The largely peaceful revolution in Cairo and Americans’ celebration of it raises the question:

What would it take to mount a peaceful revolution in America against the Wall Street and corporate powerhouses that have turned the government against the best interests of our people?”

The largely peaceful revolution in Cairo and Americans’ celebration of it raises the question:

What would it take to mount a peaceful revolution in America against the Wall Street and corporate powerhouses that have turned the government against the best interests of our people?”

In America, the corporation is king and the abuses of corporate power are the subject of our people’s greatest grievances.

The 2008 election was supposed to settle the score with Wall Street and the corporate elite that have ransomed, ransacked and run over the average American. The change never came, and it’s even less likely in 2012.

At Consumer Watchdog we build populist revolutions one spark at a time where the public has spoken but the rich and powerful won’t listen. While our work cannot compare to the heroism of the Egyptian people, we are inspired by their example.

The revolution in Cairo showed the power of online platforms like Twitter and Facebook to authentically air outrage and connect change makers. In Washington, DC, Consumer Watchdog is fighting to protect individuals’ freedom online, which is being threatened in the name of greater profit, by some of the very corporate innovators that created these platforms.

On Friday, the “Do Not Track Me Online” revolution began with the introduction of legislation by Congressional Rep. Jackie Speier (HR 654) to force corporations to respect our right to keep personal information and online habits private. You can weigh in with your Congressional Representative to pass the legislation here.

Our freedom to be revolutionaries in America depends on how well we can maintain the online commons as free, open, and in the service of the individual, and our privacy needs, rather than the corporation and its commercial needs.  This is an American battlefield that begins with online privacy, the right not to tracked online, extends to net neutrality and evolves to the greater notion that online technology should be in the service of individuals not corporate robots (in spirit of the teaching of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget.

If there is a nonpartisan street revolt brewing in America today it is against the staggering health insurance premium increases that insurance companies are foisting on Americans.  I was in the streets against Blue Shield’s 59% rate hike two weeks ago with angry patients and the California Nurses Association. Blue Shield actually agreed to delay the hike when we showed up.

Consistent premium hikes and the pending mandatory health insurance law to take effect in 2014 are bound to continue a growing rebellion.

Health insurance companies like Blue Shield and Anthem Blue Cross thumb their noses at our democracy daily.  They hijacked health reform to give themselves a guaranteed market, even as they fight daily to erode the consumer protections in the new federal law. Consumer Watchdog is working with regulators to force the health insurance companies to live by the new rules and with California legislators for “Do Not Gouge Me” legislation — giving government the right to stop unnecessary premium hikes. (You can weigh in for AB 52, if you have not already, here. )

Ultimately, the 24 states with ballot initiative processes will be a vehicle to get the people what Congress will not deliver – a public insurance alternative to the private market. Consumer Watchdog is already drafting such a ballot measure for California.

What happens after a revolt is as important as the uprising itself. Insurance companies like Mercury Insurance, Allstate and Farmers have been fighting for two decades against the ballot box revolution of insurance reform Proposition 103. Consumer Watchdog’s lawyers fight back daily to protect and further that voter revolt, which has saved motorists $62 billion on their auto insurance, and to show that even the biggest and most powerful companies have to respect the people’s will.

Revolutions in America today take place in the corporate suites, not the streets.  CEOs are generally the ones deposed, not presidents, which is the first clue to who really holds the power in our nation… But if a governmental revolution were to come, how would it unfold?

Bob Herbert in his New York Times column Saturday artfully makes the case  of the price we have paid for the sins of Wall Street and self-serving interest of those at the very top of the economy.  America will never be the same, nor will our schools, parks, colleges, social programs and deficit, without a major re-rewrite of how our government works to divorce it from the state of corporate capture that is its numbing existence.

Elections are not tools of revolutions in America anymore. What will it take to get Americans in the streets?  

Higher prices for everything coming with growing inflation, higher unemployment,  no jobs for our youth, the closing down of public services and public assistance?

The powerful in America have too much to lose and usually buckle when they smell the whiff of a revolution. That’s why it’s worth putting that smell in the air and in the streets again when the moment calls for it.

Dramatic changes in ideas and practices are the results of long, hard marches toward freedom and accountability. We need to start marching together in America again.

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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.

By Michael Risher, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

Forcing people to provide a DNA sample without any judicial oversight, just because a single police officer has arrested them, violates the Constitution. That’s why California’s law mandating that DNA samples be taken from all felony arrestees is facing a legal challenge from the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC).

At issue is Proposition 69, a voter-enacted law which mandates that anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony in California has to hand over a DNA sample, regardless of whether or not they are ever charged or convicted. As a result, tens of thousands of innocent Californians will be subject to a lifetime of genetic surveillance because a single police officer suspected them of a crime.

ACLU-NC filed suit in federal court last year seeking to stop this invasive law that violates the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the ACLU’s appeal of a lower court’s denial of a request for a preliminary injunction to halt the law while the suit continues. The appeals court hearing on July 13 showed that the court takes the privacy concerns and other constitutional issues in this case very seriously. The court clearly recognized the importance of the case, questioning both sides closely and extending the time allotted for oral argument.

Instead of being limited to serious, violent offenses, this law even applies to someone who has written a bad check, shoplifters, and people arrested during political demonstrations. And because collection occurs before any review by a prosecutor or a court, even people who are wrongfully arrested — either because of police misconduct or because the police simply had been provided with incorrect information — will be ordered to provide a sample. For example, a domestic violence victim who injured her partner in self defense might well be arrested while the police investigated her story and then released when they confirmed it, but would still have had to provide a sample.

The practice of automatically collecting DNA from people who are merely arrested ignores the presumption of innocence and blurs the line between being suspected of a crime and being convicted.

The lead plaintiff in the suit, Lily Haskell, was arrested at a peace rally in San Francisco. She was not charged with a crime and was quickly released, but not before being required to provide a DNA sample. When your DNA is taken after an arrest at a political demonstration, it can have a silencing effect on political action. Now, her genetic information is stored indefinitely in a government database.

Data from the California Department of Justice reveal that nearly one-third of the 300,000 arrests every year in California on suspicion of a felony never result in a conviction. A disproportionate number of these arrestees are people of color. Communities of color will face an even greater burden from the impact of this kind of genetic surveillance. Moreover, there are reports from Great Britain, which also takes DNA from some persons who are arrested, of police making arrests without cause simply to obtain a DNA sample to put in the country’s database.

Databanks should focus on people who have been convicted of crimes, not on those whom a single police officer thinks may have committed a crime — that is a better use of our limited resources and it’s what the constitution demands.

Meanwhile, California’s huge forensic DNA database — the third largest in the world — already faces tremendous backlogs. The resources spent collecting thousands upon thousands of DNA samples from arrestees detract from the resources that could instead be devoted to processing crime scene samples to help solve violent and serious crimes like rape, assault, and murder.

The final numbers on the stimulus package are trickling out.  Some of the baseline investments are here:

* Investments in Infrastructure and Science – $120 billion

* Investments in Health – $14.2 billion

* Investments in Education and Training – $105.9 billion

* Investments in Energy, including over $30 billion in infrastructure – $37.5 billion

* Helping Americans Hit Hardest by the Economic Crisis – $24.3 billion

* Law Enforcement, Oversight, Other Programs – $7.8 billion

It’s unquestionable that the conference report is worse than the House bill but better than the Senate.  It costs less than the Senate bill while providing more stimulus.  Some bad spending like the clean coal “FutureGen” project is out, along with some of the worst corporate tax breaks.  Mass transit spending is up, the child tax credit was partially restored to House levels (now kicking in after $3,000 in income), and the state fiscal stabilization fund gets around $54 million (but that includes funding for school construction).  You can find the full summary here.

There are some very solid elements to the bill.  White House economists estimate that the package will create or save 396,000 jobs in California and 3.5 million nationwide.  This is a down payment on a new generation of investment in America.

However, like with most Congressional sausage-making, there may be some rough patches.  The worst is the allegation that Dianne Feinstein is trying to include filtering into the stimulus as part of the program to expand broadband capacity across the country.

The Open Internet Coalition – which includes groups like Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) – is applauding the more than $2 billion expected to be in the stimulus bill for broadband build-out in rural or underserved areas. They say not only will building out high-speed Internet instantly create jobs, but giving people in those areas more access to the Internet will spur small-business creation and other growth […]

These groups are also over-the-moon about the fact that the Senate bill has a non-discrimination, interconnection requirement that essentially says any provider receiving stimulus funding has to make sure they provide equal access to everyone over their network (part of the so-called “net neutrality” debate). The House version requires the FCC to define “open access,” which essentially calls for carriers to share their networks with competitors.

But they’re worried Hollywood is still trying to insert a content filtering provision via Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., at the last minute. Feinstein has been trying to add language specifying that Internet service provider (ISPs) may engage in “reasonable network management” … “such as” efforts to combat illegal activity like “child pornography and copyright infringement.” In essence, some argue, ISPs would be able to monitor any content coming to and from your computer, just in case there was some copyrighted material violating fair use, or kiddie porn in there.

But groups like the Motion Picture Association of America stress the “network management” angle of the bill (“filtering” is a nasty word around these parts). After all, it’s hard to argue against stopping kiddie porn from being sent over one’s pipes. I’ve left a message with Feinstein’s press office to see what the status of her amendment is. It doesn’t appear to be in there, but I’ll let you know if she plans on trying to stick it in at some point.

“Of course we see huge privacy invasions from this sort of thing,” said Cathy Sloan of CCIA.

Now, some caveats.  There was a hyperventilating story in the UK Register claiming that this would kill net neutrality.  As stated earlier, there are open access provisions in the stimulus, and it doesn’t appear that this amendment even made it into the final version.  This looks to me to be more of a privacy and anti-competition issue.

In another part of that story, Henry Waxman was implicated.  His office has assured multiple constituents, including yours truly, that he has had nothing to do with any filtering amendment.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned.  DiFi is allegedly trying to pay back a corporate constituent with a highly invasive amendment that would certainly violate the spirit if not the letter of privacy laws.  And of course this kind of monitoring is a slippery slope, as are most IP issues.  At the root I agree with John Cole:

As baseball season is getting close, I would like to propose a trade. We give the Republicans Dianne Feinstein and a PTBNL and they give us Olympia Snowe. This is a solid trade for us. With Judd Gregg at commerce, we would almost complete the New England rout, and Feinstein, as a newly minted Republican, will go down to certain defeat in California. Additionally, there is nothing in this agreement that says the PTBNL can’t be Nelson or Lieberman.

Last week I wrote a post about SB 1096, a bill to allow pharmacies to sell prescription data. Apparently that post got some attention, partially for my rather crass snark, but also for the subject of the bill.  One particular response was noteworthy. I publish the following email with permission of the author; the phone number is for the main line at Calderon's Sacramento office.

Brian,

You should go back to public policy school and learn how to read a bill. You apparently don’t know how to or are too lazy. If you had bothered to do that, rather than taking the word of others who haven’t read the bill either, you’d have known how inaccurate your misinformed little column is. And accuracy should be important, even for bloggers. If you would like to discuss you can reach me at (916) xxx-xxxx.

Rocky Rushing
Chief of Staff
Senator Ronald S. Calderon
30th Senate District

Perhaps I should go back to school, it was fun after all. But, I think I know how to read a bill pretty darn well. Specifically, I'm pretty comfortable with my analysis of SB 1096.  I called the number in the email and eventually spoke to Mr. Rushing. His principal concern was a quote from the Consumer Federation of California that indicated that SB 1096 would allow pharmacies to sell data to pharmaceutical manufacturers that I quoted from the Chronicle article

“This bill would be a windfall for corporations seeking to track, buy and sell a patient's private medical records,” said Zack Kaldveer, spokesman for the Consumer Federation of California. “This would represent a significant intrusion by pharmaceutical companies into the privacy of patients. By opening this Pandora's box, consumers could wind up receiving mailings designed to look as if they came from the pharmacy yet conflict with what their pharmacist or doctor has recommended. Such a scenario would be a threat to their health.” (SF Chron 5/28/08)

First, he should think about taking this up with the Consumer Fed, but I'll address it as well.  I described the purchasers of this data as “pharmaceutical marketers.” The accuracy of that description is incontrovertible; clearly the people buying this data can be fairly described as marketers. Mr. Rushing was quite keen on saying that the data wasn't going to the manufacturers but rather to these third party data brokers. Now, that might be true in practice, but there is no limitation in the bill as written which would stop the manufacturers from attaining this data to send these letters themselves. 

The nitty gritty and some more details of the conversation over the flip.

Here's the newly crafted language of the relevant law:

Except to the extent expressly authorized by the patient or enrollee or subscriber or as provided by subdivisions (b) and (c), no provider of health care, health care service plan, contractor, or corporation and its subsidiaries and affiliates shall intentionally share, sell, use for marketing, or otherwise use any medical information for any purpose not necessary to provide health care services to the patient. For purposes of this section, a written communication mailed to a patient by a pharmacy shall be deemed to be necessary to provide health care services to the patient and shall not require prior authorization, if all of the following conditions are met:(emphasis added)

There are a bunch of limitations to this broad general exception to the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that you can see if you check out the bill. There's a requirement that the letters stop when there's no refills remaining or the prescription is canceled and a requirement that only the drug prescribed can be referenced in the reminder letter. There are strict confidentiality provisions in proposed Civil Code 56.10(d)(9). But nowhere does the bill stop manufacturers from purchasing the data from pharmacies. In fact, the bill explicitly contemplates that “manufacturers and distributors” will be paying for these letters by requiring a disclosure on the letter. 

Furthermore, I'm not sure having 3rd party data brokers like Adheris (aka Elansys ) having the data is really that much more comforting than having Merck or Eli Lilly having it. In effect, this bill would moot a court case brought against Adheris for doing this already. Retroactive immunity is in vogue these days I suppose. (Note: It's not clear that this would moot the court case, that would have to be resolved by the courts.)

But to the greater issue, that of privacy. Mr. Rushing makes the argument that 49 other states have this rule to allow sales of pharmaceutical records, and why is California the outlier? There is a simple response to this: Californians value their privacy. We have the toughest privacy laws in the nation, thank you, Representative Speier, precisely because we feel that data warehousers shouldn't have access to every morsel of information about us. As my mother always said, just because everybody else is doing it doesn't mean that we should too.  We needn't join that race to the privacy floor that HIPAA provides.  Our privacy laws are, and should be, a model for other states.

That being said, there are health benefits of reminder communications for chronic conditions. However, they do not need to be sponsored. The pharmacy can send out these mailings now as could the prescribing doctor.  In fact, despite whatever arguments the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the California Retailers Association makes on the policy arguments that this is substantially better for public health (Rushing gave me a $150bn figure for nationwide savings if everybody took their meds on schedule), the fact is that the risk involved in the sales of these records outweighs the benefits. We can already provide reminders without sales of medical records financed by manufacturers or distributors. Even the California Medical Association agrees that we needn't travel this risky ground in the name of possible results.
 
I had a very enlightening conversation with Mr. Rushing on other issues as well, whereupon he told me that “Ivory Tower/Ivy League” elites just don't get the district. I will point out that I have been entirely educated by public schools, from kindergarten through both graduate degrees.  Nonetheless, it was all the “elites”(like me, I suppose) fault because everybody loves the Calderons in the district.  Well, at least 300 people more than those who liked Rudy Bermudez in the 2006 primary election. (PDF Results here ) Oh, Mr. Rushing also believes that they deserve their success because of their record of service.  I think that really there is too much there to even parse.

When I asked Mr. Rushing if he happened to know how many individual contributions Sen. Calderon took in last year, or at least a general comparison to how much money he had received from interests opposed to consumer privacy. He was unable to answer, but I am. Sen. Calderon over $20K  from corporations and PACs that would be benefitted by SB 1096. As to the other side of the equation, let's just say that last year Senator Ron Calderon took in no personal contributions, no contributions from privacy groups, etc. But, I suppose that's all chump change compared to what Ron Calderon took in for his “Legal Defense Fund” that he used on his recount in the 2006 election.

I'll agree that the 30th Senate District isn't a bastion of wealth, and that it needs legislators that put in effort and facetime.  It's great that people know the Calderons. But it would be even better if elections were determined not by family relationships, but by the issues and accomplishments that each candidate brings to the table. Mr. Calderon eeked out his election against Rudy Bermudez, a former Assemblyman who fought for ethics reform, and he next faces voters in 2010. I'm sure Senator Calderon will use the opportunity to discuss his achievements. We'll see if allowing pharmacies to sell prescription data is in the stump speech.

Oh, and if Mr. Rushing is interested in a policy school, I highly recommend Berkeley's Goldman School.

Ignore the physical differences between Jackie Speier and Ronald Calderon, the jokes are too easy to make.  These two legislators are basically examples of where the California Democratic Party is coming from and where it is headed. Calderon is the past, Speier is the future.

Current Representative (and 20-year state legislator) Speier is a leader who stands up to corporations. The privacy bill that she passed is the toughest in the nation. And she passed that despite the fierce opposition of financial institutions that the bill regulated, save for the CEO of e-Loan.  Oh, and she pissed off the Republicans in the House. While the privacy bill is her hallmark legislation, she has a record that anybody would be proud of.

Calderon, on the other hand, is part of the “Mod Squad” intent on nuzzling up to the corporate trough. He is fond of the all money is good money philosophy, no matter how many strings are attached. And perhaps he knows something about which Rep. Speier speaks. In this session, he has been pushing SB1096, a bill to allow pharmacies to sell medical records to pharmaceutical marketers. The privacy implications are astounding, and unacceptable.

The legislation would allow pharmaceutical firms to send mailings directly to patients. Supporters of the proposal say the intent is to remind patients to take their medicine and order refills. But consumer privacy advocates are outraged.

“This bill would be a windfall for corporations seeking to track, buy and sell a patient’s private medical records,” said Zack Kaldveer, spokesman for the Consumer Federation of California. “This would represent a significant intrusion by pharmaceutical companies into the privacy of patients.

“By opening this Pandora’s box, consumers could wind up receiving mailings designed to look as if they came from the pharmacy yet conflict with what their pharmacist or doctor has recommended. Such a scenario would be a threat to their health.”

The California Medical Association opposes the legislation, contending that it could jeopardize patient safety and hurt doctor-patient relationships. The mailings are particularly problematic for patients with sensitive medical issues such as mental illnesses, says the association. (SF Chron 5/28/08)

The bill originally failed by a vote of 17-17, with an interesting coalition of Republicans and Democrats opposing the bill. Eventually, Calderon was able to pass the bill out of the Senate last week by adding an opt-out provision. The final Senate vote was 21-16, with the Noes including progressives like Kuehl and Migden and conservatives like McClintock and Battin.

However, opt-out is not strong enough. Heck, even e-mail marketers for retail stores like the gap have the common courtesy to ask before they send us spam. The least California can do is require that pharmacies get affirmative opt-ins to this practice. The privacy of medical records is just too important to monkey around with opt-out rules.

But opt-out wouldn’t really work for the drug marketers, would it? The data would be too sporadic to have any great value.  This bill was essentially written by Adheris, the self-described leader in “prescription drug patient behavior modification.” In other words, they’re trying to sell more drugs. By the way, they don’t have such a great record on these issues:

A primary backer of the bill is Adheris Inc, a subsidiary of a drug marketing company that was sued several years ago under its former name for privacy violations. Adheris is involved in a pending class-action lawsuit in San Diego involving the same issues in the Calderon bill. (SF Chron 5/28/08)

The California Senate made the mistake of letting this stinker slip through. The Assembly cannot do the same. Contact your Assemblymember and tell them to vote NO on SB 1096. I know I’ll be contacting mine.