Progressive bloggers and progressive organizers exhibit a willingness to be foot soldiers for the Democratic Party, which has utterly sold the American people out on this health care by passing a package of tiny of reforms that could have been passed individually at anytime.
Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist who is known for his coverage of the military contractor Blackwater (which is has changed its name to Xe) said in an interview:
"let's be clear here: This is a complete and total sellout to the interests of the insurance lobby by the Obama administration. This is, as Michael Moore has said, a complete victory for the ultra-capitalists. Yet, if you look on the liberal blogosphere, people like Jane Hamsher are attacked mercilessly for having the audacity to stand up and say "this is a Democratic sellout."à ‚¬ ¨
So you have this blind allegiance to ... what? To Obama as a man? To the Democrats as a party? To me, it's very dangerous when you start going down the road of unquestioning support for any powerful individual or any politician. The moment you cede your conscience to a politician is the moment you stop struggling for a better society.
Indeed, many progressives buy into this idea that pushing a public option or Medicare buy-in could complicate the process. Even though now is the time in the process for amendments like a public option, a Medicare buy-in, or even a state single payer amendment, progressives unwisely promote this idea that those who want real healthcare reform need to stay out of the way.
The package gives Democrats the ability to parade around like martyrs for health care even though they haven't really advanced much of a social agenda at all. Support for the public option or single payer not-for-profit healthcare didn't change much during the health reform process and neither did opposition to the bill. (That's because until a few weeks ago nobody knew what was in the bill.)
Not much was done at all to mold consensus; Democrats tracked conventional wisdom among Democrats and Republicans and staked out at a "middle" position--an average of the two ideologies--and passed a bill that will probably lead businesses to cut jobs, that will require people to purchase a defective product from private insurance companies, and that will cause premiums to increase.
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