Tuesday, August 18, 2020
A Brief History Of Political Interference In The U.S. Postal Service
Political interference in the U.S. Postal Service isn't new, according to Winifred Gallagher, the author of How the Post Office Created America.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro (host), Winifred Gallagher (guest)
https://portside.org/2020-08-16/brief-history-political-interference-us-postal-service
The U.S. Postal Service is hemorrhaging money, and the Trump administration has suggested it won't bail it out. Speaking yesterday, President Trump blamed Democrats for the Postal Service's financial problems, saying they aren't approving funding for mail-in voting. The Biden campaign is calling the administration's moves sabotage, saying it is an attempt to gut an institution that is an essential part of American life and to thwart the demand for mail-in ballots before an election. But political interference in the U.S. Postal Service isn't new, says our next guest. Winifred Gallagher is the author of "How The Post Office Created America," and she joins us now.
Welcome.
WINIFRED GALLAGHER: Good morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So before we get to what is happening now, I want to start with history. The roots of the post office actually go back to when the U.S. was 13 colonies.
GALLAGHER: Yeah, even before the Declaration of Independence. The post office has really been woven into America's DNA since Benjamin Franklin. He was our first postmaster general and our founding father. In the 1760s and '70s, the American patriots created these underground postal networks that enabled them to conspire, talk treason under the British radar.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've called the Postal Service our democracy's unifier and equalizer. How did it become America's favorite government service?
GALLAGHER: I would date it to 1792. That's when our post office became truly unique. George Washington, Benjamin Rush and James Madison decided to use the postal network to create an informed electorate. This was, like, very radical. The Europeans were horrified. These founders devised this kind of Robin Hood scheme that used the high cost of postage to send letters to subsidize the cost of mailing cheap, uncensored newspapers to every citizen so that they could understand public affairs before they cast their votes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But after that, politicians used the post office for their own ends. How so?
GALLAGHER: Actually, they didn't interfere with postal operations very much until Andrew Jackson became president. He created what is called the spoils system. So he made the postmaster general a very powerful Cabinet officers and installed his political cronies in that position. And for nearly a century and a half, this spoils system allowed whichever party won the White House to reward its supporters with tens of thousands of jobs.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So there is a lot of concern over the financial trouble the post office is in. But this, you know, predates this administration. Briefly walk us through how we got to this moment.
GALLAGHER: Yeah. I would date it to the - the current crisis to the 1980s, when a very timid USPS management and Congress fatefully decided not to shift from letter mail to email. They could've given Americans digital addresses the same way they gave us our physical street addresses. And in fact, of course, as everyone knows, by 2001, email had drastically reduced the volume of first-class letter mail.
And then that crisis was worsened further by the really disastrous Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which restricted the Postal Service's ability to offer new services or adjust its pricing to its cost, and worse, required it to prefund its retiree health care benefits decades into the future, which created billions of dollars of debt. And that is what has prevented the post office from turning a profit for the past six years.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let's talk about what the Trump administration has now done. Louis DeJoy has been appointed as the postmaster general. He is a North Carolina businessman and a major Trump donor who reportedly has financial interests and competitors to the post office. And he stepped in, and he's cut the overtime of hundreds of thousands of employees. He said he would hold mail if it can't be sorted. This is purportedly to cut costs. Do you see it that way?
GALLAGHER: No, not at all. And it also, of course, reminds me of his favorite president - is Andrew Jackson. And that's the guy who invented the spoils system and made the postmaster general his political crony. Congress has to accept its responsibility and restore the USPS to health with these very commonsense reforms, including forgiving the huge debt for the retiree health care benefits, and also allow it to raise its prices very modestly. These are just things that the Congress has to do to, you know, preserve the system at this time of incredible partisanship and fragmentation. We have this one big, unifying national delivery system, and we need it to continue to support our democracy and free speech in ways that, you know, Benjamin Franklin couldn't even have imagined - delivering medicines and test kits during a COVID epidemic, but especially voting by mail.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Winifred Gallagher is the author of "How The Post Office Created America: A History."
Thank you very much.
GALLAGHER: Thank you.
'Canary in the Coal Mine': Greenland Ice Has Shrunk Beyond Return, Study Finds
Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.
August 16, 2020 Cassandra Garrison REUTERS
https://portside.org/2020-08-16/canary-coal-mine-greenland-ice-has-shrunk-beyond-return-study-finds
Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.
Scientists studied data on 234 glaciers across the Arctic territory spanning 34 years through 2018 and found that annual snowfall was no longer enough to replenish glaciers of the snow and ice being lost to summertime melting.
That melting is already causing global seas to rise about a millimeter on average per year. If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades.
“Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point,” said glaciologist Ian Howat at Ohio State University. He and his colleagues published the study Thursday in the Nature Communications Earth & Environment journal.
The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years.
The Arctic thaw has brought more water to the region, opening up routes for shipping traffic, as well as increased interest in extracting fossil fuels and other natural resources.
Greenland is strategically important for the U.S. military and its ballistic missile early warning system, as the shortest route from Europe to North America goes via the Arctic island.
Last year, President Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. But Denmark, a U.S. ally, rebuffed the offer. Then last month, the U.S. reopened a consulate in the territory’s capital of Nuuk, and Denmark reportedly said last week it was appointing an intermediary between Nuuk and Copenhagen some 3,500 kilometers away.
Scientists, however, have long worried about Greenland’s fate, given the amount of water locked into the ice.
The new study suggests the territory’s ice sheet will now gain mass only once every 100 years — a grim indicator of how difficult it is to re-grow glaciers once they hemorrhage ice.
In studying satellite images of the glaciers, the researchers noted that the glaciers had a 50% chance of regaining mass before 2000, with the odds declining since.
“We are still draining more ice now than what was gained through snow accumulation in ‘good’ years,” said lead author Michalea King, a glaciologist at Ohio State University.
The sobering findings should spur governments to prepare for sea-level rise, King said.
“Things that happen in the polar regions don’t stay in the polar region,” she said.
Still, the world can still bring down emissions to slow climate change, scientists said. Even if Greenland can’t regain the icy bulk that covered its 2 million square kilometers, containing the global temperature rise can slow the rate of ice loss.
“When we think about climate action, we’re not talking about building back the Greenland ice sheet,” said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who was not involved in the study. “We’re talking about how quickly rapid sea-level rise comes to our communities, our infrastructure, our homes, our military bases.”
Dems Begin Signaling A Post-Election Surrender On Health Care
Biden and every Dem Senate challenger is running on a public option, but party Hill aides quickly start promising a retreat after the health care industry begins attacks.
Andrew Perez
Aug 17
This story was written by Andrew Perez and David Sirota.
On the eve of a Democratic National Convention taking place as millions lose health care coverage, the health care industry is launching a new ad campaign pressing Democrats to back off the party’s already compromised health care promises. That pressure seems to be having its intended effect on Capitol Hill as congressional aides say the party will not push the initiative if Biden wins. The signs of retreat come as health care industry profits are skyrocketing and the industry’s campaign cash has flooded into Democratic coffers.
The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) -- a front group created by health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital lobbying groups to oppose “Medicare for All” -- announced on Friday that it is launching a new national ad campaign to persuade Democrats to abandon their plans to create a public health insurance plan. The group said it will run ads during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week. PAHCF is led by a former Hillary Clinton aide and run out of the offices of a D.C. lobbying firm led by former top Democratic congressional aides.
A substantial “public option” plan — which polls show is wildly popular — was the centerpiece of recent policy negotiations between supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden and progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had been pushing for a more expansive Medicare for All program. A draft of the party platform, approved by DNC members late last month, includes a pledge to pass a public option, or a government-run health insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.
Within 24 hours of the launch of the industry’s new ads, however, anonymous Democratic congressional sources were telling The Hill that Democrats likely won’t bother with the public option fight next year if Biden wins the election. Instead, they said the party will instead work to tweak the party’s 2010 health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has done little to limit insurance or hospital costs and has failed to ensure universal coverage.
To justify the preemptive retreat, Democratic congressional aides told the newspaper that the party’s moderate crop of 2020 Senate challenger candidates could make it harder to pass a public option. That assertion comes even though every single one of those candidates is currently campaigning in support of a public option, according to a TMI review of campaign statements.
The situation echoes the Democratic promises and subsequent surrender on a public option that marked the debate over health care more than a decade ago -- only this time around, the health care crisis is an even more acute emergency. While most developed countries have managed to contain COVID-19, the pandemic is spiraling out of control in the U.S. and an estimated 27 million people have lost their employer-based health insurance plans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
At the same time, the coronavirus crisis has been a boon for much of the corporate health care industry -- particularly for insurance companies and drugmakers, but also for some investor-owned hospital companies. As PAHCF gears up to fight the public option, the interests the group represents have been generating outsized profits and benefiting from massive federal assistance.
Democrats Promise Big Reforms
The idea of a public option isn’t new -- progressives fought unsuccessfully for its inclusion in the ACA, but the Democratic-controlled Senate refused to pass it. Ten years later, the public option has become a middle-ground proposal favored by many moderate Democrats.
One of the more common arguments for supporting a public option over Medicare for All is that it would be easier to pass such a public option through Congress than a single-payer program that eliminates the need for private health insurance coverage.
The public option generally polls better than Medicare for All -- people like being told they can buy into a plan or choose to keep their existing plan -- though public polling has found strong support for both ideas, especially as Americans grapple with the coronavirus crisis.
Of course, whether you keep your employer-based health insurance plan is less up to you than your boss or the overall state of the economy, as millions of Americans have experienced during a pandemic that’s caused global business shutdowns. Medicare for All would also likely cost the country far less in the long term.
During the 2020 Democratic primary, Biden repeatedly slammed Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal while offering scant details about what a government health insurance plan would look like in his administration. Last month, the joint policy task force between the Biden and Sanders camps released a detailed framework for a public option plan that would actually represent a significant piece of reform, if enacted.
“The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles, will be administered by the traditional Medicare program, not private companies, and will cover all primary care without any copayments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people,” the task force wrote.
The Biden-Sanders task force plan includes some key details about what a public option would look like that weren’t clear during the Democratic primary campaign. Biden’s website never said (it still doesn’t say) whether his public option plan would have a deductible. It also wasn’t clear who would administer the plan -- the task force document says Medicare. Anyone could sign up.
A draft of the DNC platform includes similar language about a public option. It says that Democrats will “make available on the marketplace a public option administered through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which includes a platinum-level choice, with low fees and no deductibles.” The DNC language would also make the public option available to all Americans, and “will cover all primary care without any co-payments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals.”
‘More Modest Package Of Fixes’
Despite optimism from progressives about Biden’s health care plan, the negotiations between the Biden and Sanders teams might not ultimately matter.
According to a new report in The Hill, Democratic congressional aides anticipate “the party would start next year with a more modest package of fixes to Obamacare that did not include a public option in an effort to get some early points on the board.”
The story reads like a trial balloon offering prefabricated talking points for the early weeks of a Biden administration when Democrats make huge concessions to industry in exchange for peanuts, while progressives watch in horror.
The Hill further reported: “A Senate Democratic aide...noted that if Democrats win back the Senate, it will be through red or purple states, and there will be plenty more moderate members in the caucus.”
Every single Democratic challenger running in a competitive Senate race this cycle has publicly campaigned on a public option -- Mark Kelly in Arizona, Sara Gideon in Maine, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, John Hickenlooper in Colorado, Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Steve Bullock in Montana, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Barbara Bollier in Kansas. Even Amy McGrath, the Trump Democrat running in Kentucky, supports a public option.
There are some better potential explanations for why Democrats might give up on the public option already.
For one, Democratic lawmakers have received $86 million from donors in the health care industry since 2019, according to OpenSecrets. That’s an average of $310,000 per politician. The party's Senate-focused super PAC and an affiliated dark money group has also received large donations from health care interests.
Perhaps the biggest factor at play is that the corporate health care industry can and likely will spend tens of millions of dollars to try to make the public option unpopular and demonize the Democratic Party by extension.
After all, in 2009 and 2010, the health insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) secretly funneled $100 million into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to finance a marketing and astroturf campaign against the Affordable Care Act. Democrats ultimately nixed the public option before passing the bill, and ended up losing control of the House of Representatives in a landslide election anyway.
Thriving Health Care Industry Ready To Pounce
PAHCF -- a dark money group led by AHIP and lobbying groups for pharmaceutical companies and hospitals -- already spent $4.5 million on slamming Medicare for All in presidential primary states and at least as much to block a state-level public option in Colorado this year.
And that was before COVID, which has been an absolute windfall for much of the corporate health care industry.
Health insurance companies doubled their profits between April and June compared to last year, specifically because Americans are avoiding medical care and putting off surgeries.
The Trump administration has been throwing gobs of cash at pharmaceutical and biotech companies -- at least $8 billion so far -- to produce stockpiles of potential COVID vaccines “before clinical trials have been completed,” according to the New York Times.
Hospitals have been hit hard by the pandemic, as emergency rooms have seen surges of patients with deadly respiratory issues. Doctors and workers have risked their lives to save others, often without adequate protective gear. Hundreds of health care workers have died. Many hospitals are struggling financially because people are avoiding medical care.
Some hospitals are doing better than others. In June, Reuters reported that two major investor-owned hospital chains, HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare, had received billions of dollars in federal loans and grants since the start of the pandemic and “appear to be benefiting disproportionately from the initial government relief as some other hospitals struggle to stay afloat.” HCA and Tenet are both PAHCF members.
On Friday, PAHCF previewed its new advertising campaign against the public option.
One ad warns that “your taxes would pay for a public option.” This should evidently scare people who are already paying expensive monthly premiums to insurance companies that often find ways to avoid paying for their care.
Another ad says the public option could become "the third largest government program" behind Social Security and Medicare.
Echoes Of The Public Option Retreat A Decade Ago
If the promises and subsequent retreat seem familiar, that’s because the situation echoes what happened a decade ago.
During the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s platform included a promise to create a public health care option -- a promise he later pretended he never made.
Obama and Biden came into office with sky-high approval ratings and a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority -- a perfect setting for the new Democratic administration to quickly pass a public option. However, soon after being elected, Obama and Biden’s White House began backing away from the public-option pledge -- well before the party lost its 60 Senate votes.
“One of the earliest signs that the public option was a negotiable item for the administration came in July 2009, from Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff,” reported Health Affairs. “Emanuel floated the idea of a ‘trigger’ that would enable the public option only if the desired competition and cost control failed to materialize. During the congressional recess in August 2009, at the height of the town hall pushback against health reform, other administration voices began to downplay the importance of the public option.”
By the end of 2009, Senate Democrats dropped their support for a public option in response to opposition from Sen. Joe Lieberman. A few months later as the ACA was being finalized, Democratic senators refused to even use their power to force a recorded public vote on legislation to create a public option.
Fast forward ten years and some Democratic congressional aides appear to be telegraphing the retreat process again -- setting the stage for backing off a public option before the election has even occurred.
Monday, August 17, 2020
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