On Monday, I stood in the rain on the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento with thousands of students and workers to protest further deep cuts to California’s beleaguered public infrastructure. Last Saturday, over 85,000 people marched in Madison, Wisconsin in support of the basic rights of workers to collectively bargain. What these actions have in common, aside from being largely ignored by corporate media outlets, is a renewed commitment to resisting the relentless assault on the American middle class exemplified by Governor Scott Walker’s phantom anti-worker agenda in Wisconsin and the persistent lack of democracy in California.

In last fall’s elections, Scott Walker did not campaign on stripping the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Yet that has become the non-negotiable central goal of his brief tenure in office. Similarly, the progressives who swept every statewide office in California while continuing to hold commanding majorities in both chambers of the legislature did not campaign on a platform of cutting further billions from California’s education and health care systems. But such cuts are the most conspicuous feature of Jerry Brown’s proposed budget.

Electoral democracy has effectively ceased to function across vast swaths of the federal, state and local governments of the United States of America. This did not happen by accident, but rather is part of a plan orchestrated and carried out by a relatively small group of wealthy plutocrats and radical right-wing ideologues with converging interests. They accept frequent assistance from heedlessly self-interested corporations particularly those in the financial industry along with various fundamentalist Christian organizations. All of this may sound like a conspiracy theory, but I would hardly call it that. Much of this plan has been carried out in the open and there is extensive literature documenting it all the way back to the late 1970s. A recent example of this documentation would be Jane Meyers’ extensive investigative report for the New Yorker on the hugely influential political activities of the Koch brothers, who are well known industrial billionaires that believe in radically remaking the U.S. to have an authoritarian government exclusively of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

For these reasons, elections can no longer be the principal means that the American people use to express their political will because the results of elections have become increasingly detached from actual government policymaking. One can look at the unanticipated but vicious attacks on workers rights across the Midwest, or California’s non-democratic legislature, or the absurdly dysfunctional institution that is the United States Senate, to know with certainty that this assertion is true. Voting is still important and seems to occasionally yield results, but the machinery of governance has become too disconnected from the voting booth for it to be reliable as the primary democratic action. I am advocating that given the deteriorating position of the middle class and the perilous state of global climate systems, U.S. citizenship demands more from those who benefit from its rights and privileges.

But what else can we do? If the electoral process is too corrupt to be effective and a self-selected billionaire elite is systematically dismantling democratic self-government, it would seem that despair is our only option. Except to believe that would only be buying into the modern mythology about ultra wealthy people. We are meant to believe they are wealthy because they are brilliant, or talented, or because they add untold value to our economy, or even due to a preternatural luck that the rest of us cannot access. But in reality, they are only rich because of us. The Koch brothers are nothing more than a pair of clever thugs who have helped push the government to systematically redistribute the wealth of the nation upwards for the last thirty years, some of it into their own pockets. We make them wealthy and we can stop anytime we want.

When I was in Sacramento, there were huge numbers of students from community colleges and CSUs, but very few from the University of California. I think that is because UC students do not understand that we don’t need the boss. Rather, the boss needs us. Put simply: the University of California, the state of California, the United States of America and most especially the moneyed elites that have driven our country into a ditch, can only function if students keep going to school, workers keep going to work, and the police keep securing the institutions of public and private governance against the collective will of the governed. What would happen if we just stopped playing their game?

Crossposted at A Gilded Planet.

The breathtakingly ugly dude in this video either has no understanding of how finance works, or he is being deliberately obtuse in order to keep his viewers from understanding the financial condition of the U.S. The most obvious way to look at whether the US government is broke is to look at interest rates on federal government bonds. This is the same as looking at how much the government has to pay to borrow money. If we were broke, this interest rate would be astronomical because people would risk lending to us only in exchange for very high returns. As it stands today, the interest rate on government bonds is at record lows. That means it’s cheaper for the US government to borrow right now than at any time in recent history. Needless to say, this would not happen if the country was bankrupt unless markets are completely irrational. If Republicans think the U.S. is broke and can’t afford to borrow any more money, then what logically follows

Another way of looking at this question (Is America Broke?) is to look at our debt-to-GDP ratio. This ratio compares public debt to the total wealth of our economy, and its useful for making historical and international comparisons. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is currently high, but much much lower than it was right after World War II. Despite this much bigger public debt after World War II, there was a massive postwar economic boom. In other words, America was either broke during the postwar economic boom that created the modern American middle class or it’s not broke right now. You pick.

Finally, this pitifully hideous dude from the video completely ignores Michael Moore’s point in favor of making glib remarks about Charlie Sheen. Moore is not denying that federal, state and local governments face significant budget deficits, he is saying that the reason they face deficits is due to a series of government policies in recent decades that culminated in the Bush years. These policies were, in effect, massive wealth transfer policies that redistributed money and economic power from the middle class to the super rich. And while you can quibble about the nature of those policies, what there is no question about is the wealth of this nation. America is still the richest country in the world. We are not, by any means or honest measurement, broke.

I think the answer here is that this isn’t really an ideal moderate Republican plan. It’s a plan that a few moderate Republicans have proposed before…but they only proposed it as an alternative to an incredibly liberal plan. Very few moderate Republicans have fought for a plan like this or even supported one. Their support was nominal.

The exception was Mitt Romney…but even he was working with a huge liberal Democratic majority (8-1 in one legislature).

In a vacuum, would any Republican actually seriously push for this plan or any other healthcare plan? No. They simply don’t care about healthcare. It’s not on their agenda. So it’s hard to really ascribe the plan to any of them and be 100% accurate. It works as a political rhetoric, but it’s a stretch in practice.

I think this is a progressive victory. We’re providing public insurance (Medicaid) for [~15] millions, spending on public health clinics, giving subsidies to millions, and we’re moving towards a system where private insurance companies are more like heavily regulated utilities. That’s a system that can work, and has worked in other countries.

There are many ways to skin the healthcare cat. There are many different systems that can work. We’re heading towards the heavily regulated private market approach. That’s fine.

One note: if progressives continue to enjoy political success for the foreseeable future, it’s likely that some kind of Medicare buy-in or public insurance option will be added to the reform structure. If this happens, I would argue that something like French system of insurance may evolve over the coming decades. All else being equal, we’re looking at a Dutch or Swiss system as a worst case scenario. Both countries acknowledge health care as a right, legally and culturally. That’s why the Affordable Care Act is an historic progressive achievement.

Jeremy Pilaar: “Kill The Health Care Bill! Start Over!” – Howard Dean

Robbie Bruens: Yeah, because if we start over now we’re not going to end up waiting another decade or two. Killing a bill does not mean we will get bolder reform in the future. It means we will get less bold reform in the future. History tells this story from Truman through Obama. Only Democrats are this good at adopting Republican talking points when the going gets tough.

Nik Dixit: The way I see it:

A) This is still a great bill. Insurance regulations and subsidies are a huge win, and they will cover 30+ million people. Moreover, they establish the principle that government is responsible for ensuring coverage.

B) We can improve this bill later. Medicare and Social Securities each began as limited programs, but as they developed constituencies they became much more broad.

C) If we fail, we’re not going to get another chance for decades. When Truman/Nixon/Clinton failed, it was literally decades before anyone tried again (16 years in Clinton’s case). If this happens, literally hundreds of thousands of people will die in the interim.

It’s not a perfect bill, but it’s a good bill, and a bill that can be improved. We have the first real chance to do this in half a century, and we would be fools to toss it aside.

Jeremy Pilaar: I know this bill still has a lot of good in it, but do either of you feel like we’ve crossed a line somewhere on the amount of acceptable concessions we’ve been giving to get 60 votes? The political strategist in me says “yes, duh”, but the citizen in me is screaming “wtf happened?”. With this president and this strong a democratic presence in congress, it feels highly disappointing that we were unable to get any sort of public option (even a trigger) as part of the bill. I feel like the public option was in and of itself a fairly big concession and a low starting point from which to build forward, and was willing to accept its removal and replacement with the medicare buy-in, but now I feel like the bill carries just as many advantages (if not more) for insurance companies as it does for consumers. Their profits are now not only locked in, but increased as a result of the pool of new customers now waiting at the door with public money in hand. I know that there will be some degree of strict new oversight, but the lack of any public option whatsoever sets up absolutely no alternative to the status quo that has so desperately failed up until this point and gives us no reason to think will change all that dramatically considering the power the insurance lobbies have in Washington. I guess it’s the Canadian and French in me speaking (vive la révolution!), but I would have liked to see at least some form of public health service...

Nik Dixit: Yeah, it’s a win for insurance companies. However, I don’t particularly care about insurance companies, I care about the average person. At the end of the day, the average person stands to gain a lot, too.

Robbie Bruens: A couple of things to note about what has been said here. First, the bill expands Medicaid coverage considerably. Hopefully we’ll get the House expansion, which is even bigger than the Senate expansion. There’s also some major improvements to Medicare. So even though we might not get a new public health service, we’re going to get better public health services out of the programs that already exist. And the other thing is that this bill establishes the principle that the federal government has the responsibility to ensure that health care is available for everyone. You could view it as the creation of a new implicit public health program…and once this principle is established it will never go away. Then we can be free to tinker around the margins as far as public/private and profit/nonprofit etc.

And as far as the insurance companies go, yes it is a win for them to not have to compete with a Medicare buy-in or any sort of public option. But there are two complexities to this story.

First, the insurance companies wouldn’t have had much trouble with a opt-out public option that has no ability to use Medicare’s bargaining power advantage (this is the version of the public option Reid had thought could get through the Senate with 60 votes until Lieberfuck and Brainless Nelson threw fits). What this says to me is that it would be better to get a public option that’s integrated into Medicare (and thus has a bargaining advantage) through a reconciliation vote (only need 50 Senators) next year or in 2011, rather than a weak public option with 60 votes this year. Because a weak public option could actually hurt the case for public health care in the long run.

Second, I do not see insurance companies as stronger after this bill passes regardless of what happens to the public option. They are essentially on life support, because they serve no useful purpose except to enable to excess profits of Pharma, the device manufacturers and the private hospitals and doctor’s groups. This is the most frustrating thing about the progressive backlash against Lieberman. The health insurance companies couldn’t beat a public option on their own. It’s the other parts of the medical-industrial complex that really stand to benefit and they are the true killers of the public option.

Which bring me to a final point. What this process has revealed is the continuing need for lobbying reform and campaign finance reform, but almost more importantly, reform of the United States Senate. The filibuster has evolved into minority rule, and if we want to prevent the federal government from following California into the gutter, we need to help Senator Tom Harkin who is trying to change Senate procedure so they can actually function properly.

Don’t use the existence of the filibuster as an excuse to dodge responsibility for creating subpar legislation. Everyone knows the Democratic caucus has the power to get around the filibuster or end it, so don’t expect progressives to cut you slack when you sell us down the river in deference to minority rule. Progressives worked hard to elect President Obama and the very large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. If we don’t feel like we’re being represented in Washington, we aren’t going to work very hard for you in 2010. That’s not a threat, any ‘political scientist’ can explain how base motivation works. So fight for us like your job depends on it…because it actually does.

More on the public option here and here and the filibuster here.

This weekend’s House vote to pass historic health care reform legislation sends President Obama’s central domestic policy priority sailing towards the legislative end zone. In addition, the House passed major energy/environment legislation earlier this year, another major Obama agenda item. Both bills now await consideration on the floor of the United States Senate. As we work to push our Senators to do the right thing on both bills, it would be wise to keep the recent comments offered by Chris Hayes in mind:

The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world’s greatest deliberative body. What was once a rarely invoked procedural mechanism has metastasized and turned into a de facto supermajority requirement for any legislation. In the 103rd Congress (1993-94) there were forty-six votes on “cloture,” the motion to override a filibuster and allow something to be considered on the floor. In the last Congress, the 110th, the first one in which Republicans were in the minority, there were a record 112. Even without the filibuster, our system already has more choke points where legislation can die than almost any other liberal democracy. It’s rare for one party to control both houses of Congress and the White House, and to have as solid a majority as the Democrats currently do. But the filibuster confers such power on an obstinate minority that it distorts the relationship between elections and governance in a way that dangerously attenuates democracy itself.

Right wing obstructionists be warned: the progressive movement that elected President Obama and substantial majorities in both national legislative bodies will not abide the subversion of democracy by an entrenched minority.

Yesterday was a special election. The political world treated it like it was this year’s political World Series. But it wasn’t. It had serious consequences for the state of New Jersey and the state of Virginia. It had conventional consequences for New York City. It had minor consequences for the United States House of Representatives, which is now slightly but measurably more progressive than it used to be. The election NY-23 may have affected the internal politics of the Republican Party in a serious way. And of course, it had consequences for the gay population of Maine, who have been tragically deprived of some of their human rights.

But that’s all. A little drama, a little comedy, a little tragedy. It was not this year’s political World Series. This year, the political World Series is not an election. It’s what happens with health care. But don’t be a spectator. Go and play a little hardball.

Last Friday, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as a call to action rather than a reward for prior accomplishments. If you haven’t watched his remarks yet, you should. While he takes some measure of credit for his work towards ending the Iraq War, he appears uncomfortable when speaking about Afghanistan. This is a good thing. He realizes the dissonance of accepting a Peace Prize while conducting a war in Afghanistan that many are urging him to escalate. This call to action should inform his decisions moving forward.

It’s easy to prattle on about the Nobel Committee’s process of selection (Hendrik Hertzberg and Howard Zinn offer the best attempts). Holding the leader of the most powerful nation on earth accountable for the advancement of the cause of peace is much harder. But it is what we must do if we want peace.

…our own Senator, Dianne Feinstein. So congratulations, Cal Democrats! Only a handful of weeks ago, Senator Feinstein refused to take a stance on the central component of meaningful health care reform. But we spent the fall calling Senator Feinstein’s office (so often that the office began asking people on the phone if they were from our group) and gathering signatures for the public insurance plan and it’s that kind of public pressure that can really shape outcomes even in a repugnantly undemocratic institution like the United States Senate. This is how we can beat the corporate lobbyists who have run Washington for too long and if we keep working hard, we will have a universal health care bill on the president’s desk sometime next month that makes us all proud.