Tearing down the "progressives" mask

[impik]

Al Giordano's piece is the best thing i've read since this whole HC thing started. Brutal honesty, completely on point.

One of the more annoying traits of many of the aspiring Health Care “bill killers” on the US left that we’ve heard from of late is that they act as if the control by multinational corporations over all aspects of human existence (including governments) is somehow this big new surprise and development. Fact is, it has been an evident part of our species’ reality for decades already.
Richard Barnet and Ronald Mueller published Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations in 1976 (Touchstone Books) and 33 years later a certain political tendency among some college educated self-described progressives carries the whiff of the freshly converted. OMG! Corporations are evil! Daddy government should do something!

Meanwhile, any actual progress in improving the lives of the poor and and the working class must be, according to them, halted, even demonized, if it doesn’t simultaneously and immediately overturn the existing reality of corporate domination of our world...

...Would single-payer and public-options still be preferable? Yes, but with the proviso that the improvement would be at the margins, and they, too, would create new problems to solve. I have yet to see a single-payer health proposal, for example, that honestly admits that removing insurance corporations altogether would cause hundreds of thousands of Americans that work for them to become unemployed. Where is the necessary plan to retrain, retool and provide jobs for those workers? Who has even mentioned it, much less developed a plan or a proposal?...

...In lieu of any real plan, we are offered “feel good” solutions of lashing out against corporations. Lost in that discourse: the people down below. That is what has defined the health care debate on parts of the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter to some that 30 million people who don’t have any health insurance at all will now have theirs subsidized. To them, if the insurance corporations also benefit from it, then it is a moral “evil” that must be stopped.

Also forgotten in this born-again anti-corporatism is what Alinksy, Gandhi and others have demonstrated: To create and sustain successful political movements and revolutions, you have to turn small triumphs into ever increasing larger ones. If you don’t have victories along the way and call them that, the people lose hope and motivation to back any movement or revolt...


....And yet that is precisely what the bill-killer tendency (and we will surely see them behave the same incoherent way on future battles: immigration reform will be next) is pushing: This sense that nothing is progress, nothing can be defined as a win, and that winning itself is evil if it doesn’t overturn everything. Even that might be understandable if they had a coherent plan for what winning would really look like, for what kind of society and system they would build to replace corporate capitalism. But they don't have even a skeletal blueprint yet...

In the meantime, I think the only way to nudge them in that direction is with incremental victories, like the one pending on health care, and the upcoming one on immigration reform, where the usual suspects will whine anew all over again (the proverbial making of perfection into the enemy of the good) and the newly resurgent multi-racial working class of the US left will be knocking on doors, putting together phone banks, and organizing instead of ranting.

There is actually a lot of progress going on in the United States, but it is hard to see amidst the smokescreens and media distortions, and even harder to hear above the din of what is now a mechanized industry of poutrage that has created its own market niche inside the capitalist system. That tendency's credo ought to be: We have met the corporation and it is us.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3694/we-have-met-corporation-and-it-us

Go read it all.

[Cha]

1. Thanks, impik and Al Giordano!

They're so good at demonizing everything except their lies.

[Scurrilous]

2. K & R

:thumbsup:

[DJ13]

3. So the most progressive thing to do is to embrace our corporate overlords?

Wouldnt that make us ..............REPUBLICANS?

[lunatica]

10. Regulating them again would be a start in the right direction

And getting them out of politics and lobbying would go a long way towards curbing the power grabbing. Make them serve the people and the country they belong to. Make them pay taxes and forced them to reinvest their money in new research and jobs instead of turning it all into profit.

And I'm a progressive.

[DJ13]

11. Excellent points

:thumbsup:

[CBR]

4. I have been involved in working on a program -- the Homeless Prevention

and Rapid Re-Housing Program (part of ARRA) -- that helps renters (only renters) pay arrears, rent, security deposit, utility assistance, moving (including storage) etc... This does nothing to overturn the system but it sure is helping people stay on their feet. Up to 18 months of rental and utility assistance -- for individuals/families at 50% AMI or below.

[treestar]

5. Good editorial

cadre of progressive bloggers who share Moyers’ half-developed vision – that corporate power must be stopped but who don’t offer a shred of suggestion or vision about what to replace it with – type their denouncements furiously on computer systems produced by Microsoft or Apple. (True, some nobly use Linux and free software, but nonetheless on components made by corporations in non-unionized sweatshops in developing world countries.) Their demands for anti-corporate purity from others are patently hypocritical from the get-go.

A case in point: Keith Olbermann – who of late has shared this born again anti-corporatism tendency - issues his ranted communiqués from the studios of General Electric-owned NBC. If we were to apply Olbermann's own yardstick honestly to him, we would ignore anything he says and simply report how GE stock rises or falls corresponding to each of Keith’s televised speeches. Ah, but that would make us as silly as the caricature of himself he has invented.

The unspoken truth is that college educated North Americans are not yet ready or prepared to live and work in a post-capitalist society. They have become weak and deformed around the corporate produced technologies and luxuries to which they have become accustomed and dependent. And so there is a vague call from these quarters for government to provide them these luxuries and technologies instead. Yet coming just two decades on the heels of the failed Soviet experiment one sees little evidence that those making the call have thought through how exactly state run health care, for example, would be operated much differently, qualitatively, than corporate run health care today.

Puts it very well.

[CitizenLeft]

12. I know someone who I dearly love and admire who fits this...

...description perfectly. She rants about corporatism and capitalism while indulgently buying movies, TVs, and "things" that all contribute to the consumer cycle. I even asked, so, if we destroy the "government" and all corporations, how will you live? Who will build roads? How will you watch the movies you love so much? There won't BE any movies! And in the process, you will destroy the very people you care about - the government-subsidised poor. The answer? Maybe that's what needs to happen to start all over and do it "right."

What?????

Reminds me of that scene in Amistad, where Skellan Skarsgard tells Morgan Freeman that maybe it'll be a good thing if Cinque and the slaves lose the court battle - to make a point. It's like saying people must die first in order to save them.

Great article.

[depakid]

6. What a laughable apologia for the corporate right!

Reading half baked propaganda pieces like this always gives me some solace knowing that the author- along with others who live in America will suffer too as the nation inexorably declines (or in his terms progresses) into a third world socioeconomic model.

He- along with others (notably Republicans) richly deserves it.

[angee_is_mad]

7. Kick and

keep kicking.

[angee_is_mad]

8. kick and

Keep kicking!!!!

[tblue]

9. With all due respect, this is horsesh!+.

Sounds so much like the incremental, "same we can believe in," of this administration. Nothing personal, mind you. But I'd be owned and enslaved, unable to vote or get a decent education if it wasn't for bold progressive misbehavers of times past. Thanks but no thanks for trying to get us to slow that wicked healthcare reform train down lest the red tapers find themselves with no power to deny coverage to sick people. Humbug!!!

[treestar]

14. And you aren't right now typing on a computer bought from a huge

corporation?

And what job field are you in? Why is it honorable, while everyone else's jobs are just trash? Explain why you are better than everyone else.

[tblue]

26. Okay. A bunny with a pancake on his head for you. nt

[Orsino]

15. I can't figure out the point of it, even...

...and it doesn't seem worth following a link to read.

Anti-corporate alarm bells have been ringing since there were first corporations.

[fugop]

13. K&R!

[HopeOverFear]

16. Amen.

[Armstead]

17. DU -- Home of the Neo Reaganites

That is so staggeringly insulting and stupid that I can't even begin to answer it

[Cha]

22. I'll take to heart what Al Giordano has to say much more than the

fail pushers on DU.

[Name removed]

23. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Number23]

18. Good Lord this man must have been reading DU over the last 7 days

"I have yet to see a single-payer health proposal, for example, that honestly admits that removing insurance corporations altogether would cause hundreds of thousands of Americans that work for them to become unemployed. Where is the necessary plan to retrain, retool and provide jobs for those workers? Who has even mentioned it, much less developed a plan or a proposal?"

"...In lieu of any real plan, we are offered “feel good” solutions of lashing out against corporations. Lost in that discourse: the people down below. That is what has defined the health care debate on parts of the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter to some that 30 million people who don’t have any health insurance at all will now have theirs subsidized. To them, if the insurance corporations also benefit from it, then it is a moral “evil” that must be stopped."

And what I think is his best one:

"There is actually a lot of progress going on in the United States, but it is hard to see amidst the smokescreens and media distortions, and even harder to hear above the din of what is now a mechanized industry of poutrage that has created its own market niche inside the capitalist system. That tendency's credo ought to be: We have met the corporation and it is us."

Fantastic points. Thanks for posting this, impik. Happy to rec.

[Warren Stupidity]

19. False premise.

Perhaps it is a revelation to the 20 somethings that both of our political parties are bought and paid for by whatever label one wants to apply to the corporate kleptocracy, most of us have been well aware of this fact for at least as long as the OP cites. Our outrage is over the bare naked aspect of the deformation of this attempt at health care reform - the creation of a de jure revenue funnel from washington to a branch of the kleptocracy. It is a rare day that the corruption is this manifest. What piques our outrage, beyond the naked corruption, is the jarring disconnect with the soaring 'yes we can, change you can believe in' rhetoric, and perhaps even intentions of the Obama administration.

Is the Health Care Deform Bill and incremental victory? I give up. I'm on the fence about that. Yes there is some reform, but there is no fundamental change to the current broken system, and a mandate to purchase for-profit healthcare from an industry that has demonstrated a ruthless avarice in a field that should never ever have been allowed to be profit based to begin with is simply an outrage. Luckily for the vast majority of us, we who have coverage through employers, through single payer government systems like medicare or the va, we will not be forced to hand over our money to wall street for our health care. Yes, more people will get coverage, but in doing so the sense of hopeless outrage at a system that represents corporations over people, the very rich over the rest of us is overwhelming and discouraging.


"There is actually a lot of progress going on in the United States" is there? Where? From Washington? Not that I know of.


"The December 18 edition of the Bill Moyers’ Journal television program offered a fairly representative example of the incoherence of this position. Moyers opened a panel discussion with this question to Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi:

“Let's start with some news. Some of the big insurance companies, Well Point, Cigna, United Health, all surged to a 52 week high in their share prices this week when it was clear there'd be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now. What does that tell you, Matt?”

Moyers’ first and central “concern” was not how health care reform might affect the lives of real people, but over whether it causes corporation stocks to rise."

No - Moyers point is that the market is reflecting the reality of this legislation. The Health Insurance Mafia has locked in its strangle hold on health care with guaranteed profits and mandatory insurance. Wall Street has correctly analyzed that fact and responded appropriately.

[cliffordu]

20. Kick and a thousand recs.

Yep, yep and yep.

[Phx_Dem]

21. Amen. n/t

[hulka38]

24. Let's not get to where we need to get to too fast. That would be very bad.

[rapturedbyrobots]

25. tearing down the false assumptions

its not as easy as corporations benefit = bad. corporations punished = good. i don't care if the insurance companies do better or worse after this bill. that's not the argument against the bill that i'm seeing put forward from the left/progressives/whatever you want to call us.

basically this is what i'm hearing from others, and now saying clearly myself:

i hate the insurance companies.
i would rather they did not exist.
i accept that they will exist in this health care system.
i accept that they will attempt to maximize their profits.
i am glad more people will have access to affordable (not sure what that means) health INSURANCE.
i hope that having insurance means access to health CARE.
i believe that health insurance companies attempt to deny care from subscribers to maximize profits.
i might be able accept being forced to buy their product if they could not do that.

giving the insurance companies a captive market without HEAVY regulation to protect said market is not a good idea (in any industry), and would rather fend for myself than be at the mercy of the insurance companies. of course, i'm young and in relatively good health, so your opinion may differ.

but don't pretend we're against this just because 'corporations are the devil' or some simplistic crap like that.

[Aramchek]

27. excellent post

if the 'progressives' here were responsible for getting Civil Rights Equality or Women's Suffrage achieved,
neither would have ever happened.

they have no concept of how lasting change is reached.