Predatory Lenders'

Partner in Crime

How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help


By Eliot Spitzer
Washington Post
February 14, 2008
Page A25


Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range ofpredatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of theCurrency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formalopinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.

The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

The writer is (was) governor of New York.

Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html
_________________

Keating 5 ring a bell?

McCain's past collides with the present Wall Street debacle.


Rosa Brooks
Los Angeles Times
Sept. 25, 2008


Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association.

The contributions were generous:

They came to about $200,000 in today's dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent's S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan.

While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors' federally insured savings in risky ventures.

When those lost money, Keating tried to hide the losses from regulators by inducing his customers to switch from insured accounts to uninsured (and worthless) bonds issued by Lincoln's near-bankrupt parent company. In 1989, it went belly up -- and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish.

Keating went to prison, and McCain's Senate career almost ended.

Together with the rest of the so-called Keating Five -- Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio), Don Riegle (D-Mich.) and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), all of whom had also accepted large donations from Keating and intervened on his behalf -- McCain was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and ultimately reprimanded for "poor judgment."

But the savings and loan crisis mushroomed. Eventually, the government spent about $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail out hundreds of failed S&Ls that, like Keating's, fell victim to a combination of private-sector greed and the "poor judgment" of politicians like McCain.

The $125 billion seems like small change compared to the $700-billion price tag for the Bush administration's proposed Wall Street bailout. But the root causes of both crises are the same: a lethal mix of deregulation and greed.

Today's meltdown began when unscrupulous mortgage lenders pushed naive borrowers to sign up for loans they couldn't afford to pay back.

The original lenders didn't care:

They pocketed the upfront fees and quickly sold the loans to others, who sold them to others still. With the government MIA, soon mortgage-backed securities were zipping around the globe. But by the time many ordinary people began to struggle to make their mortgage payments, the numerous "good" loans (held by borrowers able to pay) had gotten hopelessly mixed up with the bad loans. Investors and banks started to panic about being left with the hot potato -- securities backed mainly by worthless loans. And so began the downward spiral of a credit crunch, short-selling, stock sell-offs and bankruptcies.

Could all this have been prevented?

Sure. It's not rocket science:

A sensible package of regulatory reforms -- like those Barack Obama has been pushing since well before the current meltdown began -- could have kept this most recent crisis from escalating, just as maintaining reasonable regulatory regimes for S&Ls in the '80s could have prevented that crisis (McCain learned this the hard way).

But, despite his political near-death experience as a member of the Keating Five, McCain continued to champion deregulation, voting in 2000, for instance, against federal regulation of the kind of financial derivatives at the heart of today's crisis.

Shades of the Keating Five scandal don't end there.

This week, for instance, news broke that until August, the lobbying firm owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac, one of the mortgage giants implicated in the current crisis (now taken over by the government and under investigation by the FBI).

Apparently, Freddie Mac's plan was to gain influence with McCain's campaign in hopes that he would help shield it from pesky government regulations. And until very recently, Freddie Mac executives probably figured money paid to Davis' firm was money well spent. "I'm always in favor of less regulation," McCain told the Wall Street Journal in March.

These days, McCain is singing a different tune.

"There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week, explaining the sudden mass conversion of so many onetime free marketeers into champions of robust government intervention.

Fair enough. But as you try to figure out what and who can get us out of this mess, beware of those who now embrace regulation with the fervor of new converts.

Source:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks25-2008sep25,0,5467109.column?track=ntothtml
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Western States Propose Carbon Trading


MSNBC
Sept. 23, 2008


Seven western states and four Canadian provinces on Tuesday proposed a comprehensive program to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, manufacturers, and vehicles.

The Western Climate Initiative would establish a regional market to trade carbon emissions credits and is designed to keep down costs for those affected.

The plan is aimed at cutting the region’s carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2020, a roughly 15 percent reduction.

The idea is to allow industries that emit greenhouse gases to buy and sell credits for their emissions. Businesses that cannot cut their emissions enough can buy the right to pollute from cleaner companies.

The plan was drafted by Arizona, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, and by the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.

Whether lawmakers in each state will now adopt the regulations is unclear.

Most large industrial polluters, automakers, and coal-based utilities are lobbying state legislatures to wait for a uniform federal program.

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26858084/
___________________

Time is Running Out


September 24, 2008


Dear Friends,


Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception.

The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress' throat is not just economically foolish.

It is downright sinister.

It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect.

It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder.

Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! "This is welfare for the rich," he said. "This is socialism for the rich. It's bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters."

That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we're being told it's unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it.

But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences - predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics - are being let off the hook.

The Federal Reserve System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess!

• The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.
• Financial institutions are "designated as financial agents of the Government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.
• Then there's this: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.
  

There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this "sadly necessary." Sad, yes. Necessary? Don't make me laugh.

Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people.

The two major party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind - another example of the big choice we're supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes.

Now, with a backlash brewing, they're not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short.

Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow.

With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it.

Call them! Let them hear from you!

Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom?

Do we care about responsibility and accountability?

Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for?

Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government?

Do we care?

When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media?

Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Read the Crisis on Wall Street

Handouts to spread the word

________________

McCain and the POW Cover-up

The "war hero" candidate buried information about POW's left behind in Vietnam.


The Nation Institute
By Sydney H. Schanberg
Sept. 18, 2008


John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind."

This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

Mass of Evidence

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.

The chairman was John Kerry.

McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine. One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon's performance was an insider, Air Force Lieut. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s.

He openly challenged the Pentagon's position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement. Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993.

The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid "without any political conditions."

But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party "in accordance with its own constitutional provisions." That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so.

The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored - and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam.

In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home. In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community.

The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed. My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few—if any—are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my own reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain's role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs.

That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.

The Arizona Senator, now the Republican candidate for President, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and national security advisor, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H. W. Bush's defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington.

McCain's Role

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called "the Truth Bill" and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads:

"[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."

The McCain Bill

DOD cites the McCain Bill in denying a FOIA request

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as "the McCain Bill," suddenly appeared.

By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, at left, when the Pentagon cited McCain's bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.

So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying: "Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both."

A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon. About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said: "This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington."

He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, "would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks."

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make.

Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records?

By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs. McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence—documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs' sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned—has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth.

He calls it the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos."

Some of McCain's fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn't share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter—a response to McCain's stream of insults hurled at MIA activists.

Guy wrote: "John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were 'last known alive'? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?"

DOD denies access to McCain's 1973 debriefing

It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his post-war behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo—to try to break down other prisoners—and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio.

Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain. (See the Pentagon's rejection of my attempt to obtain records of this debriefing, at left.)

All humans have breaking points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself and his military family.

His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded rear admiral then serving as commander of all US forces in the Pacific. His grandfather was also a rear admiral. In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value.

Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the "Crown Prince," something McCain acknowledges in the book. Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide.

(In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace." He says that when he returned home, he told his father about the confession, but "never discussed it at length"—and the Admiral, who died in 1981, didn't indicate he had heard anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes: "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."

Is McCain haunted by these memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. Many stories have been written about McCain's explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loathe to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: "This is a man not at peace with himself."

He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair. But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: If American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute

This is an expanded version, with primary documents attached, of a story that appears in the October 6, 2008 issue of The Nation.

Read Entire Story Here:
http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1
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Experience 101


By Dick Cavet
The New York Times
Sept. 12, 2008


Dear Reader: It may be time to give up on writing about current events in this space. When you think how news travel time has been telescoped, it’s dizzying. It took days for even the rumors of Custer’s annihilation at Little Big Horn to reach the east.

Now any news over two hours old isn’t news — it’s “olds.” Anything from the day before is virtually archaeology.

In reading what follows, be aware that nothing here is exactly meant to be a “this just in” bulletin.

And so, the inevitable phrase: “By the time you read this….”

Or, for short:

B.T.T.Y.R.T.: Sarah Palin will doubtless have been outed even further from the witness protection program in which her handlers have kept her secreted since her smasheroo solo performance on That Memorable Night.

There’s no denying that she rocked the place and, as her enthusing boosters said, “She really delivered the goods.”

So she did, even if some were shoddy.

Back here in the past, when I’m writing this, we have just seen part one of her quizzing by Charles Gibson, with mixed reviews for both. So far I have not seen her confronted with some of the things about which she has been, to put it in that awful Diplomatically Correct phrase, “somewhat less than fully truthful.” (Typesetter: If space is scarce, use “lying.”) As in claiming “no thanks” to the bridge money while failing to disclose that she kept it.

Performance is the mot juste for what she did at the convention. And I admit that even my own jaded and cynical showbiz heart leapt up as she wowed the adoring crowd with a show-stopper display of charm and personality. I even laughed at two or three of the two or three too many insults directed at Obama. Don Rickles could not have snapped them out better.

Watching a woman, slight of build and full of pizazz so thoroughly bedazzle a vast audience is entertaining. Something chimed in my memory when she brought that crowd to its feet with frantic and worshipful cheering.

Ah, yes. I had seen it all before.

It was Judy Garland at The Palace.

And yet no one offered her the vice-presidency. (Fact-checker: Am I right on this?)

I wince and feel for her over the reports of how she is being tutored, guided and taught in marathon cram sessions of what might be called a crash course in Instant Experience 101.

There’s something almost funny in the idea that she is being speedily stuffed, Strasbourg-goose-style, with knowledge she should have had before she was selected.

You can’t help wondering about her current tutors and coaches and experts. Will they collect their checks and depart? Or will they still be around should she have to make a quick decision about things like troop movements, new surges, or whether or not to reduce Iran to a cinder? Or any number of other matters requiring resume items more complex than those faced by a mayor of Wasilla.

I’d love to have the chance to ask her how being able to see Russia from parts of her state apparently qualifies her to deal with that vastly complex country more effectively than those scholars and diplomats who find themselves less proximate to its shores.

Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.

If there were a prize cake available, McCain’s lowbrow ad attempting to paint Obama as a virtual pornographer and peddler of sex to kindergarteners would take that pastry. Plate and all.

And it might be, if not instructive, at least fun to give McCain’s trash-peddling Karl Rove acolytes some truth serum and ask them if — in their heart of hearts — they really think Obama meant to call our Sarah a pig.

To believe that, wouldn’t you have to be at least as dumb as Georgia Republican Lynn Westmoreland? The man who used the word “uppity” about Obama?

Westmoreland, a living embodiment of that stock cartoonist’s character the Good Old Boy southern senator — complete with slouch, beer gut and eyes over his bags — courageously claimed ignorance of any racism in that favorite term of those who murdered Emmett Till and Medgar Evers. Anything involving Westmoreland and ignorance is unlikely to be disputed.

McCain is in on a pass with a large chunk of the press. It’s said he owes that to his friendly kaffeeklatsch manner in the back of the plane, sleeves rolled up, chummy, not averse to a dirty joke or two — one of them a stomach-turning jest about a recent president’s daughter uttered at a public gathering.

His remedial-reading clumsiness with the Teleprompter sometimes affords amusement.

On Sarah: “She’s worked with her hands and knows” — pause, making it sound exactly like “hands and nose” — then, realizing, “… and knows what it’s like to worry about mortgage payments, and health care, and the cost of gasoline and groceries.” (Did YouTube and Stephen Colbert miss that one?)

But enough of this carping. There is one good thing you can say about Sarah. She seems to have hit upon something that might bring relief to the hordes of suffering souls with the wolf at the door and their homes in jeopardy: Collect per diem for nights spent in your own house.

Source:
http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/experience-101/index.html
_________________

Obama: McCain/Palin "Not Telling the Truth"

Obama serves up straight talk of his own. Part one of Keith Olbermann's interview with Barack Obama

TRANSCRIPT

By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC
Sept. 8, 2008


Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama talks with Countdown's Keith Olbermann about the attacks made by McCain and Palin on his campaign.

Below is a transcript of their conversation.

KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST, COUNTDOWN: Senator, thanks for your time. I'm sorry I couldn't join you in person, but I had to update people on quarterback injuries or something like that.

(LAUGHTER)

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thanks, Keith.

OLBERMANN: This is...

OBAMA: Lousy day for quarterbacks.

OLBERMANN: Yes, it is. Brady is out.

This is more about campaign tactics to start with rather than issues. But it seems sometimes like tactics have replaced issues altogether. "He fights pork barrel spending," said this new McCain/Palin ad, "she stopped the 'Bridge to Nowhere.'"

I mean, it sounds a little like "Remington Steele," but I'm confused otherwise. As late as October of 2006, Mrs. Palin insisted to voters in Alaska that not only would she defend that infamous bridge, but she also said — and here's the quote — "She would not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative."

What are Sen. McCain and Governor Palin doing in this new commercial, do you think?

OBAMA: They're not telling the truth. You know, I mean, it's —I think we've all gotten accustomed to being able to spin things in politics. But when you've got somebody who was for a project being presented as being against it, then that, you know, stretches the bounds of spin into new areas.

And you know, as far as John McCain is concerned, you know, I think that Sen. McCain has, on occasion, broken with his party, but this notion that, as he said at his convention, that he would tell the lobbyists that they're not going to be running Washington anymore, who is he going to tell, his campaign chairman, Charlie Black, his campaign manager, Rick Davis, two of the largest corporate lobbyists in Washington with client lists that extend into every major industry?

You know, there is just a sense that they're making these assertions that ignore the facts of their campaigns and their past history. And I think people should be troubled by that.

OLBERMANN: And Governor Palin hired a lobbyist to get earmarks to the tune of $27 million for a 6,000-person town which is — in its own scope, is kind of a neat trick, but it does seem to counterbalance the basic platform of the Republican Party.

You said that they're not telling the truth here, but when the stuff is a gross distortion, whether it's about their own positions or yours, or facts in your history or whatever, what can you do about it? And why do people hesitate to use the word "lie" about these things?

OBAMA: Well, look, we have been very clear about the fact that this argument John McCain and Sarah Palin are making, that they are agents of change, just won't fly. It defies their history and their background. And we saw it in the convention that they wouldn't talk about the basic issues that are really going to make a difference in the lives of middle class families.

So you know, I'm happy to have legitimate policy debates with them on where we want to take health care, what we want to do about energy, what we want to do about education, what are we going to do about the war in Iraq.

But you know, for them to run an ad that basically doesn't present an accurate record of their positions on issues I think should raise some questions about how they would approach an administration.

OLBERMANN: To something from your own convention, maybe the most compelling moment of your acceptance speech in Denver was that one strongly voiced word, "enough." A lot of people who have felt angry about what has been done to this country in the last seven or eight years have that same sense of urgency and simplicity to it.

Have you thought of using on the campaign trail and in your speaking engagements, more exclamation points? Have you thought of getting angrier?

OBAMA: Well, I'll tell you what, with two months to go, I think everybody needs to feel a sense of urgency. You know, when I hear John McCain suggest that he is going to bring about change, I am reminded of the cartoon that Tom Toles did in "The Washington Post" where he has McCain say: "Watch out, George Bush, with the exception of the economy, tax policy, foreign policy, health care policy, education policy, and Karl Rove politics, we're really going to shake things up in Washington."

You know, the fact of the matter is, is that not only has John McCain agreed with George Bush 90 percent of the time, this is the party that has been in charge for eight years. And they're now trying to run against themselves despite a few months ago having argued that — John McCain saying that, listen, I've been supportive of George Bush, boasting about it.

You know, I said, I think on Saturday in Indiana, the American people aren't stupid. They are going to get it. But we've got to make sure that we are being clear, not only that they will not bring about change, but the very specific kinds of changes we want to bring, in terms of green technology jobs in America, investing in our education system, making college more affordable, making health care accessible to every American, that contrast, if we go into November, with that contrast on the minds of the American people, I think we're going to do well.

OLBERMANN: But clearly it must not be fully on their minds because the race is as close as it is. And nobody's burst into laughter at the latest Republican ad, at least not many Republicans have.

Have the Republicans succeeded in muddying up this election in kind of overcomplicating it so the point is not as simple as you just made it.

Sixty years ago Harry Truman went out and campaigned very simply, looked out at people in trouble because of a Republican Congress at that point and the impact it had on their lives and he said, "How many more times do you have to be hit over the head till you figure out who's hitting you?"

I mean, has your campaign in some way not kept it that simple?

OBAMA: You know, we've actually been driving this point home and I think the convention drove it home. But look, the Republicans can't govern but they run smart campaigns and frankly, they are not always policed by the media as effectively as they should be.

I was struck with how little scrutiny some of the claims that John McCain and Sarah Palin were making, how little they were subjected to scrutiny coming out of the convention. It's our job to press the point and make the case and I think that the Republicans have been pretty successful at working the refs during this game.

But yeah, I have confidence in the American people that if we just drum home the fact that the country is off course, that middle class families are struggling, your wages and incomes have gone down under George Bush. Under Democrats, they went up. Unemployment has gone up. Unemployment was down under Bill Clinton.

If we just keep on being clear about how we are going to rebuild this economy, then I think we are going to end up winning this campaign.

OLBERMANN: And there are extraordinarily large developments in terms of that economy. Especially in the last couple of days, especially about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They were created as a kind of gentle encouragement by government to more home ownership, to make it more possible.

There is nothing gentle about it, it is now fully taxpayer funded subsidization of home interest rates and home ownership. Should this be the way it is? Is this a permanent solution or did we just add $5 trillion to the national debt? What do we do now about this?

OBAMA: Well, I don't think it's going to be $5 trillion. That's the amount of debt that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are holding. But a lot of those are good mortgages. People are paying them. We are going to see some losses. Taxpayers are going to take a hit. How big it is, we don't yet know.

And I have to be fair on this one. Republicans and Democrats I think in Congress did not pay enough attention to the structural problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which was, they are quasi public, quasi private institutions. They are making big profits and their CEOs are taking in big bonuses when times are good. But there is this implicit federal guarantee when times are bad.

And that was a structural problem that needs to be fixed.

But the problem of not regulating the financial markets effectively generally, not seeing that the subprime mortgage crisis was leading to a mess, not updating some of our financial regulations since the 1930s, that's been, I think, an example of the neglect on the part of the Bush administration over the last eight years whose view is basically anything goes and the government just has to stay out of the way. That has ironically hurt the market and one of the things we have got to rediscover is a little bit of well-applied regulation and transparency and accountability actually helps the market, helps the economy grow. And that's what I want to restore when I'm president.

OLBERMANN: You pointed out last week how little time at their convention Republicans spent talking about the economy. I think the time might have been zero, zero, zero. I'm not sure. We weren't running a clock. But if the election does, in fact, hinge on the economy, on how Americans are doing, has there been thought given to breaking this down to its simplest element, in much the way one of the Republican icons, Mr. Reagan did during the 1980 campaign, and ask the voters if today, are you better off now than you were eight years ago?

OBAMA: Oh, absolutely. And I often do that on the campaign trail. And we're going to just keep on repeating that.

I mean, this is — this should not be complicated. Here's what it comes down to. Under George Bush's stewardship, with an assist from John McCain and the rest of the Republican Party, the economy is weaker now than it has been in a very long time. Unemployment is higher. Poverty is higher. More people are uninsured. Wages and incomes have flat-lined. Middle class folks who used to feel secure now feel unstable. We've got more homes being lost to foreclosure than at any time since the Great Depression.

And John McCain does not have any discernible difference from George Bush when it comes to economic policy. He's got the same economic policy. So if you like what has happened under George Bush's presidency, you should vote for John McCain. If you think that we have to move this country in a fundamentally different direction, then you should vote for me. And that is going to be the case that we make throughout this election, and frankly, that's not the conversation that the McCain campaign wants to have.

Rick Davis was very explicit. John McCain's campaign manager said this campaign is not going to be about the issues. That was his assertion. Well, I think that the American people expect it to be about the issues. They deserve it to be about the issues. That's what we're going to keep on pressing in the weeks that will remain.

OLBERMANN: In terms of getting that and other messages out, Rachel Maddow wanted me to ask this question, so I'm doing this on her behalf, because her new show is starting tonight. Given — given the tone that the campaign has taken, I mean, this Georgia congressman last week, Mr. Westmoreland, who called you and your wife, quote, "Uppity." In that context, do you regret putting the brakes on the 527 groups who would have produced or could have produced hard-hitting ads that would have been sharing your sympathies?

OBAMA: You know, I'll tell you what, Keith, I am confident that the American people, once the dust has settled, are going to say to themselves, "Do we really want to do the same thing we've been doing for the last eight years? Or do we want something new?" I think there's a genuine sense of anxiety out there, not just about immediate economic prospects but the sense that we are not living up to what's possible in America, that we're not delivering on the American promise.

And I think that understandably people are saying to themselves, gosh, we like Obama, we like his message, but we haven't known him that long, let's really lift the hood, kick the tires, you know, take them out and watch them work hard.

And you know, let's take a look at these debates and then we're going to make up our mind in mid-October. And I think that by the time this thing is all over, the contrast is going to be clear and I believe the American people are going to make the choice for a new direction in the country.

And I'm looking forward to helping to lead that.

OLBERMANN: One more campaign question. It pertains to not knowing someone or something. This is a question I have not really heard asked directly of anybody in a position perhaps to answer it, let alone answered.

In your opinion, is Governor Palin experienced enough and qualified enough to become president of the United States in the relatively short-term future?

OBAMA: Well, you know, I'll let you ask Governor Palin that when I'm sure she'll be appearing on your show.

(LAUGHTER)

OBAMA: But rather than focus on a resume, I just want to focus on where she wants to take the country. As far as I can tell, there has not been any area, economic policy or foreign policy, in which she is different from John McCain or George Bush.

In many ways, in fact, she agrees with George Bush even more than John McCain. So if John McCain agrees with Bush 90 percent of the time, maybe with her it's 97 percent. And so my -- the thrust of our argument is going to be that the McCain/Palin ticket is offering the same stuff that has resulted in the middle class struggling, not seeing their incomes go up, seeing their costs go up, falling deeper into debt, at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure, unable to save or retire.

Those are going to be I think the issues that ultimately matter to the voters, and that's why I'm trying to offer to them a very clear set of prescriptions, very clear ideas about what we intend to do, how we want to change the tax code, stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, give 95 percent of Americans tax relief.

Have an energy policy that is serious about climate change, is serious about weaning ourselves off of Middle Eastern oil, investing in solar and wind and biodiesel so we've got energy independence and creating jobs here in the United States, having a health care system that makes sure that we don't have 47 million people without health insurance.

That message of possibility is, I think, the one that the American people are looking for.

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26612909/
_______________

Greg Palast on How Rove May Have Already Stolen the 2008 Election


Interview conducted by Mark Karlin.
Originally Posted
May 17, 2007


People ask me: Are they going to steal the 2008 election? No, they’ve already stolen the 2008 election. We still have a chance of swiping it back, but the reason I’ve expanded and put out the new edition of Armed Madhouse is to tell you how they will steal in 2008, and what to do about it. That’s one of the main new things. Plus a special chapter on New Orleans and my bust down there. -- Greg Palast

You might say, since the 2000 election, BuzzFlash and Greg Palast have shared many a foxhole in the fight for democracy. He's a workaholic, like we are -- and he doesn't flinch one iota in investigating the powers that be.

One of the things that makes Palast such an incredible asset is that he is in the I.F. Stone tradition of his doing thorough research. As much as he's built up a Sam Spade sleuthing persona, it is grounded in his ability to shift through large piles of documents and data that most modern reporters would just look at and cry, "No way, I've got to meet someone for a daquiri."

Mainstream jounalism in D.C. is built on the "easy story," as in the one that is handed to you by the Executive Branch. Actually, Palast doesn't work in D.C. much at all. He is out traveling around the country -- and world -- doing actual investigations into what is really going on.

That's the reason he is the person whom BuzzFlash has interviewed the most times over our seven year history.

Besides, we just love that fedora hat he's always wearing. Just the right touch.

And Greg always has something controversial and eye-popping to share, whether you agree with him 100% or not.

So enjoy, another BuzzFlash interview with Greg Palast.

BuzzFlash: You’re having incredible success with the new expanded paperback edition of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Of course, the electronic voting machines and how they function is a very significant issue, but your specialty has really been how the Bush/Rove GOP political machine keeps persons who are likely to vote Democratic or Independent from voting.

Greg Palast: Yes. People ask me: Are they going to steal the 2008 election? No, they’ve already stolen the 2008 election. We still have a chance of swiping it back, but the reason I’ve expanded and put out the new edition of Armed Madhouse is to tell you how they will steal in 2008, and what to do about it. That’s one of the main new things. Plus a special chapter on New Orleans and my bust down there.

Of course, I was very flattered that the first review of the new edition of Armed Madhouse was written by Karl Rove and the Rove-bots -- it was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee -- I can’t make this up. On February 7th, the Rove team, which had been writing several e-mails screaming about Armed Madhouse and "that British reporter," Greg Palast, were gloating that no U.S. media had picked up my stories. And they had a .pdf file attached. Of course, the reason my book was subpoenaed is that it has to do with the US prosecutor firings.

The prosecutor firings were 100% about influencing elections -- not about loyalty to Bush, which is what The New York Times wrote. The administration team couldn’t tolerate appointees who wouldn’t go along with crime. In the book I present the evidence that Karl Rove directed a guy named Tim Griffin to target suppressing the votes of African American students, homeless men, and soldiers. Nice guy. They actually challenged the votes and successfully removed tens of thousands of legal voters from the voter rolls, same as they did in 2000. But instead of calling them felons, they said that they had suspect addresses.

BuzzFlash: In which election cycle?

Greg Palast: 2004. And in 2006 and 2004, they challenged tens of thousands of black soldiers. They stopped their votes from being counted when they were mailed in from Baghdad. Go to Baghdad and lose your vote -- mission accomplished.

BuzzFlash: How did they do that?

Greg Palast: By sending letters to the homes of soldiers, marked "do not forward." When they came back undelivered, they said: Aha! Illegal voter registered from a false address. And when their ballot came in from Fallujah, it was challenged. The soldier didn’t know it. Their vote was lost. Over half a million votes were challenged and lost by the Republicans -- absentee ballots.

Three million voters who went to the polls found themselves challenged by the Republicans. This was not a small operation. It was a multi-million dollar, wholesale theft operation.

They’re right that I’m a British reporter, because I put this story on British TV, not on American TV, which won’t touch it. [BuzzFlash note: Palast writes for British papers and reports on the BBC, but he is a product of the San Fernando Valley and the University of Chicago, 100% American.] But our election was a complete, total fraud. This is grand theft -- no question. It’s not a dirty trick; it’s a felony crime.

I’m working with Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney. He said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.”

[paraphrase] And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is -- badda-bing -- U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying -- it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.

BuzzFlash: You have been questioned about prosecutor-gate and about the theft of the election of 2008. But these replacement prosecutors are still in place, not to mention the ones who have cooperated with Bush. Gonzales has basically told the House Judiciary Committee, make my day. I’m staying on. It’s over with. You asked me questions. I didn’t give you answers, but you don’t have the courage to impeach me, so I’m staying.

Greg Palast: That’s the game, too. Congress is shooting at the glove puppet. I shoot at the puppeteers. It’s not Gonzales. He’s meaningless. He’s a nothing. He should go because he allowed it to happen, and that’s a crime. When I was a racketeering investigator, we used to call it “willful failure to know.” He can’t just say to his staff, I know what Rove is doing, but don’t tell me about it. He would still be liable for criminal conspiracy of obstruction of justice. That’s why Monica Goodling took the Fifth. Not knowing doesn’t mean you’re not guilty, especially when you went out of your way not to know.

Gonzales should be read his rights and carted away. But it’s the puppeteers behind him -- Rove and Harriet Miers -- who were deeply involved in the prosecutor hits. No one’s talking about her. This is the woman who went from head of the Texas State Lottery to nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by George Bush, and no one asked how that happened. They said: Harriet who?

But they didn’t ask how that happened. They said, oh, she’s loyal to Bush. She’s the one who did the payoffs to cover up the fact that George Senior got George Junior out of the war in Vietnam.

Do you think that that was done just by daddy making a call? Money had to be paid -- lots and lots of money to keep people quiet -- $23 million. That is something I reported on BBC Television and in the Guardian newspaper. We’ve given them plenty of time to challenge that story about the payoffs. We’ve never gotten a peep from these guys. And unlike CBS, the BBC has not withdrawn the story that the fix was put in to get Chicken George out of Vietnam. No one has challenged our story, nor have we withdrawn a comment on our story that the payoffs were made to keep it quiet.

BuzzFlash: Let’s focus for the moment on voter suppression, and we'll return later to other elements of the voter manipulation story.

Greg Palast: I have it all in Armed Madhouse, including in the three new chapters. First and foremost, is that it’s not one thing. It ain’t just electronic voting, guys. You go, oh, we have paper ballots, we’re saved, we’re saved. Bulls***! Wake up! Hello! Let’s remember that in Florida and Ohio, they didn’t have computer voting. So all the stuff about Diebold -- Ohio was not stolen by computers, because they didn’t have computers there. In fact, they were thrilled when people complained about computers because they could keep the junky punch cards in. That doesn’t mean that computers are safe. As I point out in the new chapter, the Republicans held on to Katherine Harris’ seat -- and we don’t want to think too carefully about that image -- they held onto Katherine Harris’ seat with 300 votes, while 18,000 votes disappeared in the computers.

So they do use computers. That was a pure, straight-up, shoplift of the Congressional seat.

BuzzFlash: A House committee just voted not to pursue an investigation of that election, despite the disappearance of 18,000 votes.

Greg Palast: That’s sick -- deeply, deviously sick. First of all, in New York and other states, when votes are in question, they simply redo them. People talk about recount -- forget it. Redo the vote. When the machines collapse, then there’s no question that there was monkey business.
BuzzFlash: Then why do you think --

Greg Palast: -- why don’t Democrats stand up?

BuzzFlash: The U.S. House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats. It’s like saying, well, $320 million is missing from a bank but we’re not going to investigate that.

Greg Palast: You’re forgetting it’s not about the two parties. Vote theft is mainly a racial issue in America, and it’s a class issue. The white caucus is a lot bigger than the black caucus. They don’t call the Congress a millionaire’s club for nothing. There aren’t many guys in there -- or women -- who are not millionaires. So it’s the millionaires versus us. It’s the white caucus versus the black caucus, which is of great concern. So the vote is along racial class and economic lines, not along party lines.

Party lines are pretty much meaningless. There’s pretty much one party -- the party of the cash. But I’m not one of these people that says there’s no difference between the Democratic and Republican Party. The question is: is the difference meaningful? That’s all. When it comes down to voter issues, remember that the Democrats in power there were elected under the racist, broken, classist system. If you fix the voting system, a third of those Democrats could never win a primary. The last thing that they want is poor people to vote.

BuzzFlash: Let’s go back to your tremendous work in the 2000 election.

Greg Palast: In that case, Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush targeted 97,000 registered voters, as it turned out, to remove from the voter rolls on the grounds that they were criminals. They were "guilty of voting black." By the way, of out of the 97,000 people, do you know how many they charged with actually voting illegally? Of the 97,000 names that they had? Zero. They looked at six cases and brought no charges. There were only six suspected cases, out of 97,000.

That’s how sick that was. And the U.S. press -- Fox TV -- said not one voter was wrongly disenfranchised. In Armed Madhouse, I have the little weasel on Fox who said that, next to the picture of one of the disenfranchised voters, a Gulf War veteran. They love to take out veterans, because who do you think is in the armed forces? A whole lot of war veterans lost their vote because they happened to have -- as part of the legacy of slavery -- names that are the same as someone who, maybe fifty years before, got convicted of something.

BuzzFlash: We just want to praise you again to the readers. We’ve seen you present a number of times, and several years ago, in Chicago, you did a presentation that shows the list that was used to disenfranchise voters.

Greg Palast: Those are the purge lists. For 2004, we have the caging lists. And in 2008, we’re going to have what’s called the verification list.

BuzzFlash: Meaning the return of the Jim Crow laws, I assume?

Greg Palast: When I say the 2008 race has already been stolen, about a million and a half voter registrations have been turned down. Even though there have been massive voter registration drives among Hispanics and African Americans, as the churches fill up the bucket, there’s a hole in the bucket where the registrations are being dumped.

It used to be that you signed your name -- bang, you got through, you’re registered. Not anymore. About 40% of the registrations are being rejected on the grounds that they don’t match citizenship files. Well, you know what? It ain’t the Soviet Union. We don’t have citizenship files in the United States. They don’t exist. They can’t exist under the law, which is the U.S. Constitution.

So how do you verify voters? Well, you don’t. About the only thing that could happen is if you require a passport -- and who has passports?

BuzzFlash: This is not conjecture on your part. You're very methodical.

Greg Palast: We've got the documents. We ain’t guessing. When I say they had caging lists targeting innocent black soldiers, I have the lists. I have the soldiers’ names. We spoke to their families. In fact, interestingly, "60 Minutes" came into our office and said, “My God, to prove what these caging lists are, you’re going to have to make hundreds of calls and spend hundreds of hours going through this stuff.” And we said, “Yeah, it’s reporting. Try it. It won’t hurt you.”

BuzzFlash: You go back again to Florida and Choice Point, and you have excellent video documentation of the confrontations with Choice Point.

Greg Palast: Yes.

BuzzFlash: The Secretary of State’s office, meaning Katherine Harris’ office, no doubt at the request of Jeb Bush and the Bush campaign, chose to expand, rather than limit, the list.

Greg Palast: After they were done bleaching the voter rolls of Florida white -- yes, they wrote some memos to cover their ass. They knew exactly what was happening. These guys were guilty as sin. They should be in prison. But it’s all right. Their CEO maybe in trouble now. He may still yet be cuffed because of allegations of insider trading. The Choice Point people are back in Armed Madhouse for a very good reason. It’s that after they bleached the voter rolls white for the Bush family, they were paid off by no-bid contracts for the war on terror. They’re the guys who are keeping these KGB lists for the government, because the government is not allowed to keep information files on citizens. It’s against the Constitution.

But somehow Bush has decided that if he contracts it out to his cronies, that there’s kind of a contracting out exception to the Constitution. So he gives it out to Choice Point. Well, do we want this private KGB earning billions? And what else do they do with the information? Well, first of all, they’re in the info biz. They are using it -- they sell this stuff. And in fact, they got caught selling at least 145,000 records to identity thieves.

Another problem with using private contractors, of course, is that these private guys don’t have any of the requirements that the government does to be accurate, to produce the information under the Freedom of Information Act. These guys can ream you. And they do. Some people say, well, it’s worth it if they keep us safe. Well, I was charged by the Department of Homeland Security with violating the anti-terror laws -- me. Probably I was caught doing investigative reporting in the United States.

BuzzFlash: In New Orleans, right?

Greg Palast: Yes, that was in New Orleans. While I was charged, I was afraid I wouldn’t get home, because I’d be on a watch list. And then, I’d be more afraid when I got home. So, I mean, I’m still wearing my fedora. And these are the guys who are supposed to be saving us from Osama. And as I point out in the book, I have lists of several six-month-old children who are on the terrorism watch list. You can never start too young, I suppose. Maybe they’ll open up a kind of kindergarten at Guantanamo.

BuzzFlash: People have to read Armed Madhouse and your other articles. They need to go to your site, gregpalast.com. Because you are the expert on what is basically a RICO case to undermine the American electoral and voting system in a comprehensive way from several different angles, as masterminded by Karl Rove and other people in the Republican Party. What you have exposed is, in essence --

Greg Palast: A criminal conspiracy, according to Bobby Kennedy. The BBC requires me to work with lawyers so that I don’t just shoot my mouth off on legal stuff. And Bobby Kennedy, Jr., is a law professor and an expert on voting rights law. And his father gave his life for voting rights, too, don’t forget. Bobby Kennedy says that what we have here is a criminal conspiracy to commit felony manipulation of the voter system. It violates endless numbers of laws.

These people really need to be not in office, but in prison. He’s not a guy given to much excitement, but when he looked at the evidence in Armed Madhouse, he just flipped. And what’s driving him crazy as well is that Karl Rove is right. The U.S. media is not picking up the investigation.

BuzzFlash: That’s why I want to say that people should read your book and follow your website and your articles.

Greg Palast: They should stay on with BuzzFlash because, yes, a lot of my stuff will eventually get picked up by the U.S. media. They may say "there are accusations within the blogosphere," because it’s on BuzzFlash. But, of course, this started out with a massive, high-level investigation for the BBC Television network. I’m proud to give it to BuzzFlash because we sure as hell ain’t getting it into the Washington Pravda Post. We aren’t getting into the New York Judith Miller Times. And I’m glad to say that you’re growing and they’re dying, and that’s the way it ought to be.

BuzzFlash: It is such a massive assault on the voting system and felony suppression of rights in many ways, as we’ve pointed out. They’re coming at it from all angles. For instance, in prosecutor-gate, they’re using prosecutors to kind of gin up accusations of voter fraud that don’t exist just to win elections. And then when the elections are over, they get Republicans and state legislatures to cry, oh, that was terrible, even though nothing was ever prosecuted. We need new Jim Crow voter laws to keep people who shouldn’t vote from voting, to prevent fraud that never existed.

Greg Palast: Right now, I’m following up with another story that involves prosecutor-gate. I’m speaking to one of the fired prosecutors' offices -- David Iglesias. Rove had this whole scheme.

While he’s stealing votes with both hands -- I mean, literally -- he is, at the same time, coming up with this scheme to accuse Democrats of registering illegal aliens and encouraging massive voter ID theft. It’s a complete goofy scheme. And what they did is try to involve the U.S. attorneys in bringing prosecution. For example, in New Mexico, they wanted David Iglesias.

Rove’s people told me that. Rove’s people claimed that there were 150 cases of voter ID theft in New Mexico. And I said, “Well, then send them to me.” And they said, “Well.”

It’s in the book. And they said, “Well, David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney, will back us up.” So I called his office. And they refused to back it up. They said, “Well, we don’t really have an open investigation on this.”

I said, “In other words, you can’t back up this story.” They said, “Well, I guess you could say that.” I said, “I guess I will.” In other words, they fabricated the evidence and they wanted him to bring a phony prosecution -- like a Stalin trial. Pick out a couple Mexicans and say that they were voting illegally, and then we’ll disappear. But you know what? Iglesias wouldn’t do it. He and eight prosecutors drew a line in the sand.

Iglesias, you have to understand, is a right-wing Ashcroft protégé Republican, and he turned away from evidence of the Republicans stealing the election in New Mexico, which they did in 2004. He wouldn’t bust the Rove-arians there. But he wouldn’t go so far as to actually bring false prosecutions. He wouldn’t do it. He has now said the evidence they gave him is bogus. Not that he didn’t try. He had the FBI on these cases. They had the state attorney general on these cases, hoping to give them one prosecution in the entire state. They couldn’t find one. And he said he wasn’t going to just cuff some poor Mexican-American and charge him with voter fraud because Karl Rove ordered him to.

And by the way, Karl Rove flew to New Mexico. The Capo himself flew to New Mexico to give a kiss on each cheek to the doomed prosecutor. And speak to the local guys ordering his execution.

Rove went to New Mexico himself to do the hit. It was bring prosecutions against Mexican Americans, or look for a job -- and let’s not forget Iglesias’ last name, okay?

BuzzFlash: Now let’s focus on one individual who stands above all the prosecutors in terms of suppressing the right to vote through fraudulent strategies.

Greg Palast: A lot of competition there, but I think we have a winner.

BuzzFlash: You’ve written about “The Talented Mr. Griffin,” Arkansas’ new U.S. attorney, who has a history of suppressing minority voters. So how does Tim Griffin, a Rove protégé, Rove hit man, Rove op and research man, Rove suppression and voter man, end up in one of the disputed districts?

Greg Palast: Because the Democrats have no cojones. I’m going to tell you something very unhappy, okay? Again, it’s the white caucus versus the black caucus. It’s not Democrats versus Republicans. I talked to the black caucus. John Conyers, head of Judiciary on the House side, is very upset that you have a criminal who knocked black soldiers off the voter rolls as the U.S. attorney in Arkansas. The white caucus leader on the Senate side, is Patrick Leahy. His people said, well, Griffin is just there as an interim appointment, so big deal. Well, he’s interim through the 2008 election. In fact, I have another e-mail from inside the Rovian office which said if the Democrats complain, just say that Griffin is interim.

BuzzFlash: The press fell for this, and Democrats fell for this, too. They won’t seek Senate appointment, and everyone went, oh, you see? They’re conceding that they wouldn’t get it. But it didn’t matter because that was the whole scheme. They are in place for 2008. Rove won.

Greg Palast: Oh, it’s okay because he’s only in there for two years. It’s through the election. Like I say, this is not about Democrats versus Republicans. What you just saw was the millionaires white boys’ club -- versus the black caucus. And that’s what it’s all about. America has an apartheid electoral system and an apartheid Congress. And it’s about time we call it what it is.

BuzzFlash: How does the amazing Tim Griffin represent what really is the goal? As you just pointed out, it’s very important. The Democrats in Congress seem to have forgotten this in not calling for the impeachment of Gonzales.

Greg Palast: If the prosecutors are wrongfully fired, what you do in any wrongful dismissal is you hire them back. Why don’t we have one Democrat saying put them back? Crazy.

BuzzFlash: Basically if you’re Karl Rove and you’re sitting there, you feel you’ve survived everything. And you say I’ll survive this one. The people I’ve put in place to steal the 2008 election are gonna still be there.

Greg Palast: My boys count the votes.

BuzzFlash: Let’s look at Mr. Griffin, who’s one of those who’s in place and will be there until 2008. They went around the senior Democratic senator from Arkansas, Mark Pryor. There’s all sorts of e-mails indicating how they played Pryor.

Greg Palast: The Republicans proved their point. They can break the law. They can put a criminal in as U.S. prosecutor. They can break every rule of the Senate by going around -- remember, it’s not just senatorial privilege, it’s called voter privilege. The people of Arkansas elected Senator Pryor. One of the things that they elected him to do is approve the U.S. attorney for his area. We call that democracy.

BuzzFlash: Why is Griffin particularly emblematic of the reason that most of these eight were being replaced? Either to muddy up Democrats --

Greg Palast: I think that muddying the Democrats is secondary. It’s that he is the guy in charge of the caging list operation. He’s the guy who knocked off tens of thousands -- and it may go up to hundreds of thousands -- of Democratic voters, mostly minorities. That was his operation.

And that is why he is particularly evil, manipulative; and plus, if he can get away with it and then get this appointment without any Democrat raising their voice, then what do you think he’s going to do in office? In other words, if he could get away with what he did, and the Democrats don’t complain, and they basically piss all over the Democrats and Senator Pryor says that’s all right with me, and Patrick Leahy says that’s all right with me, then obviously, what’s he going to do once he’s in office? Take my word for it, he’s going to wipe out the black voters of Arkansas.

And I smell a deal, by the way -- and now I’m speculating. Everyone keeps saying he’s been put in Arkansas so he can do investigation of Hillary Clinton. He’s not going to do that. The deal’s been cut. Why do you think that he’s allowed to be there? Because the deal has been cut. We’ll put in Timmy, but he’s not going to touch Hillary. I’ve seen this before. There was a deal cut between the Democrats and Republicans back in the late nineties. The Republican, Newt Gingrich, was going to be in big legal trouble. So was Hillary Clinton. They traded. I smell a trade right here. Why would you allow a complete dirt bag, felon, criminal, racist scum spider in as U.S. prosecutor in Arkansas, in Hillary Clinton’s state, unless the deal was cut that Hillary is off limits to any investigation or grand jury charges?

BuzzFlash: Now we’ve got Griffin, specialist in violating the Voting Rights Act. In Arkansas, we have other people who were appointed who are willing to go on with the scheme to suppress the vote and then have states pass Jim Crow-type laws and Republican legislators. There probably are other prosecutors who weren’t replaced who are willing to go along with this scheme in key states. Otherwise, they would have been replaced. There also have been bogus claims of violation of registration of voters on Native American reservations.

Greg Palast: There is a litany of fake charges. In the new Armed Madhouse, I have Russell Pearce, a Republican legislator from Arizona, who said five million illegal aliens crossed the border to vote for Democrats -- five million. I asked this fruitcake to give me five names. I said, “If they voted, that means that you have their names. You have their registrations. So why aren’t you arresting them?” And that’s when I began to smell the Rove plan. He said, “Oh, the U.S. attorneys are going to arrest them.” But there was not one case brought in New Mexico by the honest attorney. Not one case where there’s an honest U.S. attorney. And by the way, they did find about a half dozen illegal aliens who had registered to vote in Arizona. They were registered by the Republican Party.

BuzzFlash: You’ve shown an arc from 2000 up through 2008. Again, we want to emphasize for the umpteenth time in this interview, that despite all this "investigation" of Gonzales, the status quo remains. These U.S. attorneys were replaced, and "interim" attorneys are still functioning on behalf of Gonzales and Rove. Nothing has been done to inhibit or curtail their activity, which can result in the theft of the election in 2008. And what’s more, no one is even speaking about investigating the patterns of behavior in suppressing votes by those who weren’t replaced.

Greg Palast: But there were cases brought against voters in Missouri. One of the new prosecutors, who came in after they fired the honest guy who said that there were no cases here -- the Rove-bot came in and actually brought charges in Missouri. Illegal voters, illegal voters, illegal voters -- nothing in the papers about the fact that every single case -- every single one -- was dismissed by judges. The judge says, you’re kidding, right? You know, you’re talking about things like someone being arrested for voting twice as Juan Gonzalez. How many guys named Juan Gonzalez there are in a state? They knew. These were fraudulent cases. And when you bring a fraudulent case, you go to jail. This is what the RICO laws were about, and the Civil Rights Act of ’64, and the Voting Rights Act of ’65. It used to be the Democratic officials in the South that teamed up with the Ku Klux Klan to bring false cases. Well, they’re back, but the white sheets have switched parties.

BuzzFlash: You’ve laid it right out on the table in Congress, this abuse of power, the suppression of voting rights. Why then is the mainstream media ignoring what is clearly a multi-year strategy to commit felonies?

Greg Palast: Two reasons. The victims are the poor, and the victims are the defenseless. The victims are black soldiers. There’s a whole section of New Orleans -- these are people that are off the radar. Do you think Obama gives a flying toot about someone living in a mobile home for a year and a half in New Orleans? Nah. They’re not voters. They’re not going to let them vote, so he doesn’t care.

And it’s a class issue. It’s a class war issue, and it’s tainted by race, too. Let’s not forget that. When I talk about voter suppression in 2000, it was a race issue. It was a story about black people. If they had removed people from country clubs off the voter rolls -- baby, you’d hear it. In fact, let’s remember that the only vote manipulation story that got any play at all in 2000 was in Palm Beach. Because imagine -- rich people didn’t have their votes counted correctly. All the reporters are down there, taking pictures of voters in string bikinis. And we’re down the road in Gadsden County, the blackest, poorest county in Florida where the big vote theft was done -- not one single camera.

Okay, except for Ted Koppel who went down there and said these poor black people -- they’re just too stupid to figure out the ballot, you know? And Koppel didn’t even check on the fact that they had busted machines. But it was very easy to say black people are too stupid to figure out how to vote. You have to understand, the racism within U.S. papers is absolutely unbelievable. There is an assumption that black people are stupid, incompetent and lazy.

BuzzFlash: Where do we stand today? Gonzales appeared before Conyers’ committee, I believe, and Conyers was, of course in a huff, as he should be, because he’s a righteous man. He sees the plot.

Greg Palast: Again, he knows what’s happening. I’m in contact with his office. He’s worked on a lot of investigations with me. It’s like the man is the entire conscience of the U.S. Congress.
BuzzFlash: Along with Henry Waxman. Let’s give him at least some credit here.

Greg Palast: Waxman is fantastic. Of course, you can’t separate New Orleans and voting, Iraq and voting, the war on terror and voting -- it’s all the same crew playing the same games. And there’s not only votes being lost, but blood being spilled. Of course, the book has a lot of funny stuff in it, because it’s so grim it’s humorous. It’s like a comic horror show. My friend calls it the clown-ocracy, because these are armed and dangerous jesters.

BuzzFlash: So where do we stand? Right now, we have these replacement prosecutors, and the prosecutors who weren’t replaced -- some of whom went along with this voter suppression plan and rewriting state laws into Jim Crow laws. We have electronic voting machines. We have a vast scheme here. But the mainstream media is playing the story that Gonzales is going to survive this because they don’t have any more goods on him.

Greg Palast: It’s a Punch and Judy show. It’s all about Gonzales. He’s the glove puppet. How come they aren’t bringing Rove up? And remember that Conyers cannot just call Rove by himself. He needs the power of the other Democrats who have to find their soul and find their balls. They haven’t grown back yet, despite the election of 2006.

BuzzFlash: Is there anyone else on the national scene in the media, in politics, beyond Conyers and Waxman, who understands that the Bush Administration is still trying to extend unitary, executive authority, as it did a couple of weeks ago, trying to extend wireless taps, spying power, and domestic surveillance? They are not doing this with the intention that a Democrat may then end up in the presidency with expanded powers. Their intention is that the Republicans are going to hold on to the White House. To have that expectation, they must have inside knowledge about how they’re going to manipulate the election.

Greg Palast: The new chapter, called “The Theft of 2008,” calculates with, I think, some reasoned accuracy, that four and a half million votes are going to be shoplifted. Get ready for it.

That doesn’t mean that they will own the White House. It just means that they start with a big old thumb on the electoral scale.

We should scream bloody murder. But the whining is not a help, you know. It only takes five million more votes. I say work with Jessie Jackson on this. If they’re going to knock out 40% of the registrations, then overwhelm them with more. If they’re going to throw away half the soldiers’ votes, then you better make sure that more of them vote, and that you’re watching it.

Yes, try to change the laws. And when you can’t, you better protect yourself. Don’t mail in your ballot. Don’t go posting, fools. You know, everyone’s concerned about the electronic voting. So, do you think that they’re going to go through all this hassle to manipulate the software, but then politely take your vote that you sent through the mail, open it up, and count it correctly? Really?

If you believe that, then you deserve not to have your vote counted.

BuzzFlash: One of your contentions, and it’s an important one, concerns the proprietary software issue, and the likelihood that votes have been lost through it. Certainly the Sarasota incident of 18,000 lost votes gives one pause.

Greg Palast: They want you to think that there’s one problem, which is electronic voting and paper ballots. By the way, that’s also racial. You talk to white voter activists, they talk about computers. You talk to black voter activists, and they talk about suppressing the vote. I want to repeat: There were virtually no computer voting machines in Ohio, and that’s where they stole it. There were virtually no computer voting machines in New Mexico. That’s where they stole it.

There were virtually no computer voting machines in Florida in 2000. That’s where they stole it.

It’s not the computer voting machines. Yes, they’re evil. They are wrong, they are manipulative, they are hack-prone, and they stole the election through computers in Sarasota and elsewhere in the last election. By the way, Jeb Bush got reelected as governor through manipulation of the new electronic voting machines. So, yes, they are a problem. But if you think that’s it, baby, they’ve got you.

So let me explain. Start thinking like a Hispanic or black voter who’s trying to get to the polls, and they ask you for your ID.

BuzzFlash: I believe in Arizona now it’s a birth certificate.

Greg Palast: You can’t use a driver’s license, because an alien can get a driver’s license. So, you can use a birth certificate -- certified original -- or a passport. And what people have passports?

Now, again, it’s a class issue. After all, Andy Young and Vernon Jordan and Bill Richardson are all for voter ID, okay? Because at their country club, they have plenty of IDs and they can always vote because their chauffeur can vouch for them.

Every time you have a new question or a way to challenge a voter, they will use it. They will abuse it. Three million voters were given provisional ballots. If you’re reading this and you’re white, you don’t know what a provisional ballot is. If you’re reading this and you’re black, you were the ones that got one. It’s that simple. We have one ballot for black folk, one ballot for white folk. And the black ballot is a provisional ballot and it does not get counted. And that’s how it was coming down in the United States of America.

So it’s time that the apartheid within the voter protection movement in America. White voters better start thinking about the need to protect the black vote, because your vote ain’t safe if it gets cancelled out by Karl Rove when they take away a Hispanic voter’s right to vote. You can have a nice, neat paper ballot they will count, but they’re laughing at you because they just purged fifteen Hispanics.

BuzzFlash: In your presentations, you often bring up the figure of millions of votes that are stolen before the election was even open.

Greg Palast: That’s right. Because people are being thrown off the voter rolls. In addition, the one thing that we’re constantly forgetting is that, while there’s this endless discussion of how they can hack the votes that turn you to vote from Democratic to Republican, there’s very, very little evidence of it. It’s there -- I don’t doubt it. But we’re not going to find it.

But one thing we know for damn sure is that they have to do something simple. The machines simply don’t work and don’t record the vote. And then there’s no fingerprints. There’s no manipulation. It just didn’t work. We had a million and a half votes in the 2006 election which just disappeared because machines didn’t work. And now you try to prove that it was deliberate.
All you have to do is look at where they didn’t work. In places like New Mexico, 88% in minority areas -- 88% in minority areas. You want to know how Diebold might have fixed the election in Cynthia McKinney’s district? Their machines don’t work in humidity. What do you have in July in Atlanta but humidity? In the poor areas. In the rich areas, they’re in air conditioned gymnasiums. That’s the games that they play. And the way that you figure it out is, you stop thinking white, and you start thinking slave.

BuzzFlash: Greg. Thank you so much.

Greg Palast: You guys are the best.

Source:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/061
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McCain's Health Plan Only Works If You Don't Get Sick

Even McCain wouldn't be eligible under his own plan.


By Trudy Lieberman ,
Columbia Journalism Review
Sept. 1, 2008


This is the third entry in a series examining John McCain's health proposals and how they have been covered in the press. Part I is found here, and Part II is found here.

Most people are finally beginning to realize that if they have even the most minor of preexisting health problems, they probably won't qualify for health insurance; if they do qualify, the insurer won't cover them for the ailments they already have.

That's right: in America, if you need insurance to cover a particular illness, you might not get coverage. Perverse, isn't it? That's because private insurance companies run the show, and their sine qua non is risk selection -- choosing to cover only the healthiest people, those who are unlikely to file claims and cost companies money. Risk selection is most important in the so-called individual market, where those without employer insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid must buy their coverage. That's the market where McCain wants to send more people when his proposals for weaning workers from the boss's insurance policy take root.

Earlier this year, Elizabeth Edwards attacked McCain, saying that neither he nor she would qualify for insurance under McCain's plan. Both have had cancer, which makes them persona non grata at the House of Aetna.

McCain responded on ABC's This Week: "We're not leaving anybody behind."

So it's worth examining McCain's plans for bringing everyone on board. He has proposed something called a Guaranteed Access Plan (GAP), which most closely resembles the high-risk pools that have become dumping grounds in thirty-four states for sick people insurers don't want. High risk pools originated in the 1970s as the industry's answer to national health insurance.

Then, like now, health reform was high on the public agenda. While the number of enrollees has grown from 55,500 in 1990 to 207,000 today, the number of uninsured tops 47 million, so pool coverage is the proverbial drop in the bucket.

"They haven't been very successful," says Mila Kofman, Maine's superintendent of insurance. "They are certainly not the starting point. If the goal is to provide coverage that works and is affordable, there's no evidence that risk pools have done that. They've done just the opposite."

Coverage tends to be expensive -- twice as high as standard rates in some states.

Deductibles may be high; in Arkansas, they can reach $10,000. Some states limit enrollment, so there may be waiting lists; more than 600 people are currently waiting in California. Once in, participants may face another waiting period, from ninety days to one year for pre-existing conditions -- ironically, the very health problems that qualify them for pool coverage in the first place.

A few years ago, Kofman studied how diabetics fall through cracks in the insurance system. She and her colleagues discovered that, of 340 diabetic patients who lived in states with a high risk pool, only seven patients actually enrolled. The rest found coverage unavailable, unaffordable, or inadequate for their needs.

With the number of diabetics growing, easy access to health insurance is a real concern.

Premiums paid by those in the pool don't cover the costs of providing the care, so states have to make up the difference, either through state funds or assessments on employers, hospitals, or insurers. In 2002, the federal government made matching payments available to expand coverage through high risk pools. But eighteen of the nineteen states that received grants in 2003 used the money to pay for existing programs instead of to finance coverage for new enrollees.

Like most of McCain's health proposals, the GAP hasn't received much press. The Wall Street Journal offered readers a pretty fair assessment of the problems currently facing risk pools and raised the $64 question: How much will McCain spend to subsidize coverage?

The New York Times approached the story anecdotally, telling readers about a man who turned down pool coverage in Maryland because it was too expensive, and a couple who said the Maryland pool was a godsend -- the ying and the yang of the risk pool business. The Times also raised the cost issue, giving the impression that the McCain camp was no longer sure how much their high-risk proposal would cost.

In April, McCain's domestic policy adviser said it would cost between $7 and $10 billion, but he told the Times that projections "could change dramatically" depending on how the program was structured. In other words, who will be left out and how much of the cost those in the pool will shoulder in the form of waiting periods, deductibles, and lifetime caps on payouts. These are details about which voters should have some clue as they weigh the candidate's proposals.

Maybe they will take a hint from the insurance industry trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which, as it did in the 1970s, is advocating a risk pool solution -- albeit with variations on the theme. AHIP's Web site gives a head-spinning description of its proposal -- one that could become a bureaucratic nightmare for consumers while keeping insurers in the risk selection game.

Diagrams show that consumers must first apply to an insurer's health plan that gets an initial shot at insuring them if they are healthy. (The insurer gets the business if it's good business.) If the insurer turns consumers down, or offers coverage at substandard (very high) rates, the consumers apply to the state guaranteed access plan, which determines how much a person's ailments will cost the plan.

If the state access plan finds that a consumer's expected claims are 200 percent below the statewide average, the state plan denies coverage and sends the person back to the insurance company, which will then issue a policy with higher premiums. But if the claims are expected to exceed 200 percent of the state average, the guarantee access plan assumes the coverage. Whew!

The insurer is home free; it doesn't have to cover someone on whom it might lose money. (A pretty sweet deal!) The industry palms the bad risks onto the state and keeps the good ones for itself. Apparently that's how AHIP expects to achieve universal access to coverage. It wouldn't be surprising if McCain, whose own plan seems vague, will look to AHIP for advice. All in all, a pretty good story.


Source:
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/97164/mccain%27s_health_plan_only_works_if_you_don%27t_get_sick/
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