Our capitol's being looted, Republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's _capital_ at work -- raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.

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http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript4.html

Here's a synopsis of what was said:

One year after the great collapse of our financial system,

Main Street

is still struggling, Wall Street is again "cleaning up," while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, many of us are about to be forced to buy excessively expensive insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House. Obama and the Democrats seem to be reluctant to cross swords with the corporate elite that has so much power in this country, whether it's the Wall Street elite or the health-industrial complex.

Our capitol's being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital at work -- raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.

Some of the big insurance companies -- Well Point, Cigna, United Health -- all surged to a 52-week high in their share prices this week when it became clear to investors that there'd be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now.

The massive subsidies for health insurance companies have been preserved, yet they've also managed to expand their customer base. How? There's a mandate in the bill that's going to provide these big companies with the 30 million new customers who are going to be forced, under possible penalty of a fine, to give them top dollar for health insurance. Wall Street investors correctly read what this Congressional health care effort is all about. It's about ever larger profits, mandated by law, thanks to a Congressional majority that is essentially owned by Big Pharma and the Health Insurance Giants.

Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, was Bill Clinton's political director. And what he learned from Bill Clinton's failure to get health insurance passed was, 'don't get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.' So Obama's strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies and the drug industry going in. And the promise to these industries was, "we're not going to attack your customer base, we're going to subsidize a new addition to your customer base. This was a sweetheart deal between the pharmaceutical-"health' industry and the White House, done many months ago, well before this fight in Congress really began.

That's one way to get legislation, but it's not a way to transform the health system. Once the White House made this deal with the insurance companies and Big Pharma, the public option was never going to be anything more than a fig leaf. And, sure enough, over the summer and the fall, it gradually got whittled down to nothing.

Howard Dean's point this week was that by way of this mandate (which is going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies), the Democrats are going to end up owning this crappy policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular. He says it's going to be an albatross around the Democrats' neck for a generation.

The difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this: Social insurance everybody pays for, through their taxes. As a result, we don't think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. An individual mandate, on the other hand, is an order to you, under threat of a fine, to buy some product from some private profit-making company, which in the case of a lot of moderate-income people, you can't afford to buy. The dilemma here is that the affordable policies have very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums, but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. However, if the coverage is decent, then the premiums are unaffordable. And so our government is doing the bidding of private industry, in this way coercing people to buy profit-making products that many of them can't afford -- and Congress has the audacity to tell them that this "healthcare reform"!

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Just this week, the Washington Post and ABC News had a poll showing that the American public supports the Medicare buy-in plan by a margin of some 30 percentage points -- yet in Congress this proposal went down like a lead balloon. Why?

Basically there are two ways, if you're the President of the United States sizing up a situation like this, that you can try and create reform. One is to say, "well, the interest groups are so powerful that the only thing I can do is work with them and move the ball a few yards, get some incremental reform, and hope we can eventually turn it into something better." The other way is to try to rally the people against the special interests and play on the fact that the insurance industry and the drug industry are not going to win any popularity contests with the American people. In this second scenario, the president must be the champion of the people against the special interests. However, that's the course that Obama and the Democratic Party has chosen not to pursue.

So how to explain this?

If you look at the Democratic Party as a business -- and after all, their job is basically to raise campaign funds and to stay in power -- what they are doing makes a lot of sense. They have a consistent strategy which is to negotiate a compromise between the expressed wishes of the electorate and the interests of the campaign-financing industries which, to be prudent, they must protect. And that's exactly what they're doing right now.

So, all the Republicans have to do now, aside from prolonging the struggle as much as possible, is sit back and watch the Democrats make a disaster out of this health care effort. One way or the other, the Dems are going to lose on this one. The Repugs are going to gain political capital from it whether they're in the right or not.

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The current version of the Senate bill covers 30 million more people than are covered at present, has subsidies for low-income families, spreads the risk, lowers some premium costs, creates some exchanges where some people can shop for better coverage and prices. So, some say, don't be too hard on it.

Don't be too hard on Obama, either. He inherited a really difficult situation and we're making incremental progress. If we could've done better we would've.

One of the challenges facing any president is to transform the reality rather than just work within its parameters. The other problem is that those of us who consider ourselves progressives invested so much in this apparently remarkable figure, Barack Obama -- we read our own hopes into him, we saw him as a potentially great president. We saw this as a potentially transformative moment in history, in which he could've chosen to be the kind of president Roosevelt was. But as it turns out, that's not who he is. However, will a collapsing economy, and his therefore collapsing presidency, move him to become another FDR? We can only hope.

Problem is, if his health care bill goes down, the way the Republicans have framed this as a make-or-break moment for President Obama will make it easier for them to take control of Congress in 2010. Plus, it could very well make Obama even more gun-shy about promoting reform. It could well also create even more political paralysis because it might very well embolden the Republicans, still further, to block whatever this President is trying to do, at every turn.

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In its present form, this health care bill doesn't address the two biggest problems within the health care crisis.

One of these problems is the inefficiency and the bureaucracy and the paperwork, which it doesn't address at all. (For instance, it doesn't standardize anything -- every doctor's office, clinic and hospital must spend countless hours processing their own separate system of paperwork, virtually all of which work would be eliminated with a Medicare-for-all program.)

The other problem is price, the concern for which has now fallen by the wayside because there's not going to be a public option to drive down prices.

So, if we are left with a health care bill that doesn't address either of these two major problems, and is additionally a big give-away to the insurance companies, thanks to the creation of this additional 30-million-strong customer base, composed of a great many people wanting to avoid a fine, how popular could this program be, once it goes into effect? And how many unhappy and financially-stressed customers will have to either be fined or jailed, in order to implement this grand rip-off?

If this bill goes down in flames, it's going to be even harder to get the kind of legislation we want, because the Republicans, greatly inspired by our failure, are really going to be on the march. So, the Democrats are really between a rock and a hard place here. If the bill loses, there's a number of ways in which the Republicans gain. And if the bill wins, there could be another set of ways that the Republicans gain. And this is all because of the deal that our friend, Rahm Emanuel struck, back in the spring, creating a pro-industry bill that doesn't really address the main structural problems of the current system.

The defeat of the bill would be absolutely crushing -- in terms of the way the press would play it, and in terms of the way it would give encouragement to the far right in this country, providing them with the confidence that "we can block this guy if we just fight hard enough, if we just demagogue it."

Some say the crushing defeat of the bill might be good for the Democrats. It would teach them a lesson that they're going to have to pursue a radically different course in the future.

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Part of the problem here is the so-called New Democrats who are really the party of Wall Street. Essentially they are corporate-affiliated Democrats. Example: Look at what happened in Barney Frank's committee to the financial reform bill: Frank's a pretty good liberal and he ended up looking like a complete stooge for industry because in order to get a bill out of his own committee, he had to appease the 15 new corporate-affiliated Democrats who were put on that committee mostly by Rahm Emanuel, as a means to raise money. He felt that there's no better place than the House Financial Services Committee if you want to shake down Wall Street, to put it bluntly. Melissa Bean, who's a two-term Democratic Congressman, ended up being the power broker because she essentially controls those 15 votes on Barney Frank's committee. She decides what she's going to allow out of committee and what she isn't going to allow.

A great example of Melissa Bean's power was when the banks wanted to pass an amendment into the bill that would have prevented the states from making their own tougher financial regulatory rules. She obligingly put through this amendment that basically said that the federal government would have purview over all these laws, not the states.

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In order to fix this country's economic and financial problems, President Obama is going to have to go over the heads of the special interests, to the people. There's a lot of sullen apprehension, frustration in the country now, and people are hungry for the kind of strong leadership that he is not currently providing. It would absolutely be a political winner for the president to hit Wall Street very hard and do all the things that FDR did. If he did that, if he remade Wall Street in the way that it needs to be remade, he would do nothing but gain popularity.

But what if by nature, that's not what he wants to do? What if, by nature, he prefers to head the establishment, rather than change it?

In that case he runs the risk of being a failed president. Let's just hope that he's a smart enough, principled enough guy, that some time in his second year in office, he's going to realize that he's at a crossroads.

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Is there a way that we can have a politician get elected without the sponsorship of corporate/Wall Street interests? Can we get somebody in the White House who's independent of these interests that are always in the way of real reform?

It's not accidental that the last three Democratic presidents have been at best, corporate Democrats. One hoped that because of the depth of our current crisis and the disgrace of deregulation and its ideology, and the practical failure of the Bush presidency, that this was a moment for a clean break. The fact that even at such a moment, even with an outsider president campaigning on "change we can believe in," Barack Obama turned out to be who he has been so far, is quite revealing in terms of the structural undertow that big money represents in this country. The question is: Is he capable of making a change in time to redeem the moment, redeem his own promise?

Back in the in the mid-'80s, after Walter Mondale lost, the Democrats made a conscious decision that they were no longer going to rely entirely on certain interest groups and unions to fund their campaigns. Instead they decided that they were going to try to close that funding gap with the Republicans. And they made a lot of concessions to the financial services industry and to big corporations generally. And that's who they are now. There are probably only 40 Democrats in the Senate who are not corporate Democrats. And there are probably only 200 Democrats in the House who are not corporate Democrats.

You have Republican wall-to-wall obstructionism, and with a few exceptions, Republicans are totally in bed with big business. And you have just enough Democrats who are in bed with big business that it makes it much harder for progressive Democrats to follow the agenda that the country so desperately needs.

It takes a lot of guts to confront the elite that really does have a hammerlock on politics in this country, and articulate the needs of ordinary people.

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President Obama recently said: "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street."

Then on Monday afternoon, he had this photo op in which he scolded the bankers and they took it politely and graciously, which they could've easily managed to do because the Hill at that very moment was swarming with banking lobbyists making sure that what the President wants doesn't happen!

One of the main problems is that no one in Washington is afraid of Obama. His style is rather diffident and hands-off, and very principled. However, if you're going to be a politician, you have to get in there and mix it up. And to the extent that his surrogates are mixing it up, when it comes to reforming Wall Street, they're mixing it up on the wrong side of the fence.

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So why did Obama chose Geithner and Summers and people from Goldman Sachs and Wall Street to come and be his financial advisors, instead of choosing people like Stiglitz and Volker?

The first possible explanation is that Obama was naïve, that he doesn't know a whole about the financial services industry, and he felt the need to rely upon people who'd been there before, people who've had these jobs before, and who have this expertise.

The other school of thought is that he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate in history. Goldman Sachs was his number one private campaign contributor. This is, after all, the kind of thing the Democratic Party has done since the mid-'80s; they've relied heavily on the financial services industry to fund their campaigns. And so you've got the old quid pro quo: They gave a lot of money to help these guys run, and in return, they get the big jobs in the White House. Also instructive is the article at The Huffington Post, "Bank lobbyists launch call to action to crush financial reform. The American Bankers Association issued a call to action on Wednesday urging its lobbyist and member banks to make an all-out effort to crush regulatory reform in the Senate." This is how they take advantage of Obama's purchased tolerance.

Will Obama ever develop the guts to stand up against these financial benefactors of his? Some argue that he is a work in progress. He's a learner. So, there's at least a possibility that by the fall of 2010, looking down the barrel of a real election blowout, you could see him change course, if only for reasons of expediency, but hopefully for reasons of principle as well -- if he feels that the public doesn't have confidence that he is delivering the kind of recovery that the public needs. This is a guy who is a very smart, complicated man. So perhaps we shouldn't judge him too quickly, for the wheel's still in spin.

The other thing that's missing, if you are to fairly compare him with Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, is a social movement. In all of these great periods of transformation, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president, where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson. It describes the abolitionists and Lincoln. It describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. So where's the movement today? It's in its infancy and must become a whole lot bigger and stronger if there's to be any hope for Obama becoming an FDR.

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To some extent the White House lives in an echo chamber. They do these public events that are intended to demonstrate that the president's listening, that he's feeling our pain. Congress gets a very bad rap. But the House Democrat caucus is furious. They can't publicly embarrass their president, but they go home on weekends and they talk to their folks and they hear the individual stories of suffering. And they feel that certainly the Treasury, and to some extent the White House, just doesn't get it. So the House Democrat caucus fears that the Republicans are going to end up with a compelling narrative as well as the Tea Party folks. Thus far, it seems, it's the far right that is on the march when ordinary people need a champion. As a potential champion of the people, Obama is still nowhere to be found.

If the value of your home is going down the drain because the government's not doing anything about an epidemic of foreclosures, that's the kind of thing that rightfully angry people can talk about across a kitchen table. If the Dems are going to stir up enough people to turn this anger into a movement, they will need more leadership from people like a Marcy Kaptur or a Maria Cantwell, two elected officials who get it, and who have not been bought and paid for by Wall Street. And this is exactly where we could use a president with the communication skills that Obama has. He's probably the one person who could help all of America make sense of all this stuff. But he's not even making an effort to do that. Instead, he's doing photo ops with bankers, pretending to scold them. It's basically a kabuki dance to create the illusion that he's "against the Wall Street banksters." But the bottom line is that he's not explaining to people how all this stuff works. And therein lies the central problem.

Democracy is the only possible counterweight to concentrated financial power. But to take effect, that requires a great president rendezvousing with a powerful social movement. One way or another, sooner or later, there is going to be a social movement. Why? Because growing numbers of people are hurting and going hungry, and so many people are feeling, correctly, that Wall Street is getting way too much, while

Main Street

gets the shaft. Wall Street bonuses alone were of an amount that, used differently, could have prevented hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. All the banks would have had to do was to use their government grants to offer the owners a chance to either reduce their mortgage payments so that they were in line with what the house would in all likelihood sell for at an auction. If necessary, let the owner bid at the auction himself, with the understanding that he would have his payments reduced in line with the amount of the winning bid, should he be the one to place that bid.

If it's not a progressive social movement that articulates the frustration and shapes the reform program, you know that the right wing is going to articulate it and shape it, in a much less democratic and much less egalitarian way. That is what ought to be scaring us the most.

In conclusion, we are starting to see signs of grassroots movements. There are growing numbers of people who are refusing to leave their homes after they've been foreclosed. If the sheriff's deputies move all the furniture out of a house and onto the street, neighbors and activists break the lock on the door and move the furniture right back in again, and keep doing this until the sheriff's deputies give up. There are little pockets of such movements that are organizing against the mounting number of foreclosures all across the country, sometimes even with the blessings of the city's mayor. With the number of foreclosures growing at a frightful pace, and six Americans looking for every available job, perhaps a larger, nationwide movement will coalesce around something like that.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript4.html

Authors Bio:

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.