High Court Health Ruling to Increase Uninsured, CBO Says

About 3 million fewer low-income Americans will have health insurance as a result of the Supreme Court decision that threw out part of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, the Congressional Budget Office said.

The cost of expanding coverage will shrink by $84 billion to $1.168 trillion under the court decision, which voided a requirement that states expand Medicaid coverage for the poor in 2014, the nonpartisan agency said in a report today. At the same time, the report said the per-person cost of expanding aid will increase because some who would have been covered by Medicaid will instead receive more-expensive subsidies to buy private health insurance.

It is the first official estimate of the effects of the June 28 court decision upholding the core requirement in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that most Americans carry health insurance or pay a penalty. The court threw out a provision requiring states that don’t comply with the Medicaid expansion to lose existing federal Medicaid funding. The court said Congress can require states to meet conditions to receive new Medicaid money. Read more >>

Obamacare, the Great Swindle

Now that Obamacare has been ruled a tax by the U.S. Supreme Court, reality is starting to sink in for all those who emotionally supported it. Promoted as a way to provide either free health care or low-cost health care to the masses, the sobering reality is that under Obamacare, health insurance prices keep rising, not falling.

That's no surprise, of course, since the Obamacare legislation was practically written by the health insurance companies, and they sure didn't put their weight behind a sweeping new law that would earn them less profit. In an era when the so-called "99%" are sick and tired of being exploited by the one percent who control everything, they just handed their medical futures over to precisely the one percent who skillfully monopolize the conventional health care system! Obamacare is, at every level, a huge victory for the one percent.

By the year 2016, the Obamacare "penalty" tax will reach roughly $2,000 per year for a two-person household. According to Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, 75% of the financial burden of Obamacare's new taxes will fall onto Americans making less than $120,000 a year. Read more >>

Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment.

Monica Youn
Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections
Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don't support their preferred agenda. Voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies.

The Supreme Court's decision in the hotly anticipated campaign finance reform case Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission -- which may be announced as early as Tuesday -- will show whether a majority of the Roberts court is buying their argument.

The case may be the turning point in a concerted, decades-long ideological campaign -- the "corporate free speech movement," as Robert L. Kerr and other scholars have chronicled. As far back as 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr. (whom President Nixon would shortly nominate to the Supreme Court) sent a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor Jr. at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that corporate interests needed to take advantage of a "neglected opportunity in the courts." Because "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change," the memo said, the chamber and other corporate interests should develop a cadre of constitutional lawyers to file lawsuits and amicus briefs to push a corporate-friendly legal agenda in the Supreme Court.

Corporations heeded this call to arms, generously funding the chamber's litigation arm and founding other think tanks. In hundreds of lawsuits and briefs, the chamber and corporations such as Exxon-Mobil and Nike have drilled in the pro-business party line that 1st Amendment protection should extend to corporate political spending -- such as the corporate-funded movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton that is at issue in Citizens United. The case, which began on narrow grounds (did restrictions on corporate campaign ads apply to this film?) has become a test of whether restrictions on political speech by corporations should be ended altogether.

Only five years after Powell sent his memo, the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo struck down campaign spending limits on 1st Amendment grounds, with the rationale that such limits "impose direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech." Two years later, in First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, the court held -- for the first time -- that the 1st Amendment extends to corporate political spending, striking down a law that had prevented business corporations from spending shareholder funds to influence the outcome of state ballot measures. By then Powell was on the court, and he wrote the controlling opinion in Bellotti and was in the majority in both cases.

As 1st Amendment expert Linda Berger has pointed out, the Buckley and Bellotti cases planted the seeds of three new metaphors in election law: that money is speech; that corporations are people; and that elections are marketplaces. To equate corporate campaign spending with 1st Amendment-protected speech, you must accept all three. Each, however, is problematic.

First, although spending money may, in some circumstances, have some expressive value (such as clicking a web link to give $10 to a candidate), it does not follow that money is speech or that the 1st Amendment should shield such spending from regulation. After all, I can drive my car in a way that conveys a message -- disapproval of a tailgating fellow driver, for example -- but that doesn't mean that driving is speech, nor that the 1st Amendment renders traffic laws unconstitutional. When corporations and other monied interests spend vast sums to influence the outcome of an election, they're not trying to communicate an idea but simply to wield economic power and to bid for influence.

Second, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out at the Citizens United oral argument, a corporation "is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights." After all, corporations are legal entities created for doing business and given special advantages that aren't available to individuals or even other business entities, including limited liability and favorable tax treatment.

Thus, although corporations have certain economic rights -- to enable them to conduct business -- a corporation has no claim to the fundamental constitutional rights held by "We the People." Corporations already have ample means to express their "viewpoints" -- by lobbying, testifying in Congress and conducting public education on issues -- and those corporate employees who wish to advance the corporation's political agenda can contribute to the corporation's political action committee.

Third, and finally, one should not simply import economic free-market principles wholesale into the "free market of ideas." The operating assumption of free-market theory is that, in the long term, buyers' preferences will steer money to the best outcomes, so that those firms that offer the best goods and services will be rewarded with the greatest market success. However, this "invisible hand" assumption -- that money follows or represents merit -- has no application to elections, especially when corporations are involved. The amount of money a corporation can spend lacks even a theoretical connection to the intrinsic worth -- or popular support -- of its political agenda.

For decades, the Supreme Court stopped short of fully endorsing any of the three metaphors, heeding former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's warning that to treat corporate spending as the 1st Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Instead, as campaign finance law developed, the court struck a balance between the rights of campaigners -- candidates, parties, PACs and corporations -- on the one hand and the rights of the electorate to a representative, participatory and accountable government on the other.

But since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito have replaced Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the court, concern for the 1st Amendment interests of the electorate seems to have been jettisoned. Since they joined the court, it has struck down campaign finance regulations in each of the three relevant cases it has heard, championing a 1st Amendment right to spend money freely in political campaigns without regard to the voter's right to a meaningful role in the electoral process.

With Citizens United due to be decided as campaigns for this year's elections get off the ground, political players are keenly aware that the court could open the floodgates to corporate cash. "We the People" can only hope the court steps back from the brink and instead recognizes that in a democracy, voters, not corporations, should be at the center of the political process.

Monica Youn directs the Money in Politics Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

Obama delcares torturers immune from prosecution

Image by Rosie O'Beirne via Flickr

Shocked and Unnerved

Everywhere and anywhere, those seen as rejecting even a small measure of an America-centric perspective will be labeled undesirables, subversives, and even “enemy combatants,” whether or not evidence supports the assertion.
--Chapter 11, "Social," Financial Armageddon

Although I predicted as much in my 2007 book, even I am shocked and unnerved at how quickly the U.S. is abandoning principles that once defined our nation as "the land of the free and the home of the brave." In "Supreme Court Guts Due Process Protection," Naked Capitalism highlights a recent development that should frighten the wits out of any American who is still capable of thinking:

Reader Walter passed along this distressing sighting from Chris Floyd’s blog. American civil liberties were gutted last week, and the media failed to take note of it.

The development? If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary:

After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per Floyd:

In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of “national emergency.” And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama — who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer — has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution….let’s be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand — in court — that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities.

Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.

Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.