The Health of the Senate

The Senate is about to vote on legislation affecting the health and welfare of millions of American families. Even the disastrous hurricanes, which changed the lives of so many people, won’t have the broad impact of the vote to replace the Affordable Care Act with the latest version of Republican health care thinking.

The outcome is uncertain. This new law could stand or fall by one vote. It’s a Republican-only bill, designed without public hearings or Democratic input, and they can spare at most 2 “no” votes. So all the attention is on the possible “no” Senators. What is swaying them one way or the other?

There’s no reason to mention their names. They have gotten enough attention to their political and moral agonies. What about the 50 or 49 other Republican Senators who are all in?

Barely anyone in America likes this legislation outside of Republican politicians. For most of its life, a majority of Americans have expressed opposition to “Obamacare”. Its approval rating has been below 40% since 2011, the year after it passed. But in March, approval reached 49%, finally beating out disapproval. At that time, a majority of Republican respondents approved of its major provisions and favored spending more money on health care.

In June, many polls showed that Americans rejected the “replace and repeal” version passed by the House, called the American Health Care Act (ACHA), by a more than 2-1 margin. Only about one third of Republican voters approved.

Another detailed survey, which informed respondents about current and proposed laws, found that one quarter of Republican adults found the Republican health care bill “unacceptable”. Combined with overwhelming Democratic and Independent rejection of the legislation, a majority of voters even in the most Republican districts said “unacceptable”.

In July, another poll found that people preferred Obamacare to the Republican alternative 2 to 1. Nearly three times as many people preferred that our government “provide coverage for low-income Americans” rather than “cut taxes”.

More directly personal, a poll found that more than half of Arizona voters were less likely to vote for Republican Sen. Jeff Flake because of his support for various Republican plans. A majority approved of the opposition to Republican health care by the other Senator from Arizona, John McCain.

The only poll thus far about public reaction to the latest version, the Graham-Cassidy health care bill, shows less than a quarter of Americans like it. Another way of putting that is that ordinary voters reject it by 2 - 1, with another quarter still unsure. Big majorities understood exactly what Graham-Cassidy would do: costs for most people would rise; fewer people would be covered; protections for people with pre-existing conditions would be scaled back. By 3 - 1, people wanted Congress at least to wait for a detailed analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. By an amazing 5 - 1 margin, Americans agreed to two principles: “no one should be denied lifesaving healthcare coverage for themselves or their families because they can't afford to pay,” and “changes to the health care law should be bipartisan and should include hearings that take into account the views of experts, patients, and providers like doctors.” Even most Trump voters agreed with those ideas.

The unanimous voices of the people who take care of our health have consistently rejected the Republican bills. In March, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Nurses Association and the American Medical Association scorned the AHCA. In June, the AMA, the American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Federation of American Hospitals opposed the Senate bill that later died. Now all major organizations of doctors,the whole health insurance industry, plus organizations of hospitals, the Catholic Health Association, the AARP, and dozens of other organizations oppose Graham-Cassidy.

The health care numbers can be confusing, especially when each side chooses the numbers they talk about. So let’s get specific about my demographic, old people. The CBO explained in May how the AHCA would affect people over 64 who earn $26,500 a year in 2026. That’s the median income of seniors. Instead of paying $1700 a year in insurance premiums under current law, premiums would rise to over $13,500, more than half their income. For a person with an income of $68,000, the numbers are very different: premiums fall from $5100 to under $2000 for a 21-year-old; from $6500 to under $3000 for a 40-year old; and remain about the same for a 64-year-old. Unless you are well off, you would be deeply hurt.

Why don’t most Republicans in Congress worry about voting for such an unpopular policy? It’s not voters who matter, but donors. Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado told his Republican colleagues, “Donors are furious. We haven’t kept our promise.” Big Republican donors are angry that the Republican majorities have accomplished little. Republican politicians are worried about money they could raise for the 2018 elections, not about depriving millions of their health care. Their donors want to slash Medicaid, so that’s what they’ll vote for. Republican senators apparently don’t even know in detail what their bill contains.

The devil is in the details. Will the billionaires win, while the rest of us lose?

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 26, 2017

Conservatives Don’t Like Higher Ed

Conservatives don’t like professors. When conservative Republicans were asked to gauge their feelings about college professors, over half gave a “cold” response, while only 24% were “warm”. I experience that disdain in the comments that conservatives make to my columns, where the word “professor” itself is a taunt, a curse.

Conservatives don’t like the institutions where professors work. A recent Pew poll found that only 29% of conservative Republicans thought that colleges and universities have a positive impact on our country.

Republican politicians encourage these views. Betsy DeVos, the new Secretary of Education, was explicit in her condemnation of professors as she was being confirmed: “The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think. They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community.” There is no evidence that even 1 out of 1000 professors ever said that, but DeVos didn’t need to provide evidence. The idea that college professors indoctrinate students with liberal ideas, that conservatives are discriminated against on university campuses, is now taken as fact in conservative thinking.

It is a fact that conservatives are outnumbered in higher ed. A study from 2014 shows that liberals outnumber conservatives in college and university faculties 6 to 1. Is this proof of discrimination on campus? In fact, conservatives themselves choose not to pursue advanced degrees. Only 10% of those with some postgrad study are consistent conservatives. Even fewer conservatives decide to pursue a PhD, as opposed to more professional degrees like MBA. Thus the preponderance of liberals among faculty is the result of different educational choices according to political preference.

One interesting statistic that I had never seen is that voter registrations among social science faculty at 40 major universities show that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 11 to 1, but among historians the ratio is 33 to 1. My own educational history offers an explanation of how that happened. Earning a PhD in history, studying history intensively, pushed me to the left. Timing was probably a factor: I became a graduate student in 1973, as the Watergate scandal demonstrated the dishonesty of a conservative Republican President. But more important was that learning history itself can be radicalizing.

The Russian populace had been terribly mistreated by the very conservative Tsarist autocracy and their revolutionary demands for a socialist system in 1917 were a reasonable response. American Southerners rebelled in order to defend slavery and said so clearly. Discrimination against racial minorities and women continued through the 20^th century, defended by racist and sexist conservative arguments. Social improvements, like worker safety or food purity or Social Security, were radical ideas eventually accomplished over conservative objections.

Even though all my history professors were white males, these and other obvious historical lessons pushed me in a leftward direction. Those who argue, for example, that the Civil War was not about defending slavery, but about states’ rights have to violate all the basic rules about using evidence to make this historical argument. They are out of place in academia, because they are historical frauds.

Good academic science and social science lie behind ideas that conservatives don’t want to believe, about climate change, about evolution, about the persistence of racism. So conservatives attack the whole academic enterprise. Organized conservative assaults on academic liberals are now the norm on campuses.

Here’s how it works: an art historian writes an essay about how ancient marble statues were typically painted in colors which have disappeared over the centuries. In modern museums, we see white skin as representing the ideal, contributing to the idea that white is ideal. Then the conservative media take over, gradually distorting the article to delegitimize this liberal professor, her ideas, and all others like her. “A Campus Reform headline describes a professor’s essay as arguing that white marble in sculptures ‘contributes’ to white supremacy. Two days later, a Daily Caller piece, citing Campus Reform, has the professor ‘equating’ white-marble statues with white supremacy. Two days after that, a site called Truth Revolt — now citing another account from Heat Street, which had also picked up on Campus Reform’s report — is blunter: ‘Professor: White Marble Statues Are Racist.’”

The twisting of information about what goes on at college by people like David Horowitz is central to conservative attitudes about higher ed. This process leads to organized calls for leftist professors to be fired, and even to death threats.

Arthur C. Brooks of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote a NY Times op-ed “Don’t Shun Conservative Professors” last week. He assumes this shunning is obvious and that “discrimination” is ubiquitous. He compares the historic barriers against women and the alleged plight of academic conservatives, a clever tactic that makes it harder to remember that conservatives defended those barriers for decades.

Brooks says liberals should “make campuses more open to debate and the unconstrained pursuit of truth.” But that open debate over the past decades has led to an intellectual consensus that conservatives hate. Conservatives don’t like professors precisely because the pursuit of truth demonstrates the emptiness of current conservative dogmas.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 19, 2017

White Collar Crime at Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo was the world’s most valuable bank until 2016, when it slipped into second place behind JPMorgan Chase. It may also be one of the biggest criminal enterprises in American history.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Harold Meyerson, executive editor of the American Prospect, began an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last month: “What’s the biggest criminal enterprise in California? MS-13? The remnants or successors to the Crips and the Bloods? The Mexican Mafia? If we’re talking about the sheer volume of offenses, the answer is clear: Wells Fargo.”

Not just journalists. New York Congressman Gregory Meeks told CEO John Stumpf at a Congressional hearing a year ago that Wells Fargo “basically has been a criminal enterprise”. Meeks said, “I’ve got individuals right now on the street, they’re not back in their homes,” because of fraudulent mortgages. Would Wells Fargo put his homeless constituents back in their homes? Stumpf had no answer.

Wells Fargo employees created 3.5 million fraudulent accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge. The bank signed up 500,000 customers for online bill payment services without their knowledge, some of which carried fees. It charged military personnel illegally high interest on loans and then seized vehicles from soldiers who fell behind on their payments. It charged half a million auto loan customers for insurance that they did not need. About 20,000 people could not pay these extra fees, went into default, and had their cars repossessed.

The bank didn’t only cheat its customers. Wells Fargo paid $100,000 to settle a class action suit in 2009 by its employees in Nevada, who were mislabeled “managers” so they would not have to be paid overtime and then forced to work unpaid “call nights” to drum up more business. A branch manager was fired in 2010 when he reported these criminal actions to his supervisors. The bank was ordered this year to pay him $5.4 million in back pay and compensatory damages. One manager notified the bank’s confidential ethics hotline about fraudulent activity in September 2011 and was fired later that month. A banker in Pennsylvania also called the hotline and sent an email to human resources about the unethical practices he was told to perform in September 2013. Eight days later he was fired.

Wells Fargo has committed these crimes for at least 15 years. And company leaders knew it. Internal complaints were made as early as 2005. In 2009, six fired employees sued, alleging unethical practices. Employees wrote directly to CEO John Stumpf as early as 2011. In 2013, the New York Times reported that Wells Fargo employees were under intense pressure, including threats of getting fired, if they did not meet ambitious goals by opening accounts and starting credit cards without permission. Complaints were made to managers and nothing was done.

If somebody uses someone else’s personal information to open a credit card account, the penalties are severe. Ordinary crime. Our customary language puts Wells Fargo’s actions in a different light: white-collar crime, which the FBI defines as “characterized by deceit, concealment, or violation of trust and are not dependent on the application or threat of physical force or violence.” The escape from any jail time or criminal record of every participant except one banker after the bank collapse and financial crisis of 2008 shows how our society excuses big crimes when they are committed by rich, usually white men in fine suits.

But some other definitions might be more appropriate for Wells Fargo’s actions. The crimes of so-called “organized crime” are defined clearly. Extortion, a time-tested endeavor of organized crime, is the acquisition of property through the use of threats or force. Didn’t Wells Fargo threaten homeowners and car owners with seizure of their property if they didn’t pay illegally created charges? And then make good on those threats?

Loan-sharking is the provision of loans at illegally high interest rates accompanied by the illegal use of force to collect on past due payments. Didn’t Wells Fargo charge illegal interest rates to soldiers and then forcibly take their property?

Wouldn’t Wells Fargo fit the FBI’s definition perfectly? “The FBI defines a criminal enterprise as a group of individuals with an identified hierarchy, or comparable structure, engaged in significant criminal activity.”

What price has Wells Fargo paid for their millions of individual crimes? Virtually none. The few hundred million dollars that Wells Fargo has paid in fines or has promised to pay customers who were cheated are a tiny fraction of the $11 billion in profits for just the first six months of 2017. Wells Fargo says it will refund nearly a million dollars to customers who had been signed up for online bill payment – that’s less than $2 per fraudulent transaction.

Wells Fargo’s chief executive after 2007, John Stumpf, was publicly rebuked in a congressional hearing in 2016, had to resign, and forfeited $41 million in stock options. That left him with Wells Fargo stock worth almost $250 million. Carrie Tolstedt, leader of the community banking division, where these criminal actions occurred, had to “retire” at age 56, and lost $19 million. She had made $27 million in her last three years, and took with her a mere $125 million in stocks. Earlier this year, four second-level executives were fired. Nobody has done a day of jail time.

After years of intense pressure on employees to get new accounts any way they could, Wells Fargo fired 5300 employees for unethical behavior. The company leaders walked away with millions of dollars.

That criminal enterprise was too big to jail. Our political and judicial systems seem inadequate to protect ordinary Americans from corporate crime or to punish criminals when they are caught.

Can we, the people, do something? Wells Fargo customers could simply switch banks. There is no big advantage in using a giant global bank. My local Jacksonville bank performs all the services I need, whether I’m at home or across the world.

A survey in October 2016, just after the scandal made headlines, showed that only 14% of Wells Fargo customers had decided to leave. It’s not so easy. Most people get multiple services from their bank, including loans, automatic bill pay, and credit cards. Switching takes time and money, and many customers don’t have either. One third of Americans with savings accounts have a zero balance. Although the number of new credit card and checking accounts fell by half earlier this year, that still means that thousands of people were opening new accounts with Wells Fargo.

Other corporations are happy to take tainted money from Wells Fargo. The bank will now be a sponsor of the annual football rivalry between Oregon and Oregon State. Wells Fargo signed an extension of its deal as official retail bank of Major League Soccer, and became an official partner of the NFL Los Angeles Rams.

Since the beginning of 2017, Wells Fargo stock has fallen about 10%. Don’t buy their shares. TV viewers could tune out the Wells Fargo golf championship, broadcast every May, forcing the tournament organizers to find another sponsor, and avoid other sporting events and programs sponsored by Wells Fargo.

Not very satisfying. But if we don’t say no to white-collar criminals, who will?

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

September 10-12, 2017

not accepted for publication by the Jacksonville Journal-Courier