John McCain doesn’t sound like he’s buying the idea that Jared Kushner’s efforts to set up a private line of communication with the Kremlin is normal in any way. Here’s what he said about it on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7:30” program:
“I know some administration officials are saying this is standard procedure. I don’t think it’s standard procedure prior to the inauguration of the president of the United States by someone who is not in an appointed position,” he said. “This is becoming more and more bizarre. In fact, you can’t make it up.”
At this point, I just want to pause to point out a couple of things. First, it was John McCain who personally delivered former MI6 officer Christopher Steele’s “dodgy dossier” on Trump’s Russian connections to FBI director James Comey.
‘I did what any citizen should do. I received sensitive information and handed it to the FBI,’ he told CNN – the network which broke the story that the document existed. It was then published in full by Buzzfeed.
‘That’s why I gave it to the FBI. I don’t know if it is credible or not but the information I thought deserved to be delivered to the FBI, the appropriate agency of government.’
He added: ‘It doesn’t trouble me because I don’t know if it is accurate or not. I have no way of corroborating that.
‘The individual gave me the information. I looked at it. After receiving that information I took it to the FBI.’
One reason that John McCain was interested in these rumors is because he thinks Vladmir Putin is a bigger threat to the United States than ISIS, but another reason is that the Russians hacked his campaign. On August 12th, 2016, DCLeaks released “roughly 300 emails from Republican targets, including the 2016 campaign staff of Arizona Senator John McCain [and] South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.”
Obviously, John McCain didn’t support Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, but he seems to realize that the Russians’ interest in Trump was at least in part an effort to sideline neoconservative anti-Putin hardliners like Sen. Graham and himself. These neoconservatives would have been happy with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, but much less so with Rand Paul or certainly Trump. That his campaign was targeted by the Russians right along with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party is not surprising.
Yet, the neoconservatives aren’t wrong all the time, and in this case their suspicions about Russia’s interest in Trump and possible two-way collusion are about more than self-preservation. McCain is pretty slick but he and Graham are most definitely loaded for bear when it comes to Trump. If there is ever an impeachment trial in the Senate, you can be almost certain that these two Republican senators won’t be taking the president’s side.
Very good news.
another troll diary today, guess they’re getting worried
The coat of arms story says it all – T stole coat of arms from Marjorie Merriweather Post family, then replaced original text [integrity] with his name and original animals with imperial eagle on it
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/business/trump-coat-of-arms.html
Threats generally are assessed in terms of capabilities and intentions. Capabilities are always weighted more heavily in practical terms.
Based on capabilities alone, Putin’s Russia is the greatest threat to the United States, but Trump’s United States is the greatest threat to Russia also based on capabilities alone. ISIS’s capabilities are rather limited now, essentially where they control territory and the number of people who will take up the vision and attack Western enemies, such as UK, US, and France. Because the counter-terrorism efforts in those three countries are inching closer to police state thoroughness, ISIS’s capabilities are close to nil as a direct threat; the probability of the intention of an attack make ISIS’s threat more immediately feared than a threat from Russia. Nonetheless, a lightning strike is a more probable threat than an ISIS attack.
McCain clouds the capabilities issue with Russia’s attempt to influence the US and French elections. Other actors in US elections have vastly greater capability to rig US elections.
There are more ways of dealing with threatening capabilities than arming to the teeth (in the name of deterrence) or conducting wars everywhere, in the name of not being seen as weak. In fact, up to the Obama administration strategic arms reduction talks (START) were seen as a key complement to deterrence. US an Russian nuclear arsenals are roughly 1/20 (even considering multiple targeting) of the size they were at the height of the Cold War.
A progressive pleading the case for sympathy for the neo-conservatives is about as dysfunctional a political position as pleading sympathy for Kissingerian realism, Brzezinski’s brilliant move in Afghanistan, or Hillary Clinton’s “responsibility to protect”. We have seen the consequences. None of these great viewpoints on national security worked. Even the notion of “soft power” was twisted by the need to look aggressive at all costs for domestic audiences.
What is slowly emerging as the Trump saga unfolds is the bankruptcy of ideas of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Neither knows how to govern nor how to act on the world stage anymore; part of that is the sabotaging of the supporting institutions of American politics in the attempt to rig elections. Part of it is the demonic idea that businessmen know all the answers to everything because they are rich. Part of it is the massive swirl of money in lobbying firms and campaigns now at all levels of government as billionaires seek to prevail in their ideas.
All of those are a bigger threat than Putin. The worst fear the scaremongers can muster is that Putin will annex Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (three NATO members). Other than cussedness, no one has a good explanation of why Putin would bother. Trump’s refusal to reaffirm Article 5 of the North Atlantic Charter effectively ended NATO, as Angela Merkel’s response showed.
Some Democratic national security wonks better be thinking about “What now?” That is more productive activity than echoing John McCain and neoconservatives. We know absolutely where John McCain will be when the call of duty sounds — with Mitch McConnell.
Is this the best that passes for practical thinking north of the Potomac? If so, we are in much bigger trouble than we seemed last November.
Restorations always ride on the backs of corrupt proprietors. Time to move forward.
Your reference to the “demonic idea” that businessmen know all the answers reminded of Jackson Browne’s lyric in Looking East:
“Where the search for the truth is conducted with a wink and a nod
And where power and position are equated with the grace of God
These times are famine for the soul while for the senses it’s a feast
From the edge of my country, as far as you see, looking east.”
Keep fighting the good fight Tarheel – your posts always get me thinking.
Some good points in there, but if you see what I wrote as somehow fluffing neoconservatives, you’ve spent too long reading me to not have learned either my surface or my mischievous meaning.
The past year has created snark detection overload. And the crazed reactions of both Clinton and Sanders supporters online have made me wonder about some of the people I used to enjoy reading. Not a good time for being mischievous really. More clarity than intentional ambiguity is most helpful at the moment.
So I guess that the neoconservatives are thus never left.
It’s not so difficult to imagine, is it, that I have more than one intended audience?
Not hard at all, Booman.
Not hard at all.
Sad to see, though.
You are being driven right. So is this site.
And that’s wrong.
AG
For an accomplished musician, you have no ear.
I heard the sound of Trump’s victory.
Early.
I hear the sound of a site being driven towards the center now.
I wish that I had never heard either sound.
AG
You’ve also heard the sound of Ron and Rand Paul Victories at the Presidential level for most of a decade as well.
You’re not even a stopped clock just one going round at it’s own time that just happened to be right once when checked even though said clock, and ear, were wrong hundreds of times before.
Splitting messages to satisfy more than one intended audience eventually sacrifices integrity (wholeness).
The biggest hazard in blogs is assuming that all comments are aimed personally at the poster or previous commenter and not the ideas in the post of previous comment.
That is the hook that neo-Nazis hook into with their “precious snowflake” insult.
People don’t know other people’s motives unless those other people honestly explain them. That generally takes a lot of time and text. The times have so upset expectations of behavior that people are sorting out who to trust for political news and commentary.
For all your bristling, you are still in that group for me and for a lot of the long-time readers who are suddenly controversial here.
We are no longer in a political environment in which short, quippy or snarky conversation moves toward a better future. We need more consensus on what emerging ideas deserve support, more detail about those ideas, and more discussion of that nuance and detail.
This is really about something less philosophical.
It’s about whether you can dance with me or if you’re stuck in a rigid kind of literalism that sees the notes but can’t hear the music.
Perhaps you mistake the sound of a sledgehammer on a wedge for an argument aimed at you. What’s aimed at you is the fact that the Russians are motivated as much by their desire to marginalize the neoconservatives as they are by the desire to get sanctions lifted or exact revenge on Hillary Clinton.
That doesn’t excuse pulling a digital G. Gordon Liddy. You shouldn’t ally yourself with it just because it aligns with your political opinion of U.S. foreign policy or particularly neoconservatives.
Dance with me, Tarheel. You can do it.
WTF are you talking about?
What’s the problem with marginalizing the neoconservatives as long as one is clear that Russian national interests are no more benevolent than US national interests. Globally, most ideologies of national security and national interest are failures and what goes on is corruption and cynicism.
Of course, the Russians want the sanctions lifted. Of course, the Russians would like to punish Hillary Clinton for arguing to place sanctions on them in the first place. Did you think that there would be no blowback from the pressure that the US put on Russia regarding its support of the Assad regime?
And of course the Republicans in Congress were all over pressuring for sanctions the moment that the last Syrian chemical weapon was destroyed in Germany. The GOP line then was that Obama was too close to Putin and Kerry was too close to Lavrov. Apparently there were some serious differences on foreign policy within the Obama administration that the Republican Congress played in a neoconservative direction. And with neoconservatives thick in the upper levels of the Foreign Service, in part the result of Hillary Clinton’s staffing, that pressure was easy for Kerry to bend to and for Obama to use as guidance. Did it make the world any safer?
What has changed at the Pond seems to be the pushing of a particular party line instead of open discussion of politics on the progressive side of Democratic/democratic politics.
And frequent appeals for blanket support of this line. Are we getting to the point at which blog owners are being screened for the loyalty of their commenters? Has the internet finally become actually and truly dead as a creative instrument of politics?
Man, you didn’t used to be this dense.
There is no problem with marginalizing the neoconservatives.
But there is also no reason to reject them as allies in cases where they are pursuing a common cause.
It seems like you simply have no feel for the contours of the battlefield here.
The original Russian play was to help Trump because he was going to question the neoconservative dominance of the Republican Party. I don’t they realistically expected more than that Trump would go out an insult the hell out of every anti-Russia Republican candidate for the nomination. If he won the nomination, that would be a giant victory in itself.
The plan got more ambitious once he secured the nomination and that’s when they kicked things into overdrive. They didn’t just hack the Democrats. They hacked neoconservatives, too, including McCain and Graham and at least made efforts at Rubio.
All of these targets have every reason to be pissed off regardless of whether or not their foreign policy is nuts.
They started going after Trump immediately after he won, and were in fact the initial aggressors in this war. This was in part because they were the biggest losers as Trump took over their party, but also because their data was stolen and they were direct victims of crime. And it was also because they have deep connections to the intelligence community and there’s a broad consensus that Trump isn’t just a little out of the mainstream on Russia but actually indistinguishable from a Russian agent.
What you have here is a broad Deep State coup that has the benefit of being justified. I’ve written repeatedly about how troubling this is, but it’s also under-appreciated. When Trumpistas talk about it, it sounds like just so much more conspiracy lunacy, but it’s completely real. Their paranoia is only deranged because they can’t keep it focused and concise. Their administration is getting taken down piece by piece, but by using real facts instead of fake news as they claim.
Tapping on the wedge makes them more paranoid and damages the more visible actors who would like to keep this on the down low. It’s a twofer.
There is no reason to reject them as allies where you are pursuing a common cause and they can be trusted to consistently pursue that cause. I remember the Military Commissions act when McCain and Graham (Rubio wasn’t there yet) folded like a worn beach chair. I suspect that Rubio has already folded.
Did Trump question the neoconservative dominance of the Republican Party during the primaries? I mostly tuned out the clown car debates. Are there easily cited instances?
I get that that to the extent they collaborated with Trump that Hillary Clinton would be a huge target after Trump secured the nomination.
Pat Lang claims it is not a Deep State coup. (He would, wouldn’t he.) He sees the hands of Obama holdovers with the proper security clearances in the New York Times articles. That narrative and its source (Lang’s IC contacts) signal something more complicated than “duty, honor, country” going on in the Deep State (to the extent that that exists as an operating control on the US government). The hall of mirrors in Spy v. Spy are convoluted enough that there is no way for ordinary citizens to know what is going on. The plumbers and leaks story could suddenly pop up in Democrat’s faces, regardless of the facts.
About broad consensus. Does that broad consensus extend beyond Democratic contacts in the intelligence community? (Rhetorical question; you don’t need to answer.) I would include all 2016 cross-over Hillary Clinton supporters among veterans of the intelligence community in that even though they are not Democratic contacts specifically.
Tamping on the wedge certainly is clarifying both among the Republicans but also among the Democrats. Realignment is clarifying.
What is more clarifying is seeing Russia as competitor in power regardless of its ideology. Then we can get rid of the “Putin-loving commie” slams that the Republicans engaged in during the Obama administration. Whatever happens to remove Trump (my bets are for the moment on poor health or Alzheimers), that must not threaten the restart of a generalized cold war in which nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger alert. The history of the Cold War shows three occasions in which we dodged annihilation through general global nuclear war. Only the initiative of lower-ranking officers questioning the top-down orders (or automated systems) saved us. Would Trump’s yessir generals listen to those up-communicated signals? Would they countermand an order from Trump to war on Russia if Trump tried to defend his patriotism by playing against type?
It is the neo-conservative assumption of inevitable war with Russia (on geopolitical grounds) that is the danger of a domestic alliance to seek clarity on Trump’s activities during the campaign. Brzezinski, who was not a neo-conservative nonetheless shared that assumption and one opined that the best solution for Russia was breaking into a European Russian state, a Siberian state, and are Far-East Asia state. No Russian leader, knowing those American views (and they are widespread) can feel secure as long as the US has the capability to implement them. No doubt the Russian counterpart of that view is the Nine Nations of North America; blue-state musing on secession certainly would encourage Russia if they ever thought those musing serious.
Those who have the power to tap that wedge, tap it. Interesting to see who the Alt-Right-sympathetic Russophiles in Congress are. And who the closet neo-Conservatives are. And what the liberal geostrategic disciples of Zbigniew Brzezinski think about the framing of Democratic foreign policy strategy. And how they differ from the self-described “progressive” caucuses.
My view is that the politics of the next decade has to do with achieving peace and prosperity in the midst of accelerating effects of global climate change. How Trump is dealt with and how our relations with other major powers globally are critical to that. The key trends are relations between regional security agreement institutions and the overlapping of membership in them. Another is the centralizing and devolution of regions within nations in regional frameworks. To the extent that the European Union continues, the fate of Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain. To the extent that Brexit is stalled, the fate of Northern Ireland and Scotland.
“Other actors in US elections have vastly greater capability to rig US elections.”
Who?
How?
State legislatures
Local election administrators
State governors
State party operations
Local media
How?
Arbitrarily canceling the registrations of demographically identified groups close enough to the election to prevent redress.
Printing confusing ballots.
Misrepresenting the actual positions of candidates.
Caging voter registrations demographically.
And likely still some of the techniques described in Frank Kent’s The Great Game of Politics, written in the 1920s heyday of urban machines and rigged elections.
This is strictly true, although manipulating the election was never the main vehicle of Russian interference. Trump and his team, and by extension pretty much the whole Republican Party, are.
That being the case, most of the entities on your list are potentially included, particularly in areas under Republican control. Since the media in those areas are hardly independent voices, the GOP talking points also dominate the media, which adds them to the list of tools of Russian manipulation — not of the one election, but of American political opinion.
What exactly is it that the Russians provided as interference?
The allegation is that they provided signals intelligence of DNC communications and communications within the Clinton campaign.
A second allegation is that manipulated American public opinion enough to change votes sufficient to move three states into the Trump column.
The implication is that the GOP establishment disliked Trump so much that they would not stoop to either of these tactics during the general election. Nor did they have the capability to do either the hacking or manipulating of public opinion. I would like to see this assumption proved.
You are correct that it is primarily the GOP who has the motive, opportunity, and means to rig elections. They also have a history of suppressing the vote that first appeared in 2000. And they have Paul Weyrich’s idea that suppressing the vote should be a Republican objective because in a battle between money and people for a popular vote, money always loses when the people are clear about the issues and turn out to vote.
We await clarification of just what the Trump campaign and the Russians did during the 2016 election. Unfortunately, the GOP also controls the process by which that clarification happens.
Only the “unnamed sources” feeding details to the New York Times are keeping the Russian story going. Trump is setting up a “plumbers squad” to go after those leaks.
We are at a point in journalism in which “manipulation of public opinion” is generally the object of most commercial and government-controlled media. We are at a point in which good “public relations” means attacking or killing journalists who might actually report unmanipulated information. The legacy of Roger Ailes and Edward Bernays.
Republicans dominate this because Democrats did not violation of norms coming and because Democratic and democratic mobilization in politics actually is harmed by manipulation of public opinion. Republican motivation of media resources and institutional agents is not.
The worst fear the scaremongers can muster is that Putin will annex Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (three NATO members). Other than cussedness, no one has a good explanation of why Putin would bother.
Exactly right. Putin can’t afford to invade. Russia isn’t exactly booming economically right now. Why would he want to take on three more problematic economies?
You write of “the bankruptcy of ideas of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Neither knows how to govern nor how to act on the world stage anymore … Part of it is the demonic idea that businessmen know all the answers to everything because they are rich. Part of it is the massive swirl of money in lobbying firms and campaigns now at all levels of government as billionaires seek to prevail in their ideas. — All of those are a bigger threat than Putin.”
This is an excellent analysis, but I would draw a different conclusion, because it makes no sense to compare these threats to Putin. Putin is a threat precisely because he EXPLOITS the very bankruptcy of ideas you describe, in order to further destabilize the USA.
The Trump/Russia connection is not something apart from “the demonic idea that businessmen know all the answers to everything because they are rich.” This demonic idea is exactly what created the Trump phenomenon in the first place, and then offered a handle to the Russians.
Similarly “the massive swirl of money in lobbying firms and campaigns” applies to Trump and the GOP as it does to many other players. Russia is an oligarchy, and oligarchs invest heavily in financial markets. Trump’s connections with Russia developed through Russian investors, mainly in luxury real estate. Some of these investments (we don’t know how many) were probably specifically to buy influence with Trump — not to mention the financing of his own investments by Russian bankers.
These issues extend far beyond Trump and Russia, but considering that Russia is manipulating them strategically against the United States, via Trump, they are simply a specific manipulation of neoliberal America, where finance has largely replaced all other considerations and everything is for sale.
As currently constructed, the USA is NOT a democracy, it is an auction.
Why wouldn’t any power seeking to break the hold of the illusion of the “sole superpower” “EXPLOIT” the social contradictions and philosophical weaknesses of the competitive power? Putin’s point of reference is an inside view of how the US destroyed the power of the Soviet Union by exploiting its internal contradictions and philosophical weaknesses. The US taught Putin what he knows about the exploitation of “soft power”.
Yes, this.
It is called conservatism and Reaganism, among other labels. To the extent that Smith through Ricardo are classified as “liberal” economists, it is also called neo-liberalism. It is also called the Washington Consensus. It still grips establishment Democrats, who dare not consider a “mixed economy” or infrastructure or “redistributive” tax policy (progressive taxation) as moral goods. And want to police and suppress Democrats, democrats, and progressives who do.
Yes, this.
Not just foreign investors (and not just Russian) acting as lobbyists for the interests of foreign governments through influence on US businessmen, but blatant foreign lobbying through post-Citizen United campaign funding structures. Trumps ties include Turkey, now Saudi Arabia, and others as his position as President is being used to cut personal and family side deals and deals that benefit business friends. Putin is not the only one exploiting this.
Trump is only one of the businessmen being manipulated by foreign governments. Democratic reluctance to form a coherent, visionary, and popular opposition to Trump are the result of this fact. It is no accident that the leaked emails during the campaign focused on Podesta; the clients of his brother’s lobbying firm, the existence of his brother’s lobbying firm exerts powerful constraints on what the establishment Democrats are willing to do.
When finance has replaced all other considerations, money has succeeded in commodifying values and capitalism has become a total economic, political, and cultural system. If you wonder where the whiffs of police state totalitarianism are coming from, it is this. And you find companies like TigerSwan legally violating the constitutional rights of pipeline protesters in conjunction with federal, state, and local law enforcement in both the Obama and Trump administrations. The totality of any system causes the reduction and suppression of behavior that eventually create the contradictions that bring the totalitarian system down. We saw how that happened internally in the Soviet Union. And what happened before the collapse was a long period of corruption, economic failure, and cultural ferment that allow factory managers to seize state assets and grow to be oligarchs or intelligence service officers to gain power and control over the new corporate enterprises stolen by factory managers. We saw how religion started to reassert total control over culture and use the state to punish dissenters.
The US is rapidly becoming the post-capitalist mirror version of that reassertion of totalitarianism.
What gets stripped out as inefficient under totalitarianism are checks and balances and civil society, the ideas promoted by the eighteenth century politicians who argued over the Constitution. Despite the fact that they could not break from their own institutions and forms of corruption, those ideas are what very much need implementing in reality these days. Which party and politicians do you see actually advocating those ideas of a mixed economy, civil society, and checks-and-balances governance?
With notably rare exceptions.
Obamacare is not mixed-economy infrastructure; it is a subsidy to health insurance providers that in return constrains their cherry-picking of their risk pool.
Direct provision of health care (like the UK National Health Service) is a mixed economy solution within a capitalist economy. It creates public-owned infrastructure. County-owned hospitals is a mixed economy solution.
Single-payer healthcare really isn’t even a mixed economy solutiion. It is a regulated capitalism solution.
Thanks for proving my point.
It is still a political decision whether healthcare should be part of the public part of the economy. The argument for this is simple. If you want everyone to have healthcare, no amount of market jiggling can do that because markets allocate resources on purchase intensity and ability to pay. Right now, the going delivery of health care has to do with reducing purchase intensity; that is, people must decide when to forego healthcare services consistent with their budgets.
Even fully funded, Obamacare still emphasized patients making wise purchases. What it did do is increase government study of best practices and government regulation of insurers and providers to attempt to make those purchasing decisions easier. It’s failure was that healthcare was not in fact treated as a right, but a privilege dependent on income, and still treated as a commodity.
Way to change the subject, buddy. I’m responding to your bullshit claim about progressive taxation.
Obamacare is a progressive tax-and-transfer program that’s funded by taxes on high-earner investment income and spends that money on subsidies for the middle and lower-middle class, and on medicaid for the poor. It very literally takes from the rich and gives to the less fortunate. The lives saved are very real, even if the particular approach Obamacare adopted is less than ideal. And every single senate democrat signed on at great political cost.
This is the bait and switch game that fake “leftists” need to play in order to pretend the Democratic party refuses to support progressive priorities. OCare was the largest progressive transfer of wealth since the Great Society but that fact fucks up the narrative so down the memory hole it goes.
If you don’t actually care about progressive taxation and spending and only accept public ownership of the means of production to qualify as sufficiently leftist then you might have a point. At least it would enable us to have an honest discussion about the merits of that approach. But that’s not the point you made. Your snide “thanks for proving my point (that I’m now misrepresenting)” is really icing on the cake.
The link was mostly about Obamacare.
I will grant that Obama understood that if you wanted to fund something without increasing the deficit, that money had to come for where the money was and not from his base. That’s the pragmatic reality of progressive taxation. And before any ideological perspective, Obama was a committed operational pragmatist.
What is very intriguing about this bill that delivered relief to people concerned about healthcare costs is that the Democratic Senate saw doing a “less than ideal” approach a matter that could be less politically costly than one that immediately benefitted more people, lowered healthcare costs more rapidly, and balanced the budget more rapidly. There were some perverse political incentives going on, and those relate to Democrats being as subject to the large amount of lobbying money as Republicans. It turns out that Obamacare was more politically costly than the status quo; 2010, 2014, and 2016 were Democratic disaster years. And quite frankly I’ve seen no improvement in my healthcare prospects from before passage. And I am on Medicare and my wife until this year was on Obamacare with as full a subsidy as one gets in NC. Deductibles, co-pays, and continued (and possibly illegal) balance billing make both unusable as healthcare equivalent to what employer-based healthcare provide. That largest transfer of wealth was prospective; it hasn’t happened, and is not likely to happen from Obamacare.
Look, marduk. I voted the straight Democratic ticket in 2016 and every election year going back to 1980. The only Republican I have ever voted for since 1972 was a pre-Reagan progressive Republican who was supportive of the War on Poverty in a Republican-controlled NC county. Don’t go playing the fake “leftist” nonsense because you don’t understand what a mixed economy is about.
Fire departments are public ownership of the means of production. They seem to be perfectly satisfactory to you, yes? I accept progressive attempts to model programs on market terms; I also understand how much regulation of the market it takes for that to become utterly corrupt. Because of the looseness of the medical loss ratios (guaranteed 15% profit), Obamacare was indeed welfare for health insurers; because of the failure to have negotiate a single price for Medicare prescriptions, the subsidy to the pharamaceutical industry continued; because of the delay in dealing with provider profiteering through micromanaged fee-for-service billing, subsidy of large MBA-managed health systems continued. All of that detracted from that large progressive transfer of wealth by routing it through a pseudo-market solution with inadequate regulations and penalties. And the pricing ensured that it would never become universal. But then the mandatory enrollment meant that with out subsidizing premiums people would still be paying for services that were unusable because of the debt they would incur.
The Republicans saw this Rube Goldberg mechanism (the same flaw that brought down Hillarycare) as the vulnerability to attack. It was too complicated for Democratic politicians to be able to defend in soundbites; too complicated for moderate Republicans to criticize on the merits in soundbites. The debate was hijacked by the Taxed Enough Alread (TEA) Party and its astroturf financial supporters and a complicit media.
The practical issues that a mixed economy solves are: (1) universal coverage; (2) cost reduction of basic services; (3) simplicity of operation. It works for effectively run municipal water systems. It works for fire departments. It works for municipally run broadband communication. It worked for public schools until segregationist sought to sabotage the public schools because of judicially-ordered desegregation. It was until 1988 a standard Democratic way of creating public utilities.
The basic political decisions are these: (1) What goods and services need to be universally available? (2) What are the maximum prices that users of these services can handle without the system ceasing to provide universal service? (3) How does the public service need to be organized? (4) How are costs shared among federal, state, local, and user sources of funds? (5) What is the oversight mechanism to prevent corruption of finance or operations of the public service?
Most fire service does not charge. Most public ambulance or paramedic services charge. The political calculus there (which reduces universal service) is that fire might spread to additional property. Typical ambulance users will not be creating additional liabilities.
The most useful points of discussion about public ownership of means of production has to do with: education; healthcare (what among the entities in the healthcare system); communication; transportation (especially rural transportation); income maintenance; housing (it currently is provided by government for some people); employment training (currently employers are offloading this to government and employees); clean environment; water; clean energy production; solid waste removal; sanitary sewer; stormwater management (here public regulations are putting more means of production as private responsibility than public stormsewers, pipes, and grates); “maker” or tool libraries; media (book) libraries.
If you have some good examples of pseudo-market public-private solutions that have actually worked for universal delivery of goods or services, give an example or two.
Where I’m coming from:
Once again you prove my point on mixed economies by treating them as unacceptably “leftist”. I really don’t have a narrative; I have observations that change as I get new information. I witnessed the sausage-making in 2009, when Republican Marsha Blackburn in the House markup session was angling to make sure that her district in Tennessee would get its fair share of community clinic money and Democrat Mike Ross (on behalf of Big PhRMA) was mucking up the ability of Medicare to set prescription prices for Medicare.
I saw the Gang of Six meeting drag on and on in secrecy until the public option was dead; then, Max Baucus announced “the” bill drafted by his staffer, a Wellpoint VP-Government Affairs on leave for the duration, and it became known that Evan Bayh’s wife was on the board of Wellpoint, headquartered in Indiana.
That’s not a narrative. That the way it unfolded.
“Trump is only one of the businessmen being manipulated by foreign governments.”
True. The only reason for singling trump out is that he happens to be the president.
Yes Tarheel!!!
I repeat:
Precisely.
I agree 100%.
Thank you.
AG
Exactly – and you are the only one that got this right.
I hate the title of this. The author is crediting the neoconservatives for being right about something any 4 year old should get right. Not sure that counts.
I can’t view anything McCain says with anything other than skepticism. He talks a good game, then caves when it matters. No matter if what he is saying is right or good. It only matters what he does.