More Thursday Idiocy: Battling Green-Lanternism Yet Again!: Scott Lemieux vs. Jacobin and Enrique Diaz-Alvarez
Scott Lemieux: BREAKING! The American Political System Does Not Inherently Gravitate Towards Optimal Policy:
And we have yet another article wondering why Prime Minister Obama didn’t just eliminate the American health insurance industry.... The answer, of course, is that Obama didn’t take single payer “off the table.” It was never on the table. The idea that there were 60--hell, that there were 30--votes for single payer in the Senate is sheer fantasy. Diaz-Alvarez doesn’t even try to explain how “a president willing to nationalize health care” could have actually gotten the relevant legislation enacted. (Again, given that the answers tend to be self-refuting things like “threaten to primary legislators who aren’t running for anything” or “offer to campaign for candidates in states where you’re enormously unpopular” this is probably for the best.) Rather, this is a teleological argument. Single payer is more efficient, therefore policy outcomes should naturally gravitate in that direction and if they don’t the only explanation must be that the president--the sole meaningful inhabitant of the American political universe--must be obstructing it.
I’ve already said enough about this line of argument, but wow....
As a corrective, I strongly recommend Alex Pareene’s piece on Elizabeth Warren. The White House isn’t where transformations begin; it’s where if they’re successful, they end.
Surely Jacobin could do something more useful--like publishing an article on the detailed workings of the sixteenth-century global monetary system by David Graeber?
Enrique Diaz-Alvarez: The Backroom Deal That Could’ve Given Us Single-Payer:
Back in March 2009, leaks from the White House made it clear that a single-payer health insurance system was “off the table” as an option for health care reform. By doing so, the President had ruled out the simplest and most obvious reform of the disaster that is US healthcare. Instituting single-payer would have meant putting US health insurance companies out of business and extending the existing Medicare or Medicaid to the entire population. Instead, over the following weeks the outlines of the bloated monstrosity known as Obamacare emerged; an impossibly complicated Rube Goldberg contraption, badly designed, incompetently executed, and whose intended beneficiaries increasingly seem to hate.
The decision to abandon the nationalization of perhaps the most unpopular companies in the US is correctly attributed to the fundamental conservatism of the Obama White House, and its unwillingness to take on the health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, or any interest group willing and able to spend millions lobbying, hiring former politicians, and donating to campaigns.... But were the many backroom deals that make up Obamacare really an easier alternative to nationalization?... Nationalization would have been the easiest way forward, costing relatively little and delivering immediate savings while making access to health care truly universal. Politically, Obama could have counted on the support of a unlikely ally of progressive causes: health insurance shareholders, the theoretical owners of those very companies who would have been relieved of their then-dubious investments with a huge payout.... Buying out the entire health insurance industry at an enormously generous premium of, say, 100 percent, would have cost the Treasury $240 billion....
So what would make a self-described market-lover like Obama take such an obvious solution off the table before the discussions even began?... Obama is a fan of a very specific kind of market--the kind of complicated, opaque market full of rules, moving parts, variables, exceptions, and complexities that generate lots of opportunities for rent extraction... one person’s waste is another’s income.... The picture that emerges of health insurance rent extraction is that of college-educated managers in the middle; at the top, a miasma of the impeccably credentialed and connected executives, consultants, lobbyists and PR hacks that make up the backbone of post-industrial America’s upper echelon. Instead of an Andrew Carnegie, we get a hundred Tom Daschles. Except this time, no libraries, just ten thousand MBAs droning on in front of a Powerpoint slideshow--forever. Not exactly an improvement....
From overpaid doctors, to usurious hospitals that charge $500 for a stitch, to snake oil-peddling pharmaceutical companies charging thousands a year for dubious treatments, there are simply too many people collecting too much money just because they can.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, they all seem to have a very good friend in the White House.
And:
Alex Pareene: Why Elizabeth Warren baffles pundits: “Economic populism” isn’t just a campaign slogan:
Elizabeth Warren is Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare, according to the New Republic.... Not so fast, says Politico magazine. Those hoping for Warren to lead the Democratic Party’s “left turn” will soon find that insurgent candidates rarely accomplish much in presidential primary campaigns....
But while Waldman is right, he’s answering the wrong question. It’s not his fault! Most pundits writing about “Warren versus Clinton” are answering the wrong question, because of the political media’s fixation on national elections and presidents. But the “economic populism” fight isn’t about Hillary Clinton and 2016. It’s about the entire Democratic Party and every policy fight and campaign it will be involved in in the foreseeable future.
It’s certainly easier to discuss intra-party disagreements about policy and strategy in terms of big clashing personalities, but the people and organizations championing left-wing economic policy and strict financial regulation, from Demos to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, aren’t part of a shadow Warren campaign, they’re part of a campaign to drag Democrats away from the pro-rich Washington consensus. The point of arguing for more “economic populism”... is to fix the Democratic Party....
Third Way’s recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed is a broad warning, to all Democrats, to avoid all the policies associated with Warren, income inequality, and redistribution. They’re not afraid that Warren will run for president, they’re afraid that she’ll be so popular that other senators will start acting like her.... They’re worried that Warren might embarrass Democrats into passing stricter bank regulations. They’re worried that finance’s iron grip on the Democratic Party might weaken.... A lot of money and time was spent encouraging elite consensus around “entitlement reform,” and suddenly a bunch of senators are talking about making the program more generous. That, of course, is a wildly popular idea... the anti-populism backlash relies on reinforcing the common Washington idea that it is brave to oppose policies most people want and would benefit from.... There’s no good reason that reliably liberal states should be electing senators as friendly to Wall Street as Cory Booker. But if you can’t stop a Cory Booker, the next best thing is to force him to change his positions to avoid pissing off the base. And there’s already some evidence that that’s worked on Booker: He quickly reversed his stance on Social Security...
And:
David Weigel: Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Third Way, and Elizabeth Warren:
Before we all forget about the latest spat between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the banks, before it’s downgraded to an anecdote in Game Change III: The Changeling, let’s reflect on how the media got dragged into it and covered the story on Warren’s terms.... Two honchos at the center-left think tank Third Way wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning that a proposal to expand Social Security was foolishness and “economic populism is a dead end for Democrats.” A clutch of progressives... demanded that elected Democrats distance themselves from the op-ed. The senior senator from Massachusetts issued an open letter to bankers, asking them to disclose their donations to think tanks, and then told the Huffington Post that Third Way was “flatly wrong.”... It was a lesson in how easy it can be to draw the media, bankers, pundits, and activists into a “war,” as long as you’ve a got a working Internet connection and a strong hook.
Both of the ideas at the heart of this fight—corporate influence over think tanks, expanding Social Security—had been litigated for years, well before Warren got to the Senate. This time, a small number of progressives just took advantage of the media’s bias toward big personalities, and its obsession with presidential politics, to change what the media covered....
Progressives’ distaste for Third Way is as old as the organization itself. It was founded in 2005... George W. Bush... ended the careers of several red state “New Democrats.” The exiles built an “idea tank”... issued reports with advice about how the Hispanic vote was slipping away from the blue team (oops!) and how “Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill” as long as liberals were “the public face of the party.”... The online left built new organizations... the Progressive Change Campaign Committee... Progressives United... groups like the Democracy Alliance... email lists and Twitter lists.... It almost always lost, and groups like Third Way—which warned Democrats against the public option, for example—always won.
“Who else is the insurance industry paying off?” wrote PCCC co-founder Adam Green in a 2009 Huffington Post blog entry:
Is it entirely coincidental that Third Way—which has no grassroots membership and is fully reliant on big donors—is going to bat for a proposal that would bring billions (trillions?) to the insurance industry? If Third Way is anything other than a corporate shill, with ideas that are for sale to the highest corporate bidder, they have an obligation to make transparent how much money they get from the insurance industry.”
Green’s jeremiad got little mainstream media pick-up. Neither did Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s 2012 legislation (also announced on Huffington Post) to expand Social Security.... Duncan Black, one of the first popular liberal bloggers, used a USA Today guest-columnist gig to endorse a similar plan. None of this made it into the soup of buzzy, acceptable policy ideas known as the “conversation.”...
[But] the left’s enemies responded as predictably as Godzilla swatting at Mothra. “Social Security proposals are wrongheaded,” editorialized the Washington Post....
“Just looking at the Third Way editorial, where it ran, who the audience was, it didn't strike me as a policy argument,” says Progressives United spokesman (and former Feingold spokesman) Josh Orton:
It was a cultural attack. I mean, Warren didn't even write the bill! It reminded me of what you hear from the bankers who say Obama is too mean to them. It could have been a fundraising letter to those bankers—who knows? Third Way has been a joke among progressives for years, but they didn’t just fall off the turnip truck....
When I asked Third Way co-founder (and current VP for public affairs) Michael Bennett about the idea that the think tank was fishing for donors in the Wall Street Journal’s subscription list, he laughed. “That’s ridiculous”.... But they are think tankers who give quotes to reporters about the danger of a left-wing Democratic Party. In 2012, Bennett even knocked Elizabeth Warren, and was hat-tipped by no less an admirer than Sen. Scott Brown. That was why the progressives shot at their knees. Third Way is, as think tanks go, somewhat transparent about who writes their checks.... The progressives who want to mainstream a redistributive Social Security reform want, in the meantime, to discredit the people who may oppose it...
