(archived from March 24, 2010)
by Scott Creighton
“Today, I’m signing this reform bill into law on behalf of my mother, who argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days“. Barack Obama
In the Neoliberal Age, in Washington especially, all focus is concentrated on the appearance of a thing, rather than the substance behind it. That is because the appearance creates its own substance, its own momentum relative to the weight of belief the appearance can generate. And thus it is that momentum that is all important, it is that momentum that the purveyors of fable ultimately strive for at any cost and even the subjugation of the memory of one’s own mother must remain “on the table” if that momentum is to be adequately served.
The “momentum” that the Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia are working hard to create here goes well beyond their desire to maintain control of the House and Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections. Well beyond it. Behind the podium at Obama’s signing ceremony, the corporatist Joe Biden, hardly able to contain his globalist glee, whispered to Obama that this really is a “big fucking deal”. He was absolutely right.
We are currently living in the last stages of the neoliberal revolution’s assault on our ongoing ”democratic experiment” and the endgame is a multifaceted attack on not only the constitutional structure of our precariously fragile representative republic, but it is an equally aggressive usurpation of the meaning of the language of democracy that binds us all, one to the other, in this, our shared nation of laws.
That language, the language of our founding, the language of our history, the language that holds us to each other must be erased, according to the neoliberal reformers, because it is the only thing that promises to undermine their efforts in the long-term. But the neoliberals can’t erase our history without exposing their truer nature; they can’t nullify the constitution, though they can chip away at it. They can’t erase the Bill of Rights, though they can modify them. They can’t delete the Declaration of Independence or the history of the suffrage struggle or the words of JFK, Martin Luther King, Andrew Jackson, or even Lincoln though they would certainly like to.
But they can and will remake the way in which our history will be taught. Indeed they are already working on that, so this is nothing new. The difference here is that they are actively re-writing our shared history today as it happens. They are reshaping it to fit their long-term agenda.
Take for instance the example of the newly minted healthcare “Reform” Bill.
Even before signing it into law, Obama’s craven PR writers prepared for him a set of historical fallacies, a recreation of the mythology of the process of the passage of the bill. President Obama, a man who has apparently sacrificed conscience for comfort, stepped to the podium and reveled in his own reading of the latest ad copy of the neoliberal revolutionaries, AS IF the words he was reading were actually… true. As he spoke and as the historians began to scribe the event for all posterity, the propagandist fable became living fact for many Americans desperate to BELIEVE again.
The actual history of the past 14 months is being washed away amid a comforting glow of warm fuzzy group-think. It’s Prozac-history in the making.
Rich with symbolism and ceremony, the White House event provided clues about how the administration plans to sell the measure to a skeptical public: as a moral necessity of historic proportion. Obama told his audience of allies that “we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.” Washington Post
This is the new story, yet all they did from the very beginning was scale back our aspirations, one after the other, for the benefit of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and then they told us they did it for us.
From the first moments of this process some 14 months ago, Obama and his DLC New Dems administration met with insurance lobbyists and representatives from Big Pharma and at the same time denied proponents of Single Payer systems any voice in the process. And all the way up to the last moments Saturday night when Obama met with the Stupak 7 to hash out a way to restrict the rights of poor women to choose their own fate, the Obama administration has done nothing but scale back our aspirations.
They didn’t do this because we wanted them too, not because we desperately wanted to start to undermine Roe V Wade, they did it because that was the neoliberal revolution’s plan for America’s healthcare “reform”.
Single Payer was gone. The public option was gone. Re-importation of prescription drugs to save huge costs to us was gone. The revocation of the insurance companies exemption from anti-trust/monopoly laws was gone. The amendment to remove the insurance mandate was gone.
But Team DLC Obama™ Brand isn’t going to have us remember it that way. It doesn’t serve their purpose.
The fact is, the majority of Americans didn’t want the bill to pass. In poll after poll, the bill as it was written in its final stages reflected by the corporatist Senate version, was hugely unpopular on the right and the “far left”. But that is not how the neoliberalization movement will have you remember it. They are now telling you the passage of this horrendous bill was the Will Of The People, and that is how all RIGHT THINKING liberals will remember it.
“That our generation is able to succeed in passing this reform is a testament to the persistence –- and the character -– of the American people, who championed this cause; who mobilized; who organized; who believed that people who love this country can change it.” — President Barack Obama
An insidious comment really, one that is quite reminiscent of the old Bush/Cheney days. Not only does it work to rewrite the history of the passage of his travesty, but it also suggests that those who don’t like this bill and who worked hard to get the word out that it’s passage would be truly harmful to our nation, are in fact people who don’t “love this country”. It is a Cheneyeque plum of a statement subtly embedded in the language of the new history of the passage of the bill designed to subconsciously reward all those who now convert to the “correct think” and simultaneously poison the well for those, like myself, who continue to stand firm on their previous position. It is at one time a reassurance and a condemnation.
The subtly of this “Get on board or else” message was also picked up on by other writers.
In a 10-minute speech interrupted more than 20 times by ovations, Obama suggested that those Republicans and Democrats who opposed the measure sit now on the wrong side of history. Washington Post
As an example of the effect of this kind of “far left demonization” is having, I would refer readers to yesterdays article about the once proud champion of the Blue Collar man; Michael Moore. Moore has now posted two separate articles on the Huffington Post, which I can only assume he is using to atone for his previous opposition to this tremendously ill-conceived bill. In one of the articles, the latest, Moore remarkably tries to credit himself for the passage of the bill via the conversion of the Stupak 7.
Well, our full court press on my congressman, Bart Stupak worked! Hundreds of my neighbors here in his Michigan district spent the weekend organizing thousands of voters to get busy and save the health care bill. Moore
It’s a shameless and disgusting display of kissing the emperor’s ring to make amends for his previous “wrong think” I suppose, but probably seen by Moore as the least of two evils; kissing the ring of the neoliberal emperor or losing his “viability” and influence in the eyes of the peasants. Moore seems to have chosen to jump on over to the “right” side of history.
This is really the same argument used by those who would have us still support the empty shell of the congressman from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich; a man who also kissed the ring of Team DLC Obama™ Brand and was forced to make sullen a public announcement of his love for Big Brother. At least Dennis had the fortitude to stand true to his convictions, in a way, as he declared that all his previous oppositions to the bill were still viable and correct. In a truly sad display he reaffirmed all his reasons for opposing the bill even as he bent to kiss the ring.
I wonder how those words tasted on his lips? Perhaps he should ask Colin Powell how to get that taste out of his mouth.
But perhaps the most craven aspect of all of this neoliberal endgame we seem to be entrenched in, is the populist spin the administration is putting on this entire process. White is black, war is peace, and the service of the insurance industry IS a victory for the little man; the working man.
This redefining of the idea of the common good is perhaps the most dangerous spin of all.
For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.
Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.
Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan. New York Times via MSNBC
This is the most cynical, the most jaded, the most diabolical revisionism I have yet to read about this bill. It acknowledges the destructive effects of the current neoliberal revolution in one breath and then fraudulently positions this insider crafted “reform” as a counter to it when in fact, it is nothing more than an extension of it.
This reform bill, written by insurance industry insiders, is a boon for the empowerment of their industry. It grants them money, access, and a proven mandate of control over the White House and the halls of congress, one that will certainly be used again. It is the currently the premier example of laissez-faire capitalism and it is being passed off as a populist victory for the masses. And that, my friends, is very dangerous.
This is why the momentum of this current fable is so important to the neoliberal revolutionaries, because those who serve the Washington consensus, the neocons, the neoliberals, the Blue Dogs, the New Dems, the DLCers and all the rest of the global free market zealots can feel the tide turning, shifting back to their favor, on this “big fucking deal”.
If they are successful in their efforts to rebrand neoliberalism as populism then the sky is the limit. All of the previously abhorred free market reforms can easily be within reach. This bill already attacks Medicare, Obama’s “Jobs Bill’ works to undermine the solvency of Social Security by allowing mega corporations to restaff their businesses with workers while not having to pay their share of Social Security benefits, and Obama’s “austerity measures” committee is meeting even now led by a bipartisan neoliberal team of free market supporters from the past.
And all that is to say nothing of the Obama administration’s assault on public education for the benefit of the free market for-profit school industry.
What else will they rebrand as socially conscience populist measures if this fable is allowed to go unchallenged? How many other set-backs will we see in the near future? Social Security? Minimum Wage Laws? Child Labor Laws? Will we see a time in this country when the exception becomes the rule; when sweat shops are littering the “free market zones” stretching from Florida to Virginia… from Texas to California?
Yes, this is a “big fucking deal”, that is a fact which the neoliberal corporatist Joe Biden got absolutely correct. But as is often the case, “the big deal” has two totally opposed meanings woven into one pleasant fable of “victory”, ”success”, and being on the “right” side of history.
It is now the task of the liberal demagogues to pound the correct interpretation of the events of these past 14 months into the “acceptable” group-think of the party.
This massive all out national effort will be, when it is rarely addressed, attributed to the superficial rationale of a desire to salvage political power in the upcoming election cycle. That is simply a distraction and yet another part of the fable.
What really lies at the core of the this revisionism is momentum. The momentum needed to carry this nation further than any previous Reagan era president ever dreamed they could. All the way to the pinnacle of the neoliberal far right of laissez-faire capitalism.
This is the danger of allowing language like this to go unchecked and the pity of the subjugation of our once proud champions.
This is the challenge before all of us, to hold on to the real definition of the meaning of the founding of this nation; to remember that We the People are charged with defending our right to self-determination against all those who seek to revoke it, be them foreign or domestic.
We must resist the insidious rebranding of our populist ideals.
We must, as a Party and as a nation, awaken to the assault that is taking place, here and now. An assault against our national identity, our integrity, our shared history, and ultimately the very legacy we will leave our children.
There are those within our party who also wish to undermine our freedoms and our quality of life and those of our children, all for the benefit of a very elite few. This is a fact that we must address as the party constantly promotes the artificial left/right divide.
This bill is not populist in its nature, it’s corporatist and Obama is not standing up to the Reagan era of neoliberalism, he is reveling in it, profiting from it, and expanding it at our direct expense. Make no mistake about it, we are paying for his betrayal.
Yes this is a big fucking deal. I only wish more people understood just how big it is.
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