Month: November 2013

The Contractor State


by digby

Henry Farrell had an interesting post last month over at Crooked Timber about the new book by Colin Crouch called Making Capitalism Fit For Society that’s well worth reading. He starts by highlighting these comments by David Auerbach on the health care reform outsourcing:

The number of players is considerably larger than just front-end architects Development Seed and back-end developers CGI Federal, although the government is saying very little about who’s responsible. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which issued the contracts, is keeping mum, referring reporters to the labyrinthine USASpending.gov for information about contractors. … By digging through GAO reports, however, I’ve picked out a handful of key players. One is Booz Allen … Despite getting $6 million for “Exchange IT integration support,” they now claim that they “did no IT work themselves.” Then there’s CGI Federal, of course, who got the largest set of contracts, worth $88 million, for “FFE information technology and healthcare.gov,” as well as doing nine state exchanges. Their spokesperson’s statement is a model of buck-passing … Quality Software Solutions Inc …[have] been doing health care IT since 1997, and got $55 million for healthcare.gov’s data hub in contracts finalized in January 2012. But then UnitedHealth Group purchased QSSI in September 2012, raising eyebrows about conflicts of interest.

… Development Seed President Eric Gundersen oversaw the part of healthcare.gov that did survive last week: the static front-end Web pages that had nothing to do with the hub. Development Seed was only able to do the work after being hired by contractor Aquilent, who navigated the bureaucracy of government procurement. “If I were to bid on the whole project,” Gundersen told me, “I would need more lawyers and more proposal writers than actual engineers to build the project. Why would I make a company like that?” These convolutions are exactly what prevented the brilliant techies of Obama’s re-election campaign from being involved with the development of healthcare.gov. To get the opportunity to work on arguably the most pivotal website launch in American history, a smart young programmer would have to work for a company mired in bureaucracy and procurement regulations, with a website that looks like it’s from 10 years ago. So much for the efficiency of privatization.

I had no idea. If you want complexity, that’s one good way to get it.

Farrell makes this connection with Crouch’s book

Otherwise put, it’s a good example of Crouch’s critique of neo-liberal efforts to ‘shrink’ government – that in practice it is less about free markets than the handing over of government functions to well connected businesses.

Outsourcing is … justified on the grounds that private firms bring new expertise, but an examination of the expertise base of the main private contractors shows that the same firms keep appearing in different sectors … The expertise of these corporations, their core business, lies in knowing how to win government contracts, not in the substantive knowledge of the services they provide. … This explains how and why they extend across such a sprawl of activities, the only link among which is the government contract-winning process. Typically, these firms will have former politicians and senior civil servants on their boards of directors, and will often be generous funders of political parties. This, too is part of their core business. It is very difficult to see how ultimate service users gain anything from this kind of managed competition.

This is true of our vaunted, high tech surveillance sector as well.

Farrell observes the parallels between this system and feudalism and what he calls “Old Corruption” and it’s worth reading the remainder of his post for that discussion.

To me, it seems obvious that the “contractor state” cannot be defended on democratic or capitalistic grounds. It certainly shows that simply outsourcing various necessary functions inevitably leads to corruption — as any 7th grader should be able to predict.  That this concept of “reinventing government” was pushed by certain New Democrats on the basis of gibberish makes it even more astonishing that it’s taken so long to be exposed for what it is: patronage for rich (mostly) white guys who all know each other. How sad that health care reform had to be the ultimate guinea pig.

The good news is that we didn’t let these incompetent middle men take over Social Security and Medicare. Yet.

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The ACA needs healthy people in the exchange not just young people

by digby

A good point that’s often overlooked in all this Obamacare discussion is this from Igor Volksy in his discussion of the President’s announcement:

Responding to criticism that the proposal could keep younger and healthier applicants in their current plans and out of the exchanges — thus increasing premiums in the law’s marketplaces — the officials argued that individuals have traditionally remained in the individuals market for only a short period of time and claimed that it contains older individuals.

A senior administration official pointed to data showing that 40 percent of beneficiaries in the individual market are between the ages of 45 and 64 and that just a quarter or less are under the age of 26. The administration also plans to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the law’s “risk adjustment” tools, which are designed to spread risk among health care insurers and stabilize the health care market in the first two years of reform.

But health policy experts argue that churn in the individual market will dissipate with the implementation of the individual mandate and claim that an older demographic does not necessarily translate into sicker applicants. “It again depends on the health status not as much on age, if older and sicker go to the exchanges and older and healthier stay outside,” premiums in the exchanges will eventually increase, Park said.

That’s right. It’s not just about getting younger people into the exchanges. It’s about getting healthy people into the exchanges. There are a lot of us healthy older people in the individual market who are paying way too much for lousy plans and we are very likely to want to get a better deal if we can. (And, by the way, we are paying a lot more for those plans than the youngsters in the first place so the “extra money” we bring into the system due to our advanced age may be just as important to the success of the exchanges as the younger people.)

Young people think they’re immortal. I certainly did. So, they are probably the last people who will be dragged kicking and screaming to buy health insurance if they don’t already have it. Healthy older people, on the other hand, know that something could go wrong at any time and we are not going to go without insurance unless it’s absolutely impossible for us to get it. We aren’t sick and we don’t “overuse” the system. We just need the peace of mind that it will be there if we need it. We will figure out those exchanges and we will find a better deal.

If it were up to me I’d buy into Medicare right now. But Joe Lieberman was mad at the hippies so that didn’t happen. Therefore, I’ll do the best I can, which at this point is going on the exchange and signing up for a more comprehensive plan that I have right now for the same money I’ve been paying. I’m one of the luckier ones. Some of my friends are going to be paying more. But in the end it’s people like us, older healthy people, who will join up right after the unfortunate sick people who’ve been denied insurance up until now. And that will go a long way toward stabilizing the exchanges and getting this off the ground, regardless of when the youngsters who think they are going to live forever can be coerced into jumping into the pool.

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by digby

The following numbers reflect how long most people are in the private insurance market:

Less than 6 months:    48.2 percent
6-12 months:               16.3 percent
13-18 months:             13.7 percent
19-24 months:               4.8 percent
More than 24 months:   17  percent

That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? Of the already small percentage of Americans who aren’t covered by Medicare, the VA or their employer’s insurance policy, only half of them have to buy private insurance for more than 6 months. The turnover in that market is already very high so “keeping your policy if you like it” isn’t even relevant for most people. Most are only dealing with this market temporarily anyway.

Honestly, I understand why people are freaking out. You get one of these letters, as I have, and the numbers are scary. Unless you understand this new system you’re going to be unnerved to say the least — especially if you can’t get the information you need from the web-site to see what the new plans are going to cost. But in my view, most people will eventually figure out what they need to do simply because the insurance bill is such a big one, even if you only have to use it for a short time.

I don’t happen to think that the President’s proposal to allow insurance companies to extend the shit plans for a year is the end of the world.  They already “grandfathered” shit plans from before 2010 so it’s not a huge deal to do the same thing for the bad plans the insurance companies wrote between then and now. Most people aren’t going to keep paying for crappy coverage once they see they can do better. The problem now is that they have no way of seeing that and don’t have a clear understanding of how the plan works. With a little time, they will be able to do that.

And keep in mind that nearly 50% of the people who are buying insurance on the private market are only doing it temporarily anyway. When new people come into the market they will simply go to the (hopefully working) exchange website and buy new policies without any of these concerns about these cancellations.

The problems with the rising premiums for certain people were anticipated by some of us. (And anyone who’s ever been through an IT project in a corporation know that they never, ever, ever work right at first.) And we all know that Obamacare is, at best,  a work in progress that is going to need big fixes for a long time to come. Progressives hope that we will eventually have public options and single payer “fixes.”   Changes are a necessary part of it and I don’t see any good reason not to just say that upfront. And anyway, pretending that it’s perfect when it clearly is not is not going to be politically sustainable.

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The War of the Worlds, Part XXV


by digby

Run for your lives !!!!

Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury received a fair trial when he was convicted of four terror-related charges and three charges of lying to authorities, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found. Mehanna was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in federal prison, which the court also upheld.

“Terrorism is the modern-day equivalent of the bubonic plague: It is an existential threat,” the court said, adding that the case required the trial court “to patrol a fine line between national security concerns and forbidden encroachments on constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and association.”

What are the terrorists going to do, invade us on millions of life rafts? Recruit the Pentagon to blow up the US Congress and the president? Are they going to march into Washington and take over the government at gun point or are they going to run for office and win democratically? Because I can’t see any way in hell that “terrorism” is an existential threat unless they are able to somehow take over our government and turn the US into a Caliphate, something which some fundamentalists may dream of in their messianic fever but which has the same chance of actually happening as an invasion from the Moon.

And here’s what the bubonic plague did to Europe, via Wikipedia:

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1348–50 CE. Although there were several competing theories as to the etiology of the Black Death, analysis of DNA from victims in northern and southern Europe published in 2010 and 2011 indicates that the pathogen responsible was the Yersinia pestis bacterium, probably causing several forms of plague.

The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching the Crimea by 1346. From there, it was most likely carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe’s total population. All in all, the plague reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.

Al Qaeda killed 3000 people on 9/11 and hundreds more in other terrorist attacks around the world.

What sophistry from a federal appeals court. What total unadulterated bullshit.

Honestly, until I heard Lara Logan going on like a lunatic about the “dark forces” who want to take us back centuries and now this, I had thought we had evolved past the looney tunes, panic artist nonsense of the post 9/11 period. (What’s Victor Davis Hanson been up to lately anyway?)

Also too: We might just want to be a little bit more skeptical of claims that terrorism is the modern equivalent of the bubonic plague and is going to kill us all in our beds and a little bit less skeptical of the real modern equivalent of the bubonic plague — an actual plague that will kill us all in our beds. 

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They’re doing it again

by digby

And why not?  It worked last time:

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. These Republicans are manipulating seniors with outright lies to get them to vote like they did in 2010. And it will probably work. After all Democrats had great success with that strategy for years. The difference being that the Republicans they charged with wanting to destroy Medicare really wanted to destroy Medicare.  Mark Pryor, not so much.

But hey, why quibble about the truth? They haven’t bothered with it so far.

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Shanna Bellows is a progressive civil libertarian. (There are lots of us!)

by digby

Imagine what we could do if we had more real, progressive civil libertarians in the US Senate. Here’s one for you to support.  It’s Shenna Bellows and she’s running in Maine against the bucket of lukewarm water known as Susan Collins. She wrote this for Blue America:

I may be the first ACLU leader in history to run for the United States Senate, but nothing less than our democracy is at stake. Politicians in Washington have trampled on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They have created a constitutional crisis. NSA spying is out of control, threatening our individual freedoms and international relations.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, on which my opponent, Susan Collins, sits, is reportedly holding closed-door hearings on NSA reform legislation. The secrecy of the proceedings is part of the problem. It is unacceptable for Congress to scold the White House in public but codify NSA spying in secret. The Senate should open its work to the public and enact meaningful NSA reforms.

My work in Maine provides a model for moving forward. I made my decision to run for United States Senate when I was working on two groundbreaking privacy laws this spring to require law enforcement to get a warrant before accessing cellphone communications including location data, text messages and voice mails. I organized a broad coalition of Democrats, Republicans, Independents and Greens. We did not agree on very much at all except the fundamental importance of our constitutional freedoms and the dangers posed by government intrusion into our personal lives. The opposition was intense, bipartisan and included some of my close friends, but we persevered. Maine was one of only two states in the country to protect against cell phone tracking. The law also survived a veto by Governor Paul LePage on a rare veto override vote.

Our work in Maine with Republicans and Democrats alike to advance strong privacy principles should serve as a model for the nation. We demonstrated that it’s not necessary to compromise our core principles in order to advance meaningful reform. A shared commitment to protecting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights transcends partisan politics.

The USA Freedom Act introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) is an important first step in restoring checks and balances. We can and should do more in the months to come. We need a Church-style investigation of the nature and extent of surveillance in America and comprehensive privacy legislation to bring our laws up to date. We need to repeal not just Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, but also other provisions like the “sneak and peek” searches in Section 213. We need to strengthen protections for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. We need to reduce government secrecy.

I began my career at the ACLU ten years ago as a “Safe and Free Organizer” organizing a nationwide resolutions campaign against the Patriot Act. I learned about the power of broad coalitions then when I was working with diverse groups like the American Library Association and Gun Owners of America. Following the launch of my campaign for the United States Senate one week ago, libertarians and progressives alike are voicing support for my record and my values.

Speaking out against the NSA is the popular thing to do this week, especially in light of the revelations that the NSA has been listening in on the private calls of foreign leaders. We have been down the road of tough rhetoric and weak action before unfortunately. As head of the ACLU of Maine, I led a 2006 campaign to investigate telecommunications companies’ involvement in federal surveillance of Mainers’ telephone calls. Unfortunately, Congress responded by passing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which included immunity for the telecommunications companies and prohibited state-level investigations from moving forward.

I hope that Congress will not repeat the mistakes of 2008 in responding to calls for change by codifying NSA spying. We certainly need to stop listening in on the phone calls of allies like Angela Merkel, and we need to stop spying on millions of Americans. To address the international relations crisis of the moment without looking at the larger issue of surveillance is unacceptable. Minor changes to the law, passed behind closed doors, will not go far enough to restore our constitutional freedoms.

My work against the Patriot Act in Washington and my advocacy for privacy in Maine are just two examples of my leadership. Under my leadership, Maine was the first state to reject REAL ID in 2007. I co-chaired a successful statewide voting rights ballot measure to restore same day voter registration when the Republicans took it away in 2011. I served on the executive committee of the Maine freedom to marry campaign for seven years before we won on the ballot in 2012.

At the ACLU, I learned the importance of standing up for what you believe in the face of powerful opponents. I am a carpenter’s daughter from a small town in Maine. Carpenter’s daughters don’t usually run for the United States Senate, which is why we have a Congress of millionaires instead of a Congress of working people. But our democracy is too important for good people to stay on the sidelines. 

As Howie says:

We haven’t been this excited about a Senate candidate since, well, Elizabeth Warren. If you’d like more in the Senate like her, please consider giving what you can to Shenna Bellows’ campaign today.

We need more progressive civil libertarians in the US Senate.

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Privatizing Lincoln’s grave

by David Atkins

If this isn’t symbolic of what’s wrong with America these days, I don’t know what is:

StoneMor Partners, a Pennsylvania based cemetery company, has been quietly talking with Springfield Mayor Mike Houston and other top city officials about taking over management of Oak Ridge Cemetery.
Calling StoneMor “a good company,” Houston acknowledged Tuesday that he has spoken with no other firms about taking over cemetery operations. He has said that the city plans to issue a request for proposals aimed at soliciting bids to privatize Abraham Lincoln’s final resting place. The city council must approve any management deal.

StoneMor, which runs 277 cemeteries and 90 funeral homes in 28 states and Puerto Rico, is a publicly traded firm known for a relatively stable stock price and high dividends. Wall Street, however, is not entirely enthralled and considers the company’s debt less than investment grade.
Moody’s Investors Service last May attached a B3 rating to $175 million in bonds issued by StoneMor, meaning that analysts considered the company a high-risk, speculative investment. The issue, Moody’s said, was a high level of debt. The rating issued last spring was just one notch above junk-bond status.

The company that went public in 2004 has had both success and failures in taking over cemeteries in other states.

Unreal. When they write the dismayed histories of our little Gilded Age today, this will make a nice vignette.

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Logan got more than the DaviesMorgan story wrong

by digby

Did Lara Logan have an agenda? Readers of this blog know that I think she does.  (I also believe she is a mediocre journalist with an excessively dramatic worldview that makes her reporting very suspect.) The following comments alone, made just a month after the Benghazi attack, leave little doubt in my mind about where she’s coming from:

And now McClatchey has helpfully dug into the rest of the 60 Minutes Benghazi story (aside from their hilariously unbelievable source) and have found a whole lot of misleading information:

Logan’s mea culpa said nothing about other weaknesses in the report that a line-by-line review of the broadcast’s transcript shows. McClatchy obtained the transcript from LexisNexis, a legal research service.

The report repeatedly referred to al Qaida as solely responsible for the attack on the compound, and made no mention of Ansar al Shariah, the Islamic extremist group that controls and provides much of the security in restive Benghazi and that has long been suspected in the attack. While the two organizations have worked together in Libya, experts said they have different aims – al Qaida has global objectives while Ansar al Shariah is focused on turning Libya into an Islamic state.

It is an important distinction, experts on those groups said. Additionally, al Qaida’s role, if any, in the attack has not been determined, and Logan’s narration offered no source for her repeated assertion that it had been…

Logan claimed that “it’s now well established that the Americans were attacked by al Qaida in a well-planned assault.” But al Qaida has never claimed responsibility for the attack, and the FBI, which is leading the U.S. investigation, has never named al Qaida as the sole perpetrator. Rather it is believed a number of groups were part of the assault, including members and supporters of al Qaida and Ansar al Shariah as well as attackers angered by a video made by an American that insulted Prophet Muhammad. The video spurred angry protests outside Cairo hours beforehand.

That clip above shows that she “knew” it was al-Qaeda just a month after the attacks. And it appears that she never questioned her assumption.

Another questionable assertion in the “60 Minutes” report was Logan’s unsourced reference to the Benghazi Medical Center as “under the control of al Qaida terrorists,” an assertion that McClatchy correspondents on the ground at the time and subsequent reporting in Benghazi indicates is untrue.

Around midnight, after the attack on the diplomatic compound, looters who descended on the site discovered Stevens in a safe room and took him to the medical center, where a doctor tried to revive him for 45 minutes before pronouncing him dead.

In the “60 Minutes” report, Davies, the discredited security contractor, claimed to have snuck into the hospital, where he saw Stevens, even though the hospital was “under the control of al Qaida terrorists.”

On the night of the attack, the medical center, whose compound includes several building in addition to the relatively modern, multi-story hospital itself, was being guarded by Ansar al Shariah. Libyans residents McClatchy spoke to said the group’s guards never stopped patients from entering but were there primarily to protect the nurses and doctors inside.

The Libyan Herald, an English language news outlet, reported just three days before the diplomatic compound was attacked that the Libyan health minister and the French Ambassador to Libya, Antoine Sivan, had visited the facility to break ground on an expansion. Had the hospital been under al Qaida control, it is unlikely doctors could have spent nearly an hour trying save Stevens’ life or that the health minister of the government it seeks to undo would have been allowed to enter the hospital.

Read more here. It goes on. And on.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that Logan has very strong beliefs about the al-Qaeda threat and believes she’s doing something important. But being an advocacy journalist, as she obviously is, (although undeclared and misrepresented as “objective” by 60 Minutes) does not relieve you of an obligation to get the facts straight and tell the whole truth. This piece clearly failed to do that on almost every level.

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The insidious side-effect of surveillance

by digby

Who needs jackboots?

In the human rights and free expression communities, it is a widely shared assumption that the explosive growth and proliferating uses of surveillance technologies must be harmful—to intellectual freedom, to creativity, and to social discourse. But how exactly do we know, and how can we demonstrate, that pervasive surveillance is harming freedom of expression and creative freedom?

In October 2013, PEN partnered with independent researchers at the FDR Group to conduct a survey of over 520 American writers to better understand the specific ways in which awareness of far-reaching surveillance programs influences writers’ thinking, research, and writing. The results of this survey—the beginning of a broader investigation into the harms of surveillance—substantiate PEN’s concerns: writers are not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship as a result.

I have no money and no staff of lawyers so it’s certainly crossed my mind a time or two…

Check out the full report at the link.

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“It’s yer muneeee!”

by digby

Federal deficit smaller than expected $92B in Oct. $652B in past 12 mths, ~4% GDP. FY ’16 budget will be ~balanced. pic.twitter.com/3Sod5UtvQA
— Robert Stein (@BobStein_FT) November 13, 2013

If the budget in FY 2016 is balanced, look for GOP to start talking about tax cuts. It certainly won’t be about reversing the draconian cuts of the past few years.

Here’s a little blast from the past.

GEORGE W. BUSH (November 3, 2000): 

Here’s what we believe. We don’t believe the surplus is the government’s money. We know the surplus is the people’s money. And we’re going to send some of that money back to the people who pay the bills.

(APPLAUSE)

It’s your money. It’s not the government’s money.

People all the time — the punditry says, “Well, the people don’t seem to want tax relief.” And I said, “But you missed the facts.” Today in America, people pay more in federal, state and local taxes than they do in food and clothing and housing. I want you to think about that.

The average family is working harder and longer hours and paying more in taxes than on the basic necessities to live. This isn’t right, folks.

We need to send some of your money back to the people who pay the bills. We ought to provide tax relief for everybody who pays taxes in America.”

As long as the right sets the terms of the economic debate it will always be about austerity and tax cuts. That’s how they roll:

Check out the new normal in Britain if you don’t believe me:

The government is to forge a “leaner, more efficient state” on a permanent basis, David Cameron has said as he signalled he had no intention of resuming spending once the structural deficit has been eliminated, a clear change to claims made after the last general election .

In a change of tack from saying in 2010 that he was imposing cuts out of necessity, rather than from “some ideological zeal”, the prime minister told the Lord Mayor’s banquet that the government has shown in the last three years that better services can be delivered with lower spending.

Cameron said that the government would press ahead with tackling the deficit after cutting it by a third. But he made clear that his party intended to go further.

“We are sticking to the task. But that doesn’t just mean making difficult decisions on public spending. It also means something more profound. It means building a leaner, more efficient state. We need to do more with less. Not just now, but permanently.”

The PM cited Michael Gove’s work in cutting administrative staff at the education department by 40% while 3,000 free schools and academies have been established. He also said the government has cut 23,000 administrative posts from the NHS while employing 5,000 more doctors.

He said: “So you can have a leaner, more efficient, more affordable state that actually delivers better results for the taxpayer.”

The remarks by the PM contrasted with his claim after the 2010 election. In his New Year’s message for 2011, issued on 31 December 2010, he said: “I didn’t come into politics to make cuts. Neither did Nick Clegg. But in the end politics is about national interest, not personal political agendas.

“We’re tackling the deficit because we have to – not out of some ideological zeal. This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country’s problems, not by ideology.”

He lied, of course.

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