| Labor Day Weekend, a long weekend to allow (some of us) to get prepared for battle. Oh, joy, if its battle to ensure that a workable health insurance reform is passed ... but all indications are that its going to have to first be a battle to ensure that the wrong health insurance reform is not passed.
I've talked about this in the measured tones of an academic economist, but in the heat of battle, the long winded policy wonkery is threatened with being drowned out by the shouts of simple slogans.
Unfortunately for the Corporations and their Congressional and White House Allies who have chosen this field of battle, when the fight is stripped down to its essential, we have the winning simple slogan:
NO CAPTIVE MARKETS!
It explains WHY no public choice means no individual mandate, and explains it in the simplest possible terms. The majority of us in this country - not just the majority of progressives, but the majority top to bottom, including large numbers of conservative foot soldiers - that if you give a corporation a captive market, it will be a blood sucking parasite.
And if some hundreds of thousands will die, well, if that's what it takes to get the most blood sucked out, that's what it takes.
So three words: shout them out. Blog them, comment them, put them in online newspaper commentary and write them down on pieces of paper and send them slowmail to the LTE of your local newspaper. Put them on pamphlets and hand them out on the streetcorner. Make a video YouTube clip of fifty people in various groups shouting it, then burn it onto DVD-R's and hand THEM out on college campuses. Put it on T-Shirts and start wearing them on your Sunday jog and bike ride.
Now, sure, if we get Ten Progressive Senators to tell the President, No Public Choice means No Mandate, the White House will be forced to go all in for the public choice or else write a bill that does some minor patches around the edges while we have time to primary some damn Blue Dogs and let the Democratic Party know that their strategy of a tame pseudo-progressive wing has broken down.
But otherwise, our first victory will be killing a market trying to expand the captive market that the health insurance companies enjoy. Or in other words, just one more welfare for the rich program.
UPDATE: Twitter this Docudharma essay http://bit.ly/iQ8QM with any one of the slogans above the fold, or the crosspost to Daily Kos http://bit.ly/iQ8QM in the same way.
UPDATE II: After buddhy's outburst of optimism, I do want to add that its good news that the White House did not throw Medicare Elective under the bus. I would have been happier to see the Labor Day speech include a commitment to not throw it under the bus during the legislative fight ahead, but at the very least, the White House has made it clear that if it does throw Medicare Elective under the bus, it will be in sorrow, rather than with joy.
We, in any event, must play to the whistle. |
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