Betrayal of the public option like compromises on slavery and will have the same results

yurbud

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Sun Dec-20-09 04:31 PM
Original message

Betrayal of the public option like compromises on slavery and will have the same results

The health care debate and the Democrats approach to problems essentially since LBJ left office has shown the limits of incrementalism and compromise--especially compromise that takes place before the issue is even offered for a vote.

The problem with incremental change, as the Democrats have proposed with health care reform, is that it can be rolled back over time. We have certainly seen this with alternative energy, climate change, and any number of issues where the Democrats make a modest change, then when the GOP takes control, they roll it way back.

By contrast, radical change has several advantages. First, when you set up a program like Social Security, Medicare, or financial aid for college students, they can be nibbled around the edges by the right, but they can't really be rolled back without massive public pushback.

Also, when you propose a big change, it is easier to get public support BECAUSE THEY CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING. When you put together a Rube Goldberg contraption that can't be summed up in a couple of sentences, and will make people's lives easier in a barely perceptible increment, they will neither support or oppose it, and even it does improve things, they will hardly give you credit when election times comes around, because they don't know what the hell you did.

The Democrats failed and failing attempts to mitigate the damage caused by amoral corporations reminds me a lot of how Congress dealt with slavery for decades. They would patch together compromise after compromise that on paper should have made both sides happy but eventually came unravelled, and in one case, led to a mini-civil war in Kansas.

Lincoln was not a radical. He was the last of the incrementalists. He simply said that slavery could not expand into any new states, which would have guaranteed that slavery would eventually die as free states would eventually outnumber slave ones--a nice incremental death.

But slave-holders would not tolerate their economic and political power declining and forced radical action.

So it is with the public option. It was a compromise designed to slowly kill the insurance companies as people flocked to the public option, or possibly even force the insurance companies to change their ways so they could stay in business. But Obama and Congress chose not to do this but instead leave the financial fate and even very lives of Americans in the hands of for-profit, sociopathic corporations, and left us no means of escape.

And just like every other, incremental market based reform, the current bills will be rolled back and reshaped over time so that corporate profits increase, and the benefit to average Americans fade to nothing.

It's time for middle class Americans to stand up and say enough! Politicians in Washington need to fear the public more than they enjoy the paychecks of their corporate patrons. FDR understood that if he did not deliver real, substantial change, America could have well faced a revolution. Democrats in Congress doesn't seem to understand this, but we need to figure out how to make them.