Bill Moyer's Journal hosted a discussion between Taibbi and Kuttner last night. The video and transcript are here: http://www.pbs.org/...
BILL MOYERS: Yes or no. If you were a senator, would you vote for this Senate health care bill?
MATT TAIBBI: No.
BILL MOYERS: Bob?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Yes.
Please watch this excellent segment which summarizes a great deal of the issues we are facing. Just brilliant.
Taibbi proves himself to be entirely fair and rational. I was impressed with his demeanor. Neither did he in any way attack or demean Kuttner for supporting the bill. At one point he says of Obama:
If he is not that guy [who stands up forcefully to Wall Street, etc.], he has to become that guy.
I was alerted to this segment by some comments in the Vicki Kennedy diary. One commenter was sickened by the revelations in this segment. I have to say that
I find both Taibbi's and Kuttner's take on the possibility of Obama changing course quite positive.
Right now, telling those of us who are distressed about the state of things and critiquing Obama's moves that we have it wrong, or worse, should be quiet, is exactly the opposite of what both Taibbi and Kuttner conclude.
MATT TAIBBI: It's absolutely a political winner for the president to hit Wall Street very hard and do all the things that he's supposed to be doing right now. You know, that all the things that FDR did. If he did those things, if he remade Wall Street in the way that it needs to be remade, he would do nothing but gain popularity. And I think that's the strategy he should have pursued.
Bottom line: The connections between the corporate interests on Wall Street and in the Health Care Industry are inextricable from the Health Care bill/s as written and without strong opposition from the left (hopefully that includes Kossacks) we will make no real short or long term process.
Therefore, understanding how the Obama Administration is beholden to and afraid of the plutocrats is necessary to build any movement which opposes those tendencies and keeps up the pressure on Obama to change course. Without that opposition from folks like us, we will lose, not just this round, every round on every issue.
Is is absolutely necessary for the survival of ordinary people in this country to form a long term, organized movement on the left which does not take no for an answer, which does not allow Rahmbo to continue to freeze out leftists. If a certain segment of Kossacks insist on shouting down those of us who want to both articulate and fight for Obama to change direction, they are dooming this country to disaster for the rest of my lifetime. Time is astoundingly short. Calling for compromise and acceptance without vigorous and vocal opposition to a host of policies Obama is promoting and putting into play is suicide. If we do not stand up, who will?
BILL MOYERS: . . .you said a few weeks ago that our failed health care system won't get fixed because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system, the political entity known as the United States of America. You said we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crisis. So if Bob votes for a bill that in his heart and in his mind he does not believe really helps the situation, isn't he furthering a government that can't solve the actual crisis?
/snip
MATT TAIBBI: ... And I think it's much better for the Democrats to lose on this issue and then have to regroup maybe eight years later, or six years later, and try again and do a better job the next time than to have it go through.
ROBERT KUTTNER: We're going to have to do that anyway. In other words, these fights never end. We're going to have to go back and make a fight another day. And hopefully, that won't be 20 years from now. Hopefully, it will be six years from now. I think if this bill goes down it's going to be even harder to get the kind of legislation we want because the Republicans are really going to be on the march. So, the Democrats are really between a rock and a hard place here, because if it loses, there's one set of ways the Republicans gain. If it wins, there could be another set of ways that the Republicans gain. And this is all because of the deal that our friend, Rahm Emanuel struck back in the spring of passing a bill that's a pro-industry bill that doesn't really get at the structural problems.
/snip
BILL MOYERS: Matt, Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a very progressive member of Congress who's been at this table wanted a public option. He says this health care bill appears to be the legislation that the president wanted in the first place.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense. Yeah, it's quite obvious that at the outset of this process, the White House didn't want, for instance, single payer even on the table
/snip
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, if he had wanted a public option, if he'd wanted a Medicare buy-in, he could have tried to persuade the public and the Congress.
ROBERT KUTTNER: That's what's so galling. Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Galling?
ROBERT KUTTNER: I mean, if you if you roll back the tape he could've played it so differently and he could've gotten a better bill. But we are where we are.
/snip
ROBERT KUTTNER: ... The Democrats are supposed to be the party of the average person. You have the so-called New Democrats who are really the party of Wall Street. And then you have the Blue Dogs who are fiscal conservatives. And if you look at what happened in Barney Frank's committee to the financial reform bill, he's a pretty good liberal, he ended up looking like a complete stooge for industry because in order to get a bill out of his own committee, he had to appease the 15 New Democrats, so-called, who were put on that committee mostly by Rahm Emanuel when he was the-
MATT TAIBBI: Sort of as a means to raise money.
ROBERT KUTTNER: As a means to raise money. So Melissa Bean, who's a two-term Democratic Congressman ends up being the power broker because she controls 15 votes on Barney Frank's committee of what she's going to allow out of committee and what she isn't.
BILL MOYERS: Why does she control 15 votes?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Because there are 15 New Dems, and this is the centrist caucus that particularly specializes in taking money from the financial industry.
BILL MOYERS: You call them centrist, don't you mean corporate Democrats? I mean-
ROBERT KUTTNER: Corporate, yes, sorry. That's too kind. They're corporate Democrats who were put on that committee because Rahm Emanuel felt that there's no better place than the House Financial Services Committee if you want to shake down Wall Street, to put it bluntly.
MATT TAIBBI: There's a great example of Melissa Bean's power was when the banks wanted to pass an amendment into the bill that would have prevented the states from making their own tougher financial regulatory rules. And Bean put through this amendment that basically said that the federal government would have purview over all these laws. And it passed. And this was the kind of thing that the banks wanted. They just go to Melissa Bean, she puts that amendment in there and it and it gets through.
/snip
BILL MOYERS: But what if by nature, that's not what he wants to do? What if, by nature, he prefers to head the establishment, than to change it?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Then he runs the risk of being a failed president. And I do have the audacity to hope that he's a smart enough, principled enough guy, that some time in his second year in office, he's going to realize that he's at a crossroads.
/snip
ROBERT KUTTNER: It just takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of nerve. It takes a willingness to be somewhat radical.
/snip
ROBERT KUTTNER: This style is rather diffident. His style is rather hands-off. He's very principled. But, if you're going to be a politician, you have to get in there and mix it up. And to the extent that his surrogates are mixing it up, when it comes to reforming Wall Street, they're mixing it up on the wrong side.
/snip
ROBERT KUTTNER: That's a little too harsh. Just the pity of it is there are probably 40 Democrats in the Senate who are not corporate Democrats. And there are probably 200 Democrats in the House who are not corporate Democrats. If we could push a little harder, we can take back our political system and have a democratically elected set of officials who are the kind of counterweight to big money that we need in order to get reform.
/snip
ROBERT KUTTNER: Right. And you've got to play hardball against these guys now. I do not want to leave this show with your viewers thinking this has been just a council of despair. So will you allow me to play Pollyanna for 30 seconds? Because I think this guy is nothing if not a work in progress. He's nothing if not a learner. And I think there is a chance. I don't think I would bet my life on it but I think there's a possibility that by the fall of 2010, looking down the barrel of a real election blowout, you could see him change course, if only for reasons of expediency, but hopefully for reasons of principle as well, if he feels that the public doesn't have confidence that he is delivering the kind of recovery that the public needs. This is a guy who is a very smart, complicated man. And I think don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin. I don't want to totally give up.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's too early to completely abandon hope that he's going to turn things around. But I think that's a belief that's not really based on evidence. If you look at the evidence of how he's behaved so far, and who he's got, you know, working in the White House, and who he's getting his money from, and how the party has behaved over the last couple of decades. You're really basically relying upon the impression that he gives as a kind, decent, warm-hearted intellectual guy. That's what the basis of that faith that there's going to be this turnaround. It's really not anything that's actually concretely happened that would give you reason to think that.
ROBERT KUTTNER: The other thing that's missing, if you compare him with Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, the other thing that's missing is a social movement. In all of these great periods of transformation, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president, where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson. It describes the abolitionists and Lincoln. It describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. Where's the movement?
/snip
BILL MOYERS: Are you a cynic after all your reporting this year?
MATT TAIBBI: No, not at all. I mean, I think on the contrary. I think cynicism is accepting all this as, you know, politics, as the way it is. I think we have to not accept what's going on. And that's not being cynical. That's being helpful.
Conclusion
/snip
ROBERT KUTTNER: I think there are periods of American history when the political system rises to the occasion. It certainly did with the civil rights movement. It certainly did in the 1930s. But there's no guarantee that it's going to come out the way it needs their come out. So I wouldn't give up on the political system. I mean, you have to keep fighting and working to rebuild democracy. Democracy is the only possible counterweight to concentrated financial power. And ideally, that takes a great president rendezvousing with a social movement. One way or another, there is going to be a social movement. Because so many people are hurting, and so many people are feeling correctly that Wall Street is getting too much and Main Street is getting too little. And if it's not a progressive social movement that articulates the frustration and the reform program, you know that the right wing is going to do it. And that, I think, is what ought to be scaring us silly.
MATT TAIBBI: We are starting to see signs of a little bit of a grassroots movement. I mean, the stuff, you know, people who are refusing to leave their homes after they've been foreclosed upon. There are little pockets of movements you know, groups that are organizing against foreclosures all across the country. And this is one small slice of the economic picture that where it's quite clear what's going on, and people can really understand the relationship that they have with the financial services industry. And I think if, you know, there it's possible to imagine a movement coalescing around something like that.
Finally, the Financial Bill is a travesty which is going to lead us around in the same circle the Health Care bill will, if passed.
We cannot afford to sacrifice real change to the idea that critiquing Obama is a no go. If we do not stand up forcefully for what has to be done, critiquing Obama will be entirely beside the point.
Right now, those of us who are pointing out what Obama has done wrong are his very best friends on the planet. If he doesn't heed our words, and soon, we will have a much bigger problem than another failed Democratic President.
And I really like this point from this diary:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
by HPrefugee
In hindsight, I would argue that it was not the Republicans who pulled Obama rightward this past year, it was us. Obama needed some real socialists to distance himself from. We failed him in that regard. We truly were Obamabots for far too long. Immediately after the election, we should have moved to the far left and started opposing him. We needed to get out there and scoff at his leftist credentials. We needed to mock him in front of our rightwing friends and say things like, "Obama’s not a real liberal" and "Obama couldn’t start a revolution if Karl Marx himself came back from the dead and gave him lessons." We should have rioted outside the White House and orchestrated labor strikes and threatened the bankers and scared the shit out of the entire country. It should have been us out there, not the Teabaggers. Then Obama could have calmed us down by caving to us just a little.
And here is another money quote from Kuttner which I meant to include but couldn't find when I went back. Thanks to Limelight for finding it.
Kuttner: The other thing that's missing, if you compare him with Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, the other thing that's missing is a social movement. In all of these great periods of transformation, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president, where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson. It describes the abolitionists and Lincoln. It describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. Where's the movement?
If you look at the changes Reid's manager is making in the bill almost as we read/keyboard here, you can see some real movement to the left as a result of all of us starting to scream blood murder.
Keep Screaming!!! Don't shut up.