Congratulations and Thanks to President Obama and Democrats for Success of Stimulus

On 02.17.10, In Barack Obama, Economy, Peter Roskam, By RSR

On the first anniversary of the the signing into law of the $862 billion economic stimulus passage it is appropriate to extend thanks to President Obama and to the Democratic leadership in Congress for its success in bringing the country out of recession and away from the brink of economic collapse that may have rivaled the Great Depression. While recovery is not complete and there are large numbers of  Americans still unemployed, there are many hopeful signs. The economy grew at a rate of 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2009, the fastest rate in 6 years.

While there is room to argue about what has helped and what hasn’t, there is no excuse for the nasty display of trash talk exhibited today by Peter Roskam and his fellow Republicans, many of whom hypocritically touted stimulus money being spent in their districts after having voted against it.Their behavior today was appalling. They take joy in signs of new economic difficulty hoping that the country’s failure will bring them political success in upcoming midterm elections. But their behavior is destructive to the nation’s morale and destructive to the recovery itself. This is not what they were elected to do. The nation deserves better.

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President Obama Masterfully Demolishes GOP Critics, Roskam Included

On 01.29.10, In Barack Obama, Economy, Healthcare, Peter Roskam, Unemployment, By RSR

Just finished watching the video of President Obama’s Q&A session at the GOP House Issues conference today. The President was brilliant. He called the GOP to account for for their campaign of misinformation about healthcare reform and the economic stimulus, but did it with respect and a sincere invitation to Republicans to work with him in the nation’s best interest. The President was articulate and knew his facts, including detailed knowledge of Republican counter proposals. He was warm and human in demeanor and gentle but firm in his criticisms, using self-deprecating humor effectively to put the room at ease. I have never seen a more brilliant performance by a President. Never.

You can hear Congressman Roskam pose his question at about 67:15.

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Roskam Spends Tax Dollars on Another Political Mailing to Scare Constituents

On 11.05.09, In Barack Obama, Deficit, Mortgage Crisis, Peter Roskam, By RSR

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More mail from Peter Roskam yesterday. This time a piece designed to scare me about the national debt.  On the back, next to Roskam’s signature, it tells me “This mailing was prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense. This is a service to the the citizens of the Sixth Congressional District of Illinois.” Right next to the pretty glossy photo of rich white people walking in a park, probably in Wheaton.

So how is this a service? A service to the residents of the sixth might be a mailer that told the victims of the Bush financial collapse how to get job re-training and unemployment benefits, and food stamps, and suicide counseling. No, this is a political message, designed to help Roskam’s party defeat the efforts of President Obama to make things better for ordinary Americans.  Pretty ironic when you think about it – Roskam’s spending our tax dollars to print and mail this political message railing about the national debt and excessive spending. What an ass. Based on their polling, Roskam and his Republican colleagues believe that debt and budget deficits are one area where President Obama is potentially vulnerable and so they’re wasting our money on propaganda like this.

Roskam says that “we’re at near historic debt levels, the likes of which have not been seen since WWII: the national debt is over $11 trillion dollars and growing rapidly.” Well, that’s true enough.  But where did all that debt come from? The New York Times’  David Leonhardt did a great job analyzing the growth of budget deficitsback in June: America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making.

It all began when George Bush took office in 2001. As the last Democratic president left office, he handed President Bush a booming economy and a budget surplus projected at $800 billion annually through 2012. Under Bush, the nation plunged into recession in 2001 and the country was forced to increase spending on economic relief while tax revenues decreased. Meanwhile Bush started two expensive wars, one of them inargueably elective, and spent billions on a Medicare prescription drug benefit that was largely a gift to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. So as spending soared and tax revenues decreased, what does Bush do: why give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, further decreasing revenues and increasing the deficit.

Bush’s economic policies resulted in his second recession, the present one, that began in 2007. Again tax revenues plummeted and safety net spending increased.  And then then the mortgage and banking crisis, a product of Bush’s anything goes anti-regulatory policies. Bush is forced to bailout the banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to prevent a global economic collapse, further increasing the deficit. Bush leaves office and hands President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit, two wars with no end in sight, and an economy in ruins.

Leonhardt breaks down responsibility for the deficit like this:

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

So about 10 percent of the present deficit is attributable to President Obama’s policies: 7 percent to economic stimulus to pull the nation out of the economic crisis he inherited from an incompetent Repupublican administration and 3 percent related to his new domestic programs. 3 percent!

If Peter Roskam were serious about reducing the deficit he would:

  • Stop wasting tax dollars on political mailings and telephone campaigns
  • Start working to repeal the irresponsible Bush tax cuts
  • Start working to disengage the country from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he has supported and to reduce military spending to reasonable levels
  • Get behind the President’s efforts to fix the healthcare system
  • Stop working for more tax breaks to the wealthy like an end to the estate tax

But then we all know that Roskam is not serious about reducing the deficit. His only interest is in using it to make things more difficult for the President in hopes of boosting his party’s political fortune.

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Peter Roskam’s Challenger Ben Lowe an Environmentalist

On 11.04.09, In Barack Obama, Congressional Elections, Environment, Peter Roskam, By RSR

After some more poking around, it looks to us as though Peter Roskam’s 2010 opponent, Ben Lowe, comes from the evangelical Christian environmental movement and  has worked with an organization called Renewal. Here’s his author bio from IVP which published his book, “Green Revolution:Coming Together to Care for Creation“:

Ben Lowe’s views on creation care were shaped early in his life. Growing up as a missionary kid in Singapore/Malaysia, he often dealt with water shortages and bad air quality due to mismanagement and abuse of natural resources. Carrying these experiences with him, he eventually found his way to Wheaton College where he majored in environmental studies and helped organize Wheaton’s first national Climate Change Summit. His summers were filled working as an environmental educator with the Massachusetts Audubon Society and as a student researcher for fisheries projects in Corpus Christi, TX and on Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania.

Lowe currently calls Chicago home and works as the cocoordinator of Renewal, a grassroots network committed to equipping this student generation in the compassionate stewardship of all of God’s creation. Previously he served as outreach director for A Rocha USA, an international Christian conservation organization, where he helped to mobilize churches and campuses around creation care issues.

Renewal’s web site describes the organization this way:

Renewal is a Christ-centered creation care network that focuses on living in right relationship with God. As followers of Christ, we seek to follow His example of love, stewardship, and reconciliation. For us, this means taking care of everything that God so lovingly created- the earth and each other. With a heart for the poor and a commitment to following Jesus’ call to ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ the students of Renewal seek to care for the earth so that all of God’s people and creatures, as well as future generations, can have a healthy environment in which to live.

“Heart for the poor” and “care for the earth” are music to my ears after two terms of Roskam’s screw the poor and exploit the earth mentality. I look forward to hearing more from young Ben about his aims as a candidate.

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Roskam’s Medi-Fraud Alert Highlights Obama’s Vigorous Efforts to Combat Medicare Fraud

On 07.01.09, In Barack Obama, Economic Justice, Healthcare, Peter Roskam, By RSR

In his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009, President Obama, at the very outset of his administration, promised to “root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier.” In recent days, we have begun to see the President’s promise become a reality.

Obama’s  F.Y. 2010 budget proposal, released on May 10, included a $1.7 billion increase over five years to the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program. That program, under the joint direction of the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, was established in 1996 by The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), under President Clinton.

On May 20, new Attorney General Eric Holder and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new interagency effort, the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), to combat Medicare fraud. HEAT will build on efforts begun with significant success under the Bush administration:

The HEAT team will include senior officials from DOJ and HHS who will build upon and strengthen existing programs to combat fraud while also investing new resources and technology to prevent fraud, waste and abuse before it happens. Efforts will include the expansion of joint DOJ-HHS Medicare Fraud Strike Force teams that have been successfully fighting fraud in South Florida and Los Angeles. Established in 2007, these teams have a proven record of success using a “data-driven” approach to identify unexplainable billing patterns and investigating these providers for possible fraudulent activity. The Medicare Fraud Strike Force team operating in South Florida has already convicted 146 defendants and secured $186 million in criminal fines and civil recoveries. After the success of operations in South Florida, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force expanded in May 2008 to phase two in Los Angeles, where 37 defendants have been charged with criminal health care fraud offenses. To date in the Los Angeles cases, more than $55 million has been ordered in restitution to the Medicare program.

“We know these strike forces work. I believe a targeted civil and criminal enforcement strategy in these locations will have a substantial impact on deterring fraud and abuse, protecting patients and the elderly from scams, and ensuring that taxpayer funds are not stolen,” said Attorney General Holder.

Republican Congressman Peter Roskam recently established his “Medi-FraudAlert” blog on his Congressional web site as a “forum to discuss the massive waste, fraud and abuse in the current Medicare and Medicaid systems”. Roskam absurdly states these costs could reach $500 billion annually. (The total cost of Medicare is only about $450 billion.) But the costs of fraud are significant – 3% or more of total health expenditures, 10.5% of federal Medicaid expenditures by one estimate. Roskam’s blog does a good job of highlighting some of the Obama administration’s early successes in combating fraud:

June 25:  A day after a $100 million fraud was exposed, yesterday, 53 people were indicted in a $50 million Medicare fraud scheme spanning from Detroit to Miami. The scheme involving patients, doctors, medical assistants and company owners, focused on Medicare claims submitted for unnecessary or never delivered treatments mostly for HIV-related drugs and physical therapy treatments.

June 29: Friday, eight Miami-area residents were arrested and charged with attempting to defraud Medicare for $22 million – having already paid out $15.3 million of those claims from Medicare. The Miami Herald reports that this was the prosecutors’ “first crackdown on home healthcare offenders in a decade.” In this case, two firms were raided, had their bank accounts frozen, and stand accused of filing bogus claims mostly for homebound diabetic services. ABC Home Health Care submitted $17 million in false claims since January 2006, and has already been paid $11.3 million in taxpayer money. Florida Home Health Care Providers filed $5.5 million in false claims since October 2007, being compensated with $4 million of taxpayer money.

June 30: Yesterday, a Miami doctor was sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay more than $9 million in restitution for his part in a Medicare fraud scheme where he ultimately filed $20 million in false claims. The physician, Roberto Rodriguez, billed for fake HIV infusion services at six Miami-area HIV infusion clinics.

But Roskam, of course, has not created this blog because he wants the public to know how effective the administration has been so early in combatting fraud. Rather, Peter Roskam is using the existence of Medicare/Medicaid fraud as an excuse to subvert Democratic efforts to make quality healthcare coverage available to all American citizens, something to which he is ideologically opposed.

Roskam appeared this morning on WBIG 1280 AM this morning promoting his blog. He bemoaned the fact that physicians are reimbursed at such a low rate by Medicare and Medicaid due to the excessive expenditures on fraud and abuse and reiterated that he thought it unwise to pursue universal coverage with fraud so rampant. Roskam offered no solutions however for the 45 million Americans who have no health coverage. He did not even acknowledge them. Under the Roskam plan, they are on their own. You can listen to Roskam here:

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I think Roskam’s focus on Medicare fraud is a lame excuse for not doing what basic justice and decency require – that we provide healthcare to every American. If you agree with me, I encourage you give Peter Roskam a call and demand universal coverage now.  Tell him we’ve got blogs aplenty, we need a health plan. (You can attempt to post a comment on his blog but I expect that will be a waste of time as they are screening out unfavorable comments).  You can reach Peter Roskam at (202) 225-4561 in Washington or at (630) 893-9670 in Bloomingdale.

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Peter Roskam’s Posturing on Iran Unhelpful

On 06.29.09, In Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iran, Peter Roskam, By RSR

This past Thursday, June 25, Peter Roskam spoke on the House floor in favor of an ammendment to H.R. 2647, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. The text of Roskam’s press release is here.

First off, I think Dan Conston got mixed up about what Roskam had to say:

“This is an Administration that has said that Iran has legitimate nuclear ambitions, no they don’t. There is no legitimate pursuit of nuclear power in Iran. It is all for an evil and despicable purpose. This is an Administration that got it wrong on the Iranian dissonance and has, sort of, back peddled over the past several days and recast their support of the dissonance when they really missed the mark.

…[Iran] is an aggressive regime that ought not to be coddled. This is an effort to make sure that all of us are safe, and this is a sacred duty.

I’m pretty sure we heard Peter talking about dissidents in the video, but I could be wrong.

More importantly, I think this kind of overblown rhetoric is decidedly unhelpful. The President didn’t get it wrong. Bush and Cheney and Roskam and their neo-con faction did. Their hostile rhetoric and their bungled invasion of Iraq put us into the dangerous position we are in relative to Iran today.

Roskam’s hostile language will not help Iranian dissidents. It only feeds the perception of an outside threat which helps Ahmadinejad maintain a precarious hold on power. Its terrific political theater for Republicans pandering for votes among a population that has largely rejected their platform but it is lousy foreign policy and can only make things more difficult for President Obama as he strives to deal with a very delicate situation. Roskam should shut up.

Nicholas Burns, who lead the Bush administration’s tardy efforts to negotiate with Iran on nuclear issues has praised President Obama’s handling of the Iran situation. Speaking in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition on June 16, Burns had this to say (thanks to Greg Sargeant’s The Plum Line):

“President Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to see a very aggressive series of statements by the United States that would try to put the U.S. in the center of this,” Burns said. “And I think President Obama is avoiding that quite rightly.”

“This is not a dispute for the U.S. to be the center of,” Burns said at another point. “It’s up to Iranians to decide who Iran’s future leaders will be. He said he respects Iran’s sovereignty. I think it was important to do that.”

Burns said that Obama was right to refrain from throwing the U.S.’s weight around while giving props to reformers. He praised Obama for being “low-key” while saying he’s concerned about the plight of reformers and inspired by them, which Burns called a “balancing act.”

Even creepy John Negroponte, Bush’s first ambassador to Iraq, has praised Obama for his conduct of foreign policy. Speaking at a review of foreign policy under Obama hosted by the French-America Foundation on June 23, Negroponte said that he had a “high level degree of confidence” in the Obama team, which got “an extremely good start to foreign policy.”

Roskam’s assertion that the President supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a gross distortion based on a much more nuanced remark Obama made this spring. Roskam has a bright future ahead as a commentator for Fox News once we replace him in 2010.

The ammendment that Roskam rose to speak for, and which bore his name failed. It’s point was to restore $1.2 billion in cuts to spending on missile defense over 2009 levels. Missile defense has been an article of religion  for arch-conservatives like Roskam since Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was launched. Programs have cost billions with limited success. The ground-based mid-course defense that Roskam’s ammendment refers to has failed 6 out of 14 intercept tests since 1999. This is a program that is a boon to defense contractors like Boeing, having cost over $30 billion to date, but offers no increased security to this country in the near term. Missile defense programs like these are certainly not a substitute for effective diplomacy in resolving what threat may be posed by Iran. Roskam should let the grown-ups manage foreign policy.

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