The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

 The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

Jim Kavanagh

Am I missing something or is there much less concern than one might expect in the country over the fact that the government is shut down?

I understand that each of the protagonists—the Trump administration and the Democrats—knows its own fundamental weakness in this situation and hopes it can turn the other’s weakness to its advantage, if played carefully enough. But I repeat: the government is shut down, for over a month now, with no end in sight. Thousands of people are getting laid off, thousands of businesses and millions of people aren't being paid or receiving services, scores of programs and agencies are being suspended or eliminated. Forty-two million people are about to lose their SNAP benefits, and millions will see their health insurance premiums soar. Flights are being cancelled as air traffic controllers are laid off. The country should be up in arms. Why isn’t it? Why the big—actually, moderate—yawn?

Well, maybe because paralysis is the normal state of affairs for the U.S. government. The budgetary process is now comprised of an infinite chain of Continuing Resolutions, Supplementary Appropriations, and Debt Ceiling fights. There is no agreed-upon concept of what the federal government is or what it should be doing.  Though our entire social economy depends on and is structured by it, there is no understanding of why this is so or how it works. People perceive “the government” as some kind of strange animal they have to live with that sometimes brings food and favors, sometimes goes wild and attacks the neighbors or the siblings, and spends a lot of time busying itself with tasks that no one understands. And, of course, an animal that lives off the food (taxes) it eats from our hands. Or something like that. It’s more than that people don’t have a dog in the fight; it’s that they don’t know what the dog in it is.

This is a nice example, a political instance, of what Marxism calls alienation —the phenomenon where social subjects become estranged from the process and products of their own labor, which they confront as strange, alien entities and forces with which they have little, and largely antagonistic, relation. This occurs because the process and product of their labor is not under their control. In this case, the political process of producing a government and the government produced by it, though nominally an expression of the people’s will expressed through elections, are not actually under the people’s control.

It's under the control of the same ruling class, which appropriates the political power that flows from people’s hands and uses it for the ruling class’s own antagonistic interests, in the same way that the ruling class takes the economic wealth the people’s labor created and turns it against them.

The ruling class wants the people alienated from the “government” and confused about what it is. The ruling class does not want the polity to have clear lines of political authority that derive from the people, that the people can understand and, heaven forfend, exercise.

California Scheming: Single-Payer Betrayed By The Democrats Again

Nothing better illustrates the political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party—for all progressive intents and purposes—than California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon’s announcement on Friday afternoon that he was going to put a “hold” on the single-payer health care bill (SB 562) for the state, effectively killing its passage for at least the year.

The Democratic Party finds itself in a bind in California. They hold the governorship and a supermajority in both houses of the legislature, so they can pass any bill they want. SB 562 had passed the Senate 23-14.

There was enormous enthusiasm among California progressive activists, who, with organizations like Campaign for a Healthy California (CHC,) and the National Nurses United (NNU,) and the California Nurses Association (CNA) were working tirelessly, and hopeful of success.  After all, Bernie’s people were taking over the California party from the bottom since the election. I recall a night of drinking last year with an old friend who has been spearheading that effort, as he rebuffed my skepticism, and insisted that this time there would be a really progressive takeover of the California party, and single-payer would prove it. After all, once enough progressive pressure was been put on the legislators, the bill would be going to super-progressive Democratic Governor, Jerry Brown, who had made advocacy of single-payer a centerpiece of his run for President in 1992, saying: “We treat health care not as a commodity to be played with for profit but rather the right of every American citizen when they’re born.” Bernie foretold.

Unfortunately, today that Governor is, according to Paul Song, co-chair of the CHC, “doing everything he can to make sure this never gets on his desk.” And it won’t. Unfortunately, all the Democrats like Rendon, who “claims to be a personal supporter of single-payer,” will make sure that their most progressive governor is not put in the embarrassing position of having to reject what he’s been ostensibly arguing for for twenty-five years, of demonstrating so blatantly what a fraud his, and his party’s, progressive pretensions are.

The Obamacare Death Spiral

Obamacare is in big trouble. Major insurers—Aetna, Humana, and United Health (the nation’s largest)—are pulling out of most exchanges. Remaining companies are seeking double-digit premium increases (at least 25% in 20 different states, some over 60%), while increasingly offering only “narrow network” plans that severely restrict available doctors and hospitals. With these developments, the scam of Obamacare, and its inevitable failure, are becoming too obvious for even the mainstream media to ignore.

The scam of Obamacare was that its main purpose was to ensure, or at least “move toward” healthcare coverage for everyone. Its real primary purpose, however, was to protect and extend the healthcare “market”—the for-profit private health insurance industry and its co-dependent for-profit health delivery system.

Obamacare was not designed to, and does not, provide healthcare to anyone. The subsidies it pays go to health insurance companies; not to doctors or patients. It does not, and cannot, ensure universal healthcare coverage. It can only enhance “access” to healthcare—which means actually forcing everyone to purchase whatever profitable insurance plans the private companies decide to provide, at whatever price they decide to charge.

Who’s the Boss? The Obamacare Deception

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman."

attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Is it not painfully obvious to everyone now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a complicated failure of a contraption, from a healthcare and a political point of view? Answer: Yes!  Even Michael Moore now admits that “Obamacare is awful.”

Indeed, I contend that:

• Obamacare is not a public program, but a government-assisted private boondoggle. Its main purpose is not to ensure public health, but to insure the profitability of private health insurance companies and the private pharmaceutical and hospital industries.
• It is the product of a now thoroughly corrupt political culture in which capital openly buys politicians, elections, and laws.
• It is failing politically at every level, and is even likely to fail in its actual socio-economic goal of perpetuating the profitability of the private health insurance industry.
• It cannot be “tweaked” into becoming a real public healthcare program, and every syllable of every argument for fine-tuning it does nothing but waste time and stand in the way of ever getting the single-payer, universal coverage, Medicare-for-all that we need.

Unfortunately, it was Democratic Obama cheerleaders like Moore – who refused four years ago to oppose the program and insist, as they should have (and promised they would!), on a public system – who helped to create the terrible situation we now have. (And Moore still seems to think Obamacare is “a godsend” that can be tweaked into perfection.  See Shamus Cooke’s wonderful takedown of Moore’s weaseling.)

As Norman Solomon put it, with their “disingenuous sales pitches four years ago, President Obama and his Democratic acolytes did a lot to create the current political mess engulfing Obamacare — exaggerating its virtues while pulling out the stops to normalize denial about its real drawbacks. That was a bad approach in 2009. It remains a bad approach today.”

The result has been a situation in which healthcare has become more thoroughly privatized, and the possibility of a single-payer Medicare-for-all system – the cheaper, more effective, already-proven and undeniably popular (favored by two-thirds of the public in 2009) solution – has become deferred even further, and made harder even to see or discuss.