In an important piece (blogged here in Bruin Kid's Diary; and full article here at We Have Met The Corporation and It Is Us) Al Giordano calls out the left for not being liberal. The money quote:
The December 18 edition of the Bill Moyers’ Journal television program offered a fairly representative example of the incoherence of this position. Moyers opened a panel discussion with this question to Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi:
"Let's start with some news. Some of the big insurance companies, Well Point, Cigna, United Health, all surged to a 52 week high in their share prices this week when it was clear there'd be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now. What does that tell you, Matt?"
Moyers’ first and central "concern" was not how health care reform might affect the lives of real people, but over whether it causes corporation stocks to rise.
(Emphasis provided).
Giordano focuses on a central clarifying point about the current state of politics. The left has stopped being liberal.
For decades, "liberal" in American politics has meant the belief that government has a role to play in assuring social justice. Government's role is to level the playing field. When the interests of the strong and rich conflict with the interests of the weak and poor, government properly steps in to increase or support the power of the underdog.
Liberals, thus, have led the way in the classic strong v. weak battles of our culture. But liberals have done that by regulating the powerful, not by eliminating them.
When whites oppress blacks, liberals didn't eliminate whites, they regulated them by Civil Rights laws and Voting Rights laws and Affirmative Action.
When business oppresses labor, liberals didn't eliminate business, they regulated them by labor laws.
In the health care reform battles, the left (populists, as opposed to liberals) took an il-liberal approach: 30,000,000 previously uninsured people will now be insured? Bad... because it is evil insurance companies that will insure them!
The liberal understands the world. The lefty doesn't. The liberal knows that insurance companies aren't evil. Rather, insurance companies (like all humans and all human organizations) do evil things. The liberal approach is not to demonize insurance companies -- it is to regulate them.
The liberal approach is not to have government replace corporations, but to have government regulate corporate behavior.
The leftist, populist approach unrealistically creates false dichotomies: you're either for Wall Street, or you're for Main Street; you're either for corporations, or you're for people. The truth... as the liberal knows... is that there is no such choice. For Main Street to thrive, Wall Street must be successful. For workers to thrive, corporations must be successful. The liberal approach is to make everybody win, by leveling the playing field.
The Senate HCR bill insures 30 million additional people. It lets insurance companies do that, but it provides serious regulation of those companies:
- guaranteed issue policies
- no denial of coverage
- no arbitrary dollar limits
- outside-the-company review and appeal processes
- 80%/85% of premiums must be spent on care (currently, it averages 70%)
- national (across state lines) policies
- ability of employees to opt out of employer plan and into exchange.
So insurance companies are winners because they get new customers? That's exactly the way it should be. The liberal knows (and every good lawyer, businessman, or labor negotiator knows) that you win by creating win/win situations.
And the HCR bill does something the public option couldn't do: it puts downward pressure on premiums not at the front end (with competition from a government run plan) but at the back end (controlling the cost curve by changing the way medicine is practiced).
Medicare (and any single-payer plan) helps keep premiums down by eliminating administrative costs -- and profits; but a majority of health insurance is currently issued by nonprofits. But Medicare (and any single-payer plan) doesn't give the patient an economic incentive to keep health care costs down, and therefore Medicare would not only go bankrupt but would likely bankrupt the government were it not for the reforms in the Senate bill.
The Senate health care reform bill is a liberal bill. The fact that a fringe on the left is not happy with it, says more about the il-liberality of the populist left than it does about the bill.
And this is precisely why over and over again progressives (on the populist left) fail. They are naive and not liberal. They don't understand the way the world works, and so they can't make use of that knowledge by crafting policies that use government in the way liberals know it should be used: to level playing fields by regulating the rich and powerful, not be eliminating (or even demonizing them).
The Democratic Party used to be primarily liberal. Since the late sixties, it has not been. It has been partly hijacked by populist leftists who think that demonizing corporations or insurance companies is being liberal -- instead of understanding that all humans and all human institutions have evil tendencies that should be controlled and regulated by government.
And since the Democratic Party ceased being controlled by liberals, it has been ineffective, until now. Now, liberals are back in charge and the populist leftists are having a fit. If Democrats let the populist leftist dislodge liberalism again, we'll all become irrelevent again and conservatives will be back in control.