Blogging for the 99% and the preservation of our Democracy against the Corporatists and the Citizens United ruling.
The sad truth is that the Health Care Reform bill never stood a chance. After forcibly removing advocates of a single-payer system, i.e., real health care reform, Max Baucus became the guardian of the health care industry’s interests. With Max Baucus at the helm, there would be no force that could overwhelm the industry’s desires. Just to be certain, Senator Baucus employed the Vice-President of Public Policy for WellPoint as his “Chief Health Advisor”, a fact revealed by the Sunlight Foundation.
With some further investigative work, the Sunlight Foundation learned that:
Lobbying disclosure filings for the first quarter of 2009 reveal that five of Baucus’ former staffers currently work for a total of twenty-seven different organizations that are either in the health care or insurance sector or have a noted interest in the outcome. The organizations represented include some of the top lobbying organizations in the health sector: Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Researchers of America (PhRMA), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Amgen, and GE Health Care.
The former staffers turned lobbyists include two former chiefs of staff, David Castagnetti and Jeff Forbes, and one former legislative assistant, Scott Olsen. Other former staffers working with health care portfolios include Angela Hoffman and Roger Blauwet.
http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/06/22/the-max-baucus-health-care-lobbyist-complex/
Referring to this as the Max Baucus Health Care Lobbyist Complex, the Sunlight Foundation produced a graphic that detailed all of the interconnections of Baucus’s former staff members with health industry giants. One would think that Baucus would be shamed by the revelation of his ties to lobbyists and those in the very same industry that he was to craft legislation for, but close to 5 million dollars in campaign contributions from the industry quickly quieted his nervous conscience.
The one pesky part of the health care debate that Baucus had not anticipated was the country’s preference for at least the option to buy into a plan that was not run by the insurance companies, but by the Government, in the fashion of the much-loved Medicare. It would have helped control runaway costs and bad faith behavior of the insurance industry toward the ill people who needed their services the most. When the House passed a bill *with* the Public Option, and 60 members of the House claiming that they felt that the inclusion or not of the public option was a deal breaker, the Senate had to scurry to protect the corporate interests of the Health industry. Luckily, there were plenty of Democrats with a love for cash, so Senators Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and of course, Joe Liebermann, drew a line in the sand that demanded that there be no public option.
Since Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel had never wanted a public option as anything more than a tender morsel tossed out to the left, they were able and ready to assure Lieberman, Nelson, and Landrieu that many millions of dollars could be had for them if they agreed to vote for the Health Care Reform bill, written by Baucus’s health industry staffers, without the public option. There was no berating the reluctant Democrats who did not favor the public option for putting campaign cash over the good of the American people. There was no White House pressure because Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel had already cut their own deals with the drug and insurance industries, guaranteeing that campaign donations would flow to the Democrats and not Republicans.
Even though Barack Obama campaigned on “no mandate” that would force people to buy health insurance, the question in the Senate was not whether a mandate should be included, but rather how stiff the penalties should be for those that fail to buy the insurance. The insurance companies howled when the provision for U.S. citizens to go to jail for not buying health insurance from the insurance megacorporations was stripped, and fines put in their place instead. Jailing poor people for not being able to afford insurance crossed some line that caused even Max Baucus to balk, although it is not clear why, since nothing else had suggested that he had a conscience. I suspect it was pressure from the White House because the GOP would make great political hay from the fact that Obama was going to have citizens put in debtor’s prison for not purchasing health care.
Seeing that the once-heralded Health Care Reform legislation became nothing but a windfall profit for the insurance companies, you might ask yourself why it happened that members of Max Baucus’s Senate staff went to work as lobbyists for the health care industry, and members of the health care industry went to work for Senator Max Baucus, essentially writing the Health Care Reform bill. If that question has come to mind, then you might want to pick up a copy of Janine R. Wedel’s book, the Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. In it, she describes how people of power and money morph seamlessly between government worker and industry power-broker, constantly redefining themselves and changing priorities, with the one constant being a handsome profit on each of their activities.
As she writes in Shadow Elite, a new “transnational” class of elites has taken over our country: “The mover and shaker who serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services. It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible.”
Wedel dubs this new class of influencers “flexians,” and the closed system they’ve created for themselves the “flex net.” She attributes their power, among other factors, to the “embrace of ‘truthiness,’ which allows people to play with how they present themselves to the world, regardless of fact or track record.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-first-huffpost-book-c_b_412999.html
The Shadow Elite are seen over and over again, at one time working for the government, the next time as a spokesman for a think-tank on one of the political TV shows, and next as a senior officer of some major corporation. As in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, where “Disaster Capitalism” prevails, Janine Wedel’s book allows people to see how the corporate and government power structures are merging, corporations are writing laws, and Senators are on the payroll of powerful corporations and interest groups.
I think that the two books together, revealing how well-placed people are able to influence and take advantage of any situation for their own profit, provide a needed insight into the corporatization of the United States and the subserviance of our elected officials to the dictums of the corporate board room.
