The Obamacare Disaster

The Poison of Party Loyalty
by NORMAN SOLOMON

"Medicare for All" would have been an easy concept to sell and implement. It was not for lack of ideas. It was simply corruption to the deepest core, and rank ineptitude even as prostitutes.

“Medicare for All” would have been an easy concept to sell and implement. The current fiasco was not for lack of ideas. It was simply corruption to the deepest core, and rank ineptitude even as thinly-veiled corporate prostitutes.

Four years ago, countless Democratic leaders and allies pushed for passage of Barack Obama’s complex healthcare act while arguing that his entire presidency was at stake. The party hierarchy whipped the Congressional Progressive Caucus into line, while MoveOn and other loyal groups stayed in step along with many liberal pundits.

Lauding the president’s healthcare plan for its structure of “regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in July 2009 that the administration’s fate hung in the balance: “Knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.” Such warnings were habitual until Obamacare became law eight months later.

Meanwhile, some progressives were pointing out that — contrary to the right-wing fantasy of a “government takeover of healthcare” — Obama’s Affordable Care Act actually further enthroned for-profit insurance firms atop the system. As I wrote at the time, “The continued dominance of the insurance industry is the key subtext of the healthcare battle that has been raging in Washington. But that dominance is routinely left out of the news media’s laser-beam concentration on whether a monumental healthcare law will emerge to save Obama’s presidency.”

[pullquote]As usual, the legendary cowardice and corruption of liberal centrists—personified by Obama and his DNC accomplices, plus countless Democrat loyalists and liberal pundits— has doomed another attempt at rescuing Americans from the clutches of private insurers and their deformed priority calculus. If Obama and the Democrats had really fought for single payer, they’d have won, and none of this nonsense would be happening. For in healthcare simplicity is the natural companion of truth.—Eds.[/pullquote]

Today, in terms of healthcare policy, the merits and downsides of Obamacare deserve progressive debate. But at this point there’s no doubt it’s a disaster in political terms — igniting the Mad Hatter Tea Party’s phony populism, heightening prospects for major right-wing electoral gains next year and propagating the rancid notion that the government should stay out of healthcare.

That ominous takeaway notion was flagged days ago on the PBS NewsHour by commentator Mark Shields, who worried aloud that “this is beyond the Obama administration. If this goes down, if … the Affordable Care Act is deemed a failure, this is the end — I really mean it — of liberal government, in the sense of any sense that government as an instrument of social justice, an engine of economic progress… Time and again, social programs have made the difference in this country. The public confidence in that will be so depleted, so diminished, that I really think the change — the equation of American politics changes.”

At this pivotal, historic, teachable moment, progressives should not leave the messaging battle about the ACA to right wingers and Obama loyalists. While critiquing the law for its entanglement with the profit-voracious insurance industry, we should fight for quality healthcare for everyone — definitely including the people who live in states where right-wing officials are blocking expansion of Medicaid coverage. (In a recent Nation article, historian Rick Perlstein cited a grim example of a chronic mentality: “the policy wizards in the Obama White House build a Rube Goldberg healthcare law that relies on states to expand Medicaid and create healthcare exchanges, and then are utterly blindsided when red-state legislatures and governors decline.”) We should challenge all efforts to deny the human right of healthcare.

What we should not be doing is what MoveOn.org is now doing — proclaiming that the Obamacare law is just fine. In a November 14 email blast, subject-lined “Obamacare in serious trouble,” MoveOn acknowledged that the rollout “has been badly botched” but flatly declared: “Obviously, the law itself is still really good.”

Huh?

The problems with Obamacare involve far more than simply bad website coding. They’re bound up in the enormous complexity of the law’s design, wrapped around a huge corporate steeplechase for maximizing profits. As a Maine physician, Philip Caper, wrote this fall, the ACA “is far too complicated and therefore too expensive to manage, full of holes, will be applied unevenly and unfairly, be full of unintended consequences, and be easily exploited by those looking to make a quick buck.” The ACA is so complicated because it has been so relentlessly written for the benefit of — and largely written by — insurance companies.

Along the way, the “individual mandate” cornerstone of the ACA — required by government yet actually enriching the private insurance industry — is a tremendous political boost to demagogic GOP leaders. I’m not engaging in hindsight here. Like many others, I saw this coming before the ACA became law, writing in March 2010: “On a political level, the mandate provision is a massive gift to the Republican Party, all set to keep on giving to the right wing for many years. With a highly intrusive requirement that personal funds and government subsidies be paid to private corporations, the law would further empower right-wing populists who want to pose as foes of government ‘elites’ bent on enriching Wall Street.”

Obamacare is a mess largely because it builds a revamped healthcare system around the retrenched and extended power of insurance companies — setting back prospects for real healthcare reform for a decade or more. Egged on by corporate media and corporate politicians, much of the public will blame higher premiums on government intervention and not on the greedy insurance companies which, along with Big Pharma, helped write the law in the Obama White House and on Capitol Hill.

It should now be painfully obvious that Obamacare’s little helpers, dutifully reciting White House talking points in 2009 and early 2010, were helping right-wing bogus populism to gather steam. Claiming that the Obama presidency would sink without signing into law its “landmark” healthcare bill, many a progressive worked to throw the president a rope; while ostensibly attached to a political life preserver, the rope was actually fastened to a huge deadweight anvil.

In the process, the political choreography included a chorus of statements by Congressional Progressive Caucus members before ultimate passage of the Affordable Care Act. Having previously removed the words “single payer” and “Medicare for all” from their oratorical vocabulary while retaining the laudatory language — and after later excising the words “public option” in a similar way — those legislators still pretended that passage of the ACA would be an unalloyed positive triumph. Like the president, they resolutely oversold Obamacare and made believe it would bring about an excellent healthcare system.

With such disingenuous sales pitches four years ago, President Obama and his Democratic acolytes did a lot to create the current political mess engulfing Obamacare — exaggerating its virtues while pulling out the stops to normalize denial about its real drawbacks. That was a bad approach in 2009. It remains a bad approach today.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information about the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

Yes, it was a Republican idea: The Heritage Foundation’s Obamacare blueprint

Like a broken clock that tells the right time twice a day, the wingnuts have had a field day with Obamacare. The law truly stinks.

by John Aravosis, Americablog.com

Republicans are on a renewed kick to try to repeal, or at least delay (in the hopes of killing), the “individual mandate” that’s included in the President’s health care reform law, aka the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

The irony, of course, is that it was Republicans, via their premiere think tank, the Heritage Foundation, who came up with the idea in the first place.

As you know, the “individual mandate” requires that every American buy health insurance, if they don’t have it through their work, or pay a penalty.

The individual mandate really is one of the key underpinnings of Obamacare, because without it there’s concern that everyone’s policies might be too expensive. Here’s more on the mandate from Kaiser Health News:

The health law was designed to extend insurance to nearly all people, including those who have medical conditions that require expensive care and are often denied coverage today. But to pay for their care, insurance companies need to have a large enrollment of consumers, especially young and healthy people who use fewer services. The mandate was adopted to guarantee a broad base.

Topher Spiro, the vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning nonprofit that supports the law, says it will be more effective with the mandate than without it. “This individual mandate is to keep premiums low for everyone,” he said, noting that “if you don’t have incentives for everyone to sign up for coverage then only the sick people will enroll which will drive up premiums.”

But others suggest the mandate won’t be effective because the penalties are set so much lower than the cost of coverage.

As you also know, the Republicans shut down the entire federal government, and were on the verge of forcing the United States to default on its debt, likely sending the world into a Depression, in order to force the outright repeal of Obamacare, its defunding, or at the very least a delay in the individual mandate.

Stuart Butler in a publication for the very conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989. And what group took the lead in pushing for the federal government shutdown in order to stop Obamacare? The Heritage Foundation’s political arm, Heritage Action.

Here’s the cover of Heritage’s 1989 publication:

And in a section called “The Heritage Plan,” Butler sets the premise for a form of guaranteed universal health care that would be anathema to the far-right Tea Party that controls the Republican party today:

A few pages down into the “Heritage Plan,” Butler proposes the individual mandate:

So, the next time you hear a Republican talk about how the individual mandate simply must be stopped, or at least delayed. Ask them why they’re so opposed to a plan that they came up with in the first place?

John Aravosis
Follow me on Twitter: @aravosis | @americablog | @americabloggay | Facebook | Google+. Editor of AMERICAblog, JD/MSFS from Georgetown, worked in US Senate, World Bank, Children’s Defense Fund, stringer for the Economist. Frequent TV pundit: O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, World News Tonight, Nightline & Reliable Sources. Bio,article archive.

Beware: Huge Media Companies Are Selling Corporate Ideology as the ‘New American Center’

By RJ Eskow

Neil Newhouse, the invisible gnomes who do the bidding for the powers that be.

Neil Newhouse, one of the invisible gnomes who do the bidding for the powers that be.

“IT’S OFFICIAL,” the box on my screen announced in capital letters. “YOU’RE ONE OF THE BLEEDING HEARTS.”

To examine the Esquire/NBC News “New American Center” is to enter a Beltway consultants’ dreamscape, a perceptual interspace where real Americans’ opinions dissolve and are replaced by a chimerical creature whose secret language is only understood by certain insider politicians, corporations and consultants.That creature’s name is “The Center.”

The survey commissioned by these two news organizations tells us very little about American public opinion. But it tells us a great deal about the insular worlds in which certain journalists and consultants reside.

Pop Quiz

Although there were some interesting nuggets of data in the study, overall it was an ill-conceived venture whose main purpose seemed to be reinforcing a prevailing article of faith inside the Beltway: that there is an undiscovered “center” to American politics, and that finding it will spell success for savvy corporations, candidates and consultants.

I tried to review the poll’s methodology with an open mind. But we’re not told how the study identified the “American Center,” and its architects at the Benenson Strategy Group failed to respond to requests for information.

That organization’s founder, Joel Benenson, became something of a polling legend when he defied the hackneyed pseudo-wisdom of his former mentor Mark Penn and helped guide Barack Obama to an upset victory over Penn’s client in the 2008 primaries. It’s unfortunate, then, that this particular study is packed with the kind of zingy and vacant language for which Penn became notorious. It labels Americans on a left/right axis of Bleeding Hearts, Gospel Left, Minivan Mods, MBA Middle, Pickup Populists, #whateverman, Righteous Right, and Talk Radio Heads.

By comparison, Penn’s “soccer mom” lingo seems almost profound.

Reviewing the raw data only added to the confusion. Why, for example, did many of the raw-data entries list the leftmost category as “Young Libs” rather than “Bleeding Hearts”? We don’t know—and they’re not saying.

The Unhidden Persuaders

Esquire and NBC News don’t report this study so much as hype it. Disturbingly, these journalists use the same marketing language employed by the consultants who wrote the report. Esquire tells its readers [3] that the “New American Center” is “passionate, persuadable, and very real.” NBC New [4]s informs visitors to its website that “the center is real, passionate and persuadable.” (The NBC News piece carries the byline of a “senior staff writer.” The Esquire piece is credited to “The Editors.”)

Meanwhile, over at the Benenson Strategy Group website, project leader Daniel Franklin is quoted as saying that “the Center is dynamic and persuadable”—there’s that word again—“creating an opportunity for politicians and businesses alike to reevaluate how they communicate and connect with the American public.” That sounds like a pitch for corporate clients. Benenson’s past and present clients include Toyota, major drug companies, Shell Oil, and Verizon.

Esquire, in particular, crosses the line into naked huckstering for both this survey and centrist ideology. All the “centrist” buzzwords and catchphrases are there: We’re told we must get past the “meaningless labels,” transcend our obsolete “culture war,” conquer the “extreme partisanship of Washington” (no particular party’s held responsible for that), and reconnect with “the actual national mood and values.”

The editors sneer at what they call the “hoary conventional wisdom” that “we as a people are now hopelessly polarized in our culture, our values, and our politics”—an odd stance when promoting a study which slices the public into separate (and rather clichéd) social divisions.

That, too, comes straight from the corporate-centrism playbook: before idealizing your mythical “center,” you must first compartmentalize and trivialize people of both the left and the right. Esquire even offers a “Warren/Cruz scale,” as if popular Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose opinions on banking regulation and economic justice poll well with the general public, were somehow comparable to the far-right senator from Texas whose government shutdown crusade has caused a disastrous plunge in his party’s popularity. That isn’t social science or journalism, it’s propaganda.

The sense of marketing hype and political spin is only heightened by the fact we’re told that the Center is allegedly “persuadable,” but is also amajority. That’s right: we’re told that the “New American Center” constitutes 51% of the electorate. That sounds like a corporate-funded centrist’s dream—and a consultant’s meal ticket.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Sometimes the trick is in what you don’t ask.

We’re told that “a majority of those in the center agree with a mix of Republican and Democratic ideas.” But this survey’s respondents were only asked about Republican and Democratic ideas. Pollsters excluded a number of popular, nonpartisan ideas not yet embraced by either party.

A case in point: a recent poll from Lake Research reaffirmed numerous previous studies which found that a vast majority of Americans oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The numbers were overwhelming: 82% of Republicans. 83% of Democrats. 78% of independents. Another survey by the National Academy of Social Insurance found that strong majorities of Americans, across the political spectrum want Social Security benefits increased, and would accept an increase in payroll taxes for themselves as well as the wealthy to pay for it.

But that idea isn’t supported by “centrist” leaders in either party right now, perhaps because it might require higher rates of taxation for the wealthy. Its absence from the public debate is a rebuke to our democratic process, and a sign of big-money corruption.

In short, there’s no basis for claiming that voters want the kind of “Republican/Democratic” hybrid the survey is pushing. The survey attempts to spin dissatisfaction with both parties into a yearning for a hybrid of both parties. Beltway insiders have made that leap of faith before, to disastrous effect. Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Democratic hedge funder Erskine Bowles were paired up to pitch budget cuts to the American people. But their proposal only won the support of a whopping 6% of the electorate when it was introduced. Other such “ecumenical” attempts met with similar failure.

Esquire’s War

The absence of entitlement questions is especially surprising considering Esquire’s long record of concern-trolling on the subject. First there was its hokey “Esquire Deficit Commission,” which the magazine put together under centrist MSNBC Democrat Lawrence O’Donnell. Then there was the magazine’s widely discredited claim to have discovered “the real war on American youth.” (We reviewed both here [5].)

Esquire’s long-standing intergenerational hostility was evident in 2007, when consultant Heather Smith wrote in the magazine [6] about her experience getting out the youth vote. Smith wrote that young voters “want to see campaigns and politicians or government address … jobs and the economy, health care, affording college, economic issues —things that Washington thinks of as the concerns of the middle-aged middle class.”

That’s a useful insight into the interests and goals which Americans share across the generations. But this was the subheading chosen byEsquire’s editors: “Stop pandering to the geezers and stop ignoring young voters.”

Yet, for all its expressed concern about rapacious geezers, Esquire didn’t request a single question about Social Security. Maybe that’s becauseEsquire already knows what it thinks.

And maybe that’s why Esquire, in particular, went so far over the top in pushing style “centrism”—a push which begins with the editors’ first sentence and its sneering reference to Jim Hightower as “the legendary hellion populist out of Texas,” adding, in parentheses, “yes, such a beast once roamed the earth.”

In fact, the economic populism represented by Hightower (who is very much alive) can be partially found in a cohort the Esquire study labels “Pickup Populists.” But it’s de rigueur when giving a “centrist” pitch to contemptuously dismiss all that might be considered “left.”

Esquire’s editors overhyped the study, too, making claims even the consultants don’t dare to assert. They even claim that studying their conception of the “Center” provide previously unseen insights about public opinion, adding that this is “precisely what we mean when we talk about the Center: what most Americans actually believe.”

What most Americans actually believe.

That’s quite a claim. And it’s presumably purely coincidental that this undiscovered majority is so sympathetic to the Esquireagenda.

Both Sides Now

The false ideology of Beltway-insiderism can also be found in this Esquire paragraph:

“To be sure that its findings were as far removed from the prevailing political interests as possible, the poll was designed and conducted in ecumenical fashion, by both the Benenson Strategy Group, President Obama’s pollster, and Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted the polls for Governor Romney.”

The impartial observer might be more likely to conclude that hiring not one, but two pollsters for mainstream political candidates might be a way to ensure that its findings reflected “the prevailing political interests.”

But that’s corporate-centrist ideology in a nutshell: One politician is a partisan. Two politicians are the American people incarnate.

Neil Newhouse, the Romney pollster who seems to have been something of a silent partner in this enterprise, became known for two things during the 2012 election. He insisted that the Romney campaign “would not be dictated by fact-checkers” after it was criticized for deceptive advertising. He also insisted that Romney would win.

Newhouse is a top Republican consultant. Benenson has been described by GQ as is one of “the fifty most powerful people in DC,” a fact his company website [7] proudly proclaims, alongside a similar accolade [8]—if that’s the right word—from Newsweek. So this piece may merely reflect the biases of longtime insiders. The Benenson Group has done excellent work in the past. We certainly hope this doesn’t reflect itsacquisition [9]by a multinational named WPP, whose website [10]says that “WPP companies exist to help their clients compete successfully: in marketing strategy, advertising, every form of marketing communication and in monitoring progress.”

After all, polling is not advertising or “marketing communication.”

Raw

The raw data don’t easily lend themselves to this centrist interpretation. There’s no space here to go through all the issues, so let’s take just one: government regulation. Most Americans are ambivalent about it. The conservative American Enterprise Institute think-tank captured that ambivalence effectively in its 2011 review [11]of public opinion on the subject.

The Pew Research Center [12] found in 2012 that most Americans (63%) agree with the statement that “a free-market economy needs government regulation in order to best serve the public interest,” a figure that was essentially unchanged from its 62% level in 2009. But Pew also found that solid majorities believe that government regulation of business [13]“usually does more harm than good” (a finding we would argue is the result of decades’ worth of marketing).

The Esquire/NBC News poll shows that 42% of respondents said they agreed with the statement that “financial reform should only be used to curb abuses, and shouldn’t interfere with banks’ and investors’ ability to make profits.”

That’s a slanted question. A “yes” does not necessarily mean Americans think the government is doing too much regulation, although there are times when Americans do think that. The operative word is still “ambivalence.” But Esquire’s editors nevertheless state unequivocally that the “Center wants the Federal government…to go easy on regulation.”

Other phraseology is equally dicey. Esquiretells us, for example, that “the Center believes that the government should help only those who really need help.” What does that even mean? Who supports helping people who don’t need help? It’s like the old Henny Youngman joke about the Boy Scout who helped old ladies across the street “whether they wanted to cross the street or not.”

Even a “bleeding heart” like me wouldn’t go for that.

The Center and I

Which brings us back to my experience with the online test. Was I reallyon the leftmost periphery of American public opinion. And “un-persuadable” not worthy of attention? I have no problem being on the leftist vanguard, but in this case it seemed hard to believe. After all, those Lake Research findings showed that 82% of Republicans agreed with me on Social Security, just one of many policy areas in which my own economic views seem to reflect the mainstream. Others include taxing the wealthy, doing more to fight poverty, repairing our crumbling infrastructure, taxing corporations at a higher rate, and having the government do more to create jobs.

We don’t seem that different, the Center and I. “The Center doesn’t think of itself as the ‘center,’” we’re told. Same here.

“The Center doesn’t much like how things are going,” say the editors at Esquire. Well, I’m not too thrilled either.

The chimerical “Center” and I would both like to see guns brought under control, and neither of us is thrilled about the role religious institutions are playing in politics. When it comes to the right to choose, the right to choose partners, or the right to burn one down at the end of a hard work day, we pretty much feel the same way: it’s none of our business.

Off-Center

More credible polls suggest that a new economic consensus is forming in this country, one that isn’t very accommodating toward the ideology reflected in this survey. But this new “center” has been divided by social issues. It has been excluded from political decision-making by a Beltway worldview that ignores their needs and their preferences. It’s been stymied by the kind of clichéd thinking which slices up the American people into demographic groups like “Bleeding Hearts” or “Pickup Populists.”

There are nuggets of good data here. It’s helpful to be reminded that Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the future, although that’s not a new finding. It was interesting to see confirmation of a growing populism in the white working-class, and to be reminded that it has stayed aloof from Democrats over social issues. That’s not new information either, but it’s useful for activists and politicians.

It’s time to stop searching for a nonexistent center and start reflecting the needs of a very real majority instead. That majority is inadequately represented in Washington, which is a failure of our democracy. Rather than spin or justify that failure, it’s time for even the most insider-ish analysts and journalists to report the unvarnished truth. Even their clients will eventually thank them for it.

In the words of Esquire’s editors, journalists and advisors “better be substantive” and “leave their hobbyhorses at home.” Sorry to say, this study fails on both counts.

If a “bleeding heart” won’t tell you, who will?

Source URL: http://admin.alternet.org/media/beware-corporate-ideology-being-sold-huge-media-companies-new-american-center

Robert Reich’s Inequality for All: A friendly warning to the powers that be

By Zac Corrigan, wsws.org

Inequality for All

Directed by Jacob Kornbluth

The documentary Inequality for All is inspired by the political and social views of Robert Reich, an establishment figure and Democratic Party politician who worked in the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton. Reich was Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s first administration (1993-1997). He is presently a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also taught at Harvard and authored fourteen books, including The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (1991) and Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (2007).

Reich narrates and effectively stars in Jacob Kornbluth’s film, in which he rather lamely attempts to convince viewers that it is possible, and indeed crucial, to oppose the growth of social inequality within the framework of a liberal reform agenda. The film is also a friendly warning to the ruling elite that extreme inequality will lead to a “political polarization” that will threaten their ability to rule.

The film is being promoted as an exposé—a “paradigm-shifting, eye-opening experience for the American public” that “accurately show[s] through a non-partisan perspective why extreme income inequality is such an important topic for our citizens today and for the future of America,” according to its official website.

In reality, Inequality for All presents a potted history of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It glorifies the post-World War II period—which Reich repeatedly refers to as “The Great Prosperity”—and insists that the solution to today’s extreme levels of inequality is to emulate that period through liberal reform and national regulation of the markets.

The documentary consists of a number of interviews with members of various social layers—a struggling working class family (although, tellingly, the phrase “working class” is never uttered by anyone), hand-wringing multi-millionaire businessmen, politicians and most prominently Reich himself—as well as various computer-animated graphs and other visual aids. The film is glued together into a narrative by scenes of Reich lecturing at Berkeley to hundreds of rapt students.

Reich sets the tone for the discussion in one of the film’s opening sequences. We see a shot of an Apple Store as he asserts that “capitalism generates a lot of good things.” Soon thereafter, Reich poses the film’s central question, “How much inequality can we have and still have capitalism?”

The former cabinet secretary presents data from a recent report on social inequality by academics Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Picketty (the same report on which the WSWS also reported last month) that shows social inequality in 2013 at historic highs. A graph showing income inequality from 1917 to 2013, which resembles a suspension bridge with peaks at either end and a trough in the middle, is returned to throughout the film. Reich concludes that during the middle of the 20th century, “What keeps the economy stable is a strong middle class. It keeps the economy going” by “consuming.”

In fact, Reich and others in the film (in keeping with the American media and establishment as a whole) talk endlessly about the “middle class.” What is this middle class? Reich admits there’s no agreed upon definition, but for his purposes he will consider anyone making $25,000 to $75,000 per year to be middle class.

[pullquote]This phony populist, chauvinist line of reasoning, which Reich shares with the AFL-CIO and union hierarchies generally, has sinister implications in a context of rising global tensions. Reich would be one of those urging US workers to line up with their own ruling elite against its rivals in a war to defend “American interests.”[/pullquote]

The film crew then gives us a glimpse into the life of a struggling “middle class” family trying to get by on the low end of that spectrum. A woman works at Costco making $22 per hour; her husband was laid off from his job at Circuit City when that company went bankrupt in 2009. They are raising a young daughter and have $35 in their bank account. They moved in with friends and struggle to pay bills and put food on the table.

It is with an eye to this struggling “middle class” that government policy should be oriented, Reich argues. Beside the fact that classes are determined by their relationship to the means of production, and not by their income, no one viewing this film would suspect that for many American families, the situation is even direr than the examples provided. Census data shows that in 2012, 40.6 million Americans, and fully 20 percent of American children, lived at or below the official poverty line. A report this summer from the National Poverty Center reveals that the number of people in the US living in extreme poverty, i.e., less than $2 a day per person, had risen by 2011 to 1.65 million households.

It should also be noted that Reich was a member of the Clinton administration at the time it helped destroy, along with Republicans in Congress, the previously existing welfare system. Various commentators have noted that the obscenely named “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” signed into law by Clinton in August 1996, has been one of the principal causes of the growth of extreme poverty in the US. (See also “Extreme poverty has more than doubled since 1996”)

Reich advocates nationalist policies, where “Americans,” as a classless national entity, have to compete en masse against the populations of foreign countries. “Globalization and technology” led to the deindustrialization of America, we are told. Yet the solution is to return to the conditions of the post-war period. How would that be possible?

American prosperity in the post-war period was possible due to US capitalism’s domination of a world market wherein its competitors had suffered massive physical destruction during the war. He stokes nationalist tensions by calling for investment in educating the populace to “compete with Japan and Germany,” which have, apparently regrettably, been rebuilt. Reich complains about the CEO of General Electric, who sits on Obama’s “jobs council,” not because the latter is a capitalist vulture, but because GE creates too many jobs in foreign countries.

Inequality for All

This phony populist, chauvinist line of reasoning, which Reich shares with the AFL-CIO and union hierarchies generally, has sinister implications in a context of rising global tensions. Reich would be one of those urging US workers to line up with their own ruling elite against its rivals in a war to defend “American interests.”

Reich also warns against the mobilization of “politically polarized” masses of people, referring to the Occupy movement and the Tea Party. He explains that social inequality undermines “democracy” and encourages people to go into the streets to solve their problems themselves. He takes pains to explain that, despite the accusations of his Republican critics, he is not a socialist, at one point looking directly into the camera and remarking, ironically of course, “Let me be clear: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party.”

Roger Hickney of the Huffington Post raves that Inequality for All “does for income disparity what [Al Gore’s] An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change.” This reviewer would tend to agree … with all the negative implications that suggests.

In 2006, the WSWS review of An Inconvenient Truth noted that the “former vice president and his party attempt to present themselves as oppositional, as concerned about the issues affecting ordinary citizens, while at the same time defending a social system that is ultimately responsible for war, growing inequality, the attack on democratic rights and the devastation of the environment.”

Reich’s pose as an opponent of social inequality, five years into both the Obama administration and the economic crisis that continues to devastate millions, is, if anything, even more absurd than Gore’s stance. Whatever Reich’s dreams, there is no going back in time. The historic decline of American capitalism will only lead to the exacerbation of social inequality and social tensions until workers take matters into their own hands.

The author is a commentator with wsws.org, information organ of the Social Equality Party.

The Democratic Enemies of Medicare for All

Meet the Real Adversaries of Single-Payer Health Care

Even before negotiations had started with the Republicans, Obama and his crew had already tossed aside single payer. Abject corruption? Cowardice? Take your pick.

by GRAEME ANFINSON

Democratic scum like Max Baucus gladly served as point man to stitch the Frankenstein Obamacare, while cheerfully drowning any possibility of single payer. This with the full support of the DLC and Obama, of course.

When Barack Obama decided to take ownership of a right-wing idea pushing market exchanges for private insurance, with mandates and subsides to make sure everyone bought the product, as a fix for our embarrassing health care system- it was clear we were in trouble. Now, as Obamacare is finally up and running, we see the most tech savvy Presidential Administration in history fail to build a functioning website. (Ironically, given the NSA revelations, when people actually want to give the government their personal information they seem incapable of taking it.) I remember heated conversations with liberals who assured me this was the best we could get, as conservatives would do anything to stop a plan that didn’t involve private insurance and marketplaces. Anything? Like shutdown the government even?

Quietly, while this mess was going on, some people continued to receive affordable treatment. Unlike Obamacare, this is actually a government program. Even the people who support Ted Cruz’s McCarthyite ramblings tend to support it. It is called Medicare. It is popular. It works. And it could truly bring down costs. Compare and contrast “Obamacare” with “Medicare for all.” One is convoluted and divisive, the other self-explanatory and familiar.

An honest critique of Obamacare is a critique of health insurance as a whole. A company that sells insurance, no matter what for, does it for one reason and one reason only- to make money. This makes our healthcare more expensive. We have a third party that needs to extract profit from the relationship between a doctor and his or her patient.

Having health insurance is also not the same as having access to healthcare. On top of the expensive monthly premiums, there are co-pays and deductibles that are huge barriers to getting treatments. We have in-network providers, out-of-network providers, and a book full of policies and percentages that gets changed every year. Obamacare further entrenches this mess into our lives.

Medicare for all would give us the collective power of buying in bulk. It would keep costs low, essentially using a strategy Walmart loves to exploit. If the government purchases the vast majority of the health care services and products across the country, that gives them huge leverage to bargain down costs.

While this is all well known, there is little political will to even bring the issue up. But the problem is not simply with the tea party. They are more concerned with attacking Barack Obama, for whatever reason, than providing any sort of comprehensive healthcare reform. The problem lies with the Democrats. Obama, the supposed great orator, certainly could have explained the need for Medicare’s expansion, at least as a starting point. The idea could have been taken up by any number of leading Democrats. There certainly would be pushback from the insurance industry, but this is inevitable for any reform to healthcare (it even was for Obamacare, which guarantees them customers).

The truth is the Democratic Party as a whole is ideologically against a national healthcare system. This seems obvious to anyone who has followed the issue somewhat closely, but many liberals have somehow convinced themselves that if only the nasty Republicans would be more reasonable we could finally get the healthcare the rest of the industrialized world enjoys. Until then, Obamacare is the best we will get so we should support it. That is nonsense. Those of us fighting for Medicare for all during the implementation of Obamacare need to both keep the conversation going and realize the Democrats are more adversary than ally.

Graeme Anfinson lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.