Weissman writes: "From Moscow and Kiev to Western Europe, neo-Nazis and near-Fascists are flexing their muscles, but doing it in different and changing ways. Three questions shape the story."
Neo-Nazi pictured at a rally in 2009. (photo: Reuters)
Neo-Nazis Suck, But in Changing Ways
02 September 13
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rom Moscow and Kiev to Western Europe, neo-Nazis and near-Fascists are flexing their muscles, but doing it in different and changing ways. Three questions shape the story.
- Why do neo-Nazis play such a prominent role in the supposedly moderate Ukrainian government of billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko?
- Why did Marine Le Pen, her Front National in France, and her fellow-travelers in Western Europe stop supporting their former neo-Nazi allies in Ukraine?
- And why do the Front National and many of its allies give such fervent support to Vladimir Putin, who presents himself as the Great Anti-Fascist?
Together the answers provide a far more nuanced view of the world than most Americans will get from the mainstream press, the Putin propaganda mill, or the followers of Lyndon Larouche and other conspiracy-mongers who uncritically cheerlead for Putin.
Long Before Bandera
Ukraine�s neo-Nazis, with their SS-like symbols and murderous brutality, are in many ways the most straightforward. They grow out of a long history of Ukrainian nationalism and its yearning for an ethnically homogenous homeland. Their blood and soil nationalism led them to target the country�s long-standing Jewish population, mostly in Galicia, which is now in Western Ukraine but was formerly part of Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Over the years, the nationalists have held their Jewish neighbors guilty as a group for everything from crucifying Christ to working for rich Polish land-owners to supporting Soviet Communism.
Most dramatically, nationalist-led Ukrainian pogroms against Jews reached epic proportions in the annals of ethnic cleansing. As far back as the Chmielnicki Massacres of the mid-1600s, Cossacks and their allies killed more than 100,000 Jews and destroyed 300 Jewish communities. In 1920, Ukrainian nationalists killed some 60,000 Jews. During World War II, they helped the Nazis slaughter hundreds of thousands of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Armenians, Gypsies, anti-Fascist Ukrainians, and Jews, including the killing of thousands at a ravine near Kiev called Babi Yar.
�Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regimes and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in the Ukraine,� proclaimed the followers of nationalist leader Stepan Bandera in April 1941.
�I � fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine,� declared Bandera�s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko. �I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine.�
Wanting Galicia for themselves, the Nazis jailed Bandera and Stetsko. But Ukrainian nationalists under Bandera�s wartime chief Mykola Lebed continued to slaughter Jews, Poles, and others in the most barbaric ways. As one eyewitness told the story, �Bandera men � are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down the populations of entire villages.� Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day � you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the river Bug.�
Read the horrific history for yourself. It�s available free online in an authoritative study from the U.S. National Archives: �Hitler�s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War.� Note how quickly the allies made their peace with Ukraine�s fascists, which helps explains why Washington and the Europeans feel so comfortable about using them again today.
Updating the story in Part II of �Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev,� I laid out at length the overlapping histories of the key players, especially Andriy Parubiy, who commanded the often armed militants during the coup. He now runs the government�s National Security and Defense Council, which oversees Kiev�s �anti-terrorist� campaign in Eastern Ukraine. His credentials are vintage neo-Nazi. He helped create both the militant Praviy Sektor, or Right Sector, and the pointedly named Social National Party, which became the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (�Freedom�) Party, under Dr. Oleg Tyanhnybok.
You can find the details and sources in �Meet the Americans.� Here I want to draw attention to an often overlooked part of the story. When the U.S. and its European allies engineered the first �Orange Revolution� in 2004, they brought to power Viktor Yushchenko and his Ukrainian-American wife Katherine Chumachenko, a former Reagan aide who was extremely well-connected in Washington. These supposed �democrats� authorized a new official history of Bandera and the others, presenting them as national heroes and white-washing their horrendous crimes.
Why does this matter? Because many of the same ideas that motivate the overt neo-Nazis and right-wing ultra-nationalists inspire the supposedly moderate Fatherland Party of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, for whom the scary Andriy Parubiy now works.
Follow the food chain. The U.S., EU, and IMF back Ukraine�s billionaire oligarchs. Yatsenyuk works for the oligarchs. Parubiy works for Yatsenyuk. And the neo-Nazi militias work for Parubiy as little more than hired storm troopers. The balance of power could change to a degree, especially in the highly unlikely event that Tyanhnybok�s Svoboda Party were to win the parliamentary elections, now scheduled for October 26. But, the bigger danger comes from the spread into the highest levels of the Poroshenko government of an ideology so eager to kill in pursuit of an ethnically pure Ukraine, which remains an impossible dream.
Back in March, as the coup was defining itself, I wrote a column called �Will the Nazis and Jews Make Nice?� Though I obviously had tongue in cheek, the question has become even more pressing. Ukraine�s overt neo-Nazis see the most unexpected people as ��some type of Jew or secret Jew,� to cite The Daily Stormer. The hate list includes Poroshenko, whom one militant publicly called �Jew Trash�; the heavyweight champion Vitali Klitshko, now Mayor of Kiev, whose maternal grandmother was supposedly Jewish; Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, whom a political opponent called �the impudent little Jew�; and Yulia Tymoshenko, �the billionaire Jew� with a peroxide bottle.
Who cares who�s Jewish? The neo-Nazis do. But as long as an impoverished Ukraine needs so much Western support, most of the mini-F�hrers have decided to make nice, joining with their new allies to spew racist venom against the �ethnically impure� Russians.
Paradoxically, those who simply parrot Putin�s propaganda about Ukraine�s neo-Nazis vastly underestimate the danger here, as Putin himself seems to be doing. This is especially true now that Kiev has once again asked for NATO�s nuclear guarantee. To give Ukraine, with its historic yearning for ethnic homogeneity, the key to blow up the world would be one of the dumbest things Washington and its allies could do. But they are proving themselves just dumb enough to do it, especially with Putin making his own dumb nuclear threats rather than trying harder to find a diplomatic way to make nice.
Her Daddy�s Darling
When Jean-Marie le Pen ran France�s Front National, no one could doubt how much he despised Jews, or how much he admired Adolph Hitler and his National Socialists. So, few paid attention when the old paratrooper came to Ukraine as an honored guest at the Social National Party�s convention in May 2000 or when he returned in 2004 to see the group soften its name to the Svoboda (�Freedom�) Party and began to look more like the Front National. The elder le Pen also hosted a visit by Tyanhybok to France in 2009 and worked closely with him in the Alliance of European National Movements.
File all this way as yesterday�s news. Once Le Pen�s daughter Marine took over the Front National, she began rewriting the book on how to bring the far right to power. She still uses the old Nazi template, holding fast to her father�s blood-and-soil nationalism and targeting an ethnic scapegoat on whom to blame the world�s problems. Only she now directs her fire primarily at Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims and their rich backers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Little noticed at the time, in her effort to de-demonize the Front National, she completely abandoned Ukraine�s Svoboda Party with its lingering stench as Jew-bashers.
Why the turnabout? In part, but only in part, Marine seems to have discovered a simple truth. Even with Israel�s outrageous persecution of Palestinians, which decent people loudly condemn, she has found it a tough sell in today�s world to extol Hitler, deny his Holocaust, and forever persecute Jews. Tough, and not at all necessary for building a mass right-wing movement in Western Europe. As the caustically racist American Free Press summed it up, �National Front finds being �anti-Muslim� better for business than being anti-Semitic.�
Like most of Western Europe�s leading far-right nationalist groups, Marine is proving bashing Muslims to be more productive, especially with the shameful encouragement of right-wing Israelis and anti-Muslim activists, Christian as well as Jewish, in Europe and the United States. Will this mark a major sea-change for Western Europe�s ultra-right? I have cautiously come to think it will, though how that will affect European government policies depends on how well the new strategy works in elections.
France still has the Jew-bashing comic Dieudonn� Mbala Mbala winning young people of all races with his Nazi-like salute, the quennele, and his sickening �Holocaust humor.� Crowds still march in the streets of Paris shouting �Jews. Out of France!� and �Faurisson was right. Gas Chambers are a fraud.� Righteously angry but sadly short-sighted pro-Palestinian demonstrators still shout �Death to the Jews� in both French and Arabic, and militants have carried out the threat in several highly-publicized attacks over recent years. But, if Marine Le Pen and her allies do as well as current polls suggest, these outliers will become little more than a legitimating fringe for a massive anti-Muslim movement, which will also target other immigrants and the Roma.
This is cold-blooded political marketing, to be sure. But the shift also reflects a strong strategic and even spiritual thrust. Marine Le Pen and her far right-wing allies in Western Europe have become Vladimir Putin�s greatest fans. �He is attached to the sovereignty of his people,� she explained in an interview in April with the Austrian daily Kurier. �He is aware that we defend common values. These are the values of European civilization� and of our �Christian heritage.�
Even more dramatic, her Hitlerite father is singing the same song, going to extravagant lengths to defend Russian actions in Ukraine, including the taking of Crimea. Putin acted �faultlessly,� Jean-Marie declared. �The Americans [and] the European Union have been wrong in every field, politically, historically, [morally]. Putin�s position is in my opinion unassailable.�
�Crimea has always belonged to the Russian Empire,� he explained. �It was the decision of a communist dictator, Khrushchev, to give � a part of Russia to Ukraine, perhaps to compensate for the millions of deaths the communist regime had created with the famine in Ukraine.�
Jean-Marie was obviously relishing some of his old-time anticommunist zeal. But he and his daughter support Putin as part of a larger idea long popular in the Front National. They want to oppose American hegemony by joining with Russia to create �a powerful, independent, [and] respected Europe encompassing the nations of the northern (boreal) continent from Brest to Vladivostok.� The words were Jean-Marie�s in 2009. Two years later, in laying out policy for the Front National, Marine spoke of withdrawing from the integrated command of NATO, as De Gaulle had done in 1966. In its place, she would propose to Russia a strategic alliance based on a military partnership. Suggesting that she was not merely indulging in a passing fad, she spoke of the new partnership as being �profoundly energizing.�
Vlad the Conqueror
�Sad as it might seem,� said Vladimir Putin, the fight in Eastern Ukraine �reminds me of the events of World War II, when the German Nazi occupants surrounded our cities, like Leningrad, and directly shelled those cities and their inhabitants.� He was talking about the proxy war between Kiev�s forces and pro-Russians whom he claims not to be supplying or reinforcing with Russian troops.
Given his caginess about the �green men� earlier in Crimea, I see no reason now to believe his implausible denials. Nor can I find any reason to believe most of the claims from Washington and its European allies. Once bit, twice shy.
�Both towns and cities are surrounded by the Ukrainian army, which is directly shelling residential areas with the purpose of destroying infrastructure, and suppressing the will of those in the resistance,� he went on.
Characteristically, Putin wanted the world to see current Russian policy in Ukraine as a heroic replay of the Soviet Union�s fight to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Like everyone else, he cherry-picks his history, completely ignoring the August 23, 1939, deal between Hitler and Stalin to carve up between them much of Eastern Europe. Happily for Putin�s narrative, Hitler betrayed the deal on June 22, 1941, and launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, a massive invasion to which the Soviets did respond heroically.
The present is more nuanced. If Putin is truly the Great Anti-Fascist in Ukraine, why does he get so much support from the Le Pens and their fellow-travelers in Western Europe? Why do these modern revisionists of the Nazi tradition find him such a soul-mate? The answer seems obvious. Because they see him as one of their own. Not as the reborn fascist or �National Bolshevik� that writers like Yale historian Timothy Snyder tried to paint him in the New York Review of Books. And certainly not as the �neo-commie� that so many progressives would like Putin to be.
Like the Le Pens, he remains an ultra-right nationalist who believes that blood and soil justify his meddling from Georgia to Moldova, the Baltic countries, Crimea, and the rest of Eastern Ukraine. Ultra-nationalists in Western Europe identify with all that, even as they oppose meddling and expansion by Washington and the EU.
Sharing his unhappiness with American hegemony, the Le Pens sympathize with his nationalistic response to the expansion of NATO and his desire to guarantee Russian control over its warm water fleet in Crimea. If as Kiev, Washington, and NATO warn, Putin is providing overt and covert support to the insurgency in Southeastern Ukraine to give Russia a land bridge to Crimea, the Le Pens will be the first to say �more power to you.�
They similarly feel comfortable with his embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose teachings he uses to justify his authoritarianism and persecution of gays and �blasphemers� like Pussy Riot. In much the same way, the Front National uses the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church to promote an extremely rigid view of �the natural order.�
What then do Marine and Jean-Marie think of Putin�s kleptocratic government enriching his favored oligarchs and former buddies from the security and intelligence services? They could not care less, at least from what I�ve been able to find so far. Addressing the Russian Duma in April, Marine declared that Putin was �a pure democrat, but with an authoritarian style.�
Putin clearly appreciates all the support he receives from the Le Pens and many of their Euro-Right allies, and you will find their views widely reported in the Russian media. They provide a fascinating insight into the new Russia and what the Le Pens want their new anti-Muslim Europe to become.
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 and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently 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.
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And to the fat guy in the steam room?
Yet, for years small "neutral countries" hidden money, aka part of the national treasure, with no consequence. I'm sure it has been this way, because off-shore accounts smell of unaccountable white-collar crime.
I hope Senator Sanders' bill gets traction, but I'm not hopeful.
We saw how Occupy was brutally beat back and smeared in over 25 cities.. So, the Congress? Senate? Right now?
But, this pure corruption of a 2 tiered tax system runs much deeper than just revenue.
These colonialist, Trans National Corps will never truly invest in a Country they've already colonized unless they are forced, (tariffs & taxes are much higher) and that ain't gonna be happening any time soon..
Or, we can at least start chipping away at some of their monopolistic domination tools to create some kinda competition..
If, the People continue to welfare all their domestic labor costs plus some Chump Change left over to further buy / bribe their Political Stooges.. Then, who in the heck will ever be able compete with that? This, just has to stop.. Now!
I never thought I would say this.. "Uhm, maybe, we should have Bernie speaking to the WTO for us, too.." lol.!
To all Americans, We still have a voice, it is our wallet our paycheck that they hear, not the words on this site or those like it. Its is accounts closed, credit cards canceled. Find out the Companies that steal from us (US) and refuse to do business with them, refuse to invest in them, local banks and credit unions can handle the banking, local stores the goods we buy at Walmart and if no alternative exist such as gasoline let's do all we can to buy less. Sure pound on your congressman and Senators but in the end they will do just like BOA they will side with the biggest campaign donors.
If you've been paying attention you would know he has done that numerous times.
Yes, and so do we!
This old canard is so painfully obviously - and historically - baseless, I can only wonder why it is still knee-jerk reaction offered with all evidence to the contrary.
It sounds to me like you do not realize that the taxes are the LOWEST they have been since the presidency of EISENHOWER???
Look it up. It is true, and there are many, that can certainly afford to pay more tax. The people,whose MONEY are making MORE MONEY!!
They are certainly not working hard and earning their money by their own sweat, unlike the poor and the middle class.
Doc E is who you should have been addressing. Jon was pointing out the absurdity of Doc E's comment about lowering taxes.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake. I didn't pay enough attention to the quotation mark.
I apologize Jon, please excuse the mistake.
How you earned a living was none of the business of the political class. For that matter, your bank account could be under a false name and absolutely no one cared.
This was the world of a mere 100 years ago in the United States. That's why it was called the "land for the free."
Back then, all federal revenue -- tiny by today's standards -- came from a tax on imported goods.
I think Bernie Sanders,...who I admire...
Has constituents, who are more sensible, ....and I really think, are more... intelligent, as opposed to many of the deep red southern states or purple states.
Consequently, he is not in need of all that corporate money, and can be more honest and forceful.
Before you hit me over the head, for my remark about the red states.....Ther e's LOUIS GOMERT, an idiot who is re-elected time after time and another idiot in Georgia, Brown, . He is unbelievable, and now is considering running for Saxby Chamblis' seat I think. The voters who send these guys to congress are NOT bright.
Follow Iceland's lead.
Spank the Banks
We are weenies.
I sure wish Bernie Sanders a lot of luck.
He is the most courageous person in Congress. And we all need him.
It's no wonder corporations have these welfare plans, they own the best congressmen money can buy. Get rid of the Republicans and we can get the corporations paying taxes again and also get our jobs back.
People have a right to demand an end to it and that corporate profiteers and vulture capitalists pay their share as Bernie states.
This theory says if you feed high expectations, in our case "The American Dream," to the lower and middle classes, and then snatch it away from them, you fuel the disappointment (a very strong emotion, like the one the early Americans felt when they felt they were British "citizens" and the English passed the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax without their approval, in effect telling them they were not citizens and had no say in how they were going to be treated.)and that emotion can lead as in America, France, and Russia, the Arab Spring,to giant and bloody revolutions.
FDR knew this, and in order to save capitalists from revolution from an American Communist Party,he created the two (other)great socialist programs we have, Social Security, and Medicare.
He also created huge job programs to help the people suffering from the starvation and everything else during the depression. He never got the love from the rich in our country. They stupidly cursed him instead. He saved their butts, and they still talk about him as the anti-Christ and cash their SSI checks monthly...,
I thought I was correct, but to make doubly sure I Googled it, and I AM CORRECT.
It WAS Lyndon Johnson, and congress during his term in office, which started Medicare and medicaid. Look it up yourself
FDR would have gotten us single payer or at least the public option.But that would have pissed off the drug companies and huge insurance companies that give millions every year to pay off Washington. In the first month of the first term, the drug companies made a deal with the president and gave him eighty billion towards Obamacare over ten years. Eight billion a year. They will make three trillion in that time. Use the math people.
Note how the Drug store chains fix prices because the job to stop them went from D.C. to the states somewhere along the line from the Sherman Anti Trust Act. I never see Bernie talk about that one, as it too affects millions of people on Medicare who can't afford their drugs.(My daughter lives in England because of that system. Her husband has MS.)
Single payer, and free college education laws would be enough to stop a revolution here. In the next four years, our president better get on the stick, both for the "forty seven percent" and for the World because of climate change. The World is watching, and thankfully, so is Senator Sanders.
Bernie, please start talking about the drug store heist of the public. Thanks in advance.
I think you give FDR too much credit. He did NOT institute Medicare.....Ly ndon Johnson did. Social Security was a big step in helping the less well off, and really a hated step by the majority of the wealthy. He would never have been able to implement medicare ....roo.
I have dealt with the healthcare crisis firsthand. I saw firsthand how an uninsured relative of mine put off care until it was too late, dying of cancer. Now I can't say that having insurance would have saved her--there are those with great insurance whose cancers get detected who still die--but she would have had more options. Obamacare and the state exchanges would have helped her and perhaps might have saved her life.
Obamacare is probably the best healthcare reform we will see in near to midterm unfortunately. The problem is that there is a significant minority, if not a majority, of Americans who honestly believes that "only those on welfare" don't have access to health insurance. They believe that, were it not for their decision to "have cell phones, cable TV, and Internet", they could afford insurance. Alternatively there are tons of Americans, including many liberals, who believe that you can show up at the emergency room, get care, and not have to pay. More in next post.
I literally have had the same argument over and over again with many friends, including many of whom who happen to be Democrats and liberals, that, no the emergency room isn't free. Now perhaps they don't collect from everyone who shows up there, but they damn sure will send collection agencies and garnish paychecks. Indeed a New York Times article I read about a year mentioned how one hospital in MN hired a contractor to hound patients to get money at each step of the way. This company even embedded staff with doctors.
And then yet you have others who are resistant to any form of national healthcare because "they don't want to lose the right to pick their own doctor". The irony is that insurance companies often decide which doctors they'll visit. But they fear having to report to some large, scary, Soviet-Style building staffed with unfriendly bureaucrats whose only mission in life is to prevent them from seeing their doctor and getting the care they need. They fear having to wait months on end for care, even though many doctors here in the US don't have openings for several weeks.
Alternatively you still have others who believe that national healthcare will result in "higher taxes for a social welfare benefit program that will reward and enable pathological/ir responsible behavior". More in next post.
In their fantasies they envision their taxes supporting a welfare program where the beneficiaries will be "those people"--i.e., the mythical uneducated, unemployed welfare queen with five kids getting all these checks every month--and they will have to wait in line while said welfare queen rushes to the front. They don't think they will get good care and they think their tax dollars will promote/reward/ enable irresponsible behavior.
The tragedy is that most Americans who have benefits through work will never see the flipside of the US healthcare system. They don't believe that there are those who want coverage, but can't afford either due to low salary, their employees not offering it, or having pre-existing conditions. In their mind it's "only the lazy and shiftless" who don't have insurance.
For those reasons we are not likely to get single-payer or national healthcare anytime soon. There are too many Americans opposed to it. Against this backdrop that President Obama was able to get ANY healthcare bill passed is a miracle.
Obamacare was hardly a panacea and it doesn't come close to solving the healthcare crisis. But it does provide some help to some people and it is a step forward. I'll glad take it over having nothing at all.
Thank you very much for setting it straight.
You are so right about the attitude of a great many of our country men and women.
Obamacare certainly is far from perfect, BUT it is the needed START, I am sure it will be improved upon as time goes on, and now a lot of people with preexisting conditions can get help.
Imagine,.... giving birth, means you have a preexisting condition?? And if you had skin problems when you were a teenager and saw a dermatologist.. ..same thing.
As part of his 2008 campaign Obama spoke of this problem. Americans generally don't seem to be willing to do much about it.
In the 1950's talk of the rich included Swiss bank accounts. As emerging middle class evangelicals moved to the right there were dreams of Mercedes and Swiss bank accounts. This may speek to the lack of will to address tax cheating. Trouble is, middle class Americans don't have Swiss or Cayman Island accounts and their dream is still worth letting the rich get off scott free. The thinking is irrational but serves the wealthy very very well doesn't it?
How uncharacteristi c of US Senators!
Here are the primary reasons for socialism: 1) the grotesque bipartisan political irresponsibilit y in Washington, D. C.; 2) the alarmingly obscene criminal behavior of US corporate giants; 3) the predictable political & moral lethargy of the US voter.
Why is there even a question about whether or not we have the radical collapse of education in the US?
Bernie, please start a Twelve Step Program for elected officials who love re-election more than America.
1. Educate voters on which elected officials truly love America by showing them the voting records while in office.
2. Get the voters to the polls on election days.
and.....live in a blue state
I read this on the back pages of the NYT.....
This was an immediate tip to me that he intended to get that mess,instead of single payer.And perhaps an immediate change once the republicans get the white house?
The question is: Did he figure he could never press for single payer which was really needed to help us get out of our economic mess by raising taxes to pay for single payer? Did he realize he couldn't pass anything rational like that with a rightwing house?
Or did he intend to help all the corporations involved in that important part of our economy, the healthcare business?
My thinking, or intuition is that the mayor of Chicago had something to do with that decision.
I believe that Sanders and a lot of you out there had the same thoughts in mind. I felt it was a great moment in our history and it was a huge mistake by the government.
I also think it led to the type of feelings and thoughts I have read online ever since. There seems to be a big lack of trust. And I do not blame anyone who feels that way. It is dangerous, and it is getting a pushback which is making matters worse. Obama has to make a move to have us trust him again. Right now, I don't. I wish I did.
That being said I don't agree with how Obama pushed the bill. I think he wasted way too much time trying to get Republican support when it was patently clear to even the most uninformed observer that the GOP was never going to agree to support any bill, even the supposedly "moderate" Olympia Snowe. I think he failed miserably in the messaging of the bill and compromised too much way too early. He could have pushed for single-payer and the public option, even if he (privately) knew Obamacare was the best that he could get.
Obama and the Democrats lost the messaging war. I remember how, right after the inauguration, Patients United Now and Conservatives for Patients Rights were running ads "warning against a government takeover of healthcare". I remember how the media was talking about "death panels" and so forth.
Continued in next post. . . .
By May 2009 it was clear to anyone that the bill was in trouble. The messaging war was steadily being lost. And then, when the summer finally arrived, it was the Tea Party who stormed all the townhall meetings. Like on most other policy issues the right was out there early getting their message, shaped the terms of the debate, and were able to put the pro-reform side on the defensive.
But the bottom line here is that national healthcare, the public option, or single-payer never had the votes. The votes were NEVER going to be there. As I wrote in a post above too many Americans believe that the uninsured lack coverage "because they are lazy and irresponsible". Or alternatively they fear "losing the right to choose their own doctor". Yet others believe that you can show up at the emergency room, get care, and not have to pay.
Until these attitudes change you are never going to see single-payer or the public option in the US. That Obamacare passed in the political climate at the time is a miracle.
x dane, thanks for the correction. there are two major bills he signed and i can't think of the other. fdic was also important, etc....
It is because he is not beholden to corporations or wealthy individuals.
Vermont has intelligent voters who vote for him.
He does not need to go begging for money to run a campaign, and consequently, he doesn't owe anybody but his constituents.
PUBLICLY funded elections is the answer.
all everyone has to do to alleviate the crap that is spread about socialized medicine is speak to a person from canada or england.
yes there is waiting for "elective" surgery, but emergancy stuff is done at once without charge. my son-in-law is alive because he lives in europe, england mostly, and spain now to warm up. he also used france's system when he owned a hotel in Poe. He has MS and needs about a thousand bucks or more of meds right now as he came out of remission. both england and france agreed to give him the meds he needs even though it is very expensive. i play bridge with canadians and every one of them would not trade their system of national health with ours, taxes or no taxes.
On economics, war and civil liberties the Obama Administration very much resembles the Bush Administration.
My grandfather fought such folks in WWII.
Many, since, have warned of 'Fascism with a Democratic Face.'
How ironic that that face belongs to Barry Obama.
Even Fuedal landowners realized the serfs had to win sometimes in order for them to keep their lands producing, but our rich believe they are entitled to everything, including not paying for living in a country where they can become super rich, but believe those without jobs, education or homes are miscreants of a welfare system. We need 300 Bernies to take over from our current government, because just one crying in the wind won't do.