrity to the media. As I’ve noted elsewhere, things began to unravel in earnest when Reagan’s newly appointed FCC apparatchiks were allowed to decree, with a straight face, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” Newspeak, indeed. Now reporting has been replaced by “fair and balanced” and there is a frighteningly real risk that journalism – real journalism – is dying.

Its future, if it has one, perhaps lies in endowment. I’ve heard a variety of ideas tossed around, including Mother Jones’ new tilt at non-profit journalism. I can’t say what the successful model will look like at this point, but if it emerges, it will center on the insulation of reporting and analysis from the influence of cash and spin.

We must revitalize our educational infrastructure around the imperatives of intellectual inquiry and critical thought. We have seemingly convinced ourselves that the only proper function of education is job training, and that’s an ideology that serves an identifiable master. Specifically, let’s ask ourselves who benefits when an ed system cranks out people with “marketable” skills but no capability for asking uneasy questions about their condition.

There is no surer innoculation against tyranny than a critically minded citizenry. To this end we must invest in education – and I say “invest” instead of “spend” because every dollar you spend is returned to you several times over – and invest mightily. Invest in educational innovation, in new ways of teaching everything from basic math and science to advanced reasoning skills. Invest heavily in early childhood reading programs, because nothing better energizes subsequent, lifelong learning. And most of all, invest in public education. The next time you hear somebody ranting about the marvels of vouchers and “competition” in education, remember a few things.

First, America has historically out-learned, out-taught, out-researched and out-innovated every nation on the face of the Earth. The people who did that were, in most cases, the products of public education.

Second, we’ve always had alternatives to public ed – “competition,” if you will. Private schools, parochial schools, and so on. If competition cured all ills, then how do we explain the state of contemporary public ed?

Third, we have more alternatives than ever today. We have the options noted in the previous item, plus Montessoris and Charters and again, all this competition seems not to have solved our problems.

Finally, the next time you hear rosy conservative rhetoric that seems at little at odds with the empirical world you live in, remember – we live in an age where the language has been re-tooled to serve the ends of a narrow minority. It’s possible, just possible, that you’re hearing propaganda instead of fact. And always feel free to backtrack the data. It may just come from one of those marvelously well-funded conservative “think tanks.”

In summary: Dear Progressive Billionaires, America needs your money. And I don’t mean a million here and million there. I mean hundreds of millions, even billions. If we are to realize any meaningful dreams of hope and change, we must have a world where our brightest and best can apply their minds to our shared problems as professionals. When their intellects are doing it for a living and ours are trying to carve out a couple hours after work, we lose. When their brightest minds are primarily concerned with crafting winning policy and ours are constantly distracted by desperate concerns about their ability to feed their families, they win.

Money isn’t everything, but since you’re a billionaire I’ll assume that you understand a thing or two about what it can accomplish.

Thanks for your time. If you find some value in what I’ve said but aren’t sure where to start, click the Contact button and drop me a line. I know people who are worthy of your generosity and people who will reward your support a thousand times over.

Sincerely,

Sam Smith

_______________

* See “The work of representation.” in Stuart Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage/The Open University, 1997), 13-74.

Now imagine that the doors to the room are closed, and that the participants remain unidentified, and that, in fact, “Senate aides had threatened to expel anyone who divulged details of the work group,” reports The New York Times:

Since last fall, many of the leading figures in the nation’s long-running health care debate have been meeting secretly in a Senate hearing room. Now, with the blessing of the Senate’s leading proponent of universal health insurance, Edward M. Kennedy, they appear to be inching toward a consensus that could reshape the debate.

The 20 or so people in that room sitting around tables arranged in a square, says The Times, “include lobbyists for AARP, Aetna, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Business Roundtable, Easter Seals, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the United States Chamber of Commerce.”

Well, I’m not inside that room, and neither are you. And we should be, because President Obama said we would be.

In a memorandum on the White House website headlined “Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies,” President Obama said:

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. …

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. [emphasis in original]

Now, these “talks” have not been arranged at the behest of the White House. Sen. Ted Kennedy and his aides have done so — and he ought to know better than to discuss such an issue behind closed doors. In its news story, The Times offers this thinly disguised opinion (surprise!): “It is not clear whether such back-room negotiations are still viable at a time when politicians are promising a new transparency and condemning the influence of lobbyists.”

Well, duh. The president promised transparency. But on health care, the White House has tolerated the secrecy and “has been kept informed and is encouraging the Senate effort as a way to get the ball rolling on health legislation.”

The “workhorse group,” as characterized in a summary by Senate aides, has addressed such questions as “how to enforce the requirement for everyone to have health insurance; how to make insurance affordable to the uninsured; and whether to require employers to help buy coverage for their employees.”

Health care constitutes 15 percent of gross domestic product. As a policy issue, it is probably responsible for more anxiety in the public’s mind than any other.

The public should be in that room. It should know what is said and who said it. At least provide a transcript posted on the White House website.

The response? The USA PATRIOT Act. It authorized expanded powers for US intelligence and law enforcement agencies including surveillance capabilities, broadened the definition of “terrorism”, increased border security and gave the Treasury the ability to stop money laundering the world over.

But its authority is so broad that it can lend itself to abuse. It gives power to wiretap and spy on law-abiding American citizens including monitoring what they read at the library, “sneak and peek”  without a warrant, and access to medical and financial records. Plus, this large bill was being quickly pushed through Congress without giving it full consideration or even being read by those voting on it.

Now imagine if almost every Democratic member of Congress voted against the Act based on those reasons. Or perhaps they didn’t trust this new, untested administration to do what is right. Or maybe they did it to just make a point about party unity. Would there be a public outcry? Would the pundits say that the opposition party did not grasp the enormity of the situation and that in this moment of peril it is better to “shoot first and ask questions later”? With the great danger the country is in, would it be better to err on the side of giving too much power to the government to deal with the crisis than too little?

Remember your mental answers to those questions as I change the circumstances slightly.

Let’s zoom back to the present day. The national and world economies have never been in as bad shape since the Great Depression. We have been losing a half a million jobs a month since the election and now 4.81 million people collect unemployment benefits, the highest number in at least 40 years. Consumer confidence is at a 29-year low. The Dow has lost a quarter of its value since September. The financial sector has $1.17 trillion in defaulted loans on its books which lead to a 12.4% reduction in housing prices. 1 in 9 US homes are now vacant.

The response? The $787 billion economic recovery package. It offers the largest tax cut in US history,  $272 billion for the working class. $58 billion to jump-start green energy infrastructure and another $90 billion to shore up traditional infrastructure – from bridges to roads to levees and transit. There’s $100 billion to boost welfare and unemployment, $112 billion for health care in Medicare, electronic medial records and preventative care. And then there’s billions for school reconstruction, greening federal buildings, Head Start, buying foreclosed homes, and laying down broadband for the entire country.

But this is a big bill. At a heft of over 1000 pages it has the biggest price tag of any stimulus bill ever debated in Congress. And that debate didn’t include many Republicans; only the very moderate got to influence the bill significantly while the more conservative members got their ideas heard out but never implemented. But this bill is so large it would fundamentally change the size and scope of the government’s influence in American lives. And like the PATRIOT Act, this thing blazed through Congress and no one had a chance to read it all.

Now the Republicans had their equivalent of the PATRIOT Act sitting in front of them. So what would they do? What if almost every Republican member of Congress voted against the Act based on the above reasons? Or perhaps they didn’t trust this new, untested administration to do what is right. Or maybe they did it to just make a point about party unity. Would there be a public outcry? Would the pundits say that the opposition party did not grasp the enormity of the situation and that in this moment of peril it is better to “shoot first and ask questions later”? With the great danger the country is in, would it be better to err on the side of giving too much power to the government to deal with the crisis than too little?

Some might balk at equating 9/11 with the current economic crisis. But its impact and reach are very similar. There was a lot of talk about going into the depths of another Great Depression, but the institutions and foundations laid down after the Great Depression would prevent that great of a collapse. Just like there was a lot of talk about 9/11 being another Pearl Harbor, but we were then facing a coalition of highly militarized, fascist countries actively attacking America and invading its allies.   Now we are facing a small number of fanatics with light arms. You can compare the two by type but not size.

Let me put it in an SAT equation:

Pearl Harbor : 9/11 :: Great Depression : today’s major recession

Our country has faced worse in the past and it is entirely within our capabilities to deal with our present crises. And while the Democrats were willing to take on 9/11 on the Republicans’ terms, the Republicans aren’t willing to tackle this economic crisis with the Democrats holding the reins. Every single House Republican voted against this bill along with all but three Senators. This is either because the Republicans don’t appreciate the dire straits that we are in, they had issues about the substance of the bill and way that it was pushed through, or they are more concerned with with their party than their country. My guess that it is a little of all three.

But … I doubt it. An obstacle lies squarely in the path of politicians’ ability or willingness to act sensibly and selflessly. That obstacle is money. Or, rather, the pursuit of it to grasp and maintain power, prestige, and wealth.

Despite any number of outrageous conflations of influential wealth and influenced legislation, and despite the protestations of the masses with fewer dollars over the power of the few with many dollars, and despite the laughable “reforms” Congress attempts occasionally, money is not going to leave politics.

Wishing won’t make it so. Neither will endless, whining posts by bloggers like me. Money is part of the DNA of politics and will remain so (thanks, in part, to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the “Millionaire’s Amendment” in McCain-Feingold).

“We need transparency,” yell the populists, the progressives, and those just plain pissed off. “We need more disclosure,” they shout.

Sure. Why not. Badger Congress into writing legislation uninfluenced by lobbyists that would produce more transparency and more disclosure of all that money. (Hope the Senate gets around to allowing electronic filing of campaign finance reports …)

That, of course, is unlikely, because so much money is involved — and so much power. Full, easy-to-access transparency of every political dollar means easy-to-access identification of those who may be trading donations for access to legislators. Ditto lobbying expenditures.

The Democratic and Republican parties along their hench-committees — the national committees, the congressional campaign committees, and the senate campaign committees — collected more than $3 billion for the 2008 election cycle — and more than $12.8 billion since 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That does not count fundraising by individual congressional and presidential candidates, which is likely billions more.

Many of our representatives in Congress began their political careers running for statewide offices back home. Well, in 2008, that was pricey, too. Fundraising for all candidates and committees — governors, state House and Senate seats, other statewide posts — exceeded $1.9 billion, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 2000, according to the institute’s data, state political races have accounted for $13.1 billion in fundraising.

That’s about $46 billion in political spending in just eight years (and doesn’t count lobbying expenditures aimed at state legislators and state agencies).

Some months ago, I argued that, because the paltry public funding raised through the IRS check-off represented so little money, Congress should add $10 billion a year to the federal budget to pay for every single election in the United States. The public, I argued, must outbid the monied, corporate influence seekers who fund political campaigns in exchange for access to politicians unavailable to you and me.

Well, I must have taken a Phelps-sized bong hit before I wrote that post. The likelihood that Congress would approve public financing of political campaigns so substantial that office seekers would forego any other campaign contributions is damn small. Non-existent, in fact. The lobbyists whose influence depends on infusing money into politics will not let that happen.

Since 2000, lobbyists have spent $20.3 billion to lobby Congress and federal agencies (most notably, regulatory agencies), according to the center.

Sadly, politics operates in a world inhabited by money raised through lobbyists and other influence seekers and peddlers, bundlers, 527s, inauguration committees, state and national party campaign committees, convention committees and, probably, leftover Nixon bagmen.

It’s difficult, too, to tell the difference between a politician and a lobbyist, because they’re often the same person. Revolving Door, a study of the nexus between governing and lobbying by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, found that “17 of 24 former Bush Cabinet members have taken positions with at least 119 companies, including 65 firms that lobby the government and 40 that lobby the agencies they headed.”

It’s not just former executive branch members selling access for profit. Since 2005, 195 members of Congress have fled Capitol Hill for K Street to become lobbyists — and cash in on their access to their former congressional colleagues. And don’t forget the senior congressional staff members that flit back and forth from K Street to Capitol Hill.

Since the early ’90s found former House Speaker Tom DeLay gaming the system to secure and hold GOP power, politics has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. There’s so much money to be made by so many entities, from the broadcasters who sell air time for ads, to political consultants who poll the populace and design the ads, to the companies that provide computers and phones, and even caterers. In the business of politics, there’s plenty of money to go around.

Writes Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, Feb. 2:

Washington is broken: Lobbyists and special interests have turned our government into a game that only they can afford to play. They write the checks, and the citizenry gets stuck with the bill. Politics is no longer a mission; it’s a business.

All of this is damn disgusting. Plenty of folks are fed up with the role of money in politics. So consider these two points:

1. Money will remain in politics and in fact increase.
2. People are fed up with the behavior of those pouring money into politics and profiting.

At what point will Fact 2 erode the impact of Fact 1? Not soon, argues Mr. Kaiser in discussing President Obama’s pledge to curb lobbyists’ influence in D.C.:

But slowing the revolving door will not be nearly enough to dismantle the Washington culture of money, lobbying and self-dealing that has metastasized over four decades. This culture has created multimillionaires and provided a grand style of life to thousands. It has helped moneyed interests protect their status and privileges, undermined government regulation of business and turned our elected officials into chronic money-chasers. Real reform will require more than presidential fiat.

But consider the failure of former Sen. Tom Daschle’s failed nomination for an Obama Cabinet post because the solon-turned-sinecure was too dumb or too selfish to pay about $140,000 in income taxes on a car service provided by an influential friend. Because of Sen. Daschle’s moronic — or arrogant — mistake, the public learned that his carefully crafted common-man image was merely an artifice.

Consider, too, the similarly errant, stupid tax behaviors of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who failed to pay $34,000 he owed until offered a cabinet job. And the idiocy of Nancy Killefer, “chosen to be the White House chief performance officer, who once had a $900 lien placed on her house for failing to pay unemployment taxes on household help.”

Has the outrageous, callous behaviors revealed of politicians and political wanna-bees cracked the public’s tolerance for business-as-usual Washington, D.C., politics?

Perhaps. But I’ll bet you $46 billion over the next eight years it hasn’t.

“Wanna make some serious money real fast — and legal? Yeah, really — legally.

“All you gotta do is give me about $114 million. That’s all — and I’ll give you an ROI of 258,449 percent. Yep. You heard right — 258,449 percent. You’ll make $295.2 billion.

“That work for you?”

Apparently, yes. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, the now-fabled, poorly supervised “TARP,” has been quite a lucrative return on investment for companies getting the taxpayer-funded bailout bucks.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics:

The struggling companies whose freewheeling business practices have contributed to the country’s economic woes are getting a lucrative return on at least one of their investments. Beneficiaries of the $700 billion bailout package in the finance and automotive industries have spent a total of $114.2 million on lobbying in the past year and contributions toward the 2008 election. … The companies’ political activities have, in part, yielded them $295.2 billion from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), an extraordinary return of 258,449 percent.

Says the center’s director, Sheila Krumholz:

Even in the best economic times, you won’t find an investment with a greater payoff than what these companies have been getting. Some of the companies and industries that have received payments may now consider their contributions and lobbying to be the smartest investments they’ve made in years.”

Now, who received the most in campaign contributions from these companies? Why, the politicians who are charged with oversight of TARP expenditures.

According to the center:

They include Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (he received $854,200 from the companies in the 2008 election cycle, including money to his presidential campaign) and Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, chair of the Senate Finance Committee (he received $279,000). In total, members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Senate Finance Committee and House Financial Services Committee received $5.2 million from TARP recipients in the 2007-2008 election cycle.

President Obama’s campaign received at least $4.3 million in donations from employees at these companies.

The center provides a chart listing TARP recipients as of Feb. 2, campaign contributions for the 2007-2008 cycle, lobbying expenditures for 2008, the amount of TARP money received, and what the center terns “return on investment.” Some ROIs reach into millions of percent.

It’s interesting but infuriating reading, of course, and the analysis is somewhat flawed and unfair. Not all of the lobbying expenditures were directly targeted at obtaining TARP money. Many of the campaign contributions may actually have been given because of a corporate donor’s belief in a particular candidate (please, stop laughing.)

But that amount of money placed into politics by corporations that control global financial markets amounts to an enormous megaphone. Politicians can’t help but hear, let alone be deafened, by voices that loud.

The center’s analysis is instructive. It reminds us yet again of the corrosive role of Big Money in political decision making.

State populations in the South and Southwest will have grown appreciably more than in the Midwest and Northeast, reflecting immigration and migration trends that took root after World War II. Consequently, the shift of political power from the latter to the former will continue (see map). For example, the population of California, the most populous state in the union and larger than all but 34 nations, will grow nearly 8 percent from 2000 to 2010 — but California will lose a seat in the House.

Following redistricting is important because reapportionment and redistricting may shift power in the House of Representatives. How great a shift depends on an intricate political calculus involving party control of legislatures and governorships.

This decennial dance may determine which party is best positioned to retain or regain control of the House following 2012 elections. That’s why Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee, pushed his “50-State Strategy” to rule as many state legislatures as possible to take control of mapping new congressional district boundaries. The Democrats now control both chambers in 27 states. But did it really work? In the 21 states expected to gain or lose House seats, 16 seats are at issue with the GOP holding the upper hand for more than half.

In this post, S&R examines states likely to lose or gain House seats through reapportionment and the role and influence of state legislatures and governors in redistricting.

Redistricting is complex, controversial

Given the recent gerrymandering debacles in one state alone — Texas — the early months of the next decade are likely to show American politics at its worst. After all, the deposed speaker of the House, Tom DeLay, demonstrated how to redraw congressional district lines to unduly influence the ability of Texas Republicans to gain seats in the House. Now, here’s the bad news — after reapportionment following the 2010 census, Texas is expected to gain four seats in the House. And you betcha that they’ll be carved out to add four Republican seats in the House that could erode the current Democratic majority. Think Mr. DeLay’s still out of politics? He may be, but the political processes he used are assuredly not.

Redistricting is perhaps the most complicated and mysterious of American political processes because 1) it may differ from state to state due to law and what party controls what arms of government, 2) it is often involves horse-trading out of the public eye, and 3) it has habitually been inadequately covered by the press because of the previous two reasons. As John Dean wrote in Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches:

Political pundits and commentators dismiss “process issues” by claiming they are of no interest to Americans. They are wrong. … Today, in Washington, process is the name of the game, and those who do not understand this fact are operating in ignorance. Political observers who do not make an effort to understand process matters will remain uninformed.

To understand redistricting, a useful text is “A Citizen’s Guide to Redistricting” by Justin Levitt and Bethany Foster of the Brennan Center for Justice, available as a pdf.

Mr. Levitt and Ms. Foster point out that redistricting matters because it allows politicians to choose their voters, eliminate incumbents — or challengers — from opposing parties, pack districts with partisan supporters, dilute the influence of minority voters, and split communities along unnatural lines.

Therefore it’s important for political observers in any state to be aware of who redraws district lines. In each state, the usual recipe of influences includes the governor, the leaders of the state House and state Senate, and, sometimes, members of “advisory commissions” on redistricting. In most states, the legislature redraws districts with the governor enjoying veto power, which, in turn, can be overridden by the legislature. And, of course, when no one agrees, the courts step in.

Now, imagine differing combinations of party control in a state: One party holding the governorship and both chambers of the legislature; one party holding the governorship but neither chamber of the legislature; and one party holding the governorship but the legislature divided by party. This is where redistricting can get messy.

Reapportionment after 2010: Winners and losers

Here’s a look at the states expected to gain or lose House seats following the 2010 census. (Clark Benson of Polidata, a political research firm, provided the estimates of gain or loss. Redistricting schemes are primarily drawn from the Brennan Center guide.)

ARIZONA: currently 8 seats; gains 2. Voted for Sen. McCain, 54 percent to 45. Senate: even; House: GOP. DEM Gov. Janet Napolitano. Uses a commission (two DEM, two GOP, one Independent) with exclusive authority. Governor cannot veto. (If Gov. Napolitano gives up her seat to become head of the Department of Homeland Security, GOP Secretary of State Jan Brewer will automatically become governor.) Current seats: 5 DEM, 3 GOP.

CALIFORNIA: currently 53 seats; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 61-38. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 34 DEM, 18 GOP.

FLORIDA: currently 25 seats; gains 2. Voted for president-elect Obama, 51-49. Senate: GOP; House: GOP. GOP Gov. Charlie Crist. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 15 GOP, 10 DEM.

GEORGIA: currently 13 seats; gains 1. Voted for Sen. McCain, 52-47. Senate: GOP; House: GOP. GOP Gov. Sonny Perdue. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: GOP 7, DEM 6.

ILLINOIS: currently 19 seats; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 62-37. House: DEM; Senate: DEM. DEM Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 12 DEM, 7 GOP.

IOWA: currently 5 seats; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 54-45. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Chet Culver. Nonpartisan legislative staff draw district maps sans political or election data that are submitted to the legislature for approval. If the legislature cannot agree, the state Supreme Court may approve the maps. Current seats: 3 DEM, 2 GOP.

LOUISIANA: currently 7 seats; loses 1. Voted for Sen. McCain, 51-49. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 4 GOP, 1 DEM.

MASSACHUSETTS: currently 10 seats; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 62-36. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Deval Patrick. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Following the 2000 census, the Democratically controlled Legislature overrode the then-Republican governor’s veto of new district maps. Current seats: 10 DEM.

MICHIGAN: currently 15; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 57-41. Senate: GOP; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. (If Gov. Granholm is tapped for a post in the Obama administration, her seat would be filled by DEM Lt. Gov. John Cherry, but the new lieutenant governor would be chosen by the GOP-controlled state Senate.) Current seats: 8 DEM, 7 GOP.

MINNESOTA: currently 8; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 54-44. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Following the 2000 census, with no legislative agreement, state Supreme Court drew lines. Current seats: 5 DEM, 3 GOP.

MISSOURI: currently 9; loses 1. Voted for Sen. McCain, 50-49. Senate: GOP; House: GOP. GOP Gov. Matt Blunt. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Following the 2000 census, absent legislative agreement, a court drew district lines. Current seats: 5 GOP, 4 DEM.

NEVADA: currently 3 seats; gains 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 55-43. Senate: DEM (change); House: DEM. GOP Gov. Jim Gibbons. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 2 DEM, 1 GOP.

NEW JERSEY: currently 13 seats; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 57-42. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Jon Corzine. Uses political commission selected by majority and minority leaders and state major party chairs; governor cannot veto. (If Gov. Corzine, a former U.S. senator, takes a post in the Obama administration, DEM Senate President Dick Codey would succeed him.) Current seats: 8 DEM, 5 GOP.

NEW YORK: currently 29; loses 2. Voted for president-elect Obama, 62-39. Senate: DEM (change); House: DEM. DEM Gov. Paterson. Uses an advisory commission; governor can veto. Current seats: 26 DEM, 3 GOP.

NORTH CAROLINA: currently 13 seats; gains 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 50-49. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Mike Easley. Legislature draws districts; governor cannot veto. Current seats: 8 DEM, 5 GOP.

OHIO: currently 18 seats; loses 2. Voted for president-elect Obama, 51-47. Senate: GOP; House: DEM (change). DEM Gov. Ted Strickland. Advisory commission draws districts; governor can veto. Redistricting, controlled by the GOP in 2001, may be more contentious with a divided legislature. (If Gov. Strickland, a prominent early supporter of president-elect Obama, leaves office for an Obama administration post, he would be succeeded by DEM Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher.) Current seats: 9 DEM, 8 GOP.

OREGON: currently 5 seats; gains 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 57-41. Senate: DEM; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Ted Kulongoski. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Following the 2000 census, DEM Gov. John Kitzhaber vetoed a Republican-backed redistricting bill; a court drew the lines. Current seats: 4 DEM, 1 GOP.

PENNSYLVANIA: currently 19 seats; loses 1. Voted for president-elect Obama, 55-44. Senate: GOP; House: DEM. DEM Gov. Ed Rendell. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 12 DEM, 7 GOP.

SOUTH CAROLINA: currently 6 seats; gains 1. Voted for Sen. McCain, 54-45. Senate: GOP; House: GOP. GOP Gov. Mark Sanford. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Following the 2000 census, DEM Gov. James Hovis Hodges vetoed a GOP-backed legislative plan; a court drew district lines. Current seats: 4 GOP, 2 DEM.

TEXAS: currently 32 seats; gains 4. Voted for Sen. McCain, 55-44. Senate: GOP; House: GOP. GOP Gov. Rick Perry. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Following the 2000 census, no agreement was reached by the GOP governor, GOP Senate, and DEM House; the redistricting battle was partly settled by the U.S. Supreme Court and cemented Rep. Tom DeLay’s iconic reputation through what writer Jeffrey Toobin called “a Promethean display of political power.” Current seats: 20 GOP, 12 DEM.

UTAH: currently 3 seats; gains 1. Voted for Sen. McCain, 63-34. Senate: GOP; House: GOP. GOP Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. Legislature draws districts; governor can veto. Current seats: 2 GOP, 1 DEM.

Some states, while not gaining or losing House seats through reapportionment, may have to redistrict because of changes in population density within the states, perhaps producing changes in which party holds specific seats.

The struggle to control state legislatures

The 2006 and 2008 elections left America with the fewest number of politically divided legislatures since 1982, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats control 27 statehouses, the Republicans control 14, and 7 statehouses are split. (Nebraska is unicameral.)

The Democratic Party believed control of the House of Representatives could in large measure be achieved by focusing on gaining control of both chambers of state legislatures. Democrats underwrote that effort principally through the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, according to Rachel Morris, writing in Washington Monthly:

[M]any national Democrats have been turning their attention to elections for state legislatures, which in all but eight states draw the boundaries of congressional seats according to the census. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), a K-Street political organization focused on state races, is helping candidates in places like Michigan with money, fundraising assistance, training, and logistical support. Emily’s List, a large political action committee that aims to elect more pro-choice women to Congress, is also pouring resources into state campaigns, and training both male and female candidates with the aim of winning legislative chambers to control redistricting. And this August, the DLCC, along with other national groups, established a tax-exempt organization called Foundation for the Future, which plans to raise and spend $17 million to coordinate Democrats’ long-term redistricting efforts. Political reporters this year have been understandably consumed with the few dozen close congressional races that could shift the balance of power in Washington after November. But they’ve missed a similarly fierce and focused battle over state legislative seats, one that could be just as important in determining control of the House in the not-so-distant future. [emphasis added]

That strategy appears, at first glance, to have succeeded. Democrats now control legislatures in 27 states, compared with the GOP’s 14. Of the 21 states (listed earlier) expected to gain or lose House seats, state legislatures draw district boundaries in 17. Of the 21 lose-or-gain states, Democrats control 11 legislatures; the GOP controls 6.

But the states held by Democrats represent a net loss of 8 seats; those controlled by the GOP represent a net gain of 9 seats. The states legislatively controlled by Democrats have a combined 113 Democratic House seats and 49 GOP House seats. The states legislatively controlled by Republicans have a combined 35 Democratic seats and 53 GOP seats.

Is it possible that despite controlling more state legislatures in gain-or-loss states, the Democrats could actually lose seats in the House through reapportionment and redistricting? State legislators are politicians. Within the limitations set by law, they will use redistricting to protect their parties’ interests. But if the Democrats control states that will have net loss of seats in the House, how will their party be best served?

The power of governors

Governors enjoy potent political influence over redistricting. As politicians, they are the titular heads of their parties. Through patronage, they can reward or punish the behaviors of others — such as legislators. They can choose to campaign — or not — for legislative incumbents or challengers. Governors simply know too many people — and have influence over them — throughout their states for their political clout to be ignored during redistricting battles.

In many states, governors, while by law not the principal author of new district lines, hold veto power over legislatively drafted districts. (Note that in cases where governors and legislatures cannot agree, courts often step in to draw district lines.) Obviously, it is to the advantage of a party to control both the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.

Following the 2008 elections, Democrats control governments in 16 states; Republicans are in charge in only 9 states. But …

Democrats rule over 16 states that represent, after reapportionment, a net loss of 5 House seats; The GOP commands 9 states that represent a net gain of 9 House seats.

More change is ahead. Writes Sam Stein at HuffPo:

An abundance of [governorships] are in play. There will be 36 gubernatorial races in 2010, compared to 11 such elections this cycle. Of those 36, 19 are for state houses currently held by Democrats. And of those 19, ten will involve Democratic governors who won’t be running for reelection (either because of term limits or retirement). …

In 28 states, the governor has the authority to veto any redistricting plan. In eight separate states, the governor can veto only a congressional plan. In another five states, the governor is responsible for appointing members to the redistricting board. And in three states — not separate — the governor is directly involved in redrawing the district him or herself. In only eight states does the executive body actually not play a role. As both Democratic and Republican officials readily acknowledge, the partisan makeup of a newly shaped congressional district will almost certainly reflect the politics of the sitting governor. [emphasis added]

The Democrats have enjoyed enormous successes in Congress since 2004 and now control the federal government. A Democrat will sit in the White House. Democrats will run the Senate and the House. But the key to continuance of Democratic control lies in the states. Over the next three years, 49 states will have gubernatorial races. Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson has written that “[r]ight now, the GOP is executing a plan to take 38 governorships over the next three years. If they accomplish this, they will have the power to shrewdly alter election district borders and steal back Congress.”

Similarly, margins of Democratic control in state legislatures are often narrow. A statement on redistricting by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee says, “Currently, of the 36 state legislatures that control Congressional redistricting, 27 chambers in 21 of these states are within 5 seats of tying or changing hands. These 21 states control 260 Congressional districts.”

Democrats and progressives may rejoice at the televised images of a chastised GOP being driven out of D.C., its tail between its legs.

They shouldn’t get too comfy, and they certainly ought to keep their eyes on coming races for state legislatures and governorships. That’s where power will be maintained — or lost.