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Los Angeles Times Saturday 13 September 2003 Main News Section / Nation / In Brief [page A-12] More Protest Limiting Disability for Veterans        [from L.A. Times wire reports]        Senior Republicans on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee have joined Democrats and veterans groups in a chorus of protest against proposals being considered by the Bush administration to shrink the number of military personnel who qualify for disability benefits.        Changes in the definition of service-connected disability "could have far-reaching and unintended consequences for millions of service members and veterans," wrote the committee chairman, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), and three of the panel's subcommittee chairmen.

International Herald Tribune Friday 29 November 2002 Washington Post Wednesday 27 November 2002 In the Homeland Security bill, A Quiet Bonus        by Jonathan Weisman, The Washington Post        Washington: It amounted to only two paragraphs at the end of a 475-page bill to create the Department of Homeland Security. But the brief provision - designed to shield vaccine makers such as Eli Lilly and Co. from lawsuits seeking billions of dollars for families of autistic children - has generated a whirlwind of controversy and a mystery as to its origin. The paragraphs appeared just days before the House was to vote on the legislation. House Republicans rammed the bill through during Congress's "lame duck session" and sent it to the Senate, where Democrats, demoralized by the Nov. 5 election results, could not stop it.        And so, with little debate, Congress granted broad legal protection to the makers of Thimerosal, a preservative in childhood vaccines that has been circumstantially linked to rising rates of autism and pediatric developmental problems. It seemed a lobbying coup for Lilly and its allies. Yet, strange to say in Washington, no one seems to want to take credit.        Pharmaceutical lobbyists, Eli Lilly representatives and lawmakers with the most knowledge of the Thimerosal issue have denied any role in the provision's last-minute appearance.        Now, in a sharply worded response to an accusatory letter by Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, the White House budget director, Mitchell Daniels Jr., a former Lilly executive, has denied a role.        Daniels said the provision had not been approved or developed by the White House Office of Management and Budget. "I also want to make clear that I personally had no involvement whatsoever with these provisions," he said. "I spoke to no one about these provisions, either inside the administration or outside the administration." He added: "I did not have any communications with anyone from Eli Lilly regarding the issue. Indeed, I had not even heard of Thimerosal until I received your letter, which is not surprising because Eli Lilly stopped making Thimerosal a decade before I began working there and the lawsuits appear to have been filed after I left."        Since the provision's appearance, some Democrats and trial lawyers have charged that it represented a timely payback for the pharmaceutical industry's financial support in the midterm elections.

Newsday Saturday 16 November 2002 'Special Interest' Items Part of Homeland Security Bill        by Thomas Frank, Newsday Washington Bureau        Washington: Senate Democrats accused Republicans Friday of sneaking an item into a homeland security bill that would protect pharmaceutical companies from billions of dollars in legal claims.        Democrats moved to kill the item and six other "special-interest" provisions in the bill, which could further delay creation of a new homeland security department at a time of heightened fear over potential terrorist attacks.        Republicans said the provisions would strengthen domestic security and that Democratic objections could stall by at least two months creation of a new department to lead domestic anti-terrorism efforts.        Democratic attacks Friday focused on a one-page item that would expand vaccine producers' liability protection. A major beneficiary would be Eli Lilly and Co., which was hit with several class-action lawsuits last year alleging that a preservative formerly used in children's vaccines caused autism.        Liability protection that is now given for vaccines would be extended to vaccine ingredients, such as the disputed preservative thimerosal, which guarded against contamination in commonplace vaccines. Eli Lilly was its leading manufacturer until stopping use about 10 years ago amid reports it might cause harm.         "This deserves much more debate than being placed into a bill at the last minute for the pharmaceutical industry," said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), calling the measure a "special favor" for campaign cash to Republicans. The pharmaceutical industry has given $14 million to Republicans so far this year and $5.2 million to Democrats, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.        An Eli Lilly spokesman dismissed the accusation of political payback but acknowledged the measure would benefit the company.         Spokesman Edward Sagebiel said Eli Lilly was "surprised" to find the item in the homeland security bill and had not lobbied for its inclusion. The item was taken from a separate bill, backed by Lilly and some medical groups, that was proposed in March but did not advance.        Richard Diamond, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), said the item was added because the homeland security protected other makers of homeland security equipment from product liability. "This is just another version of where a life-saving medicine would be protected from being sued out of existence," Diamond said.        Democrats had Republican support for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's measure to remove seven "special-interest" items from a 500-page homeland security bill the House passed Wednesday.        Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) indicated he would support Daschle. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of a committee that oversees homeland security, echoed Democratic complaints, saying, "These provisions don't belong in this bill," and that the vaccine liability protection "is not a homeland security issue."        Democrats also sought to remove an item giving security companies that worked at airports the same liability protection for Sept. 11-related lawsuits as airlines and others received last year. Another provision would allow the homeland security department to contract with additional U.S. companies that have incorporated overseas to avoid paying taxes.        And another provision would create a homeland security research center. Democrats said the 15 eligibility criteria were so narrowly drawn that the center would end up at Texas A&M University – in the home state of Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). Republicans said 10 other major research universities would be eligible.

Los Angeles Times Saturday 27 October 2001 SoCal Living Section / Letters [page B-18]        Since the tragic events of Sept. 11, many Americans have been waving flags from their cars and homes to illustrate their unity and patriotism. The show of patriotism has been tremendous, but exactly how many of these flag wavers do anything more than buy a cheap plastic flag?        All of the talk about unity and patriotism should be deemed superficial. One only need look at the disgustingly low 16% turnout of registered voters for the Los Angeles 4th District City Council special election to see this. Over 120,000 people are registered to vote in the 4th District, and yet only 19,000 actually exercised their right to vote. We were two of the 19,000 people who did vote. We would be interested to know how many of the approximately 120,000 people are flag wavers and how many of those flag wavers exercised their right to vote in the special election held on Oct. 23. We feel as if we are living in a City Council district full of hypocrites, and we are anguished and angered by it.        Jennifer Grondahl & Julius Galacki        Los Angeles, California

Mark Levine's Layman's Guides to Election 2000
Guide to The U.S. Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore Decision
Guide to the Congressional Challenge of Florida's Electoral Votes

Los Angeles Times Sunday 4 February 2001 Opinion Section / Letters / Little Box In The Left-hand Corner [page M-4]        Given what President Bush is doing to the separation of church and state, a prayer is about all [that] our Constituition is going to have left.        Gary Garshfield        Irvine, California

Los Angeles Times Sunday 28 January 2001 Opinion Section [page M-1] The Republican Mania        by Kevin Phillips The GOP has never met a tax cut it didn't like, and that weakness may pave the way for a repetition of the 1981-82 recession.        When it comes to orgies, even Nero couldn't hold a Roman candle to Washington tax lobbyists at one of their full-blown feeding frenzies. The danger is that the Great Treasury Raid now taking shape – K Street lobbyists are already sharpening their knives and preparing their demands – could threaten a U.S. economy that still has an unemployment rate of 4% and, so far this month, has produced 50 to 150 daily new highs for stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange.        With the venal black hats already drifting into the Capitol's corridors, it is not clear who the white hats will be or if their guns will even be loaded. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a white hat no longer, all but gave his blessing to the assembling raiders in congressional testimony on Thursday. The Democratic leaderships in the Senate and House may be too busy lining up big donors for the 2002 elections to put on anything brighter than gray hats. And the new Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, who has expressed doubts about a big tax-cut bill, is already being pulled back into line by a big-contributor-oriented Bush White House.        But there's an interesting possibility on Capitol Hill. Whitish-hat surprises could come from two new Republican chairmen of pivotal tax-writing committees: part-time Iowa farmer Charles E. Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and former California community college professor William M. Thomas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Both appear to have significant misgivings about a huge tax cut.        Meanwhile, the history is frightening. 2001 happens to be the 20th anniversary of the Great Treasury Raid of the Ronald Reagan era, which had its genesis in circumstances eerily similar to those today. The new Republican president in town had campaigned for across-the-board tax cuts but had neither the technical experience with tax lawmaking nor the political smarts to understand the inevitability of a feeding frenzy. This year, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm has already let the weasel out of the bag: The tax cut is to be bigger – not smaller – than the $1.3-trillion package that George W. Bush the Inexperienced offered during the campaign.        President Bush's program does not yet have a name. In 1981, the Reagan tax plan that turned into a feeding frenzy was called the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA). It would have been better named the New Recession and Double-Digit Unemployment Act of 1981.        From inception through the ensuing Republican-Democrat bidding war (to do favors for the lobbies), greed was in the saddle. David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, later admitted that the tax bill's real objective was to reduce the top marginal rate for the well-off, but "in order to make this palatable as a political matter, you had to bring down all the brackets." The tax reduction for business – an estimated $150 billion over five years – was described as the largest in the history of the federal income tax. Tax policy had become a trough.        Partly as a result, what in 1980 was a small federal deficit ballooned, and interest rates climbed like an elevator in the Empire State Building. The recession that Reagan administration planners said wouldn't happen at the beginning of 1981 arrived with a vengeance by autumn 1981, as the Federal Reserve raised rates to cope with the effects of the tax stimulus on top of pre-existing inflation. By late 1982, a major recession pushed U.S. unemployment above 10%, a mark not hit since the 1930s.        What's different this time is the form of economic pretense. Instead of saying that GOP policies can head off a recession, the Bush administration is saying that the United States is already in a recession, and – guess what? – Bill Clinton did it. Besides blaming the Democrats, the idea is to stoke enough economic fear to mobilize voters behind the upper-bracket-tilted tax cut as a remedy without paying too much attention to the details of which economic groups get the gold mine and which get the shaft.        Greenspan, who spent most of 2000 saying that a tax cut would be counterproductive and that paying down the U.S. debt was preferable, now seems to have taken off his white hat for a Wall Street gray homburg. He knows full well the dangers of another orgy like that of 1981, but in his Thursday testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, he seemed to go along with a rate cut even though he said it would not be effective in heading off any recession.        Unfortunately, this only makes part of the analogy to 1981 worse. That year, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul A. Volcker, endorsed the outline of the Reagan tax cuts, but, as the scope of the orgy and size of the Republican-Democratic bidding war became clear, he tried to work behind the scenes to defeat the bill by saying the revenue loss and stimulus involved would force him to raise interest rates. The bill passed; he raised interest rates, and a severe recession was not far behind.        While a tax cut focused on ordinary Americans might make sense, ordinary Americans will not get much from the Bush tax package discussed during the campaign: About one-third of its benefits go to the top 1% of the population. The possibility seems to be growing that rate cuts will be enlarged further, giving corporations and lobbies another payoff a la 1981, of which Stockman later said "the hogs were really feeding."        Which brings us to the two Republicans best positioned to kick them in the snout: Thomas and Grassley. When Thomas won his chairmanship, one tax-cut zealot, citing Thomas' moderation, said that the Californian's victory was the reason the stock market had gone down that day.         Grassley is an even better bet. He's already telling the financial press that he won't support any tax breaks for business, singling out the lobbying activities of the American Council for Capital Formation, which just happens to have been a prime architect of the 1981 excesses. He says, rightly, that breaks for corporations would take money that should go to ordinary folk.        What also makes Grassley so potentially important is that he's the Senate's No. 1 expert on pigs – both how you raise them (in Iowa) and how you kick them in the snout (in Washington). He has been a crusader against such waste as the Pentagon's famous $1,868 toilet-seat cover and probably understands better than most how business and upper-bracket tax breaks are the highest priorities of big contributors and lobbyists. And he must know that his chairmanship and the tax bill is what he'll be judged on by history, as well as by ordinary Iowans.        The forces working to crush Grassley into line unfortunately include the mania of the 20th-century Republican Party for extreme and even self-defeating tax cuts. The first example came in the early 1920s, when Congress wouldn't cut income tax rates as much as Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon wanted. He responded by launching a program of rebates, refunds and remissions of taxes to upper-bracket individuals and corporations, something almost unheard of before. More than $6 billion – a huge sum then – was paid out, and much of it, according to critics, flowed into the various stages of the 1920s stock-market bubble. These practices helped provoke the new tax burdens the New Deal imposed on wealth.        In 1947-48, when Republicans recaptured Congress for the first time in 20 years, their centerpiece was a reduction in tax brackets. President Harry S. Truman vetoed the rate-cut legislation on the ground that it was too favorable to the rich. When Congress passed it again over Truman's veto, the feisty president made it a big issue in the 1948 presidential campaign, in which Republicans not only lost Congress but watched the GOP chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee get beaten in a safe Republican district in Minnesota.        These two episodes, plus the 1981 excesses, suggest that the Republican Party suffers from the fiscal equivalent of rabies. When power gives them the opportunity, they all but foam at the mouth over the tax issue on behalf of upper-bracket individuals and corporations, even when the economic or political risk ought to stop them.        For now, even though there's no recession on hand, just a slowdown, this is the new drumbeat: cut taxes to stop the recession. Greenspan says a tax cut can't accomplish this but, otherwise, he's giving the White House enough support to suggest a repetition of Volcker's ineffective, two-faced posture in 1981.        Then there's Grassley. Anyone who has spent nearly a half century learning how to handle Iowa's 300-pound and 400-pound hogs should be uniquely qualified to deal with the 185-pound-pinstriped variety in Washington.        Kevin Phillips is the author of "The Politics of the Rich and Poor." His most recent book is "The Cousin's War: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America."

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