John Berlau is director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at
the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Berlau has written about the impact of public policy on capital markets
and everyday investors and entrepreneurs for many publications including
the Washington Examiner, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Investor's
Business Daily, and National Review. He has been cited or quoted in The
New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times. He is a frequent
guest on many radio and television programs including CNBC's "The Call"
and "Closing Bell", "FOX& Friends" and "Your World with Neil Cavuto" on
Fox News, and C-Span's "Washington Journal."
Berlau previously was Washington correspondent for Investor's Business
Daily and a staff writer for Insight magazine, published by The
Washington Times. In 2002, he received Sandy Hume Memorial Award for
Excellence in Political Journalism from Washington's National Press
Club. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2003.
Berlau graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1994 with
degrees in journalism and economics.
He is the author of the book Eco-Freaks (Nelson Current, 2006), which
has been in Amazon's top 100 best-selling non-fiction books.
John Berlau
Dodd’s Main Street Punishment Bill
by John BerlauWith the focus this week on health care’s “home stretch” and concerns about government limiting the ability of ordinary Americans to make choices about medical treatment, another threat to freedom is accelerating that could harm Americans’ abilities to start a business, invest for retirement, and get affordable home and auto insurance policies. On Monday, after abruptly shutting down earnest negotiations between Senate Republicans, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd wannounced a partisan so-called financial regulatory reform bill that he will try to ram through his committee within a week.
And this 1336-page bill will do nothing to put restrictions on two entities that were proximate causes of the housing bubble, the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and instead hit Main Street businesses and entrepreneurial firms that had nothing to do with the crisis. The bill’s specific provisions would penalize the corporate structure of public companies from Google to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, tax prudent banks stable home and auto insurers and their policy holders to pay for the bailout of the next Lehman or AIG, depress revenues from incorporation fees in Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada and Vice President Biden’s Delaware by federalizing corporate governance laws, and put thousands of retailers who issue gift cards or even offer layaway plans under a new Federal Reserve bureaucracy to regulate credit.
Here are the highlights of some of most destructive provisions for the freedom of entrepreneurs, investors and consumers.
1. The shareholder rights jujitsu with “proxy access” and other corporate governance mandates.
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The Corker-Dodd-Alinsky Bill? : Center-Right Coalition Letter Warns about ‘Proxy Access’
by John BerlauCapitol Confidential and Jim Hoft have done an excellent job laying out concerns with the potential “compromise” bill that comes out of Sen. Bob Corker’s negotiations with Chris Dodd. But when it comes to the destructive provisions that could come out of a Dodd-Corker deal, they may have just scratched the surface.
In addition to the troubling new powers for a new nanny-state consumer agency and possibly the Federal Reserve added to the prospect of billions more in bailouts for reckless financial firm, the bill may also contain the sneaky “proxy access” power grab for unions, radical environmentalists, and other groups on the Left. This rule, inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is contained in Dodd’s “discussion draft” bill from late last year.
As I detailed in BigGovernment last week, “proxy access would federalize and override decades of state law governing the structure of corporations and force publicly-traded companies to put shareholders’ nominees for a board of directors on a company’s proxy ballot along with the firm’s own nominees for those positions.” Many shareholder groups that are pushing this are union pension funds, the radical Tides Foundation, and other progressive groups — from animal rights to anti-Israel — who place their own political agenda items at the expense of ordinary shareholders.
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Proxy Access: The Obama-Dodd-Alinsky Shareholder Jujitsu
by John BerlauWhat would Saul Alinksy do?
In the wake of defeats for the Obama administration last month both with Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the bluest of blue states and the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that will let thousands of groups speak more freely about candidates positions’ in the 2010 elections and beyond, that’s the question President Obama and his allies are probably asking. It’s also the question that proponents of limited, constitutional government and free enterprise must be asking in order to anticipate the organized Left’s next moves.
Alinksy was the father of left-wing community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and other primers, which explained to would-be leftist organizers how to “search out controversy” and “fan the latent hostilities.” Seeing the world as a never-ending conflict between the “haves and have-nots,” Alinsky wrote In Rules for Radicals that “in war, the end justifies almost any means.” One community organizer who took Alinsky’s words to heart was a young Barack Obama, who worked for an offshoot of Alinsky’s network of organizations in Chicago in the 1980s. Throughout his career, according to the Washington Post, Obama has “embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics.”
And one tactic in Alinsky’s arsenal dovetails almost perfectly with Obama’s new focus on so-called “financial reform” and his bashing of Wall Street to score political points. One of Alinsky’s most important rules for radicals was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” In this case, the “moral garment” is the supposed interest of shareholders.
Obama and Democrats are pushing legislation they claim would empower average investors against powerful corporate executives. They propose requiring a shareholder vote on everything from CEO pay to – in a move to limit the freedoms in the Citizens United decision — companies’ weighing in on political candidates.
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Big PhRMA Payoff: Hidden Tax on Pedialyte, Prenatal Vitamins, and Pain Relievers
by John BerlauIf you want to see how Obamacare will hit you and your family in the wallet, look no further than the inside of your medicine cabinet. Open the cabinet door and you may see an antihistamine such as Claritin for allergies, pain relief medicine such as Tylenol or Excedrin, Pedialyte to prevent your kids from becoming dehydrated when they are sick, and prenatal vitamins if you and your spouse are expecting another one.
All of these items in your cabinet have two things in common. One is that they are classified as “over the counter” (OTC) medicines and available without a doctor’s prescription. The other is that if you pay for any of these items with money in your flexible spending account (FSA) or health savings account (HSA) – and according to this guide from FSA administrator Benesyst , all of these are eligible expenses — you will face an effective tax increase of up to 40 percent on these items in the health care bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is poised to pass the U.S. Senate.
Both bills restrict individuals with these pre-tax accounts to buying a “medicine or drug only if such medicine or drug is a prescribed” one. And ironically, this tax that will raise health care costs substantially by creating incentives for the use of more expensive prescription drugs even when OTC drugs are just as safe and effective.
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“Gifted Hands” Surgeon Rips Into Obamacare
by John BerlauAs the Senate Finance Committee completed its work on a bill that would greatly expand the government’s role in health care – requiring nearly everyone to buy insurance, and designing that insurance through subsidies and mandates – President Obama is trying to rally doctors to his side. At an event last week at the Rose Garden, phalanxed by doctors wearing their white coats (as well as some that White House staffers had handed out), Obama declared, “nobody has more credibility with the American people on this issue than you do.”
Dr. Benjamin Carson receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Yet one of the nation’s top surgeons, with credibility and acclaim the world over for the pioneering surgeries he has and his personal story of overcoming hardship, recently ripped the dominant health care legislation before Congress in a critique similar to that of conservatives and libertarians. Benjamin Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Md., and recipient of numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, criticized in a recent interview the approach of the current bills for their mandate, creation of a “public option,” and lack of malpractice liability reform.
“My biggest problem is I feel it’s going in the wrong direction,” Carson told reporters at TV station WLOS in Asheville, N.C. (Video here.)“It’s giving us more government and less autonomy. And I think we should be going in exactly the opposite direction. We should be having more autonomy and less government. And that is the kind of thing that brings the prices down.” (more…)
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