Difference though, with Soviet empty store shelves your choice was other stores that also had empty shelves, and a hope that maybe different shelves would be empty.
Here most other stores do not have empty shelves. In theory that means people will stop shopping Whole Foods and shop Trader Joe’s, or Safeway, or Wegmans more, and Whole Foods goes out of business (or that Whole Foods fixes the empty shelf problem “fast enough” that they don’t go out of business). I suspect though that with Amazon’s effectively infinitely deep pockets Whole Foods can persist in this zombie market state for decades. When it will stop depends more on what VP is responsible for it, and how much they care about what numbers on a spreadsheet.
…hmmmm, so any product line/store/whatnot run by a company with super deep pockets effectively bypasses the normal “rules” of economics? Or maybe ones that neither cost much relative to income nor provide much relative to income?
No, but it means you have to work with the opposition to find a at least somewhat of a compromise position. For decades, that was the norm in the US on most legislation. At the beginning of the 111th Congress, Democrats made it clear their #1 priority was universal healthcare. There were several plans put forward, and the only one that looked like it could pass the 60 votes required was the ACA. Universal single payer was put forward and it wasn’t going to get the votes. The Republicans reneged on the deal and the ACA only squeaked through 60-39 along party lines. McConnell said at the time:
It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.
As it was, it took removal of the public option to even get f*%&$&0! Joe Lieberman to sign on as the 60th vote. The window of opportunity was narrow, as it ended up. The only way to even get the ACA passed was in the half year between the swearing in of Al Franken and the election of Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy.
Look, I REALLY wish they’d been able to get single-payer passed in 2009, or at least a Federal public option. But that ignores the reality at the time and laws and rules on cloture in the Senate.
Other than breaking with traditional rules on nominees (especially w.r.t. SCOTUS nominees), they do, because the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires 60 votes to pass appropriations bills.
Absolutely. The problem is that many corporations in late-stage capitalist America are seeking monopoly status, and gaining that or coming close usually means that the executives and shareholders adopt the crappy Soviet mindset toward consumers and ened-users I mentioned above. Under that thinking, the kind of VP who was responsible for order-to-shelf gets promoted instead of fired or exiled. Facebook, as noted earlier, is a good example of this mentality in action, complete with Soviet-style management struggles.
I wonder which part of the “forced apathy” factors in the too-clever-by-half cynicism that minimizes or denies the actual real-world differences in policy that come from Democratic and Republican-controlled governments and works to discourage voter participation by repeating the “there’s only one party,” mantra that convinces people their vote doesn’t matter?
Citation needed. And I’m not talking about compromise. I’m talking about adopting the opposition’s idea. The ACA was not compromise. It was a GOP plan from the beginning. It’s the whole reason the GOP has never been able to propose an alternative when trying to repeal it. It was their idea to begin with.
What is it today with the inappropriate [citation needed] bullshit?
The ACA was the most progressive legislation that was going to get the necessary 60 votes. PERIOD. As it was, it had to be nerfed in order to get the last two votes (an Independent and a DINO) needed to pass.
Feel free to revise history as you like in your own mind, but that doesn’t actually change the reality others have lived through. And it doesn’t help take the next step.
I stated that the Democrats adopted a GOP healthcare plan. You then said that was what was necessary to get a healthcare plan passed. I then replied that it would be nice if the GOP did that (adopting the opposition’s idea) when they have an under 60 majority. You said they do. I said “citation needed”, meaning show me where they have adopted a Democratic Party plan when they didn’t have the votes to pass their own. Again, I’m not talking about actual compromise. Compromise is wonderful. I’m a huge fan. But that isn’t what happened.
That was very confusing. I did not get that from what you wrote at all.
Ok. They didn’t compromise with the GOP. The GOP wasn’t going to compromise. They compromised with the Independent and within the more conservative end of their own party.
But I think you’re saying what they did was wrong, somehow, because they adopted a GOP healthcare plan, rather than a more progressive one. What I’m saying is that, at the time, the least possibly progressive universal health care plan was the only one that would garner enough votes to pass despite total GOP obstruction.
Would you rather the ACA had not in fact passed, and instead a more progressive plan had been put forth, and failed? If so, I think you really, really underestimate the good the ACA has done. It’s not close to the system I would like, but it has fundamentally changed millions of American’s lives for the better.
ETA:
My primary contention with what you’ve written is that this:
I think he could have gotten a public option. I do not think he would have gotten support for eliminating all employer-paid insurance in favor of a Medicare program for all.
I knew it was all bullshit! I was dragged to the Walker in Minneapolis what seems like a hundred times while growing up, and the least bullshit thing they ever had is the big spoon in the pond. Seriously, one time the traveling exhibit was egg shells shellacked to furniture.
No - thinking it could get passed in that congress might be delusional, but that’s not what you quoted.
Proposing an idealized plan that gets defeated can be a viable political gambit. It lets your base know what you stand for.
It can also backfire badly if you end up using up most of your political capital on an issue that get stalled and thus never get the more realistic compromise.
Honestly, I don’t think Americans as a whole are ready for universal healthcare. The compromises necessary necessary to get health care costs to level that universal coverage is possible seem to inspire large scale dread in a lot of the population.
Honestly, universal healthcare works best as one giant mandatory unappealable HMO. Yet Americans seems to approach HMOs as the enemy…
Fun fact, people can be detained indefinitely for any reason / disappeared. Fun fact, the police can seize anything you have and you can do fuck all about it in most cases. Fun fact, the police can kill you in your own home and probably get away with it. Fun fact, the government is retroactively rejecting passports for trans people. Fun fact, if people on disability look content online, they lose their benefits and probably die. Fun fact, people are dying in growing numbers because they can’t afford insulin or a trip to ER. Fun fact, we have one of the lowest voter turnouts of any developed country, due to apathy / hopelessness. Fun fact, our unemployment/underemployment statistics don’t take into account that many people are working multiple part time jobs with no benefits and consider that equivalent to full time employment at one place. Fun fact, over 40% of Americans can’t cover $400 in emergency expenses. Fun fact, over 50% of Americans don’t/won’t have enough to retire. Fun fact, not every failed state looks like the final days of the Soviet Union or progresses at the same pace.
The point of the article is not to draw direct and specific comparisons with the mechanisms of Soviet oppression of dissenters and those of American oppression of dissenters (although minorities and marginalised groups here might argue that there are comparisons to be made there, too). Haque addresses that in the first graf.
The point of the article is to draw parallels between the consensus mindsets of America’s current leadership class and those of the Soviet Union’s, and pointing out how that sort of thinking tends to lead to decline and collapse.
Put another way, saying “at least Americans aren’t being thrown into gulags en masse for expressing political opinions” (which the author also acknowledges in his article) doesn’t change the ironic fact that the American lords of neoliberalism and their minions are acting like members of the old Politburo when it comes to: creating conditions of political apathy amongst the citizenry; aspiring to effective one-party rule; power-seeking at the expense of the common good; provincial and exceptionalist thinking; and an unwillingness to entertain any political-economic philosophy – no matter how mild – that differs from the default (in this case, the neoliberal one).
That’s the result of four decades’ worth of very effective propaganda by “free” market extremists. At this point, though, the mounting misery from the current for-profit “health insurance only for the ‘deserving’” system seems to be overcoming it in what once were the unlikeliest of places:
As I pointed out, even with Obama’s dominant election win, the window of opportunity for actually getting anything passed was vanishingly small in legislative terms. The stated goal was universal health care/insurance. You don’t give up on goal #1 for a faint chance at goal#2. Once the window closed, that became the opportunity to push (symbolically) for more.
?!? Do you mean single-payer? Because the ACA accomplishes universal coverage within +/- the error bars.
Also, what compromises are you talking about? With ACA coverage levels, there really aren’t any compromises in terms of access, care or technology compared to the status quo with single payer. We already pay a premium for exactly the care we receive. Health insurance companies would suffer, but shifting what we already pay from insurance premiums/deductibles/copays/employer contributions directly to taxes will pay for the existing level of coverage and care 1:1, with health insurance company profits as direct savings.
That is false. From the swearing in of Al Franken on July 7, 2009 to Scott Brown’s swearing in February 4, 2010, the Dems had 60 votes (58 + 2 independents). Even Obama himself admitted that in the following article, which has the most charming title:
Of course the word “Dems” has to be qualified: many, maybe even most, of the “Dems” were Blue Dogs, Republican-lite, and DINOs. They were never going to vote for anything even vaguely progressive.
All of the things you mentioned, PLUS not installing Federalist Society-sponsored Scalia clones in the dozens of open federal judgeships that Mitch McConnell and the Republican senate majority, in bad faith, kept open during Obama’s tenure, PLUS not attempting to dismantle the government from within, PLUS not placing the absolute worst-qualified person–often a person whose prior goal in life was to dismantle the agency–in charge of every possible federal agency, PLUS not actively pushing hatemongering conspiracy theories from the bully pulpit, PLUS not openly using the presidency as a profit-making enterprise for the president’s garbage children, PLUS not siding with powerful foreign dictators just because those foreign dictators said nice things about the administration. Among quite a lot else.
I am sympathetic to progressives’ policy goals but their “if you’re not to the left of Bernie Sanders you’re basically a Republican” shtick was old before the 2016 election and has not gotten any fresher in this stinking-fish-head administration.
