In the last several presidential election cycles, the name Ralph Nader has become synonymous with the word “pariah”. In Republican circles, people don’t seem to have any problem with Ralph’s running for office (their mistaken assumption is that he pulls voters from the Democrats). It’s much more likely that his five decade career as a citizen activist has raised their ire because they may profit directly by investing in companies he may have sought to regulate or restrict. Nader’s staunch defense labor and the environment put him on the side of “big government” from their perspective.
Many Democrats respect Nader deeply for his championing of “their” issues but many of them have fallen prey to the propaganda casting him as the “spoiler” of 2000. Some even blame Ralph for the entire Bush administration and all its foibles. It doesn’t matter to them that there were five other candidates on the Florida ballot with enough votes to “spoil” Gore’s election. It’s unimportant to them that Gore put up no fight when most analysts agreed he had won. They don’t care that Gore lost his home state (and Clinton’s) and ran a campaign that made Kerry’s 2004 effort look lively by comparison.
Perhaps the real reason Democrats have so vilified Ralph is that he had the nerve to say out loud what just under 25%* of us already know, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.” He never said there was NO difference, just that it was slight. Given the almost entirely corporate sponsorship of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, George Bush and Barack Obama, it would seem that he was absolutely correct.
As 2008 approaches, we will be asked the proverbial question, “Which hamburger (candidate) do you prefer – a Whopper or a Big Mac?” Strangely, those wanting a salad can never be included in the framing of this question. We are expected to debate and anguish over the merits of each offering and to ignore the fact that corporate sponsorship has rendered them all pretty much identical to one another.
On May 25th, a man who has addressed this two-party problem quite directly will arrive in Glens Falls for a visit. This man believes that wars are created by the military-industrial-congressional complex (he sees the loss of human life on both sides as preventable). He knows that clean air and workplace safety are not “left” or “right” issues. He knows that a “conservative” with cancer needs health care just as much as a “liberal” injured in a car crash. He knows that seatbelts and airbags don’t ask for your party registration before they save your life - they just work.
Ralph Nader will be at Red Fox Books signing copies of his new autobiography, “The Seventeen Traditions”. He and film-maker, Henriette Mantel, will also attend the premiere of “An Unreasonable Man” at Aimee’s Dinner and a Movie. The documentary is the highly acclaimed Sundance Selection about Ralph Nader, his life and his legacy.
For more info, contact: Matt Funiciello (518) 361-6278 mattfuniciello@earthlink.net
* According to the BOE, 52.8% of registered voters in Warren County were Republican in 2006. If you combine blanks and third party registrants into a group, it is 24.3% of the electorate and the Democrats, 22.9%. Food for thought.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
Hillary: The Corporate Candidate?
"We tried to do too much, too fast twelve years ago," Clinton told the Federation of American Hospitals last year, "and I still have the scars to show for it." She's now the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry.
- Hillary rationalizing her total failure to do anything meaningful on national health care -
Hillary: The Corporate Candidate?
By Ari Berman, TheNation.comPosted on May 18, 2007, Printed on May 18, 2007http://www.alternet.org/story/51619/
In a packed ballroom in midtown Manhattan, Hillary Clinton is addressing hundreds of civil rights activists and labor leaders convened by the Rev. Al Sharpton for his annual National Action Network conference. The junior senator from New York starts slowly but picks up steam when she hits on the economic anxiety many in the room feel. "We're not making progress," she says, her sharp Midwestern monotone accented with a bit of Southern twang. "Wages are flat." Nods of agreement. "This economy is not working!" Applause. She's not quite the rhetorical populist her husband was on the campaign trail, but she can still feel your pain. "Everything has been skewed," Clinton says, jabbing her index finger for emphasis, "to help the privileged and the powerful at the expense of everybody else!"
It's a rousing speech, though ultimately not very convincing. If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies. A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm -- the Glover Park Group -- that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton's campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons' closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton's economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay.
"She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors," says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.
It's not exactly an advertisement for the working-class hero, or a picture her campaign freely displays. Her lengthy support for the Iraq War is Clinton's biggest liability in Democratic primary circles. But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion. She is "running to help and restore the great middle class in our country," Wolfson says. So was Bill in 1992. He was for "putting people first." Then he entered the White House and pushed for NAFTA, signed welfare reform, consolidated the airwaves through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (leading to Clear Channel's takeover) and cleared the mergers of mega-banks. Would the First Lady do any different?
Ever since the defeat of healthcare reform, Hillary has been a committed incrementalist, describing herself as a creature of the "moderate, sensible center" whom business admires and rewards. During her six years in the Senate, she's rarely been out front on difficult economic issues. Given her proximity to money and power, it's not hard to figure out why she keeps controversial figures close to her -- even if their work becomes a liability for her campaign.
Polling Czar
After the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress, and President Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, he turned to Dick Morris, a friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris brought in two pollsters from New York, Doug Schoen and his partner, Mark Penn, a portly, combative workaholic. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said, 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-chips and school uniforms,'" says a former adviser to Bill. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest."
Penn, who had previously worked in the business world for companies like Texaco and Eli Lilly, brought his corporate ideology to the White House. After moving to Washington he aggressively expanded his polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland (PSB). It was said that Penn was the only person who could get Bill Clinton and Bill Gates on the same line. Penn's largest client was Microsoft, and he saw no contradiction between working for both the plaintiff and the defense in what was at the time the country's largest antitrust case. A variety of controversial clients enlisted PSB. The firm defended Procter & Gamble's Olestra from charges that the food additive caused anal leakage, blamed Texaco's bankruptcy on greedy jurors and market-tested genetically modified foods for Monsanto. PSB introduced to consulting the concept of "inoculation": shielding corporations from scandal through clever advertising and marketing.
In 2000 Penn became the chief architect of Hillary's Senate victory in New York, persuading her, in a rerun of '96, to eschew big themes and relentlessly focus on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. Following that election, Penn became a very rich man -- and an even more valued commodity in the business world (Hillary paid him $1 million for her re-election campaign in '06 and $277,000 in the first quarter of this year). The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M).
A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP. "Clients of stature come to Mark constantly for counsel," says Paster, who informally advises Hillary, explaining the hire. The press release announcing Penn's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." The release blithely ignored how utility deregulation contributed to the California electricity crisis manipulated by Enron and the blackout of 2003, which darkened much of the Northeast and upper Midwest.
Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of colluding with the Nigerian government in committing major human rights violations. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer groups. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.
A host of prominent Republicans fall under Penn's purview. B-M's Washington lobbying arm, BKSH & Associates, is run by Charlie Black, a leading GOP operative who maintains close ties to the White House, including Karl Rove, and was a partner with Lee Atwater, the consultant who crafted the Willie Horton smear campaign for George H.W. Bush in 1988. In recent years Black's clients have included the likes of Iraq's Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the neocon right in the run-up to the war; Lockheed Martin; and Occidental Petroleum. In 2005 he landed a contract with the Lincoln Group, the disgraced PR firm that covertly placed US military propaganda in Iraqi news outlets.
Black is only one cannon in B-M's Republican arsenal. Its "grassroots" lobbying branch, Direct Impact -- which specializes in corporate-funded astroturfing -- is run by Dennis Whitfield, a former Reagan Cabinet official, and Dave DenHerder, the political director of the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign in Ohio. That's not all. B-M recently partnered with lobbyist Ed Gillespie, the former head of the Republican National Committee, in creating the new ad firm 360Advantage, run by two admen for the Bush/Cheney campaigns. Its first project was a campaign against "liberal bias" in the media for the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine.
As expected with such a lineup, B-M has a highly confrontational relationship with organized labor. "Companies cannot be caught unprepared by Organized Labor's coordinated campaigns," read the "Labor Relations" section of its website, describing that branch of the company (the section was altered after The American Prospect quoted it in March).
Back in 2003, two large unions, UNITE (which later merged with the hotel and restaurant union, HERE) and the Teamsters, launched a major drive to organize 32,000 garment workers and truck drivers at Cintas, the country's largest and most profitable uniform and laundry supply company (it posted $3.4 billion in sales and $327 million in profits last year). Its longtime CEO, Richard Farmer, was a mega-fundraising "Pioneer" for George W. Bush. Cintas was sued for overcharging consumers and denying workers overtime pay -- it settled both cases out of court -- and was ordered by a California superior court to give employees $1.4 million for not paying them a living wage.
It has also maintained unsafe working conditions (an employee in Tulsa died recently when caught in a 300-degree dryer) and, according to union officials, has used any means necessary to block the organizing drive. According to worker complaints documented by the unions, management fired employees on false grounds, vowed to close plants and screened antiunion videos. A plant manager in Vista, California, threatened to "kick driver-employees with his steel-toed boots," according to a complaint UNITE HERE filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). To put a soft face on its harsh tactics, Cintas hired Wade Gates, a top employee in B-M's Dallas office, as its chief spokesman. Gates coined Cintas's shrewd response to labor: "the right to say yes, the freedom to say no," which has been repeated endlessly in the press. In a speech at USC Law School last year, he outlined Cintas's strategy, calling for an "aggressive defense against union tactics." Says Ahmer Qadeer, an organizer for UNITE HERE, "It's the Burson influence that's made Cintas much, much slicker than they were."
The unions have won two NLRB rulings against Cintas, but for four years the company has continued to resist the organizing campaign. Penn disclaimed any responsibility for B-M's activities before his arrival at the firm, and he told The Nation he has "never personally participated in any antiunion activity," even though B-M's antilabor arm is still operating under his tenure. (Penn added a personal note: "My father was for many years a union organizer in the poultry workers union.")
In 2004 Hillary Clinton asked for an investigation into whether Cintas had received preferential regulatory treatment from the Environmental Protection Agency in return for giving large political donations to President Bush. Union officials say she's been supportive of their organizing drive. She's a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would let workers form unions if a majority sign cards authorizing representation, thus avoiding coercion and intimidation during union election campaigns (Cintas bitterly opposes the EFCA). She told the International Association of Firefighters recently, "I believe that it is absolutely essential to the way America works that people be given the right to organize and bargain collectively."
Hillary apparently sees no contradiction between her advocacy and the antiunion work of her chief strategist's company. "Clearly not," says spokesman Wolfson. "I don't think it reflects on her at all. Mark's work away from the campaign is Mark's work, and his campaign work is separate from that."
Penn recently told the Washington Post, in a largely flattering profile, that he'd been "cleared of
all client responsibilities, except for Microsoft, for the duration of the campaign." Microsoft is a strange exception, given that it was the corporate entity the Clinton Administration challenged most directly. Moreover, Penn has no plans to take a formal leave from B-M. (Because B-M is a subsidiary of the WPP Group, a British company, it doesn't have to report its CEO's salary or ownership stake in the company.) George W. Bush forced Karl Rove to sell his direct-mail business in 1999, but don't expect a similar move from Hillary. Her campaign pays Penn's polling firm, which is part of B-M. "Senator Clinton is no different, frankly, from Mark's other clients," Howard Paster says. "Burson-Marsteller is a lot bigger firm than Senator Clinton. There's a whole 'nother life we live."
Yet occasionally the work of Penn's company spills onto Hillary's political terrain. Penn's polling firm has worked with the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition -- a PR front group for the nuclear power industry -- which purports to show "strong support among Americans for nuclear energy." Coincidentally, one of B-M's big projects is the Indian Point nuclear power plant, twenty-four miles north of Manhattan, dubbed by environmentalists "Chernobyl on the Hudson." The plant received the lowest safety rating from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2000, and after 9/11 there were widespread calls from environmentalists, consumer groups and elected officials to shut it down. It has had nine unplanned shutdowns since 2005.
With the help of B-M, Indian Point's owner, Entergy Corporation, struck back with a multipronged ad campaign. Its post-9/11 slogan, "Safe, secure, vital," emphasized security, warning that if Indian Point were closed New York could face a California-style energy crisis. In 2003, after Westchester County legislators passed resolutions condemning Indian Point, B-M set up a classic astroturf group on Entergy's behalf, the Campaign for Affordable Energy, Environmental and Economic Justice, which targeted Democratic incumbents in low-income sections of Westchester who supported closing the plant. If Indian Point were shuttered, the bilingual campaign informed residents, electricity bills would increase, power to public transportation would be jeopardized and dirty power plants would go up in low-income and minority neighborhoods.
At the same time, B-M unveiled another organization also bankrolled by Entergy that promoted Indian Point. Following the '06 elections, Entergy unveiled a new slogan, "Right for New York," citing Indian Point as an asset in the fight against global warming. Hillary has called for an "independent safety assessment" but has declined to join Governor Eliot Spitzer and twelve members of Congress in urging that the plant be shut down. Entergy, founded in Arkansas, was a major supporter of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and contributed generously to Hillary in 2000 and 2006.
It's difficult to tell where Penn's corporate life ends and his political one begins. Most Democratic consultants do some business work -- it's the easiest way to pay the bills. Yet nobody wears as many hats -- and advises as many corporations -- as Penn. "Penn and Schoen have displayed a thirst for corporate work, often in conflict with the policy agendas of their political clients, that has long set the bar among Democratic pollsters," wrote Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal on his blog recently.
Furthermore, few Democratic consultants so consistently and publicly advocate an ideology that perfectly complements their corporate clients. Every election cycle Penn discovers a new group of swing voters -- "soccer moms," "wired workers," "office park dads" -- who happen to be the key to the election and believe the same thing: "Outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy only alienate new constituencies and ring increasingly hollow," Penn has written. Through his longtime association with the Democratic Leadership Council, Penn has been pushing pro-corporate centrism for years. Many of the same companies that underwrite the DLC, such as Eli Lilly, AT&T, Texaco and Microsoft, also happen to be clients of Penn's.
Penn's views often clash with the work of other Democratic pollsters. Half a dozen former PSB staffers say Penn has stretched to get the answers he wanted, including manipulating data, phrasing misleading questions and shifting the demographics of those polled, whether it was for the Clinton campaign in 1996 or a corporate client like Procter & Gamble. For example, Penn was insistent that Clinton's poll numbers in '96 match his poll numbers in '92, say two staffers who worked at PSB during the campaign. If Clinton was underperforming, Penn would artificially add more Democratic-aligned groups to the survey sample to make Bill look better. "He was a great showman, and he'd paint you a nice picture," says one former staffer who worked with Penn in the late '90s. "But the way he got you the data -- it was cooked." Staffers who left started a PSB survivors message board documenting what they perceived as personally abusive and unethical behavior in the workplace.
When presented with these allegations, Penn said, "Polling in '96 was 100 percent accurate, to the point," adding, "no staffer you could have talked to ever attended any meeting with any of the clients." He insists that "all weightings and question wording turned out to be accurate." Former partner Doug Schoen adds, "No data was ever manipulated. ... There was never any discussion of the polling from 1992 during 1996." In response to the complaints on the message board, Penn dismissed "a nearly decade-old anonymous site with inaccurate material from an unhappy few."
Clients have usually been uninterested in Penn's methodology because they liked his results. But not always. Al Gore fired Penn as his pollster before the 2000 Democratic primaries, in part because he wanted to move in a more populist direction and in part because he didn't trust him. Penn "would write polls to get the result he felt was important," Tony Coelho, Gore's campaign chair, told Rolling Stone. Recently two poll interviewees accused the Denver-based field office of Penn's firm, PSA Interviewing, of conducting misleading telephone polls in California and New Hampshire. The interviewers read to respondents statements like "John Edwards chose not to run for another Senate term because he didn't think he could win, abandoning the fight in Congress against the administration," and "Barack Obama failed to vote in favor of abortion rights nine times as a state senator."
Hillary, by contrast, is presented as someone who "was born into a middle-class home where she learned the value of hard work and frugality." At the end of the script the poll asks, "Based on what you've heard, who would you choose as the Democratic candidate for President: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Barack Obama?" In response to these accusations, Penn said the charges were false and that "this firm conducts standard political and market research polls ... and does not do push polling." He would not confirm or deny that the questions above came from PSA.
These days Penn's few political clients lean to the right. He worked on Joe Lieberman's ill-fated presidential run and the Venezuelan recall referendum in 2004 and Italian billionaire Silvio Berlusconi's unsuccessful re-election campaign last year.
Yet despite his outsized role in the corporate world, his company's close ties to GOP operatives and questions about his polling techniques, Penn remains a leading figure in Hillary's campaign, pitching the inevitability of her nomination to donors and party bigwigs. According to the New York Times, "[Hillary] Clinton responds to Penn's points with exclamations like, Oh, Mark, what a smart thing to say!" His presence means that triangulation is alive and well inside the campaign and that despite her populist forays, Hillary won't stray far from the center or think too big. "Penn has a lot of influence on her, no doubt about it," says New York political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked with Penn in '96. "He's not going to let her drift too far left."
White House in Exile
Penn's not the only major player in Hillary's corporate orbit. There's also the Glover Park Group, a fast-rising lobbying and PR firm known as the "White House in Exile" because it's packed with former Clintonites. Its roster includes former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart and deputy chief of staff Joel Johnson. From Hillary's orbit come Peter Kauffman, her former press secretary, and Gigi Georges, her New York director. Campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle used to work there, and until recently so did Howard Wolfson.
Wolfson, a pugnacious operative who's said he admires Karl Rove's skills, took a leave of absence in March (unlike Penn), though he still has a stake in the firm. Partners at Glover Park downplay connections to Hill and Bill, but the association -- along with the Democratic takeover of Congress -- has been good for business. Glover Park was Washington's fastest-growing private company in 2005. The day before the 2006 election it got a huge infusion of private-equity cash from a firm in Chicago, Svoboda, Collins. Business has doubled since then. No one at Glover Park is now officially part of the Clinton campaign, yet there are plenty of unofficial relationships. Johnson, for example, is giving to and raising money for Hillary. The firm still lobbies her office, as it presumably would a Clinton II White House.
Glover Park's clients have included standard liberal groups like the United Federation of Teachers and the ACLU. Yet the Clinton ties have also helped the firm make an alliance with Rupert Murdoch. Hillary started cozying up to Murdoch after her 2000 Senate victory, in a calculated attempt to defang his conservative media empire, News Corp. In 2004 the billionaire required a favor of his own: Nielsen was preparing to change the way it measured viewership in US TV markets, a plan that Murdoch's Fox network feared would cost it millions in ad revenue. So Murdoch called on Glover Park. Wolfson secured a $200,000 contract and unveiled a PR blitz under the guise of a supposedly independent minority front group called Don't Count Us Out. The group played on fears of voter disenfranchisement, arguing that minorities would be undercounted in the new system. Don't Count Us Out ran more than 100 ads in two days, and Nielsen was deluged with hate mail. Letters of support came in from politicians, including Senator Clinton, who warned, "Nielsen would be remiss in pushing forward with its rollout plan." The campaign eventually fizzled when influential supporters, including Jesse Jackson, realized that Glover Park's claims were bogus and viewers were simply moving from broadcast channels like Fox to cable. Yet Murdoch kept Glover Park on retainer and held a $60,000 fundraiser for Clinton last July. News Corp. executive Peter Chernin is hosting a top-dollar shindig for her in LA in late May. Asked what she thought of Murdoch, Clinton spokesman Phillippe Reines told The New Yorker, "Senator Clinton respects him and thinks he's smart and effective."
News Corp. wasn't an exception for Glover Park. It's used similar tactics on behalf of another frequent Democratic bкte noire -- the pharmaceutical industry. As with Penn, it's been difficult to tell where business ends and politics begins. In the run-up to passage of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, Johnson (who partnered with disgraced former Tom DeLay staffers and associates of Jack Abramoff at his previous lobbying job) lobbied for the industry's chief arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
Last summer, as the law came under scrutiny from both liberals and conservatives, he wrote a memo to Hill staffers arguing that "early polls call into question the political value in strongly attacking the weakness in the Medicare prescription drug plan." Johnson failed to note that he was on the industry's payroll, as were other firms whose work he cited. After the election Glover Park inked deals with drugmakers Amgen and Pfizer to block a proposal to lower drug prices under Medicare and help the latter slash 10,000 workers this year and close five manufacturing sites.
Glover Park has also been trying to get liberals to support a program called Medicare Advantage. According to the federally run Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, this privately run plan overcharges the government by 12 percent compared with traditional Medicare. And it paves the way for privatization. As a result, Congressmen like Pete Stark and Charlie Rangel want to redirect some of the money toward children's healthcare. That proposal has drawn fierce resistance from America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which has recruited Glover Park and another Democratic firm, the Dewey Square Group, to argue that cutting benefits to Medicare Advantage would disproportionately hurt low-income and minority enrollees (note a pattern?), a claim the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls "distorted" and "based on misleading use of data."
Nevertheless, former Hillary spokesman Peter Kauffman has asked community groups in New York to join a Medicare Advantage minority advisory committee, which now includes former big-city mayors and the NAACP. And Glover Park put out polling, in conjunction with a GOP firm and AHIP, that shows "record high satisfaction" among enrollees, according to Johnson. Hillary was supportive of the Medicare Advantage program during the debate over Medicare but voted against the final bill. She hasn't commented on whether she favors preserving the current system.
Murdoch and PhRMA aren't the only odd couples to enlist the Clintonites. There's also the government of Dubai, which has paid Bill handsomely for speeches and strategic advice. Around the time of the furor over the proposed management of US ports by Dubai Ports World, Glover Park launched a lobbying drive to broker the sale of two US military plants to the government-owned Dubai International Capital. The two New York senators led opposition to the ports deal but didn't raise objections to the plant takeover. According to Newsday, the $100,000 contract was routed through the LA law firm of Raj Tanden, brother of Hillary's top domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden.
Glover Park has also fronted for Verizon to kill "net neutrality" and allow telecom companies to charge more for certain Internet content, for the insurance industry on asbestos claims, for Ernst & Young on immunity from shareholder lawsuits and for the Swift banking coalition's collaboration with the Bush Administration on "antiterror" financial records.
Partners at Glover Park say business is business -- if their work puts them at odds with fellow Democrats, so be it. "On some days you're working on the other side of an issue from a Democratic Congressman," says Johnson. "The next day you're helping them raise money." It's a world Hillary knows well.
The Compromised Candidate
It's hard to see how her advisers' corporate work doesn't reflect poorly on Clinton's progressive claims or create a liability for her with Democratic voters. There's no evidence that she has taken a position specifically to benefit one of her advisers' clients or a top supporter. More likely, the ties to corporate America, along with the bruises of past defeats, have limited what she believes is possible and will fight to achieve. "If you surround yourself by people who live off of big corporations, that's going to affect the advice they give you and your own worldview," says a former Clinton adviser.
Clinton has a consistently liberal Senate voting record, earning near-perfect scores from Americans for Democratic Action. She's fought to get New York its fair share of federal money after 9/11 and has advocated for long-neglected, though politically safe, issues like children's health and veterans care. Yet voting records capture only so much. Since the healthcare reform disaster of 1993-94, she has rarely stuck her neck out on contentious issues. "She votes the issues that come up, rather than take the leadership role," says Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. "We tried to do too much, too fast twelve years ago," Clinton told the Federation of American Hospitals last year, "and I still have the scars to show for it." She's now the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry.
Clinton's rarely been the threat to the business community that many on the right typically allege. She's often partnered with Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist. In 2002 she backed a harsh position on welfare reform reauthorization that put her at odds even with conservative Republicans like Orrin Hatch. She persuaded her husband to veto the bankruptcy bill in 1997, voted for a similar version in 2001 and missed the vote in 2005, when Bill was in the hospital. She advocated weakening the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, telling Feingold to "live in the real world." Unlike Edwards and Obama, she accepts campaign contributions from lobbyists and corporate PACs. "Ask them why they don't take money from lobbyists," Wolfson retorts. "We're proud of our support."
The conservative caricature that Hillary is to the left of her husband is a myth. She, like Bill, talks a good game. She's aggressively courted organized labor and distanced herself from policies like NAFTA. She privately tells public-interest groups and liberal commentators that she's on their side. At the same time, she's premised her presidential campaign on a restoration of the Clinton era, frequently invoking "Bill and I" on the stump as a way of claiming credit for the perceived successes of the 1990s. She's expressed no qualms about her closest advisers' forays into the corporate world. Courting elements of the Democratic base while signaling to the corporate right that she won't shake up the system is a tricky juggling act. Even the First Lady of triangulation may not be able to pull it off.
Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation and a Ralph Shikes Fellow at the Public Concern Foundation. He's currently based in D.C.
ww.alternet.org/story/51619/
- Hillary rationalizing her total failure to do anything meaningful on national health care -
Hillary: The Corporate Candidate?
By Ari Berman, TheNation.comPosted on May 18, 2007, Printed on May 18, 2007http://www.alternet.org/story/51619/
In a packed ballroom in midtown Manhattan, Hillary Clinton is addressing hundreds of civil rights activists and labor leaders convened by the Rev. Al Sharpton for his annual National Action Network conference. The junior senator from New York starts slowly but picks up steam when she hits on the economic anxiety many in the room feel. "We're not making progress," she says, her sharp Midwestern monotone accented with a bit of Southern twang. "Wages are flat." Nods of agreement. "This economy is not working!" Applause. She's not quite the rhetorical populist her husband was on the campaign trail, but she can still feel your pain. "Everything has been skewed," Clinton says, jabbing her index finger for emphasis, "to help the privileged and the powerful at the expense of everybody else!"
It's a rousing speech, though ultimately not very convincing. If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies. A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm -- the Glover Park Group -- that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton's campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons' closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton's economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay.
"She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors," says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.
It's not exactly an advertisement for the working-class hero, or a picture her campaign freely displays. Her lengthy support for the Iraq War is Clinton's biggest liability in Democratic primary circles. But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion. She is "running to help and restore the great middle class in our country," Wolfson says. So was Bill in 1992. He was for "putting people first." Then he entered the White House and pushed for NAFTA, signed welfare reform, consolidated the airwaves through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (leading to Clear Channel's takeover) and cleared the mergers of mega-banks. Would the First Lady do any different?
Ever since the defeat of healthcare reform, Hillary has been a committed incrementalist, describing herself as a creature of the "moderate, sensible center" whom business admires and rewards. During her six years in the Senate, she's rarely been out front on difficult economic issues. Given her proximity to money and power, it's not hard to figure out why she keeps controversial figures close to her -- even if their work becomes a liability for her campaign.
Polling Czar
After the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress, and President Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, he turned to Dick Morris, a friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris brought in two pollsters from New York, Doug Schoen and his partner, Mark Penn, a portly, combative workaholic. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said, 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-chips and school uniforms,'" says a former adviser to Bill. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest."
Penn, who had previously worked in the business world for companies like Texaco and Eli Lilly, brought his corporate ideology to the White House. After moving to Washington he aggressively expanded his polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland (PSB). It was said that Penn was the only person who could get Bill Clinton and Bill Gates on the same line. Penn's largest client was Microsoft, and he saw no contradiction between working for both the plaintiff and the defense in what was at the time the country's largest antitrust case. A variety of controversial clients enlisted PSB. The firm defended Procter & Gamble's Olestra from charges that the food additive caused anal leakage, blamed Texaco's bankruptcy on greedy jurors and market-tested genetically modified foods for Monsanto. PSB introduced to consulting the concept of "inoculation": shielding corporations from scandal through clever advertising and marketing.
In 2000 Penn became the chief architect of Hillary's Senate victory in New York, persuading her, in a rerun of '96, to eschew big themes and relentlessly focus on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. Following that election, Penn became a very rich man -- and an even more valued commodity in the business world (Hillary paid him $1 million for her re-election campaign in '06 and $277,000 in the first quarter of this year). The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M).
A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP. "Clients of stature come to Mark constantly for counsel," says Paster, who informally advises Hillary, explaining the hire. The press release announcing Penn's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." The release blithely ignored how utility deregulation contributed to the California electricity crisis manipulated by Enron and the blackout of 2003, which darkened much of the Northeast and upper Midwest.
Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of colluding with the Nigerian government in committing major human rights violations. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer groups. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.
A host of prominent Republicans fall under Penn's purview. B-M's Washington lobbying arm, BKSH & Associates, is run by Charlie Black, a leading GOP operative who maintains close ties to the White House, including Karl Rove, and was a partner with Lee Atwater, the consultant who crafted the Willie Horton smear campaign for George H.W. Bush in 1988. In recent years Black's clients have included the likes of Iraq's Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the neocon right in the run-up to the war; Lockheed Martin; and Occidental Petroleum. In 2005 he landed a contract with the Lincoln Group, the disgraced PR firm that covertly placed US military propaganda in Iraqi news outlets.
Black is only one cannon in B-M's Republican arsenal. Its "grassroots" lobbying branch, Direct Impact -- which specializes in corporate-funded astroturfing -- is run by Dennis Whitfield, a former Reagan Cabinet official, and Dave DenHerder, the political director of the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign in Ohio. That's not all. B-M recently partnered with lobbyist Ed Gillespie, the former head of the Republican National Committee, in creating the new ad firm 360Advantage, run by two admen for the Bush/Cheney campaigns. Its first project was a campaign against "liberal bias" in the media for the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine.
As expected with such a lineup, B-M has a highly confrontational relationship with organized labor. "Companies cannot be caught unprepared by Organized Labor's coordinated campaigns," read the "Labor Relations" section of its website, describing that branch of the company (the section was altered after The American Prospect quoted it in March).
Back in 2003, two large unions, UNITE (which later merged with the hotel and restaurant union, HERE) and the Teamsters, launched a major drive to organize 32,000 garment workers and truck drivers at Cintas, the country's largest and most profitable uniform and laundry supply company (it posted $3.4 billion in sales and $327 million in profits last year). Its longtime CEO, Richard Farmer, was a mega-fundraising "Pioneer" for George W. Bush. Cintas was sued for overcharging consumers and denying workers overtime pay -- it settled both cases out of court -- and was ordered by a California superior court to give employees $1.4 million for not paying them a living wage.
It has also maintained unsafe working conditions (an employee in Tulsa died recently when caught in a 300-degree dryer) and, according to union officials, has used any means necessary to block the organizing drive. According to worker complaints documented by the unions, management fired employees on false grounds, vowed to close plants and screened antiunion videos. A plant manager in Vista, California, threatened to "kick driver-employees with his steel-toed boots," according to a complaint UNITE HERE filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). To put a soft face on its harsh tactics, Cintas hired Wade Gates, a top employee in B-M's Dallas office, as its chief spokesman. Gates coined Cintas's shrewd response to labor: "the right to say yes, the freedom to say no," which has been repeated endlessly in the press. In a speech at USC Law School last year, he outlined Cintas's strategy, calling for an "aggressive defense against union tactics." Says Ahmer Qadeer, an organizer for UNITE HERE, "It's the Burson influence that's made Cintas much, much slicker than they were."
The unions have won two NLRB rulings against Cintas, but for four years the company has continued to resist the organizing campaign. Penn disclaimed any responsibility for B-M's activities before his arrival at the firm, and he told The Nation he has "never personally participated in any antiunion activity," even though B-M's antilabor arm is still operating under his tenure. (Penn added a personal note: "My father was for many years a union organizer in the poultry workers union.")
In 2004 Hillary Clinton asked for an investigation into whether Cintas had received preferential regulatory treatment from the Environmental Protection Agency in return for giving large political donations to President Bush. Union officials say she's been supportive of their organizing drive. She's a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would let workers form unions if a majority sign cards authorizing representation, thus avoiding coercion and intimidation during union election campaigns (Cintas bitterly opposes the EFCA). She told the International Association of Firefighters recently, "I believe that it is absolutely essential to the way America works that people be given the right to organize and bargain collectively."
Hillary apparently sees no contradiction between her advocacy and the antiunion work of her chief strategist's company. "Clearly not," says spokesman Wolfson. "I don't think it reflects on her at all. Mark's work away from the campaign is Mark's work, and his campaign work is separate from that."
Penn recently told the Washington Post, in a largely flattering profile, that he'd been "cleared of
all client responsibilities, except for Microsoft, for the duration of the campaign." Microsoft is a strange exception, given that it was the corporate entity the Clinton Administration challenged most directly. Moreover, Penn has no plans to take a formal leave from B-M. (Because B-M is a subsidiary of the WPP Group, a British company, it doesn't have to report its CEO's salary or ownership stake in the company.) George W. Bush forced Karl Rove to sell his direct-mail business in 1999, but don't expect a similar move from Hillary. Her campaign pays Penn's polling firm, which is part of B-M. "Senator Clinton is no different, frankly, from Mark's other clients," Howard Paster says. "Burson-Marsteller is a lot bigger firm than Senator Clinton. There's a whole 'nother life we live."
Yet occasionally the work of Penn's company spills onto Hillary's political terrain. Penn's polling firm has worked with the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition -- a PR front group for the nuclear power industry -- which purports to show "strong support among Americans for nuclear energy." Coincidentally, one of B-M's big projects is the Indian Point nuclear power plant, twenty-four miles north of Manhattan, dubbed by environmentalists "Chernobyl on the Hudson." The plant received the lowest safety rating from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2000, and after 9/11 there were widespread calls from environmentalists, consumer groups and elected officials to shut it down. It has had nine unplanned shutdowns since 2005.
With the help of B-M, Indian Point's owner, Entergy Corporation, struck back with a multipronged ad campaign. Its post-9/11 slogan, "Safe, secure, vital," emphasized security, warning that if Indian Point were closed New York could face a California-style energy crisis. In 2003, after Westchester County legislators passed resolutions condemning Indian Point, B-M set up a classic astroturf group on Entergy's behalf, the Campaign for Affordable Energy, Environmental and Economic Justice, which targeted Democratic incumbents in low-income sections of Westchester who supported closing the plant. If Indian Point were shuttered, the bilingual campaign informed residents, electricity bills would increase, power to public transportation would be jeopardized and dirty power plants would go up in low-income and minority neighborhoods.
At the same time, B-M unveiled another organization also bankrolled by Entergy that promoted Indian Point. Following the '06 elections, Entergy unveiled a new slogan, "Right for New York," citing Indian Point as an asset in the fight against global warming. Hillary has called for an "independent safety assessment" but has declined to join Governor Eliot Spitzer and twelve members of Congress in urging that the plant be shut down. Entergy, founded in Arkansas, was a major supporter of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and contributed generously to Hillary in 2000 and 2006.
It's difficult to tell where Penn's corporate life ends and his political one begins. Most Democratic consultants do some business work -- it's the easiest way to pay the bills. Yet nobody wears as many hats -- and advises as many corporations -- as Penn. "Penn and Schoen have displayed a thirst for corporate work, often in conflict with the policy agendas of their political clients, that has long set the bar among Democratic pollsters," wrote Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal on his blog recently.
Furthermore, few Democratic consultants so consistently and publicly advocate an ideology that perfectly complements their corporate clients. Every election cycle Penn discovers a new group of swing voters -- "soccer moms," "wired workers," "office park dads" -- who happen to be the key to the election and believe the same thing: "Outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy only alienate new constituencies and ring increasingly hollow," Penn has written. Through his longtime association with the Democratic Leadership Council, Penn has been pushing pro-corporate centrism for years. Many of the same companies that underwrite the DLC, such as Eli Lilly, AT&T, Texaco and Microsoft, also happen to be clients of Penn's.
Penn's views often clash with the work of other Democratic pollsters. Half a dozen former PSB staffers say Penn has stretched to get the answers he wanted, including manipulating data, phrasing misleading questions and shifting the demographics of those polled, whether it was for the Clinton campaign in 1996 or a corporate client like Procter & Gamble. For example, Penn was insistent that Clinton's poll numbers in '96 match his poll numbers in '92, say two staffers who worked at PSB during the campaign. If Clinton was underperforming, Penn would artificially add more Democratic-aligned groups to the survey sample to make Bill look better. "He was a great showman, and he'd paint you a nice picture," says one former staffer who worked with Penn in the late '90s. "But the way he got you the data -- it was cooked." Staffers who left started a PSB survivors message board documenting what they perceived as personally abusive and unethical behavior in the workplace.
When presented with these allegations, Penn said, "Polling in '96 was 100 percent accurate, to the point," adding, "no staffer you could have talked to ever attended any meeting with any of the clients." He insists that "all weightings and question wording turned out to be accurate." Former partner Doug Schoen adds, "No data was ever manipulated. ... There was never any discussion of the polling from 1992 during 1996." In response to the complaints on the message board, Penn dismissed "a nearly decade-old anonymous site with inaccurate material from an unhappy few."
Clients have usually been uninterested in Penn's methodology because they liked his results. But not always. Al Gore fired Penn as his pollster before the 2000 Democratic primaries, in part because he wanted to move in a more populist direction and in part because he didn't trust him. Penn "would write polls to get the result he felt was important," Tony Coelho, Gore's campaign chair, told Rolling Stone. Recently two poll interviewees accused the Denver-based field office of Penn's firm, PSA Interviewing, of conducting misleading telephone polls in California and New Hampshire. The interviewers read to respondents statements like "John Edwards chose not to run for another Senate term because he didn't think he could win, abandoning the fight in Congress against the administration," and "Barack Obama failed to vote in favor of abortion rights nine times as a state senator."
Hillary, by contrast, is presented as someone who "was born into a middle-class home where she learned the value of hard work and frugality." At the end of the script the poll asks, "Based on what you've heard, who would you choose as the Democratic candidate for President: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Barack Obama?" In response to these accusations, Penn said the charges were false and that "this firm conducts standard political and market research polls ... and does not do push polling." He would not confirm or deny that the questions above came from PSA.
These days Penn's few political clients lean to the right. He worked on Joe Lieberman's ill-fated presidential run and the Venezuelan recall referendum in 2004 and Italian billionaire Silvio Berlusconi's unsuccessful re-election campaign last year.
Yet despite his outsized role in the corporate world, his company's close ties to GOP operatives and questions about his polling techniques, Penn remains a leading figure in Hillary's campaign, pitching the inevitability of her nomination to donors and party bigwigs. According to the New York Times, "[Hillary] Clinton responds to Penn's points with exclamations like, Oh, Mark, what a smart thing to say!" His presence means that triangulation is alive and well inside the campaign and that despite her populist forays, Hillary won't stray far from the center or think too big. "Penn has a lot of influence on her, no doubt about it," says New York political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked with Penn in '96. "He's not going to let her drift too far left."
White House in Exile
Penn's not the only major player in Hillary's corporate orbit. There's also the Glover Park Group, a fast-rising lobbying and PR firm known as the "White House in Exile" because it's packed with former Clintonites. Its roster includes former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart and deputy chief of staff Joel Johnson. From Hillary's orbit come Peter Kauffman, her former press secretary, and Gigi Georges, her New York director. Campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle used to work there, and until recently so did Howard Wolfson.
Wolfson, a pugnacious operative who's said he admires Karl Rove's skills, took a leave of absence in March (unlike Penn), though he still has a stake in the firm. Partners at Glover Park downplay connections to Hill and Bill, but the association -- along with the Democratic takeover of Congress -- has been good for business. Glover Park was Washington's fastest-growing private company in 2005. The day before the 2006 election it got a huge infusion of private-equity cash from a firm in Chicago, Svoboda, Collins. Business has doubled since then. No one at Glover Park is now officially part of the Clinton campaign, yet there are plenty of unofficial relationships. Johnson, for example, is giving to and raising money for Hillary. The firm still lobbies her office, as it presumably would a Clinton II White House.
Glover Park's clients have included standard liberal groups like the United Federation of Teachers and the ACLU. Yet the Clinton ties have also helped the firm make an alliance with Rupert Murdoch. Hillary started cozying up to Murdoch after her 2000 Senate victory, in a calculated attempt to defang his conservative media empire, News Corp. In 2004 the billionaire required a favor of his own: Nielsen was preparing to change the way it measured viewership in US TV markets, a plan that Murdoch's Fox network feared would cost it millions in ad revenue. So Murdoch called on Glover Park. Wolfson secured a $200,000 contract and unveiled a PR blitz under the guise of a supposedly independent minority front group called Don't Count Us Out. The group played on fears of voter disenfranchisement, arguing that minorities would be undercounted in the new system. Don't Count Us Out ran more than 100 ads in two days, and Nielsen was deluged with hate mail. Letters of support came in from politicians, including Senator Clinton, who warned, "Nielsen would be remiss in pushing forward with its rollout plan." The campaign eventually fizzled when influential supporters, including Jesse Jackson, realized that Glover Park's claims were bogus and viewers were simply moving from broadcast channels like Fox to cable. Yet Murdoch kept Glover Park on retainer and held a $60,000 fundraiser for Clinton last July. News Corp. executive Peter Chernin is hosting a top-dollar shindig for her in LA in late May. Asked what she thought of Murdoch, Clinton spokesman Phillippe Reines told The New Yorker, "Senator Clinton respects him and thinks he's smart and effective."
News Corp. wasn't an exception for Glover Park. It's used similar tactics on behalf of another frequent Democratic bкte noire -- the pharmaceutical industry. As with Penn, it's been difficult to tell where business ends and politics begins. In the run-up to passage of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, Johnson (who partnered with disgraced former Tom DeLay staffers and associates of Jack Abramoff at his previous lobbying job) lobbied for the industry's chief arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
Last summer, as the law came under scrutiny from both liberals and conservatives, he wrote a memo to Hill staffers arguing that "early polls call into question the political value in strongly attacking the weakness in the Medicare prescription drug plan." Johnson failed to note that he was on the industry's payroll, as were other firms whose work he cited. After the election Glover Park inked deals with drugmakers Amgen and Pfizer to block a proposal to lower drug prices under Medicare and help the latter slash 10,000 workers this year and close five manufacturing sites.
Glover Park has also been trying to get liberals to support a program called Medicare Advantage. According to the federally run Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, this privately run plan overcharges the government by 12 percent compared with traditional Medicare. And it paves the way for privatization. As a result, Congressmen like Pete Stark and Charlie Rangel want to redirect some of the money toward children's healthcare. That proposal has drawn fierce resistance from America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which has recruited Glover Park and another Democratic firm, the Dewey Square Group, to argue that cutting benefits to Medicare Advantage would disproportionately hurt low-income and minority enrollees (note a pattern?), a claim the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls "distorted" and "based on misleading use of data."
Nevertheless, former Hillary spokesman Peter Kauffman has asked community groups in New York to join a Medicare Advantage minority advisory committee, which now includes former big-city mayors and the NAACP. And Glover Park put out polling, in conjunction with a GOP firm and AHIP, that shows "record high satisfaction" among enrollees, according to Johnson. Hillary was supportive of the Medicare Advantage program during the debate over Medicare but voted against the final bill. She hasn't commented on whether she favors preserving the current system.
Murdoch and PhRMA aren't the only odd couples to enlist the Clintonites. There's also the government of Dubai, which has paid Bill handsomely for speeches and strategic advice. Around the time of the furor over the proposed management of US ports by Dubai Ports World, Glover Park launched a lobbying drive to broker the sale of two US military plants to the government-owned Dubai International Capital. The two New York senators led opposition to the ports deal but didn't raise objections to the plant takeover. According to Newsday, the $100,000 contract was routed through the LA law firm of Raj Tanden, brother of Hillary's top domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden.
Glover Park has also fronted for Verizon to kill "net neutrality" and allow telecom companies to charge more for certain Internet content, for the insurance industry on asbestos claims, for Ernst & Young on immunity from shareholder lawsuits and for the Swift banking coalition's collaboration with the Bush Administration on "antiterror" financial records.
Partners at Glover Park say business is business -- if their work puts them at odds with fellow Democrats, so be it. "On some days you're working on the other side of an issue from a Democratic Congressman," says Johnson. "The next day you're helping them raise money." It's a world Hillary knows well.
The Compromised Candidate
It's hard to see how her advisers' corporate work doesn't reflect poorly on Clinton's progressive claims or create a liability for her with Democratic voters. There's no evidence that she has taken a position specifically to benefit one of her advisers' clients or a top supporter. More likely, the ties to corporate America, along with the bruises of past defeats, have limited what she believes is possible and will fight to achieve. "If you surround yourself by people who live off of big corporations, that's going to affect the advice they give you and your own worldview," says a former Clinton adviser.
Clinton has a consistently liberal Senate voting record, earning near-perfect scores from Americans for Democratic Action. She's fought to get New York its fair share of federal money after 9/11 and has advocated for long-neglected, though politically safe, issues like children's health and veterans care. Yet voting records capture only so much. Since the healthcare reform disaster of 1993-94, she has rarely stuck her neck out on contentious issues. "She votes the issues that come up, rather than take the leadership role," says Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. "We tried to do too much, too fast twelve years ago," Clinton told the Federation of American Hospitals last year, "and I still have the scars to show for it." She's now the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry.
Clinton's rarely been the threat to the business community that many on the right typically allege. She's often partnered with Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist. In 2002 she backed a harsh position on welfare reform reauthorization that put her at odds even with conservative Republicans like Orrin Hatch. She persuaded her husband to veto the bankruptcy bill in 1997, voted for a similar version in 2001 and missed the vote in 2005, when Bill was in the hospital. She advocated weakening the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, telling Feingold to "live in the real world." Unlike Edwards and Obama, she accepts campaign contributions from lobbyists and corporate PACs. "Ask them why they don't take money from lobbyists," Wolfson retorts. "We're proud of our support."
The conservative caricature that Hillary is to the left of her husband is a myth. She, like Bill, talks a good game. She's aggressively courted organized labor and distanced herself from policies like NAFTA. She privately tells public-interest groups and liberal commentators that she's on their side. At the same time, she's premised her presidential campaign on a restoration of the Clinton era, frequently invoking "Bill and I" on the stump as a way of claiming credit for the perceived successes of the 1990s. She's expressed no qualms about her closest advisers' forays into the corporate world. Courting elements of the Democratic base while signaling to the corporate right that she won't shake up the system is a tricky juggling act. Even the First Lady of triangulation may not be able to pull it off.
Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation and a Ralph Shikes Fellow at the Public Concern Foundation. He's currently based in D.C.
ww.alternet.org/story/51619/
Some Comic Relief
Some Wednesday Morning comedy for you all.
This first one is the Asylum Street Spankers singing about magnetic yellow ribbons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmsOIjzQ1V8
This one is MadTv's parody on Apple and our Iraq debacle, called "the iRack".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGHty_S0TU0
My favorite dead comedian, Bill Hicks, explains U.S. Foreign Policy in a minute and a half.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M2EyCeInBw
Will Ferrell's new site. Check out "The Landlord". Hysterical.
http://www.funnyordie.com/v1/index.php
I find it truly sad that those who parody are so often far more clever than those who control ....... but at least we can laugh at them.
This first one is the Asylum Street Spankers singing about magnetic yellow ribbons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmsOIjzQ1V8
This one is MadTv's parody on Apple and our Iraq debacle, called "the iRack".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGHty_S0TU0
My favorite dead comedian, Bill Hicks, explains U.S. Foreign Policy in a minute and a half.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M2EyCeInBw
Will Ferrell's new site. Check out "The Landlord". Hysterical.
http://www.funnyordie.com/v1/index.php
I find it truly sad that those who parody are so often far more clever than those who control ....... but at least we can laugh at them.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Post-Star Shuts Down More Free Speech!
** Please note that the piece below was shamelessly reprinted without permission or recompense to its author.
The Post-Star shut down its online forum because they didn't like what was being said. They refused to print two of my letters to the editor during the last mayoral campaign without explanation. They refused to tell me why even when pressed. They cancelled the only liberal op-ed column they had when they very suspiciously dropped Molly Ivins months before the 2004 election. They gave Lee Ann Womack's concert in Glens Falls better space, pictures and about 4 times more coverage than they subsequently gave to two-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader when he came to Glens Falls. What ever will they think of next? The quote below is an announcement posted on the Letters To The Editor section of their online version. What a great day for Free Speech!
"The Post-Star has decided to remove all commenting on letters to the editor at this time. Our letter writers are held to a standard that requires them to sign their letters. The commenting feature online does not require the respondent to be identified. We don’t feel that is fair. If anyone would like to respond to a letter, they must be held to the same standard as the letter writer and be identified. They can do this by writing their own letter to the editor through the Web site or responding directly to the editor."
The Post-Star shut down its online forum because they didn't like what was being said. They refused to print two of my letters to the editor during the last mayoral campaign without explanation. They refused to tell me why even when pressed. They cancelled the only liberal op-ed column they had when they very suspiciously dropped Molly Ivins months before the 2004 election. They gave Lee Ann Womack's concert in Glens Falls better space, pictures and about 4 times more coverage than they subsequently gave to two-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader when he came to Glens Falls. What ever will they think of next? The quote below is an announcement posted on the Letters To The Editor section of their online version. What a great day for Free Speech!
"The Post-Star has decided to remove all commenting on letters to the editor at this time. Our letter writers are held to a standard that requires them to sign their letters. The commenting feature online does not require the respondent to be identified. We don’t feel that is fair. If anyone would like to respond to a letter, they must be held to the same standard as the letter writer and be identified. They can do this by writing their own letter to the editor through the Web site or responding directly to the editor."
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Adirondack Progressives Bring Ralph Nader to Glens Falls
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Matt Funiciello (518) 361-6278 mattfuniciello@earthlink.net
Former Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader To Speak in Glens Falls May 25th
GLENS FALLS – Former presidential candidate and progressive activist Ralph Nader will return to Glens Falls on Friday, May 25, 2007 for a variety of events including an appearance at a Glens Falls High School, a local premiere of the documentary “An Unreasonable Man,” and a book signing at Red Fox Books. Ralph Nader’s visit is sponsored by Adirondack Progressives, a group of local people interested in fostering a local dialogue on today’s most important issues.
The day’s events will begin at Glens Falls High School where Nader will speak to students and participate in a student forum beginning at 1:00 pm. He is expected to speak about media reform, the Iraq War, the threat of corporate power and its dangerous convergence with government, and the role of third parties and citizen activism in the political process.
The documentary film “An Unreasonable Man,” a Sundance Film Festival Official Selection, will premiere locally at Aimie's Dinner & Movie (190 Glen Street, Glens Falls). The film traces the life and career of Ralph Nader, one of the most unique, important, and controversial political figures of the past half century from his public emergence as nemesis of General Motors in 1966, through his leadership of the Consumer Movement, to his latest controversial forays into electoral politics. Following the first showing, Nader and filmmaker Henriette Mantel will be on hand to discuss the film and take questions from the audience. Tickets are on sale at Rock Hill Cafe (19 Exchange St Glens Falls) and High Peaks Java (153 Maple Street, Glens Falls) for $75 each. The price includes a copy of Nader’s latest book, The Seventeen Traditions.
At about 3:30 pm, Ralph Nader will sign copies of his latest book (The Seventeen Traditions) at Red Fox Book Store (28 Ridge Street, Glens Falls). The book looks back to the earliest days of Nader’s own life to his serene and enriching childhood in bucolic Winsted, Connecticut. From listening to learning, from patriotism to argument, from work to simple enjoyment, Nader revisits seventeen key traditions he absorbed from his parents, his siblings, and the people in his community, and draws from them inspiring lessons for today's society. Warmly human, rich with sensory memories and lasting wisdom, it offers a kind of modern-day parable of how we grow from children into responsible adults—a reminder of a time when nature and community were central to the way we all learned and lived.
Ralph Nader is one of America's most effective social critics. He has run for the office of US President twice, as the candidate of the Green Party in 2000 (America’s third largest and fastest growing political party), and as an Independent in 2004. For forty years his documented criticism of government and industry has had a widespread effect on public awareness and bureaucratic power and has inspired a whole population of consumer advocates and citizen activists.
Nader first made headlines in 1965 with his book Unsafe at Any Speed, a scathing indictment of the auto industry for producing unsafe vehicles that led to congressional hearings and a series of automobile safety laws passed in 1966. Since then Nader has been responsible for at least eight major federal consumer protection laws such as the motor vehicle safety laws and the Safe Drinking Water Act and the launching of federal regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and Consumer Product Safety Administration, and the Freedom of Information Act of 1974.
Nader also helped establish the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) the student-funded and controlled organizations that function on college campuses in 23 states. Their impact alone has been tremendous. The groups have published hundreds of ground-breaking reports and guides, lobbied for laws in their state legislatures, and called the media's attention to environmental and energy problems. The largest of the Nader organizations is Public Citizen, founded in 1971 and with a current nationwide membership over 100,000.
[END]
Contact: Matt Funiciello (518) 361-6278 mattfuniciello@earthlink.net
Former Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader To Speak in Glens Falls May 25th
GLENS FALLS – Former presidential candidate and progressive activist Ralph Nader will return to Glens Falls on Friday, May 25, 2007 for a variety of events including an appearance at a Glens Falls High School, a local premiere of the documentary “An Unreasonable Man,” and a book signing at Red Fox Books. Ralph Nader’s visit is sponsored by Adirondack Progressives, a group of local people interested in fostering a local dialogue on today’s most important issues.
The day’s events will begin at Glens Falls High School where Nader will speak to students and participate in a student forum beginning at 1:00 pm. He is expected to speak about media reform, the Iraq War, the threat of corporate power and its dangerous convergence with government, and the role of third parties and citizen activism in the political process.
The documentary film “An Unreasonable Man,” a Sundance Film Festival Official Selection, will premiere locally at Aimie's Dinner & Movie (190 Glen Street, Glens Falls). The film traces the life and career of Ralph Nader, one of the most unique, important, and controversial political figures of the past half century from his public emergence as nemesis of General Motors in 1966, through his leadership of the Consumer Movement, to his latest controversial forays into electoral politics. Following the first showing, Nader and filmmaker Henriette Mantel will be on hand to discuss the film and take questions from the audience. Tickets are on sale at Rock Hill Cafe (19 Exchange St Glens Falls) and High Peaks Java (153 Maple Street, Glens Falls) for $75 each. The price includes a copy of Nader’s latest book, The Seventeen Traditions.
At about 3:30 pm, Ralph Nader will sign copies of his latest book (The Seventeen Traditions) at Red Fox Book Store (28 Ridge Street, Glens Falls). The book looks back to the earliest days of Nader’s own life to his serene and enriching childhood in bucolic Winsted, Connecticut. From listening to learning, from patriotism to argument, from work to simple enjoyment, Nader revisits seventeen key traditions he absorbed from his parents, his siblings, and the people in his community, and draws from them inspiring lessons for today's society. Warmly human, rich with sensory memories and lasting wisdom, it offers a kind of modern-day parable of how we grow from children into responsible adults—a reminder of a time when nature and community were central to the way we all learned and lived.
Ralph Nader is one of America's most effective social critics. He has run for the office of US President twice, as the candidate of the Green Party in 2000 (America’s third largest and fastest growing political party), and as an Independent in 2004. For forty years his documented criticism of government and industry has had a widespread effect on public awareness and bureaucratic power and has inspired a whole population of consumer advocates and citizen activists.
Nader first made headlines in 1965 with his book Unsafe at Any Speed, a scathing indictment of the auto industry for producing unsafe vehicles that led to congressional hearings and a series of automobile safety laws passed in 1966. Since then Nader has been responsible for at least eight major federal consumer protection laws such as the motor vehicle safety laws and the Safe Drinking Water Act and the launching of federal regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and Consumer Product Safety Administration, and the Freedom of Information Act of 1974.
Nader also helped establish the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) the student-funded and controlled organizations that function on college campuses in 23 states. Their impact alone has been tremendous. The groups have published hundreds of ground-breaking reports and guides, lobbied for laws in their state legislatures, and called the media's attention to environmental and energy problems. The largest of the Nader organizations is Public Citizen, founded in 1971 and with a current nationwide membership over 100,000.
[END]
Friday, May 4, 2007
The "Greening" of The Governor's Mansion
Here's an article from the NY Times about Judith Enck. She is Governor Spitzer's Deputy Secretary for the Environment and is also the wife of a friend of mine, former NYS Green Party
Chair, Mark Dunlea.
I have been pretty critical about the "greening" of the Executive mansion. The issue is discussed in the NY Times article below and was apparently one of Judith's initiatives. My cynicism about this example of "ecological leadership" stems from my belief that the government needs to lead by establishing programs and policies that make "greening" possible for the majority of us who can't afford it, not by making token gestures with our tax money. I feel that if they
really wanted to "green" the Executive mansion, they would fist need to "unmansion" it, first. One of the biggest wastes of energy resource in this country is our insanely excessive use per capita, of living space.
What is a REASONABLE amount of living space for an individual to use? While thats a difficult benchmark to establish with any certainty, it is fairly interesting to know that the average in many poorer countries is less than 30 square feet per person. How do we, as Americans, measure up to that?
It will surprise no one when I say ... not very well. We use 20 - 30 times more living space than the average global citizen. We also live in about 4.5 times more space than we would if we were to live in a reasonably ecological manner. The average house in the United States is about 2250 square feet. According to the last census, we each use about 872 square feet of that! Oasis Design, a "green" home design group, states in its guidelines on ecologically-sound homes, "120 square feet for two people is possible. 200 square feet per person is generous. At 500+ square feet per person, ecology is out the window."
Following this logic, it is my view that the AMOUNT of living space at the Executive mansion is its biggest environmental foible and not its perceived lack of color. Likely, Judith and Mark would agree. They have always "walked the walk". They have lived in an extremely modest and energy efficient home in Poestenkill for several decades. Unlike their house, the governor's mansion can't be "greened". It is about 20,000 square feet and according to an article I read about it, he and his wife only spend about two nights a week there (apparently, their kids hardly ever stay at all). So ... two people times 104 nights per year times twenty thousand square feet equals .... 70,000 square feet of living space EACH! How wasteful is that, Mister Governor? How much solar energy would one need to capture to make up for that kind of Herculeaen waste of resource? How many flushes from the European low flow toilet would it take to negate that kind of unconscionable overuse?
I am really disappointed that the best example the Spitzers can set is to spend $650,000 taxpayer dollars to change some light bulbs and put up some solar panels. Why not do something truly meaningful and completely alter the mass perception of how a Governor is supposed to live in this "new American century"? How about moving the whole operation to a GREEN Executive HOUSE and abandoning the whole mansion concept entirely? Why not turn the mansion into a museum and charge admission to cover the (now reduced) heating bills? Why not rent it out to rich voyeurs who want to spend the night or have their wedding receptions there? Show us that you REALLY are a different kind of politician. MAYBE, over thirty years ago, when Jimmy Carter solar-paneled the White House it was okay to think of it as a symbolic gesture and a nod towards clean, renewable energy. Today, this type of "greening" transcends the symbolic and enters the realm of pandering. This was an extremely patronizing maneuver and a hypocritical one, as well. If the Spitzer government wants to set the ecological bar higher they need to create and fund government grants and incentives for all of us New Yorkers who simply cannot afford to effect meaningful "greening" without meaningful "greenbacks". ;-)
May 4, 2007
Public Lives
From Voice of the Bottle Bill to Keeper of the Green
By ROBIN FINN
ALBANY
ODD, but the color green is nowhere present in the Capitol office occupied by a mountain range of paperwork and the tart-tongued Judith Enck, Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s deputy secretary for the environment, who began her career as a bottle-bill lobbyist and Naderesque nag about government eco-insensitivity. Reprising the role she played during Mr. Spitzer’s eight years as attorney general (it was her idea for him to hire her away from the New York Public Interest Research Group and bring his nascent environmental agenda up to snuff), Ms Enck is his adviser on all things green.
Or all things potentially green, which is why she was gratified last month when New York State’s first lady, Silda Wall Spitzer, embraced her whimsical but doable suggestion for a greening of the energy-guzzling governor’s mansion.
Or all things that should stay green, which is why she advised Mr. Spitzer to dig in and fight a 190-mile high-voltage transmission line through central New York that, as originally planned, would snake across seven counties, 154 streams or rivers and 155 mapped wetlands.
“It would have an enormous aesthetic impact, while the economic benefits are not that clear,” Ms. Enck says. Relocating the line alongside the New York State Thruway might be a viable compromise. As for her own personal environmental footprint, she shrugs: “I’m sure it’s huge. I’m a typical American.”
Not exactly. Her transportation of choice is a Toyota Prius. Her small house is heated by two cords of wood and sunshine. She recycles and composts like a fiend. “But I feel really guilty because I live a half-hour from where I work and I don’t carpool,” she says. (Maybe that’s because she has only five neighbors at Common Farms, a 185-acre collectively owned preserve in the town of Poestenkill, where she built her house.) “And I occasionally vote Republican,” she stage whispers, “but only for local candidates.” Her nonpartisan weakness — she is a nominal Democrat — is female candidates with a sympathetic environmental stance and smart fiscal policies.
The opportunity to make rather than simply influence environmental policy is why Ms. Enck left the advocacy side of the aisle to work for Mr. Spitzer: “Rather than knocking on the door from the outside, I wanted to shape policy from the inside.” The Pataki administration was aghast when she joined the attorney general’s senior staff, and referred to her as “a bomb thrower.” It still annoys her. “Since when is being an advocate for recycling equivalent to throwing bombs?”
Ms. Enck wryly refers to her wing of the building as “the unarmed side of the Capitol” — less security, but more recycling bins. There was just one on her floor in January. Now there are 25.
THE highlight of her office ephemera, aside from plaques and bumper stickers with the slogan “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History,” is an autographed black-and-white photograph of Jon Stewart, the irreverent talk show host. Two tickets, souvenirs of her visits as a member of the studio audience, are tucked into the frame.
Ms. Enck, 47, makeup-free and unfussily attired in a black pantsuit, confesses to being a serious Stewart groupie. It is an addiction tolerated, if not shared, by her husband, Mark Dunlea, a lawyer and former state chairman of the Green Party who is now with the Hunger Action Network.
Mr. Stewart’s photograph arrived after a friend surreptitiously wrote to him describing Ms. Enck’s decision to donate a kidney to her brother-in-law; the friend was hoping Mr. Stewart would call, but Ms. Enck seems comfortable settling for a picture with this inscription: “Judith, Wow! I’m reluctant to donate used clothing. Kudos to you.”
She blushes, and shares some organic brownies baked by her neighbor in Poestenkill, where she and her husband built their solar-and-wood-stove-heated house way before it was hip to be anti-McMansion.
Ms. Enck, whose favorite film is “The Way We Were” (go ahead and call her a square; she revels in it), admits to hauling a bunch of interns to soak up Al Gore’s sermon in “An Inconvenient Truth,” only to fall asleep. Not that global warming does not alarm her: It’s just that she knows his message by heart.
Uprooted, to her intense displeasure, by her parents — her father was a truck driver, her mother a teacher’s aide — from an urban girlhood in Queens Village and transplanted with four younger, equally outraged siblings to bucolic Cairo in upstate Greene County, Ms. Enck was not an early convert to eco-activism. She hated the Catskills.
As a teenager, her ambition was to become a pilot. “My mother kind of pushed me into it,” she says. “She was a big fan of Amelia Earhart.” At 14, Ms. Enck took flying lessons, but she quit when the money ran out, and went on to the College of Saint Rose in Albany, intending to become a social worker. “I always get a little tickle when my adversaries dismiss me as an elitist environmentalist,” she says. “I grew up working class. I know about living paycheck to paycheck.” Still does. “Environmental advocacy is not a money maker; state government is high end for us,” she says. She has a son at Vassar; he is a political science major, as she was.
Her major preoccupation these days is the “bigger, better bottle bill,” an expansion of the original bill that she helped push Gov. Hugh L. Carey into signing 25 years ago. Then, as now, her opponent is the Republican-controlled Senate.
“I’m much more pragmatic than I was 20 years ago,” she says. “What’s really sad is that the issues are the same.”
Chair, Mark Dunlea.
I have been pretty critical about the "greening" of the Executive mansion. The issue is discussed in the NY Times article below and was apparently one of Judith's initiatives. My cynicism about this example of "ecological leadership" stems from my belief that the government needs to lead by establishing programs and policies that make "greening" possible for the majority of us who can't afford it, not by making token gestures with our tax money. I feel that if they
really wanted to "green" the Executive mansion, they would fist need to "unmansion" it, first. One of the biggest wastes of energy resource in this country is our insanely excessive use per capita, of living space.
What is a REASONABLE amount of living space for an individual to use? While thats a difficult benchmark to establish with any certainty, it is fairly interesting to know that the average in many poorer countries is less than 30 square feet per person. How do we, as Americans, measure up to that?
It will surprise no one when I say ... not very well. We use 20 - 30 times more living space than the average global citizen. We also live in about 4.5 times more space than we would if we were to live in a reasonably ecological manner. The average house in the United States is about 2250 square feet. According to the last census, we each use about 872 square feet of that! Oasis Design, a "green" home design group, states in its guidelines on ecologically-sound homes, "120 square feet for two people is possible. 200 square feet per person is generous. At 500+ square feet per person, ecology is out the window."
Following this logic, it is my view that the AMOUNT of living space at the Executive mansion is its biggest environmental foible and not its perceived lack of color. Likely, Judith and Mark would agree. They have always "walked the walk". They have lived in an extremely modest and energy efficient home in Poestenkill for several decades. Unlike their house, the governor's mansion can't be "greened". It is about 20,000 square feet and according to an article I read about it, he and his wife only spend about two nights a week there (apparently, their kids hardly ever stay at all). So ... two people times 104 nights per year times twenty thousand square feet equals .... 70,000 square feet of living space EACH! How wasteful is that, Mister Governor? How much solar energy would one need to capture to make up for that kind of Herculeaen waste of resource? How many flushes from the European low flow toilet would it take to negate that kind of unconscionable overuse?
I am really disappointed that the best example the Spitzers can set is to spend $650,000 taxpayer dollars to change some light bulbs and put up some solar panels. Why not do something truly meaningful and completely alter the mass perception of how a Governor is supposed to live in this "new American century"? How about moving the whole operation to a GREEN Executive HOUSE and abandoning the whole mansion concept entirely? Why not turn the mansion into a museum and charge admission to cover the (now reduced) heating bills? Why not rent it out to rich voyeurs who want to spend the night or have their wedding receptions there? Show us that you REALLY are a different kind of politician. MAYBE, over thirty years ago, when Jimmy Carter solar-paneled the White House it was okay to think of it as a symbolic gesture and a nod towards clean, renewable energy. Today, this type of "greening" transcends the symbolic and enters the realm of pandering. This was an extremely patronizing maneuver and a hypocritical one, as well. If the Spitzer government wants to set the ecological bar higher they need to create and fund government grants and incentives for all of us New Yorkers who simply cannot afford to effect meaningful "greening" without meaningful "greenbacks". ;-)
May 4, 2007
Public Lives
From Voice of the Bottle Bill to Keeper of the Green
By ROBIN FINN
ALBANY
ODD, but the color green is nowhere present in the Capitol office occupied by a mountain range of paperwork and the tart-tongued Judith Enck, Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s deputy secretary for the environment, who began her career as a bottle-bill lobbyist and Naderesque nag about government eco-insensitivity. Reprising the role she played during Mr. Spitzer’s eight years as attorney general (it was her idea for him to hire her away from the New York Public Interest Research Group and bring his nascent environmental agenda up to snuff), Ms Enck is his adviser on all things green.
Or all things potentially green, which is why she was gratified last month when New York State’s first lady, Silda Wall Spitzer, embraced her whimsical but doable suggestion for a greening of the energy-guzzling governor’s mansion.
Or all things that should stay green, which is why she advised Mr. Spitzer to dig in and fight a 190-mile high-voltage transmission line through central New York that, as originally planned, would snake across seven counties, 154 streams or rivers and 155 mapped wetlands.
“It would have an enormous aesthetic impact, while the economic benefits are not that clear,” Ms. Enck says. Relocating the line alongside the New York State Thruway might be a viable compromise. As for her own personal environmental footprint, she shrugs: “I’m sure it’s huge. I’m a typical American.”
Not exactly. Her transportation of choice is a Toyota Prius. Her small house is heated by two cords of wood and sunshine. She recycles and composts like a fiend. “But I feel really guilty because I live a half-hour from where I work and I don’t carpool,” she says. (Maybe that’s because she has only five neighbors at Common Farms, a 185-acre collectively owned preserve in the town of Poestenkill, where she built her house.) “And I occasionally vote Republican,” she stage whispers, “but only for local candidates.” Her nonpartisan weakness — she is a nominal Democrat — is female candidates with a sympathetic environmental stance and smart fiscal policies.
The opportunity to make rather than simply influence environmental policy is why Ms. Enck left the advocacy side of the aisle to work for Mr. Spitzer: “Rather than knocking on the door from the outside, I wanted to shape policy from the inside.” The Pataki administration was aghast when she joined the attorney general’s senior staff, and referred to her as “a bomb thrower.” It still annoys her. “Since when is being an advocate for recycling equivalent to throwing bombs?”
Ms. Enck wryly refers to her wing of the building as “the unarmed side of the Capitol” — less security, but more recycling bins. There was just one on her floor in January. Now there are 25.
THE highlight of her office ephemera, aside from plaques and bumper stickers with the slogan “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History,” is an autographed black-and-white photograph of Jon Stewart, the irreverent talk show host. Two tickets, souvenirs of her visits as a member of the studio audience, are tucked into the frame.
Ms. Enck, 47, makeup-free and unfussily attired in a black pantsuit, confesses to being a serious Stewart groupie. It is an addiction tolerated, if not shared, by her husband, Mark Dunlea, a lawyer and former state chairman of the Green Party who is now with the Hunger Action Network.
Mr. Stewart’s photograph arrived after a friend surreptitiously wrote to him describing Ms. Enck’s decision to donate a kidney to her brother-in-law; the friend was hoping Mr. Stewart would call, but Ms. Enck seems comfortable settling for a picture with this inscription: “Judith, Wow! I’m reluctant to donate used clothing. Kudos to you.”
She blushes, and shares some organic brownies baked by her neighbor in Poestenkill, where she and her husband built their solar-and-wood-stove-heated house way before it was hip to be anti-McMansion.
Ms. Enck, whose favorite film is “The Way We Were” (go ahead and call her a square; she revels in it), admits to hauling a bunch of interns to soak up Al Gore’s sermon in “An Inconvenient Truth,” only to fall asleep. Not that global warming does not alarm her: It’s just that she knows his message by heart.
Uprooted, to her intense displeasure, by her parents — her father was a truck driver, her mother a teacher’s aide — from an urban girlhood in Queens Village and transplanted with four younger, equally outraged siblings to bucolic Cairo in upstate Greene County, Ms. Enck was not an early convert to eco-activism. She hated the Catskills.
As a teenager, her ambition was to become a pilot. “My mother kind of pushed me into it,” she says. “She was a big fan of Amelia Earhart.” At 14, Ms. Enck took flying lessons, but she quit when the money ran out, and went on to the College of Saint Rose in Albany, intending to become a social worker. “I always get a little tickle when my adversaries dismiss me as an elitist environmentalist,” she says. “I grew up working class. I know about living paycheck to paycheck.” Still does. “Environmental advocacy is not a money maker; state government is high end for us,” she says. She has a son at Vassar; he is a political science major, as she was.
Her major preoccupation these days is the “bigger, better bottle bill,” an expansion of the original bill that she helped push Gov. Hugh L. Carey into signing 25 years ago. Then, as now, her opponent is the Republican-controlled Senate.
“I’m much more pragmatic than I was 20 years ago,” she says. “What’s really sad is that the issues are the same.”
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Crooked Democrat Judge Fines Nader $89,000 For Running for Office
I have attached a truly frightening piece below about the lengths to which the Democrats have now stooped to quash democracy and shut down third party candidates. The Democrats, through actions like this, are succeeding at making the Republicans look like the good guys. When I read articles like this, I am quite relieved to be associated with neither set of ruling class, neo-corporatist swine.
OpEdNews
www.opednews.com/articles/genera_michael__070502_democrats_tighten_no.htm
May 2, 2007
Democrats tighten noose on Nader and Greens in punitive attack on "Third Party" candidates
By Michael Richardson
The Democrats are tightening the financial noose around Ralph Nader for his failed bid to obtain ballot access in Pennsylvania during his 2004 Presidential campaign. Nader had been deprived a place on the ballot after extensive litigation, brought by the Democrats, and was later assessed a hefty $89,821 penalty by the Pennsylvania courts to be paid to the Democrats for court-related costs. Nader appealed the assessment and was recently denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. Emboldened, lawyers for the Democrats have now entered the costly order as a final judgment in an ongoing effort to enforce the penalty.
Nader attorney Oliver Hall says about the post-election vendetta, "They have overreached and gone way too far, it is unprecedented." The obvious chilling effect on independents and minor party candidates is not lost on Carl Romanelli, the 2006 Green Party would-be candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. Romanelli, too, has been hit by the Democrats with a huge bill for their costs in removing him from the ballot and has been ordered to pay $89,668.
If successful in Pennsylvania, Democrat legislators around the country will likely introduce similar punitive election laws in other states, particularly "swing" states, in a preventive effort to keep independents and minor party candidates off the ballot.
Capital University law professor Mark Brown has studied the 2004 legal wrangling that took Nader off the ballot in Pennsylvania and recently published a law review article on the affair. Brown discovered the Democrats were aided by a judge who may have been motivated by animus toward Nader's candidacy.
Nader needed 25,697 signatures on his nomination petitions to get a spot on the Pennsylvania ballot and submitted approximately 52,000. A week after filing the petitions the Secretary of State accepted Nader's nomination after tossing about 5,000 signatures for various reasons. That same day, August 9, 2004, eight Democrat "objectors" represented by two dozen lawyers challenged some 37,000 of the remaining signatures. After weeks of legal wrangling eleven judges were assigned the monumental task of a line-by-line review of Nader's petitions.
Judge James Collins, who assessed the $89,821 bill, led the review declaring Nader's petitions were "rife with forgeries" and that "this signature gathering process was the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this Court." Collins alleged that "thousands of names" were "created at random"…a view dissented from by Justice Saylor of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court who declared the Nader campaign had not been shown to have engaged in any kind of "systemic" fraud and that only 687 signatures out of 51,273 had actually been rejected for forgery.
Professor Brown has discovered that Judge Collins personally ruled that 568 of the 687 purported forgeries were fraudulent leaving the other ten judges to find only 119 forgeries. Collins and two of the other reviewing judges discarded thousands of signatures on very "technical and complicated" criteria including a missing middle initial, use of ditto marks, or mixing printing with cursive writing. Collins ended up rejecting 70% of the 10,794 signatures he reviewed.
Brown wrote in his law review article, "Moreover, the eleven judges who reviewed Nader's signature submissions apparently employed different standards to invalidate signatures at alarmingly different rates." In a footnote, Brown notes that 3,500 signatures were invalidated for unstated reasons.
Brown writes there was a "concerted Democratic program to purge Nader from the presidential ballot." Further, "The lesson to be drawn from the 2004 presidential race is that neither major party can be trusted to police a general election ballot. Major party interests naturally lean more toward rigging and sabotaging than insuring fair and competitive fights."
"The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court pressed just under a dozen judges into service at different locations over the course of two weeks to canvass 52,000 signatures submitted by the Nader campaign. Not only did this Herculean effort push the Nader campaign beyond its legal and technical capacity--some of the proceedings were not even attended by Nader's lawyers--the eleven judges invalidated signatures at alarmingly different rates."
"Forcing lawyers to scramble among a dozen courtrooms in as many days to uphold an agency's decision authorizing ballot access is neither measured nor productive. The practice is not only constitutionally objectionable, but it also facilitates a moneyed effort to veto a political outsider's participation in the electoral arena."
Attorney Hall says that Ralph Nader is still reviewing his options regarding the costly and punitive order issued by Judge Collins to punish Nader's bid for public office.
Professor Brown concludes his analysis of the Democratic legal attack on Nader, "I suspect that as long as America's political system rewards an empty lust for power, politicians and judges will continue to turn blind eyes to fair procedures."
Permission granted to reprint. Authors Bio: Michael Richardson is a freelance writer based in Boston. Richardson writes about politics, election law, human nutrition, ethics, and music. In 2004 Richardson was Ralph Nader's national ballot access coordinator.
OpEdNews
www.opednews.com/articles/genera_michael__070502_democrats_tighten_no.htm
May 2, 2007
Democrats tighten noose on Nader and Greens in punitive attack on "Third Party" candidates
By Michael Richardson
The Democrats are tightening the financial noose around Ralph Nader for his failed bid to obtain ballot access in Pennsylvania during his 2004 Presidential campaign. Nader had been deprived a place on the ballot after extensive litigation, brought by the Democrats, and was later assessed a hefty $89,821 penalty by the Pennsylvania courts to be paid to the Democrats for court-related costs. Nader appealed the assessment and was recently denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. Emboldened, lawyers for the Democrats have now entered the costly order as a final judgment in an ongoing effort to enforce the penalty.
Nader attorney Oliver Hall says about the post-election vendetta, "They have overreached and gone way too far, it is unprecedented." The obvious chilling effect on independents and minor party candidates is not lost on Carl Romanelli, the 2006 Green Party would-be candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. Romanelli, too, has been hit by the Democrats with a huge bill for their costs in removing him from the ballot and has been ordered to pay $89,668.
If successful in Pennsylvania, Democrat legislators around the country will likely introduce similar punitive election laws in other states, particularly "swing" states, in a preventive effort to keep independents and minor party candidates off the ballot.
Capital University law professor Mark Brown has studied the 2004 legal wrangling that took Nader off the ballot in Pennsylvania and recently published a law review article on the affair. Brown discovered the Democrats were aided by a judge who may have been motivated by animus toward Nader's candidacy.
Nader needed 25,697 signatures on his nomination petitions to get a spot on the Pennsylvania ballot and submitted approximately 52,000. A week after filing the petitions the Secretary of State accepted Nader's nomination after tossing about 5,000 signatures for various reasons. That same day, August 9, 2004, eight Democrat "objectors" represented by two dozen lawyers challenged some 37,000 of the remaining signatures. After weeks of legal wrangling eleven judges were assigned the monumental task of a line-by-line review of Nader's petitions.
Judge James Collins, who assessed the $89,821 bill, led the review declaring Nader's petitions were "rife with forgeries" and that "this signature gathering process was the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this Court." Collins alleged that "thousands of names" were "created at random"…a view dissented from by Justice Saylor of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court who declared the Nader campaign had not been shown to have engaged in any kind of "systemic" fraud and that only 687 signatures out of 51,273 had actually been rejected for forgery.
Professor Brown has discovered that Judge Collins personally ruled that 568 of the 687 purported forgeries were fraudulent leaving the other ten judges to find only 119 forgeries. Collins and two of the other reviewing judges discarded thousands of signatures on very "technical and complicated" criteria including a missing middle initial, use of ditto marks, or mixing printing with cursive writing. Collins ended up rejecting 70% of the 10,794 signatures he reviewed.
Brown wrote in his law review article, "Moreover, the eleven judges who reviewed Nader's signature submissions apparently employed different standards to invalidate signatures at alarmingly different rates." In a footnote, Brown notes that 3,500 signatures were invalidated for unstated reasons.
Brown writes there was a "concerted Democratic program to purge Nader from the presidential ballot." Further, "The lesson to be drawn from the 2004 presidential race is that neither major party can be trusted to police a general election ballot. Major party interests naturally lean more toward rigging and sabotaging than insuring fair and competitive fights."
"The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court pressed just under a dozen judges into service at different locations over the course of two weeks to canvass 52,000 signatures submitted by the Nader campaign. Not only did this Herculean effort push the Nader campaign beyond its legal and technical capacity--some of the proceedings were not even attended by Nader's lawyers--the eleven judges invalidated signatures at alarmingly different rates."
"Forcing lawyers to scramble among a dozen courtrooms in as many days to uphold an agency's decision authorizing ballot access is neither measured nor productive. The practice is not only constitutionally objectionable, but it also facilitates a moneyed effort to veto a political outsider's participation in the electoral arena."
Attorney Hall says that Ralph Nader is still reviewing his options regarding the costly and punitive order issued by Judge Collins to punish Nader's bid for public office.
Professor Brown concludes his analysis of the Democratic legal attack on Nader, "I suspect that as long as America's political system rewards an empty lust for power, politicians and judges will continue to turn blind eyes to fair procedures."
Permission granted to reprint. Authors Bio: Michael Richardson is a freelance writer based in Boston. Richardson writes about politics, election law, human nutrition, ethics, and music. In 2004 Richardson was Ralph Nader's national ballot access coordinator.
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