In my earlier diary "The big stupid of health care reform", I argued first and foremost that our most basic problem in the health care fight derived from the overall deficiencies of fragmentary, short-term, ad hoc leftwing organizing vs. hegemonic, long-term, strategically pre-planned rightwing organizing. Among other things, I wrote:
Unlike us, the right builds long-term institutional infrastructure. With that infrastructure in place, it's a relatively easy task to pull together a coalition to do whatever it is you want to do. You are not assured of success, of course. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to go into battle. And as a result you can afford to go all out, and risk losing everything, because the cost of doing it all over again is not prohibitive. In fact, if you do it right, you can actually gain more from the repeat effort than it costs you.
Compared to that, our organizing methodology is doomed to failure.
Indeed, if ever there was an issue custom-made for shifting the country into a predominantly progressive political direction, it is the issue of health care for all. Indeed, this is precisely why the Republicans rallied to defeat health care reform under Clinton-even though that effort was itself a mixed-up half-measure. If the left realized the need for hegemonic struggle, and then looked around for one specific issue to use as a vehicle to wage such struggle, we would be very hard pressed to come up with something better than universal health care. And yet, instead of seeing this struggle as something that benefits us-as an opportunity to bring more and more people around to seeing things from a progressive perspective-we see it as something that puts us into peril, in panic mode, frightened into giving everything away.
While we haven't organized around this for hegemonic struggle in the past, that doesn't mean there aren't things we can start doing right now to change things-both short term strategies and tactics to make significant gains and reset the terms of terms of struggle, and a long-term shift in thinking based on preserving the state-level single-payer option, so that we can use state-level fights for hegemonic struggle in the future.
Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Jennifer Nix: Listen here. Nix is a journalist and the publisher of Guernica Magazine. She published an essay in Salon this week about her personal and political history with single-payer health care titled "I Love My Socialist Kidney."
Today's meeting of the nation's leading single payer activists with Sen. Max Baucus was historic, and a recognition of the power of the tens of thousands of nurses, doctors, and grassroots activists across the country who have been turning up the heat on the policy makers in Washington.
Make no mistake - your voices are being heard. And, the protests and pressure will continue.
As Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, told Baucus, "there is a groundswell" across the country that will continue to press for single payer reform, and Baucus and other policy makers in Washington "are going to get to know us very well." In a later press conference, DeMoro blasted the conventional wisdom that single payer is not politically viable. "Is it politically viable to let people die and suffer from a lack of political will?" Noting the fight for women's suffrage and the civil rights movement, she emphasized, "we're going to have to turn up the heat. Women did not get the right to vote by voting on it."
After years of shredding our public health infrastructure and ill advised minimal preparations for the next great global pandemic, the spreading swine flu threat is at last making clear the very real calamity that could be just around the corner. If not today, surely from the next epidemic.
The Obama administration's call on Congress Tuesday to allocate $1.5 billion for combating the virus is a start, but only a start. The RNs of the National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association (NNOC/CNA) believe that far more is needed in federal action, in regulatory crackdown on insurance practices that potentially inhibit those who are infected from seeking help, and in global coordination.
From SARS to avian flu to the swine influenza, the only question has not been if, but when.
(Much more going on around universal healthcare than the usual Beltway Banditry dominating the news. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.
For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of rightwing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide --Tommy Douglas.
While the federal window remains open for reform, with two national single payer bills, John Conyers' HR 676 in the House and now Bernie Sanders' S 703 in the Senate, many nurses, doctors, and health activists are turning to the states to lead as well.
(Reform or deform? Things are so bad that they can't prevent SOMETHING from being done. But the corporate powers that be are fighting like mad to prevent it from being anything remotely like what we need. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.
From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.
Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?
Or perhaps it's the caution or lack of will of some liberal groups to press for more fundamental reform--such as a single payer/expanded Medicare for all approach--that permits the industry and its conservative champions in Congress to dominate the terrain.
It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.
In my intro to that diary, I said:
This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Examples of those limits are everywhere, but none is better than the virtual exclusion of single-payer health care from discussion in the health-care debate. Private insurance companies take roughly one third off the top for their bureaucracy, their advertising, their lobbying and their profits, and they don't contribute anything to providing health care. In fact, they are a clear impediment, as millions of people know from their personal experience on a daily basis. They are, at this point, purely parasitical on our diseased political culture. Yet, getting rid of them is politically unthinkable in Obama's mind, in the world he accepts as given. On Democracy Now! on Friday, this was the topic of discussion with Harpers senior editor Luke Mitchell, author of the article "Sick in the head: Why America won't get the health-care system it needs."
Within hours of taking the Oath of Office, President Barack Obama ordered all federal agencies to suspend all of Bush's eleventh-hour rules changes, pending a full review. This means that Bush's notorious "conscience clause" rules are on hold until Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services can review them. That would be Tom Daschle. It's highly unlikely that Daschle would sign off on these rules, which would give government healthcare workers unprecedented latitude to refuse reproductive health services on religious grounds.
Randy Kuhl is on the death list of Republicans against Better Democrat Eric Massa in New York's 29th. Massa is not just in favor of universal health care, he's in favor of straight up single payer health care. NY-29 is also the most Republican district in New York state.
But you know, universal health care isn't popular so whatever.
In an extraordinary convention just concluding in Puerto Rico, here's what you didn't hear from Andy Stern's paid PR blitz. SEIU was under siege throughout by protest encampments of the popular Puerto Rican Teachers' Union, responding to SEIU's raid of the island's largest union-- during a strike to improve horriffic educational conditions.
Inside the convention, to the detriment of the overall labor movement, Stern successfully squashed the internal dissent by SEIU's democracy activists, thereby further concentrating power in himself. The CEO model.
And in an extraordinary development, Stern announced that SEIU is basically doing away with labor reps in favor of outsourced call centers...which makes sense, in that if you sign no-strike promises to your employer, why would you need to mobilize your members?
There's more! SEIU is continuing its war against state and national RN unions by now picking up John McCain's frame of attacking "government-run healthcare" as their latest salvo against the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (AFL-CIO). If anyone doubted SEIU's willingness to sell out genuine healthcare reform in a second, doubt no more.
Attendees of the SEIU Convention in Puerto Rico are facing a protest encampment and multiple pickets by Puerto Rican teachers, parents and schoolchildren, furious at Andy Stern and his North American union for their efforts to bust a historic strike and take over the independent Puerto Rican Teachers Union (FMPR-Federacion de Maestros de Puerto Rico).
The Puerto Rican convention center hosting the Service Employees International Union's big confab is kind of an eerie cross between Superman's Fortress of Solitude and a prison in some isolated part of rural California. The entire complex was fenced in or gated off, with police and security guards posted at every entrance. Apparently the looming threat is the Puerto Rican teachers, whose union is known by its Spanish acronym FMPR. About 100 teachers gathered outside the convention center Saturday morning to protest SEIU's raid on their union (read the full story from the February Labor Notes). In January the FMPR was decertified by the Puerto Rican government for authorizing a strike. The decertification coincided with SEIU's announcement that they were affiliating a rival teacher union and making plans to scoop up Puerto Rico's 40,000 teachers.
The union will provide resources exclusively to the GOP this fall, the person said. Union leaders, joined by key health care industry figures, met Friday with Sen. Bruno to discuss how to help the GOP hold control.
The Reps hold the Senate in this blue state by a 32-30 margin, which is very bad news for a wide range of progressive causes, especially healthcare. This SEIU-Republican deal is instructive for those following the debate within the labor movement between Andy Stern's SEIU and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, much of which turns on the political profiles of the unions and on CNA/NNOC's work towards guaranteed healthcare.
A major reason for the increasing controversy surrounding SEIU International has been their lack of commitment to genuine healthcare reform-and in fact their active attempts to undermine and sink patient-centered, single-payer reforms.
Progressive elements in the labor movement (and their own union) have long been aware of this problem, as have healthcare and single-payer activists around the country.
This story is now entering the wider public discussion as SEIU International embarks on new partnerships with corporate America and, all too often, Republican power brokers. We'll take a look, below, at their latest partnership, this one with the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Realtors, to support a bill that hurts patients in the name of increasing insurance corporation profits-and, perhaps, winning employer sanction for SEIU organizing.
...for more background, please visit the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee's new site, ServingEmployersInsteadofUs.
4,000 brave women and men, RNs from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, are spending this week on the picket lines outside of Sutter Health Hospitals throughout Northern California, on a 10-day strike over patient care issues. Let me tell you about it, and introduce you to some of the RNs, because this is an important strike for a re-energized American labor movement and a key moment for the nation's battle for quality healthcare.
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