Democrats Are Fueling a Corporate Counter-Revolution Against Progressives
By David Sirota, Guardian UK
26 May 20
Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount an
opposition to Trump. They are actively helping Republicans
These are bleak days for America's progressive movement. The Democratic
primary process handed the party's nomination to the candidate with the most
conservative record. Corporate-friendly politicians like the New York
governor, Andrew Cuomo, are using the pandemic to brandish their images and
install billionaires to run things. Progressive lawmakers in Congress are
being steamrolled, even by their own party's leadership. And a recession is
battering the state and local budgets that fund progressive priorities like
education and the social safety net.
Perhaps this is a temporary stall-out - a fleeting moment of retreat in a
two-steps-forward-one-step-back trajectory. After all, polls continue to
show that from workers' rights to universal healthcare, a majority of
Americans support a progressive policy agenda.
The problem, though, is that Democrats in Washington are not just passively
failing to mount a strong opposition to Donald Trump - they are actively
helping Republicans try to fortify the obstacles to long-term progressive
change well after this emergency subsides.
This corporate counter-revolution is easiest to see in Democrats'
enthusiastic support for Republicans' legislative response to the
coronavirus crisis. Democrats' entire 2018 electoral campaign told America
that the opposition party needed to win back Congress in order to block
Trump's regressive agenda. And yet, when the Republicans proposed a bill to
let Trump's appointees dole out government cash to their corporate allies
with no strings attached, this same opposition party mustered not a single
recorded vote against the package. Not one.
Thanks to that, Trump appointees and the Federal Reserve can now hand out
$4tn to politically connected corporations as they lay waste to our economy
and steamroll progressive reforms. Private equity firms and fossil fuel
companies get new tax breaks as they buy elections and try to lock in
permanent climate change.
These bailouts were part of a larger legislative package that included good
things like expanded unemployment benefits - and so you could argue that
Democrats simply had to swallow a bitter pill and vote yes. Except, they
subsequently proposed their own standalone legislation that would further
strengthen the corporate opponents of progressive reform.
For example, there is the Democrats' push to alter the so-called paycheck
protection program (PPP). Those loans were designed to help employees of
mom-and-pop enterprises throughout the country. House Democrats' new
stimulus legislation would open up the small business lending program to
what they call "small nonprofits", but their language was crafted to provide
the forgivable loans to industry trade associations. Those lobby groups
represent the planet's biggest corporations - and their political action
committees have delivered more than $191m of campaign cash to lawmakers in
the last two decades.
Democrats have pitched their legislation as a "message" bill that declares
their values - and in this case, they are reassuring Washington
power-players that money meant for workers at neighborhood restaurants,
local shops and other mom-and-pop concerns can be raided by the front groups
representing giant drug companies, health insurers and Wall Street firms. If
the legislation passes, it would not merely be an epic tale of greed - the
new funding stream for corporate lobbying groups would bolster the very
forces that make sure federal policy disempowers workers, maximizes private
profit and generally protects the ruling class.
It's an even worse story on healthcare. As 43 million Americans face the
prospect of losing private health insurance, Democrats had a huge
opportunity. After Trump himself suggested he wanted the government to pay
healthcare providers directly for treating uninsured Covid-19 patients, they
could have called his bluff and passed existing legislation to expand a
Medicare program that provides actual medical care. Instead, House Democrats
passed a bill to support lightly regulated private insurance marketplaces
and to subsidize existing private insurance plans through a Rube Goldberg
machine known as Cobra - and they passed this giveaway just after receiving
an infusion of campaign cash collected by insurance lobbyists.
Taken together, these initiatives would route yet more public money through
a corporate insurance bureaucracy in hopes that medical care eventually
trickles down to Americans who desperately need it. Such a system is totally
inadequate during a pandemic: it doesn't guarantee healthcare - it only only
guarantees insurance coverage, which is so often denied or restricted when a
medical claim is actually filed. Moreover, corporate health insurance has
far higher administrative costs than single-payer programs like Medicare,
and even the much-vaunted Affordable Care Act allows insurers to siphon up
to 20% of customers' premiums to corporate profits rather than actual
medical care.
But then, Democrats' Cobra plan is not merely a financial bailout for
insurers - it is also a political bailout when the industry needs it most.
At a time when popular support for Medicare for All is surging - when even a
Republican president feels the need to make rhetorical (if empty) gestures
toward the concept of government-funded healthcare - the Cobra plan would
use public money to firm up the private health insurance industry's
dominance over the healthcare system, just in time to short circuit a
Medicare expansion.
That's probably why insurance companies have been lobbying for it. They know
that such a program would boost their short-term profits, and they know that
once such a program is in place, it would be politically difficult to get it
repealed and replaced by progressives' far better Medicare for All program.
In other words: Democrats' Cobra plan may secure insurance companies'
profit-skimming position between Americans and their healthcare providers
for decades to come.
If you get the sense that the fix is in and this is all deliberate, you're
not wrong. Many of the self-styled progressive advocacy groups in Washington
that posture as #resistance leaders turned a blind eye to the bill's
problems and endorsed the legislation shortly after it was introduced,
undercutting progressive lawmakers off the bat.
Making matters worse was the theater on the House floor. During the debate
over the Democratic bill, nine progressive lawmakers made a public show of
voting against the procedural measure to advance the bill, along with a tiny
group of moderates. When it came to the real vote on actually passing the
bill, a larger group of moderates ended up voting against it, but only one
progressive lawmaker, Representative Pramila Jayapal, voted no. Had the
progressives and moderates combined forces on either of the votes, they
would have forced the bill back to the drawing board. Instead, their
shenanigans ultimately helped secure the legislation's passage.
Taken together, the spectacle was more confirmation that whatever resistance
exists in the nation's capital, it is so often performance art, rather than
anything real.
"Outside groups and House lawmakers need to work together to build a
populist bloc - probably inclusive of moderate Democrats and perhaps even an
occasional Republican - who will stand united to force votes to ensure that
our economy does right by ordinary people," said David Segal of Demand
Progress, pointing to news of a potential Democratic coalition to buck the
party's leadership and support a plan to float businesses' payrolls through
the crisis. "We must make sure that America does not go in the wrong
direction and become even more inequitable because we let unemployment soar,
compel cities and states to implement austerity, force small businesses to
shutter and let large corporations backstopped by the Fed roll them up."
The tragedy is that we're already moving in that wrong direction, and
chances to change the political dynamic do not come around often. As Barack
Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now an investment banker and TV
talking head) said more than a decade ago during the financial crisis:
"Never allow a good crisis to go to waste - it's an opportunity to do the
things you once thought were impossible."
Billionaires and corporations are clearly following that advice, aiming to
use the pandemic to grow their wealth and political power in previously
unfathomable ways. It would be better if the opposition party put up a real
fight - or at least refused to be complicit in postponing progress for yet
another generation.