Jared Golden, a Democratic member of the Maine House of Representatives who is running for Congress, supports Medicare-for-All. As made obvious by the very phrase “Medicare-for-All,” Golden wants to extend Medicare-style health coverage to every American. If you currently have Medicare, Golden thinks you should keep Medicare. If you don’t currently have Medicare, Golden thinks you should be able to have Medicare.
Nonetheless, Ian Millhiser noted at ThinkProgress (8/13), a new ad by Golden’s opponent, Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) paints a very dire picture of Golden’s stance on the government program. Polquin’s ad claims that Golden “will end Medicare as we know it” and accuses Golden of wanting to impose “over $32 trillion in higher costs.” The climax of the ad features an image of a very stern older white lady shaking her head.
The implication is that seniors should be very, very afraid. If Golden is elected, things will happen to Medicare! And those things will be bad! For you!
This isn’t a new strategy, Millhiser noted. The GOP often appeals to older voters by suggesting that Democratic spending on some other demographic group necessarily implies fewer benefits for the Republican Party’s elderly base. In 2012, for example, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran an ad accusing President Obama of cutting Medicare to pay for “a massive new government program that’s not for YOU.”
In fact, Golden wants to end Medicare as we know it. But that’s because Golden would transform Medicare from a program that only covers some Americans in one that covers all Americans. That’s hardly a reason for seniors to sternly shake their heads at him.
Millhiser noted rhetoric criticizing lawmakers for wanting to “end Medicare as we know it” is in fact a Democratic Party invention.
In 2011, then-House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) pushed a plan that would have gradually phased out the Medicare program in its entirety. Ryan would have repealed Medicare and replaced it with a voucher program — a move that, in and of itself, would have driven up seniors out-of pocket costs by nearly 40%.
But Ryan didn’t stop there. Under the 2011 version of this plan, Ryan’s vouchers would lose value every year because they did not keep up with the rate of health inflation. By 2080, according to the Congressional Budget Office, “Medicare would be cut 76% below its projected size under current policies.” And it would keep shrinking more and more after that.
Poliquin’s claim that Medicare-for-All would lead to “over $32 trillion in higher costs” is also worth unpacking. The source for this claim is a Koch Brothers-funded study by the conservative Mercatus Institute at George Mason University that determined the specific Medicare-for-All plan pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would cause the government to spend $32.6 trillion on health care over a ten-year period.
That sure sounds like a lot! But if the US leaves its current health care system in place, we will spend even more money under the current system that is financed by for-profit insurance corporations. In 2016, America’s total health expenditures were $3.3 trillion a year, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, when you include both public and private spending. That means that, even before you account for inflation, the US will spend $33 trillion over the next decade on health care if it stays its present course. And $33 trillion is, of course, more than $32.6 trillion.
“The idea that the United States could save money by adopting a universal, single-payer health plan that guarantees coverage to all Americans may sound counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you understand the economics of the health industry,” Millhiser noted. “Under Medicare-for-All, more people would receive quality care, but that care would cost a lot less.”
Single-payer healthcare advocates David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler noted that the Mercatus study neglects to mention that the current US healthcare structure would spend $49 trillion between 2018 and 2027, Kayla Pearce noted at MedicareWorld (8/2).
For the moment, Medicare-for-All is also quite popular. A March poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 59% of respondents support a universal, single-payer system. In the past, however, the most potent message a politician can bring into a health care debate is often “we should keep the status quo.”
This implicit message benefited Republicans seeking to kill Obamacare in 2009, and it benefited Democrats seeking to preserve Obamacare in 2017. Poliquin’s now hoping it will save him in 2018 — even if he is being completely dishonest.
Ironically, Republicans on the House Budget Committee approved on a party-line vote a budget resolution (6/21) that would cut $537 billion from Medicare and $1.5 trillion from Medicaid and other health programs over the next decade.
On Medicare, the budget would move toward a system of private health insurance plans, rather than the current, open-ended government provided Medicare system, The Hill reported).
On Medicaid, the budget would impose new caps on spending that could lead to cuts in payments over time.
House leaders say the health-care cuts are necessary to reduce the deficit, which is projected to exceed $1 trillion next year after Republicans enacted a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and billionaires last year.
TRUMP PUTS DOZENS OF HOUSE SEATS IN PLAY — FOR DEMS. House Democrats are looking to expand the map well beyond the 25 Republican-held districts Hillary Clinton won in 2016. There are more than twice as many names on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue list as on that Clinton-won-Republican-held list.
Democrats felt encouraged by the tight battle in the Aug. 7 congressional special election in Ohio, Dan Sewell and Bill Barrow of the Associated Press report. While Trump claimed victory for Republican state Sen. Troy Balderson, the race against Democrat Danny O’Connor was considered too close to call, with a recount possible. The two will have a rematch in November for the seat vacated by Republican Pat Tiberi, who won by 37 points two years ago.
Democrats got a boost in a March special election in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Conor Lamb won a congressional district Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points. Dems need to gain 23 seats to retake the House majority.
It’s a stunning turn, two years removed from just 16 House races coming within 5 points, with an average victory margin of 37 points across all 435 districts, the AP noted.
Aftab Pureval, the son of a Tibet-born mother and India-born father, first upset the Cincinnati political order in 2016, winning the Hamilton County clerk of court’s post that had been in Republican hands for a century. Now the 35-year-old lawyer-turned-politician wants to unseat veteran US Rep. Steve Chabot, who hasn’t had a tough race since congressional districts were redrawn following the 2010 census. Chabot won his 2016 race with 59% of the vote.
Pureval is among 60-plus names on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of candidates the national party believes are its best shots to flip GOP seats. The list is a mix of Clinton-won districts and the next tier of targets. Beyond that list, there are several dozen additional districts the national party and grassroots groups are eying for signs of competitiveness.
Certainly, Democrats don’t expect to win all those districts, and there are a handful of Democratic seats that Republicans could reclaim. But Dan Sena, the DCCC’s executive director, says the “historic and diverse battlefield” will force tough Republican decisions on “who to defend and who is a lost cause.”
Those dynamics mean legitimate House races in districts as varied as Salt Lake City, where Mayor Ben McAdams is aiming to unseat Rep. Mia Love in a district Trump carried by 7 points (Love won in 2016 by 12 points.) to West Virginia coal country, where Democratic state Sen. Richard Ojeda voted for Trump and now is aiming for an open seat in a district the president carried by 50 points. (Outgoing Republican Rep. Evan Jenkins last won by 44.)
“Conor Lamb’s special election win in Pennsylvania in March and last week’s still-uncalled Ohio special election, where Republican Troy Balderson has a razor-thin lead, show that seats previously thought out of reach could be in play come November,” Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (8/13). “Thanks, Trump?”
TRUMP TOPS 4,229 LIES IN AUGUST. The new lie tally is in, after the Washington Post fell a month behind in updating its Fact Checker database. The Great Misleader, Don Trump, turned on the spigots of false and misleading claims in June and July, telling 978 during the summer break, for an average of 16 lies a day, and, as of Aug. 1, he’d told 4,229 lies as president. [Editor’s Note: The Post’s policy does not use the word “lies,” but that is what is defined as “false or misleading claims.”]
During his first 100 days, the Great Misleader averaged 4.9 lies a day. But as most of the mainstream media fails to call him on it, the average number of false claims per day keeps climbing. Put another way, in his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Just six months later, he has almost doubled that total, with an overall average of nearly 7.6 lies a day.
On July 5, “Lying Don” reached a new daily high of 79 false claims. On a monthly basis, June and July rank in first and second place, with 532 and 446 lies, respectively.
“Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted nearly 150 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency,” Fact Checker reported.
“Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 1,293 — relate to economic issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created before he became president or company decisions with which he had no role. He cites his ‘incredible success’ in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Barack Obama’s term.
“Just on trade, the president has made 432 false or misleading claims. He frequently gets the size of trade deficits wrong or presents the numbers in a misleading fashion … ”
“Not surprisingly, immigration is the top single source of Trump’s misleading claims, now totaling 538. Thirty times just in the past five months, for instance, the president has falsely claimed his long-promised border wall with Mexico is being built, even though Congress has denied funding for it.”
INFLATION KEEPS GOING UP, BUT WAGES ARE GOING DOWN. Inflation in July rose 2.9%, its highest level in seven years. Core inflation, which doesn’t include food and energy, rose 2.33%, its highest level in 10 years, Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones (8/10).
“This is not cause for panic, but there’s unquestionably some acceleration in the inflation numbers now. This means two things. First, the Fed is now more like to tap on the brakes a little harder, which will cause the economy to slow down. Second, since employers seem to have no intention of raising wages more than about 2%, the earnings of blue-collar workers are going to continue to fall behind. …
“No matter what the inflation level is, employers raise wages between 2-2.5 percent. They’re stuck on this as a ‘reasonable’ number after years of the great moderation during the ’90s and aughts. But as inflation goes up, this means that workers are getting no real wage increases at all. Or, even worse, they’re getting effective pay cuts, as they did in June and July.”
Think about this. The economy is growing at its fastest rate in years. Unemployment is below 4%, its lowest point in years. Corporate profits are breaking records. By any normal measure, this is a very high-pressure economy. And yet blue-collar workers have gotten a pay cut over the past two months. Anyone care to explain that? [Editorial Hint: It has something to do with the decline of unions.]
LABOR WINS RIGHT-TO-WORK FIGHT IN MO. Missouri voters resoundingly rejected the state’s new right-to-work statute by referendum (8/7), delivering a stinging rebuke to the GOP legislature that recently tried to implement the law. The vote on Proposition A wasn’t close, as the “no” crowd defeated “yes” by a 2-to-1 margin.
The pro-union side appears to have outspent the anti-union side, Dave Jamieson reported at HuffPost (8/8).
With a rare opportunity to kill a law that would reduce union membership in the state, the labor-backed group We Are Missouri poured over $15 million into the campaign. The two largest groups on the other side of the issue, Freedom to Work and Missourians for Freedom to Work, spent a combined $3.2 million, according to the Missouri Ethics Commission.
But that was only one part of the story. A ballot measure like Proposition A plays to one of organized labor’s main strengths: ground game. And by most accounts, unions ran a relentless one.
Erin Schrimpf, a spokeswoman for We Are Missouri, which spearheaded the “no” campaign, shared some data on the group’s voter outreach. By election day, more than 2,000 volunteers had worked for the campaign, many of them union members. They knocked on over 800,000 doors and made nearly a million phone calls urging people to vote no on the proposition.
According to Schrimpf, the outreach probably played a role in the higher-than-expected turnout for an August primary.
“We would attribute a lot of that to how much energy we had and our supporters had,” she said. “Turnout being up definitely played to our advantage. We thought it was a pretty resounding message because the margin was better than expected.”
One voter in St. Louis told HuffPost that he was contacted about eight times by the “no” campaign either by telephone or mailer in recent weeks. If there was a strong argument in favor of the right-to-work law, he never heard it: The “yes” side didn’t contact him once.
Right-to-work laws give workers who are covered by a union contract the option to not pay any union fees, while still enjoying the union’s protections. They make it harder for unions to retain members, thereby hurting unions’ finances and, by extension, the power of the Democratic Party. The laws are now on the books in 27 states. Missouri would have been the 28th.
NEW TRUMP ‘REFORM’: MAKE IT EASIER FOR PAYDAY LENDERS TO SCAM MILITARY FAMILIES. When placing bets on who comes out of the Trump administration with indictments hanging over their heads, don’t count out Mick Mulvaney, “Hunter” noted at DailyKos (8/13). There’s got to be a shady backstory behind why this man is so obsessively dedicated to making sure that each individual segment of the most dodgy financial markets is able to continue their actions unimpeded. As “interim” Trump-appointed head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mulvaney’s latest pet project is an effort to ensure predatory lenders and other industry scammers can more easily put their hooks into American military families.
No, really. His plan is to halt the supervisory exams of lenders to ensure their practices comply with the Military Lending Act, a law enacted in response to the all-too-common practice of targeting low-income military families with loans featuring staggeringly high interest rates and other predatory behavior.
John Czwartacki, a spokesman for Mulvaney, said the rule change came from a top-to-bottom review of the bureau’s procedures geared at curtailing what the administration, along with lending industry executives, have criticized as overly aggressive enforcement by the bureau’s first director, Richard Cordray, the New York Times reported (8/10).
“Overly aggressive enforcement” of laws protecting military families? Got it. Now there’s a cause that only Mick Mulvaney, protector of crooks and scammers nationwide, would dare take up, Hunter noted.
For the record, the Military Lending Act forbids interest rates of more than 36% when lending to military families (credit cards are excluded, of course), and the payday loan industry and other overtly sleazy portions of the financial sector have been very mad about that for a very long time. Mulvaney can’t kill the law, but he can bar government watchdogs from monitoring those companies. Apparently.
In any case, the current system of supervisory exams was by all non-crooked accounts quite the success, and more to the point has continued to prove itself shudderingly necessary: Since its creation under the Obama administration in 2011, the consumer agency has returned more than $130 million to service members, veterans and their families and handled more than 72,000 complaints per year, according to the agency.
SOCIALISM APPROVAL RISES UNDER TRUMP. Gallup has a new poll out (8/13) showing that Democrats now feel more favorably toward socialism than capitalism. But a few folks have pointed out that this isn’t due to increased warmth toward socialism; rather, it’s due to a sudden distaste for Trump-era capitalism, Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones. This is true as far as it goes, but the full story is a little more complicated, he noted.
Approval of socialism took a sudden smallish jump from 2012, when it had 53% approval, to 2016, when it reached 58% approval, but declined to 57% in 2018. This was presumably the Bernie effect, which persisted but didn’t increase this year. But Bernie had zero effect on support for capitalism. The warmer attitude toward socialism was purely a personal thing.
Likewise, this year’s drop in Democrats’ support for capitalism, from 56% in 2016 to 47% in 2018, didn’t improve the outlook for socialism, Alexandria Ocasio-Sanchez notwithstanding. Once again, it appears to be more a gut reaction to what Republicans and Trump are doing with tax cuts and the economy generally, Drum wrote.
“That’s my take, anyway. For Democrats, this isn’t the sharp ideological choice that it is for Republicans—who almost unanimously approve of capitalism and hate socialism. Basically, a fair number of Democrats like Bernie, whatever he calls himself, and hate the Republican version of the economy, whatever they call it. That’s really all these numbers mean (so far).
BAYER SHARES PLUNGE AFTER $289M CANCER LIABILITY OF MERGER PARTNER MONSANTO. Shares in Bayer took a nosedive on Aug. 13—just days after newly-acquired Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages to a man who alleged that the company’s glyphosate-based herbicides, including the widely used weedkiller Roundup, caused his cancer, Andrea Germanos reported at CommonDreams.org.
At one point the German pharmaceutical giant’s shares fell by as much as 14%, Reuters reported, marking a loss in value of roughly $14 billion.
It capped the US trading day as one of the “biggest losers,” ending at a 10% loss.
Aug. 10 was also a losing day for Monsanto, which Bayer AG controversially acquired for $62.5 billion in June. In a landmark trial, a San Francisco jury (8/10) unanimously found that the company failed to warn school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, who’s suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and other consumers of the cancer risks from its weed killers, and said the company acted “with malice or oppression.” About 4,000 people are making similar allegations.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO)—classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, but Monsanto says its Roundup is safe, and that it plans on appealing.
Aug. 13 also marked the last day of the public comment period for the finalization of the merger process, prompting a broad range of advocacy groups to voice their opposition once again.
“No matter how you cut it,” said said Daniel Raichel, an attorney with the Nature Program at the National Resources Defense Council, “a Bayer/Monsanto merger spells higher costs for farmers and locks in the chemical-heavy agricultural practices that threaten our health and the bees and other pollinators critical to food security.”
WE’RE DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO CLIMATE DEATH SPIRAL, NEW STUDY WARNS. Our current climate is near the very edge of stability, according to a major new study by 16 leading climate scientists, Joe Romm reported at ThinkProgress (8/9).
We are pushing the planet toward an irreversible “Hothouse Earth” — catastrophic warming of 9°F (5°C) or more with sea level rise of up to 200 feet — the study warns. And we may be much closer to the “point of no return” than most people realize.
Simply meeting the near-term greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets that more than 190 nations agreed to in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord is not enough to be certain of avoiding this fate, the study states.
The world must keep ratcheting emissions down to zero in the second half of the century to keep total warming “well below 2°C” (3.6°F) — as the nations of the world unanimously agreed in Paris.
Yet, last year President Donald Trump announced that he plans to pull out of the Accord in 2020. Worse, his team is actively working to boost US carbon pollution.
Indeed, the administration shocked scientists earlier this week when it admitted that its plan to gut vehicle fuel economy standards would help take the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to a staggering 789.76 parts per million, which is almost double current levels.
“Many individual humans (perhaps billions of individuals) will suffer terribly,” if CO2 levels get anywhere near that high as Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment, told E&E News (8/7).
The new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, warns that the path to such a catastrophic collapse isn’t isn’t so much a steady descent fueled by burning ever more fossil fuels. Rather it is a cliff that once you cross, you trigger a rockslide or an avalanche that brings ruin quickly.
PETTIEST PREZ EVER EXCLUDES MENTION OF MCCAIN AT SIGNING OF BILL NAMED IN HIS HONOR. When ABC News wrote a piece early on Monday, Aug. 13, about Donald Trump heading to upstate New York’s Fort Drum later in the day to sign the 2019 military funding bill, the news organization imagined that Trump would “have a hard time ignoring the man whose name is attached to it: John McCain.”
Wrong, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (8/13).
There was no mention of Sen. McCain by any of the speakers at the signing event. Trump omitted McCain from the title, calling it “the National Defense Authorization Act.”
In fact, not only did Trump omit McCain’s name entirely from his speech at the signing of the “John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act”—likely the last such defense bill McCain, a war hero, will ever steward to enactment as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee—not a single speaker dared to mention McCain’s name, according to accounts from reporters covering the event, Eleveld wrote “because god forbid President Bone Spurs allow even a moment of decency and gratitude be granted to someone who actually fought and nearly died for this country.
“Never underestimate Trump’s capacity for being the most petty and pathetic commander in chief this country has ever seen. It’s a maxim journalists should have tattooed on their arms at this point.”
COLLAPSE OF SINCLAIR TV MEGA-MERGER A HUGE WIN FOR VIEWERS. Tribune Media withdrew from its proposed merger with Sinclair Broadcast Group (8/9), effectively terminating the $3.9 billion deal that would have created the largest local television conglomerate in US history.
The move follows the FCC’s late July release of a Hearing Designation Order (HDO), in which the agency criticized Sinclair for “lacking candor” in its plan to transfer control of several television stations to shell companies set up by the broadcaster. “The record raises significant questions as to whether those proposed divestitures were in fact ‘sham’ transactions,” according to the HDO.
The failure of the merger, which would have resulted in a right-wing broadcast giant with an audience reach of more than 70% of the country, is a major victory for public-interest groups that have rallied nationally against the deal’s many harms, maintaining that a larger Sinclair runs counter to the FCC’s central mandate to promote diversity, localism and competition in use of the public airwaves.
President Donald Trump tweeted his anger at the deal’s demise, praising Sinclair while calling “disgraceful” the FCC’s move to scuttle the proposed merger. Since the president’s inauguration, Sinclair has forced its local newscasts to air commentary that favors Trump administration policies and positions.
Free Press president and CEO Craig Aaron made the following statement:
“The collapse of the merger is great news for dozens of local communities that will be spared Sinclair’s slanted coverage and ridiculous must-runs.
“For years, Sinclair has been a dishonest broker at the FCC, using fuzzy math and sketchy shell companies to evade the agency’s rules and expand its empire. Its history of deceit and arrogant approach to the agency finally caught up with Sinclair. The broadcast giant’s double-dealing became too much for Tribune executives to bear. As details of Sinclair’s deceptions emerge — and with other investigations underway a the Department of Justice — it’s reasonable to question whether the broadcaster deserves to hold any licenses to profit off the public airwaves.”
“Millions of people spoke out against this deal, and that public pressure was instrumental in keeping the spotlight on Sinclair and its history of airing reactionary and often racist content. Numerous investigative journalists, viral-video makers, and whistleblowers from inside the company made sure the truth about Sinclair’s ambitions got out. And conservative voices showed that even Sinclair’s partisan allies know the anti-competitive company can’t be trusted.
“Hopefully, FCC opposition to this deal is the start of a trend in favor of more independent voices and local choices for news. The FCC majority’s recent gutting of media ownership limits suggests otherwise. The demise of this deal presents an opportunity to embark on a new path, an opportunity that will be squandered if these stations were to be simply served up to other giant conglomerates.”
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018
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