COMMENT
Comment 'The smaller the electorate, the more vulnerable a democratic government is to the influence of large special-interest groups or factions.' —William Kimberling, deputy director of the...
...We weren't embarrassed to be progressives...
...Don't run out to your mailbox to look for your peace dividend anytime soon...
...He thinks he's found the Rosetta Stone of a new Democratic coalition...
...Which leaves you to wonder how bad things are going to get once affirmative-action goes completely by the wayside...
...and others have made that now is not the time for such efforts...
...Here at The Progressive, we're mindful of the arguments that Adolph Reed Jr...
...Don't expect Bill Clinton and Al Gore to wake up and find a copy of the Bill of Rights under their pillows on January 20...
...I trust this guy.'" Progressives in the House also won reelection, including Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Lane Evans of Illinois, Maurice Hinchey of New York, and Elizabeth Furse of Oregon...
...Just as the mutual-fund industry would reap windfalls from privatizing Social Security, the private insurance companies are lobbying hard for privatization of Medicare...
...Next time, we hope the left runs a more serious race, and not just for the White House...
...The assault on affirmative action assumes that America has conquered discrimination...
...Americans' on-again-off-again flirtation with anti-business causes is off again," Peter Passell of the Times concluded, minimizing the impact of vast amounts of corporate campaign dollars...
...If we fail to take up the challenge, our views will vanish, and in the vacuum, ul-trarightists like Pat Buchanan will rise to prominence, articulating a powerful—if extremely dangerous—alternative for those who are disenchanted...
...And as Clinton moves further and further to the right, he'll be providing the left with more opportunities to step into the void...
...What we need is Medicare for everybody—universal health care...
...We should seize them...
...The vote was 54 percent to 46 percent, and it won in part because of some clever wording by those who drafted the language of the proposition, known as the California Civil-Rights Initiative, which made it sound as high-minded as God and apple pie...
...Privatization is a greater danger than even the severe cuts the Republicans proposed in 1995...
...Business was a big winner," The New York Times declared the day after the elections...
...The Nation Is Still Locked Onto Rightward Paih, a New York Times article announced...
...It doesn't even make sense at the level of pop psychology: If Clinton so desperately seeks approval, he'll be able to get more of it—and from much more powerful people—by governing from the right...
...Barriers remain to minority firms' participation in the government contracting process," the report noted, adding that, "Disparities are greater in those areas where no affirmative-action program is in place...
...All those progressives who went to the polls and voted for Clinton, hoping that he would suddenly find his progressive bearings in the second term, think again...
...and a truth-in-advertising proposition that would have made it easier to sue companies for misleading investors lost in California...
...He set out to build a new governing coalition not of the poor and the disenfranchised, but of suburban voters, the new hi-tech industries, and Wall Street...
...Chief among these was Paul Wellstone of Minnesota...
...Ross Perot's two Presidential runs show that people are not hopelessly tied into the two-party system...
...Gore's motto, as John Nichols reported in The Capital Times of Madison, is Clintonesque in its vacuity: "Not to the left, nor to the right, but to the future...
...But the Texaco case shows that the ugliest kind of prejudice persists at the highest levels of corporate America...
...Maine voters passed the most sweeping campaign-finance-reform initiative to be proposed in decades, while voters in California, Colorado, Arkansas, and Montana backed strict new limits on campaign spending by special interests...
...If this blatant bigotry still permeates the boardroom, you can bet that subtler forms of discrimination are also common: managers who use the old-boys' network, or who say that they don't have a "comfort level" with certain individuals who happen to look different than the typical executive...
...As for Pentagon spending, Clinton and Gore are already boasting about the lack of difference between the two parties...
...There's a sign up at the White House: No Left Turn...
...Health-maintenance organizations know that they stand to gain a lot of money by eliminating the cost-controls that come along with the Medicare system...
...The system is running out of money...
...And even the popcorn is stale...
...The apostles of complacency and quiescence are not bothering to look below the surface...
...His yard signs bore pictures of light bulbs to remind voters that he took on the powers-that-be who wanted him to sell off Cleveland's municipally owned power company when he was mayor during the 1970s...
...But the reason is not "government inefficiency," as the Republicans and many Democrats have claimed...
...Clinton and Gore have shown nothing but disdain for them...
...Special interests are adept at selling their way of thinking...
...And William Safire recently declared the left "all but gone...
...A small increase in the payroll tax, or a more progressive income tax, could keep the program solvent for the next forty years, just as an 0.1 percent increase in income taxes starting in the year 2010 would keep Social Security solvent indefinitely...
...Private employers are banding together to purchase health insurance and using the clout of a large patient base to get the best deal from the insurance companies...
...It's Scene I, Take II...
...Kucinich became one of the few Democrats to unseat a Republican incumbent...
...Nonvoting is the way many contented people express passive consent to current conditions," George Will wrote, adding cozily: "In a free and constitutional society, elections are of limited importance because life's basic enjoyments are not at risk...
...propositions in California and Oregon that would have imposed controls on health-maintenance organizations were voted down...
...And Dennis Kucinich, the former mayor of Cleveland, won a seat in the House...
...And he also refused to stand on the Green platform and embrace the full range of progressive issues—a refusal that alienated some of our core constituencies...
...Medicare has been operating this way for the last decade, using the clout of its large pool of elderly patients...
...Wellstone refused to back down, refused to dodge the liberal label...
...Witness how Clinton abused liberals on the welfare issue...
...But we still believe in the usefulness of leftwing Presidential challenges, if done wholeheartedly...
...We are becoming a government of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged...
...Gone the hope for universal health care, gone the hope for a peace dividend, gone the hope for rebuilding our cities, gone the hope for a more just economy...
...The glass ceiling is hardly being shattered...
...Nader refused to spend more than $5,000 on the campaign, which severely limited his abilities right from the start...
...Privatization Blues As Alexander Cockburn predicted in the last issue of The Progressive, Clinton is already making noises about establishing some big-wig bipartisan commission to "reform" Medicare and Social Security...
...It's Clinton II...
...But that raises the question: Who would be better...
...The Times cited a raft of state ballot initiatives intended to regulate business that failed at the polls...
...Christopher Dodd, the Democratic Party head, says, "the Party's moving in the right direction"—which is the literal truth...
...Some on the left have kidded themselves that their access to Clinton—when added to his willingness to please and his lame-duck status—would translate into a more liberal second term...
...They started to say, 'Hey...
...Second, if we do not challenge Democratic capitulation by exiting the Party, we will continue to be taken for granted and taken advantage of...
...But that's not a view you will find in the mainstream media...
...No matter that the elderly themselves would then have to bear the risk when their investments go bad...
...They're Republicans in disguise...
...Such comments should alert us to just how far we have to go before we have overcome discrimination...
...Nothing shows the two major parties' commitment to corporate greed and contempt for the public interest better than the emerging bipartisan consensus that the government should privatize these crucial programs...
...Privatizing Medicare would destroy the program," says Edie Rasell, an economist and physician who works for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C...
...Nader ran on the Green Party ticket, but he won only 580.000 votes—0.6 percent of the total...
...His opponent, Rudy Boschwitz, labeled him "embarrassingly liberal" and "Senator Wellfare" for his lonely and outspoken defense of federal welfare guarantees...
...We'd like to see a slate of candidates—for Senate, for the House, for state assemblies, for county boards, for city councils—so we can take our views to our fellow citizens in a systematic way, and not be hostage to a single personality...
...Those who do not vote are disproportionately poor...
...While public officials extol the virtues of "consumer choice" in a free-market health-care system, large private firms know better...
...Gore even says the Democrats are going to spend more on the military than the Republicans down the road...
...It's a convenient tactic for the business community, which stands to gain handsomely from dismantling these programs...
...The reason Medicare is in trouble is that the payroll tax that supports the Medicare trust fund has not increased since 1986...
...The confusion may have proved deci'Bill Clinton went out, and there were days when he sounded like Ronald Reagan had taken over his body.' —Haley Barbour, the Republican national chairman 'Opposition to racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in all their overt and covert forms is a similar moral, political, and tactical imperative' to the struggle against slavery and the struggle against totalitarianism...
...Big business, and its apologists in the media, have done their damnedest to discredit this idea, and to scare the American public that Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt...
...But politicians don't want to talk about raising taxes even to pay for the most popular and useful of government programs...
...The assault on Medicare is equally frightening...
...Not all was gloom...
...The Texaco case, and these new studies, prove that it hasn't...
...No one should be surprised...
...it's our job to offer them up...
...The Nader campaign had serious problems, primarily a reluctant and idiosyncratic candidate...
...If we stick around, the abuse will only continue...
...It's true that Medicare is in far more trouble than Social Security...
...And people saw that...
...By contrast, some Democrats who ran as pro-business "centrists," like Idaho's Walt Minnick, who spent several million dollars of his own money, went down in defeat...
...A Maine initiative banning clear-cutting lost to a timber-industry-sponsored initiative...
...And Clinton talks fatuously about "the vital center," a phrase that guarantees the continual blurring of the differences between Democrats and Republicans...
...Clinton's Indonesian fund-raising shenanigans may force real campaign-finance reform back on the agenda...
...He's been a corporatist since his second term as governor of Arkansas...
...The Urban Institute released a study claiming that firms owned by minorities and women do not receive a representative share even of government contracts...
...Pundits attributed the slim turnout to a combination of popular satisfaction with the political direction of the country, confidence in the economy, and voter apathy...
...It's the same old establishment crowd, only more so...
...So forget about fixing up the welfare mess...
...Private plans, vouchers, and other alternatives to the current Medicare system would also erode public support for Medicare, and threaten the quality of care...
...Privatizing Social Security, which is at no risk of running out of money for another forty years, would be a boon to the mutual-fund industry, which wants to get its hands on the retirement funds of the nation's elderly...
...Ralph Nader's paltry showing seems to substantiate such claims...
...Actually, the administrative costs for Medicare typically run at 4 percent, whereas the administrative costs of private-sector health companies run about 25 percent...
...We never ran away from our positions," Wellstone says...
...Clinton knew that dismantling welfare was a move calculated to haul the Democratic Party to the right, and Gore knew it, too: That's why the Vice President urged Clinton to sign on...
...But there is a huge section of the public that is not contented, and that does not feel so secure about obtaining life's basic enjoyments...
...He may have been the only Democrat in the country who ran ads in favor of welfare, and still he won reelection—with an even greater margin of victory than last time...
...Make way for privatization...
...To argue, in such a climate, that individuals should split off and go it alone, and use their tiny bargaining power to try to get good health insurance for a low price is ludicrous...
...Once wealthier Medicare patients leave the system, taking their clout with them, the momentum to cut funding, lower taxes, and erode the quality of Medicare would snowball...
...The most hopeful sign, though, was that many of the Democratic candidates who stood on principle managed to prevail...
...As Mother Jones recently pointed out, mutual funds stand to gain $60 billion a year even from modest versions of privatization...
...And while it is true that Clinton won't have an upcoming campaign to make him act opportunistically, his heir apparent, Al Gore, has one, and Clinton won't do anything to prevent Al from getting his due...
...The expectation that Clinton would wake up the day after the election and say, "Fooled you, I'm a leftist after all," never made any sense...
...This may not be as far off as it seems...
...But the sequel will resemble the original, only less daring, if that's possible...
...Clinton's new appointments to his cabinet and his staff show no hint of progressivism...
...Passell quoted Thomas Mann, director of the Brookings Institution, who interpreted the election results to mean that "the public is less angry and less willing to identify with populism...
...A Bad Prop The passage of Proposition 209, outlawing affirmative action in California, was one of the left's most bitter defeats on election day...
...When we try to imitate the Republicans, we lose," says Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin...
...The nonvoters outnumbered the voters on November 5. Only about 49 percent of the electorate bothered to show up at the polls, down eight million from 1992, the lowest level since 1924...
...And civil liberties...
...Not only did he not deny that he was a populist liberal, he bragged about it...
...Even as affirmative action is under fire around the country, new studies show women and minorities still are not treated fairly...
...Millions of voters are looking for alternatives...
...Another study, conducted by Catalyst, a nonprofit women's research group, showed that women hold only 2 percent of the powerful positions in Fortune 500 companies...
...The Democrats are now the party of the death penalty, wiretapping, internet censoring, and three strikes and you're out...
...Despite the reputed contentedness of the American people, many are unhappy that the almighty campaign dollar has rotted out the basic, democratic plank of one-person, one-vote...
...It was ironic that the same week that California voted to toss out affirmative action, the story broke that senior executives at Texaco allegedly referred to their African-American employees as "black jelly beans" and "niggers...
...The idea that we, as citizens of a democratic society, should pay into a common pool so that everyone benefits no longer holds sway...
...The wording did not even mention affirmative action...
...Gone are the promises of change...
...The New Party is already running candidates locally, and winning...
...First, it's important to put forward our views at a time when Americans are ready to listen, and that's election time...
...Revenge of the Hollow Man...
...Why would either of them go back on their actions now...
...Here's why: Clinton's grand plan has been to remake the Democratic Party as a moderate Republican Party...
...Turns out that Nader was not the best vehicle for a progressive third-party Presidential race...
...Currently, Medicare patients (a group that includes the vast majority of our nation's elderly) pay a fixed rate for health-care services...
...Not exactly a force to be reckoned with...
...Supporters of Proposition 209 argued that we are already a color-blind society, and that women and minorities don't need affirmative action to compete equally...
...Comment 'The smaller the electorate, the more vulnerable a democratic government is to the influence of large special-interest groups or factions.' —William Kimberling, deputy director of the Federal Election Commission Revenge of the Hollow Man So here we are, facing four more years of Clinton...
...Doctors can bill Medicare patients for no more than 15 percent above the fixed rate...
...This is delusion squared...
...And does it even make sense to compete for the Presidency when the left appears so frail...
...These aren't leftists in disguise...
...A corporatist he shall remain...
...John McGinnis, in National Review sive, since 55 percent of California voters who were asked directly if they wanted to do away with affirmative action said no, according to a Harris poll taken before the election...
...Privatization would eliminate this cap...
Vol. 60 • December 1996 • No. 12
