The Democratic race for president is one candidate smaller today than it was a couple of days ago. Kamala Harris dropped out this week, and it took about five minutes for the talking heads in the corporate media to attribute the failure of her campaign to the push for Medicare for All. By Wednesday morning, Claire McCaskill, failed candidate for senate, was on Morning Joe taking shots at M4A as a far-left government takeover of insurance, amounting to some kind of expropriation from hardworking Americans. They’re taking our corporate insurance away! People from the heartland won’t like this!
Let’s think for a moment of what would be taken away. I have one of those insurance policies people like McCaskill and Scarborough think so highly of. (I’m sure they have nothing like it, by the way.) My plan is what used to be termed a “Cadillac plan”, not because the benefits are so generous but because my employer pays 80% of my premiums. Even so, the plan costs me thousands of dollars a year even when things don’t go wrong. What M4A would take away from me are co-pays, which are considerable, and a $3,600 deductible, plus additional costs associated with out-of-network providers. Would I pay more in taxes than I do currently? Possibly, but when we’re sick, we can go to the doctor, to the hospital, to urgent care, and not even think about cost. That’s a level of liberation I have never experienced.
It’s not hard to work out why shows like Morning Joe make such a determined effort to scuttle any attempt at bringing about M4A. Just look at their advertisers. No, not the military contractor ads – they’re mainly shooting at a more specific target (i.e. lawmakers and congressional staffers). The drug companies, the hospital groups, the medical device manufacturers, and of course, the big insurance firms. They are dropping a lot of coin on advertising and lobbying, as always, but if either Bernie or Warren gets anywhere near the White House, you can bet they will be directing their ample coffers to a concerted comm strategy to kill M4A before it is even drafted. That strategy will include targeted ads, but it will also involve appearances on talk shows, columns, video news releases and inserts on local TV news broadcasts – you name it. We saw some of this during the Obamacare fight. This will be much, much more determined.
I don’t say this to discourage anyone on the left from fighting for M4A. Quite the opposite – with the forces arrayed against us, we are going to need a sustained effort like nothing any of us has experienced before. It’s a fight worth having, so please … be ready both before and after election day.
luv u,
jp
I think it’s worth saying at the outset that I have no idea of what our military’s mission is in Syria. I keep hearing that it’s essentially the same as the one we’re pursuing in Afghanistan – training and equipping a local force to fight the war for us – but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It is, in fact, a formula for another unending deployment, one that has the support of most of the foreign policy voices in the media. Much of the criticism of Trump’s abrupt decision has been from a right militarist perspective, though one that is broadly shared, much like the criticism of his Korea policy. The only argument that has merit, in my view, is that we will be leaving the Syrian Kurds twisting in the wind – something we have done to the Kurds in past decades as well (ask Kissinger). Maybe that is worth keeping 2,000 plus U.S. troops in Syria, if protecting Kurdish fighters is in fact what they’re doing, but as always, we are pondering policy stacked on top of bad policy decades in the making.
In listening to the hagiographic coverage put out by NPR, NBC and MSNBC, it’s clear that H. W, Bush’s conservative politics is a kind of “sweet spot” for our mainstream press – the ideal foil to the uncouth hair-hatted fiend who currently occupies the White House. Like the McCain funeral, this is an opportunity to demonstrate their middle-of-the-road reactionary bona fides. It’s as if there’s Trump and then everyone else, and they take the side of the latter. The stupidity of the rhetoric is kind of sobering, though. On Morning Joe, Willie Geist was talking about how Bush 41 chose to join the Navy as an aviator, as if that was a singularly selfless act. The guy is so distant from the notion of conscription that he barely knows what he’s talking about. Note to Willie: Practically everybody ended up in uniform and shipped overseas in those days. Aside from a draft, there was enormous societal pressure to join up and do your part. Every military age male in my extended family at that time was sent to fight in World War II (one didn’t return, another committed suicide afterwards). No shade on Bush 41 – he sacrificed during the war, but his experience was very, very common.
What’s ironic is that these pundits should be surprised and appalled by such behavior. After all, the Saudis have been killing people by the thousand in Yemen. It appears that Yemeni children’s biggest mistake may be that they aren’t members of the Washington Post editorial board. And if memory serves, they were well represented in the 9/11/2001 attacks … nearly as many hijackers as there were assassins sent to kill Khashoggi. I’m surprised that the Saudis considered this such heavy lifting. Nevertheless, all of the gray-headed shills who were running around trumpeting the virtues of “MBS” will now have to find some way of reconciling themselves to the ugly truth: their hero is a murderous despot.
And clearly, there is a solid, institutional consensus on American foreign policy. It’s a relatively small box that contains, on one end, the Obama approach, then the center-left liberal interventionist school (Clinton, Samantha Power, etc.), followed by the center-right establishment Republicans (James Baker, Kissinger, etc.), the hot-head interventionists (McCain, Graham, Cotton), and the neocons (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Elliot Abrams, etc.). In terms of blowing things up and killing people, there isn’t a lot of distance between any of these groupings, and they all share a common imperial worldview. The encouraging development for the Morning Joe crew is the notion that Trump has now put himself in that box.
Then there was the missile launch in North Korea. Deliberately provocative, yes, though again, our military rules on that peninsula – we’re constantly running joint exercises with the South Korean military that can only be seen as provocations by Pyongyang. Trump is going to take this up with China this weekend in his cheesy Florida resort getaway, but that just marks a continuation of the same disastrous policy. North Korea wants to talk to us, not China. This only possible way to reduce this massive threat to human existence on the Korean peninsula is provide Pyongyang with some guarantees of non belligerence. That is simply not on the table.