Auction 2012: How Drug Companies Game Washington

Paul Blumenthal  

paulblumenthal@huffingtonpost.com 

First Posted: 02/ 1/2012 12:24 pm Updated: 02/ 1/2012 12:56 pm


Auction 2012 is a weeklong series in collaboration with "The Dylan Ratigan Show" and United Republic.
When he first ran for president, Barack Obama campaigned against the influence of lobbyists in Washington, exclaiming in one ad in which he excoriated the top lobbyist of the drug industry, "I don't want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game playing."
Then, Obama won the White House and sought to pass an ambitious health care agenda. To do so, he made nice with some of Capitol Hill's most notorious influence peddlers.
There are few industries with as much power in Washington as the pharmaceutical sector. Drug companies have spent $2.3 billion on lobbying and $183 million on campaign contributions since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The industry also maintains a war chest for advertising and grassroots lobbying aimed at altering public opinion. The ready money serves as a strong deterrent against any legislative proposal that would lower costs for consumers and profits for the drug makers.
"The industry clearly had established a war chest ... to use on advertising on health care reform," said Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now and the author of the forthcoming book "Fighting for Our Health." "It was very clear that ... if the administration and Congress pushed for negotiating drug prices for Medicare in health care reform, that the industry would vociferously oppose that."
Fearing the drug industry would use its money and lobbyists to torpedo the entire reform package, the Obama White House made a deal to kill at least two major provisions that would have saved consumers money when they filled prescriptions. In exchange, the industry unleashed a $20 million-plus ad campaign to support the bill. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), a top recipient of campaign contributions from the health care industry, was put in charge of shepherding the bill to passage.
But pharma's influence didn't start with the Affordable Care Act. The industry has been blocking pro-consumer drug policies for years.

In 2003, Congress passed a prescription drug benefit for seniors known as Medicare Part D. However, thanks to industry involvement in writing the bill, the agency in charge of Medicare was barred from negotiating with drug companies to lower prices, as the Department of Veterans Affairs does. The author of that legislation was none other than Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who barely a year later would retire from Congress and land on K Street as president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America -- in other words, the drug industry's top lobbyist.
When the Obama White House later sought support from the drug industry for health care reform, the administration had to shelve the idea of releasing Medicare from the negotiation ban. Studies indicate that keeping drug prices high for seniors adds $150 billion to $300 billion to drug industry profits over a 10-year period. The increased costs hit the pockets of both seniors and taxpayers.
In Wisconsin, some seniors get a better deal. SeniorCare, a popular state program covering 91,000 Wisconsinites that was created by then-Gov. Tommy Thompson (R), sets much lower drug prices than Medicare's prescription drug benefit. It only costs $522 on average to cover a senior through SeniorCare; it costs $1,690 on average under Medicare Part D. In 2009, SeniorCare saved seniors some $50 million.
When Gov. Scott Walker (R) came into office last year, he proposed gutting SeniorCare. Wisconsin lawmakers from both parties joined together to remove this provision from the governor's first budget.

Click image to enlarge.

Nino Amato, president of the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups, told The Huffington Post that relying on Medicare Part D alone to hold down drug prices forces seniors to "make life decision trade-offs."
"Life decision trade-offs" can mean choosing between drugs or electricity or food. For millions of Americans, this is a real and growing problem.
According to a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study, drug prescriptions rose by 39 percent while drug prices nearly doubled over the last decade. More and more individuals, hard pressed to pay for medications, are opting to abandon their prescriptions. In 2009, the number of patients who did not fill or pick up prescriptions increased by 23 percent from the previous year and 68 percent from 2006.
Some Americans have tried to close the budget gap by quietly buying drugs from Canada, where government controls keep prices down. U.S. law, however, prohibits the reimportation of prescription drugs from other countries.
Efforts were made to lift the ban as part of the health care overhaul -- but the drug industry didn't like that, and the Senate Democratic leadership fell in line. Despite having previously won the support of enough senators to become law, an amendment to permit prescription drug reimportation, offered by then-Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), was defeated amid mass vote switching.
After his amendment went down, Dorgan told reporters, "I believe seven days ago we had sufficient votes to pass it, but I think what is happening in the intervening period is other things developed. It's a great disappointment because it seems to me very hard to do health care reform without doing something about the escalating prices for prescription drugs."
Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) are now trying again, co-sponsoring a bill that would legalize reimportation of drugs from certain countries. They argue that the bill would save taxpayers $19.4 billion and let millions of Americans pay drug prices that are 35 to 55 percent less.
Beyond the health care deal, the pharmaceutical sector continues to fight other pro-consumer measures. During the last Congress, a provision attached to an appropriations bill would have banned "pay-for-delay," when brand-name drug makers pay off generic drug makers to keep generics off the market. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that pay-for-delay costs consumers billions of dollars annually.
The provision, which barely made it out of committee, was killed during the lame-duck 2010 Congress. Four Republican senators voiced their opposition to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The appropriations bill containing the provision was shelved, and Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government instead.
Again, those supporting a more pro-consumer policy have not given up. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is currently co-sponsor of a bill in Congress that would give the FTC authority to stop pay-for-delay litigation settlements. In a November 2011 press release, Grassley argued, "When people across the country are having a hard time making ends meet, this could be a real boost to their bottom line."
Perhaps ordinary Americans will win the next fight over pharmaceutical policy. In the meantime, drug prices rise while the drug industry thrives, backed by its powerhouse lobbying presence in Washington.
The Auction 2012 series explores the ways industries influence policymaking in five areas: banking, energy, health care, trade and education. Read Dylan Ratigan's blog post introducing the series and his blog post on health care.

Follow this diagram of the health care trade-off from Ratigan's book "Greedy Bastards":

Auction 2012: Big Money's Next Trade Goal Is 'NAFTA With Asia'

Dan Froomkin froomkin@huffingtonpost.com

First Posted: 02/ 2/2012 1:16 pm Updated: 02/ 2/2012 2:16 pm

Auction 2012 is a weeklong series in collaboration with "The Dylan Ratigan Show" and United Republic.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement soured the American public on trade deals that were supposed to boost the economy -- remember the giant sucking sound that followed? -- but it left America's globe-spanning corporate behemoths panting for more.
Since then, powerful business interests have cheered the signing of 19 more such agreements. The three most recent, with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, won congressional approval in October.
These trade agreements have been an enormous boon to multinational corporations, making it easier for them to shift production to lower-cost countries, move capital across borders, expand into new markets and overcome foreign legal hurdles. They are consistently a top priority for the big-business lobbying groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, the American Farm Bureau, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Retail Industry Leadership Association.
Despite being hawked as job-creating measures that open the world to American goods, however, these trade agreements have historically resulted in massive outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing jobs and increases in exports.
"They may be enhancing corporate efficiency, but they're not enhancing job creation here in the U.S.," said Michael Wessel, a trade strategist who works with the labor movement.
And now the White House is forging another one -- this time a regional compact, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, with Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It's the first trade agreement entirely negotiated by President Barack Obama, the biggest since NAFTA -- and potentially a lot bigger if and when China and Japan join in, as they are expected to eventually.

The goal, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, is "to enhance trade and investment among the TPP partner countries, promote innovation, economic growth and development, and support the creation and retention of jobs."
This is a whole new kind of pact, the trade representative says. It will include "new cross-cutting issues not previously included in trade agreements, such as making the regulatory systems of TPP countries more compatible so U.S. companies can operate more seamlessly in the TPP market."

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

Figuring out what this agreement will actually do is difficult, as the public is being kept almost entirely in the dark regarding the ongoing negotiations. The draft text, for example, is only being circulated to "cleared advisers," who include dozens of corporate lobbyists and only a handful of labor and good-government advocates.
The first official word that ordinary people -- and Congress -- will get about what's been agreed to is when the deal is complete, and all that's left is an up-or-down vote.
In the meantime, however, common sense dictates that dropping trade barriers with a low-wage country like Vietnam, for instance, isn't going to do wonders for the U.S. textile or apparel industries. And leaked drafts of the occasional chapter have made consumer and good-government advocates fear the worst.
As Zach Carter reported in October for The Huffington Post, one set of leaked documents shows Obama administration negotiators trying to reverse reforms made during the George W. Bush administration that were designed to increase access to affordable medicines in developing countries. Instead, the U.S. would impose a set of restrictive intellectual property laws that would help American drug companies secure long-term monopolies overseas and increase drug prices.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups that led the recent, successful grassroots opposition to two bills that would have given corporations new powers to censor the Internet, sees the TPP as a backdoor effort to rewrite global rules on intellectual property enforcement -- including U.S. rules.
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act were "bad laws prepared in secret, but they were defeated once they had to face public opinion," Maira Sutton, international outreach coordinator for the foundation, wrote via email. "The scary thing about secret agreements like TPP ... is that they may already be well along the process by the time the public has a chance to learn about them and speak up, which means that unpopular censorship provisions, like those in SOPA and PIPA, can be slid in under the radar."
Public Citizen, the nonprofit consumer advocacy group, warns that the pact will likely allow foreign companies to sue governments to enforce the agreement in United Nations and World Bank tribunals. There, Pubic Citizen argued, "they can demand taxpayer compensation for domestic policies that investors claim undermine their new privileges established in the pact."

THE POWERS THAT BE

"The polling shows Americans on a bipartisan basis hate our current system of trade agreements," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "In the light of this, in an election year, how is it possible that this huge NAFTA with Asia is being discussed -- much less that the Obama administration is rushing it forward, trying to get it done this summer?"
Wallach answered her own question: Major business interests use these trade agreements to push policies that won't fly even in a Republican Congress "by branding them as free trade, trade expansion -- all those appealing brands."
Behind this continuous stream of trade agreements, she said, are banks, multinational manufacturers, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, oil and gas companies, agribusiness and other sectors -- all pursuing their bottom lines. "This literally is in one fell swoop one of the most elegant one-percenter corporate power grab mechanism ever designed," Wallach said.

Click image to enlarge.

The corporate lobbyists were certainly out in force this past fall, in the run-up to the vote on the latest three trade agreements, the biggest one of which was with South Korea.
The Chamber of Commerce combined forces with Boeing, Chevron, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to form a U.S.-Korea FTA Business Coalition. Other big-business groups and major corporations joined them in their full-court press.
By contrast, the outgunned opposition was led by consumer groups and small, domestic companies, who, unable to seize the same opportunities available to multinationals, have found themselves steadily losing market share and forced to cut production and jobs.
The final House votes weren't even close. Republicans wanted the pacts so badly they overcame their aversion to supporting anything Obama proposes and voted overwhelmingly in favor. Most Democrats opposed the president -- but even among the opponents, Wallach said, the passion was dimmed.
Ever since the Supreme Court legalized unlimited political spending by corporations, Wallach said, "the dynamic is totally different." The greater threat that deep-pocketed corporations now pose to any incumbent with an even slightly contested seat looms over every exchange between lobbyists and members of Congress.

TO BRING MANUFACTURING BACK

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama announced a plan to "bring manufacturing back" to the United States through tax code changes -- eliminating a tax break that rewards outsourcing, expanding a tax cut for domestic manufacturers and imposing a minimum tax on overseas profits.
But previous free trade deals have already made the incentives for outsourcing so strong that these measures, even if implemented, would likely fail, said Lee Sheppard, contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit publisher of tax information.
"You can't use the tax law to make up for things that you gave away with trade deals," Sheppard said. U.S. jobs are lost, he said, "when we let in products made by poorly paid workers who live in dormitories and work 12 hours a day."
How will the TPP fare in the end? The corporate giants who will profit are bound to keep pushing it forward, as they have earlier trade agreements.
But Wessel, who looks at the effects of free trade agreements beyond the corporate bottom line, remains skeptical about these deals: "The benefits have not materialized." But he's holding on to some hope for the TPP "that there will be enough changes in the approach that they will maximize benefits for American workers. I think it is too early to tell."
Blocking a trade agreement, Wallach said, takes a combination of mass media coverage, grassroots activism and members of the public making clear they will hold their congressmen accountable. But the increasingly complex nature of the agreements, combined with their free-trade branding, has resulted in too little coverage of trade issues, she contended. "The mainstream media doesn't dig into it," Wallach said.
And that may make all the difference. "If people understood what this really was," she said, "they'd be surrounding the trade representative's office with pitchforks."
The Auction 2012 series explores the ways industries influence policymaking in five areas: banking, energy, health care, trade and education. Read Dylan Ratigan's blog post introducing the series and his blog post on trade.
Follow this diagram of trade's flow from Dylan Ratigan's book "Greedy Bastards":

Komen Board Member Refutes ‘Reversal’ Story

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

February 3, 2012 1:26 P.M.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post: 

I just got off the phone with a Komen board member, and he confirmed that the announcement does not mean that Planned Parenthood is guaranteed future grants — a demand he said would be “unfair” to impose on Komen. He also said the job of the group’s controversial director, Nancy Brinker, is safe, as far as the board is concerned.
As some were quick to point out, the statement put out by Komen doesn’t really clarify whether Planned Parenthood will actually continue to get money from the group. The original rationale for barring Planned Parenthood was that it was under investigation (a witch-hunt probe undertaken by GOP Rep Cliff Stearns). Komen said today that the group would “amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political.”
Does that mean Planned Parenthood will get Komen grants in the future?
I asked Komen board member John Raffaelli to respond to those who are now saying that the announcement doesn’t necessarily constitute a reversal until Planned Parenthood actually sees more funding. He insisted it would be unfair to expect the group to commit to future grants.
“It would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization that doesn’t go through a grant process that shows that the money we raise is used to carry out our mission,” Raffaelli told me. “We’re a humaniatrian organization. We have a mission. Tell me you can help carry out our mission and we will sit down at the table.”

Gadhafi’s Hollywood ending

I found this article it is from Sept of 2011.  I am blogging it because I found it interesting. It is a story about how our government is the studio producing and directing, and the news media are the scriptwriters, who want freedom to write, but in the end go along with the studio.  And the article goes right down the line showing how this was done with each of the Arab Spring up risings. And it started with the Reagan Presidency, in the 80's.   I love the picture below taken in 1990. 
TUESDAY, SEP 6, 2011 8:01 AM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

How the government and media transformed the Libyan leader's image from repentant bad boy to evil tyrant

BY KEN SILVERSTEIN

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FILE - In this August 1990 file photo, during an emergency Arab League summit, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, left, is driven by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in Tahrir Square in Cairo. As rebels swarmed into Tripoli, Libya, late Sunday, Aug. 21, 2011, and Gadhafi's son and one-time heir apparent Seif al-Islam was arrested, Gadhafi's rule was all but over, even though some loyalists continued to resist. (AP Photo/Farouk Ibrahim, File) (Credit: AP)

TOPICS:LIBYA, GADHAFI'S FINAL DAYS

Poor Moammar Gadhafi. Libya’s longtime leader, dubbed “the Mad Dog of the Middle East” by President Ronald Reagan over his support for terrorism, came in from the cold after Sept. 11 by collaborating with the CIA in the fight against al-Qaida and offering American firms access to his oil fields. Look what he got for his good behavior: the enmity of his people and uninvited strangers visiting his seaside villa.

Gadhafi had warmed American hearts in 2004 by normalizing relations with George W. Bush’s administration and falling hard for Condoleezza Rice. The colonel was still an SOB, but now he was our SOB.

Then along came the Arab Spring and the colonel’s security forces started cracking heads and killing protesters. Nothing fundamental about Gadhafi had changed — anyone familiar with his four-decade reign in power knew he would employ violence if his rule were ever challenged — but with his people in open revolt it became too embarrassing to embrace him any longer. And so, in the manner of past American SOBs — think Somoza, think Noriega — U.S. policymakers found it expedient to cut him loose. The problem was that since Gadhafi had been rehabilitated in the Western media as a repentant bad boy, Washington’s policymaking agenda needed new narrative: to reestablish Gadhafi’s credentials as villain.

Just the job for a reliably credulous American press corps, whose bosses have grown bored with the details of bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington policymakers know full well that launching war, even an undeclared one like the NATO and U.S.-led overthrow of Gadhafi, cannot be sustained without a good story line.

The formula is not complicated. The two essential components are an evil enemy on one side and heroic, brave and true allies on the other. As the story unfolds, the government serves as the studio, producing and directing the movie while editors and reporters enlist as scriptwriters. These faithful scribes periodically demand their artistic freedom (i.e., by reporting on friendly fire deaths or criticizing an official action) but generally succumb, in the end, to the studio’s demands for a neat Hollywood ending.

Many outside the media class see this collaboration as cynical, if not conspiratorial — and, on the part of the policymaking class, it usually is. Conversations on “deep background” keep the names of policymakers out of the public eye. NATO psychological warfare units, while proud to disclose their leaflet drops, are doctrinally dedicated to pumping out information damaging to the enemy, whether true or false.

On the part of journalists, however, the collaboration is often pathetically idealistic. U.S. policymakers have never had a hard time finding reporters to sign up as wartime scriptwriters. Back in the Reagan years our “freedom fighters” went mano a mano with the Soviet empire, lauded by the likes of Charles Krauthammer.  Never mind that these rebels (no, brigands) were cutthroat Islamic fanatics, of whom not a few subsequently joined an emerging organization that came to be known as al-Qaida. That was not a detail to be worried about by smart people in Washington. 

No matter that in the mid-1980s the White House-funded contra rebels in Nicaragua, cheered on by the Washington Post and the Washington Times, preferred slaughtering non-combatants to real war and trafficked in cocaine on the side. When Jonas Savimbi, a murderous champagne-swilling Angolan guerrilla leader backed by South Africa’s apartheid government, came to Washington, he could count on a warm reception in the pages of the liberal New Republic.

A competent press corps would know this history and be wary. But then Sept. 11 “changed everything” — and changed nothing. The U.S. government teamed up with another coalition of Afghan rebels to topple the Taliban. Largely forgotten was that our new found allies had ruled Afghanistan from 1992 until 1996 and that their thievery, incompetence, squabbling and criminality paved the way for the rise of the Taliban in the first place.

Next to fall out of favor was Saddam Hussein. When he was willing to massacre waves of Iranian child soldiers in the 1980s, the Iraqi dictator was glad-handed by special U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld, who quietly orchestrated U.S. financial support for Saddam’s government. When Saddam ungratefully invaded Kuwait in 1991, he was transformed from unpleasant U.S ally to official monster.

Media enablers would help. When the Bush administration officials settled on the Iraqi government as a scapegoat for the 9/11 intelligence failure, they were fortunate to find the New York Times correspondent Judith Miller as a witness. She stenographically reported the White House’s suspicions of (nonexistent) WMD and (never corroborated) ties to al-Qaida, while touting the virtues of the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi. Back then U.S. officials privately acknowledged that Chalabi always had more influence along the Potomac than along the Euphrates. Today, they admit, he effectively serves as Iran’s lobbyist in Iraq.

But no matter, the persistent Judy Miller still advises statesmen on how to Do Good in the world. 

Which is not to say that some U.S. enemies were not genuinely evil people. But leave the political and policy questions out of it. Whether or not war in Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea, the media myth making around war proved hazardous to the country’s health. A more honest and accurate pre-war assessment of our allies would have made clear that what really matters is not military victory but what comes afterward.

The same holds true for Libya, which is now getting its own Hollywood treatment. Whether Gadhafi is moving from hideout to hideout or hiding out, à la Osama, in plain sight, his ending will be written in a screenplay that has undergone many rewrites over the years.

For most of his career Gadhafi was depicted much as Saddam Hussein would be: a pariah. That began to change in 1999, when he decided to turn over suspects in the Pan Am bombing to Western authorities. A bigger breakthrough in his charm offensive came in 2004 when, in seeking to end his international isolation, he renounced his WMD programs (which were never very far along to begin with).

President Bush soon lifted most U.S. trade sanctions. In 2005 American oil companies funded and founded the U.S.-Libya Business Association to push for improved trade and diplomatic relations with Col. Qaddafi’s regime. David Goldwyn — who had served at the Energy Department under Bill Clinton and would become the Obama administration’s special envoy on international energy in 2009 — headed the group.

Gadhafi, the story went, was not a bad buy. Within a few years, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other U.S. companies were producing 30 percent of Libya’s daily output.

Gadhafi signed up as a close ally in counterterrorism. He turned over Islamic radicals to neighboring pro-Western governments and in exchange the U.S. handed over to Gadhafi some Libyans captured in the “war on terrorism” and allowed his agents to interrogate Libyans held at Guantánamo Bay. Dick Cheney and Moammar Gadhafi may have disagreed on many points of policy but they were bipartisan on waterboarding: It was not a problem.

By 2008, the U.S. relationship with Libya was blossoming. That year, Congress, in response to lobbying by the oil companies, exempted Libya from a law signed by President Bush that allowed American victims to seize assets of countries found liable for terrorist attacks — a law that had specifically targeted Gadhafi.

Who really cared that Gadhafi continued to maintain his bizarre personality cult and violate human rights? The U.S. government and media quickly lost interest. “The Americans no longer want to see Gadhafi’s regime destabilized,” Ashur Shamis, a London-based Libyan dissident, told me back in 2005. “Opponents have written off the possibility of receiving tangible political support from the United States.”

It was only when the Libyan people spontaneously rebelled in 2011, and Gadhafi pledged to lay waste to Benghazi, that the U.S. government began to reconsider the wisdom of its new found friendship. Hollywood screenwriters rarely feel controlled by historical truth and neither, alas, does Washington. The policy agenda needed a storyline that again cast Gadhafi as Evildoer, and the press corps dutifully provided.

The most explosive charge in the Libyan civil war, which originated with the rebels, was that Gadhafi was feeding Viagra to his troops and sending them out to rape women. In June Secretary of State Hillary Clinton solemnly said she was “deeply concerned” about these reports and the media did its part. At CNN the tag team of Wolf Blitzer and Nic Robertson ran a lengthy report on the Viagra charges under the banner of “A tool of massive rape.”

Not quite. Several human rights groups launched major investigations into the claim of government-ordered rapes and found no evidence for it. Last week, the New York Times derided the story as one of the rebels “far-fetched claims.” Back in June the paper of record published a story saying rebel officials “had discovered condoms and packets of Viagra in tanks and other vehicles captured from Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers.”

Another widely published claim was that, again in the words of Secretary Clinton, Gadhafi was flying in “mercenaries and thugs” to kill his own people. Ali al-Essawi, who resigned as Libyan ambassador to India after Gadhafi cracked down on protesters, told Reuters that the mercenaries were “from Africa, and speak French and other languages.”

This story, accepted as true by much of the media, also turned out to be largely, if not entirely, fictitious. Many of the “mercenaries” paraded by the rebels at international press conferences later turned out to be undocumented laborers from other African countries. The story was handy, though, because it purported to explain why Gadhafi, who allegedly had little public support, managed to remain in power for six months despite massive bombardment from NATO aircraft.

The point, systematically deleted from the memory banks of U.S.-based news organizations, is that our overseas allies supported for purposes of (the clinical term) “regime change” always generate propaganda to influence U.S. public opinion. Like the Nicaraguan contras in the ’80s and the Iraqi National Congress in the 00s, the Libyan rebels have ample reason to lie to U.S news outlets — and yet many reporters and editors take their claims at face value.

Fortunately, not by all. As ABC News recently reported, Abdelhakim Belhaj, who led the rebels into Gadhafi’s compound, was a founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an anti-Gadhafi group whose members fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden and whom the Bush administration designated as a terrorist organization in 2004.

Only recently has more attention focused on the fact that the rebels, like Gadhafi, have committed vicious brutalities during the war, and that their own leadership is prone to fierce, internal squabbling. In late July, the Transitional National Council in Benghazi killed (and burned the corpse) of their military leader, Gen. Abdel Fatah Younes, who was suspected of treason. In what journalist Patrick Cockburn called “a masterpiece of mistiming,” the assassination was committed on this very day that Britain recognized the rebel government.

And there’s one more aspect to the story that has been cut from the current script. Whether he was “our” SOB or “their” SOB, there is no doubt that Gadhafi used his oil revenues to provide far more to his people than many U.S. allies in the region. In the United Nations 2010 report on “Human Development” Libya ranked first in Africa and a respectable 53rd out of 170 countries overall.

Gadhafi’s government had a terrible human rights record but it provided its citizens with free education and healthcare. The World Health Organization says Libya “boasts the highest literacy and education enrollment rates in North Africa.” Childhood immunization is close to universal and infant mortality rates are very low. Libya also ranked high on gender equality, and women were prominent in politics. The poor had a degree of protection with subsidized food and fuel. In Libya, “social exclusion due to poverty and lack of access to education is nearly nonexistent,” according to this report.

There was nothing in Gadhafi’s Libya comparable to the mass poverty of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, which has one of the highest adult illiteracy rates in the world. During the revolution in Egypt, breathless reporters on U.S. cable news networks would say that the popular upheaval had “exposed” the appalling circumstances of the Egyptian poor, as if the reality hadn’t been obvious to any sentient observer all along.

Gadhafi was corrupt, but the scale of his thievery does not appear to come close to that of the Mubarak regime in Egypt or the energy-fueled kleptocracies that U.S. policymakers quietly indulge in places like Equatorial Guinea and Turkmenistan. The reports about Gadhafi’s decadent lifestyle withered under scrutiny. The New York Times recently ran a story under the headline of “Gilded Traces of the Lives Qaddafis Led,” which reported that “as the former subjects of Col. Moammar el-Qaddafi comb through his family’s estates, farms and seaside villas, the properties are revealing the details of lives lived far removed from the people” and “the distance between power and powerlessness.” It was so unlike classless America, where the political elite and the working class live together in the same neighborhoods and vacation harmoniously on Martha’s Vineyard.

The facts of the story betrayed the headline. “The residences of the House of Qaddafi were not quite as grand as people might have supposed,” the Times acknowledged. The villas of Gadhafi’s sons “on a sand bluff overlooking the Mediterranean … failed to match the ostentation they displayed in other facets of their lives. They were not lavish; the brown paint on the patio decks was peeling, and they had a distinctly 1970s feel.”

Such are problems of scriptwriting. In Hollywood, the producers and the screenwriters always disagree. In Washington, the official story always clashes with the irritating reality of facts on the ground. As a state-sponsored media spectacle, the Libya story will conclude when Gadhafi escapes or is captured or killed. For the country where 6.5 million people live, the story line is less certain.

The odds are that a new government, even assuming it is stable, will be dependent on outside support. It will have a very hard time matching Gadhafi’s egalitarian record on economic rights. Democracy is unlikely to flourish any time soon. The rights of women’s are endangered. Human rights generally will continue to be violated.

Finally — and this is the safest bet of all — U.S. oil companies will get back into Libya as soon as possible. At which time U.S. government and the stenographers of the press corps will not devote a lot of air time or column inches dwelling on human suffering in the post-Gadhafi era. Why bother about such details when there are other important scripts to be polished elsewhere? 

Ken Silverstein is an Open Society Institute fellow and contributing editor to Harper’s magazine.