by Jamie Court, President, Consumer Watchdog

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 with outright power grabs and voters have sent them packing. What Tuesday's ballot represents is new stealth strikes by corporations going at it alone for discrete rights and privileges that legislatures, courts and voters have denied them before.

These new "smart initiatives" cloak their corporate sponsors and target a single change to their business model, at the expense of the general public, so they don't risk incurring the collateral damage of hurting another special interest with the money to fight back. If the smart initiative strategy succeeds, spending tens of millions of dollars on deceptive television advertising could be enough to buy public policy in California. You can bet companies across America will be watching closely to see what happens.

Propositions 16 and 17 are the model for the smart initiatives. Pacific Gas and Electric has spent more than $40 million on Proposition 16 to create a nearly insurmountable two-thirds vote hurdle before a municipality can create a public utility to challenge the company. Listening to the advertising PG&E is buying, the average voter would think the issue is taxpayer waste, preserving local police departments and taxpayers' right to vote, not a big utility wanting to stifle competition through a political power play.

You need to have strong eyesight or powerful glasses to read about PG&E's funding in the fine print of the disclosure at the end of the television advertisement. Since there's not sufficient moneyed opposition to the proposal to run advertising against Proposition 16, PG&E is able to create its own narrative. The cutbacks in newspaper, television and radio newsrooms over the last few years have created even less chance that honest reporting can hold the sponsor of Prop 16 accountable for its true motives.

Prop 17 is an almost identical case. One insurance company, Mercury Insurance, has spent $15 million to allow it to raise or lower rates based on a factor that voters ruled illegal in 1988: whether or not you had insurance previously. Courts and regulators have told the company 'no' repeatedly, but hidden behind a paper tiger coalition of nice sound groups, which largely only exist around election time, the insurance company is going to voters under the pretense of offering "discounts" for continuous coverage. Every major editorial board in the state has weighed in against Proposition 17 under the grounds it's deceptive, hurts those who don't drive during domestic military service and will raise rates for those least able to afford it. A group of consumer advocates, including myself, have raised about $1 million for television advertising to warn the public an insurance company is behind Prop 17. All we can really say in the 15 second television ads we can afford is this: when has an insurance company spent millions of dollars on a ballot measure to save you money? Will it be enough?

Corporate corruption of the ballot initiative process is nothing new, but what is unique in this primary is companies taking the offensive and exploiting the demise of a vital free media sector to buy all the paid media they need to overcome the few opinion leaders that help the public see past their advertising. The Federal Communications Commission once had a "Fairness Doctrine," which required equal time for both sides on electoral issues, regardless of who paid for advertising, but it fell prey to legal and lobbyist attacks. Now we have conditions where a powerful corporation with a story to tell may be able buy its own laws from an unsuspecting public.

Most initiative battles come down to finger pointing. The details of ballot initiatives are usually way beyond the public's attention span, so what matters in the end is who stands on which side of an issue. Consumer groups vs. insurance companies. Cops vs. marijuana dispensaries. The governor vs. public employee unions. Voters will have a hard time knowing whose interests are being served by the key ballot measures Tuesday.

More than six out of 10 ballot initiatives fail because voters are rightly suspicious of proponents and their snake oil. Getting a "no" vote is a lot easier than winning a "yes." Until now, the real power of an influential interest group rested in its ability to frighten voters and defeat populist ballot initiatives that threatened business as usual. The pro-active smart initiatives on Tuesday's ballot will have their own policy ramifications but they are also trial balloons for a new wave of corporate comeuppance. Let's hope voters again prove that they are smarter than corporations think they are.

I am thoroughly disgusted by Obama's lack of effective leadership on this - and Congress's willingness to lard the bill for their contributors at our expense. It's very important that we keep the pressure on, because if we don't, we're going to be saddled with a very expensive dog of a health care "reform" bill.

I suggest you send this story to your congress creature and ask what they intend to do to protect our interests:

Reporting from Washington - Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.

Some insurance company leaders continue to profess concern about the unpredictable course of President Obama's massive healthcare initiative, and they vigorously oppose elements of his agenda. But Laszewski said the industry's reaction to early negotiations boiled down to a single word: "Hallelujah!"

The insurers' success so far can be explained in part by their lobbying efforts in the nation's capital and the districts of key lawmakers.

The bills vary in the degree to which they would empower government to be a competitor and a regulator of private insurance. But analysts said that based on the way things stand now, insurers would come out ahead.

"The insurers are going to do quite well," said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "They are going to have this very stable pool, they're going to have people getting subsidies to help them buy coverage and . . . they will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide -- plus their administrative costs."

One of the Democratic proposals that most concerns insurers is the creation of a "public option" insurance plan. The industry launched a campaign on Capitol Hill against it, grounded in a study published by the Lewin Group, a health policy consulting firm that is owned by UnitedHealth Group. The lobbyists contended that a government-run plan, which would have favorable tax and regulatory treatment, would undermine private insurers.

More Kabuki. After reading Taibbi's article, It's clear the public option is already gutted and not worth fighting for in its present form.

[...] Undermining support for the public option wasn't the only gain scored by insurance lobbyists.

In May, the Senate Finance Committee discussed requiring that insurers reimburse at least 76% of policyholders' medical costs under their most affordable plans. Now the committee is considering setting that rate as low as 65%, meaning insurers would be required to cover just about two-thirds of patients' healthcare bills. According to a committee aide, the change was being considered so that companies could hold down premiums for the policies.

Most group health plans cover 80% to 90% or more of a policyholder's medical bills, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. Industry officials urged that the government set the floor lower so insurers could provide flexible, more affordable plans.

[...] Consumer advocates argue that a lower government minimum might quickly become the industry standard, placing a greater financial burden on patients and their families.

"These are a bad deal for consumers," said J. Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner who works with the Consumer Federation of America.

Meanwhile, companies would probably see a benefit by providing less insurance "per premium dollar," Hunter said.

"It would be quite a windfall," said Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna insurance company who has become an industry whistle-blower.

The conservative blog Townhall has a new spokesperson making the rounds these days and well, let's just say she is the perfect example of today's GOP -- and all that is wrong with it.

Jillian Bandes has been quite busy lately, appearing on CSPAN Friday morning, then showing up on MSNBC where she got very nasty with our dear friend Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, who laid waste to her right wing talking points.

Bandes is no stranger to controversy. As Tintin at one of my favorite blogs, Sadly No! reminds us, she made her bones by publishing an anti-Arab screed in her college newspaper:

Hey, whatever happend to Jillian Bandes? You remember her. She was the redneck wingnut who was fired from the UNC student newspaper after writing a column advocating that all Arab guys should be strip-searched at airports and that this wasn’t really a problem because Arab guys would enjoy getting all “sexed up” at the airport. Well, guess what? Jillian is now a contributor to the Clown Hall blog — “Where racism isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a job qualification!”

The other great thing about blogging for Clown Hall is you can recycle some stale wingnut blogger talking points from weeks ago, lard it up with ridiculously hyperbolic language à la Atlas’s Jugs, make up some shit to throw in for good measure to get the half-witted Town Hall commentariat all torn up, offer it up as your own blog posting, and then call it a day, collect your wingnut welfare check, and get to happy hour at Smith Point by mid-afternoon. Which is pretty much what Jillian did with her latest offering: “Michelle Obama’s Veggie Garden Is Poisoned!” Read on...

Here are a few snippets from Bandes' anti-Arab rant:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

They’re some of the brightest, kindest people I’ve ever met. Tragically, they’re also members of an ethnicity that is responsible for almost every act of terror committed against the West in the recent past....

Stay class...never mind. If you don't have Sadly No! bookmarked, you should. It's a guilty pleasure of mine that never disappoints!