The Usefulness of Alt-Left, EmoProg, BernieBros, and FireBaggers

The ‘phants alway accuse the left of doing what they are doing.

I agree. I think that there is an intentional, built-in sloppiness to most political descriptions. For example, USAToday today called Macron a pro-business progressive. This is a little like saying he’s a seven foot midget. Le Pen was called far right by the US media, but many of her positions were actually to the left of Trump’s. Liberals are routinely conflated with progressives. Even center-right pols like Clinton have called themselves, when it suited, progressives. And Democrats are always described as on the Left.

As I have written many times, many people equate liberalism with New Dealism, but New Dealism was a deviation from classic liberalism forced by the exigencies of the Great Depression, and was as much or more about saving capitalism than saving the working class. Classic Wilsonian liberalism was pro-corporate, elitist, pro-interventionist in foreign affairs, paternalistic, and rabidly, even violently, anti-populist. What we call neoliberalism is a return of liberalism from the aberration of New Dealism to its Wilsonian roots. Hillary Clinton is the poster child of what liberalism really is, and neither it nor she have anything to do with the Left, or progressivism.

Finally, I would add “snowflake” to Ian’s list.

“They aren’t as bad as actual Nazis or Republicans…” Perhaps not, but their record shows they would far sooner deal with either of those two groups than they would with actual leftists.

> Yeah; its an affliction of Usian’s called projection…

The donks do not accuse the ‘phants … thus the is a little bit more than that.

The epithet that leaves me most disgusted is BernieBros. To get us to the world we want, we should respect those who have done what we claim to want. BernieBro is a racist, sexist epithet, playing off the notion of privileged young white dudes appropriating black culture. Whatever Sanders’ faults, he has been unwavering since his days in the 60s in Chicago getting arrested in civil rights protests and his support of women’s rights throughout his career. This is in contrast to Hillary Clinton campaigning for Goldwater who opposed most legal action against discrimination and went on to a career trimming her sails to the current political breeze (young black men are super predators, supporting welfare reform that primarily hurt poor women).

The BernieBro epithet is the Democratic Party equivalent of the Republicans’ swiftboating John Kerry. AWOL W and Five-Deferment Dick ran as super militaristic strong men. Claiming to support the military, they denigrated someone who had actually displayed bravery in battle as an American soldier. Clinton ran as the feminist and racial equality candidate against someone with a better record. So the implicit dishonesty, sacrificing what the Democrats claimed to believe in on the altar of this moment’s electoral expediency. That’s destructive of the ideals we want in our better world. That’s reprehensible.

@ Hugh

You had me until you dissed ‘snowflake’ lol.

Why not names to describe these centrists who’ve proven themselves to be nothing more than lobby bait?

A characterization that transcends the faux political divide and places all the permutations of Liberals and Conservatives alike into one category, that category that is killing both physical life and quality of life, is Corporatists.

The Corporation is the key to this malaise. It’s used as Social Control. Many Corporations could exist as they are today with 80% fewer employees, yet they don’t. Why? Because they provide a Social Control function.

If people’s heads are firmly planted in their bosses’ asses they won’t be free to pursue better, more progressive ways of being & interacting. They’ll be too busy eating the boss’s shit every day to notice anything but the putrefied innards of their boss’s diseased colon.

My enemy is the Corporation and The Corporatists, at every level, who support & enable them under the guise of “getting ahead.” Yeah, they’re “getting ahead.” Right off the fucking cliff. Some “getting ahead.” These self-sabotaging dumbasses think they’re getting one over on their neighbors, The Joneses. You’re not getting one over on anyone but yourselves, you buffoons.

Reject Corporatists & Corporations. Resist them. Do not cooperate with them. Shun them. Ostracize them. Refuse to abide by them and have nothing but loathing repugnance for those who own them and serve them even, and especially, if those who do are your family & friends. Nothing will change so long as you, we, provide safe harbor for this growing toxic mold. Don’t allow it refuge. Don’t allow them refuge. If there is to be any positive change, old relationships will have to come to an end. Otherwise, you just enable The Malevolence. You cannot change that which is permanently damaged. It’s more effective & efficient to change that which can be changed, not that which cannot and will never be changed.

Where I live a large company is trying to buy legislation which will negatively impact hundreds of surrounding residents, under the guise of “environmental solutions” (while enriching that large company of course). Another local lobby wants to mandate environmental controls for less than 5% of a different problem (while enriching related businesses).

Unfortunately the local “wingnut” hardcores are blaming environmentalists. Some of the rest of us see through the ruse and fight back by threatening the corrupt politicians with their jobs.

And ideas like this aren’t half bad:
http://imgur.com/bRkRmGA

Once Trump is deposed, and I think he will be eventually, the Deep State, to include The Mainstream Media, will claim it as a resounding success & victory. Crisis averted. Democracy restored.

I don’t think so. All they would have done is bury the dead canary in the coal mine. The toxic gas remains.

Don’t fall for the Hypernormalization. America is collapsing. Be thinking about how to fill the vacuum in its wake because others who aren’t so nice are thinking about it too and they’re ready to pounce when the time is right.

@ ColoGrassFed

i go by ‘anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist’; not a label, so much, but it works for me. egalitarian shared power for all is what i’m looking for, as in true democracy.

If you go to the Urban Dictionary, “snowflake” is used to refer to those on the alt-right, white supremacists, and Nazi-sympathizers. But in the threads of this blog, it is used in a contrary sense, mostly to slime anyone who is not sufficiently pro-Trump. So I find it pointless and file it under lazy name-calling.

EmilianoZ, I disagree about impressionism. The movement got its name from Claude Monet’s 1873 Impression lever du soleil (Impression sunrise), and yes, the critic who coined the term meant it to be derogatory. But it’s a brilliant work. In fact, much of Monet’s work is very good from the early stuff to maybe the first four to five years at Giverny. It is only in the 1890s that you get the sense that he has become commercialized and has run out of ideas. Personally, I am a big fan of Camille Pissarro, both as a man and as an artist. Technically, he was the best of the lot. Although he never really developed a style of his own, he made almost all the painters in came in contact with better painters, including Paul Cézanne, and he had a big heart. He’s the guy who put Van Gogh in contact with the doctor who took care of him in his last years. And both Cézanne and Van Gogh are foundational to an understanding of modern art.

Salvadore Dali is more appropriate in describing Trump. Afterall, they’re both Surrealists.

Tell me this Trump Adventure isn’t surreal and I will tell you that you are a liar ten times over.

Dali’s Trump

The sarcasm was so heavy that I still have no clue as to what a firebagger is. Can somebody enlighten me?

Pity he was such a commercialized shallow hack so much of the time.

This also describes Trump perfectly, therefore, Dali is the perfect artist to describe, and associate with, the Trump Phenomenon.

Trump is the Canary in the Coal Mine that is America. Considering that, how ironic his feigned concern is for American Coal Mining.

You know you’ve Jumped The Shark when a Freak like Trump ascends to the Presidency.

There’s no going back — not even to Obama or anything like him at this point.

Trump’s not only The Canary, he’s also a One Man Wrecking Crew. The guy can’t even tie his own shoes. I bet he doesn’t even know you can’t put metal containers in microwaves. That should be prerequisite knowledge, a litmus test of sorts, for anyone aspiring to be POTUS.

We’re getting a lesson in just how powerful the Office of the Executive really is. This guy could give the nuclear codes to Russia and you still wouldn’t be able to extricate him from office. It’s as though everything the POTUS does is perfectly legal. The Executive is above the, or any, law, or so it seems.

It may take a Military Coup — one that the majority of the Nation would support at this point. Don’t laugh. Increasingly this appears as though it will be the solution. I’m feeling it.

TSMB,
Surrealism artist seems better. Now for sure I’ll need Peter to explain all the melting clocks all over the place. Too tough for me.

@ willy i don’t understand your question:”Would it be possible to hear stories from FDL originals about how all that went down?” how what down? i wrote at the community side, my.firedoglake (which i fondly called ‘the ghetto’) for i dunno how many years. googling kicked up this one from 2011, dunno how many were from earlier than that. but i clicked on my name at the top, and it looks like 56 pages’ earliest from sept. 2010.

https://shadowproof.com/2011/01/14/time-to-remove-the-blinders-dems-both-parties-are-elites/

Ian, your anger here suits my current mood, but I have to agree with some of the commenters above on ‘alt-left’. I like it, my view is don’t run from that one, embrace it as a gift that differentiates your version of ‘left’ from ‘liberal’ and that clarifies the plutocrat ‘centre’ as the true implacable enemy of the people (vs the alts on either side of it).

I’ll second the notion that “alt-left” is something to embrace. After decades of confounding the real left by wearing its skin as a disguise, the liberals have finally gifted us with an identity clearly divided from their own. Whether asking people to reveal their sympathies by standing with one side or the other, or reaching out to culturally right working class folks ready for populism and suspicious of the old New Left, I think we’ll find alt-left useful.

This jury member is still out on how long it will take the liberals to try to co-opt the term once they see us embracing it, of course, but presumably they picked a term they’d rather run away from.

While everyone is deciding how best to refer to themselves, a form of navel gazing in my opinion, Hillary, and The Clintonites, are usurping any chance for organic, homegrown, natural Resistance.

Onward Together

Meanwhile, it\’s obvious the laws of this land we call America don\’t apply to the POTUS. The POTUS is above and outside of The Law. Trump could rape a young child in The Oval Office on National Television and The Lamestream Media would inform us it\’s all perfectly legal because the POTUS gets to determine what is rape & pedophilia and he\’s just learning on the job and his supporters will continue to cheer him on.

It\’s not funny, but that\’s the way it is. It\’s this absurd. I truly believe Donald Trump will test every limit there is and what we\’re finding out is, there are no limits if you\’re POTUS. You can pretty much do anything you like.

Lavrov and Kislyak were laughing their asses off at Trump. So too am I and all of his braindead supporters who think they\’re so smart. They\’re Chumps just like Trump. Trump\’s Chumps. Lavrov & Kislyak are looking at one another and laughing as if to say, \”can you believe how stooooopid this numb nuts is? He doesn\’t even know he our\’s — that\’s how dumb he is. This is too easy. Like taking candy from a baby — even easier.\”

\”HaHaHaHa — what a dumbass this guy is. Can you believe he\’s POTUS.\”

Maybe I shouldn’t have said “worked”, more like was at least “comprehensible in”.

@ Hugh: christy hardin smith, although she was gone before my time. but yes to ‘the tensions’. miz hamsher began to represent the self-same Veal Pen term she’d allegedly coined in too many ways, by my lights. she’d often get on my anti-big union bosses diaries and blast me, although i only found out later that she’d been ‘dating’ andy stern. (smile) once he dissed her publicly, flipping trumka was fair game…

after an apparently heavily moderated book salon w/ the creepy triangulator van jones that i hadn’t watched in real time, i wrote a satire something like ‘i’ve been van-jones and democRatted…, etc’ to the tune of paul simon’s ‘simple desultory philippic’. long and short of it was that the diary was ‘suspended’ until the PTB could figure out if it should be let out of the Veal Pen, lol. eventually, they decided to release it.

besides you and ian, there must be another ten or so who comment here who were involved there. reality checker, metamars, karenjj, mary in IL, et.al. alt-left sounds idiotic to me; radical left if it fits, but many of you may not be such. but i assume it’s for use on this site, not that it’ll have great meaning in the wider blogosphere? or is this more akin to the hopes of some that folks here can knit together a revolution using guerilla tactics and all?

but since it’s a great song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOvs3rCFI2A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

The counter example is the diamond. This is one of the reason the “political economy” gives way to “economics” in 1890s – basically, the response to Marx engenders a new field to explain why he is wrong.

But – Marx is wrong, and hard left needs to come up with another thinker. Which a problem – because thinkers like Marx, Smith, JMK etc. do not come on demand.

Hugh,
I’m also a huge fan of Pissarro, except for his pointillist period (I love pointillism done by Seurat or Signac but not by Pissarro). As a human, he also seems to have been a very decent man. He was a anarchist, and as such sometimes had to take refuge in Belgium when there were crackdowns in France. I’m not so concerned about the question of style. Sisley was even worse I think in lacking a distinctive style. But when a painting is gorgeous it’s just gorgeous, style or no style.

Cezanne’s transformation after working with Pissarro is I think one of the great mysteries of modern painting. Before, Cezanne used to make those terrible black and grey tormented paintings with very thick impasto. After, he became the Cezanne we love. No wonder he called himself “eleve de Pissarro” until his death.

@ Peter: i dunno if this will help, or that you already know but are still a doubter, but:

‘Conyers Reintroduces Single Payer Healthcare Bill’, January 25, 2017

“The data is clear that simply expanding Medicare to all Americans to create a single-payer system would be far more efficient. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. spends more than 17% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare, while countries with single-payer systems like France, Germany, Canada, the UK, and Australia spend 9-11% of GDP. In addition to paying a fraction of what we do for healthcare, those countries enjoy better outcomes and higher satisfaction than in the United States.

“Single-payer isn’t just the moral thing to do or a good government issue, it’s what Americans want. Many leading health care practitioners and experts share my belief and that of most Americans that establishing a non-profit universal health care system would be the best way to effectively contain health care costs and provide quality care for all Americans. I look forward to my colleagues joining me in supporting a universal, single-payer health care system.”

https://conyers.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/conyers-reintroduces-single-payer-healthcare-bill-1

now the courageous st. bernie has been swearing, i tell ya, swearing, that he’ll introduce a companion senate version soon-ish, but doggoneit! for now we have to support obamaDontCare! but yanno, mebbe his ‘peoples’ revolution’ will make him do it (as a 2020 campaign promise?)

@Peter

People use the term as an incantation but I haven’t seen any real analysis beyond the obvious benefit, there must be costs associated with anything this large and system altering.

Taiwan, like the US, was having a problem with out-of-control health care spending by the early 90s eating up like 15 % of its GDP. They switched to single-payer and now it’s like 6 %, and delivers excellent care. I mention Taiwan because they had pretty much the same problem we suffer.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/34/3/502.abstract

On its twentieth anniversary, Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) stands out as a high-performing single-payer national health insurance system that provides universal health coverage to Taiwan’s 23.4 million residents based on egalitarian ethical principles. The system has encountered myriad challenges over the years, including serious financial deficits. Taiwan’s government managed those crises through successive policy adjustments and reforms. Taiwan’s NHI continues to enjoy high public satisfaction and delivers affordable modern health care to all Taiwanese without the waiting times in single-payer systems such as those in England and Canada. It faces challenges, including balancing the system’s budget, improving the quality of health care, and achieving greater cost-effectiveness. However, Taiwan’s experience with the NHI shows that a single-payer approach can work and control health care costs effectively. There are lessons for the United States in how to expand coverage rapidly, manage incremental adjustments to the health system, and achieve freedom of choice.

The only “failure” I can think of in single-payer is in the US at the state level, in Tennessee, where a Republican governor was elected and deliberately sabotaged Tennessee’s TennCare Medicaid expansion system by removing all cost controls (like requiring generic drugs to be prescribed when available). But that was not a natural death, but a deliberate murder.

Single Payer is Revenue & Profit to Healthcare Providers absent the Revenue & Profit to Insurance Companies. Also, it’s easier for Healthcare Providers because they only have to abide by one contract with one Payer rather a gazillion contracts with a gazillion different Payers. That alone helps Healthcare Providers save some expense.

That being said, if Single Payer was enacted, it still isn’t a panacea, but it would be much better than what we have now or what we’re going to get. We need an entirely new approach to Healthcare in America. End of Life issues need to be addressed. So much money is being transferred from the savings of The Aging to keep them alive a few extra years. It’s practically a racket. Who is the money transferred to? To the wealthy shareholders of Big Pharma and Big Medical Tech and Hospitals and Doctors. This is Nuts.

Cancer isn’t being cured, its ability to kill you is being deferred, via Medical Technology, for 10 to 20 years but at a tremendous expense to you if you’re wealthy and to taxpayers if you’re not, especially if Single Payer was ever passed into legislation.

Medical Technology has far outpaced the ability of most people to pay and unless America addresses that 20,000 lb. elephant in the room, Single Payer, even if its better, is also doomed to fail .

“The ‘phants alway accuse the left of doing what they are doing.”

What the ever loving hell is a “phant”? Let’s confine ourselves to the English language.

Let’s confine ourselves to the English language.

I just learned that progressives emphasize doing the most for the most, while liberals are more identity-tribal (at least by the current street definitions).

Liberal = JMK left
alt-left = once Marxist left

Stirling, I don’t think we need another “great” economic thinker. I think economics is easy, and easy to understand. Its measures do not reside in it. The economy exists to help us achieve and maintain the society we want to live in. I think this is the real meaning of political economy. So the questions we should be asking ourselves, ones that anyone can answer or make a good try at answering, are what kind of a society do we want, how do we get it, and how do we keep it.

EmilianoZ, usually if we look at a painter’s corpus of work, something that the internet allows us to do really well through sites like mutualart, the athenaeum, and wikiart, we can see a trajectory. Sisley seems to come along, paint his environs north of Paris, and do so in much the same way, a straight impressionist style, throughout his career. The difference between him and Pissarro is that Pissarro could knock off a Monet or Seurat that was as good as or sometimes better than Monet or Seurat. His pointillist period is not my favorite, but even there his great humanity and sympathy for the peasants he’s painting shine through its staticism. As for Cézanne and his dark self described période couillarde, I think its self-explanatory. Pissarro got him to think about painting with his head, not his dick.

wendy, thanks for supplying Christy’s name. At its best, firedoglake was an incredibly freewheeling moving feast that ran the gamut from deep thought to great snark, from real outrage to adolescent humor. It made all the more inexplicable Jane’s decisions which were often arbitrary, opaque, and ran against the very openness, and progressiveness, that made firedoglake what it was. I remember pushing the idea that sites like firedoglake would be a perfect platform for launching a third party. They had a wide and varied audience, lots of energy and lots of interested people up for some activism. But I was told, come back after your party has won elections, and maybe we’ll talk. That seemed really strange to me. Once a third party was winning elections, why would it need or want to come back to sites like FDL that had denied it their resources, when those resources might have made a difference, and otherwise done zip for it? It wasn’t until some 8 years later that Sanders was able to exploit some of the political potential of the internet, and I wonder what we could have accomplished if we had started 8 years earlier.

When analyzing why Jane H made firedog fail, it’s useful to remember that she was a producer of Natural Born Killers – by far the shittiest movie of all time.

Thanks for the link Wendy. If people here were there back then, reading posts like that… no wonder the high quality of their commentary around here. Had I been there myself I might not have had to slowly figure some of those things out on my own.

Has anybody ever done a study about how people arrive at their politics? Commentor’s on other websites tend to believe it’s repetition, repetition… from a corporate media. But I didn’t get here that way. I’m curious about how others got here.

@Hugh Nothing to do with politics, but pbs.org released a video last year proving that Van Gogh really did cut off most of his ear, not just his ear lobe. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/van-goghs-ear-full-episode/3357/

Watching early DKos go to post Obama DKos was super instructive too. Related, the Vox boys, Klein and the other one, Matt something, and their access, that was too.

Watching those transformations over the years helped clarify who got rewarded, and what that delta really looks like.

@WD

We have about three times the number of people on Medicaid as the whole population of Taiwan. A large percentage of these people will never work or pay into this single payer system. It appears that the Taiwanese government is involved in delivering health care which is where increasing costs are generated, insurance costs just reflect that cost.

There is no plan for an American Health Service where doctor and hospital costs could be regulated so the savings from single payer would be limited to about l5% from the insurers profits. That’s a lot of money but it does not address the constantly increasing cost of health services.

Under single payer the about 50% of Americans who get their insurance mostly paid by their employers will be required to make all those costly payments to the government. This is at least $500 per month in new taxes or some kind of deductions just for current payments for health services. No one has explained what level of coverage single-payer could offer but I doubt it would be as generous as some of the private insurance policies.

Some of the people possibly many people who work in the insurance industry will pay a high price for single payer when they become unemployed. They will face bankruptcy, foreclosure and lack of health insurance.

I love this post.

Sad story – I’ve got a real-life friendly acquaintance on the opposite coast who’s gone completely off the rails since the Hillary campaign. An otherwise intelligent woman who’s become so overly identified and invested in Hillary Clinton (yes, she’s White), that she has literally lost her political mind. She was never a “lefty”, but definitely on the “democratic wing of the Democratic Party”, as Janeane Garofalo calls it. Now, any issue (even ones that would benefit the vast majority of U.S. women) that has the slightest whiff that it was initiated or might be backed by Bernie supporters is by definition bad, and must go down to defeat. After the fact, I found out she was among an unhinged (there’s a peak-blogging throwback adjective for you!) cadre threatening to leave the Democratic Party had Keith Ellison won the DNC Chair (no more phone banking, donations, door knocking, social media campaigning, etc.). I honestly have no idea what she and her political allies stand for now besides bashing anyone who appears to be to the left of Hillary Clinton. I don’t think they do, either.

5/17/17
12:40 AM, PST

> Stirling, I don’t think we need another “great” economic thinker. I think economics is easy, and easy to understand. Its measures do not reside in it.

Then why don’t we have money to correct Climate Change? On the contrary, we need a figure who will explain – to take only one example – what get grade on the curve, and the gets grade straight up.

> We don’t need a new economics or a new and catchy label like alt-left. Just go back to the New Deal, and call it the Old Deal.

Oil is isn’t the fuel of the future, in 1932 in was. Also, the the of the world has caught up with 1945 technology – you need to be ahead on. The old deal needs overhaul. Just ask someone who is not white.

Stirling, we live in a kleptocracy which uses class war to suppress any discussion of what kind of a society we might want. So money that might go to mitigate and adapt to climate change continues to go to our looting classes. But it is also important to be realistic about climate change. We can and should do what we can, but it is coming no matter what along with the environmental, governmental, economic, and societal collapse of large areas of our world precisely because much of our world is even less interested in dealing with existential issues, like climate change and overpopulation, than we are.

Also New Deal and Old Deal should be seen as metaphors, not literally.

“Who writes the metaphor?”

Fair question. I would say it should be seen as a turning away from today’s neoliberalism and kleptocracy back to a society that actually functions for the benefit of its members.

Unbelievable. Donald Trump invites a Fascist Thug to America & The White House and encourages Erdogan’s (tellingly, Trump can’t even pronounce the Tyrant’s name correctly) Jackbooted Thugs to beat up on American Protesters.

If I was POTUS, I would have placed those Jackbooted Thugs under arrest and the Tyrant from Turkey would not only never be invited to America again, but I would publicly shame him and disavow his governance as illegitimate. But Trump can’t do any of that for all the obvious reasons, meaning, he’s really just an American rendition of Erdogan.

‘Erdoğan’s bodyguards’ in violent clash with protesters in Washington DC

@ Hugh

“And it is important to understand that we get virtually everything of who and what we are from society. And just as we get all this from our society, so we have responsibilities to our society. A society is not just a collection of individuals. It is a joint undertaking and a web of connections and obligations we have to each other.”

Oh my, can’t say this too often.

It’s been a source of continuing amazement to me how so many of the victim groups who require and expect sympathy and support from the larger community seem unwilling to ever acknowledge that their victimhood fails to excuse them from some reciprocal responsibilities and obligations to that larger community that they are begging to leap to their defense and support. Instead, we are most likely to receive their demands with a strong flavoring of hostility whilst they declare their exemption from those reciprocal responsibilities.

Kinda surreal to witness.

Reciprocity is everything in human relations, IMO. It’s the most fundamental criterion of fairness.

RC, wrong, again. While this has been an unusually bad week for Trump and I admit to trying to making light of all these fine messes he gets himself into, I don’t care that much about recognition. In fact, I’m willing to share it with you: From here, 1/24/17:
Political leftists have clearly shown in this cycle and previously that they will cheerfully fellate anyone who seems to be supporting them in the moment. And will just as willingly seek to destroy the same guy if he does something perceived as adverse to them a few moments later.
Low self-esteem leads to overeager embrace of any perceived ally, and that is where the left has always operated from.
Drown that simple and concrete truth in all the verbose bs you want, but you can never obscure that all the data accords with this assertion.

I still haven’t heard anybody vouch for you from those days, especially what might have caused such a cynical break to where you’re now not much more than a ‘juvenile jouster’ yourself. What specifically did you mean by such sweeping generalizations? How are “political leftists” any worse than the alternative?

@ Willy

Well, that was a very cogent comment from me, thank you for reviving it. If your intent was to doubt the substance, then please explain where the substance was inaccurate or deficient. I don’t believe it was either.

You don’t recognize the adolescent flavor of your own contributions here? Nobody can help you with that if you are unable to see it for yourself. Some if us come here, or to any serious site like FDL was in hopes of learning and or teaching something. Not to have a rank-out competition. Do you even know the difference?

To your query: Political “leftists” now earn my scorn because they are supposed to be my team, but they shame me with their actual recent history.

You need someone to “vouch” for me having been at FDL? I used to practically live there. Grow the fuck up.

> functions for the benefit of its members.

Which include neo-liberalism – since imports take people, and not importing leave people doing less. The question is: where is the limit?

It would be nice it you would read economics, and maths, so you could understand the problem which the current elite funnel down you way. Otherwise, the fate of Venezuela awaits you – good intentions – but brutal failure.

oh, dear; it looks like even with only one link my comment tripped ian’s moderation thingie. or maybe i was too damned verbose, lol.

TSMB:

No, I don’t hang out here enough to characterize anyone else’s views beyond a particular post. I read a few tweets today about the Erdogan protests, and made the mistake of also reading some of the replies. The anti-Trumpers most definitely did not have a grip – “How can this be happening in our country?”…. etc. I’m not opposed to people losing their grip a bit over many of the abuses of our political and economic systems, but a lot of the particular focus on Trump, among people who didn’t and don’t also hold the Dems accountable, is counter-productive.

marym, I am not an anti-Trumper. I oppose power in its current form no matter who it is. Right now, it’s Trump. Before Trump, it was Obama and I was equally critical of him.

Comey said something very pertinent & appropriate in his testimony to Congress. He said you must be objective & independent in both fact & appearance. Obama was in appearance, meaning he played the decorum game well, but he was not objective & independent in fact. He was by and for The Rich. Trump is neither independent & objective in fact or appearance. He’s a horrible misfit in every imaginable way, but he does reflect the Rot of this System.

My point remains — if I was POTUS, i would have done what I said I would have done above. It’s what Obama should have done and it’s what Trump should have done. For me, it’s a matter of principle that transcends party loyalty. For those you mentioned, party loyalty comes before principle. They are deeply flawed people who have no scruples or character and yet another example of just how flawed our System really is.

Peter:
One ought to be able to oppose concurrently an elected government, another segment of its opposition, and foreign nationals slugging people on the street.

Exactly marym. Whenever I see an unarmed person being beaten mercilessly, I’m going to take umbrage with it and even be outraged and pissed about it, politics be damned. It’s especially egregious when it’s a foreign tyrant’s thugs doing it on my turf. It’s a huge insult and any decent POTUS should feel the same way and act accordingly. The fact Obama & Trump didn’t, means neither is a person of principle. Tell me something I didn’t already know. If we don’t have principles that transcend politics, we have nothing. Therefore, we have nothing. Isn’t it time we had something versus nothing? I think it is. It’s about time.

@Peter

We have about three times the number of people on Medicaid as the whole population of Taiwan. A large percentage of these people will never work or pay into this single payer system. It appears that the Taiwanese government is involved in delivering health care which is where increasing costs are generated, insurance costs just reflect that cost.

a) You’re forgetting the US has almost three times the per-capita GDP as Taiwan. Per-capita GDP, not the absolute number of people, is the key metric.

b) A lot of those people on Medicaid could do some form of work again if they 1) didn’t lose their benefits if they worked or 2) we had a true full-employment economy, which we do not.

c) Finally, what you’re contending is that we can afford a bloated, expensive, system that consumes 18 % of GDP, doesn’t cover everyone, and has bad result metrics, but can’t possibly afford a system that does cover everyone, delivers excellent care by any standard, could cost us half as much. HUH?

Stewart, even if Sanders had somehow miraculously won the Democratic Nomination and the Presidency, he still would have faced a Republic Dominated Congress. As we see with Trump, he’s allegedly Republican with a Republican Dominated Congress, and he’ll be lucky to get anything accomplished despite his scandals.

So, we’re back to the System. It’s calcified. It’s locked into the Status Quo. Trying to change it by utilizing it is impossible. The Old System has to come down as a New System is being built up. Let’s envision a New System. I have some ideas.

Trump is a Systems Test, of sorts. He is a reflection of just how antiquated and inappropriate the System is for these modern times. For example, the power of the executive is too great. There is too much consolidated power. I suggest we have four or five presidents, each responsible for overseeing various aspects of governance. For example, we could have one president who oversees all matters financial. Another president would oversee all foreign relations matters to include the military. Another president would oversee domestic social issues and yet another could oversee matters of law enforcement.

There are so many pressing issues that one person and his/her administration cannot possibly address all of them, and now it seems any of them, effectively.

How about The Legislative Branch and The Judicial Branch? Does anyone have any ideas on how we can change both for the better? It’s best to have this discussion now rather than later. It’s this or Autocracy. The Status Quo cannot hold much longer. Something’s going to give. Let’s be there with a solution when it does rather than ignoring it and becoming victims when it does.

Whatever. It. Takes. And all which that implies.

Spot on. And that “whatever it takes” includes the ascension of Trump to POTUS. If they didn’t want him there for some yet to be determined purpose, he wouldn’t be POTUS. What is his purpose for them, and keep in mind, he doesn’t have to be, and most likely isn’t, witting to this special purpose?

The Dems ran the worst possible candidate they could have run against Trump. The one matchup that made Trump look marginally palatable. A mistake that huuuge betrays a strategic purpose.

CNN & Twitter were crucial to Trump’s win. CNN could have covered Trump in such a way as to diminish his effect and Twitter could have just shut down his account. Instead, they did the exact opposite.

Trump is paying dividends in more ways than one. Navigate the chaos and turn it against them. My grandmother always used to say, “if you can keep your head when all around you seem to be losing theirs, perhaps you just don’t understand the situation.” She was a wise lady, my grandmother — rest her soul.

I’m just a guy who knows your future is turning to shit, and you have no clue what to do about it. And never will. Also, you will have to live through that future, but I will not.

And there you have it folks, realitychecker’s core point.

It really appears that you need me a lot more than I need you.

Suppose we play a game to see who can ignore the other for the longest time?

Start now.

Stirling, “It would be nice it you would read economics, and maths, so you could understand the problem”

This is a little like asking me to read up on necromancy or alchemy as it might help me understand the “problem”. Economics is the problem. It is pernicious, malevolent BS. As I said, the measures of an economy are not economic. They are not GDP, balance of payments, or ficititious unemployment rates. They are the kind and quality of the society achieved. If you have the society you want and it is sustainable, game over. You do not need to expand, grow, or maximize, you do not need to become more competitive or globalize. You are where you want to be. The idea that you can get to where you are going without having some clue as to where you are going is the essence of Economic Man. The magic of markets and the invisible hand will guide us to the promise land. Spare me.

I am rather good at the critical analysis of theory. So I am used to meeting people with my best blank stare when they tell me that I need to read everything ever written about their subject, MMT, classical economics, whatever, before I can really understand it. What I am hearing is something akin to if we start building the house on the third floor, we can expand it down to the foundations and the roof will take care of itself (MMT) or don’t worry about an architectural plan, the house will construct itself, and it will be the best house possible or achievable (classical economics). Envision my best blank stare here.

@Stew

Taiwan’s PPP GDP is 4/5 of the US per-capita but that doesn’t explain where they have gotten their health care savings. One thing that was mentioned was that they pay large co-pays but there wasn’t further explanations of exactly where the large savings were found.

The info I read on Medicaid stated there were 60 million recipients who were too disabled either physically or mentally to ever work while some of the other l0 million do work at least part time. I doubt that many earn enough money to be bumped from the program.

I think there are many things that could be done to improve our healthcare system including single-payer but I doubt any of it will happen. There are too many powerful vested interests other than the insurance industry involved. About 40% of the US population is already on single-payer programs and those programs face insolvency in the near future without any insurance costs.

Projecting the superficial information from an authoritarian foreign country as a model for the US without any analysis except ‘look single-payer’ is magic thinking and offers no real plan.

@Hugh

“Who writes the metaphor?”

Fair question. I would say it should be seen as a turning away from today’s neoliberalism and kleptocracy back to a society that actually functions for the benefit of its members.

That’s roughly what I had in mind. A direct answer to Stirling’s question might be: Anyone and everyone who wants to.

Stirling’s caveat is useful, though. The old New Deal depended on the Solid South for much of its political success. We can’t, and shouldn’t want to, go back there.

@Peter

Taiwan’s PPP GDP is 4/5 of the US per-capita but that doesn’t explain where they have gotten their health care savings.

First of all, I think per-capita income is the correct measure, not PPP GDP. Just because US businesses are now run solely for stockholder profit above all-else doesn’t mean other countries have to follow that model. In Asia, servicing the *customer* is job #1, providing for the employee job #2, and the stockholder comes in at #3. All you have to do is to travel there and you come to realize how how understaffed American businesses are, how crappy American customer service is because of that, how how Americans put up with things that Asians would not tolerate.

Walk say, into an Asian department store, and they have people just standing around to answer your questions and there to help you. Walk into the American equivalent, there is one overworked guy who can barely keep up running the cash register and you’re on your own. An Asian hotel has 2-4 people behind the customer service desk; an American has 1-2. By US standards they are “overstaffed”. Yet they make what they consider to be reasonable profits.

While in Taiwan the minimum wage is a little more than half the US, the corresponding price to buy most essential things is at least half than the corresponding US price; often one-third or one-fourth of the US price. While Taiwan is hardly perfect (they’re sitting on a demographic time bomb too, and they consider that they too have too-low wage problem) visiting there makes me think “why do WE put up with so much crap??” You don’t realize the extent that US businesses gouge their customers until you see what’s possible.

So US companies make large profits and this shows up in the various economic inequality indices (Taiwan’s 10 % Gini index is 6.1; the US is 14). US businesses could make far less profit and still survive (and in fact, hire more employees and reduce the unemployment rate). In *fact they used to do just this* before (as Ian has noted) the Friedman/Jack Welch idea that companies should be run solely for shareholder benefit took root. So what I am describing is not some weird foreign idea, we could go back to running our country the same; particularly if we taxed rich people at very high levels like we used to to punish them for rewarding themselves.

I think there are many things that could be done to improve our healthcare system including single-payer but I doubt any of it will happen. There are too many powerful vested interests other than the insurance industry involved. About 40% of the US population is already on single-payer programs and those programs face insolvency in the near future without any insurance costs.

Jon Walker of Shadowproof has a good article on the solutions–“socialized medicine” (like the British NHS), single-payer, and all-payer, and how they lower costs.

https://shadowproof.com/2017/04/17/road-single-payer-understanding-different-universal-health-care-systems/

All these work to lower costs, in they way Jon describes. It’s no mystery, single-payer could work here. In fact studies like this indicate exactly why and how:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-geyman/misinformation-about-the_b_8172086.html

Thanks to a landmark study in 2013 by Gerald Friedman, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, we have a solid financial analysis of the costs and benefits of a single-payer national health plan. With NHI, $592 billion would be saved annually by cutting the administrative waste of some 1,300 private health insurers ($476 billion) and reducing pharmaceutical prices to European levels ($116 billion). These savings would be enough to cover all of the 44 million uninsured (at the time of his study) and upgrade benefits for all other Americans, even including dental and long-term care. A single-payer public financing system would be established, similar to traditional (not privatized) Medicare, coupled with a private delivery system. Instead of having to pay the increasing costs of private health insurance, so often with unaffordable deductibles and other cost-sharing, patients would present their NHI cards at the point of service without cost-sharing or other out-of-pocket costs. Care would be based on medical need, not ability to pay. (2)

When we look at cost controls after NHI is enacted, the argument for it becomes even more compelling. Cost controls would include negotiated annual budgets with hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities, negotiated fees with physicians and other health care professionals, and bulk purchasing for prescription drugs, as the Veterans Administration has done for many years in getting 40 percent discounts.

AND..Medicare is in trouble because we don’t do many of these things (like drive prices down to European levels). Medicare’s finances would be *improved* by single-payer, not worsened.

As Jon notes, all-payer systems can work and work well, but they actually require the most government regulation and oversight to work efficiently. One thing that the US definitely *does NOT do well* is regulate business for the public interest over the long-term. So if we are going to be “realistic” given our history, such systems are out.

Lastly, on Singapore’s system, which you have praised:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/25/15356118/singapore-health-care-system-explained

But Singapore isn’t a free market utopia. Quite the opposite, really. It’s a largely state-run health care system where the government designed the insurance products with a healthy appreciation for free market principles — the kind of policy Milton Friedman might have crafted if he’d been a socialist.

That speaks to the more depressing lesson of Singapore. As soon as you begin seriously comparing where they are, and how their system works, to where the US is, and how our system works, it becomes painfully clear how far America is from having the institutions or preconditions for truly radical health care reform.

Plus some of their system is semantics. I mean, being forced to put 9 % of your paycheck into a health savings account that you can only spend for services and drugs that the government approves, is really not much different than a tax:

But again, the way Medisave actually works is the government forces you to divert 7 to 9.5 percent of your wages into this account, and then it decides what you can do with those savings — one way Singapore keeps drug prices low, for instance, is it only allows Medisave funds to be used for drugs that the government judges cost-effective (more on this later).

So while Medisave may look like a health savings account, it’s a mandatory health savings account funded by a payroll tax and only usable in certain conditions.

@Stew

I don’t think you could use the UK’s NHS as an successful example of universal healthcare. Just a few months ago the Red Cross declared a humanitarian crisis there with people dying on gurneys after days of waiting for care. Their system is broken with too few doctors/nurses and even beds, people wait years for elective surgery or go to Europe to get care. With a booming economy and high oil revenues the system worked reasonably well but those days are gone.

Converting the US into a Socialist health care state is a very large fantasy and even trying to impose single-payer will create a lot of resistance. When millions of people learn that the State mandated Medicare for all means only 80% of their medical bills are covered and they must pay more every month for this degraded coverage their not going to be happy about their part in this deal.

The numbers you list above as savings under single-payer may be accurate but most savings from administration costs would come directly from employee paychecks leaving them out of work. I doubt drug price controls are part of any single-payer proposal, they didn’t come with Obamacare. A few more years of the current level of cost increases will eat whatever actual savings single-payer produces.

The Clintonites waited until they were safely out of power before embracing singe-payer so it’s nothing more than an election ploy, more phony virtue signaling to attract the fleeing rubes.

@ Peter

I don’t think you could use the UK’s NHS as an successful example of universal healthcare. Just a few months ago the Red Cross declared a humanitarian crisis there with people dying on gurneys after days of waiting for care. Their system is broken with too few doctors/nurses and even beds, people wait years for elective surgery or go to Europe to get care.

1) The ‘humanitarian crises’ involved the deaths of *three patients* awaiting care.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/06/three-deaths-worcestershire-royal-hospital-nhs-winter-crisis

Care to scale that to the US experience (a friend of mine would have died from a heart attack, because the hospital staff was wanting insurance information (ahem) from him first before admitting him to treatment, and was only saved by a doctor who chanced to walk by and recognized he was having a heart attack.

2) The problems are due to a faster-than-anticipated rise in the number of incoming patients, and due to the fact that the Tory government places higher priority on spending billions on measures to accelerate privatization than on actually providing health care, and cutting corporate taxes. The solution is to fund the system. Watch Corbyn’s response:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-38538637

3) The fact that Norway and Denmark also have ‘socialized medicine’ and their systems are not in crises is simply proof that the current issues with the NHS are not due to a failed design, but by deliberate mismanagement by a conservative government. Like I said, Tennessee in the 1990s once had a similar Medicaid expansion program that was initially very successful until a conservative Republican took power and deliberately ran the system into the ditch by removing all cost controls. No private or public institution can be made entirely safe from deliberate mismanagement designed to wreck it.

Converting the US into a Socialist health care state is a very large fantasy and even trying to impose single-payer will create a lot of resistance.

Ahem, we have the VA. And despite its troubles, it’s still the best-rated care in America:

http://prospect.org/article/why-veterans-health-system-better-you-think

The VA’s problems too stem from ideological opposition:

The real VHA story is ideological opposition by the right—and clinical excellence despite chronic under-funding. The main opponents of the Veterans Health Administration are congressional Republicans. This Republican opposition is odd, since Republicans go to great lengths to demonstrate their support for Americans in uniform. But when vets return home and are hidden from view, the right short-changes their care and then blames the VHA. During the Senate debate about the $24 billion Department of Veterans Affairs allocation, for example, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions echoed the sentiments of his fellow Republicans, insisting, “I don’t think our veterans want their programs to be enhanced if every penny of the money to enhance those programs is added to the debt of the United States of America.” Has he asked any vets about that?

Again, neoliberal ideology is the issue, not concept or even execution:

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2014/june/va-care-still-the-best-care-anywhere

But before we go there, can we get clear on just what the underlying reality is? There is, to be sure, a systemic backlog of vets of all ages trying to establish eligibility for VA health care. This is due to absurd laws passed by Congress, which reflect on all us, that make veterans essentially prove that they are “worthy” of VA treatment (about which more later). But this backlog often gets confused with the entirely separate issue of whether those who get into system face wait times that are longer than what Americans enrolled in non-VA health care plans generally must endure.

Reflecting this decline, as well a general trend toward more outpatient services, many VA hospitals in these areas, including flagship facilities, want for nothing except sufficient numbers of patients to maintain their long-term viability. I have visited VA hospitals around the county and often been unnerved by how empty they are . When I visited two of the VA’s four state-of-the-art, breathtakingly advanced polytrauma units, in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, there was hardly a patient to be found.

So why not fill these empty hospitals with people in need? Oh…neoliberals don’t want Americans to have ‘socialized medicine’ because Americans would find out how excellent it can be…and they then could never get rid of it. Just like Grover Norquist said.

The numbers you list above as savings under single-payer may be accurate but most savings from administration costs would come directly from employee paychecks leaving them out of work.

Huh?? Are you making coal industry analogy here (‘we have to maintain armies of people doing unnecessary jobs for no good reason that add nothing of value to the economy and that are intrinsically inflationary just because’)? Besides, people who advocate this also advocate things such as free college so that people who got degrees for jobs manipulating paper that should be worthless in a truly productive economy can get jobs in different fields. We need more doers and less paper-shufflers. Paradoxically, contrary to its hype, it’s capitalism that produces armies of paper-shufflers while socialism rewards doers.

That has national policy implications. The reason why I believe the Fed considers unemployment rates of 5 % as inflationary is not only because it’s setting its rates for the sole benefit of Wall Street (true enough). I believe that Marvin Harris was largely correct in his assessment that the systemic inflation experienced in the US starting 50 years ago or so are largely systemic, due to a smaller proportion of the workforce actually doing economically useful work and yet doing things that add to the money supply. Today, we have the military-weapons complex, the prison-industrial complex, the surveillance state complex, the medical-industrial complex, a bloated financial sector, and so forth–all doing things that we’re better off without them doing. Just go to the DC suburbs and look who’s building. Any part of “making America great again” has to downsize YUGELY these entire sectors of our economy.

By contrast, look at the unemployment rates in the Asian countries I cited, where people are still largely producing *things* or economically useful services. Even though these businesses are “overstaffed” by comparison with the US, they have unemployment rates of one-third to one-fourth the US and yet comparable inflation rates.

I doubt drug price controls are part of any single-payer proposal, they didn’t come with Obamacare. A few more years of the current level of cost increases will eat whatever actual savings single-payer produces.

a) Obamacare wasn’t single-payer (didn’t you read Jon’s article)?

b) Single-payer systems *do* in fact achieve lower drug costs and lower rates of drug inflation. That’s why Medicare would save oodles of money by allowing drug re-importation.
Here’s the price of Nexium, which is fairly typical:

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e6e7933513c263b62345f4e3e7852c79-c