Kucinich, out of Congress after being redistricted into a tough primary fight with Marcy Kaptur that he lost. Good riddance, although Russell Simmons is no doubt heartbroken. It is tempting to say that he was thrown onto the trash heap of political has-beens despite providing a progressive fig leak for the neoliberal policies of Obama and Pelosi when the Democrats controlled Congress during the 2009-2010 session. But a has-been is defined as: A person, especially one formerly popular or influential, whose popularity or effectiveness has peaked and is now in decline. It is typically said of professionals and celebrities whose prime is behind them.

Given that Kucinich was never especially popular, at least as defined by the national electoral process, and that he was never effective legislatively, it would, strictly speaking, be inaccurate to even describe him as a has-been. Would it be more precise, using baseball lingo, to call him a never was? Well, not exactly, that's a little too harsh. Merriam-Webster defines never was as one that has attained no rank, success, or eminence. He did, it must be conceded, wins elections to become the mayor of Cleveland and a congressional representative, and he did attain a sort of avant-garde eminence amongst a small group of progressives, for whom he singularly represented their political impotence.

Kucinich was, in effect, a reed by which these progressives clung to the hope that the US could be moved in a more socially responsible direction through the electoral process. In this, his presidential campaigns anticipated the enthusiastic, pragmatic embrace of Obama in 2008 by a much larger progressive constituency. In both instances, progressives underestimated the extent to which the electoral process had degenerated into a duopoly where the two major parties competed for the privilege of which one could better serve the interests of capital. If Kucinich really wanted to perform a public service, he would expose this in relation to his experiences in Congress by writing and publishing his memoirs. Somehow, I doubt that will happen. At heart, he's a team player, as he showed when he voted for health care reform in 2010.

His defenders might contend that Kucinich was in the tradition of Peter Camejo, a revolutionary political figure who, unlike Camejo, actually got elected to office. Camejo, formerly a highly respected leadership figure in the Socialist Workers Party, subsequently participated in the creation of the Green Party and ran for the governorship and the Senate here in California as a third party candidate. It is, of course, a strained comparison. Kucinich was obviously no revolutionary, and, as many have observed, he performed the function of keeping purportedly rebellious progressives inside the Democratic Party, especially during presidential election years. He would run in the primaries, garner a small, enthusiastic vote from progressives that might otherwise be tempted to support a third party effort, and then dutifully support the nominee, no matter how far removed from his own perspective. Not surprisingly, the other, more mainstream, better financed candidates generally ignored him.

Camejo put the people first and the party second, while Kucinich invariably did the opposite. That's why he was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party. Beyond this, he participated in the electoral process as a means of educating people about the urgency of a radical, revolutionary transformation of the US. His efforts can therefore be paradoxically characterized as one of many foreshadowings of Occupy, a marked contrast to Kucinich's facilitation of the cooption of progressives by Obama. Kucinich yet again revealed the importance of his need to remain part of the congressional club when he voted for a bill on February 27th that would criminalize protest at many federal buildings and facilities, the Federal Restricted Grounds and Improvement Act. As with his vote for health care reform, he must have known that it was an act of desperation because of the contempt that those who run the Democratic Party have for him. Sadly, by trying to split the difference, he also earned the contempt of those for whom he sought to represent.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Vote or Die

I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, so much so that I found myself interested in a post over at firedoglake about Richard Kirsch, Health Care for America Now and the abandonment of the public option during the passage of health care reform. For those of you with any remaining doubt that over the lack of Democratic support for the public option, Talking Points Memo dispels it during the course of a review of Kirsch's recently released book about his experience:

The book is Fighting For Our Health, by Richard Kirsch, who directed the advocacy group Health Care for America Now during the push for reform. HCAN is a well financed umbrella group backed by scores of liberal groups, unions, and other reformers — making Kirsch a close witness to the entire saga. He confirms that the White House treated the public option like a bargaining chip with powerful industry players, and believes that when his group became most critical of the bill mid-way through the fight, that top White House aides sought to have him canned.

The White House had negotiated a number of deals with the health industry, designed to win their support for reform, including agreeing to oppose a robust public option, which would have the greatest clout to control how much providers got paid, writes Kirsch, largely confirming what has become an open secret in Washington.

Kirsch’s book is replete with similar stories. Thematically, it centers on contradictions within the Democratic party, and Obama himself, that gave rise to the infighting that marked the debate. To keep factions from spinning apart, Kirsch suggests, the administration was averse from the outset to the idea that progressives and sympathetic stakeholders should play an outside game, pressuring the President and problem Democrats in Congress to pass robust reforms.

By way of background, it is important to note that the public option was a watered down version of single payer, designed to provide an acceptable alternative for a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress. Perhaps, you recall that the passage of health care reform with a public option and the availability of generic drugs, also voted down in Congress, was mentioned by progressives as one of the reasons that it was essential for to vote for Obama and the Democrats in 2008.The public option, it seems, was more about creating a transfer station for those health care reform supporters traveling from single payer to the individual mandate than it was about an actual policy that could be effectively implemented.

Upon reading the Talking Points Memo review, one is immediately struck by the fact that the White House could not even tolerate the mild advocacy of an Obama friendly organization like HCAN. In the end, Kirsch got back in line, as HCAN urged its supporters to call Congress to get the final version of the bill passed, warts and all, as a visit to the HCAN homepage demonstrates. HCAN is therefore a cautionary story about how a progressive organization created for a particular, socially beneficial purpose ended up as an advocate for what it purportedly loathed, a neoliberal health care reform that places much of the costs on the middle class, although one can plausible argue that this was the true objective of those who created HCAN from the inception.

Not surprisingly, if the Talking Points Memo review of his book gives us an accurate impression of the scope of his book, Kirsch evades these unpleasant truths. Even today, it seems, Kirsch just can't be forthcoming with those who would support his objectives. Kirsch and HCAN refused, during the legislative process, to inform the public about what had already been done to the public option, and, in fact, continued to lead people to believe that, through public pressure, legislators could be induced to pass it. It was all just one big Kabuki show, where Kirsch and HCAN, with the support of labor unions like AFSCME and SEIU, and progressive groups like MoveON.org, mislead progressives and workers because they felt it was more important to dissemble and maintain an illusory influence with the White House than it was to be truthful with those who made phone calls, sent letters and organized rallies in support of the public option. Indeed, Kirsch is still being dishonest with this book, because, according to Talking Points Memo, it attributes the refusal of Obama to fight for a public option to a failure of political nerve and a misguided political strategy, when, instead, it is entirely consistent with the neoliberal, financial sector orientation of his policies.

Put bluntly, Kirsch and HCAN believe that people like you and me need to understand that we have to accept such manipulation as part of the effort to implement the progressive agenda. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly what many of the Strauss influenced neoconservatives say about foreign policy. From this loss of credibility in the legislative process and the institutionalized progressive organizations that considered it pragmatic to manipulate their supporters for the benefit of the White House, we now have Occupy. The failure of the progressive mobilization for health care reform and a Keynesian stimulus plan for the economy induced many to draw the inescapable conclusion that the electoral process merely serves the purpose of legitimizing corporate control of the US political system. They embraced the direct action ethos of Occupy as a form of resistance.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, MoveON.org, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Unions, Vote or Die

Who says that the practice of medicine has to have any relationship to the treatment of real illnesses and injuries?

Designer vagina surgery is big business: according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2009 female consumers spent an estimated $6.8m (£4.4m) on these procedures (the figure counts only plastic surgeons, not gynaecologists). Its popularity is rising in the UK, too – in 2008, the NHS carried out 1,118 labiaplasty operations, an increase of 70% on the previous year. And figures released this year show that plastic surgery company the Harley Medical Group received more than 5,000 inquiries about cosmetic gynaecology in 2010, 65% of them for labial reduction, the rest for tightening and reshaping.

The only reason I know about cosmetic vaginal surgery is that, while researching my latest book, I was given temporary faculty status at the medical school of the university where I teach creative writing, so I could observe obstetrics and gynaecology students. Somehow, I began to get spam emails addressed to Dr Lee, extolling the revenue expanding virtues of learning vaginal rejuvenation. And it's clear at this conference that the bulk of participants are indeed not plastic surgeons but run-of-the-mill obstetricians and gynaecologists who see this as their passport out of traditional practice.

When I ask these doctors about the drastic switch from delivering babies to doing cash-only cosmetic surgeries, many seem uncomfortable. A few sheepishly say they are just exploring their options. The ones already practising cite the rising costs of malpractice insurance, dwindling insurance and government reimbursements (in the US healthcare model, nine months of prenatal care and a normal vaginal delivery nets these primary care providers less than $2,000 [£1,288]). Others talk of a desire for more control over their schedule, rationalising the switch as a family values move.

But the irrefutable fact of the matter is that these cosmetic procedures can make you rich. As one speaker makes a presentation about his successful cosmetic-gyn practice, the wallpaper from his laptop appears on screen: various shots of him with his Porsche. The message is simple. A straightforward labiaplasty, done in-office, in a few hours, nets about $5,000 (£3,222). Enough customers and you, too, can live the good life.

Does one have to be a feminist to find this appalling? Apparently, this is the future of medicine, manipulating the emotional inadequacies of patients about their physical condition so as to persuade them to pay substantial sums of money for unnecessary surgical procedures. Of course, I recognize that this is perversely analogous to the execrable explosion of the number of plastic surgeons willing to perform cosmetic eye surgery for Asians. But be careful about reading the article in its entirety, you will just get angrier, especially if you stay with it until the doctor's joke about how pleased a patient's husband was after a vaginal rejuvenation procedure.

Labels: Feminism, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism

A couple of weekends ago, I took my young son to an event at the downtown library here in Sacramento. It was an event for children with activities, music and a little drama to celebrate Mark Twain, who, because of his brief time in the Central Valley during the Gold Rush, has been adopted as the city's honorary intellectual and author. Certainly, you could do a lot worse, even if the emphasis is upon the Calaveras frog and Tom Sawyer without any acknowledgement of his hostility to plutocracy and imperialism.

I used to work at the superior court less than a block from the library for many years, so I am familiar with the area. Upon arrival for the event, I was surprised at the number of homeless people that I encountered at the library and the adjacent Cesar Chavez Park. I have never seen so many since I first started work at the courthouse in August 1988, and I was employed there through the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, frequently spending my lunch break reading in the park. Perhaps, I haven't been around there recently, and exaggerate it, but I doubt it. One commonly encounters homeless people taking cans and bottles out of recycling bins and offering to wash your windows at gas stations. Of course, this isn't unusual except for the increasing pervasiveness of it. Unfortunately, in this era of austerity, Sacramento County is refusing to fund winter shelters, and it will make life difficult for a lot people. Despite the stereotype about the great weather in California, Sacramento can be harsh in the winter because of the combination of rain, wind and temperatures in the 30 to 50 degree Fahrenheit range. Getting wet in mid-40 to mid-50 degree temperatures is, quite literally, life threatening.

It is just one indication that poverty is becoming a ubiquitous presence in Sacramento. Several weeks ago, I went to another Sunday event associated with my son's youth soccer team. It was a day for taking pictures, among other things, and I asked one of the parents of another kid on the team as to what package they were going to purchase. He explained that he was going to merely request the free one, one where you get a couple of pictures, because he couldn't afford more than that. Mind you, the more inexpensive packages cost $11 and $16 dollars. But that's a lot when you don't have anything. I considered this experience an important indication about the extent of poverty in Sacramento because parents will find a way to purchase these sorts of things about their children if at all possible. My guess is that there is a large number of families who can't even pay for the association fee to get their children into the soccer league.

With the exception of the homeless, people conceal their poverty. Given the egalitarian nature of dress in this country, it is hard to distinguish people in regard to their economic security. But there are measures. Consider this article from the Sacramento Bee yesterday:

During panel discussion on the state's shrinking safety net, Bruce Wagstaff, director of the Countywide Services Agency, said the impact of the situation can be seen at the agency's offices on 28th and P streets, where a long line forms outside every morning before the building opens.

He said the challenges are as great as he has experienced in nearly 40 years in government.

People are going to the agency in record numbers for CalFresh (formerly called food stamps), CalWORKS and cash assistance, and Medi-Cal, Wagstaff said. CalWORKS enrollment is up by about 20 percent; CalFresh enrollment has gone up by about 50 percent.

One in four county residents is served by the county's welfare agency, Wagstaff said.

Meanwhile, the federal government is obssessed with the deficit, a deficit that, paradoxically, will grow if the economy is starved of an effective stimulus. The government has been captured by those with an ideological belief that the populace abuses social support programs and need to be encouraged to rely upon them less. The Obama administration's recent Medicare cost containment proposal is a typical example of it:

The proposal would require new beneficiaries to pay higher deductibles before Medicare coverage of doctors’ services and other outpatient care kicks in. The deductible, now $162 a year, is already adjusted for inflation. Mr. Obama would increase it further by $25 in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

In addition, the White House would increase Medicare premiums by about 30 percent for new beneficiaries who buy generous private insurance to help fill gaps in Medicare.

Many beneficiaries choose these private Medigap policies because they want the financial security they get from the extra insurance. But the White House said this protection gives individuals less incentive to consider the costs of health care and thus raises Medicare costs.

This is, of course, neo-Reaganism, a neoliberalism that punishes people for finding a way to obtain necessary medical care without concern for the cost. Many senior citizens live on fixed incomes, as my mother did, and Medigap insurance is necessary to prevent them from going broke when confronted with the urgency for immediate medical care. My mother was billed over $40,000 for an two emergency room visits and subsequent inpatient care. Without Medigap insurance, she would have been required to pay around $8,000 out of pocket. Fortunately, unlike many, she could have done so, at least this one time, but it goes beyond money. The purpose of such a proposal is to encourage people to deprive themselves of medical care because no one can know the cost with certainty prior to requesting it. It places people in the impossible position of diagnosing their condition before seeing a doctor. Just as union members have been maligned by the President because they have Cadillac plans for their health care, and must therefore, over time, be financially penalized in an attempt to coerce them into abandoning them, so must the seniors savvy enough to protect themselves with Medigap insurance. The cruelty of the neoliberal proponents of such policies is masked by the bland, actuarial language of accountancy, a language the privileges the profit and loss statement over people.

Labels: Barack Obama, California, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Poverty, Sacramento, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Today, the AFL-CIO is lobbying the Senate against any amendment of the health care reconciliation bill to include a public option. It is working, of course, is to prevent any Democrat from even introducing one so as to enable Senators from having to vote on the record. With labor unions, pro-choice groups and progressive organizations overwhelmingly acting at the behest of the White House, having abandoned any pretense of independently representing their constituencies, the inescapable question is: What Now?

With the House passage of the health care bill, the pattern of the remainder of the Obama presidency has been set in stone. We will see a progression of moderate to conservative policies, with the same groups that supported the health care bill cheerleading for them against the interests of those whom they purport to represent. They will distract attention from it through various faux mobilization campaigns, urging their members to call their congressional representatives and participate in rallies, frequently directed towards various Republican scapegoats.

What should people do as the progressive and non-profit infrastructure facilitates more war and more subsidization of the financial sector at the expense of working Americans? Generally, the answer is simple: stop paying for it. If you are a member of an AFL-CIO or Change to Win affiliated union, and oppose the obsequiousness of the union leadership, that means no longer paying that portion of your dues that go towards their political campaigns and lobbying efforts. For example, in California, most of my non-affiliated union dues go towards my representation in the workplace, but a smaller amount goes towards its political efforts. It is this contribution that union members should suspend.

By doing this, members can then donate to political activities of the union that they believe are worthy of support. Furthermore, the time may have come for progressive union members to aggregate their monies and volunteer efforts based upon a shared purpose and not upon their union affiliation. US Labor Against the War is a partial example of this approach, as it includes both AFL-CIO and Change to Win affiliated locals. But members should go farther, and solicit support at the level of individual members and not locals. The objectives of this approach are self-evident: it empowers union members to advocate for what they really want, and exposes the lack of credibility of the leadership of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win.

Longer term, the objective would be to substitute a politics by delegation, a politics that has failed so miserably, as here, with a politics in the first person, one in which people are not prevented from giving expression to their needs and desires through institutional structures that repress them. But this is a challenge that goes beyond the union movement. Many other pro-choice organizations and progressive groups have been captured by the neoliberal circle around Obama, and, as noted, will never escape their captors. Indeed, they have even less room for manuever that unions. Again, people should first withdraw their unconditional financial support, and demand that their contributions only go towards activities that they support. They should also consider, like union members, whether it is now time to create new organizations centered around an ideological program in which accountability is measured by the expression and fulfillment of the expectations of its participants.

firedoglake has been a good example of this sort of organization, but it is too dependent upon the financial resources and personal appeal of Jane Hamsher. In other words, it constitutes a laudable effort in the right direction, but it can be improved. It also relies upon the Internet, which can paradoxically engender both activity and passivity. To her credit, Hamsher is aware of these things, and firedoglake is an ongoing work in progress. But it is essential to recognize that we should not seek to create monolithic institutions that purportedly represent a coalition of large masses of people. Past efforts to do so, like the AFL-CIO, like Change to Win, like NOW, like MoveON.org, are partially responsible for our predicament, as they concentrated power in a small group of people who then spoke against the interests of the millions that they purportedly represent. Even worse, they have effectively alienated these people from the belief that they can collectively influence the governance of the country. As the CCP briefly said, before it understood the consequences, let a thousand flowers bloom.

Labels: Anarchism, Barack Obama, Feminism, Health Care, MoveON.org, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Too busy taking care of my son last weekend to notice that Gaius posted a thoughtful response to my Going Down with the Titanic one on Thursday.

Here it is, in its entirety (assuming, of course, that Gaius isn't going to raise a copyright objection):

Richard, you might well be right that the bill is a net loss for union workers.

Many (most?) of them already have health insurance and some will pay taxes on that coverage to help pay the costs this plan.

Also, the individual mandate has essentially the same purpose and the same effect as the "cadillac plan" tax.

It puts a big part of the burden of finance on a population of young and healthy working people who will not, as a group, require services costing anyting like what they will pay in.

The purpose and effect of both these features is to make the less badly off sectors of the working class pay a portion of the costs of the whole program, both administrative and actually medical, that should be paid for by the wealthier classes of society.

Not that they are getting off, completely.

The plan includes increased taxes on those making better than a working class income to finance this large extension of care to tens of millions of those less well off.

But the whole burden should have been tossed on the top end, and none of it on the working class.

Even so, the question can be asked whether Americans making less than that $250K are, as a group, net winners in this.

And the answer, of course, is that they are.

Too, it helps to remember that every major piece of America's social democracy is riddled with ugly compromises and partially defeated by them.

Social Security is far too close to being the coerced individual savings plan conservatives pretend it is when they work to defund, subvert, and destroy it, advertising their project as the liberal one of making it at least in part voluntary.

Medicare is crappy coverage compared to the plans people get from their employers during their working years as to what is actually covered, as to individual premiums, and as to eventual copays and coinsurance in case of need.

The corrupt boondoggle that is Medicare D, though it does provide needed coverage, is a laughing stock.

Medicaid, even in comparatively generous states like Pennsylvania, in case of serious medical need requires people to lose almost everything before kicking in.

The coverage in red states is so limited and wretched there is a constant flow of desperately sick people of all ages from Florida to Pennsylvania or Alabama to Illinois, people hoping to live long enough to establish residency and qualify under the blue state rules for treatment absolutely necessary to save their lives.

Every piece of social legislation imposing burdens on employers from workplace safety to unemployment insurance is full of exceptions for small businesses whose workers are in consequence not protected by these laws and regulations.

And that is a very large slice of American businesses and workers.

Just as this health insurance reform, if it passes, will still leave millions and tens of millions of people in our country without coverage.

All of America’s social democracy is half-assed.

But half an ass is better than none.

Update.

The student loan program is a good example of a good idea, corrupted by built in buyoffs for corporations.

Of course, the best idea is totally tax-financed education from bottom to top, for all.

Government guaranteed and subsidized loans from private banks are maybe third or fourth best.

Cheap government loans directly to students with no sweetener for banks is a better idea.

This is the sort of progressive move the Democrats hope to make in the future in connection with the health care reforms to be passed – or not – this weekend.

Interestingly, Gaius is saying pretty much the same thing my co-host said on our KDVS public affairs program last Friday. At the risk of boring everyone with repetition, I see the following problems with this perspective. Unlike Medicare and Social Security, this health care plan relies upon the private sector with minimal regulatory controls, especially in the area of cost containment. The fact that Congress and the President rejected the expansion of Medicare as a way of assisting the uninsured is quite telling as to the long term viability of this approach, if one defines viability as the provision of affordable insurance coverage.

Medicare, for all of its flaws, has provided coverage for over 40 years. Indeed, this plan incorporates the worst features of contemporary neoliberalism, state coercion along with direct subsidies for the insurance industry. The coercion reveals itself through both the mandate and the excise tax, with the tax constituting governmental intervention to discourage the provison of quality health insurance coverage by employers. The delayed application of the excise tax to policies obtained through collective bargaining agreements, if approved through the reconciliation process, will only forestall this outcome.

In regard to the subsidy, there is the obvious allocation of revenue to help people purchase policies. But, they will be insufficent, and, over time, will become even more inadequate given the lack of cost containment. It is entirely possible that the plan will never be more successful than during its first year of implementation, as that will constitute the period in which the subsidies will have the most value in terms of paying for policies. After that, there will be a slow, but inexorable decrease in overall coverage of the populace as the increased costs of policies outpace the subsidies. And, this is the best case scenario. Under the worst one, a coalition of Republicans and Blue Dogs cut the subsidies as part of a broader effort to cut Medicare and Social Security as part of entitlement reform.

The peril is especially acute because the President and the Congress rejected cost containment measures, such as, among others, single payer, the public option and the importation of much less expensive drugs from Canada. Thus, people expecting coverage under the plan face the prospect of being required to purchase policies with limited cost controls while there is unrelenting political pressure to cut the subsidies that they will rely upon to cushion the burden of purchasing them. There is also the problem that the plan is also being subsidized by cuts in Medicare spending over the next 10 years.

As noted by Gaius, a lot of people around the country already have trouble finding doctors because the reimbursement rates are considered too low. It is tempting to dismiss this because it has become a distorted talking point for Republicans, but Medicare is already in the sights of people who want to independently cut it as a means of reducing the deficit. How long before we are confronted with industry funded economic studies that show that dismantling Medicare and folding it into this plan will drastically reduce the government expenditures required to fund health care? One wonders if there is a long term expectation that Medicare will eventually be disbanded and replaced by this approach.

Finally, as I mentioned on Friday, there are the broader macroeconomic questions. There was an opportunity to expand health care coverage for people in a way that was marginally redistributive. In other words, increased coverage would be financed through more revenue obtained from the wealthy than from the middle and lower middle classes, and, furthermore, the middle and lower middle class would be protected from expropriation through ongoing, rapacious rate increases. Such a plan would have increased economic growth and job creation, making easier for people to purchase policies and the government to maintain the program.

Instead, we will now experience the opposite, a moribund economy for the indefinite future, with the middle and lower middle class subsidizing the profit of the industries associated with health care. Both the ability of people to purchase policies, such as they are, and the ability of the government to finance the program, will be compromised. Medicare has survived because of the economic growth, as sporadic as it was, since its inception. The notion that this plan, caught between the pincers of public expectation, lack of sufficient regulation and financial constraints, will fulfill its goal of insuring the vast majority of Americans, strikes me as implausible. But I don't think that has ever been the intention.

Labels: Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The health care bill vote is supposed to go down later today in the House. My guess is that it will narrowly pass by the slimmest of margins. After all, controversial business friendly proposals like this usually do, no matter how unpopular with the general public. That's American democracy in action, designed from the inception to empower political leaders to make decisions contrary to public sentiment for the benefit of the capital class. But what happens then? Clip 'n save the link to the firedoglake legislative analysis provided by cutting and pasting it to a secure location on your computer, and then go back and check it out every two or three years. Naturally, my ingrained pessimism leads me to believe that Hamsher and Co. are not bearish enough about the consequences, primarily because they, and many others, have not paid enough attention to the deflationary impact it will have on the economy and job growth.

Labels: Democrats, firedoglake, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The AFL-CIO and Change to Win get behind the health care bill. This is a generational moment in US politics, a moment when a progressive infrastructure built over decades permanently loses what remains of its credibility. Unions, pro-choice groups, liberal advocacy organizations, desperately throwing overboard firmly held convictions developed over a quarter century or longer to retain a seat at the table, although I have to concede, MoveON.org has never conducted itself according to any principle other that expediency.

The decision of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to support the bill is especially disheartening as they are among the only groups with sufficient membership and financial clout to chart a course independent of the White House. But no need to worry, they are going to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed, and ignite a new era of successful unionization in the workplace . . . you know, whenever they get around to actually putting resources into it instead of fighting with one another.

The sad fact is that the interests of unionized workers were better represented by tea party crazies than by their own unions, because the efforts of the tea party activists would have prevented an excise tax of employer based plans from going into effect, a tax that will, with the passage of time, either degrade the quality of their health coverage or cause them to pay substantially more for it. Having foregone salary increases for years in return for decent health care plans, the implementation of the health care bill will now take this away from them. It is all part of the new austerity, whereby workers are being forced by the government and transnational corporations to finance the reconstruction of the shattered financial system through a lower standard of living for years, and, possibly, decades. Marxists would probably call it a means by which the appropriation of surplus labor is increased.

It calls into the question the historic left commitment to trade unionism, as I observed in September 2009:

For those schooled in the traditions of the left, whether it be Social Democracy, Communism or anarchism, the reinvigoration of trade unionism is an essential precondition to any prospect of a progressive, not to mention revolutionary, social transformation. While there has been many points of disagreement between these leftist variations, there has been one constant. All three have emphasized the necessity of participating in unions as a means of educating and organizing workers in support of a radical, class based politics. None of them, with the exception of anarchists in the 1890s, believed that we could bring about a more just, more egalitarian society independent of the trade union movement. Furthermore, the unions served an essential purpose by providing a means whereby workers could learn how to manage their workplaces for themselves.

If the moribund trade union movement cannot be resuscitated, the consequences for the left are profound. An entirely new doctrinal approach will be required, one that reinterprets class and capitalism in such a way as to present the prospect of social change despite an immobilized union movement. It would require transcending nearly 200 years of modernist left thought that sanctifies the worker as given expression through trade unionism. It is hard to imagine, but it may be unavoidable.

For those of us who are not quite ready to fully confront this challenge, we must take hope in small victories.

Labels: Activism, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

The born again Dennis Kucinich, team player par excellence:

A few hours after Rep. Dennis Kucinich switched his support to become a critical vote for the health care bill, he took to the House floor to ask wavering colleagues to join him. Astonished colleagues pointed to Kucinich (D-OH) darting from member to member on the House floor yesterday, saying privately they'd never seen him get so involved in whipping a vote.

It's not just progressives he's targeting to keep in the fold, it's everyone, a top Democratic aide told me. Members know that Kucinich - a staunch antiwar liberal long in favor of a single-payer system and often going out on a limb with his own agenda - is setting aside deep ideology to help get something passed. It's a totally new dynamic. People are realizing he's doing it for history, the aide said.

People with long memories know that this movie is a remake of a March 2007 release:

The supplemental funding bill has cleared the House with exactly the number of votes required for passage:

The House of Representatives voted today, by the narrowest possible margin and after an unusually emotional debate, to set a timetable for bringing American troops home from Iraq.

The bill received 218 votes in favor, the minimum needed for passage in the 435-seat chamber. There were 212 votes opposed. The Democratic leadership held the voting open for two additional minutes past the originally scheduled 15 to lock up the majority. Vote-counters had predicted beforehand that the outcome would be very close.

Who made this victory for the proponents of perpetual war in the Middle East possible? It's shocking, and should never be forgotten:

With Democrats holding 233 seats and Republicans with 201, Democrats were able to afford only 15 "no" votes. Accordingly, Pelosi, and her leadership team spent days trying to convince members that the bill was Congress' best chance of forcing Bush to change course—an argument that was aided when they added more than $20 billion in domestic spending in an effort to lure votes.

They got a breakthrough Thursday when four of the bill's most consistent critics said they would not stand in its way. California Democrats Lynn Woolsey, Diane Watson, Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters said they would help round up support for the bill despite their intention to personally vote against it because it would not end the war immediately. "Despite my steadfast opposition, I have told the speaker that I will work with her to obtain the needed votes to pass the supplemental, but that in the end I must vote my conscience," said Rep. Diane Watson, D- Calif.

Woolsey, Watson, Lee and Waters, the Gang of Four that rescued funding for the President's wars in the Middle East, while keeping their own voting records scrupulously clean.

Careful readers have no doubt identified the one significant change in the narrative for the current sequel. In 2007, Woolsey, Watson, Lee and Waters were permitted to personally vote against supplemental war funding as long as they could round up enough support from others to get it passed. One suspects that one or more of them would have voted for it as required to get it passed if necessary. Here, there is no such margin, every last vote must be turned to assure victory, and, as emphasized yesterday, the President's socioeconomic vision generates so much public hostility that liberals must be compelled to support it to the greatest extent possible.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

I've never thought much of Dennis Kucinich. Nice enough person who says, and often does, the right thing, or, at least, tries to push the political dialogue in the right direction. But I've never thought he was serious when he ran for President. He wasn't particularly effective at creating a grassroots organization, either for himself or the social issues that he espouses. In Congress, he has a safe seat, and therefore has the latitude to do what he does, as long as he doesn't cause discomfort for the leadership. He primarily serves the purpose of providing a a safety valve that keeps liberals and some leftists in the Democratic Party, perpetuating the illusion that the party remains a plausible vehicle for social change.

Until today. After loudly condemning the Senate health care bill, criticizing it for its lack of a public option and the constraints that it places upon states that might be inclined to implement a single payer system, he crumbled like a cardboard box when Obama flew into his district and criticized him for refusing to vote for the bill. And, he did this after accepting thousands and thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from people who want a public option. To his credit, he, unlike many other purported progressives, has agreed to return the money, although, given that the filing deadline for a primary challenge has already passed, that's not nearly as much of a sacrifice as it appears.

Overnight, Dennis the Menace became Dennis Who?, just another congressional cipher who does what Pelosi and Obama tell him to do. He may not have had a huge following, but his supporters were committed. They appreciated the hearings that he called on a myriad of progressive issues that no one else would touch. They exhalted him as a truth teller in Congress, alone in a sea of corruption. So much for that. His press releases and e-mail announcements are now going to promptly find their way into garbage cans, both real and virtual.

But why was it so essential to destroy the public reputation of Dennis Kucinich? He did, after all, serve a very useful function, as noted at the beginning of this post. Radicalized liberals and progressives now understand that the Obama administration and its elite allies brook no dissent from the left, and that the political process in DC has no place for them, in marked contrast to the hospitality shown the right. Of course, the simple answer is that Democratic congressional leadership needed his vote to get the Senate health care bill onto Obama's desk. That's true. But I believe that there is more to it.

Obama and the congressional Democrats know that the bill is unpopular. They understand that many people will be forever outraged over the mandate they purchase insurance, the excise tax and the lack of any cost containment. Or, to put it more bluntly, they will remain angry about being forced to buy insurance provided on terms designed to preserve the maximum profitability of health insurance companies, health care providers and pharmaceutical companies. In such a situation, it is essential to not only get the bill passed, but eliminate any credible liberal opponents around whom people could coalesce. Hence, the hardball tactics used by the White House to coerce the AFL-CIO, MoveON and specific Democratic representatives into supporting the bill in the most embarrassing way that exposes their powerlessness. Now, the way is open for Obama, consistent with his Chicago School of Economics perspective, to even more aggressively restructure the US economy for the benefit of capital.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Within about a half and hour or so, we are likely to discover that Democrat Martha Coakley has lost the Massachusetss Senate race to Republican Scott Brown. As Coakley's campaign unravelled as a consequence of her ineptitude and public dismay at the corporate friendly policies of the Obama administration, liberals at DailyKos and firedoglake, among other places, engaged in increasingly vitriolic exchanges, with some believing that Coakley's defeat would serve as a wake up call to the national Democratic Party, while others asserted that it would destroy any prospect of progressive change.

If you spend any time following the raucous debate, it gets tiresome pretty quickly. A few participants are willing to acknowledge that Obama signalled his willingness to serve the interests of capital when he took no action to challenge the cloture rule in the Senate, the rule that requires 60 votes to cut off debate. By doing so, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid empowered conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans by making it necessary to obtain their support to get any legislation to the White House for signature. It was all very convenient, a ready made excuse as to why it was necessary to escalate the war in Afghanistan, continue to bail out the banks and transform health care reform into a government subsidization of the insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies.

Hence, the public would just have to learn the virtues of generational patience, and accept that it will take not just years, but decades, to accomplish all those things that they expected from an Obama presidency. But, for those of us to the left of liberals, to the left of the American electoral process, the Coakley-Brown race is a textbook example of how the system is rigged against any meaningful participation by many Americans. If Brown wins, health care reform is either killed, or passed in an even more menacing form, while if Coakley wins, you get health care reform passed with a few fig leafs, such as the recent deal between the White House and the AFL-CIO on the so-called Cadillac plan tax, that do not alter its regressive features. One can anticipate similar outcomes in relation to other future measures designed to address the current economic downturn. Given that the Congress is firmly in the hands of the Lieberman/Nelson/Baucus axis, it hard to even identify any differences that would result in foreign policy as a result of the election of either candidate.

Liberals understood this very clearly, as appeals for support for Coakley took on more and more hysterical tones. If Brown won, they screamed, Republicans would return to power and destroy the country. Voters who refused to respond to the rhetorical horsewhipping administered by Democratic activists deserved what they will get. Left unanswered, of course, was whether voters deserve what they are currently getting from Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. Coakley supporters were left with such emotional appeals, because there have nothing to substantively say that would persuade voters that Coakley, and by extension, Obama, have any intention of challenging the plutocracy that controls the government.

Perhaps, such fearmongering will work just enough to carry Coakley through to victory, and put off the day of reckoning until next November. Obama and Reid could respond to a Coakley defeat by getting progressive legislation through the Senate with just 51 votes, and thus, reinvigorate a moribund liberalism with a record of populist accomplishment, but that's about as likely as the prospect of the US military abandoning the control over Haiti that it has seized in response to the earthquake. If given a choice, the middle class looks likely to gravitate to a party that celebrates its exercise of power for the benefit of capital, as opposed to a party that dresses its corporate friendly policies in the garb of an ersatz populism. One wonders whether the collapse of the Obama presidency will plant the seeds of a direct action political movement based upon the recognition that the electoral process is no longer capable of addressing the needs of the populace. If so, it will take awhile for the seeds to germinate.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Barack Obama, Elections, Health Care, Liberals, Postmodernism, Vote or Die

Last night, around 9pm, my son was watching a DVD before going to sleep for the night. Nearby, my wife was following the debate on the Senate health care bill over the Internet. Meanwhile, I tried to focus my attention upon reading Beijing Coma.

Even so, I couldn't help but overhear snippets of various speakers like Lamar Alexander, Tom Harkin and John McCain. Of course, they went on and on and on, as if the importance of their declarations rivalled those of Zeus. Brevity is not something for which Senators are known, and, from my limited exposure, they did not disappoint the expectations of the typesetters of the Congressional Record.

The most striking feature of the debate, though, was the mendacity on display by representatives of both parties. Alexander, smooth and polished as always, maligned the bill for provisions that, if included in a bill directed towards the desk of a President Bush, Romney or McCain, he would have enthusiastically supported. McCain, apparently embarrassed by this, focused upon Obama's embrace of secrecy in the negotiations that resulted in the final version, while scrupulously avoiding any substantive engagement. And then there was Harkin, the good liberal, striving mightily to put lipstick on a pig, recharacterizing a mandate to buy insurance on terms set by the insurance industry as the fulfillment of our right to health care, with a reassurance that, if it all doesn't work out, we can fix it.

All three were oblivious to the larger implications of the debate and its outcome. The passage of the health care bill in the Senate is one of the five most important congressional events of the last 20 years, with the others being the narrow passage of the resolution authorizing the Gulf War in 1991, the passage of NAFTA in the face of overwhelming public opposition in 1994, the late 2002 passage of the authorization of force resolution paving the way for the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and, of course, the October 2008 bailout of the global financial sector. Each of these actions reflected a further dimunintion of the institution's ability to respond to public sentiment during its deliberations, with an accompanying increase in public dissatisfaction. Each also, not coincidentally, also reflected the the marriage between neoliberal economic policy at home with military expansionism abroad.

No doubt, Gaius is correct, the purpose of the Senate, as opposed to the House, is precisely this, to ensure that the majority does not infringe upon the perogatives of elites, but it was never supposed to be this blatant. Accordingly, we are now entering uncharted territory, a period that will be marked by intense populist eruptions against politicians and the government more generally. Liberals, seeing over the horizon, are already in disarray, with Jane Hamsher of firedoglake extending an olive branch to those willing to work with her on specific issues of concern, while Kossacks appear horrified at the prospect of people marching upon the iron triangle in DC with pitchforks. In any event, the notion that Democrats, and by extension, existing establishment relationships, can survive by saying that this health care bill is just the beginning of a larger generational enterprise is ludricrous. Instead, the bill is the last straw for a populace enraged by a government that perpetually socializes the needs of the wealthy while privatizing those of everyone else.

Or, to put it more colorfully, the earthquake at the bottom of the Pacific has already happened, it cannot be reversed, and the only questions remaining are where the tsuanami will strike and the severity of the devastation. Liberals are especially alarmed, because, after having rejected several opportunities in the last 20 years to harnass populism, they are now synonymous with the militaristic plutocracy that runs the country, and, indeed, much of the world, despite, paradoxically, having periodically expressed opposition to some aspects of US foreign policy. Much of the liberal discourse that one encounters at places like DailyKos entails distinguishing liberals as better educated, more rational and less prone to superstitution and bigotries than those who do not agree with them. Needless to say, there is little to support this perspective, but it does have the effect of isolating them for much of the American public.

Most importantly, they have willingly distanced themselves from the everyday economic problems of people, as noted by Sam Smith the other day:

Most of all, however, Obama represented a triumph of a generation of liberals dramatically different from their predecessors, most markedly in their general indifference to issues of economic as well as ethnic equality.

This heavily professional liberal class never once - in the manner of their predecessors of the New Deal and Great Society - took the lead in pressing for economic reforms. It wasn't that they opposed them; they just never seemed to occur to them.

They, after all, had risen in status even as much of the rest of the country was slipping. Over a quarter of a century passed and the best the liberal Democrats could come up with was to slash welfare and raise the age for Social Security.

Obama was the epitome of this new generation: well educated, well connected and well toned in rhetoric. But far distant from the concerns of so many.

Most of us out here in the real world recognize this, even as people in DC do not. Hence, the argument that we will only get worse from the Republicans if we do not turn out for the Democrats in future elections, no matter how odious we find the prospect, has no resonance. People feel defensiveless in the face of a neoliberal onslaught in which members of both political parties participate. There is no political comprehension of the scope of the failure of the Obama economic program, a program in which millions remain unemployed, millions continue to have their homes foreclosed and millions, despite this economic distress, now find themselves handed over to the insurance industry through a requirement that they purchase health insurance.

Through Obama, the Democrats have finally succumbed to the neoliberal state just as it is about to be repudiated. They, not the Republicans, are going to get blamed for the ruthless restructuring of the economy that they are allowing transnational finance to impose upon us. Conversely, the Republicans are going to harvest a bushel of populist votes next fall, as they cynically play the game of serving as a vessel for discontent that will allow them to return to power. It worked for Reagan, it worked for the second Bush, and it will work yet again. But this time, will the public mood tolerate an intensification of the policies that precipitated the current crisis? I doubt it.

And, finally, some liberals get it. Hamsher, through an astute reading of the current climate, is consciously seeking to create a liberal, progressive alternative that is independent of the parties, willing to challenge anyone, Republican or Democrat, who continues to insist upon the current orthodoxy. While she will not say it publicly, she recognizes that Obama has made the old progressive blogosphere slogan, More and Better Democrats, laughable. Naturally, the reaction from many hidebound Kossacks was arrogant and insulting. Hamsher understands that not only liberalism, but the legitimacy of the government itself, are in peril, and that it is essential to slip the establishment noose. Otherwise, the right will run wild.

Will it work? That's hard to say. Liberals and Democrats often resort to fearmongering to impose strict conformity with the neoliberal orientation of the party, and, naturally, they are falling back upon it now. As a leftist, not a liberal and definitely not a Democrat, I read such dystopian alarms with care. People, even those within the tea party scene, cannot be reduced to a simple right, left or center program. Instead, it is critical, as Chomsky recently said, that the left begin to directly engage people who are experiecing severe economic distress so that they can actually improve their lives. An alternative discourse is urgently needed to counter the illusory one provided by the right.

I guess that you could say that I am suggesting a popular front program centered around class conscious economic policies and demilitarization as a means of alleviating the distress of millions of Americans, and, ultimately, billions around the world. No doubt, you consider that strange coming from someone who purports to be anarchist influenced, but the immediate necessity is to address the suffering of people and prevent it from becoming worse, much worse. There is no way to do that in the absence of a political movement that emphasizes such a perspective over party identification, while allowing for the involvement of people all across the spectrum who agree with a radical assertion of personal and economic equality.

Personally, I believe that it would be most effective in the form of a non-electoral, direct action protest movement, but that's why you have a popular front, so that liberals, Marxist-Leninists and anarchists can act in ways that they consider most appropriate. I also believe that such a movement, should it succeed, would eventually result in a dramatic transformation of the US, if not its disintegration, much as what in relation to the USSR, given the intensity of the conflict required to dismante the military-industrial complex and redirect resources towards the populace. It is, as Lou Reed sang many, many years ago, the beginning of our new age.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, firedoglake, Global Recession, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The embrace of expediency by the Obama administration continues unabated. Just announced:

President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.

"It is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time," he said near the conclusion of a 193-nation global warming summit. "We have come a long way, but we have much further to go."

The president said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations. Still he said this week's efforts "will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner planet."

The deal as described by Obama reflects some progress helping poor nations cope with climate change and getting China to disclose its actions to address the warming problem.

But it falls far short of committing any nation to pollution reductions beyond a general acknowledgment that the effort should contain global temperatures along the lines agreed to at a conference of the leading economic nations last July.

Meanwhile, cue the music, the AFL-CIO is against the evolving Senate health care bill . . . well . . . sort of. As is Andy Stern of SEIU. Given that both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win are now singing from the same songbook, all the way down to self-serving press releases about ongoing faux resistance, while the White House, the Congress and industry lobbyists decide the provisions of the health care reform bill in secret, one wonders why the split in the union movement persists. The only plausible explanation is that it would require SEIU to stop raiding the members of AFL-CIO affiliated uinons.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Neoliberalism, SEIU, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Over 50,000,000 Americans have yet to realize that they really voted for him in November 2008. The bailout, the stimulus, executive salaries, Afghanistan, and now health care, Joseph Lieberman is the man. Curiously, people who post at liberal sites like firedoglake still persist in pejoratively talking about President Olympia Snowe and President Susan Collins as a way complaining about Obama's lack of leadership and his seeming obsession with bipartisanship, but they never say President Joseph Lieberman. They persist in the perpetuating the fiction that Lieberman is some sort of outrider, a self-serving mercenary on the edge of the legislative frontier raiding liberal outposts, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps, it is too close to the bone, given that Lieberman was Obama's mentor when he entered the Senate in 2006. Meanwhile, as the health care bill is eviscerated in secret, the unions have gone silent, holding their powder again until after all the important decisions have been made. A visit to the AFL-CIO home page reveals that the emphasis upon the public option has been replaced by a new theme, Don't tax our health benefits. An television ad to this effect, absent any reference to the public option, is also posted there. Sadly, the AFL-CIO is conducting itself as predicted after it allowed the Baucus bill to escape the Senate Finance Committee without opposition:

One wonders how their members are going to react when they discover that, starting in 2013, many of them are going to be facing a 40% surcharge on portions of the health plans, plans that actually provide decent coverage, because they are considered, in the words of the President and others, Cadillac plans.

One suspects that, in the end, organized labor will soften the blow of this provision during reconciliation, without fully eliminating it, and call it a victory after the Baucus bill is signed.

After more than a week of secret negotiation in the Senate, most of what the liberals attempted to insert into the Baucus bill has been jettisoned. All that remains is the illusion of a reconciliation process with the House whereby enough crumbs are tossed the way of the AFL-CIO in order for it to claim victory.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Over the course of the last week, the liberal narrative of political change has been exposed as a fiction, a creation as illusory as the Mighty Oz. According to this evolving fairy tale of wish fulfillment, the Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 were part of a generational transformation of American politics, one potentially as important as FDR's victory in 1932. With a savvy new Democratic President to go along with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, the road was now open towards the enactment of creative progressive policies that would overturn much of what had happened since the Reagan admininistration. Liberal and progressive activists who had labored mightily over the last 30 years to create conditions favorable to their social vision were about to reap the rewards of their persistence.

But the events of the first two weeks of December have buried both the prospects and plausibility of such change. If he were alive today, T. S. Eliot would have written that December, not April, is the cruelest month. With his Nobel speech in Oslo today, unabashedly advocating for the continuation of war in the Middle East and Central Asia, Obama put an exclamation mark to a series of events that extinguished any remaining residue hope that Democratic governance would alter the country's economic and military policies. If anything, they have demonstrated that transnational financial instituations and the military industrial complex have intensified their control over them.

On December 1st, Obama gave a speech in which he explained why he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. It was remarkable for the sort of fear mongering and dishonesty indelibly associated with Bush and Cheney. He tied the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan to 9/11, without expressly saying it, just as Cheney implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda, preserving the ability to deny it if challenged. One can only assume that he deliberately refused to acknowledge the actual connection of two American allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Just as Cheney evoked the mushroom cloud, the fear that Saddam might obtain nuclear weapons, to justify the invasion of Iraq, Obama revived it in regard to the proximity of Afghanistan to the Pakastani nuclear arsenal. And, finally, just as Bush floated imaginary withdrawal dates to allay public anxiety, Obama did likewise by putting out a withdrawal date of July 2011, a date that was promptly repudiated by his own defense secretary.

It is entirely possible that Obama's Afghanistan speech will be remembered as a seminal episode, a slow motion lighting strike in which the inevitable failure of his administration flashed through the public mind, a squandering of all the goodwill that he had accumulated over the course of his life in politics. During mass campaign rallies on the eve of Super Tuesday in 2008, Obama exhorted his supporters not to fall for the okey-doke, slang for the ways in which politicians consciously manipulate people to vote for them by asserting a similarity of perspective that doesn't really exist. Now, we have an administration and a Congress that can only communicate by recourse to the okey-doke, and people are wise to it.

Obama's Afghanistan speech was, however, only the beginning. On Monday night, December 7th, it was announced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had reached a deal that would get the stalled health care reform bill out of the Senate. Predictably, the abandonment of the public option, so prized by progressives as a means of getting costs under control, is an essential feature of the deal, and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is OK with it. Shockingly, it is now Thursday afternoon in California, and the Senate has yet to release the terms of the deal, or the language of the bill that incorporates it. The President knows, the Senators know, their staffers know and, most likely, lobbyists associated with health insurance companies, health care providers and pharmaceutical companies know . . . but the public does not. Just as a California state budget that cut services to millions of California residents was determined in secret Gang of Five meetings, and then rammed through both houses for the Governor's signature, the provisions of the health care reform bill are being decided by 10 Senators, after months and months of committee hearings and votes that have been reduced to a meaningless form of political theatre. Of course, the President has remained as invisible as possible during this process.

Now, it is being rumored that, upon the passage of the bill by the Senate, the bill will be force fed to the House whole, subject to a straight up or down vote, without reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bill in conference. Hence, the inconvenience of having to deal with a House bill that includes a timid public option is eliminated, at the price of reducing the deliberations of the entire House to nothing more than a rubber stamp for the Senate and the President. No need to worry, though, the members have been able to accumulate a lot of irrelevant votes that will serve the purpose of getting them re-elected in November 2010, or so they think. They seem to be blissfully unaware of the electoral tsunami that looms just over the horizon. Meanwhile, there are early warning signs that the impetus for financial reform is going down the same road as health care reform, yet another progressive issue of concern about to exploited for the benefit of finance capitalists and their electoral retainers.

And, then, over in a small, dark corner, there is the Obama administration response to what has happened in Honduras. After months and months of passivity in the face of a June coup that deposed the elected President of the country, after perpetual efforts to obtain a face saving resolution that would allow the rightist coup participants to prevail while permiting the leftist President to serve out the few remaining days his term as a figurehead, the administration threw in the towel on December 4th and urged the other countries of the hemisphere to accept the outcome of an election carried out by a coup regime that has frequently imposed curfews and martial law. The administration did so despite accounts of systematic fraud that concealed a low turnout of less than 50% generated by the opposition's refusal to participate. In Oslo, in Washington, D. C. in Tegucigalpa, the month of December has revealed a remarkable consistency in the policies of this presidency and its party in Congress.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Now that the industry friendly Baucus bill has escaped the Senate Finance Committee, it is going to move through the Senate and the House like a greased pig, with the approval of the President. But, don't worry, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions are now, finally, going to come off the bench to derail it:

[Gerald] McEntee, [president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees], said Emanuel called him and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on a Sunday last month and asked them not to oppose the legislation while the Finance Committee was considering it. “We didn’t talk to any senators about our opposition,” he said.

Emanuel pressed labor again last week not to oppose the bill once it was approved by the committee, according to McEntee. “That was not the commitment we made,” he said.

Labor leaders have made clear their distaste toward the committee bill since it was proposed last month by Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and the panel’s chairman. Trumka urged labor activists at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh to make the case against it. McEntee led the convention delegates in a chant denouncing the proposal as “bullshit.”

Some labor unions that were included in a draft of the newspaper advertisement didn’t sign on to the final version, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The Service Employees International Union, led by Andy Stern, didn’t sign either version of the ad.

Or are they? And, do really want to? Am I the only one who recognizes what happened here? Passage of the Baucus bill by by the Senate Finance Committee was essential to frame the debate in favor of the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies and health care providers. Once out of committee, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with the assistance of the White House and, as we subsequently discovered, Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snow, would ensure that there would be no public option or any other measures to contain costs when it was reconciled with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee alternative.

After full Senate approval, the Baucus bill would, after minor alternations through reconciliation to placate the House, finally reach the President's desk for signature. Hence, it was essential to fight for amendments to change the overall thrust of the Baucus bill while it was pending approval in the Finance Committee, and kill it if such amendments were defeated. Where was the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions while the bill was being debated in the Committee? Nowhere. As the Bloomberg article indicates, they had agreed, at the request of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, to not publicly express opposition to the bill at that time. In other words, during the most critical period for the passage of health care reform in the Congress, they abandoned the field and left it open for financial interests to get their way.

Now, that the bill is out of committee, they are putting on a big act about how they are opposing the bill over the objections of the White House. Everybody comes out looking like a rose: AFL-CIO leadership tells their members that they went to the wall for their members; the White House basks in the glow of showing its independence from the union movement; the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies and health care providers laugh all the way to the bank. Everyone, that is, except the millions of us that will be economically victimized by the "reform".

This isn't the first time that the AFL-CIO has done this since Obama was elected President. Organized labor, which includes the AFL-CIO, as well as its competitor, the Change to Win coalition led by the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters, decided, after Obama's election, to dismantle a network of field organizers that could have pressured Obama and the newly elected Democratic Congress to enact what they describe as their top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act ("EFCA"), an Act designed to enhance and protect the rights of people trying to organize unions in the workplace.

Meanwhile, hundreds of business organzations effectively lobbied Congress to place it in dry dock, where it remains today. Even more embarassing, while national union leadership had given Obama and the Congress a free pass on immediate action, state and local union affiliates were turning out members at raucous rallies, such as the ones that I observed at the State Capital in Sacramento, demanding its passage. They didn't know, and their national leaders didn't want them to know, that maintaining good relations with Obama and the Congress were more important than passing the EFCA.

Sadly, in relation to their latest health care ruse, liberals remain in the dark. Liberals actually seem to believe that the AFL-CIO and its affiliates are defying the White House and trying to prevent the passage of the Baucus bill. Nothing could be further from the truth. One wonders how their members are going to react when they discover that, starting in 2013, many of them are going to be facing a 40% surcharge on portions of the health plans, plans that actually provide decent coverage, because they are considered, in the words of the President and others, Cadillac plans.

One suspects that, in the end, organized labor will soften the blow of this provision during reconciliation, without fully eliminating it, and call it a victory after the Baucus bill is signed. During the inevitable post-mortems, after the dreadful consequences of this "reform" become obvious, it will become evident that labor, liberals and progressive organizations were caught off guard by the rapaciousness of finance capital in seizing upon a social welfare proposal that it had historically opposed as a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring about one of the most enormous transfers of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy in US history.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Turns out that Obama liked Reagan a lot more than he let on during the campaign.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution

On Tuesday, Montana Senator Max Baucus released his proposed Senate Finance Committee health care reform bill. Of course, it's an atrocity, a bill that exploits the health care crisis as yet another opportunity to transfer wealth from workers to finance capitalists. People will be forced to purchase policies that are useless in the event of a serious health problem, despite inadequate subsidies and non-existent cost containment. Furthermore, there is the additional prospect that individuals fortunate enough to have good policies through, say, collective bargaining agreements, will find themselves forced to pay a 35% surcharge in 2013 to help fund the program.

In other words, we face a looming social and political catastrophe, one in which the middle and lower classes are even more impoverished as a result of conscious government policy than they are today. Progressives are also prognosticating a wipe out for the Democrats in the mid-term elections of 2010, and, possibly, a defeat for President Obama in 2012. But this underestimates the peril. It goes beyond political partisanship and economic hardship to the legitimacy of the political system itself.

California is a bellwether for what is likely to come. As a consequence of a distressed economy, a legislature riven by partisan conflict, an unwillingness by legislators to make any decisions that would place their salaries, per diem and car allowances at risk and a governor who substitutes vapid public relations gestures for policy, the public holds the political system in complete contempt. Both the governor and the legislature are extremely unpopular. It is impossible to generate public support for any measures that would resolve the fiscal crisis and preserve essential public sector programs.

Everyone, and every public institution, is quite literally, on their own. If the Congress puts through health care reform on terms dictated by health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and health care providers, and Obama signs it, this is what we can expect nationally. A collapse in progressive support for the political process, resulting in, at best, gridlock, and, at worst, the passage and implementation of more and more regressive social measures. Combine the passage of such a miserable health care reform bill with possibly as many as 40,000 additional troops for Afghanistan, and we will see the ascendency of an irrational, emotionally driven right wing populism that will escape the boundaries set by Rahm Emanuel and other conservative Democrats, and go beyond preventing the passage of any progressive measures during an Obama administration, to destroying his presidency, and perhaps, the existing social fabric of the country.

Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America

For those of you out there who are rightly suspicious that the public option will be nothing more than a rhetorical device to facilitate the passage of a bill dictated by industry participants, consider this:

The people who brought us the public option began their campaign promising one thing but now promote something entirely different. To make matters worse, they have not told the public they have backpedalled. The campaign for the public option resembles the classic bait-and-switch scam: tell your customers you’ve got one thing for sale when in fact you’re selling something very different.

When the public option campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge Medicare-like program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation’s largest health insurer, public or private. But today public option advocates sing the praises of tiny “public options” contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the public options described in the Democrats’ legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the public options cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the public option movement haven’t told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It’s high time they did.

After this blunt introduction, Kip Sullivan, a member of the steering committee of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, then proceeds to lay it all out for us: the original concept of a public option that would cover as much as half of the non-elderly population, the cost savings that could result, and then, as one could have predicted, the evisceration of it through the legislative process. It is well worth reading in its entirety as a touchstone for evaluating the ultimate outcome.

Sullivan's article also points toward a question that emerged in relation to the bailout, namely, the passivity of the other sectors of the American economy that will suffer as a consequence of a policy dictated by the rapacious interests directly affected. In the case of the bailout, the real estate, manufacturing and service sectors remained mute as trillions of dollars that could have reinvigorated consumption instead went to buttress the balance sheets of transnational financial firms. Whatever one thinks about the environmental merit of the program, Cash for Clunkers reveals the explosive benefit of even minor amounts of effectively targeted stimulus that captures the public imagination.

Imagine if the federal government had adopted some aggressive, targeted proposals designed to provide financial relief to the struggling middle and lower classes, such as, for example, the ones I suggested in February:

. . . . the federal government would deficit spend primarily for the purpose of providing a safety net for those facing severe hardship as a result of unemployment and the loss of the homes. Along these lines, unemployment insurance funds, now within the jurisdiction of individual states, and, in many instances, bordering on insolvency, would be completely federalized for a specified period of time, say two or three years. The federal government would then pour billions into these funds so as to guarantee a much more generous minimum benefit, say 60% of one's salary prior to discharge, with a maximum yearly benefit amount of around $50,000. Of course, these benefits would be untaxed at both the state and federal level.

Such a program would be matched by a loan modification program whereby the banks would be required to refinance the mortgages of people facing foreclosure at existing market rates for those properties. They are already begrudgingly moving in this direction, as they are going to have to eat the losses, anyway. After all, why foreclose on the mortgages when they can instead create a new stream of income by substituting new ones, especially as they are desperate for new transaction fees and revenues going forward.

Clearly, there were many ways to skin the cat, as they used to say back in the North Georgia hill country, so there were, no doubt, other policies that could have achieved equally good, or even better results. But the urgent question here is why did the sectors of the US economy outside of finance acquiesce in the adoption of a policy that was cleary ruinous to them?

And, now in relation to health care, why are they doing it again? In their current forms, the health care reform proposals circulating through Congress will, if adopted, do nothing to arrest the enormous, ongoing transfer of wealth from non-health related sectors of the economy to pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies and health care providers. Indeed, they will worsen the situation by making it mandatory that Americans purchase health insurance coverage. A combination of a lack of cost containment, with a government imposed requirement that people purchase coverage despite inadequate subsidization, will be yet another constraint, along with the long term consequences of the bailout, upon the rest of the US economy. Expect the offshoring of US jobs to accelerate if Obama succeeds in his effort to reform health care or health insurance or whatever they call it these days.

Labels: American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Health Care, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The blog has been quiescent because of my brief family vacation and pressing work demands, but now, I am back in action. Last Saturday, I discovered, yet again, that the Davis Farmers Market is one of those places where important political transformations first make themselves known.

As I walked through the market with my son, I passed by a table in the community activity section beyond the produce area. There were people sitting in chairs under an awning that announced www.barackobama.com and urged support for health insurance reform. Upon my return passage back through the market towards my car, I looked at the awning again, and recognized its significance. Obama had abandoned the more audacious goal of health care reform and replaced it with a more subdued one, health insurance reform.

In other words, the urgency of providing competitive, cost-efficient health coverage to almost everyone had been replaced by the more prosaic aspiration of humanizing the means by which insurers provide health insurance coverage. My suspicion was confirmed an hour or so later when one of my friends told me that he had actually read the petition at the table and recognized that there was no reference to a public option for health care. He told the people at the table that he would sign a petition that demanded a public option to contain costs, and was curtly told that he could start his own petition.

As you might have guessed from this exchange, the people at the table displayed none of the warmth and enthusiasm of the grassroots effort associated with the Obama presidential campaign. Instead, they looked like Young Democrats from UC Davis just down the street, you know, college student careerists working to curry favor with local Democratic elected officials in the hope that they will be hired for positions as administrative assistants. Clearly, this was an effort coordinated by the White House, through the perverse remains of the Obama Internet campaign apparatus, for outreach into communities across the country.

On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathryn Sibelius formally announced the shift in policy when she declared that Obama did not consider the public option as an essential, non-negotiable component of a health care reform proposal. Of course, no one should be surprised. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has not concealed his hostility to the public option and its proponents, and the President has observed a strict silence on the subject. Liberals, however, were outraged. There are supposedly as many as 100 House Democrats that will refuse to vote out a health care bill that does not include a public option. I'll believe it when I see it. At the end of the day, we will probably see the inclusion of a public option into the bill that will benefit few, if any, people. One of those chimerical exercises reminscent of the rights enumerated in Stalinist constitutions.

Such a depressing state of affairs raises the question: how did we get to a point where a health care proposal with substantial public support degenerated into yet another corporate windfall? To confront this question, we call upon our powers of random observation. First, it is quite striking that the opponents of health care reform have undermined public confidence by projecting the gross deficiencies of the current system upon the reforms proposed in Congress, most particularly, the public option. The extent of public denial about this is frankly quite shocking. I have pondered why this strategy has been so effective in the face of the known inadequacies of the current health care system.

I have only one, rather elliptical answer. Several years ago, I recall speaking briefly with a friend about investment strategies. One of the things he told me was that Vanguard, the mutual fund company, had a fund that invested exclusively in health care stocks, and that the returns were incredible. Hence, I have a hypothesis that people within the middle and upper middle class that rely upon investment returns only want a health care proposal that enhances the profitability of pharmaceutical companies and providers of health insurance and health care.

Accordingly, they are ecstatic about provisions that require everyone to purchase health insurance, or face the prospect of being fined, while they are hostile to the notion of cost containment through a public option. The essential principle here is that, behind the evil trinity of pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies and health care providers, are millions of well educated, politically involved people who invest in them. They share the economic perspective of these companies, and advocate in support of them.

Second, the strident protests against health care reform that have taken place at congressional town hall meetings around the country are not well understood. Naturally, they have been financed by industry lobbyists, but this misses their more profound importance. For Obama, they have been a godsend, because they actually enhance the prospects of a corporate friendly reform package being passed. How? Through their excesses, the protesters discredit the opposition against any reform being passed, even as they drown out progressive voices for reforms that actually address the compelling health needs of the populace.

Lastly, we should consider how this episode confirms my evaluation of Obama from last summer:

Obama has been moving towards what some call the center in US politics, if he wasn't there already. And that is actually a little deceptive. He hasn't been moving towards the political center, because that is a dubious form of analysis based upon the acceptance of an unsubstantiated linear, horizontal spectrum that classifies the political values of the US electorate. Instead, as I said here about a month ago, he has been signalling his acceptability to the corporate media, the media that frames the presentation of political subjects to the general public, by adopting conventional narratives on an array of issues, ranging from the war in Iraq to faith based initiatives to the purported failure of black men to fulfill their responsibilities to their families.

Cultural leftists might find a peculiar reassurance in all this, because, if one perceives his actions in this way, Obama is revealing a sophisticated sociological recognition of the power of the media to manufacture consent. In other words, like many cultural leftists, he understands that the US is not an actual, functioning republic where an informed populace selects representatives to implement their preferred policies, and must navigate his way through this system of social control. Implicit in this analysis is a subjective belief that, once elected, he will put this insight to use to reform US politics at home and abroad.

Or, to clarify the concept, Obama understands that the United States is not a functioning democracy, but one dominated by powerful international capital interests that must be assauged if one is to retain power. Therefore, health care reform can only be implemented in a form that meets with their approval, much as the response to the global recession did.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism