All posts by Consumer Watchdog

Big Oil Behind The Tea

When Californians angry about oil companies’ attempt to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas emission cap went to confront the oil refiner  behind Prop 23’s power play, they found the Tea Party in their way.

When Californians angry about oil companies’ attempt to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas emission cap went to confront the oil refiner  behind Prop 23’s power play, they found the Tea Party in their way.

What’s an angry populist movement that’s supposed to represent real people doing defending oil companies?

It’s a question the New York Times could have answered in its otherwise excellent editorial today, The Brothers Koch and AB 32. Petroleum magnates Charles and David Koch fund both Prop 23’s greenhouse gas cap repeal and The Tea Party.

While the Tea Party is voicing authentic anger, the money fueling it is coming from petroleum magnates who simply want to profit and pollute at the expense of the rest of us. The Tea Party in California has become Big Oil’s army. Not very populist to me.

If you believe Kansas oil and gas tycoons want to save California jobs through Prop 23, you might as well join The Tea Party. I debated a Tea Party pooh-bah on LA’s NPR station KPCC yesterday. All there is when you strip away the angry talk is a Reagan-Bush plan to deregulate everything.  

That’ why Consumer Watchdog is airing a JumboTron advertisement in Times Square, the largest public square in America, that raises the question: “Are You Mad As Hell? But Think The Tea Party Is Insane?”

The commercial, created by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, calls upon those who believe in progress to use their anger to get the change they voted for. It is insane to let oil companies repeal greenhouse gas emissions caps, and it’s insane to turn the reins of government over to people who would destroy it.

Progressives need to start speaking up and raising some hell. The power of the government is our collective will to deal with the corporate abuses at the heart of the 2008 election. We cannot allow the Tea Party or anyone else to exploit the public’s anger in order to rob us of our ability to deal with the corporate greed and corruption that pisses us off most.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Mad as Hell, But Don’t Want to Join The Tea Party?

The Tea Party is on a roll with its upset Senate primary victory in Delaware.  If the rest of us don’t start raising hell, the Tea Party will have us living it.

Are you mad as hell but don’t want to join the Tea Party?  Do you still want to get the change you voted for in 2008?  That’s most Americans, but the right wing is the only wing talking about its anger.

Public outrage is the most powerful force in the world if you know how to leverage it and turn it into power. That’s why I wrote The Progressive’s Guide To Raising Hell, published today by Chelsea Green, to show average Americans how their common anger can be turned into power using the force of public opinion online and offline.  

Award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald made this short video about Raising Hell and its battle-proven, step-by-step tactics that artfully sums up the book’s essence.

I have spent two decades fighting and winning campaigns against insurance companies, Big Oil, utilities, banks, and corrupt politicians. The tactics of turning anger into change are the same regardless of whether you are trying to win a Senate primary, pass a ballot measure or get an insurer to pay a claim.

Change is no simple matter in America politics, as Americans have recently learned so well.

Elections rarely produce the change they promise because too often ballot victories leave intact the ways power is exercised, and on whose behalf. The special interests that fund and curry favor with our legislators may rebalance their party allegiances, but not their self-interest.

Anger, not hope, is the fuel of political and economic change. As things grow worse and worse, public rage grows more intense–and so does the energy for making things better.  And in 2010 in America, anger rules, but it needs to be vectored and focused if it is to succeed in fueling the type of change that the majority of Americans believe in.

If progressives walk away, rather than engage, the Tea Party and GOP will capture the popular anger and turn it against government, rather than focus it rightly back on the targets of the 2008 election: Wall Street, health insurers, polluters, the military industrial complex, and the politicians they buy. If we want progress, the kind that polls show 60 percent of Americans believe in, we need to do more than vote every two to four years or wait for Obama to learn the tactics of confrontation.  

We need to make demands. We need to raise some hell. The alternative is giving up the reins of government to a flash mob that wants to do nothing but destroy it.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and president of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Insurers’ naked greed triggers White House response

A message Thursday from Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius is unusual not just for its tough language toward health insurers, but because it exists at all. In a letter to the insurance industry’s lobbying and trade association, Sebelius flatly warns insurers to cut it out with blaming their double-digit price hikes on federal health reform.

I can’t remember seeing any kind of federal response to health premium increases, so a letter Thursday from Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius (thanks to Igor Volsky at Wonkroom for the tip) is unusual not just for its tough language, but because it exists at all. In a letter to Karen Ignani, president of the insurance industry lobbying and trade association, Sebelius warns insurers to cut it out with blaming their double-digit price hikes on federal health reform:

It has come to my attention that several health insurer carriers are sending letters to their enrolees falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act. I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.

Of course, it appears to be no accident that insurance companies are shoving out these increase notices just before the November elections, or that Ignagni herself, the industry’s top lobbyist, is writing the script for her members.  

Even as the health insurance industry is proving the need for regulation of rates, the industry is mounting a full-court press against any regulation.

Unfortunately, Sebelius and the White House don’t have much beyond tough talk in their arsenal. The letter uses the one credible threat at the administration’s disposal: exclusion of insurers that gouge their customers from the new state insurance exchanges in 2014:

We will … keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases; those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014. Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections [required by the ACA].

But 2014 is a long way away, and insurance companies are not even commited to the Exchanges, where it will be all too easy to see who provides the best value for the money.

All the more reason for states to get with it in regulating health insurance directly. Insurers aren’t the only cost problem, but it’s outrageous that they are blaming a new round of 18% or 20% premium hikes on the 1% to 2% cost of new patient protections. Of course, it was insurer greed that triggered the new protections from, for instance, arbitrary policy cancellations and exclusion of sick children from coverage.

At least we know the industry is taking Sebelius’ letter seriously because of the speed of its response. Ignagni snapped back with lots of fire and few facts that the insurance industry can’t be blamed for anything. No wonder insurance companies are as popular as used car salesmen. At least the car dealers don’t hold life and death power like the health care dealers and their chief salesperson, Ignagni.

One point in the insurers’ letter deserves a closer look:

Health insurance premiums are increasing because of soaring prices for medical services, the impact of younger and healthier people dropping their insurance during the weak economy, and additional benefits required under the new law.

Yes, lots of people are dropping their insurance because they can no longer afford it. Yet insurers are actually seeing the lowest level of medical inflation in years, and holding  tens of billions of dollars of surplus in corporate reserves that could temporarily quell premium increases. But no, they’d rather throw hundreds of thousands of patients to the wolves so they can enter the new era of health reform with the highest possible rates.

That’s greed at it most naked.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.