In my diary this past Wednesday I had an interesting exchange with wu ming, who I certainly hope and expect will not object to my pulling out his comments to explain my purpose in this diary. He tends to be on the anti-corporatist side of the debate over the health care bill ("don't compromise with evil") while I'm on the side of amelioration -- ("take what we can get and immediately start working for more.") Anyone who doesn't think that both sides have their merit is just being silly.
But this diary is not about health care, although it may influence one's thinking about the issue at hand. It's about history -- our history of successes, or the lack thereof -- in challenging corporate interests legislatively over the past 35 years or so. One of wu ming's replies to me sent me reeling.
My diary offered a now-familiar song and dance (plus a picture of a two-headed LieberNelson creature, if you missed it) about why Obama could not get the legislation he wanted through the Senate and how we might fare better through reconciliation. wu ming replied by accusing me and others of being insufficiently cynical (all comments are excerpted largely to take out California-specific discussion):
[I]f the insurance corporations want to make sure a good bill did not arise, the number of senators willing to vote to pass a good bill will always be one or two short of whatever threshold is given.
There's certainly something to that, and wu ming escapes criticism of insufficient cynicism. So I challenged him:
We can only know how cynical we should be by testing the limits of what we can achieve. By your reasoning, though, much important legislation that has trod on the toes of powerful interests in the past should never have passed -- Medicare itself included.
He had a damn good reply to that:
i haven't seen such legislation in my lifetime. [note: emphasis mine.] the trend in the past 3 or 4 decades has been enabling the powerful, not stepping on their toes, regardless of the party in power. but i'm all for testing the limits whenever possible, if just so that we know exactly where we stand. i was overjoyed at the 60 vote senate majority for this very reason.
And that led me to this thought:
Good legislation post-Nixon: It's interesting to think of what good federal legislation -- as opposed to appointments, executive orders, regulations, etc. -- that challenges corporate interests has passed since the Zeitgeist and the Democratic majority in Congress pushed through the likes of the EPA and Clean Water Act under Nixon. Expanding the EITC is the first thing that comes to mind, but that didn't tread on any interests' toes specifically. You've given me a good idea for a diary.
And the time for that diary has come. You're reading it.
I argue with people from time to time who, in the process of slagging Democrats, talk about how relatively good Eisenhower and Nixon were. There's a better case for Eisenhower, who did indeed give a great speech on the military industrial complex just at the moment when it would no longer be possible for him personally to do anything about it (whoops!), but I accept that Eisenhower was a good guy who would have fit reasonably well in the Democratic Party in 1952 or 2009, and his failure to stand up against McCarthyism and to constrain the flaming anti-communist bastards in his Cabinet like the Dulles Brothers can only be help against him to a degree.
Nixon is the example who comes most powerfully to mind, because when I think about the good legislation that passed in my lifetime of consciousness about politics, a lot of it passed during the Nixon Administration. And, to be clear, a lot of it passed despite Nixon, who would have been extremely comfortable in the Republican Party of 2009, and probably would be posing awkwardly with teabaggers during this holiday season. He was no liberal, or even moderate; he was simply someone who happened to be President in a time when the Zeitgeist demanded that in order to succeed he had to be a better man than he would have preferred.
Still, I realized that I was having trouble generating what struck me as really good legislation passed since the mid-70s that challenged corporate interests -- and to me that's a shock.
I can certainly identify a lot of bad legislation serving corporate interests passed since then.
I can think of some good legislation that didn't particularly challenge corporate interests -- the Earned Income Tax Credit expansion under Clinton, S-CHIP expansion, and arguably the Immigration Reforms and Social Security reforms during the Reagan Era were good legislation, but unlike conservative ideologues corporations hadn't exactly lined up to kill them.
I can identify a lot of good regulation that has shored up that good legislation of the Johnson and Nixon years and pissed off corporations.
But new, good legislation that has made it passed concerted corporate attacks? It's amazing to me that there seems so little of it to mention.
I intentionally haven't looked up bills passed since that time to refresh my memory. My memory -- like yours and that of every voter -- is what it is; an accomplishment we can't remember doesn't much affect our political attitudes and behaviors. So I'm asking you not to look anything up either. So, off the top of your head, what legislation is there that is significant and worth celebrating for challenging corporate interests?
And, if you have to talk about health care (and I know some of you do!), let me ask you this: if it is really so hard to think of legislation worth celebrating in the past 35 years or so, what does that say about the value of passing, or not passing, this bill? What does it say about Obama's decision to cut a separate deal with Big Pharma so that only one set of corporate interests would be fighting tooth and nail against him?
If and when I get some suggestions I may add a poll asking people what is the best bill challenging corporate interests to have passed post-Nixon. Can we come up with fifteen options for the poll?