From a letter from Public Citizen, the major rightwing threats in the coming year:
1. Citizens United and McCutcheon
One of the worst Supreme Court rulings of our time remains one of the gravest threats to our democracy.
The midterm elections in 2014 will see record-setting spending by billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers, corporate giants like Exxon Mobil and Bank of America, and dark money conduits like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
So far, 16 states have joined in calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn the ruling. There is active organizing in seven other states. We will soon have more than half the number needed to ultimately ratify an amendment.
The Supreme Court will decide another case next year — McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission — that may turn out to be a sequel of sorts to Citizens United. A bad ruling could allow anyone who so chooses to directly contribute as much as $3.6 million per election cycle to a single party and its candidates. Of course, not many people can afford that choice.
So much for “one person, one vote.”
2. 45,000 Preventable Deaths
Every year, 45,000 of our fellow Americans die preventable deaths solely for lack of health insurance. That’s one man, woman or child lost every 12 minutes.
Even if it overcomes the radical right’s partisan stonewalling, the Affordable Care Act is not designed to end the for-profit health insurance industry’s commodification of what should be a basic human right.
It is important to never stop fighting for a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system until the day when nobody is denied care for the sake of corporate profits.
3. Wall Street Greed
After causing a global financial meltdown from which Main Street still has not recovered, Wall Street is — alarmingly and disgustingly — up to many of its former tricks.
The Big Banks have demonstrated, repeatedly and unequivocally, that they cannot avoid succumbing to their own greed and shortsightedness. Yet they have fought tooth and nail every piece of legislation and every commonsense regulation designed to prevent them from ever again driving our economy off a cliff.
They’ve spent hundreds of millions trying to roll back, water down and weasel out of the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act necessitated by their hubris.
And their efforts have perpetuated their supposed status as “too big to fail” and even “too big to jail.”
As the collapse in 2008 recedes in time, Wall Street seems to be counting on some sort of societal amnesia about what it did.
4. Keystone XL Pipeline
“Let’s build a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, straight through America’s heartland, so we can ship our dirty tar sands oil overseas, eh?”
That seems to the thinking behind the Keystone XL pipeline proposed by Canadian oil company TransCanada.
One has to wonder if the “XL” stands for eXtreme Lunacy.
At a time when scientists universally acknowledge the danger of continued reliance on fossil fuels, why are we extracting one of the most toxic forms of crude from the Canadian tundra, piping it across a continent, and shipping it to other countries — where its consumption will only hasten climate change?
Keystone XL will not reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil and will actually drive up prices at the pump.
A portion of the pipeline about to become operational in Oklahoma and Texas had 125 dents, bad welds and other flaws. That’s a lot of potential leaks in a pipeline that could carry nearly 35 million gallons of corrosive sludge a day.
5. Trans-Pacific Partnership
Behind closed doors, the U.S. and 11 other countries are negotiating a trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), hoping to finalize the deal in 2014.
Unless you’re a corporate CEO — who looks at the travesty that is NAFTA and asks “How can we offshore more jobs, import unsafe food and products, weaken consumer, workplace and environmental safeguards, and relinquish our national sovereignty to secret corporate tribunals, all so that I can have even more money?” — the TPP under negotiation is a very bad idea.
The only way the Obama administration can get this TPP deal done is with “Fast Track” — an anti-democratic Nixon-era maneuver that transfers Congress’ constitutional trade authority to the president. After hundreds of grassroots and D.C. meetings, rallies and more, 190 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have said “no” to Fast Track.
Next year we will make sure a majority refuse to speed passage of the TPP.
6. Public Health Threats
In April, severe ethical lapses were uncovered in federally funded clinical experiments — conducted by prominent universities like Yale, Stanford and Duke — that subjected premature babies to increased risk of blindness, brain damage and death without the parents and even some of the doctors being properly informed of the methodology and hazards.
We are spearheading a campaign to force government regulators and medical researchers to drastically strengthen their commitment to the principle of informed consent in studies involving human patients.
In November, the FDA at last proposed a rule in response to a petition filed with the agency back in 2011 that could save countless lives.
A 2010 Supreme Court decision held that manufacturers of generic drugs could not, on their own, change their labeling when new dangers are discovered with their products. That left them with no incentive to investigate and report safety problems — even where they dominate the market, and even for the hundreds of prescription drugs that exist only in generic form.
The FDA’s proposed rule will give manufacturers of generics authority — and motivation — to revise their labeling as dangers are discovered, fixing the problem created by the Supreme Court decision.
