Posts by David Sirota

David Sirota was the top spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. He is currently writing a book on the middle class economic squeeze for Crown Publishers. You can contact him at Davidsirota.com.

Best Little Whorehouse in Washington
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on October 1, 2009 at 8:27 AM.

 D.C. is a town teeming with corporate brothels. You've got your non-profit bordellos like Third Way, your for-profit massage parlors like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, K Street is the single biggest red-light district in the world. But bar none, the best little whorehouse in definitely the New Democratic Caucus, and this Bloomberg News story could serve as its advertisement:

The New Democrats got Rep. Barney Frank to drop provisions that would have required banks to offer so-called plain vanilla products like 30-year mortgages or low-fee credit cards. The lawmakers were also influential in excluding non-financial companies such as accounting firms, auto dealers and retailers from the agency's oversight...

Now the group is turning its attention to brokering a more difficult compromise over whether the proposed consumer agency should have the power to enforce its rules over banks that already answer to federal regulators, and whether states should be allowed to enact consumer-protection rules for nationally chartered financial institutions that are stricter than federal standards.

The coalition hasn't taken a public position on either issue, though its members are wary of the administration proposal that gives the new regulator policing power and allows states to enforce tougher rules. Those concerns are shared by the banking industry.

The story goes on to note that in just the first six months of 2009, the 15 New Democrats on the relevant Financial Services committee "received about $1.9 million in contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate industries." They may be high-class hookers - but that's a pittance when considering their work will result in  billions of dollars in higher consumer fees - and thus an orgasmic happy ending for bank executives.

What's so hilarious about these harlets is the public justifications they offer up for their prostitution. They insist their lascivious behavior has nothing at all to do with the cash their clients throw at them, citing everything from "good policy" to personal experience. This is my favorite:

We're pro-growth, innovative Democrats with real-life experience," said New York Representative Joseph Crowley, who is the coalition's chairman and also was invited on Air Force One after the president's speech. "Many of us come out of the business world."

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An Idiot's Guide to Tom Friedman's Idiocy
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on September 24, 2009 at 10:33 AM.

Tom Friedman may be the single stupidest figure in American public life, and certainly is the supidest writer with such a large platform. I don't mean that he's wrong on everything (although he is substantively wrong on a lot of things) - I mean that he's actually an extremely dim bulb in that he displays a stunning lack of basic cognitive function. Specifically, he shows almost zero ability to realize that the arguments made by Tom Friedman often undermine the arguments made by Tom Friedman.

A great example of this is Friedman's recent column, decrying the truly lamentable fact that federal stimulus money is subsidizing job offshoring and foreign green industries, and not building jobs and green industries at home:

So, right now, our federal and state subsidies for installing solar systems are largely paying for the cost of importing solar panels made in China, by Chinese workers, using hi-tech manufacturing equipment invented in America...if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you're going to love importing solar panels from China.

He's right on the substance, of course. Stimulus money is subsidizing all of that, as many of us predicted well before the stimulus passed. Why? In part because Tom Friedman, other pundits and corporations all made sure that the stimulus's "Buy American" provisions were severely watered down. Here was Friedman not-so-subtly attacking "Buy America" provisions as "protectionist" back during the stimulus debate:

President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan...Each Indian state tries to protect its little economy with its own rules. America should not be trying to copy that...Protectionism did not cause the Great Depression, but it sure helped to make it "Great."

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The Wrong Kind of Pressure from Obama?
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on September 16, 2009 at 5:37 PM.

In my post earlier today, I suggested that if the president wanted to pass legislation, rather than just be a famous person, he would probably need to do the hard, unglamorous work of, ya know, trying to pass legislation. That is, he'd have to start pressuring senators to pass specific legislation. I suggested that with House Democrats taking a progressive pro-public-option stance on health care, and with 60 votes not there for a non-public-option bill in the Senate, a straightforward path would be for him to specifically pressure public option opponents to relent.

The good news is that the president seems to be starting to get serious about legislating. The bad news, as Jane Hamsher notes, is that he may be getting serious specifically about pressuring Democrats to drop the public option.

We'll see what comes of the White House meeting with Sen. Jay Rockefeller. Maybe the president is listening to Rockefeller and is going to come around to his position. I sure hope that's the case (and if it is, I will happily amend this post).

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Hours After Pelosi Backs off on Public Option, Health Lobbyist Announces Fundraiser in Her Honor
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on September 11, 2009 at 3:47 PM.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the first time yesterday suggested she may be backing off her support of the public option. According to CNN, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "said they would support any provision that increases competition and accessibility for health insurance - whether or not it is the public option favored by most Democrats." When "asked if inclusion of a public option was a non-negotiable demand - as her previous statements had indicated  Pelosi ruled out any non-negotiable positions," according to CNN.

This announcement came just hours before Steve Elmendorf, a registered UnitedHealth lobbyist and the head of UnitedHealth's lobbying firm Elmendorf Strategies, blasted this email invitation throughout Washington, D.C. I just happened to get my hands on a copy of the invitation from a source - check out this OpenLeft exclusive:

From: Steve Elmendorf [mailto:steve@elmendorfstrategies.com]
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:31 AM
Subject: event with Speaker Pelosi at my home

You are cordially invited to a reception with

Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi

Thursday, September 24, 2009
6:30pm ~ 8:00pm

At the home of
Steve Elmendorf
2301 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Apt. 7B
Washington, D.C.

$5,000 PAC
$2,400 Individual

To RSVP or for additional information please contact
Carmela Clendening at (202) 485-3508 or clendening@dccc.org

Steve Elmendorf            
ELMENDORF STRATEGIES
GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS SOLUTIONS
900 7th Street NW Suite 750  Washington DC 20001
(202) 737-1655

Again, Elmendorf is a registered lobbyist for UnitedHealth, and his firm's website brags about its work for UnitedHealth on its website (Elmendorf was also a chief of staff for Democratic Minority Leader Dick Gephardt).

The sequencing here is important: Pelosi makes her announcement and then just hours later, the fundraising invitation goes out. Coincidental? I'm guessing no - these things rarely ever are.

I wrote a book a few years ago called Hostile Takeover whose premise was that corruption and legalized bribery has become so widespread that nobody in Washington even tries to hide it. This is about as good an example of that truism as I've ever seen.

Sign of the Apocalypse: Mike "Heckuva Job Brownie" Now Hosting Radio As a Political/Gov't Expert
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on August 12, 2009 at 11:51 AM.

So I'm driving home after finishing up my drive-time radio show here on AM760 in Colorado, and I'm flipping through the stations and I come upon 850 KOA - the local conservative station. There's a host on there filling in for the regular guy - and this guest host has a vaguely familiar voice. He's whining and moaning about how he's among the richest 5 percent in the country and is being oppressed by the tax system. He's reading the script with the usual lies - all of them addressed and debunked in my most recent column. I'm getting mildly irritated listening to the drivel - but then become apoplectic when I hear this person introduce himself as Michael Brown.

Yes, Mike "Heckuva Job, Brownie" Brown. On the airwaves. As a political/governmental expert.

I. Shit. You. Not.

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Fox News: Partisan Propaganda Machine
Posted by David Sirota on August 11, 2009 at 12:27 PM.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, just as I was writing this post, Fox News did a "breaking news" segment that showed a crazed protestor screaming at Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (D). Here's the screen shot from Fox's website. I'm sure the protestor will soon be an "exclusive guest" on a Fox News program. As I said, this is not merely a right-leaning news outlet - it is a partisan propaganda machine.

To understand how Fox News crosses the line from right-leaning news outlet into partisan propaganda machine (and there is a difference between the two), look no further than exactly how the network is driving (or at least trying to drive) the health care debate via the congressional town hall meetings.

As a PR tactic, Fox's three-tiered formula is absolutely ingenious:

1. First, Fox has given a huge amount of airtime to covering the lobbyist-organized protests at the town hall meetings, without, of course, mentioning that many of the protests are organized by lobbyists. Mind you, we know this interest in protest and "democracy" is completely politically motivated because we know it is completely new - it's not some ongoing Fox News principle. This is the same network that regularly pilloried anti-war protests during the Bush administration, and gave them almost no coverage, much less positive, whatsoever. So Fox it's safe to assume that Fox is only now interested in protest and democracy because it might hurt President Obama, Democrats and the progressive agenda.

2. Whenever one member of the protestors in the Khaki Pants Offensive makes an especially circus-like scene, Fox then has that particular protestor on for an interview - all under the pretense that the protestor has made him/herself "news." In the last two days alone, I've seen Fox aggressively promote "exclusive" interviews with screaming protestors from Rep. John Dingell's (D-MI) and Rep. David Scott's (D-GA) town meetings. Fox dutifully promotes these people as persecuted martyrs, and their actual claims about health care are barely - if ever - explored for their veracity (or lack thereof).

3. Finally, after helping create the media image of mass protests, Fox has manufactured a reason to continue covering the supposed mass protests. And the cycle starts over.

What this does is create a vicious cycle whereby the small group of conservative activists who are terrorizing these town halls have an incentive to be more and more aggressive. They know that if they can go further than the last supposed martyr, they might get their mug on Fox News. And so from protestors trying to shut down town hall meetings with screaming we get protestors shoving matches and then protestors arming themselves and then protestors making death threats. This is the Fox News Incentive System at work.

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CNN Dives Head First Into Television Payola
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on August 6, 2009 at 5:00 AM.

In the wake of the Richard Wolffe brouhaha, some may still insist that its rare for television networks to promote corporate spokespeople as disinterested, nonpartisan "political analysts." If you are one of those people, check this out - it gives you a good sense that this happens all the time:

Longtime CNN political analyst Bill Schneider has joined, Third Way, a think tank that bills itself as advancing "the next generation of moderate policy ideas." Schneider, who will continue his on-air political analysis at CNN, will be the organization's first Distinguished Senior Fellow & Resident Scholar.

You may recall that "Third Way" is one of the most notorious corporate front groups in Washington, most recently working to destroy health care reform:

Third Way was launched in early 2005 to produce policy papers and messaging tactics for congressional Democrats, with a focus on Blue Dog senators. It was then, as it is now, drenched in corporate money and tangled in ties to big business. These ties stretch from the board of trustees, thick with hedge-funders and investment bankers, to its lone senior fellow for health policy, David Kendall, a former Blue Cross Blue Shield consultant.

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The 13 Tyrants of Health Care
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on July 31, 2009 at 4:39 PM.

We do not live in a functioning democracy - republican, direct, or otherwise. You don't have to look at the 2000 election to know that - as I've discussed before, you can just look at the basic mathematics of the U.S. Senate, which gives the same representation to 600,000 people in Wyoming that it gives to tens of millions of people in California (and that says nothing of the filibuster, either). And, as my newspaper column today shows, American tyranny - that is, America's lack of democracy - is now distorting the health care debate.

Right now, we're watching six U.S. Senators (from some of the most sparsely populated states) and seven Commerce Committee Blue Dog Democrats hijack the health care debate. Together, these 13 tyrants represent just 13 million people - or 4 percent of the total population. And they are obstructing a health care bill for the other 300 million of us.

I ran the numbers on these districts and states - and there's some particularly interesting things to note.

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Taking the Theory Out of Conspiracy
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 25, 2009 at 1:45 PM.

This ABC News story won't help quell conspiracy theories about a Grand Council of Rich People conspiring to control the world:

Under a cloak of secrecy, some of the world's wealthiest people gathered in an unprecedented meeting early this month in New York City "to see how they can join together to do more," according to one attendee.

Invited by the world's two richest men Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, along with David Rockefeller, a Who's Who of American wealth and influence gathered around a long table in a window-lined private room overlooking the East River on May 5...

A clandestine meeting of the country's rich and powerful, left off their public calendars and hidden from the press, is enough to spark the imaginations of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

My take on this kind of stuff is pretty simple: While some of the Bilderberg Group/Trilateral Commission/Rothschild Power obsession gets irritatingly close to Protocols of the Elders of Zion/International Jewish Cabal crap, it's no "theory" to believe that rich people work together to protect their wealth. Whether this meeting is truly a philanthropic venture or something more nefarios is kinda beside the point - all you have to do is look at, say, the Davos conference to know that the wealthy work to hoard wealth.

Just When You Thought the Corporate Rip-Off Schemes Couldn't Get Any Worse...
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 22, 2009 at 10:02 AM.

This month, the Obama administration unveiled a plan to reform the taxes that apply to life insurance. Not surprisingly, the insurance industry freaked out, paushing out its spokesman to say "This is absolutely the wrong time to make it more expensive for families, as well as U.S. businesses, to obtain the security and peace of mind our products provide."

That sounds reasonable, until you read this incredible new report from the Wall Street Journal about how insurance companies use current tax rules not to help "families obtain security and peace of mind" but to help fat-cat executives pad their salaries:

Banks are using a little-known tactic to help pay bonuses, deferred pay and pensions they owe executives: They're holding life-insurance policies on hundreds of thousands of their workers, with themselves as the beneficiaries.

The insurance policies essentially are informal pension funds for executives: Companies deposit money into the contracts, which are like big, nondeductible IRAs, and allocate the cash among investments that grow tax-free. Over time, employers receive tax-free death benefits when employees, former employees and retirees die.

Though not improper, the practice is similar to what is known as "janitors insurance," an insurance-on-employees technique that has long been controversial. Critics say the banks' insurance contracts are a way for companies to create tax breaks for funding executive pensions. And some families have complained that employers shouldn't profit from the deaths of their loved ones.

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Trade Fight: Labor Slowly Moves Into Position to Oppose Obama
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 20, 2009 at 10:04 AM.

Here's what we know when it comes to trade:

- President Obama campaigned on a promise to substantially change America's trade policies and move us off of the failed NAFTA trade model.

- Labor unions took that promise seriously, and therefore spent millions of dollars of workers' hard-earned wages to help elect President Obama.

- Obama's U.S. Trade Representative now says he is looking to pass Bush-negotiated, NAFTA-style trade deals with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. While he says he wants some tweaks to these deals, they are still the NAFTA model.

- Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is still giving speeches publicly bragging that he helped pass NAFTA.

- Thanks in large part to the NAFTA trade model, taxpayer funded bailouts of key industries could end up subsidizing the offshoring of American jobs.

Now, after all of this, we're finally getting a proper reaction from labor leaders in Washington, D.C.:

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Time for Reform: 20-Year-Old Intern Easily Forms Offshore Tax Haven
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 19, 2009 at 1:59 PM.

Bloomberg News this morning reports that U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk gave a speech yesterday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce "saying he hopes Congress will approve stalled trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea within the next year." The good news is that Kirk also  noted that Bush-written trade policies are "really a tough sell in this environment."

They certainly should be - our lobbyist-written trade policies have significantly contributed to the economic collapse, hollowing out America's good-paying job base for years. Indeed, just yesterday, we see what that means: As the government bolsters domestic automakers, our rigged trade/international economic policies may undermine those efforts by allowing taxpayer cash to subsidize more job outsourcing.

The good news out of Kirk's speech was the fact that he "said negotiators in his office are working 'furiously' on labor and tax issues with Panama." At a time of massive budget deficits, that's an important step - especially when you consider how easy it currently is to hide tax income in a tax haven like Panama. Check out this video from Global Trade Watch - notice that the organization's intern is able to quickly set up a shell corporation to hide tax revenues:

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First Amendment Rights Watch: Criminalizing the Internet
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 15, 2009 at 3:25 PM.

In the last few years as my work has increasingly integrated with the Internet, blogosphere and Netroots, I've been constantly reminded that there are a lot of great people out there - but I've also been reminded that there are a number of really crazy, nasty, unhinged and generally bad people out there, too. The Internet's unique mix of interactivity, instant response and anonymity can really bring out the worst in people - all you have to do is read the comments sections on many major blogs, both liberal and conservative, to know that there's a lot of hate out there.

However, the Internet is a terrifically democratizing force, and while most of us can't stand the haters who try to hijack this medium for their own sad agendas, any effort to criminalize speech in this medium is really unacceptable.

Unfortunately, such an effort is underway, headed by Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA). As Wired magazine notes, her bill, HR 1966, is called the "Cyberbullying Prevention Act" and includes this section:

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The Bank 'Stress Tests' Were Neither Stressful Nor Tests
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 12, 2009 at 9:13 AM.

So, call me crazy, but I thought after the Enron and Arthur Andersen meltdowns, the government had gotten out of the business of bending over backwards to help companies cook their books. In fact, yes after reading this Politico piece by the generally solid Eamon Javers, it seems I am crazy.

The article goes over 5 different ways the Obama administration turned the much-vaunted "stress tests" into government seals-of-approval for all sorts of accounting shenanigans. Here's an example:

December was probably an awful month for Goldman Sachs. What to do? Make it go away. The investment house changed its fiscal calendar, so that the year ended in December, rather than in November in the past. That had the effect of eliminating December's results from public disclosures...

Firms took advantage of new accounting rules that can make the same business results look better on the bottom line - like the way Citigroup added an additional $2.7 billion on the bottom line simply by tweaking the math for the first quarter.

It worked. Traders started buying bank stocks again, and the White House didn't make a peep of complaint.

What's amazing is that the media and the administration even called these "stress tests" tests at all, considering "The government announced early on in the process that every single bank would "pass" the stress tests."

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Is Obama's 'Major' Health Care Announcement Just a Bunch of Bull?
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on May 11, 2009 at 9:33 AM.

So the big news today is President Obama's press conference with the health insurance industry touting the industry's "voluntary" commitment to slashing $2 trillion off Americans' health care bills over the next decade. The New York Times reports that this voluntary announcement is motivated by the health insurance industry's "hope to stave off new government price constraints that might be imposed by Congress or a National Health Board of the kind favored by many Democrats."

My three questions are really simple:

1) If the health industry is saying it can lower costs by $2 trillion over 10 years and remain highly profitable, isn't the industry admitting that it was planning to absolutely bilk consumers, and has been bilking consumers in the past? Put another way, isn't the industry admitting that it's entire business model is based on outright profiteering?

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