Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

Schumer Breaks Ranks on Obamacare

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Obamacare Will Cost 2.9 Million or More Jobs a Year

Obamacare Facts & Figures

  • The law cuts an estimated $716 billion from Medicare over ten years. However, these “savings” are not set aside to preserve Medicare’s future, instead they are used to fund new spending created by the law.
  • Nearly one-third of all seniors rely on Medicare Advantage, the private health care option in Medicare. Despite the program’s growing enrollment and beneficiary satisfaction, Obamacare makes deep cuts to the program that jeopardize its viability in coming years.
  • In addition to payment cuts, Obamacare imposes new taxes on drug companies and medical device makers, and new regulations that will make health care more costly for seniors.

So, what is the real reason that Senator Chuck Schumer now opposes Obamacare?

Chuck Schumer Flip-Flops on the Politics of Obamacare

2:20 PM, Nov 25, 2014 • By JOHN MCCORMACK

Chuck Schumer, the high-ranking Democratic senator from New York, gave a speech today at the National Press Club in which he said that it “made no political sense” for Democrats to focus on passing the Affordable Care Act. The New York Times reports:

“Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” Mr. Schumer said, according to his prepared remarks. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – health care reform.”

Mr. Schumer’s calculus could seem coldly political. He points out that only a third of the uninsured population is even registered to vote. “To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense,” he said. “So when Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought ‘the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me.’”

Back when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, Schumer was singing a different tune. The weekend after the law was enacted, Schumer claimed on Meet the Press that it “really does deliver for the middle class” and confidently predicted that by November 2010 “those who voted for health care will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”

“I think as people learn about the bill, and now that the bill is enacted, it’s going to become more and more popular,” Schumer said. “The lies that have been spread, they vanish because you see what’s in the bill. We had ‘death panels’ in the summer. People are going to see there are no death panels. ‘Illegal immigrants are going to get health care,” it’s clear that’s not true in the bill. And the number one lie that bothers people is ‘You’ll lose your insurance if you have it now and you’re pretty happy with it.'”

Of course, Democrats were blown out in 2010 after the bill passed and again in 2014 after it was implemented and millions of Americans learned that what Schumer called “the number one lie that bothers people” was actually true.

When Schumer was asked during his 2010 Meet the Press appearance about polling that showed the middle-class opposed the Affordable Care Act, he replied:

Well, it really does deliver for the middle class. But, as I said, there are lots of, lots of misinformation. That firefighter in Rockville Centre, and you could repeat that with tens of millions of families, are worried. People ask themselves, particularly at a time of recession, “How is it going to affect me?” They’ve been told by special interests that are against the bill that they will lose their coverage. People who have coverage now, whether through an employer or Medicare, will keep it and it will get better, actually, because the waste and the duplication will, will be cut back greatly. They’ll keep it longer, they’ll keep it better, they’ll pay less. So this is a bill aimed at the middle class. And my point being, if you look at a snapshot poll today, some of them show–there was one that was 49-40 in favor of health care, this one’s against it. But I would predict to you, and I feel very, very strongly about this and firmly about this, that as people learn what’s actually in the bill, that six months from now, by election time, this is going to be a plus because the parade of horribles, particularly the worry that the average middle-class person has that this is going to affect them negatively.

That Schumer, arguably the Democrats’ top political strategist in Congress, would now publicly admit that the politics of Obamacare has been terrible for Democrats is remarkable. It should send chills down the spines of the law’s supporters.

Iran ‘Richer’ Today Due to John Kerry

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The legacy of the Obama administration will not be Obamacare, it will not be amnesty, it will be eliminating America’s enemies and Iran has become the closest ally to the U.S. State Department under the edict of the White House with John Kerry leading the charge.

Obama wrote a letter to the Mullahs back in 2008 as he became the presidential nominee. The letters to the Ayatollahs continued and open talks have continued such that John Kerry led the charge to move the needle to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The expiration date for the agreement was today and they failed. The talks have now officially been extended another 7 months.

Iran is a state sponsor of terror and has been an avowed enemy of the United States going back to the late 70’s but John Kerry has dismissed all the history. A deal with Iran or no deal with Iran on their nuclear weapons program is bad news either way….the point is the program needs to be destroyed, there is and never was a peaceful nuclear program.

Each day that passes, Iran’s centrifuges continue to spin putting a nuclear warhead only months away. Iran does have everything to hide and to lie about such that Iran refuses the International Atomic Energy Agency access for inspections which has been agreed to and performed in the past and often.

There is a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and not only is Israel in jeopardy with its virtual existence but Saudi Arabia is also.

The story gets worse however as additional sanctions against Iran have been lifted. Some early sanctions were lifted just to get Iran to the negotiation table, and indeed since many months have passed with no resolution, additional sanctions were lifted by John Kerry to keep Iran at the table for the next 7 months.

Iran’s economy has been slipping from stability for a very long time due to effective sanctions, but their economy has received huge positive money shots due to lifted sanctions but now it gets better for them as additional sanctions will provide Iran with an economic income of seized monies up to $700 million a month. Iran has been rewarded for bad behavior and for stonewalling talks, hence John Kerry is either being a naïve dupe or a willing participant in allowing Iran’s to thrive.

Now the question is what will occur during the 7 months of extended talks? Could Saudi Arabia get involved to stop the enrichment? Will Israel be drafting war plans? Will John Kerry continue on a fool’s errand during the next 7 months to keep the talks viable and will they ultimately fail then?

Congress has been purposely left out of the loop of the talks yet they are in fact aware of some conditions. This is a time they will use once the 114th Congress is seated in January to stop the madness, pass additional irrevocable sanctions and the division in Congress and the State Department will continue.

All sides have been working from a thin ‘framework‘ such that Iran had little to do for compliance and now Iran is asking for a secondary framework to be developed.

It is going to be difficult in coming months due to continued military sequestration, the expanding footprint in Afghanistan, the expanding footprint in Iraq, a new Congress and then immigration. 2015 will not start off well.

Question is who is gonna notice and be proactive?

 

 

Lerner’s Emails Are Here!

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After so much obstruction, so much testimony and delay, it has finally come to light that there is something called ‘disaster recovery tapes’ which for the most part every large entity has to guard against profound document loss. The IRS was no different yet no one seemed to be forthcoming with redundant systems.

Now since the mid-terms are over and scandals continue to mount, we have our work to do to go through documents to determine the names and connections of those in the Obama administration that have been covertly destroying the country.

30,000 missing emails from IRS’ Lerner recovered

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system.

“They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.

Committees in the House and Senate are seeking the emails, which they believe could show Lerner was working in concert with Obama administration officials to target conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status before the 2012 presidential election.

The missing emails extend from 2009 to 2011, a period when Lerner headed the IRS’s exempt-organizations division. The emails were lost when Lerner’s computer crashed, IRS officials said earlier this year.

In June, IRS Administrator John Koskinen told Congress the emails were probably lost for good because the disaster recovery tape holds onto the data for only six months. He said even if the IRS had sought the emails within the six-month period, it would have been a complicated and difficult process to produce them from the tapes.

The IRS also lost the emails of several other employees who worked under Lerner during that period.

Lerner, who retired from the IRS, has refused to be questioned by Congress.

She provided a statement at a March hearing, but then clammed up, following the advice of her lawyer to avoid self-incrimination.

The House, led by Republicans, voted in May to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress.

Congressional aides said officials from the inspector general’s office said it could take weeks to get the recovered emails off the tape before sending them to lawmakers in Capitol Hill.

In all, investigators from the inspector general’s office combed through 744 disaster recovery tapes. They are not finished looking.

There are 250 million emails ion the tapes that will be reviewed. Officials said it is likely they will find missing emails from other IRS officials who worked under Lerner and who said they suffered computer crashes.

Investigators said the emails could include some overlapping information because it is not clear how many of them are duplicates or were already produced by Lerner to the congressional committees.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee he chairs will be one of the committees that will examine the emails.

“Though it is unclear whether TIGTA has found all of the missing Lois Lerner e-mails, there may be significant information in this discovery,” Issa told the Examiner. “The Oversight Committee will be looking for information about her mindset and who she was communicating with outside the IRS during a critical period of time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups. This discovery also underscores the lack of cooperation Congress has received from the IRS. The agency first failed to disclose the loss to Congress and then tried to declare Lerner’s e-mails gone and lost forever. Once again it appears the IRS hasn’t been straight with Congress and the American people.”

 

Boehner Files Lawsuit Against Obama Today

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After the immigration speech Barack Obama delivered on November 20, John Boehner today filed the House lawsuit against Treasury and Health and Human Services.

The full 38 page complaint is listed here.

The points of the lawsuit are:

THE BASICS OF THE HOUSE LITIGATION

  • The president’s unilateral actions on the health care law’s employer mandate in 2013 and 2014 will likely be the focus of the litigation brought by the House.  There are many examples of executive overreach by the president, but his actions on the health care law are arguably the ones that give the House the best chance of success in the courts.
  • The litigation will focus solely on the president’s unilateral changes to the health care law because that’s how the suit must be structured in order to maximize the House’s chances of being granted standing by the court.  Basing the litigation on a laundry list of grievances against the president would make standing more difficult.
  • In the case of the health care law’s employer mandate, the president twice changed the law without going through Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it.  He legislated without the Legislative Branch.  The Constitution doesn’t give presidents the power to do that.  No president should have such authority.  That’s what the House litigation will argue.

Republicans call Obama executive actions ‘damaging to presidency,’ file lawsuit over Obamacare

By Paul Kane

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) launched a double-barreled response to President Obama’s recent executive actions on Friday, announcing a House lawsuit over unilateral changes to Obamacare and vowing to counter Obama’s move to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation with additional legislative action.

He warned that the executive action on immigration was “damaging the presidency” and that Congress will not let it stand without a fight.

“Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and rewrite federal law on his own without a vote of Congress. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work,” Boehner said.

The lawsuit, filed Friday against the Health and Human Services (HHS) and Treasury secretaries, challenges two of Obama’s executive actions: that his administration “unlawfully waived the employer mandate” and illegally transferred funds to insurance companies.

Obama’s executive actions twice delaying the employer mandate “directly contradict the clear and plain language of the health care law,” Boehner said in a statement.

Boehner also said that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration will pay $3 billion to insurance companies this fiscal year, and will make payments of $175 billion over the next 10 years under an HHS-based cost-sharing program, even though Congress has never appropriated funds for the program.

Boehner declined to spell out how Republicans would counter the immigration executive actions, which extend protections to roughly 4 million undocumented parents of legal U.S. citizens and young immigrants brought here illegally when they were children.

“We’re working with our members and looking at the options available to us, but I will say to you the House will, in fact, act,” Boehner told reporters Friday morning, in the first televised Republican rebuttal to Obama’s prime-time address Thursday night.

He dodged a question about the assertion by one of his own leadership team members, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), that there was little Congress could do to restrict funding for the new program. Rogers and his staff said Thursday that funding for the implementation of the new policy does not come from the annual spending bills approved by Congress but instead comes from border fees, placing it outside the reach of congressional Republicans.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the leading opponent of the president’s action, told reporters Thursday that he would support attaching a policy rider onto the government funding bills that simply forbid the federal workforce from implementing the new rules on immigration. Sessions is leading the effort to keep government funding to a short leash into the new year, when Republicans take over the Senate and control both chambers of Congress, making it easier to get clear majorities for his preferred line of attack.

Such a move would require a 60-vote super-majority in the Senate, and it would almost certainly draw a veto from Obama, which, critics say, would lead to a possible shutdown of some federal agencies.

Boehner deflected those questions and instead blamed Obama for issuing too many executive orders to modify the controversial new health law that took effect over the last year, which left his rank-and-file Republicans unwilling to trust the president and refusing to even consider a broad rewrite of immigration laws.

“He created an environment where the members could not trust him, and trying to find a way to work together was virtually impossible, and I had warned the president over and over that his actions were making it impossible for me to do what he wanted me to do,” the speaker said, explaining his inability to even consider smaller pieces of the 2013 Senate-approved legislation that revamped border and immigration laws.

“We have a broken immigration system, and the American people expect us to work together to fix it, and we ought to do it through the democratic process,” he said.

In his prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House, Obama blamed Republicans for forcing his hand by refusing to approve immigration reform and told them, “Pass a bill.”

Conservatives inside and outside Congress want to use the budget process as a battleground to wage war against Obama and his immigration program. The proposed gambit raises the specter of another government shutdown, akin to the one that damaged Republicans last year.

In a floor speech Thursday, soon-to-be Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested that his preference would be for Republicans to avoid becoming mired in a fiscal clash during the lame-duck session, shortly before the GOP takes control of the Senate in January.

Many conservative lawmakers are shrugging off those pleas, however. Furious with the president, they are planning a series of immediate and hard-line actions that could have sweeping consequences. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said Wednesday that Obama’s executive action should be met with a refusal to vote on any more of his nominees, and on Thursday, he compared the action with the ancient Catiline conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Roman Republic.

Sessions (R-Ala.), likely the next chairman of the budget committee, has advocated for a series of stopgap spending bills with the intent of pressuring the president to relent. Sessions is the featured speaker at a Heritage Foundation event Friday morning in response to Obama’s moves.

And Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — one of the loudest voices on the right — has hinted at bringing up impeachment measures. “We have constitutional authority to do a string of things. [Impeachment] would be the very last option, but I would not rule it out,” King said Thursday on CNN.

Robert A. Costa contributed to this report.

 

Why Keystone XL Failed

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The Keystone XL Pipeline vote passed by the House of Representatives failed in the Senate.

S.2280
Latest Title: A bill to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Sponsor: Sen Hoeven, John [ND] (introduced 5/1/2014)      Cosponsors (55)
Related Bills: H.R.5682, S.2314, S.2554
Latest Major Action: 11/18/2014 Failed of passage/not agreed to in Senate. Status: Under the order of 11/12/14, not having achieved 60 votes in the affirmative, failed of passage in Senate by Yea-Nay Vote. 59 – 41. Record Vote Number: 280.

The full text of the bill is here. To find out which Democratic Senators voted no, click here.

We all want the Keystone XL pipeline for the sake of jobs even though they may be temporary and some interesting people will make lots of money, however it should also be noted that this oil will not be used domestically. It is also important to use the Keystone legislation to see the behind the curtains machinations and money that drives law from many lobby groups, corporations and special interest.

Senate Keystone “Yea” Votes Took In Six Times More Oil & Gas Money Than Opponents

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Senate Democrats successfully blocked a bill Tuesday that would have approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The controversial measure fell one vote shy of overcoming a filibuster, with 59 senators supporting it and 41 opposing. The vote followed the bill’s approval in the House by a much wider margin, with 252 lawmakers voting to advance the pipeline.

The vote largely fell along party lines. All Senate Republicans supported construction of the pipeline but they were joined by 14 Democrats, including three of the four Democrat incumbents who lost their re-election bids earlier this month. For Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the bill’s main sponsor, the vote was considered an important test of her effectiveness in advance of a Dec. 6 runoff that will determine whether she keeps her seat. In the House, 31 Democrats crossed the aisle to side with the Republican majority.

SVB

Construction of the pipeline has been decried by environmental groups and championed by heavyweights in the oil and gas industry. Both of these interests are no strangers to money in politics. The oil and gas industry has long been a generous donor to federal candidates and committees — and increased its donations in 2014 over 2010. In the environmental community, where the League of Conservation Voters has long been the lead player on this front, environmental activist Tom Steyer is 2014′s top overall donor.

Oil and Gas

The 59 senators who voted for the pipeline have received, on average, significantly more money from the oil and gas industry than those who voted against construction. Over the course of their careers, those 59 took in over $33 million in campaign donations from the industry, compared to the approximately $4.2 million received by the 41 who successfully blocked the bill’s approval. On average, those voting for Keystone have received $572,000 from oil and gas interests, compared with just $103,900 for those voting against it.

TAOG

Among the Democrats, the 39 “nay” votes received $4.2 million from oil and gas, while the 14 who voted with the Republicans received just under $4 million. On average, those voting no received about $108,000, while the Democratic supporters — who disproportionately represent states with strong oil and gas industry presence – received more than twice as much, about $284,000.

AAOG

But the amount taken in by Democratic Keystone supporters pales in comparison to that received by Republicans, who received $662,000, on average, from oil and gas interests. The 11 Republicans who will be joining the Senate in January have taken in $370,000 on average (likely an artificially small amount since most of these Republicans have had much shorter time periods in which to accrue this money).

In the House, the picture is even more stark. Keystone supporters have garnered $56.2 million from the oil and gas industry over the course of their careers, compared to the $5.2 million that opponents have brought in. On average, a “yea” vote took in around $223,000 over the course of his or her career, while a “nay” vote took in a paltry $32,200. For just the 31 Democrats voting in favor, the average oil and gas tally was $115,349 — slightly less than the Republicans were able to bring in, but much more than the Keystone opponents.

Environment

The environmental community has historically given much less to federal candidates than oil and gas interests have. One reason the tally is lower: We have no way of knowing which donors consider themselves environmentalists. We classify contributions according to donors’ employers, and far more donors work for oil and gas companies than work for environmental groups.

(Spending by the Tom Steyer-funded NextGen Climate Action super PAC, as well as that of other super PACs, is not reflected in these totals, which include only contributions directly to candidates.)

AAE

Environmental money largely followed the same pattern that oil and gas money took, but in reverse — Senate Republicans received far less than Senate Democrats (on average just under $11,000 compared to an average of $141,000 for Democrats). Among Democrats, those who voted to build the pipeline received less than those who voted not to: just over $98,000 on average, compared to the $183,000 that Democrats who wanted to deep-six the project raised.

TAE (1)

Similarly, in the House Republicans received far less than Democrats overall, but Keystone-supporting Democrats took in less from environmental groups and their employees than Keystone opponents. Keystone opponents received $6.2 million over the course of their careers, while Keystone proponents were only able to bring in $1.1 million, despite there being many more of them. On average, Keystone’s GOP supporters took in $2,932 from environmental interests while its Democratic cheerleaders brought in $14,196. Keystone opponents, all of them Democrats, took in $38,642 — more than twice as much as their nay-voting Democratic counterparts.

What does it mean?

It probably comes as no surprise that opponents of the pipeline — all Democrats — were more likely to be supported by environmental interests and that proponents were more likely to take in large sums from the oil and gas industry. Those Democrats who crossed party lines are a more interesting story: Although they more closely resemble their Democratic colleagues, they are far less likely to have received significant sums from environmental donors, but have received more from the oil and gas industry than those who voted against Keystone.

They are also less likely to be returning. Of the 14 Senate Democrats who sided with Republicans, four will be departing and many pollsters are speculating that Landrieu will not win her runoff. If she does not return, 65 percent of the Keystone-supporting Democrats will be members of the 114th Congress. Among the 39 Keystone opponents, however, five will not be returning — a yield of 87%. All of those five except for Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) will be replaced by Republicans.

Table

Though the 114th Congress will have more GOP senators, they will have, on average, received less from the oil and gas industry over the course of their careers than the Republicans currently in the Senate, but the difference is slight and probably explained by the incoming lawmakers having had shorter congressional careers than the senators they are replacing.  However, incoming Democratic senators will have received much less, on average, than the current Democratic class: A Democrat in the 114th Congress will have received $100,000 from the oil and gas industry, while a Democrat in the current Congress has received more $155,000.  It looks, therefore, like upcoming Congress’ Senate Democrats will not only be fewer in number, but will have a weaker connection to the oil and gas industry.

For the full data set showing how each member of the Senate voted and how much they received from oil and gas or environment, click here.

All numbers in this story reflect career (back to 1989 at the earliest) totals to members of Congress and are based on data collected from the Federal Election Commission on 11/17/2014. Only itemized contributions of greater than $200 are included in the industry totals.