What an unmitigated tragedy. What an unspeakable disaster.
Democrats, led by President Obama, should have owned the populist outrage sweeping the country. Instead, Democrats made googoo eyes at Wall Street and the insurance corporations, and accused those of us, (people like Howard Dean, who pleaded that the giveaway to the insurance corporations in the PPACA at least be frontloaded), of being ungrateful whiners.
If you bail out Wall Street with taxpayer money and the suffering on Main Street goes on unabated, then you don't need to be a genius to know the consequences. Sooner or later, you're going to be dealing with very angry voters. And sooner it is for the hapless Democratic party.
Does anyone think the outcome last night would be different if at least, we had genuine healthcare reform? Legislation that controlled skyrocketing premiums, guaranteed healthcare as a right of citizenship, and removed once and for all, the pay or die reality of the broken and unsustainable for-profit U.S. healthcare system.
The much heralded PPACA, did none of that, and we still lost. Instead it enshrined the insurance corporations into the epicenter of our healthcare system.
I told you in September, much to the chagrin of those who thought if we brushed shit under the rug, no one would notice, what the Economist said.
But this isn't just a superficial public-relations issue for the Democrats. It's the product of a deeper malady affecting the party. Democrats seem to be unable to craft policies that deliver clear results in a fashion which voters can understand and vote on. That's because the policy-making process that takes place among Democratic legislators is so open to compromise, amendment, interest-group giveaways, and bank-shottery that the party's big programmes end up lacking coherence, not just in their details, but in their basic goals and values.
This is why Howard Dean was pleading for an age 55 Medicare buy in which would have already begun. This would have been an immediate and tangible hugely popular benefit which would have gone a long way against the Republican demonizing. And imagine how voters would have trooped to the polls to protect this from Republican assaults.
Howard Dean: "you can start enrolling people in June".
Like I already said, here's where it get's truly awful.
Embrace (cause we own it), the staggering electoral losses we've sustained. Let's say Democrats had passed a good healthcare bill, how much worse would the losses be today? At least we'd have an historic and proud legislative achievement, really helping people. Instead we have crushing electoral losses and a happy face bill amounting to very little.
Some of you actually thought that if we just stayed silent, little pesky details of how poorly the Democrats governed might evade the notice of a very angry electorate, who voted for change they could touch and would impact their lives. Instead, we received instead a bunch of possible way down the road IOUs, while Wall Street happily devoured taxpayer money with few or no strings attached.
So not wishing to poke my fist into a hornets nest, despite knowing the lunacy of such pedestrian thinking, I stayed largely silent.
But no longer.
I hope we can also agree that that dopey strategy doesn't win elections. Plenty went wrong, let's agree that, the next Democrats we begin electing will be true Democrats, not the triple and quadruple talking milquetoasters who got their walking papers last night.
I'll leave you with the enormity of the tragedy.
The other day, I read a rather horrifying article in the New York Times about the likely impact of the quantitative easing the Fed has planned for later today. Long story short, many economists don't think it's going to help very much, and it will do little or nothing to help most beleaguered Americans.
Here's what you need to understand. We have a shredded and hugely defective or non-existent safety net in the United States, and Americans are in for what I fear could be many years of terrible hardship.
But economists seem to be in broad agreement that no matter the magnitude of the Fed’s actions this week, the economy will remain challenged for some time.
"There is a substantial chance that the U.S. economy is headed into a lost decade, similar to what Japan has experienced in the past 15 years, possibly with zero inflation instead of actual deflation," said Robert J. Gordon, of Northwestern University, who serves on the committee that determines the start and end dates of recessions.
"But the consequences for the U.S. population will be much more severe than in Japan," he added, "because of our higher unemployment rate, our lack of a social safety net, our system that ties medical insurance to employment instead of making it a right of citizenship, our greater inequality and our higher level of poverty."
[emphasis added]
I'll have more in the days to come. I'm wasted and furious.