How Pure is
Your Hate?
By Paul Street
January 16,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Counterpunch"
-
Fellow workers and citizens, how pure is your hatred?
It’s easy to hate on openly authoritarian, loathsome,
right-wing political personalities and institutions like
Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, the Koch
brothers, Paul Ryan, the Republican Party, the Heritage
Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Breitbart
News, and FOX News. There’s no serious mystery over what
those malicious people and entities are about: the ever
upward distribution of wealth and power.
The bigger
tests are supposedly liberal and progressive
personalities and institutions like Barack Obama, the
Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, George
Soros, the Brookings Institution, the Center for
American Progress, the “Public” Broadcasting System (“P”BS),
the Washington Post, MSNBC, and the New
York Times.
These people
and organizations are no less committed than the
nation’s more transparently right-wing counterparts to
the nation’s unelected deep state dictatorships of
money, empire, and white-supremacy, but their allegiance
and service to the nation’s reigning oppression
structures and ideologies is cloaked by outwardly
multicultural, liberal, and even progressive concern for
the poor and nonwhite.
“What’s
the Something Much Better?”
I was reminded
of this distinction for the five thousandth time last
Thursday while watching Council of Foreign Relations
(CFR) member and “P”BS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff
interview the longtime Senior Obama Advisor and intimate
Obama family mentor and confidant Valerie Jarrett.
Read the
following passage from
the interview last week and then tell me, please, to
quote Alexander Cockburn,
“is your hate pure?”
Judy Woodruff, CFR and “P”BS:
Just last night, the
United States Senate took another step toward repeal
of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. There was a
budget vote, which is going to lead to other steps,
which will lead to repeal. Just yesterday, the
president-elect called Obamacare a complete and
total disaster.
Valerie Jarrett, White House:
I think it’s very
easy to say repeal and replace, but we have been
encouraging the Republicans, since the president
first started embarking on this effort, to put in
place a plan for affordable care to come up with
their best ideas. And they have had, what, 50, 60
votes to repeal, and not a single replacement plan.
So…
Woodruff:
Well, they say that’s
what they’re going to do. They’re going to get rid
of what’s there now and replace it with something
much better.
Jarrett:
Well, what’s the something much
better? That’s my
question. That’s the question the president has been
asking for eight years right now. So, if there is a
something better, let’s hear it. What’s the secret?
Obama,
2003: “What I’d Like to See”
After this
exchange, Woodruff moved off the health care topic, with
no follow up. That was a statement in itself. Surely
any reasonably informed “public” media journalist would
be aware that national Canadian-style single-payer
health insurance – Improved Medicare for All – has long
been backed by most Americans. Such a journalist would
know that single-payer would provide comprehensive
coverage to all the nation’s many millions of uninsured
and under-insured while retaining free choice in doctor
selection and being the most cost-effective way to go
thanks to the elimination of private for-profit
insurance corporations’ parasitic control over the
system.
A knowledgeable
“public” journalist might even know that then state
senator Barack Obama endorsed single payer on these very
grounds as late as the summer of 2003, when he
said the following to the Illinois AFL-CIO:
“I happen
to be a proponent of a single payer universal health
care program I see no reason why the United States
of America, the wealthiest country in the history of
the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National
Product on health care cannot provide basic
health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim
is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody
out. A single payer health care plan, a universal
health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to
see.”
Obama would
quickly drop those sentiments in the interest of getting
campaign backing from the nation’s giant insurance and
drug companies and their Wall Street investors on his
path to the U.S. Senate and the presidency.
Right after he
entered the White House Obama set up a health care
reform task force chock full of big insurance company
representatives. Not one of the more than 80 U.S. House
of Representative members who had endorsed single payer
– not even the veteran Black Congressman John Conyers,
author of a House single payer bill – was invited to
participate.
A Sicko
Game
The outcome was
the so-called Affordable Care Act (later dubbed
“Obamacare”), a complicated and corporatist bill based
on a Republican plan drawn up by the right-wing Heritage
Foundation. Since it left the price- and
premium-gouging and profit-taking power of the big
insurance and drug syndicates intact, the ACA condemned
a vast swath of the nation to continuing inadequate and
unaffordable coverage – this while the right-wing noise
machine has absurdly railed against “socialized health
care.”
Along the way,
the new neoliberal president played a sicko (yes,
Michael Moore) game to sell his Heritage Foundation
bill, promising citizens that his plan would include a
public option while having already traded that policy
away to get for-profit hospitals to back the ACA. As
Miles Moguiescu
reported on Huffington Post and as the New York
Times confirmed, “Obama made a backroom deal…with
the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure
there would be no national public option in the final
health reform legislation…Even while President Obama was
saying that he thought a public option was a good idea
and encouraging supporters to believe his healthcare
plan would include one,” Moguiescu noted, “he had
promised for-profit hospital lobbyists that there would
be no public option in the final bill.”
We can be
certain that the veteran agent of neoliberal mendacity
Valerie Jarrett advised Obama to take this deeply
duplicitous path.
The
Memory Hole
It’s quite
remarkable how completely the dominant “mainstream”
media-politics culture manages to throw
majority-supported social-democratic policy proposals
down George Orwell’s memory hole.
Listening to
the Woodruff-Jarrett conversation, you’d think Bernie
Sanders had never spoken to giant and enthusiastic
crowds on behalf of single payer last year.
You’d think
Conyers had never drafted single-payer legislation
backed by a considerable number of U.S. Congressman.
You’d think
that Canada and most of the industrialized world had
never successfully implemented a widely popular
nation-wide systems of universal governmental health
insurance.
You’d think
single-payer didn’t have millions of citizen backers –
including many thousands of doctors and National Nurses
United – from coast to coast.
You wouldn’t
imagine that even Donald Trump has mused that
single-payer might be the best way to fund health
insurance for all.
“So,
if there is a something better, let’s hear it. What’s
the secret?”
Unreal.
It reminds me
of Hillary Clinton’s response as head of newly elected
U.S. President Bill Clinton’s health care task force
when Dr. David Himmelstien, the head of Physicians for a
National Health Program, told her about the incredible
possibilities of a comprehensive, single payer “Canadian
style” health plan, supported by more than two-thirds of
the U.S. public and certified by the Congressional
Budget Office as “the most cost-effective plan on
offer.”
“David,”
Hillary (Michael Moore’s heart throb)
commented with fading patience before sending him
away in 1993, “tell me something interesting.”
That’s right:
tell me something interesting.
Along with the
big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed
against, the co-presidents Bill and Hill decided from
the start to exclude the popular health care alternative
– single payer – from the national health care
“discussion.” What she advanced instead of the system
that bored her was a hopelessly complex and secretly
developed program called “managed competition.”
Interesting. Obama would have more success with his
Heritage Foundation-developed update in 2009 and 2010.
And they wonder
why Trump won.
Paul Street’s latest
book is They
Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014) |
