SUMMARY:A new season of Major League Baseball begins this week, after a busy and lucrative winter that saw just 10 players awarded a total of over $2 billion in contracts. What’s behind these huge numbers for superstars, and where does it leave the rest of the player population financially? Amna Nawaz talks to ESPN columnist Jeff Passan, author of a book about baseball players as commodities.
Editor's note: In this segment, we referred to Mike Trout as the richest athlete in North America. We should have stated that he is the highest-paid athlete in North America currently.
SUMMARY: The FCC is expected to roll back net neutrality rules on Thursday, a move that could have significant implications for Americans' access to the internet. FCC chairman Ajit Pai is pushing to kill the Obama-era rules, which ensure that internet providers treat all content on the web equally. Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat on the commission, joins Judy Woodruff to explain why she opposes the change.
SUMMARY: College basketball is embroiled in yet another scandal. Ten people, including NCAA assistant coaches, an agent and a top executive at Adidas, have been charged with bribery involving thousands of dollars used to influence student athletes. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss what these accusations reveal about the “dark underbelly of college basketball.”
SUMMARY: Political consultants have obtained an exalted status in contemporary politics. But for their sky-high fees, and in an era when Donald Trump won his party's nomination without the help of experienced campaigners, what do consultants really offer a candidate? As part of a collaboration between The Atlantic and the PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff interviews journalist Molly Ball about what she found.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Regardless of the outcome on Election Day, political scientists have already begun studying this groundbreaking campaign.
One tantalizing subject, the true value of political consultants. Are they worth the millions they charge politicians each year?
Atlantic Magazine writer Molly Ball explores this question in her article, “There's Nothing Better Than a Scared, Rich Candidate.”
What a great quote.
(LAUGHTER)
MOLLY BALL, The Atlantic: Yes.
That is a quotation from a book by a political scientist about the political consulting industry. And it's something that a consultant said to him that just really summed up what I was getting at with this article, which was kind of asking the question, is this all a con game, this political consulting racket?
Candidates are spending billions of dollars, and what are they really getting for it? Or is it just the consultants lining their pockets?
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, this is a question that has been asked for some time, but it comes into particular relief this year, doesn't it?
MOLLY BALL: That's right.
I mean, first of all, look at what happened particularly in the Republican primaries. You had the two extremes. You had Jeb Bush spent $130 million, end up with four delegates.
JEB BUSH (R), Former Governor, Florida: I'm Jeb Bush, and I approve this message.
MOLLY BALL:Donald Trump spent almost nothing......
DONALD TRUMP (R), Presidential Nominee: I'm not doing that to brag, because you know what? I don't have to brag. I don't have to, believe it or not.
MOLLY BALL:.....Had no experienced consultants on his staff, nobody who'd ever run a presidential campaign before, and barely advertised on television, didn't do any of the tactical stuff we're used to and we write about so much, building of field operation and having a communications shop and all of that stuff. And he won the whole thing.
DONALD TRUMP: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
MOLLY BALL: So, the question is, does that mean the emperor has no clothes? Does that mean that all this spending — there's more money in politics than ever before. Because of the way campaign finance has been deregulated*, donor money is pouring into the political process. There's, by one estimate, $6 billion this year alone.
Where is all that money going, what is it doing, and is it having any effect?
aka Money before people or environment or Rape the Earth for more money.
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Minnesota’s Arrowhead region sits atop a trove of precious metals: four billion tons of raw material like copper and nickel, a haul worth $1 trillion, mining companies say. But local residents and activists are taking a stand against encroaching mining operations, citing the potentially disastrous environmental consequences. Josh Buettner of Iowa Public Television reports.
JOSH BUETTNER (PBS Iowa):Last fall, demonstrators pressured Minnesota’s Saint Louis County Board to publicly acknowledge a proposed copper-nickel sulfide mine would threaten the health of their local watershed.
WOMAN:It’s crazy to clean the river, only to allow it to be polluted again.
MAN: Mining is less than 1 percent of Minnesota’s economy.
JOSH BUETTNER:Opponents allege newly unearthed sulfur-bearing rock will create acid mine drainage, diluting previous efforts to restore the Saint Louis River, a waterway once crippled by iron ore pollution.
Since 2008, applications to conduct exploratory drilling have surged in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. And Toronto, Canada-based PolyMet Mining Corporation is first in line to unlock precious metals from the Duluth complex, a vast mineral deposit in the Arrowhead of Minnesota.
Mining proponents say geologists have known about the formation for over 60 years, but new technology will allow excavation of four billion tons of raw material worth an estimated $1 trillion.
LATISHA GIETZEN, PolyMet: It’s kind of a closed loop system.
JOSH BUETTNER: Latisha Gietzen, director of public affairs for PolyMet, says new mining techniques and rehabilitated infrastructure will mitigate past damages.
LATISHA GIETZEN: Because we’re using a Legacy site, we will actually be able to clean up some of the issues that are currently going on and bring modern technology to the process.
JOSH BUETTNER: Additionally, corporate officials say any water released from their proposed NorthMet site will be treated to meet state and federal guidelines.
But, for some, the mining industry’s track record is suspect. A well-established hub for agriculture, forestry and mining exports, the Port of Duluth sits between the contested estuary and Lake Superior. Ships from North America’s furthest inland port traditionally transported taconite, a mineral used to make steel, to mills around the Great Lakes Rust Belt and the world.
The finite resource is mined exclusively in the state’s Mesabi Iron Range. In the 1980s, two steel making facilities on the banks of the Saint Louis River became so polluted, they became qualified for EPA’s Superfund program.
With corporate- and taxpayer-funded cleanup continuing today, environmentalists such as Aaron Klemm fear relapse.
SUMMARY: How does the Islamic State militant group make money to fund its operations? A key source is oil extraction, which has helped make the group one of the richest terrorist armies in history. Economics correspondent Paul Solman takes a look at the Islamic State’s revenue sources, while William Brangham learns more from Cam Simpson of Bloomberg Businessweek.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Since the Paris attacks this weekend, the forces arrayed against ISIS have been pounding the territory it holds, and, specifically, hitting oil it’s been extracting for sale, as oil is a key source of ISIS revenue, having made the group one of the richest terrorist armies in history.
Earlier today, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton insisted the U.S. should be targeting ISIS’ money.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, Democratic Presidential Candidate: When it comes to terrorist financing, we have to go after the nodes that facilitate illicit trade and transactions. The U.N. Security Council should update its terrorism sanctions.
They have a resolution that does try to block terrorist financing and other enabling activities. But we have to place more obligations on countries to police their own banks.
PAUL SOLMAN: Republican candidate Donald Trump has been even more aggressive.
DONALD TRUMP, Republican Presidential Candidate: ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because they have certain oil caps, right? They have certain areas of oil that they took away. There’s some in Syria, some in Iraq. I would bomb the (EXPLETIVE DELETED) out of them.
PAUL SOLMAN: Meanwhile, there’s been a debate over just how much money ISIS actually has.
Last year, David Cohen, then with the U.S. Treasury Department, said on the “NewsHour”:
DAVID COHEN, Former U.S. Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence: In the aftermath of some of the airstrikes that have been taken, as well as some of the efforts that have been undertaken to restrict ISIL’s ability to use these smuggling networks, our estimate is that ISIL is now earning something on the order of a couple million dollars a week.
PAUL SOLMAN: A report this week in Bloomberg Businessweek suggests Cohen was overly optimistic, citing new data from the Treasury that ISIS actually took in as much as half-a-billion dollars in the past year from oil.
But just yesterday, Army Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the joint task force, said the stepped-up offensive against ISIS’ main source of revenue is paying off. For the first time, the U.S. is attacking oil delivery trucks.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the week’s news, including a look at the Democratic debate, campaign fundraising, and troop withdrawal in Afghanistan.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The Democratic candidates for president faced off in their first debate this week, and new fund-raising numbers give a closer look at which contenders are winning the money game.
For all that and more, we turn to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
So, you watched the debate, obviously. How was the tone different from this? It seems that perhaps FOX News set the tone in a much more aggressive and sharp way for the questioners in this round. Is that what we’re going to see throughout the cycle?
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist: I think that Democrats, generally speaking, felt better about their debates than probably Republicans did about theirs.
There is no question that Donald Trump brought big numbers and brought a certain level of suspense, and you kind of hold your breath at what’s going to happen to it. But Martin O’Malley and — the former governor of Maryland, in one of his rare good moments on Tuesday night, pointed out that the Democrats had gone through an entire debate discussing issues with no personal attacks. Nobody had been accused of being ugly or a loser, and there had been no racial stereotyping or negatives.
So I think, in that sense, there was an entirely — difference in tone.
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: There was a difference in tone, a difference in subject matter. I think the Democrats actually have the advantage of subject matter, because they actually did talk about middle-class concerns, whereas Republicans are talking about weird stuff.
But the other factor is, the Republicans are actually arguing and fighting with each other. And what I saw up there was Hillary Clinton performing extremely well, and four other guys lying down and let her, letting her have the nomination. It’s like Bernie Sanders held up the white flag of surrender when he refused to really go after her on the character and moral issue, which is his only way in.
And the other three, I don’t know why they were there. O’Malley was the one who surprised me the most. I thought he would come in and see the Fiorina model and come out with some sort of aggressiveness. He had a little toward the end, but in the beginning, it was just passive.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How do you think Sanders did?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, I thought Hillary Clinton had the best night of her campaign.
I thought that she was in command, she was comfortable, she was spontaneous. She came back from the break and was a little late getting to the stage, having obviously visited the ladies room, and kind of tossed a — gave the lie to the stereotype of the joyless feminist by pointing out it takes women a little bit longer to go to the lavatory.
And I just thought there was — it bordered on the authentic. I thought she did very well. David is right. Campaigns are about differences. And when you’re behind somebody, you better draw the differences with them, whether it’s in style, or substance, or record, or character. And the others didn’t do that.
I thought Bernie had a — Bernie Sanders had a better night than David thinks he did, and I think it was reflected in the dial polls, which viewers watch it and their emotions and reactions are gauged. It’s a very legitimate way of measuring people’s reaction. People use it on speeches, presidential acceptance speeches and so forth. He did well on that. He did well on the focus groups. ----- MARK SHIELDS: You can’t talk at the money, Hari, without talking about the concentration of big money in this campaign.
And The New York Times did a story last Sunday of 158 families in the United States that have given over half the money in this campaign.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So far, yes.
MARK SHIELDS: Citizens United, thank you, Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, Justice(s) Scalia and Thomas and Kennedy. I mean, this is truly oligarchy.
And people who worry about big money having too large a voice, this has given them a megaphone. And the golden rule operates, where who he has the gold rules. And it is truly terrifying for those who care about democracy.
SUMMARY: Sesame Street, the beloved children's television series and PBS staple since 1969, will have a new address coming this fall. A five-year partnership with HBO means episodes will air first on the premium pay cable channel before appearing on public television nine months later. Judy Woodruff discusses the changes with Gary Knell, former CEO of Sesame Workshop.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally, big changes at “Sesame Street.”
Yesterday, the long-running PBS children’s television series announced a new five-year partnership with HBO starting this fall. New episodes of the show, a PBS staple since it premiered in 1969, will appear first on the premium pay cable channel. Then it will air for free on their traditional public television home nine months later.
To help us explore what led to this change, and what it means, we turn to Gary Knell. He was CEO of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit group behind the show, from 2000 until 2011. Then he was head of NPR, before moving to his current job as president of the National Geographic Society.
Gary Knell, great to have you with us.
GARY KNELL, Former CEO, Sesame Workshop: Thanks for having me back.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, tell us, what was behind this? Now that we have a day to digest the news, what do we attribute this to? What were the forces at work?
GARY KNELL: Well, I think you have got to look at this three ways, Judy.
For HBO, this is about streaming. They’re competing with Netflix, and for them — and Amazon Prime — and this is a way of getting a number-one quality brand onto their streaming platforms.
For “Sesame Street”, this filled an economic gap. And their economic model for many years has really been filled by home video and toys and books and other things that they were able to monetize off the brand to pay for the production in a lot of ways from — for PBS. And this is a way of plugging that gap and giving them running room.
And I think, for PBS, it’s a little bit of an admission that maybe they’re a little bigger than “Sesame Street.” They have 19 preschool and kids shows on PBS. And PBS KIDS has become a robust network that is bigger than “Sesame Street” now. It includes “Sesame Street.” That’s an important component, but it’s bigger than.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But why HBO? We think of this as a — frankly, a channel that appeals to adults. It’s a premium pay cable thing. It’s something people are going to have to pay for. Why — couldn’t it work at PBS?
GARY KNELL: Well, it could, but I think, for HBO, this is quite a brilliant move, I think, to go after millennial audiences and young parents who grew up with “Sesame Street.”
(like I said, it's all about the money, for HBO)
And, again, they’re in a fight to the death now, not so much about their cable channel, so to speak, but it’s much more about streaming. It’s this a la carte world, where we’re now competing against every piece of content ever invented, from a cat video to “Gone With the Wind,” every night, and unless you have great a la carte programs, you’re going to be in a competitive disadvantage to the Netflixes and the Amazon Primes of the world.
SUMMARY: The amount of money spent in the 2016 election cycle is on track to double the roughly $2 billion spent in 2012. One reason is the rise of spending by millionaire and billionaire political activists on both sides of the aisle. Gwen Ifill talks to billionaire Tom Steyer of NextGen Climate, who has pledged millions on the issue of climate change.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):The ever-growing cost of political warfare is now reaching into the stratosphere, with the 2016 election on track to possibly double the roughly $2 billion spent in 2012.
Part of the reason for all that spending has been the rise of millionaire and billionaire political activists on both sides of the political aisle. In the past, we have looked at the Koch brothers, who have pledged nearly a billion dollars to Republican and conservative causes this cycle. On the left, there is billionaire Tom Steyer, who has pledged millions on the issue of climate change.
And Tom Steyer joins me now.
Welcome to the NewsHour.
TOM STEYER, Founder, NextGen Climate: Nice to see you, Gwen.
GWEN IFILL: You spent, they say, $70 million in the 2014 midterm elections. Is money the key to this 2016 election?
TOM STEYER:I sure hope not, because, from what I can tell, the Democrats have a very good chance of being outspent.
I think the key to the election is going to be message and candidate, the way it usually is. And if the message is significant and meaningful to voters, and if the candidate connects as an authentic person who really cares about their concerns and wants to address them and can address them, I think that is going to carry the day.
SUMMARY: Some popular weight loss and workout supplements contain a chemical called BMPEA that includes an ingredient nearly identical to amphetamine, according to a new study. Dr. Pieter Cohen of Harvard Medical School and Daniel Fabricant of the Natural Products Association join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the safety and regulation of dietary supplements.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A study out this week is calling new attention to the health risks of some dietary supplements, and whether the industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are doing enough to protect consumers.
It found that some popular weight loss and workout supplements contains a chemical called BMPEA that includes an ingredient nearly identical to amphetamine.
And again to Hari, who has the latest on this from our New York studios.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):Researchers found the amphetamine-like stimulant in 11 of 21 products they tested, including in popular ones like JetFuel Superburn, and JetFuel T-300 that are sold at stores nationwide.
Last year, Canadian health officials pulled some supplements with those chemicals from shelves over concerns of stroke risk and cardiovascular health. Today, the Vitamin Shoppe chain announced it would stop selling any products in the study that were believed to contain BMPEA.
The study is raising flags once again about the regulation and responsibility of a $30 billion-a-year industry.
Dr. Pieter Cohen of Harvard Medical School was the lead author of the study. And Daniel Fabricant is with the industry trade group the Natural Products Association. He also ran the FDA’s Division of Dietary Supplements from 2011 to 2014.
What’s worse: Ebola or AIDS? Measles or malnutrition? Lung cancer or low back pain? As individuals, as a nation, and as a global community, where should we focus our time and money to improve lives the most?
The way we usually answer these questions is to count the number of deaths: The more people killed, the more important the problem. Counting deaths is so familiar that few have thought to question it. But death toll alone says nothing about how long people live, and good health is much more than not being dead.
Every year, for example, more than six million people worldwide die of stroke. Only about 300,000 people die worldwide of meningitis. So is stroke 20 times worse for humanity than meningitis? Not necessarily — because most people who die of stroke are age 75 or older, while those most likely to die of meningitis are infants. Death is an inevitability, but a death in very early childhood is a tragedy. All else being equal, saving the lives of infants should still be one of our global health systems’ top priorities.
Now consider everything that doesn’t kill people. If you are blind or deaf, anxious or depressed, disabled, disfigured or simply sick, your pain does not show up in death records or life expectancy statistics. Yet nonfatal conditions are responsible for a majority of health spending — and of human suffering. Every time we see a doctor and don’t die afterward, we demonstrate the inadequacy of counting deaths to track health.
Faced with these issues, health economists have in recent years developed new summary measures of personal, public and global health, perhaps chief among them a unit they call disability-adjusted life years, or DALYs. DALYs (rhymes with tallies) are akin to one of the advanced statistics — like Wins Above Replacement — that have revolutionized professional sports. Except, in this case, the wins and losses are years of healthy life.
DALYs are calculated first by measuring how many potential years of life are lost when a person dies. DALYs then incorporate the total years lived with disability — a measure based on international estimates of how much each nonfatal condition detracts from perfect health. Being paralyzed, for example, is considered close to half as healthy as perfect health, so every year you live with paralysis, you have lost the equivalent of half a year of healthy life.
Focusing on disability-adjusted life years may sound convoluted compared with simple lives lost. But it more closely aligns with most people’s intuitive sense of how health really works. Say, for example, that I’m in a paralyzing car crash at age 35, but survive until age 65, when I die (alas) from a heart attack. Then, assuming an ideal life span of 85 years, I lost 20 years of potential life to the heart attack. But, because I lived 30 years with paralysis after the car crash, the crash cost me the equivalent of 15 years of healthy life. My total health loss is 35 DALYs, a figure that accounts both for the health loss from the fatal heart attack and the health loss from the nonfatal car crash.
Just as baseball and other sports have been transformed by our understanding of new numbers, public and global health can be, too.
In late 2012, the British medical journal The Lancet published a new ranking of the world’s leading health problems comparing deaths and DALYs by cause. In terms of death, scientists reported, lung cancer kills about 200,000 more people than road injuries annually. But measured by DALYs, road injuries are almost two and a half times worse for humanity. That’s because most fatal victims of lung cancer are in their 60s, 70s and 80s, while those most likely to die of road injury are in their 20s and 30s — and road injuries cause almost 40 times more disabilities. If you are an international policy maker or aid agency choosing how much to invest in road safety relative to antismoking campaigns, that’s vital information.
The same kind of analysis works even better at a national level, where most health spending takes place, because current health care gaps usually correlate much more with the leading causes of DALYs than the leading causes of deaths. As Mexico moved to a universal health care system in the last decade, it used this type of analysis to prioritize those treatments — like medications for childhood cancers, and emergency care after a car accident — that reduce DALYs the most.
Australia has used its own DALY calculations to direct close to $900 million in public health program spending since 2009, focusing successfully on curbing tobacco use, childhood obesity and diabetes.
Now people everywhere can bring “Moneyball” to medicine. A few months after releasing their global numbers in The Lancet, the same scientists supplied the underlying figures for 187 nations. These statistics will be updated again later this year. At last report, in the United States, measured by DALYs, the third-largest health problem was low back pain. Fifth is major depressive disorders. Eleventh is neck pain. Thirteenth is anxiety disorders. None of these maladies kill anyone directly, so they don’t even show up on a list of leading killers. But they still cause huge amounts of pain and suffering, and cost our economy billions of dollars in lost productivity.
When will low back pain get the research funds and attention given to lung cancer, just below it in a DALY ranking? The toll from major depressive disorder, No. 5, is estimated to be 20 percent worse than that from stroke. Why don’t we promote early detection in the same way, on public billboards and ad campaigns? Health loss from anxiety disorders is estimated to be 80 percent higher than that from breast cancer. Do advocates for anxiety treatment even have their own colored ribbon?
These are provocative questions, and new statistics in any field are inherently threatening to the status quo. But just because we have always looked at things one way is no reason not to consider alternatives, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as improving how we all live and die. We don’t have to take new measures like the DALY as the final word, but they highlight areas for health gain we might otherwise miss. Advanced stats are too important to leave to professional sports teams. We can all try to choose the prevention, detection and treatment strategies that best add years to life and life to years.
The government’s new website on drug and device company ties to doctors will be incomplete and may be misleading — for now.
The government's release today of a trove of data detailing drug and device companies' payments to doctors has been widely hailed as a milestone for transparency. But it is also something else; a very limited window into the billions in industry spending. Before you dive in and search your doctor, here are five caveats to keep in mind.
The data doesn’t cover all payments.
The Physician Payment Sunshine Act, part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, called for the first public release of this data 18 months ago. But because of delays writing detailed rules implementing the law, the first release of data will happen today and it will only cover payments for a few months, from August to December 2013. So if you search for your doctor and you do not find him or her, it doesn't mean that he or she didn't receive a payment. Also, those few months may not be representative of a company's spending over an entire year. Some companies may try to concentrate promotional talks at the start of a year, and those wouldn't be represented in this data. Some of these problems will be resolved by the time the government releases data on payments for the full calendar year 2014, expected next summer.
By design, some data on research payments won't be included.
The Sunshine Act allows drug and device companies to delay the publication of data related to research of new products or, in some cases, new uses for existing products. The payments won't be made public until the product is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or four calendar years after the payment was made, whichever comes first. It is unclear how much money is involved, but, again, just because a doctor doesn't show up as receiving a research payment doesn't mean he or she hasn't received one. Beyond that, not all types of health professionals are included. You'll find physicians (medical doctors and osteopaths), dentists, chiropractors, podiatrists and optometrists. But companies do not have to report payments to nurse practitioners or physician assistants, so you won't find them.
Because of errors, additional data isn't being released.
CMS has acknowledged that one third of the payment records submitted by companies for last year had data problems that could lead to cases of mistaken identity. The names associated with those payments won't be released today. Federal officials are asking companies to recheck the data, which should be released publicly next year. CMS officials discovered the problem while investigating a physician's complaint that payments were being attributed to him even though they were made to another physician with the same name. In the process of reviewing that issue, it found "intermingled data," meaning physicians were being linked to medical license numbers or national provider identification numbers that were not theirs.
Not all payments have the same significance.
When consumers go to the federal website, they will see payments divided into different categories; consulting fees, speaking fees (called "services other than consulting"), research payments, honoraria, gifts, entertainment, food and beverage, travel and lodging, educational items, charitable contributions, royalties, ownership interests, and grants. Those different types of payments signal different levels of involvement with a company. Educational items, for instance, include medical textbooks and reprints of journal studies given to doctors. Research payments can include more than the pay a doctor got to lead a study. Payments for clinical studies may include costs associated with patient care, supplies, as well as the time spent by health care professionals treating patients and managing the study. Educational items that directly benefit patients (such as anatomical posters) and medication samples do not have to be reported and won't be displayed.
This is the first federal release of this data: Expect errors.
While the payments database is a far cry from Healthcare.gov — and less complex – it's reasonable to expect some glitches. CGI Federal, the company that led what turned out to be the botched launch of Healthcare.gov, is also responsible for the release of the payment data. Beyond that, drug and device manufacturers sometimes make their own errors. Doctors have similar names, and a payment made to one may be attributed to a different one. The government gave doctors a 45-day window to review and dispute payments attributed to them before the information becomes public, but it's unclear how many did. The American Medical Association, as well as pharmaceutical and device trade groups, say the process has been confusing. Probably, many doctors will notice payments attributed to them in the days to come when they search their names in Google. If you can't find what you're looking for on the government's website, you might try our Dollars for Docs feature, where we have been tracking payments by some large companies for four years. We've just added data from 2013, and have included 17 drug companies accounting for half of United States drug sales that year. In some cases, that will be more complete than the federal data. If you have a question about what your doctor received, you should ask your doctor.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): How has big money come to dominate politics? And who is writing the checks? It can be hard to tell.
For instance, The New York Times discovered a glitch in the website run by the tax-exempt wing of the Republican Governors Association that revealed the names of prominent corporate donors. Large political contributions are perfectly legal, and both parties solicit them. But corporate donors’ identities are usually kept secret.
In this book conversation, Jeffrey Brown looks at a group of very rich donors who’s names are already well-known.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The numbers keep growing and the dollars keep flowing. This midterm election has already seen more spending by outside interest groups than any in history, some $230 million and counting, more, in fact, than any election, other than the last one for the presidency in 2012.
Under campaign finance laws, much of this funding is not required to be disclosed, but a lot of it comes from a relatively small number of the very wealthiest Americans.
Darrell West, the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, writes of their influence on politics in his new book, “Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust.”
And welcome to you.
DARRELL WEST, Brookings Institution: Thank you.
JEFFREY BROWN: The argument first is that billionaires and their money are big players in politics, right? How big and how much influence?
DARRELL WEST: Very big.
The Koch brothers are estimated to be spending $125 million just on this election year, much of it focused on those key Senate races, but then liberal and moderate billionaires also are amping up their resources. Michael Bloomberg has put $50 million into fighting the NRA and gun violence. Tom Steyer is very concerned about climate change. He’s spending $50 million of his own money.
So, 2014 is shaping up as the battle of the billionaires. ---- DARRELL WEST: Well, this is certainly not the first time wealthy interests have been influential. When you think about the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the other barons of 100 years ago, they were very influential and in some cases dictated public policy.
But, after Watergate, we made a serious effort to clean up the political process. There were caps on spending. People had to disclose the sources of their contributions, but over the last 30 years, there have been gaping loopholes in these rules.
And so now we have essentially returned to the pre-Watergate era of big money and great secrecy. And this is also taking place at a time when the news media are much weaker. And so the oversight organizations are having a difficult time keeping track of all the money.
"The public be damned!"
— William H. Vanderbilt, railroad magnate, 1882
A shattering new study by two political science professors has found that ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in our country. The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in the United States.
This study should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government. To reclaim the promise of American democracy, ordinary citizens must act positively to change the relationship between the people and our government
The new study, with the jaw-clenching title of "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," is forthcoming in the fall 2014 edition of Perspectives on Politics. Its authors, Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, examined survey data on 1,779 national policy issues for which they could gauge the preferences of average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups and business-dominated interest groups. They used statistical methods to determine the influence of each of these four groups on policy outcomes, including both policies that are adopted and rejected.
The analysts found that when controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups, the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a "non-significant, near-zero level." The analysts further discovered that rich individuals and business-dominated interest groups dominate the policymaking process. The mass-based interest groups had minimal influence compared to the business-based interest groups.
The study also debunks the notion that the policy preferences of business and the rich reflect the views of common citizens. They found to the contrary that such preferences often sharply diverge and when they do, the economic elites and business interests almost always win and the ordinary Americans lose.
The authors also say that given limitations to tapping into the full power elite in America and their policy preferences, "the real world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater" than their findings indicate.
Ultimately, Gilens and Page conclude from their work, "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
Rich individuals and business interests have the capacity to hire the lobbyists that shadow legislators in Washington and to fill the campaign coffers of political candidates. Ordinary citizens are themselves partly to blame, however, because they do not choose to vote.
America's turnout rate places us near the bottom of industrialized democracies. More than 90 million eligible Americans did not vote in the presidential election of 2012 and more than 120 million did not vote in the midterm elections of 2010.
Electoral turnout in the United States is highly correlated with economic standing: The more affluent Americans vote in much higher proportion than the less affluent. A study by Ellen Shearer of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern found that 59 percent of 2012 voters earned $50,000 or more per year, compared to 39 percent of non-voters. Only 12 percent of non-voters earned more than $75,000, compared to 31 percent of voters.
Ordinary citizens in recent decades have largely abandoned their participation in grassroots movements. Politicians respond to the mass mobilization of everyday Americans as proven by the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But no comparable movements exist today. Without a substantial presence on the ground, people-oriented interest groups cannot compete against their wealthy adversaries.
Average Americans also have failed to deploy the political techniques used by elites. Political Action Committees (PACs) and super-PACs, for example, raise large sums of money to sway the outcome of any election in the United States. Although average Americans cannot match the economic power of the rich, large numbers of modest contributions can still finance PACs and super-PACs that advance our common interests.
If only they vote and organize, ordinary Americans can reclaim American democracy and challenge the politicians who still echo the view of old Vanderbilt that the public should be damned.
Lichtman is distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington.
Friday, April 18, 2014
My answer, big money wants to buy the elections by shouting out the individual voter. Big money corrupts our election process.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Last night was the deadline for political candidates, parties and some outside groups to report how much money they have raised and spent in the first three months of this election year. One thing is clear: Organizations not officially linked to the candidates are spending at record levels.
Combined, these outside groups have poured in more than $57 million so far this cycle. That outpaces any election in American history at this calendar date, except the 2012 presidential election, which came on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling prohibiting restrictions on spending.
Now, a quarter of all this year’s money has been spent in just six states, where some of the key Senate races are playing out. Overall, more money has been spent already in this election than the entire 2000 presidential election, and the races have barely just begun.
And here to talk about what all this means is Sheila Krumholz. She’s the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. It’s a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. And David Keating, he’s the president of the Center for Competitive Politics. It’s a nonprofit organization that promotes deregulation of campaign finance.
The dark money giant Crossroads GPS, launched by Republican strategist Karl Rove, told the IRS it raised almost $180 million in 2012, including one donation of $22.5 million, another of $18 million and another of $10 million. Fifty donations were for $1 million or more. Because the group is a social welfare nonprofit, none of the donors have to be made public.
The details come from the group’s 2012 tax return, which Crossroads made available today at their Washington office. We picked up a copy and you can see it here.
Crossroads raised more than twice as much in 2012 as it collected in 2010 and 2011 combined.
The group also reported spending almost $75 million on direct and indirect campaign activities.
Crossroads GPS, also known as Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is the largest social nonprofit active in elections. The group was created after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling opened the door to unlimited corporate and union spending on elections, to super PACs and to hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous money.
In Crossroads’ application for nonprofit status in 2010, the group told the IRS that while it planned to spend money on elections, “any such activity will be limited in amount, and will not constitute the organization’s primary purpose.”
In the 2012 cycle, Crossroads told the Federal Election Commission it spent almost twice as much on political ads as the next most active social welfare nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, backed by conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
Crossroads is in the crosshairs of campaign finance watchdogs, who have criticized social welfare nonprofits for exploiting loopholes in tax and election rules to be able to pour millions from undisclosed donors into campaigns. Democrats have also targeted Crossroads for special attention. In 2012, the lawyer for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign asked the FEC to force Crossroads to register as a political committee and disclose its donors. (So far, that hasn’t happened.)
“There is no way in the world that $20 million-plus contributions, $10 million-plus contributions, that are funding campaign ads should be kept secret from the American people,” said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, who has worked to rein in outside spending in politics for decades.
Social welfare nonprofits are allowed to spend money on elections, but they are also supposed to be able to prove that social welfare is their primary purpose. ProPublica has focused extensively on how many of these groups have poured much of their resources into political races.
Tax returns are one of the few places in which groups are required to detail both their revenues and expenditures and justify their social welfare mission. But the returns are often filed more than a year after an election.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): A startling report in today’s Washington Post, the newspaper says more than a thousand of the nation’s non-profits have each acknowledged losses of a quarter million dollars or more, because of theft, investment fraud, embezzlement or other unauthorized use of funds. The report is based on tax filings by the non-profits during the past five years. Each non-profit disclosed the problem by checking a box on the tax form indicating what’s called a significant diversion of funds. For more about all this, we’re joined from Washington by Joe Stevens, he’s an investigative reporter for the Post and the co-author of today’s piece.
Two dark money groups linked to conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have paid a record $1 million in fines to California to settle allegations that the combined $15 million they spent on two ballot proposals in the state was not properly disclosed.
The civil settlement, announced Thursday afternoon in Sacramento, caps a year of investigation into the activities of the two Arizona groups, Americans for Responsible Leadership and the Center to Protect Patient Rights.
The settlement disclosed new details in the case, including how the money was raised and how the Center to Protect Patient Rights disguised its two contributions to two California political committees. As part of the settlement, the Center to Protect Patient Rights conceded it was responsible for funneling $11 million through Americans for Responsible Leadership to a political committee spending money to fight a tax-hike measure and to support a proposition restricting unions’ political power.
The Center to Protect Patient Rights also gave an additional $4 million to another dark money group, the American Future Fund, which gave the money to another political committee spending on the anti-union measure.
“What is the takeaway from this trail of dark money?” asked Ann Ravel, the outgoing head of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, which investigated the groups along with the state attorney general’s office. “This is a nationwide issue. These groups exploit loopholes in the law to undermine the clear purpose of the law, to give essential information to the public.”
The state assessed one $500,000 fine to the Center to Protect Patient Rights only, and another $500,000 fine to the two groups jointly. The state is also demanding that the two political committees “disgorge,” or hand over, the $15 million they received in improper donations through the Center to Protect Patient Rights before the end of November. All of the money would go to California’s general fund.
In an interview, Gary Winuk, the chief of enforcement for the California Fair Political Practices Commission, acknowledged that the state may have to go to court to recover that $15 million. One of the political committees has already closed down.
The settlement says California authorities determined that the Center to Protect Patient Rights “inadvertently, or at worst negligently,” did not report itself as a donor to the American Future Fund. A similar decision was made on the group’s lack of disclosure to Americans for Responsible Leadership.
In a statement sent through its lawyer, the Center to Protect Patient Rights said the commission recognized it erred largely because it had never before made contributions in California and that it had no intention to violate campaign reporting rules.
“Also, the California Attorney General conducted a complete and thorough investigation and agreed that the conduct was unintentional and inadvertent,” said the lawyer, Malcolm Segal.
Americans for Responsible Leadership did not return a message seeking comment.
Anonymous money funneled through social welfare nonprofits and trade associations has become a major factor in federal elections since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in early 2010 opened up the door to unlimited corporate and union spending on outside ads, as documented by ProPublica. In the past two election cycles, social welfare nonprofits have spent more than $350 million, mostly from unknown donors, on election ads telling people to vote for or against federal candidates.
Some national groups have also started playing on the state level, particularly with ballot proposals.
The California agreement, reached on Oct. 17, underscored how some states, such as California, Idaho and Montana, have actually done more to identify anonymous donors than the Federal Election Commission. In June, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman imposed regulations attempting to require disclosure for money spent on state elections. A new disclosure bill has been introduced in California. This month, after a push by California’s Ravel, regulators from 10 states announced the launch of a nationwide effort to encourage the disclosure of donors.
But the settlement also highlights the limitations of investigations into who’s behind dark money groups: Instead of unmasking some reclusive billionaire or shy corporation, regulators often uncover yet another nonprofit, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. The original sources of the money spent in California were not publicly identified, nor will they be.
“A number of donors did not want to be identified,” said Winuk, the enforcement chief for California’s campaign finance regulator, who received only a redacted list of donors for the original contributions.
And while the groups have been linked to the Koch brothers, it’s not clear how exactly they’re connected. The Center to Protect Patient Rights, which operates out of a post office box in Arizona and doesn’t even have a website, has been described practically like an ATM machine for various groups affiliated with the Koch brothers. The press release issued by California authorities says the Center and Americans for Responsible Leadership “operated as part of the ‘Koch Brothers Network’ of dark money political nonprofit corporations.”
The Kochs have long been known for spending millions to influence elections behind the scenes, through a complex network of groups that critics have nicknamed “the Kochtopus.” The Kochs themselves have remained determinedly in the background.
One link between these two groups and the Koch network is Sean Noble, a GOP strategist who runs two political consulting firms and is the sole employee of the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which was launched in 2009. In 2010, he spoke on a panel at a Koch brothers’ secretive retreat, small semiannual affairs that are invitation-only and closed to the media. In 2010 and 2011, the Center to Protect Patient Rights handed out almost $60 million to conservative groups that spent tens of millions on election ads. The Huffington Post recently quoted a GOP operative describing Noble as “the wizard behind the screen” for the Koch network’s election efforts in 2012.
Noble did not return a call for comment.
Another link is Wayne Gable, a former top official at Koch Industries who has also served in leadership roles in several nonprofits formed by the Kochs. In 2011, Gable launched a new trade association that gave almost $115 million to the Center to Protect Patient Rights over the following year. It’s not yet clear how the Center doled out its money, as its tax return for 2012 isn’t yet available.
The leader of Americans for Responsible Leadership has close ties to Noble. Republican Kirk Adams hired Noble’s firm in 2011 and 2012 to help run his failed campaign to replace outgoing U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake in Arizona. Adams lost in the primary in August 2012; the next month, he was named president of Americans for Responsible Leadership.
According to the settlement, some $24.5 million of the money distributed by the Center to Protect Patient Rights was raised by GOP strategist Tony Russo for another organization, Americans for Job Security, a Virginia-based trade association. (Russo didn’t return calls for comment.)
Americans for Job Security gave the money to the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Then the Center gave about $7 million to the Iowa dark money powerhouse American Future Fund on Sept. 11, 2012; of that, the American Future Fund gave about $4 million to a new California committee, the California Future Fund for Free Markets, which supported the anti-union measure. That committee has since closed down.
The Center also gave $18 million to Americans for Responsible Leadership in October 2012, recommending that the group “should use the funds to support common social interests, including support” for the Small Business Action Committee PAC, a committee that Russo was also raising money for, the settlement said. Americans for Responsible Leadership then gave $11 million to the Small Business Action Committee PAC to spend on the two ballot proposals.
That $11 million contribution sparked a complaint, an investigation and a court battle. Just before the election, Americans for Responsible Leadership admitted that it got its money from the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which in turn got the money from Americans for Job Security.
The fine is the largest in California history in a campaign-finance case.
The manner in which the groups paid it speaks volumes about how dark their money really is.
They paid by cashier’s check, sent by a Sacramento lawyer’s office Thursday morning, betraying no clue to the money’s origin.
George Washington University — which got in trouble last year for misreporting admissions data to bolster its college ranking — is making yet another confession.
The university has been misrepresenting its admissions and financial-aid policy for years, touting a “need-blind” admissions policy while in fact giving preference to wealthier students in the final stages of the admissions process, according to the student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, which first reported on the practice. Meanwhile, hundreds of academically comparable but needier students were put on the waitlist for admission because they lacked the financial resources.
Many colleges and universities like to tout “need-blind” admissions processes, or the practice of judging their applicants’ academic qualifications strictly on their merits and making decisions without factoring in applicants’ wealth. In recent years, some colleges that have traditionally been need-blind have weighed whether to become more need-aware.
Until a few days ago, the undergraduate admissions page for George Washington University stated, “Requests for financial aid do not affect admissions decisions.” That language was removed over the weekend. (Here’s the archived version)
The updated page now explains that the admissions committee “evaluates” candidates initially without factoring in their financial need, but then considers applicants’ financial resources “at the point of finalizing admissions decisions.”
“I believe using the phrase ‘need aware’ better represents the totality of our practices than using the phrase ‘need blind,’” Laurie Koehler, senior associate provost for enrollment management, said in a statement to ProPublica.
“What we are trying to do is increase the transparency of the admissions process,” said Koehler.
Top GW administrators have repeatedly stated over the years that the university is need-blind. When the student newspaper in 2011 did a story about how some colleges are moving away from need-blind admissions, one administrator told the paper, “We’re still need-blind.”
It’s worth noting that the “need-blind” label can be as much about marketing as it is about giving all applicants a fair shot.
Many schools are “need-blind” but don’t actually give out much need-based aid. We recently detailed how universities, looking to boost their bottom lines, are increasingly using financial-aid dollars to attract wealthier students.
“It sounds better to people to say, ‘We're need-blind.’ People think that's a badge of courage,” said Matt Malatesta, vice president for admissions, financial aid, and enrollment at Union College, a small liberal arts college in New York that practices need-aware admissions.
Unless schools pony up the aid dollars to meet students’ financial needs, touting the need-blind label isn’t particularly meaningful for students, who may simply get the offer of admission along with an offer to take on unsustainable debt.
“There are pluses and minuses on both sides of the debate,” Malatesta said in an earlier interview. “I’m not a believer that one is better than another.”
But in contrast to GW, many of the schools that have weighed the pluses and minuses of need-blind versus need-aware have done so quite publicly.
Grinnell College, for instance, announced earlier this year that after considering whether to become need-aware, it would remain need-blind for the time being -- but would still look to wealthier students in the recruitment process and use merit aid to help attract them.
Wesleyan University last year took the other route, announcing it would give up the “need-blind” label and start to consider students’ financial need once its aid dollars were given out.
Both institutions are part of a handful of colleges across the country that promise to meet the full needs of all admitted students. George Washington University has not offered any such guarantee.
Earlier this year, George Washington University was featured in the Washington Post as trying to buck its “rich-kid reputation.” “I’m not going to deny we have a lot of students that come from wealthy families,” GW President Steven Knapp told the Post in April. “But we are increasingly trying to diversify, and I think we have been diversifying compared to where we were 10 years ago.”
About 13 percent of undergraduates at George Washington University receive the federal Pell grant for low-income students. That’s low, according to a recent report by the New America Foundation that also noted that the university charges its few low-income students, on average, a high net price even after grants and scholarships.
Tuition alone is more than $47,000 a year, and room and board costs another $11,000. The majority of students at the university pay less than the full sticker price, due to the university’s strategy of offering grants as discounts.
But even after grants are applied, low-income students at GW still pay a heavy price. Federal data for the 2011-2012 school year show that students at the university coming from families making $30,000 or less paid, on average, $21,000 to attend the university.
Sept. 13:This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 7, 2013.
We’re continuing to learn new details about how the American government is collecting bulk records of citizens’ communications -- from demanding that a telephone company hand over the daily records of “all telephone calls in its systems,” to collecting an unknown number of emails, instant messages and Facebook messages.
It’s not clear how much information about ordinary people’s conversations the National Security Agency has gathered. But we do know there’s a thriving public market for data on individual Americans -- especially data about the things we buy and might want to buy.
Consumer data companies scoop up large amounts of consumer information about people around the world and sell it, providing marketers details about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars you drive. But many people still don't know data brokers exist.
Regulators and some in Congress have been taking a closer look at this industry, and are beginning to push the companies to give consumers more information and control over what happens to their data. The prominent data broker Acxiom recently launched aboutthedata.com, a site that allows you to review some of the information the company has connected to your name -- and, potentially, edit and update it as well.
Here's a look (originally published in March) at what we know about the consumer data industry.
How much do these companies know about individual people?
They start with the basics, like names, addresses and contact information, and add on demographics, like age, race, occupation and "education level," according to consumer data firm Acxiom's overview of its various categories.
But that's just the beginning: The companies collect lists of people experiencing "life-event triggers" like getting married, buying a home, sending a kid to college — or even getting divorced.
Credit reporting giant Experian has a separate marketing services division, which sells lists of "names of expectant parents and families with newborns" that are "updated weekly."
The companies also collect data about your hobbies and many of the purchases you make. Want to buy a list of people who read romance novels? Epsilon can sell you that, as well as a list of people who donate to international aid charities.
A subsidiary of credit reporting company Equifax even collects detailed salary and paystub information for roughly 38 percent of employed Americans, as NBC News reported. As part of handling employee verification requests, the company gets the information directly from employers.
Equifax said in a statement that the information is only sold to customers "who have been verified through a detailed credentialing process." It added that if a mortgage company or other lender wants to access information about your salary, they must obtain your permission to do so.
Of course, data companies typically don't have all of this information on any one person. As Acxiom notes in its overview, "No individual record ever contains all the possible data." And some of the data these companies sell is really just a guess about your background or preferences, based on the characteristics of your neighborhood, or other people in a similar age or demographic group.
Where are they getting all this info?
The stores where you shop sell it to them.
Datalogix, for instance, which collects information from store loyalty cards, says it has information on more than $1 trillion in consumer spending "across 1400+ leading brands." It doesn't say which ones. (Datalogix did not respond to our requests for comment.)
Data companies usually refuse to say exactly what companies sell them information, citing competitive reasons. And retailers also don't make it easy for you to find out whether they're selling your information.
But thanks to California's "Shine the Light" law, researchers at U.C. Berkeley were able to get a small glimpse of how companies sell or share your data. The study recruited volunteers to ask more than 80 companies how the volunteers' information was being shared.
Only two companies actually responded with details about how volunteers' information had been shared. Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent "your name, address and what you purchased" to seven other companies, including a data "cooperative" that allows retailers to pool data about customer transactions, and another company that later became part of Datalogix. (Restoration Hardware hasn't responded to our request for comment.)
Walt Disney also responded and described sharing even more information: not just a person's name and address and what they purchased, but their age, occupation, and the number, age and gender of their children. It listed companies that received data, among them companies owned by Disney, like ABC and ESPN, as well as others, including Honda, HarperCollins Publishing, Almay cosmetics, and yogurt company Dannon.
But Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said that Disney's letter, sent in 2007, "wasn't clear" about how the data was actually shared with different companies on the list. Outside companies like Honda only received personal information as part of a contest, sweepstakes, or other joint promotion that they had done with Disney, Mucha said. The data was shared "for the fulfillment of that contest prize, not for their own marketing purposes."
Where else do data brokers get information about me?
Government records and other publicly available information, including some sources that may surprise you. Your state Department of Motor Vehicles, for instance, may sell personal information — like your name, address, and the type of vehicles you own — to data companies, although only for certain permitted purposes, including identify verification.
Public voting records, which include information about your party registration and how often you vote, can also be bought and sold for commercial purposes in some states.
Are there limits to the kinds of data these companies can buy and sell?
Yes, certain kinds of sensitive data are protected — but much of your information can be bought and sold without any input from you.
Federal law protects the confidentiality of your medical records and your conversations with your doctor. There are also strict rules regarding the sale of information used to determine your credit-worthiness, or your eligibility for employment, insurance and housing. For instance, consumers have the right to view and correct their own credit reports, and potential employers have to ask for your consent before they buy a credit report about you.
Other than certain kinds of protected data — including medical records and data used for credit reports — consumers have no legal right to control or even monitor how information about them is bought and sold. As the FTC notes, "There are no current laws requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes."
So they don't sell information about my health?
Actually, they do.
Data companies can capture information about your "interests" in certain health conditions based on what you buy — or what you search for online. Datalogix has lists of people classified as "allergy sufferers" and "dieters." Acxiom sells data on whether an individual has an "online search propensity" for a certain "ailment or prescription."
Consumer data is also beginning to be used to evaluate whether you're making healthy choices.
One health insurance company recently bought data on more than three million people's consumer purchases in order to flag health-related actions, like purchasing plus-sized clothing, the Wall Street Journal reported. (The company bought purchasing information for current plan members, not as part of screening people for potential coverage.)
Spokeswoman Michelle Douglas said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina would use the data to target free programming offers to their customers.
Douglas suggested that it might be more valuable for companies to use consumer data "to determine ways to help me improve my health" rather than "to buy my data to send me pre-paid credit card applications or catalogs full of stuff they want me to buy."
Do companies collect information about my social media profiles and what I do online?
Yes.
As we highlighted last year, some data companies record — and then resell — all kinds of information you post online, including your screen names, website addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.
Acxiom said it collects information about which social media sites individual people use, and "whether they are a heavy or a light user," but that they do not collect information about "individual postings" or your "lists of friends."
More traditional consumer data can also be connected with information about what you do online. Datalogix, the company that collects loyalty card data, has partnered with Facebook to track whether Facebook users who see ads for certain products actually end up buying them at local stores, as the Financial Times reported last year.
Is there a way to find out exactly what these data companies know about me? (Updated 9/5/2013)
Not really -- although that’s beginning to change.
You have the right to review and correct your credit report. But with marketing data, there's often no way to know exactly what information is attached to your name — or whether it's accurate.
Most companies offer, at best, a partial picture.
In September, Acxiom debuted aboutthedata.com, which allows to you review and edit some of the company’s marketing data on you, by entering your name, address, birth date and the last four digits of your social security number.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Julie Brill tweeted that “more data brokers should follow” Acxiom’s example. But the effort received mixed reviews from users, privacy advocates and government regulators, the New York Times reported.
Previously, Acxiom only let customers review a smaller slice of the information the company sells about them, including criminal history, as New York Times reporter Natasha Singer described last year. When Singer requested and finally received her report in 2012, all it included was a record of her residential addresses.
Other companies also offer some access. A spokeswoman for Epsilon said it allows consumers to review "high level information" about their data — like whether or not you’ve purchased "home furnishings" merchandise. (Requests to review this information cost $5 and can only be made by postal mail.)
RapLeaf, a company that advertises that it has "real-time data" on 80 percent of U.S. email addresses, says it gives customers "total control over the data we have on you," and allows them to review and edit the categories it associates with them (like "estimated household income" and "Likely Political Contributor to Republicans").
How do I know when someone has purchased data about me?
Most of the time, you don't.
When you're checking out at a store and a cashier asks you for your Zip code, the store isn't just getting that single piece of information. Acxiom and other data companies offer services that allow stores to use your Zip code and the name on your credit card to pinpoint your home address — without asking you for it directly.
Is there any way to stop the companies from collecting and sharing information about me?
Yes, but it would require a whole lot of work.
Many data brokers offer consumers the chance to "opt out" of being included in their databases, or at least from receiving advertising enabled by that company. Rapleaf, for instance, has a "Permanent opt-out" that "deletes information associated with your email address from the Rapleaf database."
But to actually opt-out effectively, you need to know about all the different data brokers and where to find their opt-outs. Most consumers, of course, don't have that information.
In their privacy report last year, the FTC suggested that data brokers should create a centralized website that would make it easier for consumers to learn about the existence of these companies and their rights regarding the data they collect.
How many people do these companies have information on?
Basically everyone in the U.S. and many beyond it. Acxiom, recently profiled by the New York Times, says it has information on 500 million people worldwide, including "nearly every U.S. consumer."
After the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported, Acxiom was able to locate 11 of the 19 hijackers in its database.
How is all of this data actually used?
Mostly to sell you stuff. Companies want to buy lists of people who might be interested in what they're selling — and also want to learn more about their current customers.
They also sell their information for other purposes, including identity verification, fraud prevention and background checks.
If new privacy laws are passed, will they include the right to see what data these companies have collected about me?
Unlikely.
In a report on privacy last year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress pass legislation "that would provide consumers with access to information about them held by a data broker." President Barack Obama has also proposed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that would give consumers the right to access and correct certain information about them.
But this probably won't include access to marketing data, which the Federal Trade Commission considers less sensitive than data used for credit reports or identity verification.
In terms of marketing data, "we think at the very least consumers should have access to the general categories of data the companies have about consumers," said Maneesha Mithal of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.
Data companies have also pushed back against the idea of opening up marketing profiles for individual consumers' inspection.
Even if there were errors in your marketing data profile, "the worst thing that could happen is that you get an advertising offer that isn't relevant to you," said Rachel Thomas, the vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.
"The fraud and security risks that you run by opening up those files is higher than any potential harm that could happen to the consumer," Thomas said.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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