"Medicare PRICES for All" — latest neolib head fake

In a move of health care strategery that the likes of a Beto O'Rourke would surely love, two Obamacare flaks at neoliberal punditry mag Washington Monthly say "we" (who's that mouse in your collective pocket?) don't really need Medicare for All.

We need Medicare PRICES for all.

This is built on such a foundation of sinking bullshit, I don't know where to start.

First, if this does save my late-stage capitalist employer money on health care, he's not passing it on to me. But, you guys know that.

Second, my boss wants to keep me enserfed to health care benefits. "Bennies," so that I still don't want to change jobs. But, you guys know that, too.

And, talk about burying the lede? It's down in the last paragraph of the long piece:

So why not just keep it simple, at least to start? A “Medicare prices for all” plan doesn’t require tax increases or involve transfers paid for by the middle class. It doesn’t require Americans to give up their current health care plans. And it doesn’t repeal or replace the popular features of the Affordable Care Act. But it does directly attack the middle-class affordability crisis using a proven approach that the great majority of Americans might actually support.

In other words, you poor? Keep your state-largesse-dependent Medicaid. Working poor? Keep your CHIP for your kids. 

If you're "working poor" or lower-middle-class in a state that didn't do the Medicaid expansion with Obamacare, or did it, but with restrictions? Oh, so sorry. That "transfers paid for by the middle class" shows the gig is up right there. Because we can attack, or pretend to attack, an abstract health care industry, but we can't tax rich individuals more and more progressively as part of a national health care system.

They even outrightly admit that, two paragraphs up:

Even if the CAP plan was financed in good measure by new taxes on the super-rich, it would still involve large transfers from middle-income people, who will be at least partially financing their own benefits, to people with lower incomes, who would be paying nothing for the health care they receive.

This dreck may not be racist, but it certainly is classist. Beyond that, middle-class taxes already help pay for Medicaid and CHIP. And these neoliberal wingnuts know THAT, too. So, it's classist with a counterfactual pandering element.

And we sure as hell can't have a British-style NHS because that would be an even bigger giveaway to "them" than Medicare for All. (It would also address the increasing monopilization of hospitals that Medicare PRICES for All would not. What's to stop a hospital from going cash-only? Or a cartel of them, if the gummint doesn't investigate?)

Fuck you all. Fuck your Council for Affordable Health Coverage, since it's an insurance industry front group.

Do #BlackNamesMatter? How do they relate to #BlackLivesMatter? To #ReversePrivilege and #SJW ideas? (updated for certain classes of white names)

I'm posting this in advance. I'm on vacation at the time this post goes live.

Because I have comments set on moderation, if your comment doesn't go up right away, that's because I'm not online.

The hashtag is deliberate in a non-snarky way.

It's related to this blog post, and related thoughts posted by a friend on Facebook, that we shouldn't snicker ("we" being "whites") at first names from a certain subculture within African-American culture.

I agree on snickering. However, I do have a right (not just a First Amendment right, but a sociological "right") to question such naming, as well as questioning any idea that I have no "right" to such questioning.

Part of what I said, in response to both, was the issue of assimilation, or "conformity," per the Facebook person.

I don't question the desire to establish a certain subculture within African American culture.

I do question, though:
1. The specific tools being used to create that subculture
2. How the tools are being used
3. Whether these tools and/or their use are the best ways to reach any goals
3. The specific goals of that subculture, to the degree it has specific goals, rather than nebulosity
5. Whether it's a culture, rather than a subculture (a commenter on the blog post used "subculture" and I agree)

On point 1 and 2, to the Facebooker, I quote Sam Rayburn's "to get along, go along," after he derided conformity in general.

Beyond that?

I can question, sometimes question strongly, without being bigoted. I do resent, and there's no other word for it, when, on someone else's Facebook post, I expanded this to the issue of American Indian names, or Indonesians (normally one-named) being forced to adopt a first name/surname format, of being anti- #BlackLivesMatter. I resent that, and being indirectly accused of privilege as well.

I respect that it was his thread. I respect that his focus was just on this certain subculture of African-American culture.

That said, I disagree to the degree he seemed to indicate it should be part of African-American culture in general, and to the degree that, without nuance, he "went off" on Bill Cosby. And, I think that was his intent. After my Sam Rayburn quote, and attempt to expand, he insisted it was conformity within black culture; unlike the blog commenter, he didn't mention subculture.

I also tried to expand the focus beyond ethnicity entirely. I said, what if people wanted to, as has been done, named kids something like 3.14159, or tried to name them after Social Security numbers? He rejected that entirely.

I accept that he didn't want to expand the focus, as I indicated already on just the ethnic part.

But, I still resent how he rejected my attempt to expand the focus.

Beyond that?


And, for somebody insightful, I don't resent, but I do ponder, even scratch my head at, his not distinguishing, especially within black America, classism from racism. One could make a better argument against Bill Cosby on classism grounds. Or on subculture rather than culture grounds.

Per Rayburn, I mentioned first-generation Hispanics naming their kids "Daisy Fuentes." (I've seen plenty of this in the last several years, courtesy of my career.) I mentioned "Alberto Fujimori" as former president of Peru, noting such naming assimilation isn't limited to the US. (I would "expect" Caucasians in a culture like China, if they were permanent migrants, to look at doing the same.)

And, at the risk of irritating some, but, standing by and developing my own goals of becoming ever more of a Neo-Cynic, I've created that "Reverse Privilege" hashtag. The Facebook poster, whom I've not unfriended, and who has some other interesting thoughts on matters philosophical (but whom I may move to "acquaintances" at some point), was coming close to engaging in reverse privilege, or so it felt to me. (I suspect the Facebooker, if he thought about it more, would reject the classism angle because it would lessen the apparent reverse privilege angle in particular, and lessen his other angles as well.)

And, per "reverse racism" being at bottom line just another form of racism, so, "reverse privilege" is just another version of privilege.

And, some African-Americans, not conservative ones, either, have some related issues. Adolph Reed, in a definite thought-provoker, says identity politics in general is a form of neoliberalism.

Back to the names issue, now that I've noted that it, as a subpoint of identity politics, is problematic.

Respect for names matters. That said, if the certain subculture is anti-assimilationist, I have the sociological "right" to make judgments, including if those judgments are based in part on names, the names have a fair degree of correlation to that subculture, and that subculture's anti-assimilation is arguably problematic.

That includes a certain African-American subculture, certain ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews from Kiryas Joel, New York, and others.

In other words, subcultures that reject assimilation, and do so by visibly or audibly recognizable markers, shouldn't be surprised when the majority culture reacts. And, because of that, they shouldn't readily play racism cards, at least not when such reaction is serious and non-condescending.

I did make nuanced initial comments on Facebook, and I want to do that here, too.

So, I should note that the naming issue may not be deliberately anti-assimilationist. However, I do think that that is exactly the result.

And, beyond that, what's fair for the goose is good for the gander.

As for ideas of privilege, reverse privilege and the SJW movement world? If I see people like that joking about "redneck" names like "Billy Bob" or "Joe Don," or openly tolerating it in others, I'll let them know. There are arguable parallels. And, I'm not going to personally comment, but, it's possible a hiring manager might, in the white collar world, look at a resume with a name like "Billy Bob" or "Joe Don" on a resume and file 13 it just like a resume with a stereotypically black first name.

Living in Deep East Texas, where I've seen redneck-subculture white folks with kids having names like Danyell (for Danielle, presumably), on the flip side, were I a hiring manager? It's very likely I'd have some sort of subconscious, and even above-subconscious, bias about them, too.

We all make judgment calls; it's part of the nature of "fast thinking." Questioning whether such judgment calls are at times unwarranted stereotypes is part of self-examination. Questioning whether others' claims of stereotyping isn't rather a generalization, not valid for every member of a class or group, but valid enough to be retained, while acknowledged to be a generalization, is also, in my opinion, part of self-examination, and just as much a part of growth.

Yet more beneath the second fold.

Why aren't "we" Mardukites or Baalists instead of Jews or Christians?

I'm none of the four, of course, but, per this post from his new blog by philosopher friend Dan Kaufman, it's a legitimate question.

Here's an edited version of my comment on there to both Dan and Peter Smith, a former secularist now Catholic, who, after his conversion has become quite ardent in his Catholicism. As you can see on this blog post, his ardency is against Protestants, as well as against atheists, all of whom he has repeatedly stereotyped on Massimo Pigliucci's Scientia Salon as New Atheists. (As a sidebar, to be honest, I question Massimo using him as an editor for book reviews, because of this and other things, but, it's Massimo's place, not mine.)

Dan asked, rhetorically, what justification was there for Christianity if one got rid of (western) Christianity's idea of original sin, and the need for a substitutory atonement for that by a "divine man."

First, the Eastern Orthodox tradition disagrees with both Catholicism and Protestantism, and doesn't believe in original sin the way either of them do, because it rejects Augustine on this issue. It does believe, though, in an idea of "ancestral sin."

That said, as I told Dan in a follow-up, one can reject original sin, and even Orthodoxy's idea of ancestral guilt, and still see the need for Jesus, if one believes in the need for sacrificial expiation. One simply believes that Temple sacrifices, or the scapegoat of Leviticus, weren't enough.

That gets to the big issue: Supersessionism. Starting with Paul in the book of Romans, then amplified more after the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century CE, and culminating after the legalization, then establishment of Christianity, the idea is that Christianity essentially replaced Judaism, a new covenant, or new testament. Some evangelicals today try to soft-pedal that, especially many who like waving the "Judeo-Christian" fig leaf in the US that Dan rightly decries, claiming Israel is our best ally, etc., all while looking for that magical red heifer.

I, as part of my journey to secularism, of course rejected original sin, even before completing that journey. I also rejected the idea that a god would be so angry that he'd kill his own son, who later Christian theologians say is part of himself, for a sacrifice for original sin, let alone just for actual original sin.

Of course, many more liberal Christians don't stop to ask Dan's (and my) rhetorical question about "Why Jesus."

That said, this is part of why I didn't stop at liberal versions of Christianity when moving away from the conservative wing of Lutheranism.

As for Peter ... even if he  and other more modern, theoretically more modern Xns, interpret Genesis that way, Paul did not. Aquinas did not. Augustine did not. So, per Dan:
A. Why is your version correct?
B. If it is correct, why is something more "liberal" than it, like Geza Vermes' Jesus as Jewish faith healer (or Crossan's Jesus as Jewish Cynic) not even more correct yet?

That said, as a former Protestant, I can wrong-foot Catholics on issues of narrow selectivity. I won't go into details, speaking of mountains of writing, but I can. (This is a bit off topic, but Peter explicitly used the phrase "narrow selectivity" for Protestants. On things like an unmarried priesthood, an all-male priesthood, and claiming that birth control kills life, no, Peter, your church has plenty of narrow selectivity.)

But, back to my header, and a rhetorical question of my own.

That said, since the B'reshit (Genesis) story itself comes from earlier myth, why Judaism, Dan?

Why aren't we all Mardukites, per Enuma Elish, or whatever term you would use? Per the Elijah cycle of stories in 1 Kings, Ba'alism might be better term yet.

Dan puts it off, saying that he is a non-proselytizer.

The reality, though, is that Judaism, via its pre-Ezra Israelitism roots, was also supersessionist. (It's only proper, academically, to use "Judaism" to talk about the religion after Judahites from the "southern kingdom" returned from their exile in Babylon, and Ezra knocked four strands of writing and tradition, plus editing, into the five books of the Torah.) Israelite religion replaced a polytheism of sorts of the Canaanites with first a henotheism (arguably Ba'alism was the same), then a monotheism, mainly in the southern kingdom of Judah. (I'm not getting into a discussion of some historical details, such as whether David and Solomon existed or not, and how much land any putative united kingdom controlled.)

As many a "good" secularist — especially of New Atheist stripe — knows, with the Amalekites, Israelitism even had its own small-h holocaust. (Should we small-h it?)

It's very arguable that Israelitism is supersessionist, and that it presented itself as such. I mean, that's the whole theme, the whole core theme, of the entire Elijah cycle, at least as edited today. Per my reply to his comment, is this exactly the same as Christian supersessionism? No. Is it entirely different? Also, no.

I'm not here to proselytize Dan out of his modern liberal secular Judaism. However, I do invite him, and others, to look at its own history of supersessionism. That plus a bit of luck against the decaying, semi-collapsing empire of Antiochus IV, i.e., Antiochus Epiphanes, still echo around the Middle East today.

Beyond that, his Judaism is too narrow. Yes, he's a professional philosopher and I'm not, but I once was on track to being a professional theologian and he wasn't.

First, Judaism of the era of Jesus can't be limited to the Tanakh. On the one hand, you have the Sadducees, who accepted only the Torah, not the whole Tanakh. On the other, you have the folks at Qumran, accepting all sorts of extrabiblical literature, a fair chunk of which at least somewhat parallels later Xn beliefs.

As for the idea that Christians "misquote," many people still assume the text of the Tanakh was more static at this time than in actuality. Fair parts of Joshua and Judges, and smaller parts of 1-IV Kingdoms (1-2 Samuel/1-2 Kings) are different in Qumran texts, or other non-Masoretic ones, by a non-insignificant degree, than in the Masoretic version. The Septuagint of Jeremiah is 1/8 shorter than the Masoretic version, and in drastically different order. (It's a different order that reflects the normal order of other prophetic books, though.) And, that too is partially reflected at Qumran. The text of other books, cited in targums at Qumran, also differs from the Masoretic text.

These last two issues get to a bigger point. Judaism of circa 0 BCE/0 CE was far more varied and dynamic than something we might call "proto-rabbinic Judaism."

Meanwhile, back to supersessionism.

Religions have long claimed to be replacing others. Arguably, Protestantism, within Christianity, has a supersessionist angle toward Catholicism. Atheism of the Gnu Atheism stripe has the same toward religion in general.

As for Peter, beyond his thinking that Catholicism's shit doesn't stink, compared to Protestantism, and that all atheists are New Atheists? He seems to think that Christianity has unique moral insights.

Well, no.

The Torah scribe cited Leviticus 19:18, "Love your neighbor as yourself," as one half of the fulfillment of the Torah. Jesus, of course, responded with the story of the Good Samaritan, which seems to have its general ideas translate today, though some details are still problematic and situational.

And?

Yahweh himself showed Jonah that Ninevites, and by extension, Assyrians in general, were his neighbors.

As for the Golden Rule? The so-called Silver Rule, that says, "Do NOT do to your neighbor what you do NOT want done to yourself," is both morally superior in that it doesn't presume to know what's best for our neighbor, and is older.

Within Judaism, Hillel uttered it a century before Jesus. Beyond Judaism, Confucius said it 400 years before Hillel.

This is nothing personal against Peter. It's just that he is a known example of an enthusiastic convert to a non-fundamentalist type of Christianity who thinks he has all the bases covered. (That said, Peter never responded to any of my comments over there. I'm not at all shocked.)

Ditto, my noting that Israelitism is supersessionist is nothing personal against Dan. Jews theologically liberal (or nonobservant), moderate, and conservative alike abound who likely have never even thought about this.

Nor is this personal against New Atheists, who are also, of course, supersessionist and often vocally so.

#Piketty: A liberal Frenchman ignorant of unions? Or not quite so liberal?

Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman via Salon
(Credit: Reuters/Charles Platiau/Anton Golubev)

Or a left-neoliberal trying to pose as an actual liberal?

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has gotten a lot of touts. That goes even as far as Counterpunch. So, it has to be true liberal, right?

Well, Thomas Frank notes one big absence. I'd not read the book yet, but in hindsight, his review points out what all the other reviews missed.

Frank, like others, praises the analysis, while astutely noting, although without quite as much depth as Counterpunch, that Piketty's not new, nor alone.

I was puzzled at first by the extraordinary success of Piketty’s book; despite his commitment to cant-free prose, it is not an easy read. Besides, most of what Piketty tells us has been told to us before, many times over, in a three-decade long parade of forgotten treatises and sad New York Times stories on downsizing and deindustrialization.

Going beyond that, he also touts Piketty for slapping around most of his fellow economists.

One of the best things about Piketty’s masterwork is his systematic demolition of his own discipline. Academic economics, especially in the United States, has for decades been gripped by a kind of professional pretentiousness that is close to pathological. From time to time its great minds have grown so impressed by their own didactic awesomeness that they celebrate economics as “the imperial science”— “imperial” not merely because economics is the logic of globalization but because its math-driven might is supposedly capable of defeating and colonizing every other branch of the social sciences. ...

Piketty blasts it all to hell. His fellow economists may have mastered the art of spinning abstract mathematical fantasies, he acknowledges, but they have forgotten that measuring the real world comes first.

However, on the prescriptions side? Frank points out that Piketty's French souffle just fell in the oven.

Yes, he talks about a wealth tax, which all other reviews have noted.

But, in an "emperor has no clothes" moment, Frank also points out that Piketty, a native of a country where even the farmers are unionized, doesn't have bupkis to say about boosting worker organization rights. 

Frank kind of buries the nutgrafs of a critical review three-quarters of the way down. But, I'm moving it up:

Turning to the problem of income inequality here in the United States, there is an even simpler solution (than a wealth tax), by which I mean a more realistic solution, a solution that builds on familiar American traditions,that works by empowering average people, that requires few economists or experts, that would involve a minimum of government interference, and that proceeds by expanding democracy and participation rather than by building some kind of distant and unapproachable global tax authority: Allow workers to organize. Let people have a say on the basic issues affecting their lives.

Piketty’s biggest blind spot is that he has virtually nothing to say about labor unions. He starts Chapter 1 of “Capital” with an anecdote about a bloody strike in South Africa and he returns to that same tragic episode at the very end of the book, but in between he addresses the matter almost not at all. Piketty talks a good game about democracy, but like other economists who have made inequality their subject, he prefers solutions that are handed down from the lofty heights of expertise. (My emphasis.)

As I said, the man's a native of a country where the farmers unionize. It's a blind spot, or worse.

That's why I use the phrase "left-neoliberalism," which I've talked about occasionally before. Click on that tag, at bottom, for more related posts.

Hey, France is full of technocrats. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, one of the holy of holies places of neoliberal technocrats. And, arguably, François Mitterand found the "Third Way" long before Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.

Calling this a blind spot might be charitable — and not just a little. I mean, per the sentence of Frank's that I bolded, isn't this the stereotypical neoliberal approach? Let us technocrats work out the solutions?

Frank then goes on:

It is not a coincidence that labor’s rise in the 1930s happened at the same time as the One Percent’s fall from grace, nor is it a coincidence that labor’s long decline has been almost a mirror image of the One Percent’s recovery of its nineteenth-century heaven. ...

The disappearing middle class? This is labor’s grievance par excellence. The minimum wage? Labor is always the loudest voice calling for an increase.

Frank admits that re-empowering organized labor is not the totality of the solution, either. He does note that it needs to be more of the solution in union-gutted America than in Europe.

Speaking of, Piketty apparently doesn't know a lot about America in general.

Frank also notes that this lack of knowledge is part of a bigger pattern of potholes in the book:

Unfortunately, Piketty’s enthusiasm for disciplines other than economics is more theoretical than anything else.

And, for someone claiming his book is as much history as economics, his American chocolate cake fell in the oven even more than his French souffle.

Whenever Piketty moves away from numbers and tries to describe life in the United States, things go wrong in a hurry. The worst example first: Piketty tells us that, unlike the French, Americans feel “no nostalgia for the postwar period” because our economy didn’t grow rapidly in those years. ...

Piketty’s command of American political history is, quite simply, abysmal. He announces that the U.S. “never became a colonial power,” which would be news to the people of the Philippines, not to mention the Sioux. ...

There are numerous other examples in Piketty’s enormous book of this weird blind spot concerning all things American; indeed, you could write an entire review just cataloguing them.

Bad, indeed.

At Counterpunch, Jack Rasmus gets at some of those same  union-related issues via a back door of sorts. Here's his key point on this issue:

Explaining inequality—not just reporting it—requires an analysis of how these various ‘forms of wages’ have been reduced in recent decades and especially since 2009. That deeper analysis leads to explanations of trends of destruction of unions and thus the higher union wage, the growing trend of outright ‘wage theft’ by businesses, the avoidance of paying overtime pay by reclassifying millions of workers as ‘exempt’ instead of hourly paid, the atrophying of the real minimum wage, the wage reduction effects of free trade, the shift to contingent labor, and all the reasons why the total unemployed (in and out of the labor force) are rising steadily and are chronically longer term jobless. Add to this the analyses of the many government policies introduced in recent years and decades that reduce the deferred, social, and future wage and underestimate the real wage.

Exactly. And, the noted destruction of unions has been part of the cause of the rest of this. But not all of it.

Compared to much of Europe, and especially Piketty's France, the word "union" has become a four-letter word to more and more vanishing middle-class Americans.

Well, folks that didn't happen out of nowhere. Since there is class war in America, the "unions are ebil" meme came out of the mouths of people who had reason to fear unions. And, it was easily sold. You're not middle class if you're in a union, you're working class. Plus, in traditional industrial unions, people who were promoted from line jobs to management were encouraged to leave unions for that reason. Probably, though I don't know for sure, back in the 1960s and ’70s, white folks promoted from line jobs to management were encouraged to leave their unions for other reasons, but that's another story.

In short, by missing the union part of the equation, Piketty is missing half the class warfare part of the issue.

And the need to re-empower labor, and workers' desire for that, was shown on May 15 by an international fast-food employees' strike. (That said, in details of the strike, I think $15/hr, without a phase-in of seven or so years, is too high. Even then, it might be a bit much. The $10.10 of Beltway rounds, with a four-year phase-in, AND a COLA clause as part of that, sounds about right to me.)

And, given that unionized French farmers have driven their tractors into the streets of Paris before, I can't believe this is totally accidental. So, thanks to Thomas Frank triggering some thought, I doubt I'll read Piketty's book.

No, Obama, college won't help

From a long, insightful article in the Atlantic about the hollowing out of the middle class comes this observation that the normal BA or even BSBA won't help a person's bottom line so much any more, nor will it offer so much unemployment protection:

But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. ...

“It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” (MIT economist David Autor) told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral [degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.” ...

College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

Takeaways, to shorten Autor?
1. A Harvard degree is worth more than ever, rightly or wrongly, due to "branding."
2. Finding the LinkedIn/CareerBuilder "hot field" is important, but ... what he doesn't say, is a matter of luck as much as anything else.

Autor then and also notes, as I've blogged elsewhere, that more and more paralegal work, or first-year post-law-school grunt work, can be done by computer. Other work like that, which he doesn't directly note, can and will be outsourced to India with a growing English-speaking middle class wanting to do more than call center/customer service work.

And, some of the social decline that started happening to "just high school grad" families in decades past is now starting with "just college" families.

And, going beyond Peck, I'll even say that some grad degrees will get "hollowed out."

Take "service" degrees in psychology and social work. People who know anything about MIT and Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA program, and who are as sardonic, or worse, as I am about the future of America at times, has to wonder why a Fortune 500 EAP program doesn't seriously say, "Why are we sending people to human counselors instead of something like this?"

But, there's yet more to ponder, and to refute:

GOP: It’s OK to play the class warfare card, but only in our primaries

Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson have no problem bashing Mitt Romney as rich.

But, if some Democrat would say this against Romney, should he get the nomination, then Democrats would of course be practicing “class warfare.”

And, some Rethug will probably come up with the line that “playing class warfare helps the terrorists.”