Rightwing ‘Socialism’: A GOP plan signed by Obama

GOP Version of the ‘Pottery Barn Rule’:

‘We break it, we blame you ... and call you a Nazi.’

By Tina Dupuy
Fall River Herald News

Calling ObamaCare “socialized medicine” truly lowers the standards on what could be considered socialized medicine. It’s like calling paved roads “government overreach”; a stop light a “government takeover of your commute”; or a neighborhood with speed bumps “a road to communism.” The law is really some regulations to help consumers buy private insurance coupled with a small fee if consumers decide not to buy said insurance.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. However, ObamaCare is the opposite of socialism — it’s a market solution.

The right-wing got a “free” market solution to health care. That was their cause — personal responsibility their mantra — now it’s law. They got an entire reform bill incentivizing citizens to buy into private for-profit insurance plans. This is the Republican vision for America: Less government more profits for giant corporations. This core of the Affordable Care Act was an idea floated by President Nixon in 1974, touted by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, introduced by Newt Gingrich in 1993 and implemented by Mitt Romney in 2005. And now? Now it’s a big festering albatross around Obama’s neck.

As former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said in front of the Supreme Court last week, “We have not waved the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine!”

So the decades-old Republican big idea finally gets Democratic presidential ink and now, if you ask a Republican, it’s an unconstitutional government takeover of health care Stalin would have loved. Mitt Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with RomneyCare. Essentially repealing the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. Leave it to a Republican frontrunner to vow their first act as president will be to waste time with redundancies while lamenting how ineffective government can be.

Now that health care reform has reached the Supreme Court, we will have a ruling on the law in late June. Will it be overturned fully or partially or upheld? It’s anyone’s guess.

Regardless of the outcome, personal responsibility in health care is a Republican pet idea they’ve strapped to the roof of the car.

It makes the case that their ideas should never be law because if partisanship beckons, they’ll rally against them and call any Democrats who signed the bill, Hitler.

Imagine if Obama signed the most recent Paul Ryan Budget plan — a blueprint to cut taxes further for the wealthy and further increase the debt by not taking in enough revenues. If Obama embraced it, Republicans would storm the Capitol calling it a tax hike and a Maoist plot with Wall Street. People in tri-corner hats with signs reading, “Don’t raise my taxes!” and “Stop government takeover of business!” would swarm The Mall. The erosion of Medicare would make Republicans faint on the House floor. “It’s a tenet of Marxism to kill grandma!” They’d gasp.

Just remember, when George W. Bush took office the budget was set to be balanced in a few short years. Social security was actually its namesake — secure. And then he went uber-GOP-with-a-mandate — didn’t pay for any of the wars he started — just showered seniors with unpaid-for Medicare Part D and sent everyone in the country a rebate check. And when this “free market capitalism” failed? He bailed out the banks and the auto industry with taxpayer money, famously saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Now? Now the Republicans blame the deficit, the debt, the recession, the bailouts and (wait for it) the wars on the Democrat in the Oval Office.

It’s a take on the Pottery Barn rule, “You break it, you buy it.” The Republican version: “We break it, we blame you ... and call you a Nazi.”

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Health Care Campaign and the Supreme Court

Don’t Count on Single-Payer

Comeback Without a Fight

By JEFF MUCKENSTRUM
Young Democratic Socialists

April 4, 2012 - If the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act (ACA), don’t worry: President Obama will push for a single-payer healthcare system. That’s the liberal spin on what could be a national embarrassment for the former constitutional law professor whose signature legislative achievement could be wiped out in June.

Again and again and again and again liberal pundits tell us that the Democrats will snap out of their centrist slumber if the Supreme Court strikes down the ACA. They’ll be radicalized and have no other choice but to turn to single-payer, so they say.

In “How Obamacare’s Rejection Would Lead to Single Payer,” Josh Barro writes: “SCOTUS striking down the law would also be likely to radicalize Democrats on the health issue… Rejection of Obamacare would likely lead to support for more radical policies among the liberal base and Democratic officeholders. They’ll be mad, and they’ll want to fight back.”

And “…with a bit of political jujitsu,” says Robert Reich, “the President could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system – Medicare for all.”

If only. But this line of thinking simply doesn’t fit President Obama’s history of consistently caving to the right for fear of being labeled a far-left socialist. In 2008 the Republicans wouldn’t bite on the public option. So, despite having a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, he moved to the right and supported the individual mandate (something he vehemently opposed before the 2008 election) and still didn’t get one Republican vote.

Those of us supporting a single-payer system must not be fooled by this argument. Winning national single-payer healthcare, no matter what the Supreme Court rules this summer, will be a battle fought tooth and nail against the for-profit health insurance corporations, the American Medical Association, and Big Pharma. It won’t simply be handed to us by President Obama or the Democratic party.

Same goes with the Employee Free Choice Act (dead), or closing Guantanamo (still open), or nixing the Keystone XL pipeline (we’ll build half of it), or ending the war in Iraq (18,000 troops still on the ground).

President Obama is a center-right leader, and we shouldn’t expect anything else.

Historical experience shows that a political defeat for the Obama administration won’t herald a radical shift to the left on healthcare policy. After Clinton lost his health reform battle (not even getting his bill out of committee in 1994) did he take a strong stance on single-payer–even though the single-payer bill in the House at that time had more co-sponsors than his own bill did? No. Instead, all we got was the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which only covers about half of American children (Geyman, 226). A positive step, to be sure, but far short of an embrace of single-payer.

The overall message here is “do nothing.” Obama’s got this. Just get out and vote for him in November and everything will be fine. Don’t get mad at him and certainly don’t stay home on Election Day.

Don’t fall for it.

The Supreme Court’s decision won’t radicalize the Democrats or the President. Single-payer won’t be their only option. If the ACA goes down Obama will most likely drop the healthcare issue altogether or, less likely, rebrand the public option.

When liberal pundits say Medicare-for-all, they mean Medicare for all to buy–AKA a public option to compete in the market with private insurance. We know the public option won’t reduce costs or be universal or be equitable. Health Care for America Now, the $40 million health reform group, that supposedly backed a public option, and openly campaigned against single-payer, won’t come around so easily either. They’re busy trying to save face by backing Democrats and defending the individual mandate.

We want a truly universal single-payer healthcare system in which everyone in the US, undocumented immigrants included, have access to comprehensive coverage. A system with full women’s health benefits included. A system without copays or deductibles. Without for-profit hospitals, and without private insurance in the mix. As we know too well, the Democrats are quick to use women’s and immigrants’ health as a bargaining chip. We must not allow that.

It’s our job to continue to remind Congress and the President that there is an alternative to the status-quo. It will take a lot more marching, educating, and protesting before they hear us.

So we better keep organizing.

Jeff Muckensturm is on the national staff of Healthcare-NOW!, a national network of single-payer advocates and organizations. Find out more about the single-payer movement at www.Healthcare-Now.org or follow Healthcare-NOW! on Facebook and Twitter.

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GOP Throws Granny Under the Bus

National GOP Leaders Want to

Destroy the US Social Safety Net

They Have Had This Goal for Generations Because People Who Receive the Benefits of the US Social Safety Net Predominantly Are Democrats, or People so Dense ‘Tea Partiers,’ Who Receive These Benefits but Don't Realize They Do

By Brian Conners
Progressive America Rising via Takeaways

Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system and reduce Medicaid by turning them into block grant which won't keep up with the pace of medical costs.

This means that the elderly and ill segments of our population will be encouraged to " die quickly" -- remember Grayson's summary of the GOP's health care plan? This isn't what they signed up for. The GOP is not being true to the bargain we gave our people.

The article "Medicare Saves Money" delineates how the GOP is hurting us all by its Medicare plan." states "Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that's so bad, so wrongheaded, that you're almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.

And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn't actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn't be to "save Medicare," whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

And here's what you need to know: Medicare actually saves money -- a lot of money -- compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs."

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Labor and ‘Medicare for All’

Still Paying Through the Nose,

Labor Campaigns for Single Payer

By Andy Coates
Health Care NOW via Labor Notes

June 9, 2011 - A year after President Obama signed his health care reform with strong support from the labor movement, advocates of a single-payer system might be tempted to ask, “How’s that working out for you?”

At last weekend’s conference of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, a Plumbers and Pipe Fitters delegate pointed out that his members are paying $12.31 per hour for their health benefits.

The activists marshaled their forces once again in D.C. last weekend, where campaign coordinator Mark Dudzic reported progress on the group’s mission: “to establish and expand within labor the idea that labor has got to lead this fight” for single payer, or improved and expanded Medicare-for-All.

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Note to Obama: 'Futurama' Has to Wait Its Turn

Schools, Hospitals
Come First in
Stimulus Package

By Mike Davis

America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain's high-speed rail network will become the world's largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: "For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America." Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His "Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class" vows to "create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we'll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges." Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Rolling Out the Dozers

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials -- from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the "win-win" approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM's shareholders), but that infrastructure spending -- if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama's first 100 days -- can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush's "socialist" efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

If one accepts the reasonable principle of supporting the new president whenever he makes policy from the left or addresses basic social needs, shouldn't progressives be cheering the White House as it rolls out the dozers, Cats, and big cranes? Aren't high-speed mass transit and clean energy the kind of noble priorities that best reconcile big-bang stimulus with long-term public value?

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I'm not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis -- a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales -- has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis -- from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly -- is its potential universality. Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie's choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made -- with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

Saving Schools and Hospitals

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

Personally, I would love to commute via a sleek Euro-style bullet train from my home in San Diego to my job in Riverside, 100 grueling freeway miles away, but I'll take gridlock if the cost of rationing federal expenditure is tolerating the closure of my kids' school or increasing the wait in the local emergency room from two to ten hours.

Obama, unlike his predecessor, has a bold vision, shared with his powerful supporters in high-tech industries, of catching up with the Spanish and Japanese, while redeeming America as the synonym for modernity. Lots of new infrastructure will, however, become so many bridges to nowhere (especially for our children) unless he and Congress first save human-needs budgets and public-sector jobs.

A good start for progressive agitation on Obama's left flank would be to demand that his health-care reform and aid-to-education proposals be brought front and center as preferential vehicles for immediate macro-economic stimulus. Democrats should not forget that the most brilliant and enduring accomplishment of the Kennedy-Johnson era was Head Start, not the Apollo Program.

If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect's original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities and poverty.]

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The Mission: Energy, Health, and No War

Photo: Montana Rally with Crow Tribe

Obama
Talks to
Montana

By Mike Dennison
The Montana Standard

July 5, 2008 - For his first task as president, Barack Obama said Friday he’ll call in the nation’s top military officials and "tell them we have a new mission": End the war in Iraq.

Next on the list is reforming the nation’s health-care system, so everyone in the nation has basic health care and costs are reduced for families and businesses.

And, third, craft a new energy policy that "requires a shift away from the sort of wasteful energy usage of the past, and to develop alternative fuels like solar, wind and biodiesel," Obama said in an interview on his campaign bus near the Montana Tech campus.



Obama, 46, a U.S. senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, spent the day in Butte, taking in a Fourth of July parade and attending a picnic with hundreds of well-wishers and supporters. But he also took time to chat with local reporters, both on his bus and on the grounds of the World Museum of Mining, standing before a small grove of aspen trees that wavered in the breeze preceding an afternoon thunderstorm.

Obama said he has a good chance of winning in Montana because people are struggling here and will respond to his message of change and reform, to stop the war in Iraq, to reduce the weight of energy prices and ensure access to public lands. Obama has been polling strongly in several Western states where Democrats traditionally lose in presidential elections, Montana included.

Yet Republicans have signaled they certainly won’t be rolling over in these states, and will go after Obama on at least one issue dear to the hearts of many Montanans: Gun ownership. Earlier this week, the Montana Republican Party called on Obama to "clarify his muddled record on the 2nd Amendment," saying Obama has a record of supporting restrictions on gun ownership. Obama said Friday he believes in "common-sense gun laws" allow law-abiding citizens to purchase and own firearms, including items such as background checks when buying guns.

"There is not a sportsman or hunter in Montana who is a legal possessor of firearms that has anything to worry about from me," he said.

Regarding the war in Iraq, Obama repeated his call for bringing home U.S. troops in a "careful and deliberate fashion," consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On health care, he said he wants a system that regulates insurers more stiffly and helps people who can’t afford health insurance acquire it.

But he’s not in favor of a national, single-payer system like Canada or other countries, that offer the same care for all, usually financed by taxes. "The problem is, we’ve got a legacy of employer-based health care," he said. "People are accustomed to those sorts of arrangements and they’re fearful about what they might have to give up in a transition to a different system."

Obama said his plan works within the system we have now, offering "alternatives" to families who can’t get insurance now and finding ways to lower premiums for all. "And we’ve got to emphasize prevention, which is the most important thing we’ve got to do long-term," he added.

Obama also said his broad base of donors make him the candidate who can stand up to well-heeled special interests who have been controlling policy in the country. The Obama campaign doesn’t accept money from political action committees or from people who are federal registered lobbyists. However, it has accepted tens of millions of dollars from big individual donors connected with insurance, Wall Street investment houses, hedge funds, banks and pharmaceutical companies.

"When we have 1.7 million donors, there is no donor that we’re dependent on, there is no industry that we’re dependent on," he said. "I can say ‘no’ to anybody because I’ve got a broad base of support. "I’ve been able to show independence not only in the past, but will be able to show independence as president."

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