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If you believe that health insurance companies will really go broke if they don't get 20% premium increases during a deep recession, raise your hand. Ah, the one hand I see raised is Karen Ignagni's. She's the top lobbyist for the health insurance industry, and president of America's Health Insurance Plans. She's pleading for Congress not to regulate health insurance rates, no matter how bad her clients look to the rest of us. All we need to do, in her view, is trust the insurance industry's own math.

The problem with American politics is that there is too much focus on raising money and too little on raising hell. The Labor movement in America suffers from the safe fate. This labor day, let's remember what works for the American middle class and the labor movement that's supposed to represent it.

The chief funders of California's anti-regulation Proposition 23 on the November ballot are a pair of Texas-based refiners, Valero and Tesoro. Each of them has two refineries in California and the last thing they want, from a profit standpoint, is regulation of greenhouse gases or any concerted attempt to slow climate change.

It took my wife an hour and half to make the two mile commute home Monday, after the secret service closed some of LA's busiest streets at rush hour to shuttle the president from his Beverly Hills hotel to a fundraiser for Congress...

If there's one thing the National Association of Insurance Commissioners don't see much of, it's public attention. Now, however, it's got the attention of the media, consumer advocates and at least part of an increasingly aware public....

There are days when the idea of private health insurance companies running health reform are more ludicrous than others. Today, we find that health insurance CEOs are raking in ever-higher compensation--up to $110 million a year for one retiring CEO. This is obviously where a lot of our ever-rising premium dollars are going.

Drivers, business owners and every other American who expects their insurance policies to be there in an emergency can breathe a sigh of relief that an eleventh hour fix saved consumers from insurance deregulation in the financial reform bill...

During my two decades battling in California's ballot initiative process never before have large corporations been poised to gain so much so cleverly as in next Tuesday's election.

Industries have long tried to lard ballots...

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was asked directly if his strident opposition to financial reform was because he is acting on behalf of big banks. His ringing denial? "I'd say that's inaccurate"...

Pay to play policymaking is rarely spelled out as clearly in public as it was in a just-released fundraising email sent to financial industry lobbyists on behalf of Senator Corker, a key Republican negotiator on finanicial reform...

Last night, in a surreal process that from gavel to gavel took less than 25 minutes, the Senate Banking committee approved Chairman Dodd’s financial reform legislation on a party-line vote. But opponents of Wall Street reform can’t be allowed to avoid public debate entirely by cutting deals behind closed doors before a bill reaches the Senate floor...

Check out this hilarious and too-truthful Huffington Post from Heather Booth, director of Americans for Financial Reform, on this week's Capitol Hill visit from the American Bankers' Association. It will make you laugh, curse, and maybe vomit a little...

When the US Supreme Court decided to allow corporations to spend money directly on campaign advertising, they opened the floodgates to excessive spending by companies to change the outcome of elections. The long-term solution is a...

When Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly doesn't like a question, she's a regular Houdini of evasion and blame-shifting. Her testimony in front of Congress today managed to turn denial of health care into "efficiency" and put the blame for 39% yearly premium increases onto Blue Cross policyholders who dared to get sick.

The Supreme Court just gave Wall Street (and the rest of the corporate world) the go ahead to spend unlimited money running ads for and against political candidates. According to the Court's logic, it shouldn't make a difference for voters, or politicians calculating election strategies.

This sizzling editorial (two words you can't often use together) in the New York Times lays out the damage Sen. Joe Lieberman has singlehandedly done to health reform. It's the best argument you could find for following the call of my colleague, Jamie Court, to dump the Senate's 60-vote "filibuster rule" that lets industry mouthpieces like Lieberman play a suicide bomber role against reforms.

 

When Sen. Joe Lieberman said last week that he might favor a health reform bill that traded away a "public option" for letting people over 55 buy into Medicare, he must not have checked with his bosses first. Now that the...

I'm having a hard time understanding how an industry that stole Americans’ money, gambled with it and pocketed billions, then came begging to taxpayers for a bailout when their bets went sour, has managed to keep the brakes on financial reform for this long...

If money is the mother milk of politics, then big bucks from the banks and financial industry are souring financial reform legislation being debated in the House of Representatives this week. A new analysis by Consumer Watchdog shows just how rotten the Capitol Hill dairy is.

Oh, this is rich... The Sacramento Bee reports that Arnold collected $250K last year to finance his political reform ballot measure, Prop 11, from Scott Rothstein, the guy who is now being accused of running a massive Ponzi-style investment fraud in Florida.