The Success of Health Care Reform May Well Depend on Big Government That No Longer Exists.
Buried deep in Greg Palast’s detailed and devastatingly direct book from 2011 titled Vulture’s Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnavores is a statement that is becoming more and more common among some on the left, from David Kay Johnston, and Joseph Stiglitz to Adolph Reed Jr., and that is this:
“[T]he Big Problem with government is that we don’t have enough of it, the rules aren’t tough enough to stop BP from blowing Cajuns to Kingdom Come [or the coal companies like ]. Or the rules are corrupted, made by politicians who are greased to make [vulture capitalist] Steven Cohen’s Monkey jump.
"If you are screaming for the “guvmint to git off” your back, I see your point. But you’re still a loser, a cheap mark, a decoy duck, a dim unwitting stooge for forces even more powerful than that ugly guvment, a toy for powers who are shitting on you while telling you it is raining chocolate.” (310)
Tragically, this understanding might have been trumpeted to better effective in 1980 when the working class in this country, unlike the working class in France which joined its students and radicals, shunned its radical elements within the population and followed it’s right wing Union leaders who had joined with business to manage labor, that is control it, rather than support it, to support one Republican after another in their destruction of labor and the labor movement, while convincing these workers in a propaganda campaign that can only be seen in hindsight as brilliantly effective in convincing those same workers even as it used government to effectively strip them of their rights and well being that their real problem was government and that they should denounce government and they did.
Reagan convinced nearly every working class fool in America, from Oxnard to Hoboken, that the problem was BIG GOVERNMENT, even as the business interests in this country, under Reagan, usurped the power of that government from the people and effectively used it to strip them of pensions, benefits, and a livable wage, while also using it to ship millions of jobs overseas and suck their tax dollars into more and more benefits for the business community in the form of one government subsidy after another while continuing to convince the people of this country that the real problem, wasn’t the billions of dollars in corporate welfare dispensed at every level of government from federal to state to local, and defense spending boondoggles, but the people, many of whom now work for minimum or near minimum wage, as a result of structural transformations and now qualify for government largess in the form of the food assistance, and as such are bleeding the treasury dry at the princely rate of $189 a month or less.
Yes, sadly when people start speaking of big government, they quickly get too confused to be taken seriously because the only entity even remotely capable of taming the multinational corporation and the rampant destruction of the globe and the nation is an even bigger government. But the people who deny this are merely pawns of the propaganda that they have been fed and swallowed for over 40 years. Unless they are from the Southern U.S., there this ignorant ideology has been the norm for 2 centuries.
Obamacare: Too Small to Succeed?
The problems with the Affordable Care Act stem from government being too small and weak, not too big and powerful.
Richard Kim November 20, 2013
Just a few weeks ago, on the heels of the Tea Party’s disastrous shutdown of the government, pundits were predicting a sea change in American politics. Republicans were on the run, while Democrats were looking to recapture the House and revive a can-do, muscular liberalism. Oh, how things have changed! Now the conventional wisdom is that the various snafus in the rollout of Healthcare.gov have reversed the political dynamic. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly crow about the “end of modern liberalism,” the New York Post declares an “Obamacare Overreach,” and Congressman Paul Ryan (who, as my colleague Lee Fang points out, once quietly requested Obamacare cash for his own district) brays on about how Americans are witnessing—and rejecting—“big government in practice.” Even mainstreamers like The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, invoking Jonathan Rauch’s tired, Clinton-era jeremiad against the size of government, blame Obamacare’s failures on bureaucratic sprawl, because “government spends and regulates so much.”
It’s a nice parable, full of the tidy parallels that make the No Labels crowd swoon: as Republicans have pushed their monomaniacal hatred of government too far, so Democrats have fallen into the hubris of thinking that big government can solve everything. It’s also total bullshit (my emphasis).
At this point, we don’t know if the Affordable Care Act will eventually succeed and endure, and anybody who tells you it will or won’t is indulging in ideological wish fulfillment. What does seem clear is that unless circumstances change, it will fall short of its original goal of insuring 27 million Americans by at least 5 million people—and perhaps many, many more. These shortcomings, however, are a result of government being too small—too clipped, constrained, underfunded and underpowered—to achieve Obamacare’s policy aims, not vice versa.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/177293/obamacare-too-small-succeed
Buried deep in Greg Palast’s detailed and devastatingly direct book from 2011 titled Vulture’s Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnavores is a statement that is becoming more and more common among some on the left, from David Kay Johnston, and Joseph Stiglitz to Adolph Reed Jr., and that is this:
“[T]he Big Problem with government is that we don’t have enough of it, the rules aren’t tough enough to stop BP from blowing Cajuns to Kingdom Come [or the coal companies like ]. Or the rules are corrupted, made by politicians who are greased to make [vulture capitalist] Steven Cohen’s Monkey jump.
"If you are screaming for the “guvmint to git off” your back, I see your point. But you’re still a loser, a cheap mark, a decoy duck, a dim unwitting stooge for forces even more powerful than that ugly guvment, a toy for powers who are shitting on you while telling you it is raining chocolate.” (310)
Tragically, this understanding might have been trumpeted to better effective in 1980 when the working class in this country, unlike the working class in France which joined its students and radicals, shunned its radical elements within the population and followed it’s right wing Union leaders who had joined with business to manage labor, that is control it, rather than support it, to support one Republican after another in their destruction of labor and the labor movement, while convincing these workers in a propaganda campaign that can only be seen in hindsight as brilliantly effective in convincing those same workers even as it used government to effectively strip them of their rights and well being that their real problem was government and that they should denounce government and they did.
Reagan convinced nearly every working class fool in America, from Oxnard to Hoboken, that the problem was BIG GOVERNMENT, even as the business interests in this country, under Reagan, usurped the power of that government from the people and effectively used it to strip them of pensions, benefits, and a livable wage, while also using it to ship millions of jobs overseas and suck their tax dollars into more and more benefits for the business community in the form of one government subsidy after another while continuing to convince the people of this country that the real problem, wasn’t the billions of dollars in corporate welfare dispensed at every level of government from federal to state to local, and defense spending boondoggles, but the people, many of whom now work for minimum or near minimum wage, as a result of structural transformations and now qualify for government largess in the form of the food assistance, and as such are bleeding the treasury dry at the princely rate of $189 a month or less.
Yes, sadly when people start speaking of big government, they quickly get too confused to be taken seriously because the only entity even remotely capable of taming the multinational corporation and the rampant destruction of the globe and the nation is an even bigger government. But the people who deny this are merely pawns of the propaganda that they have been fed and swallowed for over 40 years. Unless they are from the Southern U.S., there this ignorant ideology has been the norm for 2 centuries.
Obamacare: Too Small to Succeed?
The problems with the Affordable Care Act stem from government being too small and weak, not too big and powerful.
Richard Kim November 20, 2013
Just a few weeks ago, on the heels of the Tea Party’s disastrous shutdown of the government, pundits were predicting a sea change in American politics. Republicans were on the run, while Democrats were looking to recapture the House and revive a can-do, muscular liberalism. Oh, how things have changed! Now the conventional wisdom is that the various snafus in the rollout of Healthcare.gov have reversed the political dynamic. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly crow about the “end of modern liberalism,” the New York Post declares an “Obamacare Overreach,” and Congressman Paul Ryan (who, as my colleague Lee Fang points out, once quietly requested Obamacare cash for his own district) brays on about how Americans are witnessing—and rejecting—“big government in practice.” Even mainstreamers like The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, invoking Jonathan Rauch’s tired, Clinton-era jeremiad against the size of government, blame Obamacare’s failures on bureaucratic sprawl, because “government spends and regulates so much.”
It’s a nice parable, full of the tidy parallels that make the No Labels crowd swoon: as Republicans have pushed their monomaniacal hatred of government too far, so Democrats have fallen into the hubris of thinking that big government can solve everything. It’s also total bullshit (my emphasis).
At this point, we don’t know if the Affordable Care Act will eventually succeed and endure, and anybody who tells you it will or won’t is indulging in ideological wish fulfillment. What does seem clear is that unless circumstances change, it will fall short of its original goal of insuring 27 million Americans by at least 5 million people—and perhaps many, many more. These shortcomings, however, are a result of government being too small—too clipped, constrained, underfunded and underpowered—to achieve Obamacare’s policy aims, not vice versa.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/177293/obamacare-too-small-succeed
