The Los Angeles Times reported today that the California-based Consumer Watchdog has submitted a letter to Attorney General Jerry Brown calling for an investigation of insurance giants Wellpoint and United HealthCare (UHC). The complaint comes in response to the insurance companies’ practice of actively encouraging employees to engage in anti-health care reform political activity. According to Consumer Watchdog, “while coercive communications with employees may be legal, if abhorrent, in most states, California’s Labor Code appears to directly prohibit them.”

UHC was exposed last month for creating a call center that directed employees to anti-health reform protests. More recently, Wellpoint launched a “grassroots Web site” urging employees to “make [their] voice heard” by contacting Congress in opposition to health reform. It appears that these tactics may have been a violation of California law. According to the watchdog organization’s letter, UnitedHealthCare’s anti-reform hotline and Wellpoint’s astroturf lobbying website may violate California laws meant to prevent employers from influencing the political activity of its employees.

The accusations against UHC and Wellpoint comes on the heels of a string of ethically questionable moves by healthcare and energy giants to fight reform:

• AHIP, the multimillion dollar lobbying juggernaut for the health insurance industry, has mobilized 50,000 of its employees to lobby Congress against the public option.

• AHIP’s grassroots lobbying is managed by the corporate consulting firm
Democracy Data & Communications. The firm made its name working for organizations like Phillip Morris and Koch Industries, and is responsible for Wellpoint’s “grassroots” lobbying site linked in the Consumer Watchdog letter.

• Astroturf firm Bonner & Associates is being investigated by Congress for forging letters in opposition to the Waxman-Markey clean energy act.

If Calfornia’s Attorney General chooses to pursue an investigation of UHC and Wellpoint, it could open the floodgates to increased accountability of health care industry ethically questionable lobbying strategies.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Democrats, in light of the realization that they may have to go it alone on health care reform, are revisiting some of the tax increases that they had previously ruled out to placate Republicans, including limiting tax deductions for the richest Americans. “Bluntly…the idea of getting Republicans on board is becoming much more fantastical, so some ideas that were jettisoned for that reason are coming back,” said one Senate Democratic aide.

Never missing an opportunity to lament the plight of the richest one percent of Americans, Fox News went on the offensive against the tax hike proposals today, aided by a disingenuous calculation from its “Brain Room.” The network falsely claimed that the entirety of the $1 trillion cost of health care reform is going to paid for with tax hikes on the richest one percent of Americans, and used that notion to calculate a potential top income tax rate of 52.5 percent:

They’re talking about raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 a year. Remember the CBO says it’s going to be $1 trillion over ten years. To get that $1 trillion, you would have to raise the tax rate for those making two-fifty plus from 35 percent to 52.5 percent, that is a 50 percent increase and that would give you the grand total of your $1 trillion. That’s a pretty hefty increase.

Watch it:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) did not disavow Fox of this notion, of course, but instead trotted out the thoroughly debunked line that the tax increases under consideration would be harmful to small businesses and job creation.

The Obama administration has been very consistent in its insistence on covering two-thirds of the cost of health care reform by eliminating inefficiencies in Medicare and cutting subsidies to insurance companies. The final one-third (from $300-600 billion) would come from tax increases. No one is proposing to put the cost of the entire reform effort onto the backs of the richest one percent.

Under President Obama’s budget, the effective tax rate on the richest one percent of Americans will be 32.4 percent (and would presumably go up a few points if the House’s plan to implement a surtax is adopted), which is decidedly less than 52.5 percent. This is simply more tax fearmongering from the team at Fox News.

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised that no Republicans will vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), should it come to the Senate floor. In order for the bill to pass “the Democratic members will have to do it,” he said.

In a speech before the business organization Commerce Lexington, McConnell explained that the reason for such uncompromising opposition is that workers don’t actually want to join unions due to the “very enlightened management in this country now”:

McConnell said the AFL-CIO wants the measure approved because “private sector union membership has declined from a high of 35 percent in the 1950s to 7.5 percent now.” That has happened “because we have very enlightened management in this country now, treating employees better and employees have decided they don’t want to pay the dues.”

McConnell has already made his personal opinion that EFCA will “Europeanize America” well known, and with this rhetoric, he has officially aligned the entire Republican position on EFCA with that of the Chamber of Commerce (which has said that EFCA is a “no-compromise” piece of legislation). But if McConnell truly thinks that the reason more workers aren’t joining unions is because of “enlightened management,” he hasn’t been paying any attention to the reality of working and organizing in America.

For starters, an AFL-CIO survey found that there are 60 million American workers who say that they would join a union if they could. The reason that they can’t is because employers threaten to close plants in 57 percent of union organizing drives and threaten to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent, while ultimately firing pro-union workers 34 percent of the time.

As Kate Bronfenbrenner, Director of Labor Education Research at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations pointed out, over the last 20 years “employer opposition [to unionization] has intensified…and the nature of campaigns has changed so that the focus is on more coercive and punitive tactics designed to intensely monitor and punish union activity.”

And in addition to anti-union campaigns, management in this country is engaged in a whole host of other labor violations. Yesterday, a new survey came out in which 68 percent of low-income workers reported being subject to a pay violation in the previous work week alone. This isn’t meant to paint the entire business community with a broad stroke — as there are surely plenty of companies that don’t engage in this sort of behavior — but the problem is far more widespread than McConnell and the rest of the Republican party are evidently willing to concede. And just like with health care reform, the GOP has already decided that it’s not interested in discussing a solution.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.