Is a populist moment emerging?

The AP discovers an example of America's democratic class struggle:

When it comes to paying for health overhaul, Americans see just one way to go: Tax the rich.

That finding from a new Associated Press poll will be welcome news for House Democrats, who proposed doing just that in their sweeping remake of the U.S. medical system, which passed earlier this month and would extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

The poll found participants sour on other ways of paying for the health overhaul that is being considered in Congress, including taxing insurers on high-value coverage packages derided by President Barack Obama and Democrats as "Cadillac plans."

That approach is being weighed in the Senate. It is one of the few proposals in any congressional legislation that analysts say would help reduce the nation's health expenditures, but it has come under fire from organized labor and has little support in the House.

What makes this case interesting is the "make the rich pay" sentiment present among Americans today. Decades of GOP-led welfare state retrenchment, deindustrialization, anti-labor reaction, race-baiting, etc. have dulled the sense that wealth is a social product, not a consequence of an individual's good work.

The color of welfare?

One might gather that the racists within the Republican Party believe welfare to be black, and this confluence of a collective identity and a political institution includes health care measures like Medicare and surely a single-payer health care system. This, in any case, is Leslie Savan's point:

With every passing day it gets harder to think of this sudden dialing-up of whiny hate speech as sheer coincidence. Instead, it's beginning to look inevitable — so much so that maybe the real question is, What is it about health care that brings out the latent racism in the GOP?

The answer is simple: For two or three generations, Republicans have defeated progressive reform of the health care system by hinting that it would mean redistributing wealth from whites to blacks. As Beck himself said, practically redefining "welfare queen" as "healthcare queen": "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America, and they're all driven by President Obama's thinking on one idea: reparations."

To be sure, this race-based backlash has driven the Republican Party since the election of 1968. During its gestation racism clearly damaged Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Richard Nixon's Family Assistance plan and reached its bi-partisan nadir when Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1966. Yet it is ironic that America's exceptional condition, namely, that as a modern industrial economy the United States also lacks an adequate social safety net, will fall heavily on the white middle class — Nixon's infamous "silent majority" — during the current depression. The irony derives from the reversal effected by this racist politics: The downwardly mobile white middle class needs or will soon need the kind of programs it wanted to destroy when they were seemingly targeted towards a minority.

The optimistic Savan believes the new situation includes a political opportunity:

But watching the Republican Party morph into the National Association for the Advancement of White People should give us all hope, not despair: Anything that brings 'em out of the closet and gets 'em running naked through the streets shouting, "I'm the victim here, dammit!" will only ensure their minority status over the long run.

It is unfortunate, though, that the Democratic Party is not worth a damn…. After all, the Democratic Party spells "pragmatic" as "crude opportunism."

One reason to avoid hospitals if you can

But for the want of a can of Lysol….

As reported by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of Health Populi:

U.S. hospital finances are so stretched in the current recession, infection prevention efforts have begun to be curtailed.

32% of health facilities say that reductions in staffing and infection prevention (IP) departments have reduced their capacity to deal with IP in their institutions.

Change we can believe in….

The anti-Obama moment

This is the moment for radical reform, for reform that cuts to the quick, that alters a society or one of its parts. Reform of this kind has become timely because the powerful, productive and secure America which emerged directly after the Second World War no longer exits and resurrecting this "golden age" entity must be counted as an unrealistic project. I say this because the "real economy" is now in crisis; Wall Street and the Fed continue to debauch the dollar; numerous individual states must manage severe fiscal crises and these undoubtedly will damage their capacity to govern effectively and legitimately; many Americans and their families have been forced by circumstances to watch while their life savings dwindle away and their children struggle to make a place for themselves in a country in economic and social decline; the federal government is bankrupt but gives the security-surveillance apparatus an enormous amount of money which the spook apparatchiks then waste by undermining the country's democratic institutions and culture along with its international standing and its economic capabilities. The upshot: The American dream has finished its run and Americans must now face a difficult world with their fantasies exposed for what they are.

To be sure, reform could mean the restoration of past practice, which is to say, a return to constitutional and economic fundamentals. These reforms allegedly were part of what the Reagan Revolution was all about. Radical reform today, on the other hand, can only take the form of a "new beginning" for the country. As a moment marked by the novelty of the reforms which mark it, these reforms must include a rejection of the conservatism inherent within the American political culture and its political institutions. They would thus entail a principled rejection of America's historical record since 1968 and beyond.

Chris Bowers of Open Left addresses the need for reform, doing so in light of the nature of party politics in the United States. His topic: Health care reform and the obstructionist Democrats! Bowers writes:

Here is a message that progressive organizations and media outlets need to start sending to all Democratic party committees and members of Congress:

We are done attacking Republicans until you pass a public option for health care.

Until a public option is passed, I don't want to hear about the latest hate and idiocy spewing from Limbaugh, or Tancredo, or Palin, or Gingrich, or whoever. And to tell you the truth, I don't want to attack them for it, either. Because, right now, Republicans are not the obstacle to progressive governance. Instead, Democrats who refuse to support a public option are the obstacle [emphasis in the original].

Why would the Democratic Party refuse to meet this sensible and popular demand? Why would the Party of the People undermine this popular reform? Why would it embrace an increasingly impossible reality? William Greider provides an answer:

The Democratic Party ignores its left-liberal-progressive base with some regularity because it knows it can. Politicians understand they will suffer no consequences afterward. The galaxy of mediating organizations, including organized labor, that surrounds and supports the party may stomp and holler, but they do not attempt any retribution that might alter their relationship with power. Reform organizations will not withdraw their support, either money or rank-and-file voters. Nor will they seek to punish any of the wayward Democrats who regularly vote against them with opposition at the next election. The "white hat" reformers are Washington insiders themselves, with a seat at the table and influence on the substance of the party's agenda. They do not want to put their status at risk. Politicians know this from long experience. So do the reformers.

For the outsider who would be an insider — that is, for the reformers who want to become effective in the here and now, who want have more than a tiny bit of influence over the government in power, who wish to have direct access to that government, to instituted political power — access seemingly comes attached to a stringent and unavoidable quid pro quo: The reform-minded liberal can have and even enjoy their seat at the big table but he or she will occupy this seat only so long as he or she does not pose a practical threat to the Washington-Wall Street way of governing the world. Once these reformers become insiders, once they "make it big" and turn into recognized 'players' and thus members of the elite, these arrivistes will have thereby gained a stake in the system they wanted to reform. Having this stake in their hand means they will confront circumstances and pressures that will compel them to reproduce the system such as it is. It means, in other words, rejecting reforms which would disturb the already-powerful, the entrenched interests and institutions that are enduring features of the polity.

For the moment, therefore, party politics must be considered a dead end sensible reformers would wisely avoid. Radical reform must spring from civil society itself. Common Americans must want to reform their government and society, for these needed reforms will not be gifted to them by the elite.

America is a democracy…Right?

It is. Really.

American may learn this fact by considering the good work their representatives do for them every day. Robert Parry has noticed. He recently wrote:

As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare — and that's why the choice can't be permitted [emphasis added].

But would that outcome not ruin the for-profit insurance industry? It would if the government and its program were able to defeat the private insurers in a fair competition. In fact:

…the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.

Their exodus would create a situation in which the federal government would likely become the primary provider of health care insurance coverage for the country as a whole.

Naturally, and as Parry indicates, many Congressional Republicans and some Democrats oppose including the government provision option in any reform bill Congress may care to discuss in the near future. This sad fact generates the following question: These Congressmen and –women represent whom?