The daily Progressive Breakfast serves up what progressive movement members need to know to start their day.
Leiberman and the Remains of Reform
The political blogosphere and pundit class are still reeling either from Sen. Joe Lieberman's none-to-surprising betrayal on health care reform. or the newest political reality on health care reform. For progressives it comes town to at least a few options: kill the bill, support the bill for what good it does, and/or demand serious changes to the bill.
The New York Times addresses Lieberman's about-face:
This week, when there actually seemed to be a compromise on health care that did not focus on Mr. Lieberman, he announced that he would block the package if the Democrats included a terrible idea — allowing people between 55 and 65 to buy Medicare.
He presented this as a principled effort to keep down federal debt, but when a Times reporter asked about his 180-degree turn, he said he had forgotten taking his earlier position until the Democratic leadership reminded him about it over the weekend.
Mr. Lieberman has taken more than $1 million from the industry over his Senate career. In his 2006 re-election campaign, he ranked second in the Senate in contributions from the industry. He doesn’t seem to have forgotten that.
William Rivers Pitt reminds us that Lieberman is campaigning for the other side in 2010: "Lieberman of Connecticut, he was throwing sand into the gears of the Democratic push for health care reform by declaring he would filibuster any legislation containing the so-called public option .'I feel so strongly about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement," said the senator back in November.' ...This pronouncement came at the same time as word got out that Lieberman was also planning to actively campaign for GOP candidates during the 2010 midterms, further undercutting his erstwhile party's hold on the majority in Congress .'There's a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans,' he said at the time. 'There's a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side. And in between is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them - and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who's not a Democrat."
Howard Dean says "kill the bill," despite his initial support the short-lived Medicare buy-in. But Michael Tomasky makes a point over at The Guardian that killing the bill would mean handing Republicans a victory: "The argument you're going to hear from liberal opponents of the current version, that liberals didn't get anything out of the bill, is not persuasive. So many people became fixated on one item that would affect only a few million people (the public option). There are a lot of progressive aspects to the bill, and the shortcomings can maybe be addressed in the future... No matter how frustrated or angry you are about what's not in this bill, is the proper response to that really to strike a posture that amounts to giving Republicans, who will never do anything to promote or even gesture toward universal healthcare when they have power, their biggest political win on Capitol Hill in at least six or seven and arguably in 15 years? That's just silly."
And what's in the bill? Ezra Klein is among those — including Mike Lux, Slate's Timothy Noah, and Paul Starr at the American Prospect — to point out that, even sans the public option, what's left of the health care reform bill will help some Americans who really need it: " The core of this legislation is as it always was: $900 billion, give or take, so people who can't afford health-care insurance suddenly can. Insurance regulations paired with the individual mandate, so insurers can't discriminate against the sick and the healthy can't make insurance unaffordable by hanging back until the moment they need medical care. The construction of health insurance exchanges so the people currently left out of the employer-based market are better served, and the many who will join them as the employer system continues to erode will have somewhere to go."
In addition, Starr points out that there will be time to improve the bill between passage and implementation: "Liberals in Congress should also recognize that with either a 2013 or 2014 date for implementation, there will be time enough to revise the program before it goes into effect (indeed, time enough for the opponents to roll it back). Many of the specifics, such as the level of subsidies, almost certainly will be changed in the intervening years. And many of those specifics can be changed through budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass the Senate. Sen. Lieberman's influence is at its maximum in passing health-care legislation now, and some of those provisions will be hard to change. But if Democrats succeed in getting a bill through Congress in the next several weeks, they can return to some of the issues in the reconciliation process next year. And at that point they won't necessarily need to have Lieberman on board."
Of course, the political calculus of 2010 and beyond weighs heavily on the debate.Chri's Bowers gives some attention to the politics of defeating the health care bill. And Timothy Noah spells out what failure would mean for Democrats: " Politically, it would be an obvious setback for Democrats and a triumph for Republicans, for whom stonewalling is now official policy. The antecedent weighing on everybody's mind is the death of Hillarycare, which in 1994 helped the GOP recapture the House of Representative for the first time in 42 years. Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, argued in a 1996 paper that the GOP's 52-seat House gain (it also picked up eight votes in the Senate, winning a majority there, too) owed much to a sense of frustration on voters' part with "the kind of partisan posturing, haggling, delay, and confusion" characteristic of government when one party lacks sufficient votes to get legislation passed. Sound familiar? "
No Reform No Mandate?
One thing that does remain in the bill is the individual mandate, which some progressives want removed from the bill, if there's to be no public option. Kos takes on Ezra Klein's argument, and takes us out to the ball game:
Klein's argument seems to be:
- If we need more money for subsidies, we can later throw more money at the system,
- If costs aren't held down, then there'll be a better argument for a public option in the future.
My take is that it's unconscionable to force people to buy a product from a private insurer that enjoys sanctioned monopoly status. It'd be like forcing everyone to attend baseball games, but instead of watching the Yankees, they were forced to watch the Kansas City Royals. Or Washington Nationals. It would effectively be a tax -- and a huge one -- paid directly to a private industry.
Without any mechanisms to control costs, this is yet another bailout for yet another reviled industry. Subsidies? Insurance companies are free to raise their rates to absorb that cash. More money for subsidies? More rate increases, as well as more national debt. Don't expect Lieberman and his ilk to care. They're in it for their industry pals.
Air America's Nicole Sander likens an individual mandate without a public option to robbery:
OK, maybe I'm being overly critical. According to Senators Tom Harkin and Ron Wyden, this bill does include some very real reform: it outlaws the practices of cherry picking, rescission and denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions. It will get the exchange up and running, and lay a foundation for future reform to be built upon.
I get it. And I get that some lives will be saved. And that's the main point of health care reform.
But this "reform" is also a giant wet kiss for the for-profit insurance industry. It will require us -- all of us-- to purchase insurance from a for-profit health insurance company. If we can't afford it, the government will give us subsidies to help pay for it.
Yes, our taxpayer dollars will go to line the coffers of these leeches. For years now I've maintained that the for-profit health insurers are government sanctioned extortionists. Now they'll be able to get their payoff money right from the treasury.
If there's a mandate for citizens to buy insurance, and our tax dollars are going to be used to subsidize the purchases, shouldn't there be a way to do it without paying the extra dollars that go toward the insurance company profits? It seems to me a no-brainer.
Take It To The Banks
While health care reform is either headed for the finishing line or circling the bowl, depending on your point of view, OurFuture.Org's Robert Borosage sees haunting parallels with financial reform:
Enjoy the health care debate? Wait until the Senate takes on the big banks. It already looks like déjà vu all over again. Democrats, bloodied from self-inflicted wounds in the health care debate, may well commit seppuku over financial reform.
The script is in place for a failed sequel. The administration, via Treasury, cobbled together a reform plan that was weaker than it should be. The banks signed up every ambulatory lobbyist in town to gut the central reforms. The House fended off Melissa Bean's attempt to be the Joe Lieberman of financial reform, but ended up passing a bill even weaker than the administration's proposal — with nary a Republican vote.
Borosage also takes on Time Magazine's "Man of the Year", Ben Bernanke: "Time Magazine's naming Ben Bernanke "Man of the Year" is a little bit like celebrating an arsonist for his heroics in putting out a fire that he set. Bernanke has done creative and bold work in staving off a financial free fall. But he would also be on any list of the 10 people most responsible for creating the free fall."
Robert Scheer says "the fat cats are still in charge," no matter what President Obama says. After all, they didn't bother to show up when he called them to a meeting: "The largest of the banks—the very ones that led the charge into the financial abyss—are fiercely lobbying against the very sensible and all-too-limited proposals that would increase their capital requirements and empower the government to prevent them from growing to unmanageable proportions once again. They are even more incensed about attempts to regulate the rewards that bankers reap from risking the capital of their depositors and the taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill. ...However, Obama’s stern rhetoric apparently did not move the top banking honchos who failed to show up for this week’s White House meeting with the president. The heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley waited until the morning of the Monday meeting to catch a plane and then claimed that fog prevented their journey."
Robert Creamer says the way forward is to pass reform and then break up the banks: "There is no economic rationale for allowing a few big private corporations to control America's financial markets. And we've just seen the outrageous outcome. When big banks are "too big to fail" because of the devastating impact of their collapse on the entire economy, taxpayers are forced to reach into their jeans and bail them out, so that they can go on making tens of billions of dollars in "bonuses" as compensation for their "financial genius. ...There's something wrong with this picture. To put it succinctly: if a private institution is too big to fail, it's too big to exist.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson has an almost elegiac (no to mention Dickensian) column looking back on what he calls "America's decade of dread":
This decade began and ended in dread. It began with Wall Street -- the World Trade Center -- targeted for mass murder. It ends with Main Street fearful and reeling from economic reverses that Wall Street helped create.
It was the decade of distraction. While the U.S. economy bubbled and then crumbled, the president for eight of the decade's 10 years embroiled us in a grudge match with Saddam Hussein and then persisted in throwing lives and money into the chaotic conflict that (as many predicted would happen) ensued. The decline of the American middle class was nowhere on his radar screen.
...The problem is that America's economic elites have thrived on the financialization and globalization of the economy that have caused the incomes of the vast majority of their fellow Americans to stagnate or decline. The insecurity that haunts their compatriots is alien to them. Fully 85 percent of Americans in that CFR-sponsored poll said that protecting U.S. jobs should be a top foreign policy priority, but when the pollsters asked that question of the council's own members, just 21 percent said that protecting American jobs should be a top concern.
Meanwhile, OurFuture.Org's Eric Lotke points out that, at the end of a decade of "" and a year of change, most of the rest of us are still waiting on recovery:
Things are supposed to be looking up. Today’s data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis gives a fuller picture: low wages and declining domestic production.
Real average hourly earnings fell 0.5 percent from October to November, seasonally adjusted
The U.S. current-account deficit— the combined balance on trade in goods and services increased to $108 billion in the third quarter of 2009, up from $98 billion in the second quarter. The main driver was the deficit in goods. With the economy beginning to “recover” people started buying again – sending more of our money overseas.
This isn't recovery. This is putting us back onto the same wrong path we had before – a low wage economy supported by trade deficits and foreign borrowing. No, thank you. I hope.
