I haven't always agreed with Robert Reich but he nails this one.
As many know, The Washington Post ran a hit piece in its Politics section on Thursday by David A. Fahrenthold masquerading as an analysis of Bernie Sanders' agenda. I say masquerading since a central claim of the piece is that Sanders' proposals for single payer health care and free college tuition are actually attempts to extend Government power and thereby impose Sanders'personal control in these areas. That isn't analysis. That is smear and fear character assassination.
And with the government paying for college, colleges would run by government rules. Sanders’s rules.
(emphasis added)
The notion of painting the Grandfatherly Sanders as a power obsessed authoritarian strong man in waiting would be utterly laughable, except that the Editorial powers at WaPo, in an excess of credulity amounting to journalistic malpractice, have promoted it.
Fortunately, Robert Reich has penned a concise and cogent corrective to Fahrenthold's misrepresentations and fear mongering.
The Washington Post just ran an attack on Bernie Sanders that distorts not only what he’s saying and seeking but also the basic choices that lie before the nation.
An entirely accurate assessment which Reich supports with specifics.
Reich effectively punctures Fahrenthold's inflated fears of "Government control":
Apparently Fahrenthold is unaware that three-quarters of college students today attend public universities financed largely by state governments. And even those who attend elite private universities benefit from federal tax subsidies flowing to wealthy donors. (Meg Whitman’s recent $30 million donation to Princeton, for example, is really $20 million from her plus an estimated $10 million she deducted from her taxable income.) Notwithstanding all this government largesse, colleges aren’t “run by government rules.”
Having dispersed Fahrenthold's rhetorical fog, Reich points out where the actual threat to academic independence lies:
Besides, the biggest threats to academic freedom these days aren’t coming from government. They’re coming as conditions attached to funding from billionaires and big corporations that’s increasing as public funding drops.
Reich then torpedoes Fahrenthold's claims vis a vis single payer health care.
But health care is already largely financed through government subsidies – only they’re flowing to private for-profit health insurers that are now busily consolidating into corporate laviathans. Anthem purchase of giant insurer Cigna will make it the largest health insurer in America; Aetna is buying Humana, creating the second-largest, with 33 million members.
Why should anyone suppose these for-profit corporate giants will be less “controlling” than government?
Why indeed.
There's much more and I think everyone should take the time to read Reich's piece as an antidote to Fahrenthold's hackery. Particularly since he gets to the heart of the matter at the close:
The real choice isn’t between government and the “market.” It’s between a system responsive to the needs of most Americans, or one more responsive to the demands of the super-rich, big business, and Wall Street – whose economic and political power have grown dramatically over the last three decades.
Yes, that is exactly the choice we face. It is a challenge that can't be met by triangulated half measures or the stale nostrums of politics as usual. As Sanders himself has repeatedly emphasized; it will take a mass movement to accomplish the necessary radical reorientation of our politics. That is what the Sanders campaign is about.
As Reich notes:
Fahrenthold may not see the populism that’s fueling Bernie’s campaign, but it is gaining strength and conviction. Other politicians, as well as political reporters, ignore this upsurge at their peril.
As I said at the beginning, he nails it.