(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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The Lucrative Liberal Business of Killing Health Care Reform [1]
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Date: 2019-11-21
The pressure on all sides in this town—institutional, ideological, financial—to accept the broad status quo is immense; candidates who make a habit of challenging the established order are rare. Many of the firms that work for the Partnership were started by or staffed with former members of Obama’s “Yes, We Can” brigade, with others going on to work for Amazon or Uber (or Theresa May). The ability of people who come to public service as righteous, justice-and-fairness-seeking liberals to transform themselves into dedicated laborers against the goals they once espoused is astounding, but every road in Washington is laid to funnel people toward that stupid, cynical end.
If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren wants to pass Medicare for All; if Biden or Pete Buttigieg wants to implement his public option, they will have to go around not just health-industry lobbyists and their money but a whole city of careerist worms whose children’s college funds and extravagant lifestyles depend on money scraped from the Partnership’s vaults. No Democrat in Washington can claim to care at all about the millions of Americans who are currently suffering at the hands of a health care system designed to torment them for profit if they work with a group like this, or work at a firm that works with groups like this, or go to parties with people who work at groups like this without throwing a drink in their face. These are the denizens of this subterranean world, perpetuating this repulsive system by not speaking out against it and forswearing its tainted rewards. This is what big structural change means—losing friends and paychecks, and gaining a soul.
Any president who truly wants to enact bold policies to provide Americans with lives of worth and dignity will have to contend with the raw financial power of industry as well as its grinning factotums—men and women who not long ago looked as if they were down for the cause themselves. The armies that are usually deployed in defense of Democratic policies are mercenaries who are mostly happy to work for the orcs, too, if the price is right. And if Democratic policy priorities shift from “a tax credit for small businesses that employ three dogs who are veterans” to “the Green New Deal,” there’s no guarantee the Bully Pulpit Interactives of this town will pitch in. What is the fate of the planet when the needs, wants, and desires of their lucrative client base hang in the balance?
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/155795/lucrative-liberal-business-killing-health-care-reform
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