We Need a Medicare for All March on Washington

By Dustin Guastella, Jacobin

05 July 17

Both parties aren't addressing our health care needs — now is the time for socialists to lead a national Medicare for All campaign.

ig demonstrations and marches are too often seen as a silver bullet. In bad histories of the Civil Rights Movement, even, tens of thousands of meetings, organizing drives, and small actions are forgotten, while only mass assemblies on the Washington Mall remain.

Today, marches tend to replace much of the work they are meant to demonstrate, namely organization- and infrastructure-building. Where at one time such demonstrations proved the strength of an insurgent political bloc, nowadays they are seen as an end in themselves.

But with Donald Trump’s health agenda set to kill thousands and immiserate millions more, and with Democratic resistance to it failing, now is precisely the time when we should organize a Medicare for All march on Washington.

We have a fleeting window to make such a demonstration viable. The socialist left is in a period of rapid growth, thanks to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders but also due to the downward mobility experienced by many young workers. The economic and social conditions in the country are fueling anger and resentment that’s taken many forms, including the growing popularity of working-class demands for jobs programs and an expanded safety net.

The demand for decent health care is at the forefront of these calls, with polling indicating that some 60 percent favor expanding Medicare to cover every American.

The current popularity of Medicare for All can be attributed to both the success of Bernie Sanders’s advocacy throughout his campaign and the failure of both major political parties to address health-care needs. The Republican health-care plan provides more profits for providers and less coverage for workers and as a result has suffered a major public rebuke. Meanwhile the Democrats are struggling to justify Obamacare’s inability to keep costs low and provisions decent.

Medicare for All is the only demand that meets the needs of most workers and has received a warm reception among voters across the political spectrum. The prospect of free health care at the point of access is more popular than ever. Given the widespread enthusiasm for the demand itself, Medicare for All advocacy should — and likely will — make up the bulk of the organized activity among socialists and progressives across the country in the coming period. And while single-payer has long been a major demand of the Left, socialists have only recently again become visible on a national stage. We’re now presented with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to participate in the fledgling nationwide movement for single-payer health care while organizing and consolidating our ranks.

A Leading Working-Class Demand

Despite the recent growth of groups like the Democratic Socialists of America — which has quintupled in size from around five thousand members before the election to around twenty-three thousand today — much of the Left’s activity is ghettoized among a small layer of young people and disconnected from any wider social base. By working on a popular demand, we’ll be better positioned to relate to militant sections of the working class; advocate for an oppositional and positive working-class politics; and have a reason to canvass, organize, and convene those who won’t be won over by dank #fullcommunism memes.

A Medicare for All campaign also reflects a particular strategic importance for socialists regarding our potential allies in the labor movement and the need to connect the young layer of Sanderistas with organized workers on the basis of an oppositional class politics.

Single-payer health care has a preexisting base among one of the most important sectors of the organized working class: nurses and health-care workers. Health-care workers are likely the leading political edge of the labor movement. Their organizations have been among the few sectors of the organized working class that have actually increased their strike rates during a period of decline in labor militancy. National Nurses United was the first national union to endorse Bernie Sanders and stake a clear opposition to the corporate accommodationist politics of the Democratic Party. Further, nurses and health-care workers have access to a built-in base: their patients. Socialists have common cause with these workers but are largely segregated from them; advocating for an explicitly political demand alongside them could be a first step to connecting the socialist left to a broader workers’ movement.

Beyond this, a Medicare for All campaign presents opportunities for an oppositional class politics. Despite the clear advantages of a single-payer health system, the corporate class is dead set against the possibility of enacting such legislation. Their objection isn’t merely a question of profitability — indeed many employers would benefit from having their employee health-care costs offloaded onto the federal government — rather their objection is about class power.

Since the postwar era large employers have used health care as a major bargaining chip over workers. Tying health care to employment creates a dependent workforce, one that is less likely to strike and less likely to leave their jobs. Employers tolerate the high costs of health care because it gives them an alternative leverage on the shop floor. In their eyes Medicare for All also sets a dangerous precedent, challenging their ability to manage their workers and affirming the state’s ability to remove sectors of the economy from the market.

Politically, Medicare for All gives socialists the opportunity to speak to a frustrated electorate. And despite polling which suggests that 70-80 percent of registered Democrats support the demand, party leaders like Nancy Pelosi consistently mock advocates and insist on the futility of single-payer, leaving an opening for socialists and progressives to advocate for a more aggressive approach.

Why March?

Given the long list of recent do-nothing demonstrations, organizers might be skeptical of another march. Contemporary mass marches are exhausting to organize and tend to function as cathartic endeavors rather than as a catalyst for deeper organizing or as a demonstration of a particular social bloc’s leverage over those in power. This past year’s marches often failed to develop a long-term political strategy and even those that had programmatic points of unity were unable to maintain lasting and durable political alliances.

Still, the mass and semi-spontaneous demonstrations that followed the inauguration were fruitful insofar as they managed to shake the confidence of Trump’s supporters and perhaps the administration itself. Trump’s base has still not been able to defend his reactionary program with mobilizations anywhere near the scale and enthusiasm of the Women’s March or the airport protests. This dynamic has managed to slow down what Trump hoped would be an immediate, aggressive implementation of his policies.

A march of the kind proposed here would strive for the successes of 2017’s early mobilizations while avoiding their weaknesses.

For one, a march for a single achievable demand would be both more attractive and more effective than those built around platforms full of abstract feel-good phrases.

Further, the march itself would be the result of a yearlong campaign of coast-to-coast advocacy and organizing. By working on a single tactical goal, requiring close cooperation on logistics, messaging, speakers, and more, organizers can build a tighter coalition that doesn’t just exist on paper. Those relationships can form the basis of a long-haul national movement emerging out of the march.

Some on the Left will see this as too ambitious, insisting that we need to think small and act locally.

But despite the proven popularity of Medicare for All, advocating for it at the local level has clear limits. California’s Democratic Socialists have done important work advocating for single payer in their state, but most states do not have the that option either because such legislation doesn’t exist or if it does it’s a political dead letter. States are dependent on federal Medicare funding for their own programs, and are especially jumpy about implementing new spending given Trump’s vindictive threat to cut off funding to asylum cities.

Worse, state-level legislative strategies would facilitate the segregation of the Medicare for All movement, wherein each organization fights for legislative gains in their home states largely independent of a nationally coordinated effort. Such lobbying campaigns — especially under the current political conditions — would likely fail to secure gains in most states, fail to generate mass nationwide enthusiasm for the demand, and risk organizational exhaustion by virtue of the sheer power of our opposition. Our enemies — like the insurance lobbyists, the American Medical Association, and other tools of the health-care industry — are better funded and better connected. Fighting them on their terms, siloed from each other by state lines, would make the battle nearly unwinnable.

Our best weapon against these powerful industries is those young people who were drawn to the Bernie Sanders campaign and its promise of a programmatic working-class politics. With the campaign itself in the rearview, political and organizational unity has waned. But by committing to a campaign for a single working-class demand we could reignite those young people and connect them with organized health-care workers, patients’ groups, and the larger movement that’s sprung up in opposition to Trumpcare. We could productively feed off the general frustration with the Trump administration while going on the offensive with a nationwide, positive campaign.

Simply, a march would give socialists the opportunity to vocally and aggressively lead on a major working-class demand. It would help us build organization, forge political consensus, and reintegrate the socialist movement with a key sector of the workers’ movement.

That same level of unity and clarity of focus could not be achieved by lobbying-style tactics like phone-banking senators or through hyper-local campaigns. The achievability and immediacy of a march gives us the opportunity to focus attention on a single nationwide goal and will help us foster solidarity among thousands of socialists and progressive workers. Further, if successful the march could turn Medicare for All into a defining political flashpoint in the coming years.

The socialist left cannot afford to let this moment pass.

Criminal Justice Reform Is Coming and There Is Nothing Jeff Sessions Can Do About It

By Isaac Chotiner, Slate

04 July 17

The attorney general can’t stop criminal justice reform in this country.

n a new collection of essays, Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, Angela J. Davis gathers contributions from scholars and academics to examine the disadvantaged position from which black Americans are forced to navigate the criminal justice system. From racial profiling, to a flawed grand jury system, to prosecutors who exacerbate existing inequality, America’s criminal justice infrastructure is in need of serious repair.

I spoke by phone with Davis, a professor of law at American University, recently. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why district attorney elections are so crucial, who really controls the criminal justice system, and why President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t totally wreck efforts at reform.

Isaac Chotiner: What made you want to connect the police abuse story we’ve been reading so much about to the larger criminal justice system?

Angela J. Davis: The title of the book is Policing the Black Man, and I think people look at that and think it’s just a book about how police interact with black men. But really “policing” is used in the broader sense of the word: how the whole criminal justice system polices black men, from arrest all the way through sentencing. At every single step of the criminal process, black men are treated worse than their similarly situated white counterparts.

The essay you wrote is about the role of prosecutors. Why did you choose that as your focus?

I truly believe that is one aspect of the criminal justice system that people definitely have not been aware of and have been shocked by. We see police on the street. People are aware of racial profiling. People interact with police much more than they do with prosecutors, but very few people know what prosecutors do, unless they are involved in the criminal justice system themselves as either a victim of a crime or as a defendant. I think one of the outcomes of Ferguson was that for the first time people started focusing on prosecutors, right? When the prosecutor in that case refused to indict the police officer and then came out and made that public statement and revealed what happened in the grand jury, I think people were absolutely shocked. Just from my own public speaking on the topic, I was surprised by how people responded with shock and quite frankly despair and horror when they found out how powerful prosecutors are and how little accountability there is for prosecutors.

Prosecutors have a tremendous amount of power. They in fact control the criminal justice system. They decide whether there’s going to be a case or not.

One theme of the book is that once the process of bringing black men into the system starts, it just gets worse. What are the initial things that begin this process?

Racial profiling is the obvious one. That police officers target black men, stop, and search them far more than their similarly situated white counterparts, meaning that they’re doing it in ways that are illegal. That they’re stopping them when they don’t have a legal basis to do so, and those stops result in interactions between black men and police officers, harsh treatment by police officers that gives police officers a basis for arresting them.

Then that starts the process that entrenches them in the criminal justice system. I think most people are not aware that, in fact, black men are prosecuted more frequently and more harshly than white men who engage in the same behaviors. All the studies show that. A lot of people focus on cops, but cops only have the power to bring individuals to the courthouse door. It’s prosecutors who decide whether they remain there, become entrenched there, whether they’re charged with something or not. They have total discretion in making that decision and very little accountability for that decision.

Is prosecutorial reform easier or harder than reforming police departments?

Part of the issue is the election of prosecutors. I personally think it’s almost the key, if not to solving this problem, certainly to improving it. Electing individuals in those prosecutor positions that are going to make decisions that will change the system.

For example, in this last election there were a number of, I will call them bad prosecutors who were unseated by what I call progressive prosecutors who have stated that they have an entirely different view of how prosecution should be done and that they’re really seeking to change the goals of the prosecutor’s office, that it’s no longer just simply to lock people up but to maybe divert a lot of people out of the system, to try to do something about this problem of mass incarceration. I’m heartened by that.

There had been talk of criminal justice reform from both parties in recent years, but now we have a new attorney general and president who seem extremely uninterested in criminal justice reform. To what degree do you think that message from Washington that reform is not important will filter down to prosecutors at the federal and even state level?

I’m very concerned about Jeff Sessions being the attorney general. I’m very concerned that he’s going to roll back all of the progress that Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch were making, particularly with regard to consent decrees. He’s already tried to turn back, to redo the consent decrees that were done in Baltimore and in Ferguson. Luckily, so far, the judge in Baltimore has stopped that.

But you know 90 percent of all criminal cases are prosecuted on the state and local level, so as bad as the federal sentencing laws are, and as harsh as the policies that Sessions is now trying to implement with forcing U.S. attorneys to charge at the highest possible level, we’re still talking about 10 percent of the cases. I’m actually not as concerned that the administration’s harsh policies and their efforts to turn back criminal justice reform will impact that many cases.

Why did you decide to call the book Policing the Black Man rather than policing black people?

This was a question I knew I would be asked a lot. I think that black men are in somewhat of a unique position in the criminal justice system. Here’s what I mean by that. I certainly, certainly am aware of and in fact have been writing about for decades the fact that people of color in general, particularly African Americans and Latinos, and also Native Americans, are treated so harshly in our criminal justice system. LGBT people are treated worse in the criminal justice system. By focusing on black men, I am in no way minimizing or trivializing the horrible experiences of all of these groups. But if you look at, just looking at the sheer numbers, black men are treated worse. Black boys are disproportionally arrested and detained, much more so than their white counterparts.