Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/21/bloomberg-mark-zuckerberg-pri.html
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I wasn’t inclined toward supporting Buttigieg in the first place, but Zuckerberg’s effective endorsement [ETA: by pro-actively recommending Facebook managers to work on his campaign] cements it.
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Yep. Being in Zuck’s pocket is a deal breaker.
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Y’all. As it stands, this is a complete non-story.
Employees of Facebook liked Pete and wanted to work for his campaign. Zuckerberg, as an employer, recommended them. Two of them (no idea how many asked Zuck) were indeed hired.
This isn’t Facebook advising Pete. This isn’t selling out or being a corporate shill.
This is how white-collar employment functions: you work your connections, you ask your current boss for a recommendation (especially if you know they have met with your prospective new employer), they reach out, you get hired if you meet the qualifications of the new job.
Chill, please.
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Not to mention that it’s laughably inane to call Buttigieg’s campaign centrist. He is absolutely and unequivocally a pragmatic progressive. He rails against neoliberal policies that got us where we are, and he’s the only candidate speaking seriously about democratic reform (including addressing the politicization of SCOTUS).
He’s not a democratic socialist, but that hardly makes him a centrist.
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Is … is that you, Pete? Pete Buttigieg is that you? Come out from behind that fake twitter handle Pete. We all know it’s you.
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I can only conclude your first name is Jon.
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You win the topic. Shut it down.
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Building on Obamacare by supporting a public health insurance option in addition to, rather than as replacement for, employer-paid health care is not “conspicious defensive of billionaires and big corporations”.
No, its conspicuous defense of a corrupt health insurance industry who is facing being disappeared.
Warren’s response to his challenge on costs is understandable - she will not offer a quote that “Warren will raise taxes - ohmy, ohmy, peemypants”.
However I can’t be so generous for Mayor Pete’s purpose for the question - he wants to put Warren in a difficult spot, to advance his campaign, ok, but also knowingly help the insurance industry, NOT OK.
Sanders is the only one with the enough balls to speak facts here. Taxes will go up, but less than your health insurance cost. - NET GAIN.
As an indépendant who writes a check for insurance each month this is an easy thing to see. Medicare for all is not going to raise my taxes the 12k plus I put out every year for shitty coverage.
BUT for the majority of people who have jobs and insurance as part of a benefits package - this is not so clear.
SO we should be asking the real question in all of this: ARE EMPLOYERS GOING TO GIVE BACK ALL THE INSURANCE COST TO THEIR EMPLOYEES, OR ARE THEY GOING TO TRY TO POCKET SOME OF IT?
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Most likely. Late Stage Capitalism, and all that.
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Even though it’s been explained time and time again to these “rugged individualists” that doing health insurance this way basically chains an employee to a job and/or boss he might hate and reduces labour mobility (not co-incidentally, either).
Oh, I think we know the answer to that one.
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Yeah, well that’s why we want somebody who will make it part of the law that this compensation must return 100% to the employee - like Sanders, maybe Warren. But not Pete if he is going to ask a question that makes it sound like that’s not going to happen.
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YUP - first thing GM did to their recent strikers - canceled their health insurance. duh.
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The way I know that Buttigieg is no good is that I have a randian relative who will not stop talking him up. A platform of “trusting citizens to make the choice” between private and public healthcare is not the way to win electorally, nor is it a system that would actually deliver anything to the people who actually need healthcare right now. It’s unethical, neo-liberal gibberish.
It’s telling that mainstream Dem’s can only dream of tacking to the center to scrape votes from “moderate conservatives”… They know that there’s an un-tapped population of voters who will respond to true economic reforms, but this is unacceptable to the big money who runs the show. The Dems need to embrace real economic reform before the ethno-nationalists co-opt it’s potential.
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I think that offering a public option is a good idea, but I don’t trust anyone who would say “We’ll offer a public option” to do it. Healthcare is cheaper to provide in every other developed nation than it is in the US. Obama promoted including a public option when the ACA was being brought in, but the Senate removed it. I think it’s fair to guess that private insurers did not want to compete with a public option. A properly run public option would gradually just swallow up all the private insurers, if for no reason other than not having to allocate any of it’s balance sheet to profit.
So there isn’t much point in a public option. Either you are going to make a proper public option and you might as well just introduce public healthcare, or you are going to make a sham public option that refuses to drive insurance companies out of business and I don’t like shams. So when someone says they want a public option I’m pretty wary.
But I guess I have to admit it’s possible that someone would want to introduce a public option as a way of slowly, organically transitioning from the current system to a public one. And that might not be such a bad idea, and if it was your idea you wouldn’t say so out loud.
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That’s why it needs to be baked into the legislation. There needs to be an employer contribution equivalent to the employer contribution to a private health insurance plan.
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Right and a key point of the public option - which Mayor Pete supports - is to eliminate this problem.
#DeleteFacebookCandidates
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Maybe not so much?
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