De Blasio, Warren, and Obamacare: How Supportive Are We?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

19 November 13

rom the uncritical infatuation with Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio to our desperate defense of Obamacare, the left needs to relearn the under-used art of critical support.

A few months back, this might have amounted to little more than philosophic thumb-sucking. But once we helped organize overwhelming opposition to Obama's plan for a not-so-limited military strike on Syria, forcing him to do a deal with the Russians, we showed that we could make things happen - or not happen. Our activism also encouraged negotiations with Iran, which were already underway. And now with Wikileaks' release of the Intellectual Property Rights Chapter of the secretly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), activists have a real chance to work with increasingly assertive members of Congress to block the treaty from ever passing Congress.

So, how do we put our limited, but growing power behind our own principles? If we don't, we will remain extras in somebody else's movie, the way so many progressives have been while Team Obama pursues its corporate and surveillance state agenda.

Like it or not, until we build the strength to offer voters a progressive presidential candidate who can win, most of us will find the appeal of third party politics unconvincing and hold our noses to vote for some effing corporate Democrat who seems - and probably is - a lesser evil than her even farther rightwing Republican opponent.

That's life. But we do not have to play stupid. More of us can loudly and clearly put forward our own progressive positions - say Medicare for All - rather than spending so much time trying to defend the cockamamie complexities of Obamacare with its gigantic government giveaways to insurance companies, health maintenance organizations, and Big Pharma. Let democrats like the Clintons and former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, now a health care lobbyist, defend their corporate approach. We have a better, more straight-forward, and more cost-efficient alternative to promote, and if we do our work now, its day will come.

We should show the same independence with regard to the rise of the rise of left-leaning populist politicians. Most of us back Elizabeth Warren in her efforts to reign in Wall Street, and some see her prematurely as a potential presidential alternative to Hillary Clinton, who sides with Wall Street and the corporate tax cheats and remains far too much of an interventionist hawk on foreign policy.

Personally, I love Warren's response to the crackpot individualism of Mitt Romney, Ayn Rand, and Tea Party libertarians. "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own," she declared. "Nobody…. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

I'm also pleased that she spoke out against the secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and that she has co-sponsored the USA Freedom Act to outlaw the National Security Agency's bulk surveillance. But, though I like the way she supports strong regulation of the financial sector, I find her too ideologically wedded to the so-called "free market." And as a Jew with family in Israel, I worry about her overly enthusiastic support of Bibi Netanyahu's government and her willingness to buy all the unproved propaganda against Iran and its nuclear program. As I've argued for years, Israel poses far more of an existential threat to Iran than Iran does to Israel.

Bill de Blasio, the populist-sounding mayor-elect of New York, has also been hawkish on Iran, working closely with United Against Nuclear Iran, one of the leading groups now trying to block the Obama administration's negotiations with Tehran. With both Warren and de Blasio, we should remain critical while trying to convince them that they are just plain wrong, both on the facts and on the best path to peace.

Both Warren and de Blasio are decent people open to reason, and we should pursue every opportunity for dialogue without rancor. But if we want to be players in the political system and not just cheer from the sidelines, we will have far greater impact if we remain true to our principles and openly express our disagreements.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.