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New Year, New Congress—Same Old U.S. Chamber

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Never at a loss for spinning its corporate-friendly agenda as somehow benefiting working Americans, yesterday’s “2019 State of American Business Address” by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s CEO, Thomas J. Donohue, was a textbook example of using syrupy public relations-friendly language to mask the Chamber’s true intent. The speech laid out the Chamber’s policy priorities for 2019 and for the newly sworn-in 116th Congress in characteristically rosy terms.

A closer look at what was officially called the “#AmericanDreams” speech, though, paints a starkly different picture from how it sounded on its surface. The vision Donohue laid out—of maintaining private, for-profit healthcare; of an unregulated pharmaceutical industry free to price gouge consumers; of unrestrained use of fossil fuels that would pollute our environment and further contribute to climate change; of policies preventing consumers and workers from suing corporations that have harmed or discriminated against them; and of a total lack of transparency in corporate political spending—would be more like an American Nightmare for the average citizen.

When Donohue claims that the state of the economy is extremely strong, what he really means is that it’s great if you’re a CEO or wealthy stockholder raking in record corporate profits and increased share values due to record stock buybacks. However, the average American has been facing years of wage stagnation, job insecurity, underemployment, and a dangerous lack of worker protections. And, when he says “prudent regulation,” he means fewer safeguards for workers, consumers, and the public at large.

The Chamber’s well-funded and heavily-staffed lobby machine can be very savvy. So, when it says it will “take bipartisanship into account” we know that means that with a Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives in the 116th Congress, the Chamber cannot simply rely on congressional Republicans to pass its corporate agenda alone, as it’s done for years. And though the Chamber has added bipartisanship as a criterion in its 2019 legislative scorecard (at 10% of total score, making it roughly the weighted equivalent of the “participation” grade in an average college class), these feints toward moderation are merely PR. Its policy advocacy is no less extreme in its tilt toward corporations and the extremely wealthy folks who make up its donor base and against the average consumer, worker or family.

To wit: Donohue promises to “use all of our resources to combat” a single-payer healthcare system. Although such a system would overwhelmingly benefit the average American and is tremendously popular with the public, it would endanger the Chamber’s corporate buddies in the health industry, so the Chamber is now threatening to oppose it with all of its considerable lobbying might. Elsewhere in the speech, Donohue claims that protests of natural gas pipelines and the push to keep fossil fuels in the ground are causing undue strain on American traditional energy producers. In reality, this decline is because those entities are themselves fossils, tied to a business model that is no longer profitable (let alone prudent given the clear evidence of climate change). This willfully misleading stance proves the Chamber is just as beholden to the fossil fuel industry as ever.

Later in the speech, Donohue claims that Americans’ right to file civil and class action suits “undermines justice” when really it protects vulnerable populations from powerful wealthy interests. And, when the Chamber says that the U.S. should restrict shareholder rights to “reform” publicly-owned corporations’ policies on matters such as disclosure of political spending, it really means it wants average investors to have less of a say and intends to do all it can to ensure secret money continues to be dumped into political campaigns.

In all of these cases, the Chamber’s policy goal amounts to letting corporations do whatever they want with zero accountability and zero protection for the public interest. The Chamber may be attempting to put on a fresh new face to deal with a new Congress, but rest assured, its agenda is as pro-corporate and anti-Main Street as ever. Perhaps instead of promising to stand for “every child, every family, every worker, and every entrepreneur,” a more honest promise would be that the Chamber stands for “every corporation, every billionaire, every Big Bank, and every CEO.”

This post originally appeared on chamberofcommercewatch.org.

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Over 100,000 Rally in Rapid Response to #ProtectMueller In the Wake of Whitaker’s Taking Over Investigation

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We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

For over a year now, the over 100 diverse organizations that make up the TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw.org coalition has been preparing hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists to take to the streets to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation should it come under attack by President Donald Trump.

These patriotic everyday Americans recognize that since the appointment of Mueller in May 2017 we have been on the razor’s edge of a constitutional crisis. Now such a crisis has arisen, and the results show that the tireless preparation over the past year has paid off, allowing an effective response to the needs of this emergency. At over 1,000 events across the country, over 100,000 citizens dedicated to the rule of law gathered to protest the elevation of Trump’s lackey Matthew Whitaker to Acting Attorney General, thereby hijacking oversight of the Mueller investigation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The members of TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw.org all agreed to mobilize if a red line was crossed, and this was definitively that moment. The administration may have though that the grassroots would be too exhausted by the election only one night earlier to summon the energy to fight back, but the massive turnout at protests across the country on Thursday night proved they were dead wrong. Trump underestimated the tenacity of democracy’s defenders.

On Thursday night, we proved that every minute of deliberation and planning was worth it. After Trump elevated Whitaker to Acting Attorney General, it didn’t take long for the grassroots to realize how unacceptable Whitaker is as an overseer of this investigation: his elevation by Trump raised questions about whether he was compromised, about his sketchy ethical history, and even about whether his role as Acting Attorney General was constitutionally defensible.

In response, the coalition turned on a dime, proving that the short notice would not deter us. Only one night after Whitaker was elevated, and only two nights after an election for which many of the coalition’s RSVPs, hosts, and member organizations had spent weeks or months organizing and tirelessly getting out the vote, we still showed up.  The coalition’s dedicated members recognized the need to defend democracy, no matter how inconvenient the timing. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said it well, when she remarked that these activists recognized that “sometimes citizenship requires overtime and double shifts.”

The results were stunning. At rallies held in cities across the country—from red states to blue, from urban areas to rural ones, from the coasts to the Heartland and everywhere in between—over 100,000 patriotic Americans showed up to protest the nakedly obstructive promotion of Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to oversee the Mueller investigation.

These rallies were a sonic boom that resonated across the country. Taking notice of the remarkable display of activism, media outlets from national ones like MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, CBS News and NBC News to local outlets like the Arizona Republic, Tampa Bay Times, Chicago Sun-Times and Des Moines Register (to name just a few) covered the rallies as a groundbreaking story that they were.

As a member organization, Public Citizen is extremely proud of and grateful for the hard work and the contribution of so many dedicated and talented patriots at all levels.

In the coming days, we will need your help to make demands of Congress and the Department of Justice among other crucial next steps. If you have not already, you can sign up at TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw.org now to be kept in the loop of actions you can take to defend our democracy from an authoritarian attack from within.

As we proved with last week’s events, if we take a stand and demonstrate the full might of what an engaged and concerned public can do, we will win.

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The $660 Million Hurdle to Single-Payer Health Care

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While a majority of the public, and an increasing number of politicians, support a Medicare-for-All health care system, any serious proposal will face major hurdles due to the lobbying power of insurers, big pharma and other industries that are deeply invested in the status quo. Three-fourths of lobbyists on health care issues in 2017 were from the pharmaceuticals, insurance or hospital industries, which will likely oppose single-payer health care.

That’s what our newly published report, “The $660 Million Hurdle,” shows.

Organizations from health care-related industries spent $660 million on at least 3,335 lobbyists in 2017, with more than 75 percent of the lobbyists deployed from the pharmaceuticals/health products; health services/HMOs or insurance; or hospitals/nursing homes industries. As the Medicare-for-All debate continues to heat up, private insurers likely will view single-payer as an existential threat to their businesses. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical and hospital industries are also likely to resist a system that would hinder their ability to charge far more for their services in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world.

As a result, congressional lawmakers must eventually choose whether to side with Americans, or with special interests.

Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, the trade association of the brand-name pharmaceutical industry, was tops among organizations analyzed in lobbying spending in 2017, spending almost $26 million in that year. Among individual companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield spent $24 million on lobbying in 2017, the highest of any health insurer, and second highest among all organizations covered in the report. The American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association both shelled out about $22 million on lobbying in that same year.

The report comes as Medicare-for-All gains steam and popularity among American voters. An August 2018 poll by Reuters and Ipsos found that a majority of Democrats (85 percent) and Republicans (52 percent) support such a policy. Many other polls in recent years have found majority support for single-payer Medicare-for-All.

Increasingly, the public and our elected officials have started to view single-payer as the best solution to our unjust, inhumane health care system. Advocates for single-payer should not underestimate industry’s inevitable attempts to deceive the public in order to preserve the status quo.

Read the .pdf of the report here

 

Photo credit: Flickr user Images Money (Healthcare Costs)
[CC-BY 2.0]

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Ten Years After the Wall Street Crash, It’s Time to Restore Glass-Steagall

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Ten years ago the financial world experienced a meltdown that brought on a Great Recession so devastating many Americans have still not fully recovered from it. Starting with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008—the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history—one financial institution after another collapsed, and with them went the global economy.

Rather than face any kind of punishment for the calamity their risky behavior caused, Wall Street institutions were instead bailed out to the tune of $700 billion in taxpayer dollars. The justification? These banks had supposedly become “too big to fail”—that is, that Wall Street institutions were so large, complex, and interconnected, that their failure would pose an unacceptable risk to the economy at large.

Whether or not you think that it was the right decision to bail out the banks, what’s clear is that we can’t allow it to happen again. The idea that our financial institutions are “too big to fail” is an indictment of the rules-or more correctly, the lack thereof– that allow them to grow so big in the first place.

One of those now-missing rules is the Glass-Steagall Act. That law, passed in 1933 in the wake of the bank failures and stock market crashes that led to the Great Depression, worked well for nearly a century before it was repealed. The law prohibited government-backed commercial banks from engaging in risky investment activity. By keeping banks and investments separate, Glass-Steagall not only insulated customers’ deposits from being gambled on risky investments, it helped keep financial institutions’ sizes smaller, thereby preventing them from becoming “too big to fail.”

Unfortunately, the law was repealed in 1999, bringing down the wall separating commercial banking and investing. This allowed the merger of the commercial bank Citicorp and the insurance company Travelers’ Group to go through to form the first post-Glass-Steagall banking conglomerate, Citigroup. More and more banks followed suit and within a decade, everyday Americans paid the price for the repeal of Glass-Steagall when the financial crisis brought about the most devastating economic calamity in decades.

Nowadays, even the founders of Citigroup, John Reed and Sanford Weill, have said that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a mistake and that we need stronger rules for Wall Street. Reed has written that Glass-Steagall’s repeal caused a “culture clash” on Wall Street—suddenly, there was a collision of mindsets between that of commercial banking, which is typically more focused on long-term profits accrued through interest on loans, and investment, which is focused on engaging in risky speculative activity in pursuit of short-term profits.

Long story short, the investment culture won out, and the name of the game on Wall Street has been gambling with bank deposits ever since. Though the post-crisis Volcker Rule required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act put in place some prohibitions on investment trading by banks, the rule contained major loopholes and there is not nearly enough transparency about its implementation. Moreover, federal regulators are currently seeking to weaken the Volcker Rule.  It’s time to take on Wall Street and reinstate the wall between commercial and investment banking.

There are many reasons banks should not be able to gamble with taxpayer-backed deposits. Not only could it lead to the sorts of bad investments that sparked the crisis a decade ago, it produces mega bank conglomerates that could again be considered “too big to fail.” Also, when banks use their deposits in this way, it means they’re not using their funds for the kinds of loans everyday people actually need, like mortgages or capital to start a business.

We must not forget the lessons learned from the crash ten years ago. Main Street Americans should not have to live in fear that our property values will plummet, our retirement savings will vanish, or our tax dollars will be used to bail out giant financial institutions. We need stronger, not weaker, rules on Wall Street.

Now is the time to band together to enact a new Glass-Steagall Act for the 21st Century and help prevent another Wall Street crash. Our new tool makes it easy to write a letter to the editor (LTE) to your local paper. By writing an LTE, you’ll be helping to raise your community’s awareness of the need for a new Glass-Steagall, focus more media attention on the issue, and put pressure on your elected officials to act. Together, we can make a difference!

Please take a minute to write an LTE to your local paper today to educate your community about the need for a 21st Century Glass-Steagall and call for your members of Congress to support legislation that would enact it.

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Activists Gather at Vigils Around the Country to Confront Corruption and Demand Democracy

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If you looked out your window on Wednesday night, you may have witnessed an unusual sight: hundreds of candles held high by concerned citizens in an act of solemn yet empowering protest.

Activists in cities around the country, from Salt Lake City to Palm Beach, from Walla Walla to Atlanta and everywhere in between gathered to raise their voices. Altogether, there were nearly 200 vigils held in 39 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. These vigils were an opportunity for concerned citizens to come together and say enough is enough; we will not accept having government corruption and that the constant ethics scandals must end. These peaceful protests called for an end to the threats facing the basic health of our democracy, from money in politics to gerrymandering and voter suppression. Through songs, speeches and a moment of silence to recognize the human cost of corruption on people’s lives, hundreds of attendees recommitted to protecting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and to promoting reforms to strengthen democracy.

As citizens gathered to channel their anger as well as their hope, the country took notice. National media outlets such as Fox News, NBC News, and The Hill, as well as dozens of local media outlets from across the country covered the protests.

Public Citizen is honored to have participated in the vigil in Washington, D.C. across from the White House. As one of dozens of sponsoring organizations representing a diverse coalition of issues, political beliefs, tactics and visions, Public Citizen was proud to stand united in solidarity with its cosponsors and with the thousands of activists across the country in the name of rejecting government abuse and preserving the fair, participatory promise of the American dream.

At the D.C. vigil, which you can watch in its entirety here, speakers from Public Citizen, People for the American Way, Common Cause, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Working Families Party and local activist Ericka Taylor took the stage, as well as U.S. Senators Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Merkley (D-Ore.) and U.S. Congressmen Sarbanes (D-Md.), Nadler (D-N.Y.), Capuano (D-Mass.), and Pocan (D-Wis.). These speakers’ messages channeled the crowd’s frustration, fear and anger at the rampant corruption in our government and institutional threats to our democracy, while emphasizing an important undercurrent of hope. As bad as things are right now, we can be assured that we can still win back a fair democracy and an ethical government if we mobilize and make our voices heard in the streets and in the voting booth.

Below are some of our photos from the Washington, D.C. vigil. For photos and stories from vigils around the country, explore the #ConfrontCorruption hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, view the photos from different cities in this Google folder, and enjoy a compilation of photos and videos in this Twitter moment.

But, most importantly, join the fight! You can sign up to one of the hundreds of rapid-response events that will take place across the country if the Mueller investigation is compromised at trumpisnotabovethelaw.org. Together we can protect our democracy!


Created with flickr slideshow.

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