Even before yesterday’s loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat to a
Republican, the last few months have made the likely outcome of health
insurance reform pretty clear: in the best
case scenario, they’ll pass lukewarm “reform” that keeps the current system
pretty much in place but places a few bandaids on it to keep the boat from
sinking; in the worst case, they do nothing at all.
Some have argued (myself included) that the 60 seat majority
that the Dems had in the Senate is an illusion (thanks to the Blue Dogs) and
therefore the 41st Republican doesn’t much matter. The scenario above was just as likely before
yesterday’s special election in Massachusetts as it was after. But the loss is symbolic and coming on the
anniversary of Obama’s presidency I thought I’d put down in writing my thoughts
on what it all means. Call it a personal
State of the Union address.
We are one year into the election of a man who brought hope
to millions and things are not looking good, on health care and on many other pressing
social issues as well. On health care, I’ll
be interested to see if the Dems can somehow turn the ship around but I’m not
very optimistic. Why? Because the reality of the situation is this:
multinational corporations as a whole are extremely powerful in this
country. Corporate interests always come
first. To the extent that the people can
get what scraps of reform they can depends on more or less well-organized
campaigns (social movements) but they will always win only scraps. Symbolic victories. Minor reforms. Corporations won’t allow anything that would in
any way threaten their bottom-line much less their very existence. We can petition Coca-Cola, for example, to
stop selling unhealthy sodas in our public schools, but the most we can ask for
is that they sell some of their other products instead (Dansani water for
example). We cannot ask that our public
schools be one of the few places where kids are spared the relentless barrage
of advertisements and the pressure to consume.
After all, that’s what our economic system is based on and we want them
to grow up to be good capitalists.
So it is with health care reform (which really was more
accurately called “health insurance reform”).
From the start, the insurance companies (arguably the most powerful of
powerful corporations) waged a steady, well-organized and well-financed campaign
against it. They fought the battle on a
variety of fronts, employed the heavy use of astro-turf groups, took advantage
of some of the uglier aspects of U.S. culture (racism and classism) and made
smart use of hyperbole and propaganda to lure in what actual citizens they
could to become a small but vocal minority on the issue, sunk millions of dollars
into organizing rallies, disrupting town hall meetings and putting pressure on
Congress and through all this they won. We
won’t get access to decent health care for every American. Not because we can’t afford it (most other
wealthy industrial nations manage to provide this basic human right for their
citizens) but because in the end, we the people were not able to slay the Goliaths
of powerful insurance corporations.
I think what’s most important now is that we take this time
to reflect and ask ourselves some questions.
Why did this happen? How did these
Goliaths get to be so huge? (hint:
google “corporations and legal personhood”) What does it mean for democracy
when corporate interests outweigh those of society as a whole? Can we still call such a system a democracy?
This is the context in which we must examine President Obama’s
first year.
If there’s one overwhelming lesson to learn here it’s this: who
rules this country depends less on who occupies the Oval Office and more on who
sits in the board rooms of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Obama was the best candidate we could ever
have hoped for. He’s a good, smart man,
a brilliant politician and he had an idealist belief in the democratic values
this country was [partly] founded on and most of us found that idealism refreshing
and irresistible. But it still wasn’t enough.
It will take more than electing the best and brightest to
the highest office of the country to bring real democracy back to the United
States, to create the “great society” that all our people deserve. In the United States, the system itself is
rotten at the core. Going back to the
early days, when our founding fathers were sitting around thinking of what
their new country would look like, we can see it was based partly on admirable Enlightenment
age values such as democracy, freedom, equality and justice for all (not just
for the rich) that the cynics among us call hyperbole but the idealists among
us take to heart. But, being crafted by those
founding fathers (also known as the wealthy elite, exclusively white men) it
was also based on the notion that some people deserve to have more democracy,
freedom, equality and justice than others (their definition of “all” was rather
limited) and that capitalism is not only the best but the ONLY way to organize an
economic system. From this start,
things have only gotten worse.
Hyper-capitalism is what we have today.
A globalized capitalism that devours the world’s poor and grows stronger
every day.
As Dorothy Day said, “our problems stem from our acceptance
of this filthy rotten system”. It’s a
system that prizes corporations over citizens, profits over people and money
over basic human rights. It will take
more than electing a good guy to the presidency to change this system. People like Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi showed us that it is possible to create a better, more humane system through non-violence. I
truly believe the human race is capable of it. We’ll get there eventually, and we won't get there unless we dismantle the current system. I don't believe this will happen
in my lifetime. But it will happen. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but
it bends towards justice”.
Recent Comments