Tag: progressives

Robert Reich: Why the New Healthcare Law Should Have Been Based on Medicare (And What Democrats Should Have Learned By Now)

robertreich:

So what do Obama and the Democrats do if the individual mandate in the new health care law gets struck down by the Supreme Court?

Immediately propose what they should have proposed right from the start — universal health care based on Medicare for all, financed by payroll taxes. The public will be behind them, as will the courts.

This is utterly wrong on all counts. It utterly and willfully ignores the year of political sausage making that only managed to barely result in a marginally workable plan that squeaked by under reconciliation rules. The law enacting Reich’s paragraph couldn’t have passed a majority of Democrats at the time, and you’ll recall there were commanding majorities in both houses of Congress then. Aren’t now. And this wouldn’t even see the floor, no matter how passionately Obama or Bernie Sanders or Nancy Pelosi or Jesus Christ Himself argued for it.

What, then, needs to happen if the mandate section of the ACA is struck down? The death spiral needs to happen is what. The ACA without a mandate will destroy the private insurance companies within a decade. But,long before that happens, when the moment arrives that the mega-rich can no longer afford premiums, the party in power on that day, whichever that may be, will be forced to enact Medicare for all. Immediately. Not because they want to, but because it will be the only way forward. And that is the one and only way it ever gets passed. Not through rousing speeches or acting tough or with anything less than a 70-80 seat majority in the Senate and a few hundred in the House coupled to a far more progressive Democratic President than is currently serving.

And until the moment that we as citizens, they the politicians, they the DCCC (and like groups that run the party, its messaging, goals, and determine its candidates), and especially they in the form of the broader media internalize this and begin to act on it accordingly, we and they will fail. Period.

Robert Reich: Why the New Healthcare Law Should Have Been Based on Medicare (And What Democrats Should Have Learned By Now)

In that spirit, let me end by saying I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face, and I look forward to periodic conversations with all of you in the months and years to come. I trust that you will continue to let me and other Democrats know when you believe we are screwing up. And I, in turn, will always try and show you the respect and candor one owes his friends and allies.

Barack Obama sounding oh so 2005 on the Great Orange Devil, and apparently Gibbs would agree: that was all a bunch of meaningless horseshit aimed primarily at the center-right that is so desperately underserved by American “politics.”
Abandon those that put you there and then blame them when you’re not there anymore. That’s change we can believe in, all right.

Center-right radical socialism

“ My fellow Americans, in the past weeks we have witnessed a string of avoidable tragedies caused by the excesses of corporations and their executives. Millions of innocent people have suffered economic losses and dozens have lost their lives. The heedless rapacity of BP will cause suffering to the fishing industry, damage to the Gulf’s fragile ecology and new economic losses to a region that is only beginning to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“The mining disaster is another reason why we cannot rely on corporations to act in the public interest. Unless government vigorously policies mine safety, more miners will lose their lives, more wives will lose husbands and more children will lose fathers. But better enforcement of oil and coal safety will never solve the entire problem. We as a nation must do what BP cynically professed it was doing. We must move beyond petroleum and beyond carbon.

"And the mother of all economic catastrophes, the financial collapse, is further proof that markets must not be left to their own devices. We need the toughest possible regulation of Wall Street so that the rest of the economy can recover.

—Robert Kuttner, saying what Obama won’t.
Kuttner goes on:

Gentle reader, presidents on occasion have actually made speeches like this. Roosevelt did. Lyndon Johnson did during the civil rights era. You could look it up. They used events to move public opinion. They built popular support for progressive interventions.

To which I add: yep.

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

Paul Krugman