After graduating nursing school in mid Dec, I have felt a bit of an intellectual letdown. While in school, one of my classes required me to write two treatises on the health care system. This got me thinking about politics and the progressive movement. Since graduating, I’ve turned to reading about politics for amusement/edification, primarily Daily Kos, Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal and William Vollman’s Europe Central, which contrasts communism and fascism during WWII.
All of these things I’ve been reading got me thinking; who is proposing a long term progressive strategy? What is the progressives’ answer to what Krugman calls movement conservatism. Winning, while essential for progressives to govern, is not a philosophy in itself, so what is progressivism really about? What should it be about?
Many of these questions have been raised, answered, debated ad infinitum here. For example, most progressives support health care reform. All major Dem candidates have a plan that doesn't involve a single payer system; however, many progressives a single payer system. I’d like to also give a shout out to the American Nurses Association for its support of a single payer system. Krugman tends to support mandate plans like Clinton’s or Edwards which aren’t single payer but in effect, he argues, do the same thing as a single payer and are more politically expedient or possible when confronted by the evil twin specters of Big Insurance and Big Pharma. So while we aren't all in agreement as to how to get there, we all agree universal health care for all is a good thing. Great.
Thanks in part to Al Gore and the IPCC we all became aware of Global Warming, our role in it and the peril of ignoring it. It must be addressed in a meaningful way, like yesterday. Government policy must shift toward investment in CO2 reductions. I see investments in renewable energy combined with low or no emission vehicles (air cars-my current favorite, hybrids and electric cars) as essential ideas but there are a million others. There are so many great ideas out there already, we are so not living up to potential in this regard.
Back in the 90’s, I remember reading Thom Hartmann’s Last Days of Ancient Sunlight. In this book I was first introduced to the idea of corporatism as an insidious evil corrupting democracy. His thesis was that since corporations have become recognized by the US legal system as ‘persons’ and have immense financial resources, they obviously have greater power than any single US Citizen. So GM has more power even than Bill Gates. At least we can agree that GM has more power than I do and can get its way in this country even if it tramples my rights. According to Hartmann, GM is a fiction, the product of someone’s imagination. We give more power to not real things than people.
I don’t hear anyone in this year’s presidential run-up talking about this. Maybe Edwards has, but I don’t hear about it much. Too bad. Reform and limitation of corporations must be on the front burner of the progressive manifesto or we will never get a just society. Hartmann proposed a charter for corporations and ending personhood for corporations. Also, the corporate ‘death penalty’ for rogue corporations, ie charter revocation. I believe that corporations should be taxed more than citizens. Corporations, a fictional construct, must serve us, not vice versa.
To recap, Progressivism is, so far, about:
- Universal Health Care
- Ending Global Warming
- Renewable Energy
- Limiting Corporations
Part II to come..