The Health Care Post

Update: For a great account similar to what I’m saying, check out Cenk Uygur, who compares the passage of health care to ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq.

And in the interest of transparency, here are a number of people who take a rosier view of the bill while still being honest about the nature of the process: Robert Reich, Robert Kuttner, Lawrence Lessig, Matthew Yglesias, and Kevin Drum.  They don’t go as far as I do.  I see this bill as a pretty big indication that Obama frankly either lied about his intentions (most explicitly on the public option and drug re-importation, what I’d argue would have been the two most effective strategies for making insurance and drugs more affordable for people and the government.  See Greenwald- he killed them both) or more charitably, failed to initiate anything resembling ‘change’ in Washington.  But be that as it may, at least they have the journalistic integrity (I won’t impugn Kuttner’s integrity, but I do think he’s just wrong about Obama on this one- turn to any other issue and it’s impossible to claim he’s learned any kind of lesson here) not to swallow the claim that anyone ‘beat’ the special interests.  That may be good politics, but it’s also, to all of our detriment’s, a complete lie.  I’d like to get beat like the special interests do if that’s the case.

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When looking at what the health care reform bill achieves, I’m confident that we needed to pass it.  Shit, Chomsky felt like we needed to pass it.

But when I look at how we got here, I’m horrified by the precedent that has been set.

Because what it says is that those most responsible for a social problem must be bought off and begged for that problem to be addressed.  This is a fundamentally unsustainable (in every way) proposition.  Chris Hayes had a piece out in January that was probably the single best explanation I’ve yet found of the nature of our current predicament:

So what, exactly, is it that ails us?

In pondering the answer, it’s useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that’s warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands. It didn’t happen overnight, of course, and the devolution has been analyzed and decried by a host of writers and thinkers in these very pages.

It’s also not the first time. Indeed, the story of the American Republic is the never-ending task of redistributing power that always seems to collect and pool and re-form, a cycle in which we break up the power trusts, only to find them reassembling, Terminator 2-like, and requiring yet another dose of the founders’ revolutionary fervor to be broken up again.

The central and unique paradox of our politics at this moment, however, is that our institutions are so broken, the government so sclerotic and dysfunctional, that in almost all cases, from financial bailouts to health insurance mandates, the easiest means of addressing the first set of problems is to take steps that exacerbate the second.

And that leaves us in a position of gross insecurity, depending on the benevolence of concentrated, and greatly advanced power, whom we must hope will deign to consider our needs.

This is not, to be fair, entirely unprecedented.  But it has now been definitively confirmed to be not just an anomaly, but a trend.  This is how things are done now.  The Senate climate(?)/energy/jobs bill further confirms that trend.  Instead of starting with what’s necessary and then diminishing it from there, we now start with what we think we can get this group of people to agree to (also, this group of people).  Get ready folks, we are entering a period of extended capitulation.

It’s as though the government has been reduced to the level of a corrupt police force, forced to pay off not only Mr. Potter, the petty drug dealers and assassins, but also the local ‘convenience’ store and evil gas station, to get any services to the local residents.  No one in their right mind would respect that kind of authority.  But that is what every indication seems to point to about where we’re going, in no small part because while our community is having trouble with the current authorities, it has every reason to be existentially terrified about the gang trying to move in on their turf.  At least our guys can sweet-talk the above mentioned criminals into doling out any services at all.

Not only did this bill set a destructive precedent in terms of necessitating that we can only solve problems by empowering the causers of them (which should give you a hint as to whether the problem is truly solved), it also set the precedent that ‘reform’ only happens when some of our most undervalued members of society, like Latinos (to be fair, National Council de La Raza ended up supporting what passed) or Women (NOW alone in its furious response to Obama’s executive order) get unambiguously fucked over and told that their concerns are marginal to the ‘greater good’, so could you quit whining and get back in the kitchen/field while the White guys figure out how to solve your problem?

Finally, let’s not forget that at the end of the day this was an essentially Republican bill (Robert Reich also good) that they didn’t even have to vote on to get it passed- they basically got Democrats so freaked out they couldn’t pass their own.

All in all, you’ll have to forgive me for feeling somewhat less than jubilant when I look at the landscape of other issues in store for us (climate/energy, education, jobs/finance, military/civil liberties).  I say this all not to be a downer, but because it is imperative that we be honest about where we’re at, and the steps that need to be taken for addressing not just the symptoms of our dysfunctional system but its core- concentrated corporate power.  Anything less than a recognition that we have not truly advanced toward fundamental change, and need to figure out how we do that as soon as possible, strikes me as lacking.

On the other hand, as I hope to get to soon, I do think the immigration rally that I attended on Sunday really does point toward an awakening that may have some hope for setting a different kind of precedent- a people’s precedent.

But it’s late, and I’m dumb for being up now already, so hopefully I’ll get to that by like, I dunno, Saturday?

Peace,
Joel

Follow-Up On Why I Spend Most Of My Time Criticizing Democrats

Just gonna link to some articles for this one.  The first two, The Pundit Candidate: How Cable News Networks Are ‘Being Taken Advantage Of’ By Future Candidates, and The Lobbying-Media Complex are on how the media is facilitating the selling of conservative-corporatist ideology and political influence.  The third, Our Democracy No Longer Works And The Problem Is Congress is pretty self-explanatory.

Peace,
Joel

Political Mythbusters, Episode III: ESSENTIAL Reading On Why ‘Bipartisanship’ Will Never Ever Ever Ever Ever-

Ever produce results any time soon:

Several years ago, I had an epiphany:  the core of conservatism is identity politics, not ideology or issues.  Oh, sure, there are ideological differences between conservatives and liberals, but those differences are substantially smaller than the gaps between who they vote for, as I discussed in my Dec, 2007 diary, “Collapsing The Ideological Overlap: The Gulf Between Issues and Candidates”.   But if that’s so, you might ask, why say that it’s conservatives who are responsible for the gap?  The reason is simple: conservatives are more likely to hold liberal policy positions and more likely to vote for candidates opposed to what they say they believe…

[Paul shows how in issue after issue, Republicans awkwardly- or not- flip flop heinously in order to oppose Obama]

On issue after issue, Obama naively believed that incorporating GOP ideas into his initial proposals-and systematically excluding ideas strongly supported by his base, so as not to make Republicans mad-was a sure-fired way to foster a spirit of bipartisanship.  On issue after issue he was wrong… for a very simple reason: When push comes to shove, conservatives don’t care about policy, they only really care about identity-and winning. Indeed, for conservatives, identity is winning, since conservatism is all about maintaining social hierarchy, elite rule, and conventional morality that keeps the lower orders in line, and virtuous conservatives on top.

For conservatives, a liberal proposing conservative ideas is simply acknowledging the natural order of things-and if he really acknowledges the natural order of things, then he ought to acknowledge that conservatives should be running the show.  So, if he doesn’t acknowledge that, then he’s not really serious–indeed, he’s downright deceitful, and everything Glen Beck says is true.  He’s really a socialist fascist Nazi out to destroy America.

In psychological terms, it’s very simple: The more he moves towards them, the more he threatens their identities as not-him, and the more hysterically they have to oppose him.  It’s a strategy doomed to failure from the start.

This isn’t really that surprising, right?  Conservative inconsistency on a host of issues (you want to cut the deficit but want to increase military funding/wars?  you want to cut the deficit but want to destroy the most cost-effective measure of reducing health care costs?  you are pro-life and pro-war but pro-economy of death?) is pretty well demonstrated, but what’s essential is what drives much of the inconsistency- the absolutely pathological need to oppose one’s enemies, who happen to be remarkably more consistent and reality-based.

This is why (or one reason anyway- that our government is wholly unrepresentative of the people it governs, due to voter disenfranchisement, is another biggy), despite the fact that the welfare state has enormous support across lines of ideological self-identification and spending cuts for social spending are deeply unpopular, deficit hysteria (mostly among the political class, I see few normal people and good economists giving a rats ass about the deficit when we’re in the midst of 10% unemployment and 20% unemployment/underemployment- which beeteedubs, exacerbates long-term deficit) notwithstanding, we see absolute gridlock on jobs and social services, even as huge numbers of Americans suffer under the Conservative nightmare (see also, as well as- you know what, just read this).  Conservative politicians misrepresent the actual beliefs of the people they ‘represent’ because they are driven not by actual policy interest, but by narrow self-interest alone.

That’s not to say we’re not driven by it too.  We are.  I just happen to have a broader view of self-interest in which it’s impossible to hope for security for oneself if others are left in insecurity.  That’s just dumb.

But this is why ‘bipartisanship’ as it’s conceived right now is doomed to fail, because bipartisanship is wholly at odds with Conservative ideology- “Fuck you”.

Peace,
Joel

Supreme Court FAIL!

He knows...

This is an unmitigated disaster.  I’m serious, this is devastating for the democratic process:

A bitterly divided Supreme Court vastly increased the power of big business and unions to influence government decisions Thursday by freeing them to spend their millions directly to sway elections for president and Congress.

The ruling reversed a century-long trend to limit the political muscle of corporations, organized labor and their massive war chests. It also recast the political landscape just as crucial midterm election campaigns are getting under way.

In its sweeping 5-4 ruling, the court set the stage for a wave of likely repercussions — from new pressures on lawmakers to heed special interest demands to increasingly boisterous campaigns featuring highly charged ads that drown out candidate voices…

The justices weighed two fundamental political forces — the power of the central government and the concentration of corporate wealth — and tilted decidedly in favor of the latter. The opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy made a vigorous argument based on the Constitution for the right of the public to be exposed to a multitude of ideas and against the ability of government to limit political speech, even in the interest of fighting corruption…

Strongly dissenting, Justice John Paul Stevens said, ”The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.”

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Kennedy to form the majority in the main part of the case. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens’ dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.

The court overturned two earlier decisions and threw out parts of a 63-year-old law that said companies and unions can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads urging the election or defeat of particular candidates by name. The decision, which applies to independent spending that is not coordinated with candidates, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions and didn’t touch the McCain-Feingold ban on unlimited corporate and union donations to political parties. Nor did it disturb companies’ right to solicit voluntary contributions to political action committees that can donate directly to candidates…

At the very least Obama stands on the right side of this one.  I pray this populist rhetoric turns into more than fightin’ words:

Obama called the decision a victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and other powerful interests.

The ruling will lead to a ”stampede of special interest money in our politics,” Obama said. He pledged to work with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to come up with a ”forceful response” to the high court’s action.

But Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader who filed the first lawsuit challenging the McCain-Feingold law, praised the court for ”restoring the First Amendment rights” of corporations and unions. ”By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers,” McConnell said.

Kennedy’s opinion goes to the heart of laws dating back to the Gilded Age when Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907 banning corporations from donating money directly to federal candidates. Though that prohibition still stands, the same can’t be said for much of the century-long effort that followed to separate politics from corporate money.

I don’t have time (Cavs v. Lakers!) to go into the response that is already building.  But I will.

This is truly awful, and will make it immensely more difficult for candidates to run campaigns independent of being hollow, corporate wards.  You think our current herd of politicians lacks leadership and will to fight corporate interests now?  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Peace,
Joel

ps. while this does also affect unions, I need to emphasize that the ramifications are such that while unions can, yes, now pump more ads into politics (though that means less money for organizing), they are titanically outspent by corporations.  So the relative effect is that unions and other people-serving institutions are completely outgunned.

pps. my favorite tweets in response:

buckeyeblog

And the major corporations shall inherit the Earth…

chrislhayes

Citizens United (for Oligarchy!) decision is here: [PDF] http://bit.ly/6zO7EY.

CharlesMBlow

If corps can now spend to influence elecs, Wall Street is making billions, and Obama wants to regulate them: guess what 2012 will look like?

buckeyeblog

The Supreme Court also ruled that we shall now be known as the United States of Exxon-Mobile.

chrislhayes

RT @daveweigel: BREAKING: In wake of Citizens United ruling, Goldman announces presidential bid. “Let’s cut out the middleman,” sez company.

chrislhayes

I propose a bet: $500 to Partners in Health to any libertarian takers. Tot. corporate IE’s in 2010 cycle for R’s will exceed those for D’s.

chrislhayes

RT @lessig: Stop fighting to silence speakers. Fight 4a system where funders don’t control congress. Citizen Funded Elections.

BradleyLCromes

Citizens United a major setback for democracy. Corporations are not real citizens. “Chilled speech” is ours.

Jane Hamsher On The Jonathan Gruber Story, And The Fate Of Our Democracy

I will admit I haven’t been following this story as much as I’d like.  Frankly, I don’t have the time.  But this is a little disturbing.

If you haven’t heard this story, I’ll give you a brief (as un-biased as possible) rundown.  Jonathan Gruber is an MIT economist who has been widely cited (by the likes of Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman, and thus, those that cite them) as an impartial source of analysis on White House favored and Senate health care proposals.  It was recently disclosed that :

Gruber began negotiating a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services in February of 2009, for which he was ultimately paid $392,600. The contract called for Gruber to use his statistical model for evaluating alternatives “derived from the President’s health reform proposal.” It was not a research grant, but rather a consulting contract to advise the White House Office of Health Reform, headed by Obama’s health care czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, to “develop proposals” for health care reform.

Jane’s allegations go further:

The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification.  Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits…

Gruber validates the argument put forward by the Senate bill’s proponent that it will make health care more affordable — a claim that Marcy Wheeler has made compelling arguments against.  Though Gruber’s analysis has been cited as support that insurance would be affordable, it appears that the individual mandate will impose a financial burden on middle class families that will leave them with no ability to make the co-pays necessary to use the insurance they are forced to buy.  But because Gruber’s work has the authority of an expert from MIT, it has been accepted as independent confirmation that the bill will make things better, not worse…

most claims that the excise tax will “bend the cost curve” inevitably lead back to Gruber’s analysis..  And now that his ties to the White House have been exposed, he seems to be inserting caveats and backing away from that assertion.

What was Gruber’s role in crafting the Senate bill?  Nobody will say. Is he in effect grading his own work when he praises the bill?  We don’t know.  What we do know is that the White House engaged an expert who was quite likely to reach the conclusions he reached, because he’d been making similar claims for years.  And they worked hard to promote his work as independent validation of their plan, when in fact he was an integral part of it…

Recently Bill Black, Eliot Spitzer and Frank Partnoy called for the release of AIG emails and internal documents, asserting that the public now owns 80% of the company and should be able to examine them in order to be able to ascertain what happened in the past.  Likewise, now that it is known that Jonathan Gruber was a White House consultant, the assumptions that have been used by the White House to estimate the impact of the health care bill will for decades to come should be made publicly available.

Both Congress and President Obama owe us that kind of transparency before committing to a path that could have serious consequences for the health and prosperity of all Americans.

If Jane’s account is accurate, and I don’t yet see a reason to doubt them (though I acknowledge that I really haven’t had the time to do my own fact-checking), the implications could not be more serious.  While this process has been fraught with misinformation and manipulation from the beginning, it has mostly been of a cartoonishly evil quality from the likes of this asshole (also, a similar sentiment from Pat Robertson).  But transparent process, respectful dialogue, and accurate information are essential to a functional democracy.  This shouldn’t be counter-intuitive.  If the people and legislators are not provided with accurate information (and are being psychologically and emotionally assaulted), they cannot make decisions effectively on behalf of themselves, and are easier to manipulate, coerce, or co-opt.

I am not implying (nor, I think, are FDL) that the White House did anything so bold/amateurish as to try and directly influence the results that Gruber reached.  Nevertheless, the promotion of a favorable and financially connected outcome as ‘impartial’ is a problem, one that deserves the utmost scrutiny.  Health care, though it is being commented on as though it were a particularly exciting NFL match, has huge implications both for people’s livelihoods and the nature of our political discourse now and in the far future.  What occurs now is critical.

I encourage enterprising readers of this blog with more time than I do to contest this account with better research than I could do, because I acknowledge that my single-sourcing is not ideal.  Such is the difficulty of trying to come to intellectually satisfying conclusions in this age where finding trustworthy sources is frankly a fucking nightmare.

Peace,
Joel

“Exemplifies Divisions In The Democratic Party”: What’s Really On The Table Here

One of the things that I think is actually really constructive (and incredibly painful) about the Obama presidency is that it is an eye-opener and a chance to tackle a question we haven’t had to deal with for eight years.  What do Democrats really believe?

As it turns out, a whole lot of things.  Many of those things are incredibly, almost diametrically opposed.  Let’s explore!

Steve Benen and Glenn Greenwald (and Ed Kilgore, and Jake McIntyre, who he references) (fuck, I need to start citing/reading more POCs and women, this is just ridiculous…) all argue, in various ways, that there is a big split among Dems about whether to ‘kill the bill’ (though I hope I showed in my last post how ‘kill the bill’ does not equal ‘death to health care reform’), and that split serves to flesh out major ideological differences among us.

Jake doesn’t explore so much as point out what is to me a very revealing parallel: that the fault line between those who think we should pass the Senate bill as is, and those who think that that bill does not qualify as true reform and must be changed before it’s passed (whew) mirrors the line between those who “grudgingly backed the invasion of Iraq and those who fought against the war seven years ago”.  He also argues that this line reveals the fundamental difference: “When all is said and done, the wonks trust Democratic politicians to protect our interests. The activists don’t. That doesn’t mean that we don’t like certain Democratic politicians, or that we don’t cherish our wonky brethren. It just means that we’re not willing to get fooled again.”

Ed Kilgore has a great piece that elevates his sense of what the split is.  It’s complicated so I’m gonna suggest you read it yourself, but to sum up, one side of the Democrats believe that a tightly regulated and subsidized private sector approach can better accomplish progressive policy aims.  This is waaaay different than Republican unabashed ‘privatization’.  But it is also different from other-side Democrats, who believe in actual strategic nationalization (say single-payer, or more aggressive management of TARP-funded banks) over ‘strategic regulation and subsidization’.  Like I said, great analysis that deserves hearing, though I differ with Ed on precisely the ideological bases that he describes.  I’ll come back to him though, as parts of his piece tie in just beautifully to my next post.

Finally, Greenwald largely agrees with Kilgore, though his emphasis (which comes, I think, from Glenn and I standing at a different ideological location from Ed) is different.  He argues that the difference is in an allegiance to corporatism, which favors the merge rather than takeover of public and private institutions (centrist Democrats) versus an antagonism to corporatism, which favors the use of public institutions as a watchdog and firm guide of private institutions, with a strong safety net and human development mechanism (progressive Democrats).

Steve doesn’t identify the nature of the difference, but makes the point that hey, at least we’re seeing a constructive debate between centrists and progressives.  Because obviously, the Republican ideology has been proved intellectually bankrupt and fantastical once and for all.

My next post will deeply critique both of Benen’s points, which I wish I could believe were true.

Peace,

Joel

Keeping Focused for the Long Haul

[Update I At Bottom]

There is too much shit to keep track of.  That sounds like kind of a cop-out, but I mean it more to say that at this particular historic moment, there are so many things that demand attention, like emergency-response class attention, that it becomes necessary to take a step back to remember process, and the system-reorienting transformational change we need to keep in mind as we fight our battles in this larger war for our country’s future.

A couple weeks ago I wrote that The Republicans, and Beck, Aren’t Fucking Up Health Care.  That’s not entirely true of course- they make it much harder to deal with health care because we have a smaller pool of good-faith negotiating partners, and they provide a decent cover for Baucus, Nelson, Conrad, and other clowns to claim that they’re seeking bipartisanship, when they are really trying to avoid pissing off their corporate sponsors (who managed to get pretty pissed anyway).  But the main point is that even as we confront Beck-style authoritarian rhetoric, we need to remember to also confront corporate-style authoritarian power, and do it across the board, not just in one sector.  We need to keep in mind what things are mostly distractions, and where the institutionalized power and inertia against change really lies.  Glenn Beck, if he ties up our energy, morale, and effort, leaving us incapable of fighting the forces that are actually driving the system, is an incredibly impressive investment in diminishing the ability of change agents to commit to the work that needs doing.

The Republicans, and Beck, Aren’t Fucking Up Health Care

I know, shocking right?

I’m working on another post right now, but I just saw one story today on The Huffington Post that kind of perfectly encapsulates where I’m at right now, and I thought I’d briefly take the opportunity to highlight it and strongly agree, with a minor qualification, below the jump.

Obama FAIL! Time To Drop This Politeness Shit, Time To Get Uppity

“The answer to that is: They’re [Republicans] assholes. That’s a technical political science term. And Barack Obama’s not an asshole. I will say this, I can be an asshole. And some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are gonna have to start getting a little bit uppity.”

The above quote, delivered by Van Jones on February 11th, before he began working at the White House, serves as a pretty good organizing principle from here on out.

In the interest of getting to the meat of this argument, I encourage you to check out my caveats at the end of the piece, marked by *s, where I concede that I am guessing there was a very particular and racialized reason for this particular Sister Souljah moment. Never the less, I think we’re going to have to do better if our goal is truly substantive change.

Obama FAIL! The Precarious State Of Political Causality

So far I’ve given some background on my argumentative methodology and my interpretation of how this whole shebang played out. But now it’s time to turn to the most painful part of this process: assessing what happened and where we go from here. I’m gonna try and be funny. But honesty is more important than humor, and mostly this fucking sucks. Sometimes humor won’t do.

This whole event provided a potent symbol for the ‘strained’ relationship between the Obama White House and its base of supporters that we’ve been aware of for some time. This just made it really fucking obvious. Because while many of us felt we were being given short shrift with regards to policy (a weak, compromised stimulus; weak, compromised approach to civil rights in the gay community and with Guantanamo; poor leadership on both energy/climate and health care; and poor judgment with regards to withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq), there’s a difference (to me at least, but I’m not gay so I can accept that other people have probably been this disillusioned for a bit longer than I) between failing to live up to policy expectations and actually failing to stand by your people. The people screaming and dancing on the night of November 4th in jubilation, ecstatic that finally, everything was going to be alright.