Any Democrat who does not vote for a "public option" insurance plan in health care reform must be challenged in a primary. And this includes any President who does not go to the mat and fight 100% for a public option.
Our elected officials gave away our opening negotiating position by refusing to even consider the popular "Medicare-for-All" plan. Had they started with Medicare-for-All they would have the option of giving in and compromising with a public option. In fact they could well have won with this because Medicare-for-All just makes more sense. It is simple, costs less, is easily explained and the public loves Medicare.
So here we are. Just like the stimulus fight, the administration gave away essential policy to please Republicans and appear "bipartisan" before even entering negotiations. Just like during the fight for a solid stimulus plan, the Republicans took that compromise as an opening position, whittled it away without having to exchange their wins for votes, and after reducing the plan to bad public policy won't vote for it anyway.
If -- let me emphasize that I am saying "if" -- the President is really backing away from the public option these are the lessons that will be learned:
Lesson learned for members of Congress who spent political capital and backed their President, going public supporting a public option: The President can't be trusted to be consistent and stand with you. So the lesson is don't go out on a limb to back him again.
Lesson learned for teabaggers who shouted down Democratic legislators as they tried to explain the advantages of a public option: Intimidation works, so ramp it up.
Lesson learned for big corporate interests who orchestrated the terrible lies and intimidation: Do more of this.
Lesson learned for the public: Why even bother to vote? You might win, but what does it matter if the leaders you elect feel free to do the opposite of what you voted for.
We need to fix this. We need to apply pressure the way it should be applied in a democracy. We need a credible threat to run solid progressive candidates in primaries against any elected official who lets us down, rewards the big corporate interests and enables and encourages the intimidation tactics of the teabaggers. We need to start now to find a candidate to run against Obama in the 2012 primaries if he does not step up and fight for us. If.
Along with Ian Welsh I have been sitting in while Chris and Natasha got married and took some time off. But soon they will be coming back.
The blog is still here, largely undamaged. I only got in a few comment fights and managed not to insult anyone (too much). I hope I was able to inspire some thinking. I know that the people here got me thinking about a number of new things.
If you are a progressive idea person and want to follow some of the ideas that have been worked on here, please visit both the Campaign for America's Future blog, Blog for OurFuture, and the Commonweal Institute's blog, Uncommon Denominator. BOTH blogs have a LOT going on. (But ALWAYS come back to Open Left.) If you want to get on their mailing lists, the Campaign For America's Future's email signup is right on their front page, and the Commonweal Institute's signup page is here. (And just like Open Left, both organizations need your donations to help them get progressive ideas out to the mainstream!)
I guess I'll be out of here for now. Of course, something might trigger another rant at any time, and I still have the keys...
As I occasionally say at Seeing the Forest: Watch your backs!
Have we developed into a country that has one set of rules for the people at the top of the ladder and another for the rest of us? Or perhaps a special set of rules for Republicans and their cronies - IOKIYAR - and a completely different set of rules for Democrats?
I think the original model for "special set of rules" was Richard Nixon. When Nixon was pardoned the whole country learned that you can get away with things if you have enough power. You had to be there. It wasn't just about "Watergate," it was about corrupting the entire system, breaking every rule, taking every bribe, starting illegal wars, spying on and using the power of government against your political opponents -- you name it the country by then knew that the Nixon administration had done it.
And then a few years later, Nixon explained, ""When the President does it, that means it is not illegal."
Sounds like an overall model for the Bush administration.
OK, that was a funny line, but think about it. If Nixon had not been pardoned, would the corruption of the Reagan administration have occurred?
"By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever."
- Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years, by Haynes Johnson
As I said above, you had to be there. These were not political prosecutions - Democrats just don't do that - these were the ones who were so bad that it just could not be ignored. (One example: the Secretary of something was prosecuted for mob activities, and found not guilty after witnesses were murdered before they could testify. Not that they were connected or anything.)
After Reagan was caught going around Congress' express instructions and sending arms to Iran the investigation was blocked and the perpetrators let loose. The crimes were investigated by Iran/Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh who was blocked at every turn:
"Walsh recognized that many of the appeals judges held a "continuing political allegiance" to the conservative Federalist Society, an organization dedicated to purging liberalism from the federal courts.
"It reminded me of the communist front groups of the 1940s and 1950s, whose members were committed to the communist cause and subject to communist direction but were not card-carrying members of the Communist Party," Walsh wrote."
Walsh's investigation ended when Bush I pardoned all the potential witnesses against him.
So just as the corruption of Nixon set the stage for the corruption of Reagan/Bush, Reagan/Bush getting away with the most serious - and public - abuses of the Constitution and democracy set the stage for the political witch hunts against Clinton. And it all set the stage for the Bush administration.
So far the Bush administration is clean off the hook for pretty much everything they did. What does that tell us about what the next Republican administration will be like?
A corporate lobbying organization, partly funded by oil and tobacco companies, its leadership implicated in the Abramoff corruption scandal, arranged for an astroturf "demonstration" at a local town hall meeting on health care put on by Senator McCaskill's staff.
Americans for Prosperity is led by Tim Phillips, who was a former partner with Ralph Reed's Century Strategies. That organization became well-known when it was revealed in a Senate investigation that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was laundering money through Century Strategies and Americans for Tax Reform to oppose legislation that his Indian tribe clients wanted to defeat.
I expect that corporate front groups are arranging for similar disruptions of meetings between members of Congress and their constituents all summer. They are trying to make it appear that the public is against health care reform.
Meanwhile, have you received the email that is circulating, claiming that the health care plan includes forced euthanasia of seniors to save on costs?
This post originally appeared at Blog for OurFuture. It was written for the Making It In America project.
I am pro-corporate. I'll go a step further with that and proclaim that I believe that there are no bad corporations, and that I haven't seen any corporations do anything wrong.
I see the way you are looking at me. I'd better explain.
The reason I say there are no "bad" corporations is because corporations are not sentient beings that can "do" things or that can be good or bad. They can't make decisions. Corporations are just a bundle of contracts that allow groups of people to more easily raise capital and amass resources. Corporations are things, like chairs, and things do not make decisions, any more than a chair does. Corporations are tools and tools are neither good nor bad.
When I say I am pro-corporate, this is what I mean: The things that the corporate legal structure enables people to do are good for society. This is why We, the People decided to enact the laws that created corporations. If we want to be able to accomplish things on a large scale, like build a railroad or airports and airplanes or skyscrapers - or solar power plants to replace coal power plants - we want to enable people to more easily raise the necessary capital and amass the resources needed to get the job done. The legal structure of the corporate form of a business accomplishes this.
You may have heard that some European countries have banned models that are underweight because seeing them has a harmful effect on teenage girls.
Should we be thinking about the negative societal effects of marketing? Should we ban marketing that is based on manipulating people by harming their self-esteem or encouraging them to do unhealthy things? Should we ban advertising that utilizes techniques that effect how our brains work? Should we demand that ads stop distracting us from our thoughts? I have been wondering about this.
Marketers today are learning how to reach down into the wiring of the brain itself, to manipulate us at a level that we do not consciously perceive and cannot control. Science has come a long way in recent decades. There is a new kind of marketing called neuromarketing that actually uses brain scans to measure how our brains react to certain stimuli. We are in danger of marketers using the information gained from these new techniques to come up with ways to sell us things and make us do things and we may in many cases be literally unable to resist.
It is not unprecedented to think about restricting marketing, even in the "free market" United States. We have confronted the problem of people being harmed by marketing in the past, with tobacco advertising and false claims of medical benefits. It used to be against regulations to make false claims in TV ads. But by and large companies have free range to manipulate people as they see fit.
OK, sit down for this. The root of the "forged Obama birth certificate" idea is that Obama was created as part of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to take over the United States. More on this later in the post.
In America people won't work. They are lazy. You have to make them work. If you don't make them, they just want to sit around.
If you just give people money or pay people too much it makes them dependent. They get used to it. They demand more. It never stops.
Enlightened managers provide incentives (carrot) instead of just punishing them but really it's still the same thing, you have to make them work or they won't. You have to keep on them.
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My students are good kids. I know they get into trouble sometimes but they mean well. Most of them don't have the kind of background that let me go to college. I was lucky and I want to give back what I can.
I don't get paid a lot. And now I have to work extra hours since the budget cuts, and I don't know how I will make up for the loss in pay. Especially lately, since I have been buying the materials for the class projects myself. The school couldn't pay for them anymore.
They say I am a good teacher, so they put me with the worst students because they need the most. But that means these students test worse than the other students, and that is how teachers are rated now. It is too bad that I don't get raises anymore, but it us so important what I am doing. I know I am doing a good job with them. Some of them will go on to college.
I said it the other day, and I feel the need to repeat it: the public does not yet understand that the government is about to order people to buy health insurance, with their own money. Yes, the government is about to order people to cough up hundreds of dollars a month each.
When the Republicans start using their toxic message-machine magic on this, and the public starts to understand that they are being ordered by the government to cough up a huge amount of money every month, Democrats had better have good hiding places, because things are going to get really bad out there.
This is the kind of policy that results when "centrist" Democrats give in to to the demands of Republicans and big corporations and the top 1% of the wealthy. Instead of just taxing the wealthy and corporations at reasonable rates and using the money to provide We, the People with health care -- thereby vastly improving the economy for ... the wealthy and big corporations -- they instead come up with a scheme to order regular people to pay for health insurance because they don't already have it because they can't afford it.
This is how things work in the Post-Reagan era: The corporations and vastly wealthy get tax cuts. We, the People get service cutbacks, increases in the retirement age, jobs outsourced, the infrastructure deteriorates... When huge financial corporations get in trouble because they got too greedy the government salutes and says, "Yes, Sir!" and coughs up trillions in bailouts. But when regular people can't afford insurance, the government as presently constituted comes up with a plan ordering them to buy it.
This fight over health care seems to be exposing the contradictions much more visibly than other policy battles we have had. Against the background of the vast sums spent on the bailouts we have people in power telling us that it wouldn't be fair to insurance company profits to come up with a health care plan that provides great care to the public for a low price.
Who is our economy FOR, anyway? That is the question that my own blog asks. Just asking the question takes your thinking in new directions.
What can we do about this?We need to fight for meaningful health care subsidies so regular people who do not now have health insurance will not have to pay for health insurance. It is a simple tradeoff, really: every dollar in new taxes on corporations and the top 1% can be applied to a dollar of subsidies covering health care. This will result in a more equitable, prosperous and healthier society -- and happier voters.
Is Obama's insistence on bipartisanship killing his presidency?
I submit that health care reform could fail and take the Obama Presidency with it, and that this may well be the result of attempting to appease Republicans who want only to destroy him.
Let's look at the record. When Obama took office the country urgently needed sufficient stimulus to make up for the slack in demand from consumers and businesses. But before even offering his plan Obama weakened it because he believed this would bring in Republican votes. And then while the plan was going through Congress more and more actual stimulus was removed. Then the stimulus didn't get a single Republican vote in the House, and only a couple in the Senate. In the name of bipartisanship Obama gave up a good plan in exchange for nothing. Now the economy is beginning to suffer the consequences.
Meanwhile the Republicans who Obama gave up so much to bring on board are working to destroy his administration with propaganda and lies about how the plan is failing, how the plan is part of a socialist conspiracy to ruin the country, etc.
Conservatives complain about government as a meddlesome, intrusive problem. But just who is government a problem for? If you are a top executive in a large chemical corporation and your bonus depends on lowering the cost of discarding toxic wastes, government stands between you and the river into which you want to dump the wastes. It costs the company less to dump the waste into the river, you will get your bonus, but We, the People don't want that stuff in our water. So for you, government is the problem. ...
We are all familiar with this problem because it comes up so frequently. A company or industry pushes a cost onto the rest of us, thereby making more money for a few people. We all pay to clean up the mess, be it polluted rivers, ruined lungs or a warming planet.
This dumping of costs on the rest of us (regardless of the consequences) is called "externalizing." A cost that has been moved outside the corporation is an "externality." A cost is passed out of the corporation and on to the rest of us.
Here are some examples. Some are obvious, some not so obvious:
The Senate Democrats are giving up on health care for now. They say it is for now, they are just going to leave for vacation and take it up again after the summer, but delay is death for an effort like this -- and they know that.
We must stop this vacation and make them stay in DC until health care passes. THEY have gold-plated health care policies, and no Senator's insurance company would dare deny them coverage if they got sick. Everyone else in America is at risk, and thousands are losing their coverage every day.
We need to do more than issue a strongly-worded letter, we need to make them STAY IN DC!
Later Update - I am just back from an event where Howard Dean was discussing health care. He says this is OK, because it gives supporters time to contact people to develop pressure for a good plan -- as long as it passes the House before the recess.
Increasingly people are asking about our country's plan for restoring and reinventing the economy. And that means thinking about manufacturing - the root of economic power. How will we revive American manufacturing and being back the good-paying jobs manufacturing creates?
Just look at the growth of China, Korea and other countries that have been following their own plans for growing their industry. On Friday Ian Welsh asked why the US is hemorrhaging good manufacturing jobs, described examples of industrial policies of a few other countries:
For good chunks of the 2000's, the Chinese government spent about 10% of their entire GDP keeping the Yuan undervalued. Other countries, like Japan and Korea also worked hard to keep their currencies undervalued (or the US dollar propped up, depending on how you want to look at it.) This made their goods more competitive than they would have been otherwise and the direct result was the loss of US manufacturing jobs.
Lately I have been realizing that modern conservatives very much depend on the benefits of good government to support them as they hold the anti-government positions they espouse. This first occurred to me when Sarah Palin quit her job as Governor of Alaska. This was hailed in Republican circles as "brilliant" because conservatives have so little respect for government and governing that it didn't bother them that she was shirking her responsibilities to the state and to the voters that elected her to the office. But she can get away with this only because Alaska's institutions of government have been built up to the point where the state can survive such neglect by its leadership. The courts will still function, the bridges will still allow cars and trucks to cross.
George W. Bush's administration was one more example of Republicans getting elected only to scorn the idea of actually governing.
In California we are living with the results of Republican anti-government governing. There is a Republican minority here taking advantage of the requirement that all budgets be enacted with a 2/3 vote. They vote against everything, and refuse to offer up anything they will actually vote for. To get even one or two Republican legislators to cross over so we can have any budget at all (that budget always entirely on their terms even though they will not vote for it) the Democrats have to offer up non-budget corporate sweeteners like huge tax CUTS for big corporations or waivers to allow offshore oil drilling.
The Democrats allow this to happen because it is the only way that needed services can be provided. The Republicans play a game of literally denying oxygen tanks to elderly people who will die, literally requiring people to hold their breath until Democrats cave in and cut schools and hand out more perks for the rich and big corporations.
But so far the state has survived - although at a breaking point now - because of the investment made in prior years. Bridges still allow cars and trucks to cross. Courts still hear cases. Water still arrives at faucets and sewage is still flushed away.
"We're going to take a little longer to get it right," Durbin told The Hill when asked about the oft-stated goal of a vote on or before Aug. 7, when a monthlong Senate recess begins. "Initially we had hoped for a full vote by then, but I don't think it's going to be possible."
Delaying the vote until after Labor Day would all but erase hopes of getting a bill to President Obama by mid-October, since the House and Senate versions would have to be reconciled in conference negotiations - assuming they pass their chambers.
I think healthcare for the public is more important the vacations for senators (who happen to already have incredibly good health insurance.) So I say: NO RECESS!
This is just outrageous. I guess that is why I am outraged.
Every one of us here knows that the Republican and insurance company strategy to kill the bill is to delay the bill. A delay gives Republicans time to raise more money from insurance companies, run more ads, tell more lies, incite more winguts, sow more division and hate, and could well kill this effort. Shame on any senators who are thinking of having a nice relaxing vacation before this fight is done. Shame.
This must not happen. No recess without health care! Let your Senators know that they must not leave Washington until health care is passed. Is there anything more important for the citizens of the United States?
Update (Adam Bink):Jane and the crew at Firedoglake have put together a petition that Rep. Starkactivist Mike Stark will be presenting to ask just the same. Sign here.
WHO has to wait? Obama HAS health insurance. HE doesn't have to wait. It is the citizens who have to wait.
This story informs us that,
After more than a week of tirelessly pressuring Congress to move, Obama may have to settle for a fallback strategy on overhauling health care. The best Democrats may be able to hope for this summer is action by the full House by the end of the month and some sort of agreement on a bipartisan plan in the Senate before lawmakers head home for vacation.
I used the word "inform" loosely, and I know many readers get the joke. This is process gossip, not information.
This is an example of a basic problem of today's insular, childish, gossip-focused news media. Writing about the needs of regular people or articles that inform the citizens are rare, barely even on the radar. Talking to people inside the media, the reaction to a post like this is "what is he even talking about?" The gossip, the process, the confrontation is the concern. Finding an "angle" to drive the corporate concerns of the media owners and the career of the reporter is more often the concern.
I'd like to talk about government. The conservative/corporate propaganda machine has turned "government" into a bad word. Conservatives portray our government as some kind of enemy of the public. We have all heard the scare stories about the harm done by meddlesome regulations from intrusive big government programs run by government bureaucrats.
Let's step back from reacting to the word as we hear it today and think about what the word really means.
In America government is us. It is, by definition, "We, The People." Our Constitution is the defining document of our government and it couldn't be clearer, declaring that We, the People formed this country "to promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves"... In other words, watch out for and take care of each other; "We, the People" have banded together to watch out for each other, take care of each other and build institutions to protect and empower each other.
With this in mind let's try an experiment. Try substituting some variation of the words, "We, the People," "us" or "the people making decisions for ourselves" every time you read or use the word "government." Or use the word "our" instead of "the" when you say "the government." Our government, us, we, the people, working together to take care of and empower each other.
My favorite use of this experiment is to apply it to Reagan's keynote statement, "Government is the problem, not the solution." Reagan is making a profoundly anti-democratic statement here. He is saying that "The people making our decisions for ourselves and watching out for each other is the problem."
We are supposed to be a representative democracy where We, the People are in charge, but we allow these companies and the government agencies propping them up to continue to operate with secrecy, refusing or even to let our own elected representatives know what is being done with our money!
And then I saw this. Just watch.
Alan Grayson: "Which Foreigners Got the Fed's $500,000,000,000?" Bernanke: "I Don't Know."
Sometimes you don't find out who your friends are until the bear in the woods hits the Pope's fan.
In the last year We, the People have been finding out who our friends are and aren't. (Actually mostly just aren't.) We especially have been finding out what the priorities are and where the power lies. And lies and lies.
Since the financial crisis began we have been seeing as clear a display of raw power being used against the interests of the people as I imagine can be seen. We were given hours to put up all of the money we have to bail out a few large financial institutions because they were "too big to fail," but we did nothing about how big they were -- and still are! We allowed the use of our tax money to pay incredibly fat paychecks and bonuses while more and more of the rest of us have been laid off, lost our retirement, houses, etc. We complained about the use in these bailed out companies of private jets by a select few and their families because it "looked bad" but not because of what it was. Who is this "we" anyway? I didn't want those things to happen, but "we" let them happen.
How many stories have we heard in recent years of CEO's and other executives looting, stealing, polluting and wreaking general havoc? The incentive to loot a company's pension funds is money. The incentive to outsource our jobs is money. The incentive to deny needed treatments to an insured patient is money. The incentive to pollute our rivers and air is money.
Generally the incentive to lie, cheat and steal is money. This is especially true in the corporate world where the reason for ... well, everything ... is money. This is normal, and can be kept in check. But the temptation that pushes many over the line is not just money, it is the possibility of the big, humungous jackpot. And that is what we have today.
It used to be that you could make, why, millions of dollars if you worked hard, built a company, invented something important, or had amazing talent. But today mere millions is for chumps. Today you can loot a fund, rig an energy market, forward-run stocks or threaten to bring down an economy and end up with a quick payoff of billions.
When excessive, massive paydays are possible, it opens the door to overwhelming greed and a resulting compromising of principles.
There is a way to prevent the destructive behavior we have been seeing from the top. People won't have an incentive to cheat and steal if they can't get the huge jackpot from the proceeds. Let's limit the possibility of collecting a vast and fast return. The vast and fast return is the motivator, so take it out of the equation.
