Image by Admit One
Yes, it’s another of my tiresome “I told you so, next time listen” posts. In January and April I warned that Republicans could use their skill at being in the opposition and Obama’s manifest failings could lead to a Republican rebound in 2010 and 2012. His failings were clearly visible back then and indeed in the primary campaign. He didn’t turn into a compromising milquetoast when he got to the White House, he was always one. He didn’t turn into a conservative Democrat in the White House, he was always one. Likewise, we knew the Repubicans weren’t going to play ball with Obama’s delusional ideas of bipartisanship and the stimulus package told us he wasn’t interesting in passing effective policy.
And, of course, the mockery ensued. The Republicans, I was told, were such a joke that Obama and the Democrats couldn’t possibly lose, and as for Obama, well, he was a genius with brilliant legislative strategies a dullard like myself couldn’t understand.
Yeah… I found the kool-aid drinkers sad when they drank Bush’s kool-aid, and I find them pathetic now that they’re drinking Obama’s. I understand that people need to feel some hope in Obama, because if he screws up, well, it’s Americans who get screwed. We all want to believe things will get better, but one of the surest ways to not have them get better is to live in some sort of fantasyland. Obama was very clear even in the primaries that he was a compromiser who believed that with a dose of his charisma the Republican would melt and join Democrats in linking hands and singing kumbaya around the bonfire. All could be solved if reasonable people got together and just reasoned together.
He later made his fundamental agreement with basic Bush principles of civil rights by voting for warrantless wiretapping after promising to vote against it, then made clear that he’d serve financial interests before ordinary Americans when he forced through TARP.
And yet people believed he was going to be some sort of progressive president? Granted, even I have been shocked at just how much his administration has violated progressive and liberal principles, but I was only surprised in degree, not kind, because I knew he didn’t believe in them. This isn’t because I’m brilliant, I’m not. It’s because I looked at the evidence and didn’t let “hope” and soaring rhetoric distract me from his actions and, to a large extent, what he was actually saying. Certainly he lied about some things, but he was very honest about his fundamental governing philosophy. Likewise, who his key advisers were, the fact that he had the right-most policy prescriptions of the late Democratic primary field, the way he fetishized tax cuts and so on, told anyone who was listening without “hope” clogging their ears who he was.
This is why I repeatedly advised people to give money to and work for liberal Congressional candidates rather than Obama. It was at that level that the left could make a real difference, not at the Presidential level where such donations were drops in an ocean and plenty of volunteers were already available.
America’s problems are not going to get solved before a complete crash out (something which I believe is now more than even odds within the next 20 years) if Americans, and especially progressives and liberals, keep letting themselves be fooled.
The truth won’t make you happy, nor will it set you free, but absent the truth you’re only another sucker who is helping the very people who oppress you.
[See Peter Daou on the possibility of 2010 and 2012 being loss years.]
Shorter Sebelius: Welcome to a regressive tax which will rise faster than wages or inflation
As Heinlein once said, I laugh because otherwise I’d cry (and scream, and pound my head against the wall):
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the White House would be open to co-ops instead of a government-run public option, a sign Democrats want a compromise so they can declare a victory on the must-win showdown.(TL)
Ok, so let’s say they ditch it and include an individual mandate, meaning you are forced to buy insurance from private insurers or co-ops (which won’t be able to contain costs). What is that?
It is a regressive tax. Given the likely pathetic subsidies it will hit the working and middle classes hardest as it will be a higher proportion of their income than for the rich. Since health care costs will not be properly contained, they will rise faster than pay will (they have for decades now). So every year you will be forced to spend more of your money than the year before and will have less money left over.
A regressive tax which rises faster than pay rises.
This is forced increased spending on domestic financial services, which is what insurance is. I guess that’s Obama’s economic plan as well as his health care plan. And bonus, since there’ll be no denials and no recessions, you won’t be able to get out of it in any fashion, except death.
Death and taxes, the first gets you out of the second. And a health care mandate without effective cost controls is an ever growing tax till you die.
I’m off to Pittsburgh for Netroots Nation tomorrow (Thursday) morning. I’m a panelist in one session, Transformation or Shock, Saturday from 3:00 to 4:15, and I’ll probably be at the Open Left caucus on Friday from 4:30 to 5:45. If you’re going to be at the conference, hope to see you at one of those two events, or if you see me wandering around, feel free to come up and say hello.
Congress helps their friend get healthcare while China announces universal healthcare
Good to see Congress is concerned about someone getting the care he needs:
Members of Congress are rallying around one of their own, collecting donations to help former Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.) as he battles Parkinson’s Disease.
Isn’t that nice? Perhaps their efforts might be better invested in passing legislation that takes care of all Americans, not just Americans they know personally.
China announced that it intended to spend $123 billion by 2011 to establish universal health care for the country’s 1.3 billion people.
I guess universal health care isn’t just socialistic, it’s communistic, since the Communist Party is willing to give it to their people before the US government will pass it for Americans.
China has a health care problem, so China is going to work towards solving it. The US has a healthcare problem, so it is going to force Americans to spend thousands of dollars to buy insurance from insurance companies who are proven to do an awful job instead of revampting the system to cut out the insurance industry and other bad actors, thus saving 5% of GDP.
This is why China is a rising country, for all its problems, and the US is a country in decline. China’s elites actually make serious attempts to fix problems which need to be fixed. America’s elites just try and make sure the gravy train isn’t upset for anyone who’s inside the franchise.
Seriously, “grandma’s going to be killed by Obama’s healthcare plan” (whatever his plan is, even I don’t know) wouldn’t work on “we’re just going to give medicare to everyone”.
Just sayin’.
The whole “you can’t sell single payer” is turning out to be, well, rather questionable. Because the way things are going it’s fairly clear you can’t sell some godawful hodgepodge either and all the screaming about “you’re going to take away my Medicare” indicates that a lot of the people who oppose Obamacare, love Medicare.
When you’re trying to explain something, you do so by metaphor in almost all cases. Everyone knows what Medicare is. The majority of people with Medicare are happy with it and even people without Medicare know people (usually their parents or grandparents) who have it, and whom it’s working for.
Ruling out “single payer” from the very start was an act of mind-bending incompetence on the level of disbanding Iraq’s army during the occupation of Iraq. From a policy point of view “Medicare for all” provides massive savings, and we know it works because the equivalent policies have worked for every other nation in the world who ever implemented then. From a sales point of view it’s much harder to demonize Medicare and much easier to explain it. From a negotiation point of view pre-compromising is so stupid that anyone who has spent 5 minutes in a third world bazaar or taken even a single negotiating class knows better.
The current health reform “bills” are turning into a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Scrap them, introduce Medicare for all, target Senators who won’t vote for it with bone-crushing ads which ask why they want 22,000 American to die every year who could be saved for less money than the Iraq war cost; explain with nice simple pictures how much money they receive from the insurance industry and note that they are willing to let Americans die in exchange for blood money from the medical industry.
I know it’s difficult for Democrats to play hardball since they’d have to grow a spine, but perhaps, just perhaps, it’s worth it to save lives, end 70% of all bankruptcies and make sure people who are sick get the care they need?
(Oh, and to save Obama’s presidency. )
I’m leaving tomorrow for a 5 day trip to Victoria to see my father and help with some of his affairs. Internet access will be intermittent at best, so posting is unlikely. After that I’m back for a few days, then off to Netroots Nation in Pittsburgh from Thursday, leaving fairly early Sunday. If you’re in either place during my stay, and would like to grab a coffee or some such, drop me a line.
A compilation of major polling resources shows that republicans have nearly closed the gap with democrats in a generic congressional vote. This is a poll where voters are asked, without naming any specific names, if they are likely to republicans or democrats in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections. Democrats now lead by only 1.5% after the gap had been well into double digits at the time President Obama took office.
The village consensus on this is going to be that if only Democrats had been more bipartisan that the numbers would be better. Debunking such nonsense is a waste of my time and your brain cells. There are two main reasons why these numbers are where they are:
Republicans understand opposition politics: when you’re in the opposition, you don’t smile bipartisanly, you gnaw at the ankles of the ruling party. Nothing they do is right, everything they do is wrong. You talk about how their policies are going to fail, so that if they do, you are the opposition (Democrats did not understand this when in opposition).
Continuation of ineffective Bush policies. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in too many cases Obama and the new Congress are pursuing Bush lite policies.
- Escalate in Afghanistan
- Spend more money on the military
- Get out of Iraq around about the time Bush wanted to anyway
- Continue the Bush/Paulson financial policies
- A stimulus bill which was 40% tax cuts (granted, not tax cuts for the rich, but still tax cuts)
Americans voted for Democrats because they were sick of Bush and Bush era policies. And here Congress is repeatedly voting for Bush era policies. Congressional numbers are melting down faster than presidential ones because people know that Obama’s their only hope. It may not be much of a hope, but if he can’t fix things, they’ve got to wait most of 4 years for a chance at someone who does.
Proper governance liberal style works like this. Pass effective bills even if it requires not being bipartisan. When those effective bills create good effects (a good economy, everyone having good health care) reap the benefits of voters being happy with good jobs and not going bankrupt over health care.
Congress’s stimulus bill was crap. Congress’s cap and trade bill is crap. Every indication is that the health care bill is likely to be… crap.
Why would people be happy with this?
It’s the economy stupid. By choosing to bail out financial companies instead of the real economy Obama and Congress cast their die. It has not lead to a recovery in the real economy, and by the time the next recession happens my prediction and that of many others is that jobs will still not have recovered to pre-recession levels. This is not something unknown to the Obama administration, they are well aware of it. Their hopes of winning the next election are based on two things: Republican disarray, and the financial sector continuing to give much more money to Democrats. Neither is a sure thing.
Good policy creates a country in which people are doing better than in the past. People who feel they are doing better vote for the incumbent more than not. Congress and Obama seem to have forgotten this basic electoral reality. The will reap as they have sowed.
Let’s spell this out. You can’t have health care reform which increases the deficit because the borrowed money was all given away to corporations and rich people. The 15 trillion of bailouts are the case in point, but the lousy Cap and Trade bill is also to blame. If it was auctioning all of the permits instead of 15% that would have raised 582 billion dollars more than the current bill.
Spending money is a matter of priorities. Congress and Obama’s first priority is not health care, if it was, they’d be willing to spend money on it. They aren’t, so it isn’t. Period.
If find this especially odd given that “protecting Americans”, aka “saving American lives” is supposedly the job #1 in Washington. 22,000 Americans die every year due to not having health care and many more due to inadequate care,, but apparently “saving American lives” is only job #1 when it means you get to spend money on the military, kill foreigners and put American troops in body bags; or when it means you get spy on Americans and torture people.
Al-Q’aeda would need to commit 11 9/11’s a year to kill as many Americans as die due to not having health care.
So, what’s more important than American lives, as measured by willingness to actually add to the deficit for it?
- Killing Iraqis
- Tax Cuts
- Killing Afghanis
- Sending American soldiers to die in foreign countries to “save American lives”
- Bailing out large corporations like Citigroup, AIG and Goldman Sachs
- Giving money to the IMF to bail out other countries banking systems
What else is more important than saving American lives? Add to the list in comments.
In response to my post on American politicians actually being pretty cheap to bribe compared to how much money the acts they past give those who pay them, DavidN asked:
Since politicians can be bought so cheaply, why is it only the big corporations that play the game? Why don’t progressive groups, say, tell America that, if every American were to chip in $1, they could have more bargaining power than all of the big corporations? ($300 million > $283 million)
I know the big unions do it too, but why not more? Why are all the progressive fundraising outlets seemingly focused on giving money to politicians’ election campaings with few, if any, strings attached?
Then, in a double whammy, Lord Mike said:
Act Blue DESPERATELY need s lobbying arm especially since so many of our candidates are turning their backs on us!
Y’know, both of these things are true. Progressives need an effective lobbying arm, and to the best of my knowledge, other than perhaps MoveOn and unions (by which I mostly mean SEIU), we don’t have one. And while I love my union friends, they have their own priorities, which while they often match up with progressives, don’t always. As for MoveOn, well, let’s say that they can’t do everything. The whip effort from FDL, Kos and others on healthcare which is going on now is doing yeoman work, but I’m sure they’ll agree that more money and full time lobbyists would make a huge difference.
So I’m genuinely throwing this out there. I don’t know why we don’t have really effective fund-raising which is sufficient to do effective lobbying.
Why?
