The Center for Public Integrity | PaperTrail Blog - MONEY & POLITICS: Blue Dogs’ Fundraising Totals Plummet in Third Quarter | Status: open

The Center for Public Integrity | PaperTrail Blog - MONEY & POLITICS: Blue Dogs’ Fundraising Totals Plummet in Third Quarter | Status: open
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Our analysis of the fiscally conservative and increasingly influential Blue Dog Coalition and its funding noted that the group’s political action committee had averaged more than $176,000 in receipts from other PACs over the first half of 2009. Their monthly haul dropped to a surprisingly low $27,000 in July, rebounded somewhat in August, and but then dropped again to just $12,500 in September.

That September money came from just three donations — $5,000 from accounting and professional services giant Ernst & Young’s PAC, $2,500 from the Food Marketing Institute PAC, and $5,000 from the National Rifle Association of America Political Victory Fund.

After raising $1.1 million from January to June, the committee raised less than $87,000 between July and September — less than it brought in during any one of the preceding five months. And in just three months, the Blue Dog PAC’s monthly fundraising average dropped by more than $50,000 — probably not the sort of fiscal conservatism the 52-member coalition was hoping for. ....

The CIA ‘misled Congress five times since 2001’ | Raw Story

The CIA ‘misled Congress five times since 2001’ | Raw Story

The CIA misled Congress at least five times since 2001, according to Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
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The ongoing probe found the practice of incomplete briefings or outright lying was part of a "large disease" of misinforming even the chairmen of the select intelligence committees, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said at a Tuesday press briefing that highlighted the early findings. ...

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Oligarchic Senate Still ‘Treasonous’ After All These Years : Information Clearing House - ICH

Where are gutsy muckrakers of yesteryear? In a stunning 1906 Cosmopolitan expose, journalist David Graham Phillips made history with his headline, “The Treason of the Senate.” He then justified his condemnation of mercenary senators, then cherrypicked by states and owned by nefarious Trusts:

Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the
situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of
interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be.

By 1914, the 17th Amendment mandated senators be popularly elected but, judging by today’s unevolved results, we have not yet salvaged one of the Founders' worst blunders. This American replica of the House of Lords, our least democratic, least representative organ, lives on, still the blockage after all these years.

You’d think franchising ex-slave descendants, non-land-owning men and wise women would save us? Yet our pretend elections, especially when counting votes tests southern I.Q.’s, only obscure contemporary 1906-style corruption. We pay senators from, say, Oklahoma as dumb as posts, as willfully ignorant about science and economics as history, hence easy pickings for modern “trusts” run by smarter executives. Beyond the energy, mining, banking and endless war cartels, robber barons of health will spend $400 million fighting reform just this year, on top of $50 million channeled to Senate Finance committee members. None dare call that treason, just good business.
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A Senate Unfit to Rule

Our decadent Senate epitomizes privilege and prerogative, seniority and senility (often rescued only by death) – guaranteed to be a generation in arrears. Over decades, elections (if fair) may displace uninformed, petty tyrants inconvenienced by majority rule. But do we have decades? That leaves only Constitutional redress: correcting outdated, dysfunctional institutions is why Jefferson endorsed political revolutions every generation. The majority must act by invoking the amendment process.

The urgency of now: in one regard, this country is worse off than in the 1930’s. The duration and severity of that depression empowered a strategic team of leaders – a progressive president and co-operative, post-medieval Congress. Together, this alliance achieved massive, historic advances: old-age pensions, serious regulations like Glass Stiegal, genuine pump-priming, and more – proving government the best cure to our worst excesses. Where's today's team or any urgency?

Instead of a first-rate starting team, we’re saddled by minor-league treachery by intellectual midgets. Today’s Senate may not be the most corrupt of all time, but the gap between its fitness and foresight vs. what must be done for survival has never been greater. The problems are global, complex and daunting, thus the small, partisan minds that clawed their way into power are wholly inadequate to the task.
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Reality always works for someone. The status quo is just peachy for the 1% haves, especially when have-nots are manipulated to vote against their interests. Do we have another 225 years’ leeway before the second Constitutional Convention? If political gridlock is not reversed, then Gore Vidal’s ominous prophecy applies, leaving open only the kind of banana republic we’ll become. ....

Time for change's Journal - “Setting the Crown for a Corporate State”: The Monopolization of Democracy by Corporations

Time for change's Journal - “Setting the Crown for a Corporate State”: The Monopolization of Democracy by Corporations
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It’s now been a little over a year since Congress agreed to bailout our banks, despite substantial opposition from the American people. In March 2009 our new Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, revealed plans to continue the bank bailout, which largely went into effect shortly afterwards. So how has that gone?

That depends upon whom you ask. If you listen to the corporate media you’d think everything is just fine. Typical of their opinions on this is a TV talking head that I recently heard bubbling over with praise for our economy. She mainly talked about the recovery of the stock market, concluding that this has resulted in large gains for American “taxpayers”. Taxpayers? She didn’t voice the slightest awareness that there is not a one to one correspondence between investors and taxpayers.

Actually, the banks have done quite well. But what about the rest of us?


The effects on ordinary Americans

Home foreclosures
There were 106,007 home foreclosures during the second quarter of 2009 – up 17% from the first quarter of the year. When Geithner was asked why efforts to help home owners haven’t helped more of them, he responded that:
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Unemployment
The official unemployment rate for September 2009 showed unemployment in the United States reaching 9.8%. However, it is widely accepted that the actual unemployment rate is far higher than that, when people who have given up looking for work are taken into account, or when under-employed persons are taken into account.

This graph puts the official unemployment rate into historical perspective:
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Economic inequality
Speaking of economic inequality, Paul Krugman recently commented on the most recent income inequality statistics in the United States, saying that they “didn’t get much attention but they’re truly amazing”. The important points to observe in the graph that is contained in the link are:

Income inequality rose precipitously during the 1920s under three Republican presidents, reaching a high just prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which led to the Great Depression. Numerous measures put in place during FDR’s New Deal led to declining income inequality, which reached record lows late in his presidency and remained at record lows for four decades, until they began to rise again shortly after Ronald Reagan became president. With the corporate friendly, deregulation policies of the “Reagan Revolution”, income inequality began a steady rise, ...
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We were warned by non-corporatist economists

As the Obama administration was considering putting the Geithner plan into effect – which was largely a continuation of the Bush administration plan – several eminent non-corporate economists warned them and us of the consequences. They used different words, but the basic message was quite similar: a reverse Robin Hood scheme, conducted behind closed doors: ...
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William Greider warns that we’re on the path to a corporate state

William Greider is a political journalist who has warned us many times in the past about the dire consequences of government becoming too cozy with the corporatocracy:

This will sound extreme to some people, but I came to it reluctantly. I fear what they're doing… in their design is setting the crown for a corporate state…. And by that I mean a rather small but very powerful circle of financial institutions the old Wall Street banks, famous names. But also some industrial corporations… Too big to fail. Yes, watched closely by the Federal Reserve and others in government, but also protected by them… The leading banks and corporations are sort of at the trough, ahead of everybody else in Washington, they will have the means to monopolize democracy. And I mean that literally. Some of my friends would say, hey, that already happened…. The corporate state is here…. ....

Surprise: McCain Biggest Beneficiary of Telco/ISP Lobby Money - PC World

Surprise: McCain Biggest Beneficiary of Telco/ISP Lobby Money - PC World

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is the top recipient of campaign contributions from large Internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast over the past two years, according to a new report from the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. McCain has taken in a total of $894,379 (much of that money going to support his failed 2008 bid for the presidency), more than twice the amount taken by the next-largest beneficiary, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. ($341,089).

Meanwhile, McCain has emerged as the ISPs' biggest champion against new "network neutrality" rules from the Federal Communications Commission, which voted Thursday to move forward in the process to adopt such rules. Shortly after the FCC vote, McCain introduced a bill (the "Internet Freedom Act") that would block regulation of the nation's largest broadband networks.

Net neutrality rules would amount to a federal mandate that broadband providers cannot block or hinder the internet traffic of any web site or service, regardless of whether or not that site or service completes with a similar site or service offered by the ISP itself. In other words, a telco ISP could not limit bandwidth used for Skype VoIP traffic, while maximizing bandwidth available for its own VoIP service. ...

Medicare Drug Planners Now Lobbyists, With Billions at Stake - ProPublica

Medicare Drug Planners Now Lobbyists, With Billions at Stake - ProPublica

Four years ago, a group of lawmakers and aides crafted Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program for seniors that has produced billions of dollars of profits for pharmaceutical companies.

Today, at least 25 of those key players are back, but this time they’re lobbyists, trying to persuade their former colleagues to protect the lucrative system during the health care reform negotiations.

The role of big players like Billy Tauzin — the former Republican representative from Louisiana who is now president of PhRMA, the drug industry’s lobbying group — has been long understood. But a ProPublica analysis shows that the drug industry’s position is also being promoted by other foot soldiers from the Part D legislative process, from committee aides to top Bush administration officials.

The most prominent members of this group include:

• Tauzin, former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who was instrumental in ensuring Part D’s passage. As PhRMA’s president he reportedly earns more than 10 times what he was paid as a member of Congress
• Former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., who fought against allowing drug prices to be negotiated in Medicare Part D. A year after the bill passed, he left the Senate to begin his lobbying career. He now has his own lobbying firm, Breaux Lott Leadership Group, which this year has received $300,000 to lobby for the pharmaceutical industry.
• Former Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., who helped negotiate the final version of Part D, then left to form his own lobbying firm. Bristol Myers-Squibb paid the Nickles Group $120,000 this year to lobby for, among other things, “health care reform issues related to Medicaid and Medicare.”
• Thomas Scully, the former Medicare chief who helped design Part D. Scully obtained a waiver allowing him to discuss job offers before he left his government post. Less than two weeks after the bill passed, he went to work for the lobbying firm Alston & Bird, where he works on behalf of drug companies.

Less familiar names also made the leap to lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry. ...