The New Republican Landscape
Six months after voters sent Republicans in large numbers to Congress and many statehouses, it is possible to see the full landscape of destruction that their policies would cause — much of which has already begun. If it was not clear before, it is obvious now that the party is fully engaged in a project to dismantle the foundations of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to liberate business and the rich from the inconveniences of oversight and taxes.
At first it seemed that only a few freshmen and noisy followers of the Tea Party would support the new extremism. But on Friday, nearly unanimous House Republicans showed just how far their mainstream has been dragged to the right. They approved on strict party lines the most regressive social legislation in many decades, embodied in a blueprint by the budget chairman, Paul Ryan. The vote, from which only four Republicans (and all Democrats) dissented, would have been unimaginable just eight years ago to a Republican Party that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
Mr. Ryan called the vote “our generation’s defining moment,” and indeed, nothing could more clearly define the choice that will face voters next year.
His bill would end the guarantee provided by Medicare and Medicaid to the elderly and the poor, which has been provided by the federal government with society’s clear assent since 1965. The elderly, in particular, would be cut adrift by Mr. Ryan. People now under 55 would be required to pay at least $6,400 more for health care when they qualified for Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Fully two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in budget cuts would come from low-income programs.
In addition to making “entitlement” a dirty word, the Ryan bulldozer would go much further in knocking down government programs to achieve its goals. It would cut food stamps by $127 billion, or 20 percent, over the next 10 years, almost certainly increasing hunger among the poor. It would cut Pell grants for all 9.4 million student recipients next year, removing as many as one million of them from the program altogether. It would remove more than 100,000 low-income children from Head Start, and slash job-training programs for the unemployed desperate to learn new skills.
And it would do all that while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and even expanding them. Regulation of business and the environment would be sharply reduced.
The mania for blindly cutting has also spread to statehouses, many with new Republican governors and legislatures. Several states have cut their unemployment benefits below the standard 26 weeks. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has proposed removing 138,000 people from Medicaid. Many recession-battered states, including some led by Democrats, have been forced to cut other services because Republicans have made it so politically difficult to raise taxes. Education, mental health and juvenile justice funds have been particular targets.
In Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Maine and Florida, Republican governors have used the smokescreen of a poor economy to pursue a long-held conservative goal of destroying public and private unions. This has nothing to do with creating jobs, of course, and it has shocked many blue-collar voters who are suddenly second-guessing their support for Republicans last November. Several states are also adopting Arizona-style anti-immigrant laws.
President Obama, after staying in the shadows too long, is starting to illuminate the serious damage that Republicans are doing. Their vision, he said last week, “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.” Other Democrats are also beginning to stand up and reject these ideas, having been cowed for months by the electoral wave. Their newfound confidence will give voters a clearer view of this bare and pessimistic landscape.
A Victory for Cleaner Air, and the Law
The new settlement between the Environmental Protection Agency, other plaintiffs and the Tennessee Valley Authority resolving clean air violations at 11 T.V.A. coal-fired power plants is long overdue.
As a result, millions of Americans will someday breathe cleaner air. The settlement will also reduce emissions that have brought acid rain damage to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And it emphatically vindicates the Clean Air Act, which is now under assault from House Republicans.
Under the deal, the federally run authority will close 18 of its oldest and dirtiest coal-fired boilers in Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama, spend $3 billion to $5 billion over the next decade to install state-of-the-art pollution controls at about three dozen other units, and invest $350 million in energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.
The E.P.A. estimates that the agreement will reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide by nearly 70 percent, preventing 1,200 to 3,000 premature deaths, 2,000 heart attacks and 21,000 asthma attacks annually. The retirement of older coal-fired plants combined with energy efficiencies will inevitably reduce the company’s emission of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
The T.V.A., founded during the Great Depression, has undeniably played an important role in providing electricity to poor parts of the country. But it has also been a major polluter, and a litigious one as well.
The authority agreed in a settlement three decades ago to reduce emissions and make substantial investments in emissions control systems. But further significant reductions have been hard to come by, partly because of friendly court decisions and partly because the George W. Bush administration declined to use its Clean Air Act authority to clean up older plants.
The settlement is a reminder of the value of that act, and the damage that would be done — to Americans’ health and the environment — if House Republicans succeed in their efforts to weaken it.
Hospitals Shouldn’t Make You Sicker
A vigorous quality-improvement program at more than 150 Veterans Affairs hospitals has achieved remarkable results controlling infections over the past several years. It reduced the spread of one of the most deadly bacterial infections, known as MRSA, by 62 percent in intensive care units and 45 percent in other hospital units. If other hospitals could replicate the effort, thousands of patients might be saved from needless infections acquired after they entered the hospital.
A report on the V.A.’s accomplishment was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The agency used a “bundle” of measures, including screening all patients with nasal swabs and isolating those found infected with MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. All health care workers were urged to take special precautions to prevent spreading germs from those patients and to wash their hands carefully. And the V.A. sought to change its “institutional culture” so that all personnel felt responsible for controlling the bacterium.
The good news comes with a puzzling caveat: a carefully controlled study published in the same issue of the journal found that swabs and special protections like clean gloves and gowns and hand hygiene were “not effective” in reducing the transmission of MRSA or another virulent bacterium in 10 intensive care units at major medical centers. An editorial in the journal found no clear explanation for these drastically different results. The V.A. effort was clearly broader and possibly more rigorous.
The findings emerged just after the Obama administration announced a partnership with employers, health care providers and health plans to stop preventable errors, complications, accidents and infections. The administration plans to invest up to $1 billion to test models of safer care, promote safer practices, and support hospitals and organizations that collaborate to ensure patients are well cared for after they leave the hospital. If successful, this new effort could save 60,000 lives and up to $35 billion in health care costs over the next three years.
So Much for the Referees
Campaigns are delighted at the prospect of a record binge in political spending for next year’s elections. But their lawyers are scratching their heads in wonderment — and potential delight — that the Federal Election Commission has failed to rewrite regulations after the Supreme Court enabled unlimited corporate campaign spending.
Talk about an invitation to corruption, if not chaos, unless the commission suddenly gets its act together.
The commission has deadlocked along party lines on important questions about the supposedly independent nonprofit groups that spent so heavily with secret donors’ money in 2010. They will be even bigger and richer in 2012.
The three commission Democrats want to revise regulations to bring about clear disclosure of donors and to restrict contributions from foreign sources. That makes good sense to us. The three Republicans want only minimal changes to the rules. That would mean that corporations and unions could not only spend with no limits, the voters would never know who was behind the cash.
The commission has become borderline useless, since Republican appointees began blocking pretty much any major decision or action, including punishments for politicians found to have blatantly violated the law.
Because of the complex calendar and process, leading campaign lawyers from both parties predict that the commission is “extremely unlikely” to have updated rules in place by the 2012 elections, according to National Journal. Candidates and strategists who regularly cut corners could find a free-spending nirvana.
President Obama must demand something better. By the end of the month, five of the panel’s six seats will be open for new appointees. Party bosses traditionally name loyalists for the president’s consideration. Mr. Obama should name independent, nonpartisan experts, and the Senate should confirm them. More hacks at the F.E.C. will guarantee more paralysis and even more corruption.
0 comments:
Post a Comment