Writing for The Nation, William Greider claims that the jury is still out on whether President Obama somehow lost his strategic and tactical genius as the health care “debate” has unfolded or whether the more progressive aspects of his mishmash of vague proposals were always just window-dressing and that he is and always has been a Blue Dog-Max Baucus think alike. Perhaps Greider is right. I think it’s pretty clear, though, that the latter hypothesis is the right one. My evidence: that from the moment his campaign got going, Obama positioned himself towards the center-right of the group seeking the nomination (only Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were worse); and that from the moment he won the nomination, he bounded further rightward; a process that has only become worse since Inauguration Day. I have supported these claims in countless preceding entries.
I have also argued repeatedly that the Democrats are nothing if not pusillanimous, and that “progressive” Democrats are among the most pusillanimous of all. I think Obama and Company were of a similar view. They seem to have been convinced that no matter how thoroughly the Obama administration would morph into a more competent version of the Bush administration, that liberals would stand by their man. But now, for the first time since Obamamania began, it’s beginning to look like the jury may be out on this last contention too. At long last, some House Democrats – in both the Progressive and Black Caucuses – along with some of their supporters in organized labor and on Obama-friendly web sites are showing signs of evolving into the vertebrate subphylum.
It seems that the retreat from a “public option,” floated over the weekend by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and others, was the last straw for many, and that at least some Democrats are now prepared to do the right thing – which, as I maintained recently, requires standing firm, even if it means scuttling heath insurance reform altogether. It now appears that this show of nascent courage has even registered in the highest circles of our “bipartisan” President’s administration. This is a turn of events to be welcomed wholeheartedly, and encouraged by all means. This means turning up the heat, and demanding action – not just on Obama and Company, but on liberal Democrats as well. Remember, liberal Democrats are, in the end, still Democrats -- so, no matter how hopeful things might seem, there is always the danger that they will revert back to their true, spineless nature.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Now Is the Time!
Even by the standards to which we’ve become accustomed, Republicans have long been, almost without exception, morally and intellectually execrable. They would be nothing more than a joke but for the fact that, with Democratic connivance, their power, as a wing of the reigning duopoly, is effectively institutionalized. Then remarkably, in the past few weeks, they’ve become even worse: rousting America’s Pathetic White Furies into action at the behest of those of their corporate masters who feel most threatened by Obama’s milquetoast health insurance reforms. In short, the Republican Party is fast approaching the point where it can no longer count as a “respectable” Right.
But there is nevertheless something sublime about Republican obstinacy; something “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” needs urgently to take on board.
If reports this weekend are correct, if Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are willing to give up entirely on “the public option” – not just to gut it, but to abandon it altogether – in order to appease right wing (“Blue Dog”) Democrats and to aim for “bipartisan” support; and if it’s true, as it seems to be, that, in order to win over (i.e. neutralize) the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists, Obama and Company have agreed to permit the lobbyists’ clients to charge pretty much whatever they like for their wares, as they have been doing all along, then the time is now past due for our ever so “reasonable” democratic Democrats to “just say No” too.
Now is emphatically not the time to win one for the Gipper – or rather for his twenty-first century “liberal” incarnation —but rather to outdo the (barely) respectable Right in obduracy. Democrats may think they need a “victory” at all costs, and many so-called progressives may agree. But if Obama gives up on even the pale semblance of reform he had been defending, then he is headed for a Pyrrhic victory only, and that’s the last thing anybody this side of the Blue Dogs needs.
In 1993, the Clintons set the cause of health insurance reform back a generation. Win or lose, Obama is doing it again.
Because he has been following the Clintons’ lead, this was to be expected. Of course, the conventional (Cokie Roberts) wisdom is that Obama learned from the Clintons’ mistakes. And, indeed, he involved Congress in crafting the legislation, as they did not (until too late), and he didn’t involve his wife, as they did. But these are trivial differences. Obama’s big mistake, like theirs, was to put the “stakeholders’” interests, the interests of the profiteers, above everything else, especially the interests of the stakeholders’ victims. Thus he set out to patch up a system that needs to be radically overhauled. In this way, Obama gave it all away before the “negotiations” even started, just as the Clintons did. Now he’s giving even more away as negotiations proceed.
This is why now is the time for Democrats who have not sunk to the Blue Dog level, to learn from those who have nothing but obduracy to offer. If it comes to that, they should have the courage to scuttle Obama’s “reforms,” not acquiesce in them. If they are clear and emphatic now, though, it might not come to that. In any case, as the public “discussion” bounds rightward, there is no other way.
This is a matter of the utmost urgency. It is becoming as clear as can be that as health insurance reform goes, so goes the rest of what most Obama voters thought they were electing. If there’s to be any chance of stopping the Bush (now Obama!) wars, establishing a “new deal” for organized labor, moving forward in a serious way to avert ecological catastrophes and, for that matter, setting our decrepit capitalist economy on a better course, a little backbone – here and now – is an indispensable first step.
Will Democratic “progressives” in the House and Senate evince a little backbone now, in the face of impending disaster, or will they cave? If the future is like the past, the answer is, alas, all too predictable.
But there is nevertheless something sublime about Republican obstinacy; something “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” needs urgently to take on board.
If reports this weekend are correct, if Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are willing to give up entirely on “the public option” – not just to gut it, but to abandon it altogether – in order to appease right wing (“Blue Dog”) Democrats and to aim for “bipartisan” support; and if it’s true, as it seems to be, that, in order to win over (i.e. neutralize) the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists, Obama and Company have agreed to permit the lobbyists’ clients to charge pretty much whatever they like for their wares, as they have been doing all along, then the time is now past due for our ever so “reasonable” democratic Democrats to “just say No” too.
Now is emphatically not the time to win one for the Gipper – or rather for his twenty-first century “liberal” incarnation —but rather to outdo the (barely) respectable Right in obduracy. Democrats may think they need a “victory” at all costs, and many so-called progressives may agree. But if Obama gives up on even the pale semblance of reform he had been defending, then he is headed for a Pyrrhic victory only, and that’s the last thing anybody this side of the Blue Dogs needs.
In 1993, the Clintons set the cause of health insurance reform back a generation. Win or lose, Obama is doing it again.
Because he has been following the Clintons’ lead, this was to be expected. Of course, the conventional (Cokie Roberts) wisdom is that Obama learned from the Clintons’ mistakes. And, indeed, he involved Congress in crafting the legislation, as they did not (until too late), and he didn’t involve his wife, as they did. But these are trivial differences. Obama’s big mistake, like theirs, was to put the “stakeholders’” interests, the interests of the profiteers, above everything else, especially the interests of the stakeholders’ victims. Thus he set out to patch up a system that needs to be radically overhauled. In this way, Obama gave it all away before the “negotiations” even started, just as the Clintons did. Now he’s giving even more away as negotiations proceed.
This is why now is the time for Democrats who have not sunk to the Blue Dog level, to learn from those who have nothing but obduracy to offer. If it comes to that, they should have the courage to scuttle Obama’s “reforms,” not acquiesce in them. If they are clear and emphatic now, though, it might not come to that. In any case, as the public “discussion” bounds rightward, there is no other way.
This is a matter of the utmost urgency. It is becoming as clear as can be that as health insurance reform goes, so goes the rest of what most Obama voters thought they were electing. If there’s to be any chance of stopping the Bush (now Obama!) wars, establishing a “new deal” for organized labor, moving forward in a serious way to avert ecological catastrophes and, for that matter, setting our decrepit capitalist economy on a better course, a little backbone – here and now – is an indispensable first step.
Will Democratic “progressives” in the House and Senate evince a little backbone now, in the face of impending disaster, or will they cave? If the future is like the past, the answer is, alas, all too predictable.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Town Hall Meeetings
There are so many questions Obama should be made to answer. To cite just a few timely ones, he should be forced to explain:
-why he thinks it’s so important not to concede defeat in Afghanistan, even at the cost of squandering American and Afghani lives, depleting the U.S. treasury, and insuring the generation of a fresh supply of terrorists?
-why, along with putting everything else pertaining to organized labor on the backest of back burners, he let the so-called Amigo Summit just concluded pass without even a mention of renegotiating NAFTA (as he promised to do repeatedly during the campaign)?
-and why he’s intent on violating U.S. and international law by not prosecuting everyone, from the top down, involved in torture, rather than, at most, just a handful of underlings who “went beyond” the criminal instructions supplied by functionaries of the Cheney/Bush administration?
But since health care (actually, health insurance) reform is the issue of the moment, how about this: “don’t you think, Mr. President, that a coherent and defensible plan for reform – in other words, a plan for transitioning from the mess we now have to a single-payer system – would have incurred no more opposition than the incoherent and still unformed mishmash you’re now promoting?” Or, equivalently, “don’t you think profiteers in the insurance, pharmacological and for-profit health care industries would (indeed, could) then have done no more than they already are: “lobbying” (essentially bribing) legislators while enlisting unscrupulous Public Relations operatives to spread lies, strike fear and stir up racial animosities within the most benighted sections of the American populace – formerly the useful idiots, now the “base” of the Greater Evil Party?” Or simply, “don’t you think it would be easier to promote a plan that is bold and genuinely “pragmatic,” rather than a plan that, like the one Democrats will put forward, is neither?”
Somebody, please ask him! And if some certifiably delusional idiot on Medicare, railing against government programs, tries to shout you down, don’t be intimidated. If Obama is too stuck on “bipartisanship” to vanquish the Furies, then it’s up to us; and if he’s too stuck on conventional ways of thinking to do what is plainly necessary, then it’s up to us to make him and his bought and paid for Democratic colleagues and co-thinkers do the right thing.
-why he thinks it’s so important not to concede defeat in Afghanistan, even at the cost of squandering American and Afghani lives, depleting the U.S. treasury, and insuring the generation of a fresh supply of terrorists?
-why, along with putting everything else pertaining to organized labor on the backest of back burners, he let the so-called Amigo Summit just concluded pass without even a mention of renegotiating NAFTA (as he promised to do repeatedly during the campaign)?
-and why he’s intent on violating U.S. and international law by not prosecuting everyone, from the top down, involved in torture, rather than, at most, just a handful of underlings who “went beyond” the criminal instructions supplied by functionaries of the Cheney/Bush administration?
But since health care (actually, health insurance) reform is the issue of the moment, how about this: “don’t you think, Mr. President, that a coherent and defensible plan for reform – in other words, a plan for transitioning from the mess we now have to a single-payer system – would have incurred no more opposition than the incoherent and still unformed mishmash you’re now promoting?” Or, equivalently, “don’t you think profiteers in the insurance, pharmacological and for-profit health care industries would (indeed, could) then have done no more than they already are: “lobbying” (essentially bribing) legislators while enlisting unscrupulous Public Relations operatives to spread lies, strike fear and stir up racial animosities within the most benighted sections of the American populace – formerly the useful idiots, now the “base” of the Greater Evil Party?” Or simply, “don’t you think it would be easier to promote a plan that is bold and genuinely “pragmatic,” rather than a plan that, like the one Democrats will put forward, is neither?”
Somebody, please ask him! And if some certifiably delusional idiot on Medicare, railing against government programs, tries to shout you down, don’t be intimidated. If Obama is too stuck on “bipartisanship” to vanquish the Furies, then it’s up to us; and if he’s too stuck on conventional ways of thinking to do what is plainly necessary, then it’s up to us to make him and his bought and paid for Democratic colleagues and co-thinkers do the right thing.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Perils of Bipartisanship: the Dark Side
It may not yet be too late to salvage something decent out of the mess that “health care reform” has become, but time is running short, and the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are still up to their old, bipartisan tricks. It is becoming increasingly clear that this bipartisanship of theirs is putting more than just health care reform in peril.
Obama won the presidency in large part because it had become clear to a majority of voters that the Cheney/Bush administration had been flagrantly god awful. It helped too that John McCain was uncharismatic, and that he picked a cartoon character for a running-mate. In those circumstances, all Obama had to do to win large sectors of the electorate over was to position himself towards the center of our rightward-skewed political spectrum. Then, as in judo, he was able to turn his opponents’ attacks into instruments of their own undoing – in a way that even ill-informed, clueless, apolitical “swing voters” could appreciate. But that was then, and this is now. Now it’s legislators, not the people they purport to represent, who must be won over. These are not people who can be persuaded by compelling arguments; they’re too busy paying the piper. The judo maneuvering that won the election for Obama is therefore powerless against them; especially not while health care profiteers are busily stuffing their pockets.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party had long ago turned itself over to its useful idiots, the folks who appeal to the Fox News/right-wing talk radio demographic. While shamelessly playing to this “base” in the 2008 election, John McCain at least had enough decency to reign in the looniest of his supporters when the mood at some of his rallies turned ugly (and, in a not very disguised way, racist). But nowadays, there is no one in charge, and the Republican leadership, such as it is, only wants to obstruct. Being outnumbered in Congress and vastly outnumbered in the general population, they have therefore hit upon the strategy that worked for their German and Italian counterparts in the 1920s and 30s. They have taken to stirring up the furies.
The first inklings of this strategy were the “tea parties,” organized, not very surreptitiously, by Fox News and like-minded (and funded) public relations firms. The tea parties were a joke, but the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina for the Supreme Court, nevertheless breathed new life into “the movement.” As per the conventional wisdom, it unleashed the anxieties of the most “left behind” segments of the still (barely) majority white community, and incited the pent up rage of those who feel most in jeopardy. Then came the Gates affair and Obama’s indisputably correct (but nevertheless rescinded) remark that Gates’s arrest and shackling in his own home was “stupid.” After that, it all went viral, as the corporate media – including its “liberal” wing -- desperate for ratings, took the bait, showering derisory publicity on each and every lunacy the far-right can conjure up. But even bad publicity has been good for changing the terms of the debate – even farther to the right.
Thus even the so called “birther movement” has become a factor in our politics. These are the folks who insist that Barack Obama is not a “natural born” citizen, and is therefore not “really” the President. No matter that they have made a cause of a delusion – an expression of a wish in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Their dumb obstreperousness has given them a mainstream hearing.
The crowds turning out to disrupt town hall meetings on health care reform are cut from the same cloth – and are often the same people. They too are impervious to rational argument, oblivious to the facts –and, in this instance especially, militantly opposed to their own best interests. Evidence is mounting too that their “spontaneous” demonstrations are supported financially by public relations operatives in the pay of the insurance industry and other health care profiteers. This is diligently reported and exposed. But, no matter: right-wing obstreperousness, shading off into threats of violence, has helped put even Obama’s milquetoast reform proposals on the defensive.
For this, Obama and his advisors are largely to blame. The problem isn’t just that, wanting to avoid the mistakes the Clintons made a generation ago, they erred in the opposite direction, turning much of the task of fashioning health care legislation over to lobbyists for the so-called stakeholders (the health industry profiteers) and to legislators who do their bidding. That misdeed explains why reform is still a work in progress, and why what will finally emerge becomes worse with each passing day. But it doesn’t, by itself, explain the reemergence of the dark side. That is a consequence of a more far-reaching mistake on Obama’s part -- his dogged insistence on going bipartisan; in other words, in this instance, on taking seriously the views and desires of a morally and intellectually bankrupt, but nevertheless semi-“institutionalized,” political party that has been taken over by its loonies.
No doubt, in the end, Obama will score some kind of “victory” on health-care reform. But, increasingly, it seems that any bill that passes will do little more than mandate a few worthwhile insurance reforms. At this point, it is even still up in the air whether the proposals that Congress will finally enact will include a “public option” worth having, or will permit states to institute worthwhile public options on their own.
In a saner environment, private, not public, options would be in jeopardy. After all, single-payer trumps all the other contenders: it alone makes health care a right, not a commodity; and it alone promises to cut costs without diminishing the quality of care. But despite widespread popular support for making health care a right, and despite significant Congressional support as well, single-payer is, for all practical purposes, “off the table.” Even proponents of Obama’s “public option” now have to fight to keep that pale approximation of a solution alive. Thus, in recent weeks, we have witnessed the evolution of a “debate” between those who want much too little change and those who want no change at all – while proponents of genuine change, “change we can believe in,” are cast into the margins.
This sad state of affairs is a consequence of Obama’s unrequited but determined “bipartisanship,” and of the Democratic Party leadership’s determination to “win” at all costs -- even to the point of sponsoring and supporting Democrats who might as well be Republicans. The result is plain: right-wing, aka “Blue Dog,” Democrats and two or three “moderate” (not flagrantly obdurate) Republicans have become the “swing voters” who hold the fate of health care reform in their bought and paid for hands, while a newly empowered Right drags our political culture ever more deeply into the realm of the irrational and the vicious.
The empowerment of the Republican mob is arguably even more to be regretted than yet again missing an opportunity for bringing America’s health care system into the mid-twentieth century. Sensing victory, the health care profiteers and their functionaries in the media and the public relations industry have taken it upon themselves to do whatever is necessary to keep their income flows intact. The result is already ugly and it is likely, in the weeks ahead, to become even uglier.
It didn’t have to be this way. Had Obama and Company not gone for a vague and indefensible mishmash intended to bring Republicans along, but instead opted from the outset for a coherent and defensible plan – for a single-payer system or some close facsimile -- they would have encountered no more virulent opposition than they have already. Indeed, they would now stand a better chance for success, if only because they’d be promoting a plan that makes sense. But instead they went the “bipartisan” route.
In doing so, they empowered the Fox News/talk radio audience even more than Republican plutocrats had done previously – breathing new life into the most morally and intellectually retrograde currents of our political culture. In this way, Obama’s bipartisanship has put even more than health care reform in peril.
Obama won the presidency in large part because it had become clear to a majority of voters that the Cheney/Bush administration had been flagrantly god awful. It helped too that John McCain was uncharismatic, and that he picked a cartoon character for a running-mate. In those circumstances, all Obama had to do to win large sectors of the electorate over was to position himself towards the center of our rightward-skewed political spectrum. Then, as in judo, he was able to turn his opponents’ attacks into instruments of their own undoing – in a way that even ill-informed, clueless, apolitical “swing voters” could appreciate. But that was then, and this is now. Now it’s legislators, not the people they purport to represent, who must be won over. These are not people who can be persuaded by compelling arguments; they’re too busy paying the piper. The judo maneuvering that won the election for Obama is therefore powerless against them; especially not while health care profiteers are busily stuffing their pockets.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party had long ago turned itself over to its useful idiots, the folks who appeal to the Fox News/right-wing talk radio demographic. While shamelessly playing to this “base” in the 2008 election, John McCain at least had enough decency to reign in the looniest of his supporters when the mood at some of his rallies turned ugly (and, in a not very disguised way, racist). But nowadays, there is no one in charge, and the Republican leadership, such as it is, only wants to obstruct. Being outnumbered in Congress and vastly outnumbered in the general population, they have therefore hit upon the strategy that worked for their German and Italian counterparts in the 1920s and 30s. They have taken to stirring up the furies.
The first inklings of this strategy were the “tea parties,” organized, not very surreptitiously, by Fox News and like-minded (and funded) public relations firms. The tea parties were a joke, but the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina for the Supreme Court, nevertheless breathed new life into “the movement.” As per the conventional wisdom, it unleashed the anxieties of the most “left behind” segments of the still (barely) majority white community, and incited the pent up rage of those who feel most in jeopardy. Then came the Gates affair and Obama’s indisputably correct (but nevertheless rescinded) remark that Gates’s arrest and shackling in his own home was “stupid.” After that, it all went viral, as the corporate media – including its “liberal” wing -- desperate for ratings, took the bait, showering derisory publicity on each and every lunacy the far-right can conjure up. But even bad publicity has been good for changing the terms of the debate – even farther to the right.
Thus even the so called “birther movement” has become a factor in our politics. These are the folks who insist that Barack Obama is not a “natural born” citizen, and is therefore not “really” the President. No matter that they have made a cause of a delusion – an expression of a wish in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Their dumb obstreperousness has given them a mainstream hearing.
The crowds turning out to disrupt town hall meetings on health care reform are cut from the same cloth – and are often the same people. They too are impervious to rational argument, oblivious to the facts –and, in this instance especially, militantly opposed to their own best interests. Evidence is mounting too that their “spontaneous” demonstrations are supported financially by public relations operatives in the pay of the insurance industry and other health care profiteers. This is diligently reported and exposed. But, no matter: right-wing obstreperousness, shading off into threats of violence, has helped put even Obama’s milquetoast reform proposals on the defensive.
For this, Obama and his advisors are largely to blame. The problem isn’t just that, wanting to avoid the mistakes the Clintons made a generation ago, they erred in the opposite direction, turning much of the task of fashioning health care legislation over to lobbyists for the so-called stakeholders (the health industry profiteers) and to legislators who do their bidding. That misdeed explains why reform is still a work in progress, and why what will finally emerge becomes worse with each passing day. But it doesn’t, by itself, explain the reemergence of the dark side. That is a consequence of a more far-reaching mistake on Obama’s part -- his dogged insistence on going bipartisan; in other words, in this instance, on taking seriously the views and desires of a morally and intellectually bankrupt, but nevertheless semi-“institutionalized,” political party that has been taken over by its loonies.
No doubt, in the end, Obama will score some kind of “victory” on health-care reform. But, increasingly, it seems that any bill that passes will do little more than mandate a few worthwhile insurance reforms. At this point, it is even still up in the air whether the proposals that Congress will finally enact will include a “public option” worth having, or will permit states to institute worthwhile public options on their own.
In a saner environment, private, not public, options would be in jeopardy. After all, single-payer trumps all the other contenders: it alone makes health care a right, not a commodity; and it alone promises to cut costs without diminishing the quality of care. But despite widespread popular support for making health care a right, and despite significant Congressional support as well, single-payer is, for all practical purposes, “off the table.” Even proponents of Obama’s “public option” now have to fight to keep that pale approximation of a solution alive. Thus, in recent weeks, we have witnessed the evolution of a “debate” between those who want much too little change and those who want no change at all – while proponents of genuine change, “change we can believe in,” are cast into the margins.
This sad state of affairs is a consequence of Obama’s unrequited but determined “bipartisanship,” and of the Democratic Party leadership’s determination to “win” at all costs -- even to the point of sponsoring and supporting Democrats who might as well be Republicans. The result is plain: right-wing, aka “Blue Dog,” Democrats and two or three “moderate” (not flagrantly obdurate) Republicans have become the “swing voters” who hold the fate of health care reform in their bought and paid for hands, while a newly empowered Right drags our political culture ever more deeply into the realm of the irrational and the vicious.
The empowerment of the Republican mob is arguably even more to be regretted than yet again missing an opportunity for bringing America’s health care system into the mid-twentieth century. Sensing victory, the health care profiteers and their functionaries in the media and the public relations industry have taken it upon themselves to do whatever is necessary to keep their income flows intact. The result is already ugly and it is likely, in the weeks ahead, to become even uglier.
It didn’t have to be this way. Had Obama and Company not gone for a vague and indefensible mishmash intended to bring Republicans along, but instead opted from the outset for a coherent and defensible plan – for a single-payer system or some close facsimile -- they would have encountered no more virulent opposition than they have already. Indeed, they would now stand a better chance for success, if only because they’d be promoting a plan that makes sense. But instead they went the “bipartisan” route.
In doing so, they empowered the Fox News/talk radio audience even more than Republican plutocrats had done previously – breathing new life into the most morally and intellectually retrograde currents of our political culture. In this way, Obama’s bipartisanship has put even more than health care reform in peril.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Corruptions
It is looking ever more likely that good old-fashioned corruption will undo the Obama administration’s milquetoast plan to reform the health care system. All that needs to happen is for “the public option” to be compromised away, along with the ability of states to set up single-payer systems on their own. The problem is not graft per se; at least not for the most part. It’s the whacky idea, sustained by obtuse Supreme Courts for more than three decades, that constitutionally protected free speech blocks serious efforts to keep moneyed interests from making “campaign contributions” more or less as they please – in other words, from buying benefits by “investing” in candidates.
In this era of “change,” the health care profiteers this time around have been hedging their bets. Some pharmaceutical interests and some in the for-profit health care industry, along with the AMA, decided to cast their lot with “reform.” Of course, if they start to smell blood, they will probably still jump ship. But they will be winners either way, since liberal Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have already given them most of what they want. The private insurance industry, however, fears an “existential threat” in the so-called public option. That’s why, for the most part, they’ve cast their lot with the blathering ideologues of the Republican Party and their Democratic counterparts, the “Blue Dogs.” The insurance industry is poised to make the month of August a time for “pre-positioning” right-wing forces in preparation for “Obama’s Waterloo,” as the pathetic but dangerous Jim Demint, Senator from South Carolina, famously put it.
Obama could still prevail. Indeed, if only he’d cease his self-defeating bipartisanship and tamp down his zeal for working out deals, his administration could still deal old-fashioned corruption a blow. Then, unfortunately, the moneyed interests would not exactly lose out. But neither would their nefarious greed unequivocally impede a pale semblance of progress.
Thus old-fashioned corruption may still be dealt a blow. Even in our not very democratic system, this is possible in dire enough straits; and the straits now are dire enough. The question is whether liberal Democrats and the Obama administration will rise to the occasion.
But even if Obama gets his way, real (small-d) democrats will have little to celebrate; for defeating the bought and paid for Blue Dogs and Max Baucuses of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, and their even worse colleagues in the Greater Evil Party, will not get to the heart of the corruption that afflicts us. Our democracy is riddled with another, deeper corruption that is much harder to extirpate.
It is worth recalling that, until the end of the eighteenth century, “democracy” was regarded in educated circles in much the way that “anarchy” now is – as a theoretical possibility that no one in his right mind would actually favor. That sense of things changed irreversibly when the American and French Revolutions, and cognate movements elsewhere, turned the demos, the people (in contrast to elites), into actors in the political arena. It took several decades, though, for the perceived challenge democracy posed to property to subside.
The first line of defense was to restrict the franchise to (male) property holders. But that strategy seemed increasingly frail as democratic sentiments continued to rise (in tandem with anti-democratic sentiments of various, but mainly ecclesiastical, colorations). It all came to a head in Britain in the 1840s with the Chartist movement -- where a clear attack on propertied interests took the form of a struggle to extend the franchise to adult males regardless of property qualifications. The Chartist threat was a major factor in the development of the modern party system. It is that system that has made “democracy” safe for capitalism – though at the cost of corrupting the democratic ideal fundamentally, irrespective of how much old-fashioned corruption there may be.
The party system works differently in different places. In parliamentary regimes, there are usually many (bureaucratized and disciplined) political parties that are obliged by circumstances to govern through coalition arrangements. On the one hand, this system does allow most citizens to express themselves politically inasmuch as they are able to find a political party with which to identify. On the other hand, the exigencies of coalition governance generally stifle democratic aspirations; usually because small parties, representing parochial interests at odds with the interests of the majority, must be accommodated. Even so, on the whole, the system does permit a semblance of “rule by the demos.” This is especially true when, as in most countries, old-fashioned corruption is not, as it were, constitutionally protected.
Here, in the Land of the Free, where electoral campaigns are, for the most part, privately financed, old-fashioned corruption is built into the system. But even if our judicial and legislative branches were more (small-d) democratic, even if the Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign funding were set aside, the pressures that work against real democracy in parliamentary regimes would corrupt democracy in our system too. The difference would be that, as happens now, centrist-tending coalitions would form (implicitly) before elections take place – effectively disenfranchising many, perhaps most, voters. There is always the “danger,” of course, that, in primary elections, “fringe” candidates will prevail by appealing to their respective parties’ “base.” In recent decades, this seems to have been more a problem for Republicans than Democrats. Being afraid to take their own side, “liberal” voters in Democratic primaries have tended to vote like pundits – gravitating towards “the center,” as conventional wisdom defines it (not because that is where they are in their aspirations, but because that is how they think Democrats can win). John Kerry’s victory in the 2004 Democratic primaries exemplified this phenomenon perspicuously. That a more progressive candidate than Obama did not prevail in the 2008 primaries was, at least in part, a consequence of similar ratiocinations on the part of Democratic voters.
As I’ve pointed out in countless entries, Obama ran to the center-right in the primaries and has been moving rightward ever since. Thus, no matter how much Rahm Emanuel goes on about not letting a good crisis go to waste, that’s exactly what the Obama administration has done – with health care reform and nearly everything else.
With health care, the time was right: we could have replaced the increasingly untenable status quo with a single-payer system. But, for that, instead of taking the obvious solution “off the table,” Pelosi-style, Obama would have had to defend it forthrightly, spending his political capital as freely as he doles out real capital to our real rulers on Wall Street. And because Republicans could never be brought on board, he would have had to drop the whole bipartisan effort that has blighted his presidency to date. That was not to be, because that would constitute a real challenge to the underlying corruption of the regime; something Obama has not shown the least inclination to take on. Single-payer is superior in every way to the mishmash Obama is promoting, but that is an irrelevant, if inconvenient, fact. For Obama and the rest of the Party of Pusillanimity, the POP, it is more important to pay obeisance to the structural corruption that is our party system by supporting the GOP-POP duopoly than to do the right thing.
Obama’s bipartisanship in this matter at least, is therefore not just an ill-conceived strategy. It is that, of course, but it also represents a (re)affirmation of the system in place. The catastrophes Cheney and Bush bequeathed Obama made that system vulnerable in ways it has not been for decades. Had there been a will, there would have emerged a way if not to change it fundamentally, at least to reform it structurally. But this was not to be. In consequence, even the modest reforms Obama envisions may not be either.
Of course, no Democrat could lead an assault on our two-party system itself. But there was a chance fundamentally to modify the structural corruption of democracy that our two-party system institutionalizes. Then the health care crisis could be made better. Then too the rest of an agenda suited for our time could fall in place.
This would be a victory for (small-d) democracy as well. For then those of us not stuck in the dead center, as defined by the arbiters of conventional wisdom, might actually be genuinely enfranchised for the first time. We might then have something not just to vote against, but instead to vote for. It isn’t happening though. Thus, sadly but predictably, we can only conclude that the time is now past due for even the most inveterate Obama boosters to face reality; and to realize that, barring a major change of course, “change we can believe in” is not going to happen on Obama’s watch.
In this era of “change,” the health care profiteers this time around have been hedging their bets. Some pharmaceutical interests and some in the for-profit health care industry, along with the AMA, decided to cast their lot with “reform.” Of course, if they start to smell blood, they will probably still jump ship. But they will be winners either way, since liberal Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have already given them most of what they want. The private insurance industry, however, fears an “existential threat” in the so-called public option. That’s why, for the most part, they’ve cast their lot with the blathering ideologues of the Republican Party and their Democratic counterparts, the “Blue Dogs.” The insurance industry is poised to make the month of August a time for “pre-positioning” right-wing forces in preparation for “Obama’s Waterloo,” as the pathetic but dangerous Jim Demint, Senator from South Carolina, famously put it.
Obama could still prevail. Indeed, if only he’d cease his self-defeating bipartisanship and tamp down his zeal for working out deals, his administration could still deal old-fashioned corruption a blow. Then, unfortunately, the moneyed interests would not exactly lose out. But neither would their nefarious greed unequivocally impede a pale semblance of progress.
Thus old-fashioned corruption may still be dealt a blow. Even in our not very democratic system, this is possible in dire enough straits; and the straits now are dire enough. The question is whether liberal Democrats and the Obama administration will rise to the occasion.
But even if Obama gets his way, real (small-d) democrats will have little to celebrate; for defeating the bought and paid for Blue Dogs and Max Baucuses of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, and their even worse colleagues in the Greater Evil Party, will not get to the heart of the corruption that afflicts us. Our democracy is riddled with another, deeper corruption that is much harder to extirpate.
It is worth recalling that, until the end of the eighteenth century, “democracy” was regarded in educated circles in much the way that “anarchy” now is – as a theoretical possibility that no one in his right mind would actually favor. That sense of things changed irreversibly when the American and French Revolutions, and cognate movements elsewhere, turned the demos, the people (in contrast to elites), into actors in the political arena. It took several decades, though, for the perceived challenge democracy posed to property to subside.
The first line of defense was to restrict the franchise to (male) property holders. But that strategy seemed increasingly frail as democratic sentiments continued to rise (in tandem with anti-democratic sentiments of various, but mainly ecclesiastical, colorations). It all came to a head in Britain in the 1840s with the Chartist movement -- where a clear attack on propertied interests took the form of a struggle to extend the franchise to adult males regardless of property qualifications. The Chartist threat was a major factor in the development of the modern party system. It is that system that has made “democracy” safe for capitalism – though at the cost of corrupting the democratic ideal fundamentally, irrespective of how much old-fashioned corruption there may be.
The party system works differently in different places. In parliamentary regimes, there are usually many (bureaucratized and disciplined) political parties that are obliged by circumstances to govern through coalition arrangements. On the one hand, this system does allow most citizens to express themselves politically inasmuch as they are able to find a political party with which to identify. On the other hand, the exigencies of coalition governance generally stifle democratic aspirations; usually because small parties, representing parochial interests at odds with the interests of the majority, must be accommodated. Even so, on the whole, the system does permit a semblance of “rule by the demos.” This is especially true when, as in most countries, old-fashioned corruption is not, as it were, constitutionally protected.
Here, in the Land of the Free, where electoral campaigns are, for the most part, privately financed, old-fashioned corruption is built into the system. But even if our judicial and legislative branches were more (small-d) democratic, even if the Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign funding were set aside, the pressures that work against real democracy in parliamentary regimes would corrupt democracy in our system too. The difference would be that, as happens now, centrist-tending coalitions would form (implicitly) before elections take place – effectively disenfranchising many, perhaps most, voters. There is always the “danger,” of course, that, in primary elections, “fringe” candidates will prevail by appealing to their respective parties’ “base.” In recent decades, this seems to have been more a problem for Republicans than Democrats. Being afraid to take their own side, “liberal” voters in Democratic primaries have tended to vote like pundits – gravitating towards “the center,” as conventional wisdom defines it (not because that is where they are in their aspirations, but because that is how they think Democrats can win). John Kerry’s victory in the 2004 Democratic primaries exemplified this phenomenon perspicuously. That a more progressive candidate than Obama did not prevail in the 2008 primaries was, at least in part, a consequence of similar ratiocinations on the part of Democratic voters.
As I’ve pointed out in countless entries, Obama ran to the center-right in the primaries and has been moving rightward ever since. Thus, no matter how much Rahm Emanuel goes on about not letting a good crisis go to waste, that’s exactly what the Obama administration has done – with health care reform and nearly everything else.
With health care, the time was right: we could have replaced the increasingly untenable status quo with a single-payer system. But, for that, instead of taking the obvious solution “off the table,” Pelosi-style, Obama would have had to defend it forthrightly, spending his political capital as freely as he doles out real capital to our real rulers on Wall Street. And because Republicans could never be brought on board, he would have had to drop the whole bipartisan effort that has blighted his presidency to date. That was not to be, because that would constitute a real challenge to the underlying corruption of the regime; something Obama has not shown the least inclination to take on. Single-payer is superior in every way to the mishmash Obama is promoting, but that is an irrelevant, if inconvenient, fact. For Obama and the rest of the Party of Pusillanimity, the POP, it is more important to pay obeisance to the structural corruption that is our party system by supporting the GOP-POP duopoly than to do the right thing.
Obama’s bipartisanship in this matter at least, is therefore not just an ill-conceived strategy. It is that, of course, but it also represents a (re)affirmation of the system in place. The catastrophes Cheney and Bush bequeathed Obama made that system vulnerable in ways it has not been for decades. Had there been a will, there would have emerged a way if not to change it fundamentally, at least to reform it structurally. But this was not to be. In consequence, even the modest reforms Obama envisions may not be either.
Of course, no Democrat could lead an assault on our two-party system itself. But there was a chance fundamentally to modify the structural corruption of democracy that our two-party system institutionalizes. Then the health care crisis could be made better. Then too the rest of an agenda suited for our time could fall in place.
This would be a victory for (small-d) democracy as well. For then those of us not stuck in the dead center, as defined by the arbiters of conventional wisdom, might actually be genuinely enfranchised for the first time. We might then have something not just to vote against, but instead to vote for. It isn’t happening though. Thus, sadly but predictably, we can only conclude that the time is now past due for even the most inveterate Obama boosters to face reality; and to realize that, barring a major change of course, “change we can believe in” is not going to happen on Obama’s watch.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
A Flicker of Light
It was just a flicker. At his prime time July 22 news conference on health care reform,one of the corporate media stage props pre-selected to ask questions asked President Obama how close to 100% health insurance coverage would be enough to satisfy the “guidelines” he has given Congress. Obama replied that the only way to insure 100% coverage would be with a single-payer system that provides health care for everyone as a matter of right. Then he launched into his usual answer – about how he proposes to get close but not all the way there. Thus, briefly, a flicker of light shone through. It was then immediately quashed by the unforgiving steamroller that is Obama’s “pragmatism.”
How much more salutary it would have been had Obama gone on, for just a few more seconds, to say what he clearly knows to be the case: that a single-payer system is unthinkable – notwithstanding the plain fact that its superiority over the alternatives (including the left-most version of Obama’s still vague plan) is indisputable. It is unthinkable because health care profiteers in the private insurance industry, Big Pharma and the for-profit health delivery system own Congress. So, Obama might then have said, “we might as well just get on with seeing what we can accomplish within that constraint.” If only Obama had dared say this, he would have done more to advance public deliberation and debate than anything any President has done in decades.
It’s a familiar syndrome. Everyone, Obama included, knows that the only feasible way to bring a semblance of peace and justice to Israel/Palestine is to establish a Palestinian state on all or nearly all the territory Israel has occupied illegally since 1967. But, of course, this is unthinkable given the Israel lobby’s control over Congress and the White House. Thus Obama babbles on about a two state solution and halting settlement growth (he doesn’t dare talk of dismantling settlements!). His babble may be enough to unnerve the right-wing politicians who run Israel, but everyone understands that it’s just words. Because American legislators are bought and paid for, the obviously right solution is unthinkable.
Or again: everyone with the sense they were born with – including Obama most emphatically -- also knows that continuing the occupation of Iraq and ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan is all but guaranteed to make “the homeland” less, not more, secure – and also to squander public monies needed urgently for constructive purposes (including health care). But “cut and run” is an unthinkable option. After all, it would prove the empire vulnerable – and the many interests who also own Congress, not just the military-industrial complex narrowly defined, can’t have that. Thus perpetual war has become the norm. Since Obama has become president, hardly anyone even notices anymore.
Ditto for turning the economy over to “the malefactors of great wealth,” as earlier generations of Progressives called them; the people who brought the economy to the brink of collapse, and who continue to do so, as they enrich themselves egregiously. In these matters too Obama, along with nearly everyone else, knows better. But with bought and paid for Democrats (and Republicans), doing otherwise is unthinkable. It is hardly even mentionable in policy debates.
The problem is not just Obama’s “pragmatism” (which comes to nothing more than unprincipled and ultimately self-defeating tactical flexibility). It’s that who pays the piper calls the tune. Back in the darkest days of the Cheney/Bush administration, it was easy enough for “liberals” to see how wrong-headed everything was, and how the country was headed for disaster upon disaster. Not so anymore. Instead, in Obama’s Washington, the who-pays-the-piper phenomenon has reached almost totalitarian levels. The obvious, the known to be obvious, has become unthinkable, with only the occasional and easily quashed flicker of light showing through.
How much more salutary it would have been had Obama gone on, for just a few more seconds, to say what he clearly knows to be the case: that a single-payer system is unthinkable – notwithstanding the plain fact that its superiority over the alternatives (including the left-most version of Obama’s still vague plan) is indisputable. It is unthinkable because health care profiteers in the private insurance industry, Big Pharma and the for-profit health delivery system own Congress. So, Obama might then have said, “we might as well just get on with seeing what we can accomplish within that constraint.” If only Obama had dared say this, he would have done more to advance public deliberation and debate than anything any President has done in decades.
It’s a familiar syndrome. Everyone, Obama included, knows that the only feasible way to bring a semblance of peace and justice to Israel/Palestine is to establish a Palestinian state on all or nearly all the territory Israel has occupied illegally since 1967. But, of course, this is unthinkable given the Israel lobby’s control over Congress and the White House. Thus Obama babbles on about a two state solution and halting settlement growth (he doesn’t dare talk of dismantling settlements!). His babble may be enough to unnerve the right-wing politicians who run Israel, but everyone understands that it’s just words. Because American legislators are bought and paid for, the obviously right solution is unthinkable.
Or again: everyone with the sense they were born with – including Obama most emphatically -- also knows that continuing the occupation of Iraq and ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan is all but guaranteed to make “the homeland” less, not more, secure – and also to squander public monies needed urgently for constructive purposes (including health care). But “cut and run” is an unthinkable option. After all, it would prove the empire vulnerable – and the many interests who also own Congress, not just the military-industrial complex narrowly defined, can’t have that. Thus perpetual war has become the norm. Since Obama has become president, hardly anyone even notices anymore.
Ditto for turning the economy over to “the malefactors of great wealth,” as earlier generations of Progressives called them; the people who brought the economy to the brink of collapse, and who continue to do so, as they enrich themselves egregiously. In these matters too Obama, along with nearly everyone else, knows better. But with bought and paid for Democrats (and Republicans), doing otherwise is unthinkable. It is hardly even mentionable in policy debates.
The problem is not just Obama’s “pragmatism” (which comes to nothing more than unprincipled and ultimately self-defeating tactical flexibility). It’s that who pays the piper calls the tune. Back in the darkest days of the Cheney/Bush administration, it was easy enough for “liberals” to see how wrong-headed everything was, and how the country was headed for disaster upon disaster. Not so anymore. Instead, in Obama’s Washington, the who-pays-the-piper phenomenon has reached almost totalitarian levels. The obvious, the known to be obvious, has become unthinkable, with only the occasional and easily quashed flicker of light showing through.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Right and Righter
If David Brooks is good for anything, it is for getting everything wrong by about 180 degrees. Today’s column in The New York Times is true to form. There he “argues” that liberal Democrats (in whose ranks he includes President Obama) are committing “suicide” by “overplaying” their electoral mandate, much as Republicans did in the aftermath of George Bush’s electoral victories. According to Brooks, the Democrats are way to the left of the American people. Only the right-most flank of what I have been calling the POP (the Party of Pusillanimity), the Blue Dog Democrats, gets it right. Evidently, the Republicans in Congress are too coarse, too obstructionist, and too transparently stupid even for Brooks. So, for the time being, he’ll cast his lot with the Blue Dogs.
Like most of what The Time’s “conservative” columnist writes, these latest reflections hardly merit comment. But they do inadvertently bring two thoughts to mind:
-first, that to the degree Obama is slipping in the polls (which is how Brooks and other pundits have been spinning recent poll results where Obama is still doing extraordinarily well), it is not because his proposals are too far ahead of the people who voted for him, but because they lag so far behind. The “anti-war” candidate is continuing one of the Bush wars he was elected to stop; and, at great cost (not just to the treasury but also to the safety and security of the American people), escalating the other. The candidate who was supposed to clean up Wall Street has put Wall Street predators in charge of the economy – with utterly predictable results. The candidate who was supposed to bring the United States to the level of other developed countries with respect to health care has seen fit to take the obvious solution, single-payer, off the table, while promoting (for the time being) only an anemic “public option.” The candidate who was supposed to bring transparency to government, to end preventive detention (and other violations of U.S. and international law), to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and so on and on – has been prevaricating shamefully. Obama cannot even find it in himself, so far, to bring anyone, much less the ringleaders of the Cheney-Bush torture regime, to account for clear violations of bedrock human rights and inviolable principles of international law. Overreaching? Hardly!
-Brooks’ babble also raises a question about the real liberal Democrats, the ones to the left of the “bipartisans” in the White House. They’re hardly out of step with the American people; in fact, even genuine conservatives should be in favor of ending the Bush wars, saving capitalism from the capitalists, and making health care a right, not a commodity. Real conservatives should also favor transparency and the rule of law and, so long as they’re more worldly than godly, they should not even object to such challenges to “family values” as gay marriage and gays in the military. Thus the positions most members of the “Progressive Caucus” advance are hardly outside the mainstream; they are not even genuinely “left” positions, but only positions the left (along with nearly everyone else) can get behind in the circumstances. Yet these “progressives” have been remarkably unable to influence outcomes! Unlike the Newt and his minions back in 94 when they took out a contract on America, or the Blue Dogs now, they seem constitutionally unable to “leverage” their power – which could become considerable with only minimal effort, given just the force of numbers. Even more than Obama, their error is not that they are too bold or too far ahead of the people they “represent.” Where they go wrong is in their strategic and tactical ineptitude and their eagerness to acquiesce in whatever Obama and his “bipartisans” propose.
Thus, yet again, Brooks gets it just about 180 degrees wrong!
Like most of what The Time’s “conservative” columnist writes, these latest reflections hardly merit comment. But they do inadvertently bring two thoughts to mind:
-first, that to the degree Obama is slipping in the polls (which is how Brooks and other pundits have been spinning recent poll results where Obama is still doing extraordinarily well), it is not because his proposals are too far ahead of the people who voted for him, but because they lag so far behind. The “anti-war” candidate is continuing one of the Bush wars he was elected to stop; and, at great cost (not just to the treasury but also to the safety and security of the American people), escalating the other. The candidate who was supposed to clean up Wall Street has put Wall Street predators in charge of the economy – with utterly predictable results. The candidate who was supposed to bring the United States to the level of other developed countries with respect to health care has seen fit to take the obvious solution, single-payer, off the table, while promoting (for the time being) only an anemic “public option.” The candidate who was supposed to bring transparency to government, to end preventive detention (and other violations of U.S. and international law), to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and so on and on – has been prevaricating shamefully. Obama cannot even find it in himself, so far, to bring anyone, much less the ringleaders of the Cheney-Bush torture regime, to account for clear violations of bedrock human rights and inviolable principles of international law. Overreaching? Hardly!
-Brooks’ babble also raises a question about the real liberal Democrats, the ones to the left of the “bipartisans” in the White House. They’re hardly out of step with the American people; in fact, even genuine conservatives should be in favor of ending the Bush wars, saving capitalism from the capitalists, and making health care a right, not a commodity. Real conservatives should also favor transparency and the rule of law and, so long as they’re more worldly than godly, they should not even object to such challenges to “family values” as gay marriage and gays in the military. Thus the positions most members of the “Progressive Caucus” advance are hardly outside the mainstream; they are not even genuinely “left” positions, but only positions the left (along with nearly everyone else) can get behind in the circumstances. Yet these “progressives” have been remarkably unable to influence outcomes! Unlike the Newt and his minions back in 94 when they took out a contract on America, or the Blue Dogs now, they seem constitutionally unable to “leverage” their power – which could become considerable with only minimal effort, given just the force of numbers. Even more than Obama, their error is not that they are too bold or too far ahead of the people they “represent.” Where they go wrong is in their strategic and tactical ineptitude and their eagerness to acquiesce in whatever Obama and his “bipartisans” propose.
Thus, yet again, Brooks gets it just about 180 degrees wrong!
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