Obama War on Freedom of the Press

The NY Times reporter James Risen may be in jail weeks from now for refusing to reveal his sources in a case first involving George W Bush and then aggressively pursued by President Obama and Eric Holder. There is a petition in support of Risen, I invite all to sign it.  In an article in The Guardian, Rises says about Obama "He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”.  Those are pretty strong words, but a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists tells the tale, with nearly every journalist interviewed calling this administration the most hostile to the press in history.

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations.  

 “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times.  

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote earlier this year, “it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.”  

“President Obama had said that default should be  disclosure,” Times reporter Shane told me. “The culture they’ve created is not one that favors disclosure.”  The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

Press Mutiny over Obama restrictions

There are 38 news organizations ready to stage a revolt over what they view as the "White House’s own Soviet-style news service, which gets privileged access to Mr. Obama at the expense of journalists who cover the president."

At issue is President Obama's policy of not allowing press photographers to cover many official events, then releasing photos and video taken by people under his control.  The Guardian is reporting that:

A mini-revolt by news organisations against White House press restrictions gathered momentum Monday as USA Today joined other media shops to have declared a boycott on officially issued photographs.
“We do not publish, either in print or online, handout photos originating from the White House press office, except in very extraordinary circumstances,” deputy director Andrew Scott said in a memo to employees. “The functions of the president at the White House are fundamentally public in nature, and should be documented for the public by independent news organizations, not solely by the White House press office.”
The memo followed the submission to the White House last Thursday of a letter signed by 38 US media organisations to protest limits on photographers' access.  The Obama administration has aggressively discouraged news organizations from pursuing sensitive stories, seizing reporters’ phone records and naming at least one journalist who published leaked information as a possible criminal co-conspirator. The reliance of the Obama White House on official photography has been a longtime source of complaint.

Blame It All On Snowden?

President Obama and the NSA brass have exhibited a basic flaw that has been exposed throughout the Snowden revelations, they make bad (I mean really bad) decisions and don't own up to them.  The US Press is still giving cover with soothing editorials, in one particularly mild, and offensive, NY Times article, they find no fault or deficiency in the decisions made, and in fact imply the NSA is out of control, totally ignoring the excuses President Obama has made for their actions.  It's clear that these were decisions made by Presidents Bush and Obama, not some out of control bureaucracy.  The NY Times helpfully offers this advice.

A good way out of this mess would be for Washington to take up the proposal made Friday by Germany and France to negotiate a formal pact that would set mutually acceptable surveillance guidelines.

The US press ought to be calling for blood on the floor, all the brass at the NSA, Feinstein, Chambliss, and all the rest of the toadying hawks on the Intelligence Committees.  The president has an opportunity to be presidential, but he's behaving like a school child caught shoplifting a pack of gum.  As for the NSA brass, General Keith Alexander is mouthing off that it's the fault of the press.  Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian have the only coverage fit to print.

Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted (Techdirt has the full video here):

The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.
"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.
"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared. [My italics]

There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called "the first amendment".

Medical Industrial Complex Tramples US

I continually run across stories on health care costs in the US that make me gasp in disbelief at how we are being legally robbed (sometimes robbed to death) by the Medical Industrial Complex and their partners in crime, the FDA.  The latest is an article published in the NY Times about Asthma treatments.  It includes many of the infuriating facts driving drug costs in the US.

Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for over $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented. 

Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that was selling for more than $250 a month in Oakland pharmacies last year but costs under $7 in Europe, where it is available over the counter.

Unlike other countries, where the government directly or indirectly sets an allowed national wholesale price for each drug, the United States leaves prices to market competition among pharmaceutical companies, including generic drug makers. But competition is often a mirage in today’s health care arena — a surprising number of lifesaving drugs are made by only one manufacturer — and businesses often successfully blunt market forces. 

Thanks in part to the $250 million last year spent on lobbying for pharmaceutical and health products — more than even the defense industry — the government allows such practices. Lawmakers in Washington have forbidden Medicare, the largest government purchaser of health care, to negotiate drug prices. Unlike its counterparts in other countries, the United States Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which evaluates treatments for coverage by federal programs, is not allowed to consider cost comparisons or cost-effectiveness in its recommendations. And importation of prescription medicines from abroad is illegal, even personal purchases from mail-order pharmacies.

“Our regulatory and approval system seems constructed to achieve high-priced outcomes,” said Dr. Peter Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “We don’t give any reason for drug makers to charge less.”

And taxpayers and patients bear the consequences.

See also this story on the FDA,  this story on high health care costs, and this story on Novartis in particular, as well as this one.

US Meltdown Day -1, Time to Do or Die

Now that things have dragged on to the final few hours, it looks like a bill that can pass both houses will proceed through the House and Senate, and kick the can down the road for less than 6 months. The US rating agency Fitch was about to downgrade US Treasury debt, probably causing another spike in rates.

The news came as the Treasury Department said it had only about $35 billion in cash on hand. It expects to run out of “extraordinary measures” to keep on paying all of the government’s bills on Thursday, at which point outgoing payments might exceed that cash, plus any revenue, on any day going forward.

As the United States nears default, investors have demanded more compensation for lending to the government, with yields on short-term debt spiking to their highest levels in years.

Fitch warned that Congress has not “raised the federal debt ceiling in a timely manner.” It said that it “continues to believe that the debt ceiling will be raised soon,” but that “political brinkmanship and reduced financing flexibility could increase the risk of a U.S. default.”

US Shutdown Day 15, Senate May Deliver, But What About The House?

I found a NY Times article that detailed the forces behind the shutdown planning and execution, and no surprise that the Koch brothers are generous supporters.  In addition they are prepared to back ultra-conservative primary challenges to any moderate Republicans who stray from the hard line.  This will make it nearly impossible to get a deal through the House.  I am not nearly as optimistic as the newspaper headlines announcing "the Senate is very close to a deal".  I think the hardliners will not hesitate to force us into the abyss, and we'll see if it even gets a vote in the Senate.  Any single senator could block a vote for several days, and I'll bet Cruz does it, so we will probably go past the Oct 17 deadline before any vote.   President Obama may have to use the 14th Amendment to stave off disaster.

With agencies like the Judiciary running out of money to stay open, things are getting dire.  If hypothetically the courts run out of money (likely to happen by Thursday), will criminal cases have to be dropped?  They are already postponing all Civil cases due to being short-staffed, and some say they will work without pay if that comes to pass. 

This shutdown is tearing our society apart.

Oregon Corporate Welfare System

How much do we pay corporations just to stay here?  The information is fragmented all over the place, but the NY Times has pulled it all together and listed the names of the top recipients of corporate welfare over the entire US, broken down by State.  By national standards Oregon is a middle of the road corporate welfare state, spending only $850 Million a year or $226 per capita yearly.  That is $226 for every person in the State, every year, and that doesn't even include the tax breaks we gave to Nike last year, the top name on the list is Intel.

Nationally the NY Times estimates $80 Billion a year is given to corporations, which works out to about $256 bucks a year for everybody, babies and retired included.  Corporations know how to play the system for free handouts, and they do it every day with the cities and States begging them to relocate.

House GOP Goes Nuts Over Obamacare

Ted Cruz was pouring Kool Aid and the guys in the house were guzzling it like drunks on New Years Eve, singing "Hail, Hail, the gang's all here.  What the heck do we care?".  It was just two days ago while Cruz was doing his marathon speech on the Senate floor that CNN published an analysis of the political chessboard and concluded that a shutdown would be bad for the GOP and they probably wouldn't let it happen, but Kool Aid can change everything.  The House Republicans nearly unanimously voted to check into the new Cruz wing of the asylum.  Chanting the mantra "We're listening to the people", they neglected to check out the polls that a majority of people would blame the GOP for a shutdown.  Good luck with that guys.

In a Blog post The Hill.com noted that the Wall Street Journal thought the idea was ill advised, in a story sprinkled with battlefield anecdotes.

“We wish the GOP luck, since we support the policy if not the strategy,” the conservative-leaning board wrote in a Tuesday editorial. “But however this charge into the fixed bayonets turns out, we hope the folks who planned it will take responsibility for what happens now.”

In the piece entitled “The Cruz Campaign Against Obamacare,” the op-ed board singled out Lee and Cruz for their “implausible defunding gambit”

The NY Times also discussed the sanity of the House GOP in an Opinion piece.

Our challenge today is to explain how Congress evolved into our national nutcase.  Cruz kept demanding that the Senate “listen to the American people,” but he really meant that they should listen to his Twitter followers. A politician riding on a wave of tweets feels as if the nation is cheering his every word, even when the nation is actually reading the sports page while a select splinter of hard-core supporters manically pound away on their smartphones. A hundred thousand people cheering you on in the social media feels like a mass movement. But this is a gigantic country. You can find 100,000 people who believe in a secret plot by Belgium to corner the market on beetroot.

GOP steaming towards shutdown

It's Saturday 9/28/2013 and only 2 days to go before a government shutdown and the GOP has allowed the anarchist Tea Party element of their party to paint them into a very bad corner.  They are set to propose a 1-year delay of Obamacare and a permanent repeal of its tax on medical devices as conditions to keep government running, and that would assure shutdown, as the Senate will vote it down in a second.

House leaders also proposed a provision to ensure that military service members would not be affected by a shutdown, an indication that Republicans will try to insulate themselves from political fallout if a shutdown occurs.
The proposal will be considered by the House in three separate votes. The one-year delay and the tax repeal for medical devices would be added to the Senate spending bill. The measure to keep financing for the troops in the event of a shutdown would be separate. Votes are likely to come on Saturday night.

 I think the GOP will come to regret this craziness very soon.

The Road to Shutdown

Anarchy, Ho! seems to be the GOP strategy of the moment as the House is riding the shutdown train.  Even John Boehner is joining what the NY Times calls The March to Anarchy.

Until now, the only House Republicans pushing for a government shutdown and debt crisis were a few dozen on the radical right, the ones Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, referred to as “the anarchists.” On Wednesday, however, the full Republican caucus, leadership and all, joined the anarchy movement, announcing plans to demand the defunding of health care reform as the price for keeping the government open past Sept. 30.

Earl Blumenauer posted commentary on his Facebook Page.

Appalling House GOP plan just released: Extend harmful protections for Monsanto and repeal Obamacare or we shut the government down.

 The Senate will of course reject the extra conditions and send a clean Resolution back to the House, then it's up to House and Senate members to get something passed by both.

“We’re going to pass a clean CR without any of the defunding stuff,” said a senior Democratic aide.
Reid is betting he can attract enough Republican votes to pass a Senate bill that repudiates the House effort to defund Obama’s signature healthcare initiative.
“We are completely united on this issue. We’re not defunding ObamaCare and we’re not negotiating on the debt ceiling,” Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), Reid’s deputy, told reporters Wednesday. “We believe — at least we hope — that the mainstream, reasonable Republicans, as they get closer and closer to the deadline, will come to their senses.
“If they think we’re going to back off, they’re wrong, they’re on a different planet,” he added.

Broken US Health Care

The NY Times is running a series of articles on our health care system and why it costs so much.  They pretty much conclude that the health care industry has hijacked public benefit for corporate profit.  Consider these numbers from a recent article.

The US Average price for a colonoscopy is $1,185. 

In many other developed countries, a basic colonoscopy costs just a few hundred dollars and certainly well under $1,000. That chasm in price helps explain why the United States is far and away the world leader in medical spending, even though numerous studies have concluded that Americans do not get better care.

Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy.

In another article on the bizarre cost of IV solution (a plastic bag, filled with plain sterilized water with 2 teaspoons of salt), they found:

The average manufacturer’s price, according to government data, has fluctuated in recent years from 44 cents to $1.

Yet there is nothing either cheap or simple about its ultimate cost, as I learned when I tried to trace the commercial path of IV bags from the factory to the veins of more than 100 patients struck by a May 2012 outbreak of food poisoning in upstate New York.

Some of the patients’ bills would later include markups of 100 to 200 times the manufacturer’s price, not counting separate charges for “IV administration.” And on other bills, a bundled charge for “IV therapy” was almost 1,000 times the official cost of the solution.

It is no secret that medical care in the United States is overpriced. But as the tale of the humble IV bag shows all too clearly, it is secrecy that helps keep prices high: hidden in the underbrush of transactions among multiple buyers and sellers, and in the hieroglyphics of hospital bills.

 No wonder we can't afford health care.

Reporter may go to jail for publishing story

James Risen is a NY Times reporter and he is is a new class of criminal, a journalist.  He had obtained information for a book from a knowledgeable source for a book, and now Central Intelligence Agency official Jeffrey Sterling has been indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 – for leaking classified information to Risen for publication in his book.  The government says Risen has to name his source or go to jail.

The current DOJ seems to know no limits on declaring everybody to be enemies of the state, recently adding reporters to the list.  According to the Guardian,

In effect, the court has ruled that the journalist must reveal his source. That sets a dangerous precedent now applicable in Maryland and Virginia, home to the NSA and CIA – the very states in which national security journalism matters most. If a reporter cannot guarantee confidentiality to an important source willing to provide information that may be of vital public interest, the job of journalism itself has been criminalised. If a reporter like Risen refuses to co-operate and name names, he himself may face time behind bars.
Indeed, like a dedicated few before him, Risen has vowed to go to prison rather than break his vow of confidentiality in the courtroom. Although there will almost certainly be an appeal, the court's ruling is a potentially devastating blow to investigative journalism. Given its significance, it is shocking how little publicity the Risen/Sterling case has yet received from major media outlets with a direct interest in its outcome.
The Obama administration's war on whistleblowers coupled with the court's ruling against watchdog reporters highlight the federal government's efforts to curb the flow of information from both ends. No one disputes that at times journalists have a duty of care when entrusted with secret information with possible national security implications, but Risen is critical of how government officials will use this argument cynically to delay or suppress a story. He said recently:

I've been an investigative reporter for a long time, and almost always, the government says that ['you can't publish that because of the national security risk'] when you write a story. And then they can never back it up. They say that about everything. And it's like the boy who cried wolf. It's getting old.

There is virtually no mainstream press coverage on this story.

Unemployment Wrecking Everything

The reported Unemployment rate is 7.6%, which isn't great news, but the real story is that things are much much worse than that simple number.  There are two very bad things going on in our country.

1. The duration of unemployment as published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has risen to levels not seen in the last 65 years, it peaked at 40 weeks (about 9 months) in 2011 and has since fallen to 35 weeks (about 8 months).  By comparison, the highest levels ever seen in the worst of previous recessions peaked at about 20 weeks, and then rapidly recovered.  The length of unemployment is now twice as long as it has been since the BLS kept records.  Also since 1970, the average duration keeps going higher, reflecting that once you are unemployed, it takes longer to find another job, and it's been getting harder over the last 40 years.
2. The number of people dropping out of the labor force (who are no longer reflected in the official unemployment rate) now exceed the number who eventually find jobs as reported by the New York Times.

"Unemployed workers have been more likely to flow out of the labor force than into employment for almost the entire period beginning around December 2008 to the present. This was historically not the case; for the nearly 19 years spanning from February 1990 (when the data series began) to the end of 2008, jobless workers were almost always more likely to find a job than to give up or retire. There were only two months when this was not the case (March 2003 and December 2005).
In June, the number of people flowing from unemployment into employment (2,330,000) was almost as high as the the number flowing from unemployment out of the labor force (2,481,000)"

So if it seems that things are worse this time around, it's because they are, in fact, a lot worse.  This sounds like the Giant Sucking Sound that Ross Perot mentioned in 1992 when NAFTA was proposed.

Corporations rewrite US law

As we go about our day to day life, our economic future is unfolding in the secret draft of a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  You probably never heard of it because it's so secret that even most members of congress are not allowed to even see it.  A NY Times Opinion Article calls it a "Covert Trade Deal".

While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans’ daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released. Even the George W. Bush administration, hardly a paragon of transparency, published online the draft text of the last similarly sweeping agreement, called the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in 2001.

There is one exception to this wall of secrecy: a group of some 600 trade “advisers,” dominated by representatives of big businesses, who enjoy privileged access to draft texts and negotiators.

This covert approach is a major problem because the agreement is more than just a trade deal. Only 5 of its 29 chapters cover traditional trade matters, like tariffs or quotas. The others impose parameters on nontrade policies. Existing and future American laws must be altered to conform with these terms, or trade sanctions can be imposed against American exports.

Whatever one thinks about “free trade,” the secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership process represents a huge assault on the principles and practice of democratic governance. That is untenable in the age of transparency, especially coming from an administration that is otherwise so quick to trumpet its commitment to open government. 

Since it constrains what laws can be passed in the future, one commentator decries it as a way for multi-national corporations  to override US laws they don't like.

WTO Stands For “We’re Taking Over”
Public Citizen, which has been doing excellent work on this issue, reports on three U.S. laws that were nullified by the World Trade Organization (WTO):  country-of-origin labels on meat, dolphin-safe labels on tuna, and the ban on sweet-flavored cigarettes designed to get kids addicted to the tobacco companies’ carcinogenic products. (What’s next:  Cherry-flavored crack?)

The WTO and the WTO “Appellate Body” – two bodies most Americans don’t even know exist – overruled these laws in a preemptory manner that would have outraged the Continental Congress.
We didn’t elect them. We can’t communicate with them. But they’ve issued three decrees which we must obey:
1) We are not to know where the meat we’re eating comes from.
2) We must accept the fact that we may unknowingly wind up eating the flesh of dolphins, arguably the most intelligent nonhuman species on the planet. And,
3) We must continue to allow the distribution of products designed to addict our children to a deadly and habit-forming substance.
How’s that for “controlling our own destiny”?

 See here what Peter DeFazio thinks about it.

Taxes, Taxes and jumping off cliffs

The NY Times has published a flurry of articles on the evolution of US tax policy, and just as importantly, tax rates actually paid over the 30 year stretch between 1980 to 2010.  It is a fascinating piece of work which concludes that the actual taxes paid by nearly most Americans are lower in 2010 than they were in 1980, so I guess we're not overtaxed today.  As expected, the more you make, the more benefit you got from falling rates.  Today the deficit (how much more we spend than take in) is growing which pushes the US national debt to scary levels. 

Their analysis suggests the top tax rate could be extended on incomes above $250,000 without harming economic growth, while admitting nobody knows exactly how much it could be raised before the 1% would start moving to Switzerland or stashing more cash in the Cayman Islands.

 The tax debate today is more about ideological dogma than practicality.  Maybe we need a better democracy, how about if the alternatives were put to a popular vote?  Or maybe the whimsical Warren Buffett solution, It was July 2011 when Warren Buffett joked on cable TV that he could end the federal government's spending “in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there's a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”  Well, I guess it was just a joke.