A Jacobin doubleheader: "The Case for Single-Payer" and "Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus."

Thinking, drinking and surveying the landscape, there is serious doubt in my mind that I can ever again identify with an American political party, especially the two biggest political monopolies.

I’m also no longer interested in fealty to symbols. I genuinely respect YOUR superstitions and addictions, so long as they don’t intrude on my space. I won’t whistle or splutter karaoke. By the same token, my butt and knee are mine, not yours. Open your eyes and see the world around you. Follow the money.

But I digress. Insofar as the various branches of Let's Pretend We're Democrats can get aboard with ideas like the two that follow, all the better. I might yet vote for them on occasion.

Otherwise, the tag "independent" largely summarizes my lot in life. So be it, although running for a council seat as a Sanders-style indie "genuine" Democrat still might be great fun, only if I can suppress the gag reflex at the thought of  the party's local management.

The Case for Single-Payer, by Timothy Faust (Jacobin)

Winning Medicare for All would allow us to take a giant step toward health justice.

Last month, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders introduced his Medicare for All Act — a bill that, if passed, would establish a federal, universal, single-payer health care system in the US. The legislation stands against a cruel summer of “repeal and replace” blood lust, most recently championed by senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, and years of mewling, milquetoast non-ideas from mainstream Democrats.

Toward Health Justice

The United States may be a country where Saudi princes can fly to get a heart transplant, but it remains a place where poor men die fourteen years earlier than rich men. In a land of resplendence, the powerful condemn the marginalized to chronic illness, because it’s not profitable to provide nutritious food or adequate shelter.

Fragmented and commodified, the present model treats health care as something that only happens when people are insured, not a holistic process spanning an entire life. Single-payer could begin to change this. Once the federal actor bears the costs of providing care and not providing care, it could finally be a tool for realizing health justice.

If people are getting sick and dying because they don’t have a place to live, or if the places they live are unsafe, then housing is health care, and you build housing to bring health care costs down. If people don’t have access to healthy food to eat, then food is health care, and you provide them with affordable or free food options to bring health care costs down. If people live in fear of their personal safety — if they are assaulted or beaten at home, at work, by the police, or by their domestic partners — then safety is a form of health care, and you provide safe havens for them to bring health care costs down.

In other words, a single-payer program is not the goal. Single-payer on its own cannot be the goal. Single-payer does not solve the biggest sin of commodified health care: that taking care of sick people isn’t profitable, and any profit-driven insurance system thus disregards the most vulnerable.

Sick people, people with disabilities, poor people, pregnant people, trans people, people of color — all of them are valuable to insurance markets only inasmuch as profit can be extracted from them; afterward, they are drained, discarded, abandoned to charity care, or, absent that, to the carceral state. Corporations have proven themselves unable and unwilling to look these problems in the eye, and people suffer while Democrats use public money to bribe corporations into trying to ameliorate the health care crisis.

Single-payer alone does not solve these problems. But it gives us a fighting chance to square up against them ...

Then there's this wonderful opening sentence.

Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders showed his commitment to a sharp break from the foreign policy platforms of both the Democratic and Republican establishments.

It connects to a long overdue foreign policy rethink ... but the robber barons aren't going to like it.

Breaking from the Consensus

Perhaps most significantly, Sanders used his speech to rebuke not just the neoconservative worldview, but some of the core precepts of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, like the concept of American exceptionalism and the projection of “toughness” through a willingness to use force.

“Blustery threats of force, while they might make a few columnists happy, can often signal weakness as much as strength, diminishing US deterrence, credibility, and security in the process,” he said in a thinly veiled dig at Trump, currently in the midst of an unnecessary contest of brinkmanship with the North Korean dictator.

Going further, Sanders declare the death of the concept of a US “benevolent global hegemony” — a notion embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike and often used to justify meddling in foreign countries. Events like the Iraq War, he said, “have utterly discredited that vision.”

In a rather remarkable section of his speech, Sanders went further than just about any mainstream US policymaker in rattling off a list of the US government’s past misdeeds — some of which, he noted, the US public would probably be aghast to learn about for the first time. To justify his point that intervention and force are the wrong approach, he cited events like the Iraq and Vietnam wars as well as the 1973 military coup in Chile. He particularly stressed the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government, engineered by both the US and British governments, which, as he noted, ultimately resulted in the country’s 1979 revolution and the anti-American hostility the US contends with today.

“What would Iran look like today if their democratic government had not been overthrown?” he asked the audience. “What consequences are we still living with today?”

"Single-payer health care has always been a goal of the Left. But Democrats have turned it into a punching bag."

You can't make these things up. On April Fool's Day, our local Democrats will gather to "define tomorrow."

Hmm. What exactly has the party done with regard to activism at the local level since Trump's election?

It has doubled down on failed leadership, and Gahan's shoes are being polished daily, but beyond those -- am I missing something? Or does activism in this context imply ignoring local conditions to shake fists at far-off Washington?

As ever, we await a pulse. Is there anybody out (in) there?

Democrats Against Single Payer, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Single-payer health care has always been a goal of the Left. But Democrats have turned it into a punching bag.

... The good news is that the same popular, grassroots pressure that ordinary people successfully put on Republican lawmakers who were preparing to strip Americans of even the meager protections afforded by Obamacare can also be used to push Democrats to support single payer. As much as numerous pundits and politicians mocked Sanders’s concept of getting things done through a “political revolution,” the past few months of widespread activism by ordinary Americans have shown this was far from the out-of-touch fantasy many dismissed it as.

After all, it was years of grassroots organizing and agitation from the labor movement that forced Harry Truman to cite these simple moral imperatives while proposing a single-payer system all those decades ago: “that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.” There’s no reason those forces can’t force today’s reluctant Democrats to do the same.

"We cannot begin to understand Election 2016 until we acknowledge the power and reach of socialism for white people."

Bluegill introduced this article on social media: "Indeed, we've always been pretty good at welfare for the well-off."

Yep.

Unspeakable Realities Block Universal Health Coverage In The US, by Chris Ladd (Forbes)

Election 2016 has prompted a wave of head-scratching on the left. Counties Trump won by staggering margins will be among the hardest hit by the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Millions of white voters who supported Donald Trump stand to lose their access to health coverage because of their vote.

Individual profiles of Trump voters feed this baffling narrative. A Washington Post story described the experience of Clyde Graham, a long-unemployed coal worker who depends on the ACA for access to health care. He voted for Trump knowing it might cost him his health insurance out of his hope of capturing the great white unicorn – a new job in the mines. His stance is not unusual.

Why are economically struggling blue collar voters rejecting a party that offers to expand public safety net programs? The reality is that the bulk of needy white voters are not interested in the public safety net. They want to restore their access to an older safety net, one much more generous, dignified, and stable than the public system – the one most well-employed voters still enjoy.

When it seems like people are voting against their interests, I have probably failed to understand their interests. We cannot begin to understand Election 2016 until we acknowledge the power and reach of socialism for white people ...

"The lesson to learn from Hobby Lobby is that employers shouldn’t be in the business of providing health care to their employees."

Word.

Opinion: Hobby Lobby makes the case for single payer health care, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

... The U.S. government already provides health care to the elderly through Medicare. There is no legal hurdle to expanding that system to include everyone in the country. Extending it to all Americans would not violate the U.S. Constitution, since the federal government enjoys broad power to “provide for the general welfare” under the Taxing and Spending Clause. And the Hobby Lobby decision itself notes that the government can pick up the slack on contraception if corporations like Hobby Lobby refuse to do so.

The only hurdle to Medicare for All is politics. Though some form of a universal, single payer system has long been successful in every other advanced nation (such as Canada, Japan, England, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, etc.), both major American political parties are opposed. Universal single payer enjoys widespread support among the Democratic base, but President Obama made no serious push for it and embraced instead what can only be fairly characterized as a Band-Aid on the existing private insurance system, which consistently trails our international peers.