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Pork Greased Reform's Passage
The multimillion-dollar deals cut with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and others to win the 60 votes needed for the historic health care reform bill gave President Barack Obama the margin he needed to fulfill a central campaign promise — but may also have upped the ante for future presidential horse trading.
With the bill hanging in the balance, Nelson won a provision exempting his state from paying the usual share of costs for new Medicaid patients. The deal critics have dubbed the Cornhusker Kickback is expected to cost the federal government $100 million over 10 years.
Before a close vote last month, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) won an even larger break for her state — an estimated $300 million in extra federal spending, in a move opponents derided as the Louisiana Purchase.
Some critics branded the special deals as functionally equivalent to the kind of earmarks Obama crusaded against as a senator — and a quantum leap from eleventh-hour deals Obama’s predecessors have cut.
After Nelson and Landrieu, what will key congressional swing votes want from future White Houses?
“It’s a much bigger deal, a much larger piece of legislation than half-a-million dollars for a peanut museum in North Carolina,” said Thomas Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste. “We’re now talking about programs worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. ... Sooner or later, other members are going to be saying: Why didn’t I think of this?”
“Once people see a leader willing to take these kinds of deals, people have a tendency to withhold their votes until they get a similar deal. ... If you hold out, you, too, can be Ben Nelson, perhaps,” said Diana Evans, a Trinity College political science professor who studies the greasing done to pass legislation.
Obama is hardly the first president to try to grease the skids for vote-deprived legislation — but past presidential financial incentives seem fairly tame in comparison.
When President Bill Clinton needed to get his tax-raising and deficit-reducing budget bill through the House in 1993, the vote margin was peanuts — literally. House members boasted that they had essentially traded their votes for measures to protect the U.S. peanut industry from Chinese competition.
“I did my shopping early,” then-Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.) said.
Clinton cut similar deals the same year to win ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In what critics dubbed the NAFTA bazaar, aides practically invited lawmakers to set a legislative price for their votes. “The store is open as far as the White House is concerned,” one administration official told The Associated Press. Clinton reportedly won the vote of then-Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) by agreeing to support $1.2 billion in maritime subsidies, about $50 million of which went to a troubled shipyard in Studds’s district. Rep. Bill Sarpalius (D-Texas) tied his vote to a pledge to build a new federal plutonium lab, which was never built.
While Clinton compromised on peanuts, President George W. Bush caved on socks during the 2005 fight to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) agreed to vote for the trade pact after winning a deal to protect his district’s status as the U.S. sock manufacturing capital. CAFTA passed in a 217-215 squeaker.
Brown University political science professor James Morone said Obama was wise to bless wheeling and dealing, even though it may go against the good-government impulses he showed when he tried to rein in earmarks in the Senate.
“I am thrilled that Obama is not Jimmy Carter,” Morone said. “A president who would have said to Ben Nelson, ‘No, you can’t have that,’ and lost the whole shooting match without it, would have been a fool. I say thank heaven for the Chicago politics upbringing President Obama had.”
But Morone also warned that same Chicago style can turn off voters. “I can’t think of a bill where you had this much visible horse trading, except for budget bills. It was so visible, so tawdry. ... Now you’ve got, essentially, people scornful of the filibuster,” Morone said. “Each step brings us closer to pulling the trigger on the nuclear option. Both sides of the political spectrum could now go to the public saying this isn’t working. ... I think that congressional rule is in its last days.”
Jake Sherman contributed to this report.
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16 Comments so far
Show AllAbsolutely amazing, it seems even the most audacious criminals as those we voted for, can be more corrupt than we thought. And live to brag about it. Indeed what have we come to?
What we have come to is a realization that the purpose of this world
is to prove the harm in it, and welcome the day when things could not
possibly get any worse. For then all things must turn toward the good.
"...The multimillion-dollar deals cut with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and others to win the 60 votes..."
This is the model for a Democratic Republic?! "Dealing for Dough" instead of taking care of business for "We the People"? And the worst part? IT IS BLATANT & IN OUR FACES! Why have we not said "ENOUGH!" and begun a tax strike, a general strike, and a boycott of the government in general?
When is enough enough?! In the days before T.V. and shopping malls, the citizens would be gathering en mass at the capitol with the torches and pitchforks. What do we do? What I'm doing write now: bitching into the ether from a keyboard. I'm ashamed of me and all of us for the trampling we take as muddy and bloody door mats.
"In the days before T.V. and shopping malls, the citizens would be gathering en mass at the capitol with the torches and pitchforks. What do we do?"
Start a Pitchfork Group on Facebook?
Or, get rid of your congress altogether. Think about it: when faced with a new piece of legislation that could possibly health care to the poor and needy, the congress were like "How much will you pay me to vote for it/against it?" That was the only "issue" that swayed most of their votes.
Why do Americans even elect these people? They're basically mercenaries.
But surely we have nothing in the say of it and absolutely no way to control it. For our self-absorbed majority has two nice cars in their heated garage, and hired no-change Obama to keep them tax free.
The pork spending would have been bad enough if there was any benefit for the US working class in the health care bill. Unfortunately, the anti-consumer nature of the health care reform bill will cost us more for less health care, on top of all the taxpayer money funding the pork.
Obama is draining the US Treasury even faster than Dubya did.
"Both sides of the political spectrum could now go to the public saying this isn’t working. ... I think that congressional rule is in its last days.”
I celebrate THAT last day! This system is absurd and corrupt beyond reason and most certainly does not work. How does one senator represent the will of the thousands of their diverse constituency - even if they WANTed to! Representational government is ludicrous and leaves far too many of us without any representation of our ideals and views at all! Politics has become an arena of jackals and deals... rather than the statesmanship and equitable compromise that make a community function.
I do not need to be governed. I need good stewards of the common good.
Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live
Well said!
Never happen, not without a madding crowd doing a violent overthrow.
For the filibuster has been in Congress since 1851,
a record of 110 filibusters took place during the
last 4 years of Bush Administration, and it is
essential to counteract the people’s urge to go
democratic by putting our capitalist government
out of its misery.
Mutual gratification, the hallmark of our class conscious society where feelings get hurt if anyone dares violate the norm.
Equals gratifying equals, all gifts given with the understanding that something of equal value must be given in return, and to insult someone as being below your class if dare to offer them anything that resembles charity.
Politics for example, where both GOP and Dem are of the intelligent middleclass. Where the 20% high society fund all politicians, but take care to appear not interested in government or anyway in control. Where my 50% laboring class as normal cared not to vote last year, having no funds to gratify politicians and always getting a short end of the stick.
That's DEFORMED Package by Bush Hogs (lipstick-up artists)!
Additional details of corporate control are here:
Health care profiteers: A billion-dollar lobby
By Patrick Martin
22 December 2009
A study by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), Northwestern University and the Chicago Tribune, published in the newspaper Sunday, found that health care lobbyists have spent more than $396 million this year to influence senators and congressmen engaged in passing the health care restructuring legislation, and $862 million in 2008-2009 combined.
With the frenzy of lobbying in the last quarter of 2009, the two-year total will go well beyond $1 billion.
The drug industry alone has spent $199 million on lobbying in the first nine months of the year, which CRP said was the largest such amount ever spent by any industry on any issue. The drug lobby negotiated a deal with the White House in the spring to limit to $80 billion over ten years the amount that the drug companies would have to accept in discounts and rebates as their “contribution” to paying for the health care overhaul. Efforts by some Senate and House Democrats to impose greater costs on the industry, as much as $200 billion, have been beaten back with the support of the Obama administration.
The 338 health care corporations and associations hired at least 166 former staffers and 13 former members of the nine congressional leadership offices and five committees with a role in shaping health care legislation. Another 112 former staffers worked as lobbyists on health care legislation for non-health care companies.
The value of such lobbying was demonstrated in the case of one former staffer for the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, a leading liberal and chairman of one of the key Senate committees. Donal Nexon went to work for the trade association representing small and mid-size manufacturers of medical devices, and was able to reduce a proposed $40 billion tax over ten years to one only half as large—a $20 billion saving that dwarfs the lobbying expense.
Top staffers and former congressmen can count on tripling or quadrupling their incomes when they leave Capitol Hill for positions with major lobbying groups.
...
Other reports give a glimpse of the vast flow of money from private corporations to Capitol Hill in the course of the health care “debate.” GlaxoSmithKline spent $2.3 million in the first half of 2009, Novartis $1.8 million, MetLife $1.7 million, Allstate $2.4 million. The American Medical Association spent $8.2 million in the first half of the year.
There are a total of 3,300 registered health care lobbyists, approximately six for every senator and congressman. Throughout the year, this force was increased at the rate of three new lobbyists each day.
...
The beneficiaries of the health care slush fund include both the leading opponents of the current Senate bill—Republican John McCain leads with $546,000 and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell follows with $425,000—and the leading supporters, including Senator Baucus, with $413,000 in contributions. Baucus collected $3 million from health and insurance companies from 2003 to 2008, and his top contributors include Schering-Plough, New York Life, Amgen, Blue Cross and Blue Shield and the CEO of Merck.
The Washington Post described one summer meeting between Baucus and a group of health care lobbyists who included two of his former chiefs of staff: David Castagnetti, whose clients include PhRMA and America’s Health Insurance Plans, and Jeffrey A. Forbes, who represents PhRMA, Amgen, Genentech, Merck and others. A third Baucus chief of staff, Jim Messina, is now deputy White House chief of staff.
the full article here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/lobb-d22.shtml
A new political party, that rejects corporate money and agendas, that breaks with the Democratic and Republican Parties is long overdue. The organized labor movement, notably the AFL-CIO under President Trumka, has refused to represent the demands (September Pittsburgh AFL-CIO convention) of it's members to support "single-payer" health care.
Unending wars, uncontrolled climate change, destruction of public education and health, the collapse of the capitalist economy, millions of unemployed working people becoming impoverished, are more examples of run-amok, gangster capitalism. For the survival of humanity, a transition to a world socialist economy that fills the needs of humanity, is now essential.
Read daily the World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org
This article is bassically an easy diversion from the real "pork," which is the massive billions the Senate bill would give to Big Insurance and Big Pharma et al.
What Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson got for their constituents were scraps by comparison.
Historically, it was TARP that altered the level of the feeding frenzy by orders of magnitude. "Play by the Rules." "What rules?"
-30-
The evidence that the corruption of the Congress and The White House knows no bounds slaps We the People in the face everyday. Thomas Jefferson wrote in The Declaration of Independence that the government gets its powers "from the consent of the governed," and whenever the government fails to do the job it was hired to do, "it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish" said government.
Well, it's way past that time now. The criminals that have usurped our government need to be overthrown and replaced with representatives that are members of One Big Union of men and women who are not owned by the corporations.
Until the left wing in Amerikkka becomes as radicalized as the right wing, things will only get worse.
Amazing...everyone gets something except the American Taxpayer, who just gets to pay the tab.
It's the Combine at work!
"One flew east, and one flew west,
And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
"Hell of a life. Damned if you do and damned if you don't Puts a man in one confounded bind, I'd say." -- Scanlon