After the Future

Corporate Liberalism (Updated)

Jonathan Chait in the New Republic:

There is more at work in the progressive revolt than an irrational attachment to the public plan or an executive distrust of private industry. The bizarre convergence of left-wing and right-wing paranoia echoes the forces that brought down the moderate consensus of the postwar era. The GOP retreat into Palinism represents one half of this collapse. The left’s revolt against health care reform represents the other. What has re-emerged in recent weeks is the spirit of the New Left--distrustful of evolutionary change, compromise between business and labor, and the practical tools of progressive reform. It is the spirit that rejected Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. The New Left rejection of “corporate liberalism” came at what we now regard as the historical apex of American liberalism. At the moment of another historical triumph, liberals are retreating from politics into languor, rage, and other incarnations of anti-politics. One day they may look back upon this time with longing.

Chait sounds so reasonable and grownup, doesn't he? Phrases condemning childish progressives as "New Leftists", "paranoid", as rejecting a spirit of "compromise between business and labor", and "distrustful of evolutionary change". He writes so blithely as if the the postwar New Deal moderate consensus wasn't destroyed by Reaganism. As if, as a result, Labor still has the kind of power that "business" must compromise with. He assumes that the underlying power alignments support things "evolving" rather than devolving for working and middle-income families. Everything is good and getting better according to Jonathan Chait.

Quote of the Day: Drew Westen (Updated)

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.  Read more.

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UPDATE: I just read Dougl's Balloon Juice post about Jane Hamsher's piece in which she points out that the teabaggers and  progressives are in common cause in their opposition to the senate bill.  Seems an innocuous enough point to make because it's true.  It's a point that I've made here as well. But the Balloon Juice commenters don't seem to get it.  I get that these commenters are responding to FDL's arguments to kill the bill, which I don't agree with either.  But I do agree with her that the Teabaggers are more right about this bill than the typical "don't-let-the-perfect-be-the-enemy-of-the-good" Balloon Juice reader wants to admit. 

It's not the bill in itself that is the source of the negative emotional response it's getting from those who oppose it, or those like Bob Kuttner or me who hate it but would support it anyway; it's the corporatism it symbolizes. As I've said before here, if you're ok with that corporatism or have just come to accept that's an unchangeable reality, you're probably in the don't-let-the-perfect-be-the-enemy camp. But if you can't see that these Dem corporate giveaways essentially validates the Teabaggers, then you don't really understand what's going on.

I'll say it again:  We're looking at a future when the Teabaggers are going to be perceived as the only ones telling it as it is, because Dem supporters will be forced to defend an essentially indefensible corporatism that is now defines what the Democrats are all about. The country understands this and is disgusted by these Democrat corporate collaborationists, and that empowers the populist right.  

I don't agree that the bill should be killed, but I do understand the argument that if corporatism is the enemy, this bill, because it so egregiously enhances the corporate agenda, needs to be opposed for that reason alone. Opposition to the bill is not primarily about this particular HCR bill; it's about disgust with and opposition to the underlying structure that produces bad bill like this one.

Where I disagree with Hamsher and other kill-billers is in thinking that opposition moves the ball even one inch against that corporatism, and it will deny people who need the coverage the bill does provide. And it's important that the Republicans not be perceived to win on this one.  They must be pushed further and further into irrelevancy.  This is an intramural fight within the Dem party.

But the Jane Hamsher/Glenn Greenwald/Howard Dean are all purist extremists trope plays right into the corporatist game plan. Maybe these true progressives need to repackage communications strategy, because theirs is essentially and educational task right now.  The good people at Balloon Juice are exactly the ones they need to win over.

Hacker on the Exchanges

The lack of a public option also makes even more imperative tough requirements on insurers to make them live up to their stated commitment to change their business model and slow the spiraling cost of coverage. The most important way to do this is to move away from the Senate bill’s state exchanges and toward a national exchange such as that contained in the House bill. The federal government needs to be directly involved in implementing and enforcing strong national regulations of insurers and creating the new exchange. Otherwise, the effort for reform might fail at the hands of hostile governors.

The federal government is the only entity big enough and powerful enough to ensure a highly consolidated private insurance industry follows the law.  It can and must demand transparency and obedience to the new rules. Insurers must open their books, and subject their rates, administrative costs, and profits to federal review. These new rules must apply to all plans, not just those within the exchange. And states should have authority not only to enforce these rules, but to innovate beyond them as well.

These are not politically unrealistic goals. Most are already embodied in the House bill. In bridging the differences between the two bills, Democratic leaders and the President must insist on a final bill that delivers on these fundamentals.  (Source)

The exchanges, if their administrators are tough, can solve a lot of the problems, but while in general I'm in favor of the states being free to work out their own rules, it's too likely that the insurance companies will game state-administered exchanges, divide-and-conquer style. 

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A word on Ezra Klein: I have tremendous respect for him. He's smart, thoughtful, and a honest thinker. He's not a Beltway hack or courtier.  He's someone who understands this legislation more clearly than almost everybody.  But he's a wonk, which means to me that he's so caught up in the trees that he's lost any sense of the forest. Or more accurately, he accepts that the forest is what it is and that this HCR bill is the kind of thing that this kind of forest produces.

His confusion or alarm at why progressives are so freaked out about the loss of the public option or the insistence on the individual mandate is rooted in his understanding the corporatist logic of the bill, and accepting that Obamacare was in its essence following a corporatist model. Progressives never accepted the corporatist model, but they were willing to tolerate corporatist elements if they could get certain provisions into the bill. 

The public option, even a weak one that didn't affect that many people or bend the cost curve that significantly was important both a symbolically and substantively.  Symbolically because progressives needed to win on one big component that they cared about; substantively because it created a foundation upon which to build.  The Medicare buy-in created a similar kind of foundation.  It was the camel's nose under the tent. 

And that's why corporatists like Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, Snowe, et al. opposed it so vehemently.  They understood that it was the beginning of the end of for-profit-driven health insurance industry, which is the long-term progressive objective.  Health care is a public good, and it's one of those fundamental things that should not be at the mercy of people whose main concern is shareholder returns. It's disgusting that this is the way it works in this country. This is what was at stake in the struggle over the public option/Medicare buy in.  Both progressives and corporatists understood it, even if guys like Ezra Klein don't.

Regarding the individual mandate, I understand the wonkish logic for its necessity, and Klein is one of its most articulate exponents. But if you can't see why the government holding a gun to people's heads forcing them to pay price-gouging, profit-driven corporations is a bad idea, then you really are a wonk lost in the corporataist forest. And I understand that compulsory purchase of health insurance has contributed to lowering costs in some European countries, but health insurance is not profit driven in those countries, and they don't have rabid right wingers teabagging every other weekend about big government taking away Americans' liberties.  As Kuttner said on Moyers Friday night:

Think about it, the difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this. Social insurance everybody pays for it through their taxes, so you don't think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. But an individual mandate is an order to you to go out and buy some product from some private profit-making company, that in the case of a lot of moderate income people, you can't afford to buy. And the shell game here is that the affordable policies are either very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. Or if the coverage is decent, the premiums are unaffordable. And so here's the government doing the bidding of the private industry coercing people to buy profit-making products that maybe they can't afford and they call it health reform.

So when Klein or Obama/Emmanuel say the public option is not essential to reform, and it never was, that's true if you accept the corporatist assumptions of the designers of Obamacare. When Klein and other defenders of the individual mandate say that it's necessary to control costs, that might be true in some abstract economic model, but it's not likely to be true in the American real world, and it's political dynamite for the Right. It makes wonkish sense to those who accept that 'corporatism' is the name of the forest we're operating in;  it's insanity that's obvious to anyone who is appalled that this corporatism is has come to be accepted as centrist and reasonable.

Obama, the Scam Artist? (Updated)

Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it). The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out. Frank Rich

I don't think Obama is either covertly anti-American or spineless. To believe he is spineless is to believe that refused to stand by his progressive principles, which, it's clear now, he doesn't have. It's not lack of presidential principle or resolve that has given us this corporate healthcare giveaway, but his embrace of corporatist political philosophy, which aligns with the corporatism that dominates in the Senate. It's clear this is the bill that Emmanuel/Obama wanted from the beginning. 

I've called him gutless. Was that a fair characterization? How can you call someone gutless who got what he wanted? And having guts is not something that plays well within the Beltway, unless you're a fire-breathing rightwinger.  Howard Dean is what you get in a progressive politician with guts--bluntly honest, what you see is what you get--and that is abhorrent to the Beltway aesthetic--very unpresidential. A progressive with guts by definition is an irrelevancy. It means, if you're president, you cannot govern, because effective Liberal governance has come to mean doing what you're told. Resist, and you will be destroyed. Why would Obama choose to be an irrelevancy?

Democratic Fault Lines: Corporatism vs. Progressivism

. . . in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to "single-payer" advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health care system. The difference was for a long time papered over by the cleverly devised "public option," which was acceptable to many New Democrat types as a way of ensuring robust competition among private insurers, and which became crucial to single-payer advocates who viewed it as a way to gradually introduce a superior, publicly-operated form of health insurance to those not covered by existing public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. (That's why the effort to substitute a Medicare buy-in for the public option, which Joe Lieberman killed this week, received such a strong positive response from many progressives whose ultimate goal is an expansion of Medicare-style coverage to all Americans).

Now that the public option compromise is apparently no longer on the table, and there's no Medicare buy-in to offer single-payer advocates an alternative path to the kind of system they favor, it's hardly surprising that some progressives have gone into open opposition, and are using the kind of outraged and categorical language deployed by Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake yesterday.  As with the financial issue, there's now a tactical alliance between conservative critics of "ObamaCare," who view the regulation and subsidization of private health insurers as "socialism," and progressive critics of the legislation who view the same features as representing "neo-feudalism."

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama's critics to the right say he's engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. Ed Kilgore

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Even if one grants the arguments made by proponents of the health care bill about increased coverage, what the bill does is reinforces and bolsters a radically corrupt and flawed insurance model and and an even more corrupt and destructive model of "governing."  It is a major step forward for the corporatist model, even a new innovation in propping it up.  How one weighs those benefits and costs -- both in the health care debate and with regard to many of Obama's other policies -- depends largely upon how devoted one is to undermining and weakening this corporatist framework (as opposed to exploiting it for political gain and some policy aims). (Glenn Greenwald discussing Ed Kilgore's article)

Both Kilgore's and Greenwald's articles are important and clarifying.  Read them.  They explain why you are either ok with the healthcare bill as it stands now or hate it. It all depends on your attitude toward the corporatist model or not. If you accept that as reality, then you're mostly ok with the bill.  If you resist corporatism and want to do whatever you can to oppose it, then you're mostly not ok with the bill.

What about Kerry's Work on the Exchanges? (Updated)

Not sure.  Ezra Klein criticizes Howard Dean's opposition to the current Senate bill by saying that there will be cost controls through the prudent purchaser limits in the exchanges:

What's so strange about Dean's objection is that the exchanges in the Senate bill (pdf) do act as "prudent purchasers," that is to say, they set limits on the plans that can enter in the exchange to ensure that people are getting good choices. The relevant section begins on page 131 of the Senate bill. "The Secretary shall, by regulation, establish criteria for the certification of health plans as qualified health plans." A couple of pages of relevant criteria follow, including marketing requirements (plans can be disqualified for focusing their marketing in outlets that would bring them uncommonly healthy enrollees), broad provider networks, coverage of options used by low-income folks (community health centers, say), quality measures, quality improvement strategies, consumer ratings, standardized benefit packages, etc.

We need to understand better how this works and what latitude the insurance companies will have to pressure the exchanges to their advantage.  But if this is, in fact, a robust way to insure individuals, especially older people with pre-existing conditions in a way that will enable them to find affordable, good-quality insurance, my fundamental problem with the bill might be resolved. 

But I'm dubious about "robustness."

Healthcare Boondoggle (Updated)

Somebody explain to me why this bill as it stands is worth passing. I haven't read a thing yet that's convinced me. Sure there are a few improvements here and there, but are they worth the price? I recognize that the game isn't over, and substantive improvements can be added--and it starts with dumping the individual mandate--but it just seems that the Democrats have been played and beaten by the insurance industry, and all they are trying to do now is save face and their political asses by getting something, anything passed no matter how bad it is as policy.

If I hear one more person say, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," I don't know what I might do. This bill with the individual mandate is not good; it's bad. It's worse than nothing. It's a huge gift to the insurance companies, and will be a huge burden to many, many Americans. This bill if it is passed with the individual mandate will be in large part what the teabaggers have been saying it is: Big Government forcing many people to do what is not in their best interest.

UPDATE:  Nate Silver , in arguing that the bill should be passed because of what will be lost if it isn't has twenty questions for opponents.  Among them are these on the individual mandate, which is for me the biggest obstacle:

5. Why are some of the same people who are criticizing the bill's lack of cost control also criticizing the inclusion of the individual mandate, which is key to controlling premiums in the individual market?

6. Would concerns about the political downside to the individual mandate in fact substantially be altered if a public plan were included among the choices? Might not the Republican talking point become: "forcing you to buy government-run insurance?"

Silver certainly knows more about this bill than I ever will, but why is the individual mandate necessary for controlling premiums in the individual market?  Because individuals might game the market and wait until they're sick before buying the insurance? Are there other factors? Will the minuscule number of people who do that really push costs up that significantly?

Just asking, because abuse concerns by themselves don'tt seem a good enough reason to insist on coercion.  Some people will game the system. So what? Is the price that will be paid in resentment regarding Big Government forcing people to buy insurance worth it?  And as to point six, the problem is not what the Republican talking points will be, it's what the person shopping for insurance will feel when confronted with bad choices he will be forced to make--buying bad insurance at exorbitant prices from a monopoly.  He won't need the Republicans to tell him that.

This is where wonks like Silver don't get it.

Healthcare Bill, Yes or No?

Obama can say that you're getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there's a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don't get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn't even conservative, free market or otherwise. It's some kind of weird corporatism that's very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. (Digby)

This is shaping up to be a disaster on wheels--to be a bigger boondoggle than the Bush medicare prescription bill. I haven't made my mind up completely because things are still so fluid, but I'm leaning against unless things change or until it becomes clearer to me that the positives outweigh the negatives. I'm not seeing that yet, and I trust Howard Dean more than I trust most of the other gasbags on this issue who say this bill for all its limitations is still a step forward.

The individual mandate is for me the biggest problem, and if that's removed, I might be more supportive. The individual mandate was palatable only if there would be a public option. If the mandate stays in the bill, the bill should be opposed, unless someone can prove that there are mechanisms to prevent the insurance companies from charging whatever premiums they feel like. 

Game Changer?

Except when Republicans are in power, nothing gets done, and what gets done by them is regressive and destructive of the public interest. We've become virtually ungovernable when Democrats are in power.

If there's any hope for the Obama administration, it seems to me, it lies in the expectation of something unexpected--an unplanned-for game changer. That's how desperate our situation has become. Politics as usual is a slow-motion disaster, and unless some x-factor is introduced that wakes us us and steels our will, we are in very deep trouble.

Obama's Nobel Speech (Update)

I'm at a point now when I'm responding to Obama's speeches similarly to the way I responded to Bush's. Obama's might be more interesting to listen to, more eloquent and complex, but ultimately his speeches, like Bush's, are just propaganda.  They are window dressing for a policy driven by a logic that has little or no connection to the logic or rationale argued in the speech. Obama's and Bush's speeches are fundamentally empty; they are designed to distract and deceive. I have no reason to  believe a word of any of it.  Or more precisely, I don't believe that what they say in such speeches has any correlation with the rationale for the policies he seeks to defend. When the premises upon which such speeches are based are proved wrong, new arguments with different premises will be offered rather than to admit the policy was wrong to begin with.

As such, these speeches, no matter how superficially interesting, don't warrant serious scrutiny. Obama's differ in style from Bush's insofar as they are designed to seduce a different electoral constituency. Bush appealed to the jingoist, bully right; Obama appeals to intellectuals who think of themselves as realists, and to Niebuhrian ironists. But the underlying policy is fundamentally the same in either case because directed by the same interests.That policy is pursued no matter who presents a justification for it.

Quote of the Day: Ezra Klein

But though Obama's program is quite liberal, he doesn't seem to care much how it's achieved. A public option would be nice, but if it's not there, then that's fine, too. Full auction of permits is a good idea, but if most get given away to corporations, then that's how it goes. Infrastructure spending is good, but if tax cuts are the price of passage, then tax cuts there shall be. The best description of the administration's ideology probably came from Rahm Emanuel when he said, "The only nonnegotiable principle here is success." (Source)

Better than Bush.  That's all one can really say with conviction about Obama at this point.

On Political Disappointment (Updated)

A point of clarification about my recent posts regarding my disappointment with Barack Obama. I think that a lot of it is not so much disappointment with him as a politician, but that for awhile his candidacy gave me some hope that we might reverse the damage done to us over the last thirty years. It seemed that things were aligning in such a way that a significant shift was a possibility. I didn't think effecting such a shift would be easy; I didn't expect successes across the board, but I did expect at least an effort.  I did not expect this complete cave in, especially when it comes to the Justice Dept., Treasury, and Defense. It's the lack of even a gesture toward an effort that is most disturbing and most disappointing. Not because I have big utopian dreams, but because I fear where we're headed.

If Obama, a guy who at least intellectually gets it, and a two-house Dem majority can't put a halt to the regressive track we're on, then my worst fears are confirmed:  the system at a fundamental level has become incapable of balancing and responding to the broad public interest, regardless which party is in power. I'm ok with a cyclical movement from more or less conservative to more or less liberal, but that's not what's happening to us.  We're moving aggressively to the Right whenever Republicans are in power, and when Democrats are in power, the Right consolidates its gains--there's no real shift leftward toward the center to balance things out. The center keep on being defined further and further to the Right.

So it's not the performance or lack of it from an individual politician. It's the general complacency about the status quo exhibited by him and his appointees, and the cynicism exhibited by by those who just accept the fact that there's nothing more should be expected from mainstream politicians. We are in a serious crisis concerning where power and wealth are aggregated in our country. The balances that were accepted as consensus reality forty years ago no longer exist. For most of us, if we're still employed, it's an abstract issue that we don't feel in an everyday way, so it's easy to shrug our shoulders and think about it as someone else's problem. But it's not.

Quote of the Day: John Coles

. . . a weak public option is worse than no public option at all, and a carelessly constructed public option will just become a dumping ground for high-risk patients that will require billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up. A couple years ago I said that I thought health care reform was inevitable, the only question would be how bad we would make it and how quickly we would bankrupt ourselves with it. I thought at the time I was being too cynical, but the moderates in both parties are proving me wrong. (Source)

This has been my fear all along as well.  We're going to come up with a compromise that will prove the Right's point: that government screws up everything that it touches. The Dems think of what they're doing as reasonable compromise, but the Right understands what they're doing as sabotage. The Right wins if no bill gets passed, and it wins if the Dems compromise essential elements in the bill that make it worth doing.  Amazing what you can do with majorities in both houses and a Dem in the White House, isn't it?

Shaping Reality or Accepting It

But, of course, the Obama campaign, like all presidential campaigns, was built on a series of fictions. . . .

All presidents have to adjust to these realities when they move to the White House. The only surprise with President Obama is how enthusiastically he has made the transition. He’s political, like any president, but he seems to vastly prefer the grays of governing to the simplicities of the campaign.

The election revolved around passionate rallies. The Obama White House revolves around a culture of debate. He leads long, analytic discussions, which bring competing arguments to the fore. He sometimes seems to preside over the arguments like a judge settling a lawsuit.

His policies are often a balance as he tries to accommodate different points of view. He doesn’t generally issue edicts. In matters foreign and domestic, he seems to spend a lot of time coaxing people along. His governing style, in short, is biased toward complexity. . . .

Barring a scientific breakthrough, we can’t merge Obama’s analysis with George Bush’s passion. But we should still be glad that he is governing the way he is.  (David Brooks)

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The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."( Ron Suskind)

Here's the problem with Cheney/Bush's so-called passion vs. Obama's dispassion: Republicans like Reagan and Cheney passionately ram through their regressive agenda, and then a Dem like Obama dispassionately accepts it as the new reality. And then the Beltway courtiers like Brooks praise him for his pragmatism. Right-wingers act, they create a new consensus reality, and so then the definition of a realist becomes accepting this newly created reality.

Rove, or whoever it was, when he said that those in power create their own reality was relatively correct in the assertion, at least when the GOP is in power, and relative to the ability of Dems to shape reality. Republicans change reality when they are in power, and Dems, when they are in power, accept the new consensus reality as it has been shaped by Republicans. GOP leaders, because they value will and action over debate and compromise, energetically advance their agenda when they have the chance, and the Dems accept it as the new reality that cannot be changed in any significant way when they have the chance, and the rest of us are to accept this docilely. 

Obama's Afghanistan Speech

Greenwald sums it up pretty well:

He's convinced his admirers that this is a form of noble "pragmatism" but, far more often, it appears to be a mishmash of political calculations bereft of principle and plagued by numerous internal contradictions that make it impossible to understand, let alone defend.  Everyone gets to read into it whatever they want to see.

Don't have much more to say about it than that.  I've given up any hope that this guy is really going to make a difference.  He's Clinton all over again, and that's better than Bush, but either this has been a colossal waste of an opportunity, or there never was one to begin with.  History will be the judge. But in the meanwhile this has ceased to be a presidency we can care about.  It's simply become the depressingly predictable, paint-by-numbers, more of the same.