“We can’t ditch Halliburton or Blackwater because they have become the sole primary contractor providing precisely the services they do.”

I have to take exception to that statement. The US could quite easily eliminate Halliburton and Blackwater (now Xe) overnight if they wished, in a number of ways. The one I would prefer would be to stop allowing the wishes of such entities to wag the dog of foreign policy. Iraq, for instance, seems to have been entered into for no better reason than to enrich such as these, with their connections to the odious Darth Cheney.

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Then you’re in for a lot of surprises. He’s not a community organizer, he’s a politician.

And the push for health insurance reform (which is all most of the people and organizations involved ever understood it to be) isn’t remotely analogous to the civil rights movement in any respect.

HCAN’s agenda wasn’t hidden, it was right out in the open. They were explicitly formed, in mid-2008, to ensure that the eventual bill contained a public option. The organizations involved, several of which had publicly supported single-payer in the past, also explicitly accepted that the coming reform would be insurer-based and insurer-blessed, and argued that getting a public option would make that acceptable because it would be a path to full single-payer in the future. They urged people and organizations who’d been active on single-payer in the past to join their campaign, not to continue to push for sp.

The centrality of CAP/CAF to the coalition, and the behavior of previous incarnations of the coaltion, made it inevitable that they would go no further than the White House was willing to go. The leaders knew about the White House deals with the insurers and PhRMA. I suspected early on that some of the players would be willing to cave on their major explicit goal of a public option, their real goal being to buy off sp advocacy. Others may have sincerely believed that they could win the p.o. (it’s still theoretically possible in the conference committee), but it was always pretty unlikely it would be one large enough to provide either a check on private insurers or a path to single payers.

There was very little hidden about this, it’s just that very few of the commentators would talk about it, being either part of the project themselves, or equally unwilling to hold the WH accountable.

These kinds of coalitions have electoral goals; they are not about the actual substance of the reform. That’s what makes their willingness to accept the current debacle so unforgiveable: the actual effects of this “reform” are not just substantively crappy, they’re political poison. All the benefits, such as they are, are in the future. There’s literally nothing to inspire gratitude or confidence in 2010 voters. The Republicans can paint the coming changes as terrifying and coercive, and Dems will have nothing with which to respond.

But functionally, intellectually, Barack Obama is part of the Harvard trained, corporatist Rich White Man’s Club. Much as Ronald Reagan seemed like a warm, friendly Uncle of the People, while he was redistributing the people’s wealth of government to his corporatist benefactors now, Barack Obama, who to all appearances would SEEM to be Friend of the Working Man, is trying to BOTH transfer nearly 30% of the average American’s salary to the medical industry cartel, WHILE he wants to be lionized for rubbing the working family’s face into this new feudal system … one Ronald Reagan could only dream of.

I used the comparison with Fascism for precisely the points you make about private corporate dominance over public power and lawmaking. A tailor-made example is Obama using the coercive power of the criminal law to force us to buy fraudulent products from poorly regulated insuresters.

I think that’s a better comparison. It’s a comparison fraught with problems because of the neocons’ intentional abuse of language generally, and specifically because of such intellectual vomit as the book “Liberal Fascism”. That propaganda is succeeding, in that accurately describing some of today’s trends and government measures as Fascistic no longer evokes outrage or action.

The whole AFL-CIO was in HCAN, as were USAction and MoveOn. But it was a pre-capitulated coalition that was unwilling to call out the WH deals. The leadership failure is in the White House, where the deals made with the insurers and with PhRMA paralyzed the organizations that could and should have been the drivers of grassroots energy.”

You know, when you put together an Umbrella Organization, you never base it on what might be called, “Specific Cures” for the problems you intend to address. You work with principles simply because that allows you to be more inclusive. On Health Care the principles of maximum coverage of citizens at reasonable costs ought to have headed the list — if you see that as single payer, fine — but you can see it other ways too. The point is to draw under your advocacy Umbrella as many groups as possible, and then use some degree of internal discipline to keep them there for the duration of the effort.

What really surprises me is that Obama was not apparently thinking like a community organizer in approaching Health Care Reform. This is just basic stuff that anyone who has studied reform movements that have to convert broad general agreement on principles into legislative specifics ought to know and plan to execute.

And you really can’t have semi-hidden agendas in this sort of thing. No one should enter this arena with a position, for instance, that the point of it all is to give credit to Obama…or never criticize his WH. That is actually irrelevant to the reformist’s goal of coverage at reasonable cost. No problem with making it clear you support him, like him, mean him no harm — but you have to understand him as a player with power, and see him as no more or less than that. The fault is with not having understood that at the early stages, and worked it out.

Feudalism and Fascism are both apt.

To me, they are very different. Under feudalism, there was no middle class to speak of, and society was primarily agricultural. Business and commerce were negligible. Relations are personal, rather than institutional.

Under Fascism, business and commerce become enmeshed with government. Business is big, and controls the economy. Faceless institutional businesses are in control, and personalities matter little, except for rulers at the top like Hitler and Mussolini.

I go with Naomi Wolf’s End of America. She writes about fascism for good reason.

Bob in AZ

L’Eminence Grise….D.C.?