Oil Speculation and Republican Cynicism

Once again the Republican filibuster machine has blocked a vote on legislation desperately needed to help solve our energy crisis and lower the high cost of fuel. The Democratic-sponsored bill (S 3268) was intended to curb the ability of speculators to manipulate the oil market. It would also close a loophole that allows speculators trading on the London oil market to escape scrutiny by U.S. regulators. Experts have testified that wrongful speculation has vastly increased the price of oil and that if the bill was passed and signed by Bush, it would immediately lower the price of gas.

While the Democrats have been trying to pass legislation that would have an immediate effect, Republicans have been trying to get Congress to open-up vast areas of the continental shelf and all of the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. The Republicans’ proposals would not have any impact for decades, if ever. The Republicans know this. Their only reason for this policy is political.

According to Bush and the Republican demagogues in Congress, the problem is supply and demand. They say that all we have to do is increase drilling in order to lower the price of gas. On March 5, 2008, Bush lied when he said: “It should be obvious to you all that the [gasoline] demand is outstripping supply, which causes prices to go up.” Business Week reported on April 1, 2008: “There's no shortage of gasoline or oil in the U.S. today, and we have near-record reserves on hand.” The New York Times reported on April 20, 2008, “What was striking about this latest milestone ($116 per gallon) was what didn’t happen: there was no shortage of oil, no sudden embargo, no exporter turning off its spigot.”

The Republicans in Congress are engaged in an act of extraordinary mendacity and cynicism. They realize that in the coming election they are in danger of being thrown out of office, so they have seized upon a phony issue in the hope that it will get them reelected.

On June 26, 2006, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) issued a bipartisan report which stated that “there is substantial evidence that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.”

The PSI report then indicated that there was no shortage of oil supply. It said: “Although there has been a worldwide growth in demand for oil, there has also been a corresponding growth in supply, hence no shortage. In fact, global oil supply has generally exceeded demand in recent years.” The PSI went on to say that stockpiles of oil have been growing, and that no shortage of oil was anticipated in the future.

The Department of Energy forecasts that global surplus production capacity will continue to grow to between 3 and 5 million barrels per day by 2010, "substantially thickening the surplus capacity cushion."

Republicans know that there is no oil shortage and that none is anticipated. They know that even if Congress opened up the continental shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, oil companies would not be able to start drilling there for over 10 years and that it would not do anything to lower the price of gas.

In addition, Republicans know that the oil companies already have millions of acres of offshore and onshore lands and thousands of oil leases where they could start drilling now but have not yet begun. If they were to begin drilling in those permitted areas they could reduce or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The Republicans have blocked legislation that would require the oil companies to either develop the leases they already have or forfeit them.

Republicans know that the public mistakenly believes that opening up new areas for drilling will lower the price of gas. For purely political reasons they are frantic to force the Democrats into a vote on the issue. As a result, they are filibustering everything else. For example, on July 26, 2008, they used a filibuster to block consideration of a bill (S3186) that would increase funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

So this is what it has come to; Democrats trying to do something about the energy crisis, and Republicans denying heating and cooling assistance to poor people, lying to the voters, and licking the boots of the oil companies.

Bush and the Privatization of Medicare

On July 15, 2008, President Bush vetoed H.R. 6331, a Medicare reform bill intended to reverse an automatic 10.6 percent cut in payments to doctors and hospitals. The cut had taken effect on July 1st. Within hours, the veto was overridden as Republicans rejected Bush’s effort to help the insurance industry. The House voted 383 to 41, and the Senate, where the Republicans had originally blocked the bill with a filibuster, voted 70-26 to override.

The bill contains many provisions that would improve the Medicare program, but the most immediately important provision was reversal of the 10.6 percent automatic cut in doctors’ and hospitals’ payments. That cut was part of previous Medicare legislation, and if it had been allowed to continue in effect, many thousands of seniors would have had to forego vital medical treatment. Doctors, who now complain about the rates of reimbursement, would simply have refused to treat Medicare patients. The new law will not only reverse the cut, but it will increase the rate of doctors’ and hospitals’ reimbursement by 1.1 percent.

The reason the President and conservatives in Congress opposed the bill was a provision in the bill that would slightly reduce the amount of reimbursement paid by the government to private insurance companies which manage “Medicare Advantage” programs. That reduction was necessary to pay for the other increases provided for in the bill.

In 2003, when there was a Republican President and Republican Congress, the Congress provided for private insurance companies to conduct their own Medicare programs in competition with the governmental Medicare program. Although supposedly private, these “Medicare Advantage” programs are reimbursed by the federal government. Some Republicans who dislike Medicare as a “socialist” program, believed that having private enterprise run Medicare would make it far less expensive and far more efficient. The idea was to gradually privatize all of Medicare. As it turned-out, the private programs were far more expensive than Medicare and far less efficient.

The high cost of Medicare Advantage, and particularly of its fastest growing program, PFFS (Private Fee for Service), have been creating a major fiscal dilemma for Medicare. Private plans in general receive 13 percent more from the government than it would cost traditional Medicare to cover the same people for the same treatment. Last year the Congressional Budget Office estimated that those additional payments would cost Medicare $149 billion over the next ten years. PFFS plans are the least efficient of Medicare Advantage plans. It costs 17 percent more, on average, to cover a beneficiary under PFFS than under regular Medicare. Nearly half of all PFFS excess payments go to administrative costs, marketing, and profits, rather than to additional health benefits to enrollees.

Congress should save money and totally eliminate all Medicare Advantage plans. It should cover everybody under the less expensive, more efficient, regular Medicare program.

Bush ran for president as a “compassionate conservative.” He has proven himself to be a callous ultra-conservative. He has surrounded himself with right-wing zealots who want to privatize Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security was created as a safety net for older people. It was recognized that most people do not have the means, discipline, or ability to create and fund retirement programs. Before Social Security, millions of people were suffering terrible hardship in their old age. Having the government take some money from people’s earnings and paychecks helped provide them with some guarantee of dignity in their advancing years. It was not welfare, it was insurance.

Medicare was a natural extension of the concept behind Social Security. In 1965, Congress and President Johnson recognized that one of the major sorrows for all senior citizens was their gradual decline in health. They knew of the inability of most people to thoroughly plan for the infirmities of advancing years. Medicare has brought credit on our nation and saved millions of lives. Bush and his cohorts want to abolish it. They don’t care that millions of people simply would not be able to save and plan for old-age illness. They think such people are irresponsible. But it is Bush, Chaney, Rove, and their right-wing accomplices that are irresponsible--and heartless.

McCain on Womens' Issues

There was John McCain, Mr. “Straight Talk,” wriggling on a pin, formulated by a question from a reporter. The question was about remarks made by a McCain campaign advisor, Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett Packard. Fiorina said that: “There are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication. Those women would like a choice.” The reporter wanted to know if McCain agreed with Fiorina’s comments. McCain hemmed and hawed, and said with a nervous laugh–“I certainly do not want to discuss that issue.”

The reporter explained that McCain had voted against a bill in 2003 that would have required health insurance companies to cover prescription birth control. “Is that still your position?” she persisted. McCain said he had no recollection of the vote. “I’ve cast thousands of votes in the Senate,” McCain said. He finally babbled something about getting back to the reporter.

Today, one occasionally hears comments that some of the women who supported Hillary Clinton for president might now switch and vote for John McCain. Surely they are kidding! It is hard for me to imagine such a reversal. Did such women support Hillary solely because she was a woman? Were they totally oblivious to her positions on the issues? We know that Barack Obama stands for the same principles as Hillary, but do those women think that John McCain stands for the same things as Hillary?

Well, to start off, McCain is opposed to abortion and has said that he supports the repeal of the decision in Roe v. Wade. He has said that as president he would appoint Supreme Court justices like Roberts and Alito. Everyone knows that those justices would be likely to vote to overturn the Roe decision. That is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton’s position. Barack Obama strongly supports a woman’s right to choose, and would never appoint justices like Roberts and Alito.

McCain also vigorously supports the Bush policies on the war in Iraq. That is an important issue for many women who hate the war. Among all Americans, more women (67 percent) than men (54 percent) say that funding for the war should be tied to a troop-withdrawal timetable. Although majorities of both men and women were opposed to sending more troops to Iraq in the so-called “surge,” 56 percent of men opposed the president's plan while 66 percent of women opposed it.

Barack Obama has said: “On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.” Noting that the Iraqis want us to set a timetable for withdrawl, Obama said: “We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months.” Bush and McCain say that setting a timetable for withdrawal amounts to surrender.

In addition to those two big issues, there are other womens’ issues where McCain and Obama diverge sharply. Obama would require employers to expand family and medical leave, while McCain has said that it should "be subject to negotiations between management and labor.”

Obama backed legislation that would have made it easier for women to sue their employers for pay discrimination. McCain opposed it, saying that: "I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation ... opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." McCain explained that instead of equal pay protection, women simply needed “education and training.”

In 2005, McCain voted against funding to prevent teen and unintended pregnancies. In 2006, he voted against comprehensive, medically accurate sex education. In 1996 he voted against funding for international family planning. In 2005, he voted against public education for emergency contraception. In 2005, he voted against restoring Medicaid funding that could be used for family planning for low-income women.

You may have wanted Hillary to be nominated by the Democratic Party; so did I. It didn’t happen. Get over it. In many ways, this election is about the rights of women and the disdain of a conservative president and conservative senators and congressmen for those rights. Now is the time to make a decision. Do we move ahead to protect and enhance the rights of women, or do we retreat into the past, diminishing those rights and preserving the backward policies of the rotten Bush years?

Dick Morris

MACHIAVELLI OR MEPHISTOPHELES?

One frequent guest on the nightly T.V. program of that blowhard, Bill O’Reilly, is a reptilian character named Dick Morris. Morris is a former advisor to President Bill Clinton. On August 29, 1996, Morris resigned as campaign manager to President Clinton after reports surfaced that Morris had had a long-time sexual relationship with a prostitute named Sherry Rowlands. It was reported that in order to impress Sherry while she was in bed with him, Morris invited her to listen-in on telephone conversations with the President. At the time, Morris was married to a Connecticut lawyer named Eileen McGann. Some say that it was Hillary Clinton who insisted on the firing of Morris. Since then, he has been the arch-enemy of the Clintons, the Democrats, and all things liberal.

Before Morris’s undoing in the Sherry Rowlands affair, he was widely known as a man with no principles. He went back and forth working for Republican and Democratic candidates for office, and was accused of sometimes leaking information from one side to the other. While he was working for several Republicans in 1994, he secretly advised Bill Clinton.

According to Time Magazine, he almost worked for the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988, but then ended up on the campaign of George H.W. Bush. Bush commanders, Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, became convinced that Morris was leaking information about Bush's media strategy back to the Dukakis camp. "Roger didn't confront Dick," said a source. "Instead he used Dick to send disinformation to Dukakis." Years later, pushing for more business, Morris had lunch with Ailes. "We should work together; I know how to beat the Democrats," he told Ailes. "I don't want to work with you," Ailes replied. "You have no character."

Morris has a history of asserting and repeating misinformation. The other day, I heard one of Morris’s more outrageous misstatements. Prompted by O’Reilly, Morris argued for opening-up more waters to offshore drilling, and said: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn't cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.” Bzzzz—False! The truth is that Hurricane Katrina caused massive oil spillage; spillage so significant it was clearly visible from space.

I believe that this was not just an innocent mistake of fact on the part of Dick Morris. He is far too clever a man not to be aware of the fact that Hurricane Katrina dumped approximately 233,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It is just that he has become so obsessed with revenge against the Democrats for abandoning him over the Sherry Rowlands affair that he is willing to make knowingly false statements on the O’Reilly nightly rant and other Fox News programs (“Fair and Balanced”—yeah right!).

In his fanatic attempts to get back at and smear Hillary Clinton, Morris has made many false statements about her. Morris has repeatedly accused Hillary of lying. In his efforts to paint Hillary as a liar, Morris has exposed his own dishonesty. For example, he made a reckless statement that Hillary went to Iraq and “told the American soldiers…that most Americans don’t agree with what they’re doing; that there’s strong debate over the Bush Administration; that success is not assured; that there aren’t enough troops to do the job.” Even O’Reilly had to correct Morris by pointing out that she never said that to the troops; she said it to reporters over the phone.

In a way, I blame Bill Clinton for the rise of Dick Morris. Morris is a far more unsavory person than any of the trollops or strumpets that have decorated Clinton’s life. Clinton knew that Morris was an evil little worm, but he also knew that Morris was smart. In the words of Rudy Moore, a Clinton aide in Arkansas: "Dick always worked the dark side." Clinton's Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta said: "I always had the feeling that the President wanted to listen to the dark side, even though he clearly knew in his guts where the issues were and what he wanted to do."

Clinton wanted a political savant. What he got was an unscrupulous snake.

Justice Antonin Scalia--Right-Wing Bigot

In the case of “Boumediene v. Bush,” handed down June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges. In his angry dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said that the decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

On June 26, 2008, in the case of “District of Columbia v. Heller,” Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in which he struck-down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, stating that the justices were “aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” but held that “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.”

Let us start with Justice Scalia’s dissent in the Boumediene case. By what convoluted logic does he think that giving prisoners a right to appeal to the courts will “cause more Americans to be killed”? Americans are being killed because of the war policies of the Bush Administration, not because of the exercise of constitutional rights by prisoners held in American-controlled prisons.

By what aberration of thinking and humane judgment does Justice Scalia think the “enshrinement of constitutional rights” does not apply to appeals by prisoners but does apply to the right of American citizens to massacre one-another with guns? Which does he think will “cause more Americans to be killed,” appeals to the courts or widespread possession of guns?

In an editorial, The New York Times said of the “District of Columbia v. Heller” case: “This is a decision that will cost innocent lives, cause immeasurable pain and suffering, and turn America into a more dangerous country. It will also diminish our standing in the world, sending yet another message that the United States values gun rights over human life.”

Justice Scalia supposedly believes in a so-called “originalist” judicial philosophy. Over the years there have, however, been many inconsistencies in his decisions. He seems to adhere to the originalist philosophy only when it conforms to his right-wing political philosophy. The most consistent thing about his decisions has been his arch-conservative politics. For example, he has said that he does not think that the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” forbids torture.

Although the Supreme Court, in a long string of cases, has recognized a right of privacy enshrined in a “penumbra” of rights granted by the Constitution, Scalia has said that he does not believe that the Constitution guarantees any right to privacy.

One of Scalia’s most flagrant outbursts on this subject was in the case of “Lawrence v. Texas” in which the Supreme Court struck-down the Texas law against sodomy. The majority of the court found that the law, which prohibited homosexual sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their home, violated a fundamental right of privacy and served no compelling state interest.

In his angry dissent, Justice Scalia blared: “Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” Scalia went on to say: “It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

So Justice Scalia does not think that homosexuals deserve equal protection under the Constitution of the United States. He does not believe that these people, who number in the millions, are entitled to the same privacy as married couples practicing sexual relations in the privacy of their homes. He would allow state and local governments to hunt these people down, invade their homes, and prosecute them for acting in accordance with their sexual orientation. He would exclude millions of fellow Americans from the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by our culture, our constitution, and our sense of decency.

In my opinion, that is more than right-wing dogmatism; it is bigotry.