How healthcare reform opponents prevailed in 1993-94:

Intransigence plus exploiting Hillary's cumbersome plan

Denial of health care to those in need would seem to be unnecessarily cruel, but it is viewed as politically essential by right-wing ideologues like William Kristol, now the editor of The Weekly Standard.

The same cruel calculus is visible in President George W. Bush's all-out battle against expansion of the S-CHIP program for covering the health needs of uninsured children. (See below).

As we approach the latest round of America's on-again, off-again drive for healthcare, we must understand more clearly how the clever, if demented, elements of the Right blocked enactment of a universal healthcare program in 1993-94 when there appeared to be overwhelming momentum for such a plan. For example, a Wall St. Journal poll in 1993 showed 69% for a Canadian-style single-payer plan.

But Kristol managed to rally the Right, arguing that Republicans' had a critical political imperative to destroy any health plan that might emerge during the Clinton administration. Give the devil his due: Kristol assembled the then-despondent Right at a time when ultra-conservatives were feeling a national health plan was inevitable.

Kristol recognized that if the Democrats "delivered" on such a fundamental need as healthcare, the Deems would recapture the loyalty of their wavering base--and a chunk of the Republicans'-- for decades to come.

Moreover, a successful health plan would demonstrate several inconvenient truths: That government can take the side of the people against the powerful; that government can be a constructive tool for extending democracy and improving people's lives; and finally, that government can be far more efficient than the bureaucracy-ridden, profit-driven insurance companies who impose such huge costs on the US health system.

Thus, Kristol came to this bald conclusion in a memo widely disseminated on the Right: "Sight unseen, the Republicans should oppose it."

Enactment of a successful national health plan, he warned, would "re-reinitiate middle-class dependence for 'security on government spending and regulation" and "revive the reputation of the…Democrats as the protector of middle-class interests."

Kristol's strategy called for raising doubts about reform proposals, trying to suggest that they valued efficiency over quality and would erode personal relationships between the doctor and patient.

Two additional factors intervened to help Kristol and his allies:

1) NAFTA DEMORALIZES POTENTIAL ACTIVISTS Bill Clinton's all-out push for the job-exporting, corporate-supremacy NAFTA severely alienated the rank and file of labor and its retiree groups, who saw it as an unprecedented sell-out of their interests. When Clinton prevailed on NAFTA in November, 1993, it took the wind out of the sails of working people. They felt that they had been betrayed by a Democrat who won passage of a reactionary measure sending jobs to low-wage, high-repression Mexico that no Republican could have possibly won.

2) SINGLEPAYER BLOWN OFF BY CLINTONS Second, Bill and Hillary Clinton dismissed without consideration the single-payer healthcare plan that has been so successful from Canada to Taiwan. Instead, the Clintons opted for a plan that would keep large insurers at the wheel of our healthcare system, assuring their support for the healthcare plan as well as huge campaign contributions (that is, until control of Congress switched to the Republicans in 1994.

The incredibly complex and secretive process around the Hillarycare plan, plus the cumbersome final product calling for "managed care," gave the Right a huge, slow-moving dirigible that was easy to shoot down.

Americans' experience with "managed care" up to that point had been far from positive, and was often perceived as "mangled care": HMOs denied free choice of doctors, blocked additional testing, refused to authorize needed operations, and took other ruthless cost-cutting steps.

The infamous "Harry and Louise" ads launched by medium and small insurers--cut out by the Clinton plan--coupled with relentless Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio attacks--completed the task of blasting the managed care blimp out of the sky.

(I discuss some lessons of the lost HillaryCare opportunity of 1993-94 in the July 11 issue of Progressive Populist at http://www.populist.com/07.11.bybee.html)

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The S-CHIPS are down: Bush battles child health program while fighting to subsidize insurers

All the chips are down, as President Bush is waging an all-out hold crusade against the expansion of the S-Chip program to provide healthcare to uninsured American children.

Bush claims that this battle is over "philosophy," reflecting his belief that healthcare must include a substantial rake-off for the insurance companies as parasitic middlemen. (Bush is fighting this same battle in still-ravaged New Orleans, where he is pushing the sale of private insurance policies rather than rebuilding a charity hospital that could provide far more medical coverage for the same money. (See my July 25 post below).

Even the drug industry's lobbying arm, PHRMA--always eager to polish its sordid image among the American public-- and ultra-conservatives like Sens. Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassley are deserting Bush on this issue and pushing for S-CHIP's expansion. No wonder they're backing away:  both a poll by Republican public-opinion research firm and a recent Georgetown University survey show 86%-90% support for S-CHIP expansion, including 83 percent of self-identified Republicans.

As Paul Krugman astutely observes in his New York Times column 7/30/31,

It [the conflict] must be about philosophy, because it surely isn’t about cost. One of the plans Mr. Bush opposes, the one approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Senate Finance Committee, would cost less over the next five years than we’ll spend in Iraq in the next four months. And it would be fully paid for by an increase in tobacco taxes.

The House plan, which would cover more children, is more expensive, but it offsets S-CHIP costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage — a privatization scheme that pays insurance companies to provide coverage, and costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

Strange to say, however, the administration, although determined to prevent any expansion of children’s health care, is also dead set against any cut in Medicare Advantage payments.

So what kind of philosophy says that it’s O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?

To be blunt, Bush's brand of philosophy is willing to accept chronic illnesses and reduced life-chances for children due to preventable conditions if two overriding concerns are at stake:

1) The health system retains a central, guiding role for private interests despite their proven record of inefficiency, as the private insurers most surely do Total administrative costs in the US are 31%; in Canada it is 16.7%, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

2) It prevents the spread of the dangerous example of government acting positively in behalf of ordinary people. The possibility of the government acting as the public's democratic voice, expressed in policy that actually gets implemented efficiently, could easily re-kindle the expectations that fueled the New Deal and Great Society. Thus, much of current right-wing propaganda is devoted to extinguishing the very notion that it is possible for government to ever act effectively. (See for example Daniel Popeo's ludicrous argument in the 7/30/07 NY Times, placed by the Washington Legal Defense Fund on the op/ed page)

Thus, the Bush administration's shameful performance around Katrina is attributed to the inherent flaws of government inefficiency, not the fact that this particular government was stacked with pet poodles of corporate power in the agencies that matter to Bush and filled with utterly inexperienced and uncaring incompetents in agencies that don't count with Bush, like FEMA.

But not content with re-fighting the battle of Katrina, Bush and his dwindling band of bitter-end allies are now choosing to risk a lot of political chips in their war against S-CHIPS.

Having liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, the Bush-Cheney administration apparently felt that they had liberated themselves from any need to seriously consider Iraqi public opinion--or the US public's feelings, for that matter.

When the Bush and Cheney administration promote continuing the Iraq war long after the supposed September deadline for the "surge," perhaps maintaining an ongoing US presence for decades as in Korea, they betray the utter irrelevance of the opinions of the "liberated" about determining their own futures.

This disdain for authentic democracy in Iraq has long been evident, as with the imposition of Paul Bremer's hallucinatory free-market plan for restructuring Iraq's economy that resulted in enormous economic dislocation and surely helped to fuel the early stages of the insurgency. (For an exceptionally well-written and compelling account, see Naomi Klein's "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in Prusuit of a Neo-Con Utopia" from Harper's magazine at http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html )

Contempt for the liberated Iraqis' views was also apparent when the US held off elections as long as possible, resisting demands from genuine leaders until they could no longer be ignored without acute international embarrassment for the Bush administration. When the elections were finally scheduled, the US claimed credit for promoting the very democratic process that they had sought to defer indefinitely.

Finally, polling data shows precisely how the continuing US military presence is totally at odds with the overwhelming majority sentiment of the Iraqis:

• 80% of Iraqis believe that the presence of US forces increases violence; 60% regard attacks on US forces as legitimate (mid-2006 polls by US State Dept. and the University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes).
• "About 90% of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the US-led invasion than it is today, reported the United Press International in Nov., 2006, based on a study of residents in Baghdad, Anbar, Najaf, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, based in Baghdad.
• Two-thirds of Baghdad residents want an immediate withdrawal, according to a US State Dept. poll taken in mid-2006.
• 80% of Iraqis favor "near-term troop withdrawal, according to a Nov., 2005 Brookings Institution poll.
• 82% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of US-British forces and under 1% believe that they have enhanced security. (British Ministry of Defence study, Aug. 2005)

I may be going out on a limb, but could there possibly be a consistent pattern here suggesting what  the overwhelming majority of Iraqis feel?Perhaps the Iraqi people are trying to say something. Something like, the very presence of US invaders fuels violence; the removal of US troops will help create a path toward peace.

But the opinions of the Iraqis clearly carry no more weight with Bush and Cheney than do those of the American public. Recent polls like the May 24 CB/NY Times poll show 61% of Americans believing that the US should have never invaded Iraq, with 76% convinced that the war is "going badly," including 52% of Republicans.

The Bush administration has incessantly tried to cast those opposing the war as failing to "support the troops." But similar anti-war attitudes are held by the US troops in Iraq, as suggested by a 2006 poll by James Zogby showing that 72% of US soldiers in Iraq felt that they should be withdrawn by the end of that year.

As Noam Chomsky in his recent book Interventions (which provides the above opinion data on the Iraqi people) trenchantly observes, "Generally, however, public opinion--in Iraq, the United States, is not considered relevant to policy-making, unless it may impede their [elite policymakers'] preferred choices."

Remember the promises of George Bush I and Bill Clinton and Al Gore about NAFTA lifting the economies on both sides of the Rio Grande?

Just drive through any industrial area, and you will find them pock-marked with empty factories which have fled to low-wage, high-repression Mexico (or more recently, to China.)

At least 879,000 US jobs have been lost due to NAFTA, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute. (That data is several years old, so the toll is even worse now.)

The threat of moving to Mexico is being used to intimidate workers in about 68% of union organizing drives where that possibility is credible, according to Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University. This same threat is routinely utilized at the bargaining table to hold down wages or extort concessions, so it comes as no surprise that US wages have been stagnating. Unlike the stringent protections of corporations' "rights" on intellectual property (eg., for drug patents), labor and environmental violations of NAFTA have never produced any penalties, according to economist Jeff Faux in his book, The Global Class War.

LATINO-AMERICANS BEAR BRUNT OF NAFTA JOB LOSSES IN US
Ironically, much of the brunt of NAFTA-caused job displacement in the US has been borne by workers of Latino descent who work in industries like garments,textiles, electronics, auto parts, etc.

Specifically, no less than 47% of the total number of workers certified as having suffered job loss due to NAFTA were Latino! (Source: Government Accountability Office, "Trade Adjustment Assistance…" report GAO-01-59, Oct. 2000, Appendix 1)

SCHIZOID VIEWS ON NAFTA, IMMIGRATIOM FED BY DEMAGOGUES
Unfortunately, the linkage between NAFTA and illegal immigration has rarely been seen in the establishment media, with exceptions like a piece by Louis Uchitelle in the 2/18/07 NY Times. Thus, it should be no surprise that many people--following in the footsteps of demagogues like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan--understand that NAFTA has ripped apart US industrial communities like Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha, but have no clue that NAFTA's impact in Mexico has been utterly devastating.

Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan rightly decry the flow of US jobs to Mexico, and sometimes even--as when Buchanan spoke at Serb Hall in 1996 during his presidential primary run-- express sympathy for Mexican workers in the maquiladoras who are held underfoot by US multinationals thanks to NAFTA. But Dobbs and Buchanan fail utterly to understand that NAFTA has devastated the non-maquiladora sections of the Mexican economy, from corn farming to retail stores to local manufacturing, and instead blame utterly destitute and desperate Mexican workers rather than looking at NAFTA's catastrophic effects on the Mexican economy. So instead, they cruelly scapegoat immigrants and give credibility to the most extreme, anti-Latino forces in the nation.

As a result, we see many people simultaneously furious about NAFTA and yet blaming Mexican victims of NAFTA for job losses in the US!

Below is an excerpt from a piece my wife Carolyn and I wrote last year on the relationship between NAFTA-related devastation of the Mexican economy and the growing tide of Mexican workers desperate to emigrate to the US.


Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA's Disastrous Impact on Mexican Economy
by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter

The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed 'free trade' has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America's 11 to 12 million" illegal aliens."

NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of all workers affected. While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:
* NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their 'death warrant.')
* NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
* Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China's even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead....
The rest of the article is available at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-30.htm

MEDIA COVERAGE OF NAFTA GENERALLY AWFUL

US media coverage of NAFTA in particular and corporate globalization in general has followed the government-corporate line so slavishly that Soviet journalists in Stalin era would have been put to shame. I've written a few pieces for which I have provided links below:

• "CAFTA a Bomb for Working Americans" ... www.populist.com/05.10.bybee.htm
• "NAFTA's Hung Jury" http://www.fair.org/extra/0405/nafta-jury.html
• "Sweatshops Are the Worker's Friend" http://www.fair.org/extra/9611/sweatshops.html
• "Times Unmasks Protesters" http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/julyaug01toc.htm
• "Benedict Arnold Democrats" www.populist.com/04.9.bybee.html -
• "From Green Bay to Bombay: Offshoring Costs Jobs, Tax Base" www.populist.com/03.13.offshoring.html

Some of my other stuff on NAFTA and globalization for Z magazine and Progressive Populist is also available on line.

"Operation Eagle Eye" was a Republican effort to suppress minority voting in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1960's, and was headed up by none other than future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.

"Eagle Eye" involved the crude tactic of young Republicans, led by Rehnquist, trying to intimidate mostly older African-Americans and Latinos as they waited in polling lines. Minority voters were warned by Rehnquist and his henchmen that they were committing a federal crime if they were voting while not familiar with the Constitution, according to a variety of accounts, by former Nixon counsel John Dean and personal testimony by former Eagle Eye participants like Louis Rhodes.

At a minimum, the Operation Eagle Eye was intended to cause delays in voting and thus discourage minority voters who were overwhelmingly Democratic in their sympathies. As Dean notes, Rehnquist later went on to lie about his involvement during confirmation hearings when he was being appointed as chief justice.

FLORIDA 2000: COMPUTERIZED THEFT OF VOTING RIGHTS

In recent years, Republican voter suppression tactics have grown more sophisticated. As Greg Palast documented on BBC and in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the 2000 presidential election was swung to George W. Bush by the improper purging of more than 55,000 African-Americans in Florida from the voter lists. These African-Americans were falsely identified as convicted felons and thus ineligible to vote. That scheme involved then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris (also state Bush campaign chairperson), Gov. Jeb Bush, and a firm called DataPoint which carried out the computerized deletion of what would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.

OHIO 2004: "CAGING" AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOTERS

Now a new scandal is emerging about the 2004 elections and illegal efforts by Republicans to "cage" and then purge African-American voters in Ohio and four other key states. (Mark Crispin Miller's book Fooled Again is a very persuasive argument that the 2004 election was stolen by unethical tactics, particularly in Ohio; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has also written compelling case for this charge in Rolling Stone magazine)"Caging" involves sending a registered letter to someone's home; if that person is unwilling to sign for the letter, the Republicans assert that this person does not live at that address and should be eliminated from the list of registered voters.

As Jason Leopold and Matt Renner report in today's Truthout website: (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml">http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml "Previously undisclosed documents detail how Republican operatives, with the knowledge of several White House officials, engaged in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign in a state where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry. "The documents also contain details describing how Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign officials, and at least one individual who worked for White House political adviser Karl Rove, planned to stop minorities residing in Cuyahoga County from voting on election day."

The Republican caging program to suppress minority voting will be one of the topics on Bill Moyers' "NOW" program on PBS Friday night July 27.

Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani has somehow gained the reputation of being "the liberal" in the GOP field, based on his positions on abortion and gay rights.

This reflects two political phenomena: 1) how far the Republican Party has lurched to the Right (see Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's excellent book Off-Center for a keen analysis of this) and 2) how the commercial media have narrowed the definition of "liberal." At one point, "liberal" meant more than gender issues alone, as critical as they are. "Liberal" also meant support for worker rights and economic equality, and actively fighting against racism, among other concerns. But times have changed and many so-called liberals have lost any identification with the cause of workers or the poor.

But the supposedly Giuliani has employed barely-veiled racism at times, as when he addressed a crowd of white New York police officers, many of them drunk and carrying racist banners, to oppose a civilian review board to investigate NYPD abuses against mostly African-American citizens. Wayne Barrett, one of the few journalists to critically examine Giuliani's record, uncovered a "vulnerability study" that Giuliani's own campaign conducted on their candidate's weak spots. The study stated: "Giuliani's shrieking performance at the copy rally may be his greatest political liability this year. Giuliani has yet to admonish those who attacked the mayor with racist code words on signs and banners. Why not?"

Instead, Giuliani proceeded to maintain the racial polarization and regularly label African-American Mayor David Dinkins a "Jesse Jackson Democrat," a strategy that propelled him to victory as mayor. Once in office, Giuliani not only proposed cutting already-minimal welfare benefits, but, in the words of the NY Times 7/22/07, "suggested that many of the poor might profitably leave town." As Giuliani himself put it, "A natural consequence of a reduction in benefits might very well be that that would happen. That would be a good thing."

But Giuliani is not alone in pursuing a new urban vision where the presence of the poor --especially African-Americans and Latinos--is minimized and their influence marginalized. It boils down to ethnic and class cleansing. After Hurricane Katrina, several local leaders in New Orleans openly expressed the view that the devastation provided an opportunity to purge the city of many of its poor. NY Times columnist David Brooks, along with local New Orleans-area planners, openly spoke of the "silver lining" of Katrina--the chance to reshape the city without the troublesome African-American rabble. (I discuss this view of "Disposable People" in more depth in the forthcoming issue of Extra!, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.)