Stopping mandates w/o public option will be our first victory

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

This appears to be the delicate stage of negotiations for a health care bill.  As War On Error has shown so thoroughly today, the House bill as stands is a pure giveaway, because the “public option” it offers is only available to the self-employed, and then only by 2013, by which time the insurers will have (maybe) a bit firmer control of the Federal government than they do today.

We should understand, then, that we will have to be in this for the sake of building a historic bloc, a larger social movement with a political aim.  If we can do that, we can say that it’s not over when Congress decides to vote, and we will not have to wait another sixteen years to get what we want.  Voting down all sellout bills will, in this light, be our first victory as a historic-bloc-in-formation.  It is still early in the game — it is not “now or never.”

(Crossposted at Orange)

At this point, we can see a way forward: remind Congress, repeatedly and consistently, that we want a public option, and that if there is no public option Blue Dogs will be primaried.

Then we will need cultural organizations in place in the states where there are Blue Dogs in office, to look after those who are left out by our predatory health insurance system, to advocate for them, and for the American people.

We will, in short, need a historic bloc, and our historic bloc should start with people’s unmet needs to form broad popular coalitions ultimately aiming at:

1) A single-payer health care system for affordable health care for all

2) Humane educational systems which empower children, rather than “fitting them” to the cruel world which awaits

3) Environmental policy which leads people to a rediscovery of, and a new interrelationship with, the natural world

4) Economic policy which empowers everyone to look after their own basic needs

Those of you who wish to find out what a historic bloc is can read, in more detail, my diary linked above on Gramsci.  In essence, we don’t just do politics — but, rather, extend our efforts to education, institutional linkages, and connections to power, our type of power.

Now, of course, there are a bunch of rather sick individuals out there who are given an undue “voice” (by the mass media) in the national debates over whatever issue you care to name.  Why anyone on network TV thinks that Glenn Beck is worth a second of their time is beyond me.  At any rate, what is really sick about that phenomenon is not Glenn Beck per se, but rather that voices such as his are granted so much credibility.

This is the sort of thing that should give us a bigger picture of the challenges we face.  But a far greater challenge than Glenn Beck is the “Washington Consensus” by which American is currently ruled — i.e. neoliberalism.  The history of neoliberalism that I presented in this diary had this tidbit:

1988: The nomination of Michael Dukakis means that, for the first time, both major US political parties are running Presidential candidates on neoliberal platforms.  For the next twenty years, the main ambition of the Democratic Party becomes the election of a President running on a neoliberal platform, an ambition which runs from Clinton to Gore to Kerry to Obama.  The Democratic Leadership Council is said to oversee this process.

So for the past twenty (really more like thirty) years, national policy has been oriented toward neoliberal aims, while the Democrats and the Republicans slug it out on cultural issues.  What this means, practically, is that the economy has been geared to the generation of corporate profit above all else, against the threat of economic decline.  

This is indeed what Harry Shutt tells us in his books: when there is too much capital, economic decline is a perpetual threat to profits, and so capital re-engineers government to provide it with an eternal gravy train.

The reality of this surplus of capital and this perpetual threat to profits is provided in a short comment by noofsh on nyceve’s diary of today:

No way that these companies can continue escalating the price of their policies at 10% per year not with American wages stagnating and growing about 1% per year.

As SingleVoter says in response:

Just remember though that the system is becoming unsustainable without government mandated purchase.

So here we are — with Congress trying to save the capitalist health insurance system through mandates, against the fact that nobody has the money to buy their pricey, low-grade product.  When you can’t make the sale, require the buyer to buy!  This, from the get-go, was what “reform” was about.

It is only because the progressives stepped into this debate and said “what about a public option?” that the proceedings had any teeth at all.  Of course, here in recess, what you are seeing from Congress is a public option by 2013, available to maybe 10% of the American public.

Now, I am hearing from certain quarters that the current health care bill is a sort of “now or never” — that if we don’t succeed with this one, we’ll never succeed.

Do they think we can undo thirty years of neoliberal rule in nine months of Obama?

Do they think we can pass an agenda with a historic bloc that is not (yet) ours?

By my reckoning, we (those of us on the outside: “progressives” as well as “anticapitalists”) have only just begun to reassume the political offensive, after thirty years of relative dormancy.  This is our FIRST big test — can we stop the health insurance predators from imposing mandates on everyone, with no public option available to all on day one of the mandates?

*****

I’m reading complaints that the Blue Dogs cannot be primaried because their states are too “conservative.”

Are the voters in the red states too “conservative” to hate the insurance mandate they’ve been handed, but can’t pay?

Are the voters in the red states too “conservative” to recognize that mandates will still leave about half of the uninsured without health care, and with an extra head tax they have to pay to fatten insurance company coffers?

If we don’t win the whole health care package this time around, there is another path, then: primary the Blue Dogs, organize the public both culturally as well as politically, and win for health care next time.  Next time does not need to be twenty years from now, nor even more than two or three.

If we really are to form a new historic bloc, everyone will have to step into positions of leadership.  I’ve discussed forming a think-tank with OPOL; it would either be that or a new university, one which would train activists to go out and make a difference.  At any rate, it seems to me that, now that the air is thick with activism, it is an especially good time to prepare the organizational nests and recruit members to the various causes.  No?

The health care initiative at the beginning of Clinton’s administration was foreclosed when the “Contract With America” gang took power at the end of ’94.  We can avoid a repeat of that outcome with careful planning.

*****

I am also reading fears that Obama inaction on health care (the economy etc.) will lead to some sort of horrendous Republican victory.

As Kos said after the election, the only place where the Republicans are picking up any steam is in Appalachia.  Has that fundamentally changed, even though the Democrats are losing points in recent polls?  No.

Thus fewer people than ever are drinking the Republican Kool-Aid.  The health-care issue can then be the opening salvo in a campaign to create a new historic bloc, one centered around the replacement of neoliberalism with humane governance.  We’ve only just begun to wrest government away from the vultures.  Let’s keep fighting even after Congress makes its decision, whatever that may be.