“Look, the fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option.” - Kent Conrad (D-North Dak). 7/16/09
OK. So what the fuck is the point of voting for the Democratic Party? If the Democrats can't pass low-hanging fruit like a public option (similar to RomneyCare in Mass), with a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, what is the use?
I can already hear the litany of excuses from some on the liberal left to explain why the public option crashed and burned. But this is not only the doing of a handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate. This is a deep institutional problem with the Democratic Party, with our electoral procedures, with the weight of economic power that prevails within our political institutions.
I hate that I was right about this, but I recall being totally alienated at the Obama victory-rally amidst huge numbers of elated people in the streets. I recall feeling stressed, thinking to myself: all of this energy has been spent for this moment, but this moment is only (at best) the opening of a small amount of space for other things to happen. And what's going to ensure that they do?
Sunday, August 16, 2009
60 seat filibuster-proof majority
Monday, August 10, 2009
Lance Selfa Rip of the Current Health non-Reform
(via socialistworker.org)
In a way, I wish that Selfa was wrong about this but he's not. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from liberal friends that the problem is Max Baucus, Blue Dogs, Republicans, etc. Yes, they're all blowhards. Yes, they're doing their best to thwart reform. But they're not alone. Obama and friends are doing plenty to screw this up as well. I think most of Selfa's criticisms are right on -Obama didn't try to mobilize popular support, but tried to broker a deal among elites with the assumption that if he played their game that they would bargain, with the result that we get 'something' without having to start a fight with Big Pharma, the insurance companies, etc."Given this constrained vision--where the "progressive agenda" becomes increasingly melded with the White House's agenda--even liberal complaints about Obama's concessions to corporations and "centrist" politicians fall by the wayside. Perversely, of course, this gives even greater license to the White House to make concessions to business and conservative politicians.
Until there is independent pressure from a mobilized social movement, combined with a real political challenge from Obama's left, the type of reforms--even the prospect of reforms--are likely to follow the pattern we're currently seeing in the health care debate."
There's also the related issue of Obama's rhetoric: he speaks about reform in terms of technical points which are admitedly important in some respects, but he leaves the normative punch of why we need health reform largely out of the message.
I agree wtih Selfa. I think most liberals know all of this, but feel strongly that the Democratic Party is the best that we can do. If not Obama, then John McCain. If not Harry Reid, then Mitch McConnell. But where does this leave anyone remotely close to the Left in this country? Is there no other viable option other than to sit down, shut up and resign ourselves to health care 'reform' that's beginning to look less progressive than RomneyCare?
This is a serious dilemma, and its not hard to see where the liberals have a point here.
But its also not difficult to see that the meagre electoral Left (to the extent that there even is one) has no bargaining chips. They are marginalized in the Democratic Party. Its even worse for voters, who don't get to vote on legislation but only between a canditate from one of the two dominant parties. The voting Left is powerless; the Democrats never fear for a second that they won't get these votes, because they know that these people have nowhere else to turn. They know that anyone remotely progressive despises the Republicans and that that alone will turn them out. And it does, I've seen it. I've seen anti-war friends committed to mariage equality and social justice campaign for right-wing Democrats committed to war, homophobia and cutting funding for education. I'm hardly exempt here; I've helped out and cast many votes for 'centrist' and 'Blue Dog' Democrats.
Still, the ISO invocation to 'build an independent social movement' is appealing yet frustrating. The reason that many people don't join an independent social movement isn't that they don't agree with the ISO here; its tough work that pits one against a heavily-funded institution with shock-troops who themselves claim to be 'progressive'. Most media, 'pundits', etc. won't even take note of what you're doing- and if they do they'll just distort you. Meanwhile, they'll be playing up the next election like its the most important even of the century and making you look more and more irrelevant. Its not an easy struggle. Its not easy to see what an independent Left-wing organization should be try primarily to do -its not claer what the goal should be if the organization lacks the ability to threaten to take votes from the Democrats. Of course, building a separate party is another dilemma entirely. I'm not saying its not worth trying again -there are probably many lessons to be learned from the demise of the Green Party. Still, I'm not convinced that's the place to begin putting time and energy.
The thing that intrigued me the most about the EFCA, wasn't that the big unions would get more members. In general, I'd rather that they did, but this wasn't the most interesting part of the card check. Think of the political reverberations of having more people join a union and encounter some of the values (solidarity, community, equality) that accompany the experience of striking together, fighting for a contract, etc.
Alas, I don't know what the right way forward is. But I'm not getting sucked into the next round of elections where I am supposed to bite the bullet and canvass for Democrats (no matter how conservative).
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Fire engines and emergency rooms
If your house is on fire in the United States, firefighters come to put it out and save your life.
You don't receive any bills. You don't have to purchase a monthly fire protection service whose prices fluctuate according to market conditions and the demands of profitability.
You just get the service you need, when you need it. No red tape. No fees. No needless bureaucracy. Things are simple.
That's what happens if your house is on fire. But if you have a medical emergency, its a completely different story.
This is how things might go assuming you are not one of the 50 million Americans who has no health insurance at all. Imagine you break your arm and go to the emergency room. You get the immediate care you need and get released the next day. On your way out, you stop by a department of the hospital where you're to pay and fill out the appropriate insurance information (in the U.K., for example, such departments do not exist).
That wasn't so bad, right? I mean, even though you may be paying costly premiums, deductibles and co-pays, at least you're covered, right?
Until 5 months later you get a call from the hospital (or a debt collection agency paid by the hospital) demanding that you pay for your visit. You owe some ridiculous sum of money, they claim. Say, $10,000. "But I'm insured" you say to yourself. You check into things and find out that your insurance company doesn't want to cover the treatment because it was 'experimental' or because it derived from a 'pre-existing condition'. So they claim that they aren't going to pay. You press them, and they claim that they aren't going to budge.
Somehow, things get straightened out and it appears that the insurance company is going to pay for some of it. Whew. Glad that's over.
Until a year later you get a bill from the hospital demanding some smaller sum of cash that you still 'owe' them. It turns out, that the insurance company has refused to pay for 2 bandaids and a cotton swab totalling $100. The hospital, it seems, didn't send the bill in the correct format in the correct time window to the insurance company, so the insurnace company said they refuse to pay it. Since the insurance company is a huge, powerful, and attorney-fortified institution, the hospital has decided to pass the buck along to you. If the big insurance giant wont pay or will force a trial in order to cough up the cash for your bandaids, the hospital figures they might as well harass you to pay it. After all, you're not very scary and you aren't so likely to have a team of corporate atorneys at your disposal to dispatch such requests.
So the hopsital takes this outstanding balance that they're owed and sells it to a debt-collection shark. They sell it to the shark for 75% of what its 'worth', so the hospital recoups some of the cash they're owed and is absolved of having to deal with getting the money. So now you get calls from some shark demanding that you pay for the cotton swabs that your insurance company has refused to pay.
You complain to your insurance company that they should just pay this thing, but they don't listen. After persistent calling, faxing, letter-mailing, and emailing, they explain to you that they aren't paying because of 'company policy'. The company policy, after all, was drawn up in the interests of making the company maximally profitable. If you were to aggregate the amount of 'small sums' of this nature that they refuse to pay in a single year alone, it adds up to a decent chunk of money. This is how capitalist entreprises function: the bottom line is that they try to minimize costs and maximize returns.
Meanwhile you've got some jerk-off claiming that you haven't paid for cotton swabs used at a visit to the doctor that occured 3 years ago at a time when you were fully covered by what most people would consider "really good health coverage".
Invovled in this tragic comedy, are: two different health care providers (the hopsital and the contractors) who each have their own bone to pick with you, a massive insurance institution that is not 'on your side' but rather on the side of the investors who own the company, and a handful of seperate institutions that make their money by collecting debts and harassing people. If things get really bad, you can also throw your attorney and any other legal counsels fighting against you in a legal battle that might subsequently ensue, not to mention the court system, judges, etc.
Now in the United Kingdom health care works like fire departments work here.
When you get sick, you go to a hospital. You get the care you need. You leave feeling better. 3 years later you do not receive 5 different bills from 6 different bureaucracies. In fact, you never receive any goddamn bills. As a citizen and a taxpayer of the United Kingdom, you've already paid your dues. And what's more, whatever dues you did pay were proportional to how much money you made: the amount you pay for your health care isn't a 'one size fits all affair', but takes into account your ability to pay. It doesn't much matter whether you have a job when you go to the hospital, whether you're old and frequently ill, whether you are poor. You can come and get the health care you need all the same.
The United States Congress has been holding 'health care forums' recently in which they are claiming to be putting 'all options on the table' in considering ways to reform the unbelievably moronic health insurance system that the US currently has. But nothing remotely approximating the example above is being mentioned, let alone seriously considered.
The problem, after all, isn't that we have twelve different bloated bureacracies doing sixteen different tasks that have nothing to do with insuring people, but rather firguring out how not to insure the people that already paid for their insurance. The problem isn't that our system is inefficient and has too many different institutions doing the same thing poorly. The problem isnt that profiteers are in firm control of all the relevant institutions and run them according to the criteria of "let's make me as rich as possible". The problem isn't that these assholes made billions in profits last year while millions more Americans lost their insurnace coverage.
The problem, says Obama et. al, is just that 'health care costs are too high'. Right.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Should I be less cynical about Obama?
At present the following things are on my mind.
It appears that the EFCA is dead in the water, and the White House did literally nothing (of which I'm aware) after the election to push for it.
In recent Congressional health-care 'forums' in which 'all options are [supposed to be] on the table', advocates of Single-Payer have been barred from participation and were recently arrested for showing up to the public committee hearing.
Civilians are dying in droves in Afghanistan, including children, as bombing raids and troop levels increase.
The promise to close Guantanamo and everything that it represents has miscarried. Apparently military commissions are the new "change".
Social Security looks to be in more trouble than some may have thought, and this comes after the Administration tried early in its tenure to have hearings about 'reforming' (read 'privatizing') Social Security to make it more in line with 'fiscal responsibility'.
Wait, remind me again why voting for Democrats is supposed to be the be-all-end-all of 'progressive' politics in our country? ... Guess we'll just have to wait until 2010 to put on our electioneering hats and table our anger at the democrats by getting all excited that the 'balance of power' might shift in the Congress... after that we'll only have to wait 2 more years for another round of Presidential debates and elections... yeah, wait, wasn't there something for the sake of which elections are only a means, rather than an end in themselves?
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Phil Bredesen as Heatlhcare Czar?
Yep. That's what I've heard anyway: he could be on the shortlist for the job.
No, I'm not joking. The Obama Administration is considering appointing the man who, as governor of Tennessee, took a chainsaw to TennCare and made savage cuts to medicaid, leaving hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans suddenly without any access to medical care. In fact, as Ezra Klein notes, Bredesen overemphasized cuts so much so that he actually had money leftover the following year to restore coverage for a small percentage of those who had been previously stripped of access to medical care. Politico reports that during that same period Bredesen received $150,000 from Blue Cross/Blue Shield to renovate his Governor's Mansion. Now that's change we can believe in. I wonder if Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich are next in line after Bredesen.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Bredesen made his fortune as a private health-insurance industry entrepreneur. That such a person could even be mentioned in the same sentence as 'reformist' or 'progressive' (or whatever liberal Democratic activists are calling themselves this week) is preposterous. I'm sure that the DLC applauds his tenure as governor for its 'moderation', 'bipartisan spirit' and willingness to promote 'pro-growth' policies and balanced budgets.
There is also indication, according to BAR, that the slimy right-wing fraud, Harold Ford Jr., could be up for some cabinet appointment as well. (My most memorable recollection of Ford dates back to his 2006 bid for the Senate when he debated Bob Corker in Nashville and stood up from his seat to scream at Corker, yelling 'you haven't cut anywhere near as many taxes as if I have!'... what transpired for the next 10 minutes was a pathetic pissing match between Corker and Ford over who loved tax cuts more).
In Tennessee, apparently, they don't throw away their garbage... they elect it to state-wide office.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Bipartisanship seems to be working wonders
It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.Aside from the partisan hackery (which is to be expected from Krugman, although I clearly am not recommending 'bipartisanship' as an alternative), Krugman's most recent article is right on. Obama and the Democrats have already squandered crucial moments of their mandate and political capital blathering about 'bipartisanship', which has had the net effect (surprise, surprise) of empowering an otherwise pummelled and defeated opponent and enabling them to try to derail the Democrat's plans. Nevermind that the plans in question, according to Stiglitz and Krugman, are grossly inadequate and far from 'audacious' enough. The result of the love affair with 'reaching accross the aisle', however, is that these tepid policies are further diluted by a pathetic congressional minority who has seen their power halved in the last four years at the polls. And its hardly just the Republicans who are diluting it: 'centrist' Democrats like Ben Nelson in the senate have been recently trying to defang the stimulus bill by swapping spending for tax breaks.
Obama claimed that he would bring in a new era of sweeping change. But so far he has willingly given over some of his own mandate to the neoliberal extremists on the Right and thus reneged on his promise for change by reaching out (even if only rhetorically) to a party that is thoroughly convinced that 'gummint spending is the problem, tax cuts are the only solution'. Reaching out to these morons means giving up even the most moderate conceptions of 'change' on the table already... it means in effect reverting back to the Bush years. I mean let's be honest: all we can expect from this language of 'change' at this point is increased spending on things like education, healthcare, infrastructure (particularly public transit) and public employment. If the Democrats cannot even deliver on these modest goals, in what sense are they even a nominally 'progressive' party at all? Everything that liberals have claimed that Democrats needed in order to really pass bold reforms has fallen in place: a heavily popular president elected in a near landslide, a House in firm control by the Dems, and a Senate that is ONE vote shy of a supermajority, heavy cheering for new Administration. Yet, what do they do right off the bat? They blather about bipartisanship. Its hardly peripheral to this discussion to note that the 'they' in question is largely a clique of bankers, ex-financial execs, tax-evaders and otherwise class-enemies of the majority of the population.
What is the point of voting for Democrats if they spend so much time worrying about whether the Republicans (or Capital) are happy?
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Audacity of Dope?
Red Pepper blog on some of the strange commercial appropriations of Obama lately.
This looks like a blog I may have to keep an eye on.
