Agreed. We need a public option to counter any economic activity that has an inelastic demand. Health care is the best example of this. Education is close. Water and utilities are already functional monopolies, but exploit people when they are private. Power supply using natural resources should be public, not just regulated. One item missing from your proposal is public land, the commons, that Trump, MAGA, Republicans are trying to privatize. We need to keep ecological health as a centerpiece of our entire governance. It is not there for exploitation. It has a right to exist in a healthy state apart from us. Therefore, it needs management that keeps it healthy as priority number 1. This issue may not win elections, but it is crucial to survival, perhaps even more than our healthcare system.
Keep going. This is exactly the kind of conversation that we need to have, the plans we need to write, and the consensus we need to build. The mission for America, Innovating for the public good (https://innovatingforpublicgood.org/), and the work we are doing at Public Money Action are all based on a basic understanding that the right has changed the basic rules of the game to favor Capital. While we still win tactically, they have a broader strategy and have thus gained more power. And how do you return power to Labor? Point #16 for mission for America is a start - but why is that not point #1? This is where the people and the votes are!
And why does it not include a Federal Job Guarantee to pick up any workers who their plan misses? We have over 25% functionally unemployed (Lisep.org), and the best way to get more power for Labor is to create a public option - direct job creation - a floor under which no American can fall, and under which no company can pay. https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pn_2018_3.pdf
And a quick note: the debt is not a problem per se, see the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, among others. The public dent, or US treasury market (they are the same thing!), = Private sector savings, dollar for dollar. It's an accounting identity. As John Maynard Keynes said, We can afford anything that we can actually do." Modernmoneylab.org
Corbin, I just reviewed Mission for America and was in complete agreement with you and Saikat Chakrabarti on all of it until I got to the section on Nuclear. Nuclear power, to paraphrase Amory Lovins, is an extremely expensive, incredibly dangerous and highly toxic methodology for boiling water. And it is not needed. See Mark Jacobson, Stanford U. professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for all the detail that you and Saikat need to change this section of Mission for America so it aligns with the progressive values that fuel your work. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/
The Right has been planning this for DECADES. They were willing to take temporary losses to build the bigger program and it seems they have won beyond their wildest dreams. They have an easily manipulated, egotistic, senile madman as President, a Congress that appears to be afraid of its own shadow and a SCOTUS that seems not to have attended any law schools.
WE, the PEOPLE, need to ACT with determination and vigor to oust this charade of a government, to rewrite a Constitution for these times and to become Lincoln's dream of a government of, by and for the people.
We also need to do something about propaganda outlets. Otherwise, they will bad mouth and undercut and lie about everything, turning people against the efforts.
FDR used the power of the government to directly & immediately help Americans & fight WW2. He started Social Security to protect the elders, he start Unemployment Insurance & hired 15 million out of work Americans. He directed private industry to produce the planes, tanks, trucks needed to fight Nazis & generously supplied Russia who did most of the fighting against Hitler's hoards. We need a government that builds public hospitals, public energy companies, public pharmaceutical companies. The current system is sick with greed & cannot help Americans.
In their book Stellar, Tony Seba and James Arbib describe how any community that wants a future can start building it today around the disruptions being created by artificial intelligence, renewable energy, electric transportation, self driving, and precision fermentation. They say we can either come together to create the wealthiest, healthiest, most extraordinary civilization in history, or join the ranks of every other failed civilization. Even as conservatives do their best to create a failed civilization, there is nothing to stop the left from quietly creating a stellar future for those of us who want one.
Corbin..... please become better informed on what Medicare for All is before writing anymore about it! Your piece is very good except for getting M4A completely wrong! I am inviting you to go to the website of National Single Payer (NSP) and to attend some of our Zoom meetings so you can see for yourself that what we are proposing will NOT put ANY money into the existing healthcare system. The current system is worthless. The entire goal of M4A is to COMPLETELY REPLACE the existing system with one that PROHIBITS PROFIT and all commercial insurance entirely…. NO MORE MIDDLEMEN!
All the hospital failures, medical bankruptcies, denials of claims, law suits, healthcare deserts, and unaffordability are due to the presence of PROFIT and the conflict of interest inherent in any health system where profit exists. M4A eliminates profit!
M4A is a system where funding is based on the NEED of those in the community served…. NOT on the need for any entity to make a profit or even break even. And M4A will reduce what we are now paying by HUNDREDS of BILLIONS/YEAR... while providing 100% of all medical needs for every resident in the US for life.
In fact, those of us in NSP have become concerned that because almost all the private practices have been gobbled up by ACOs, it may be better to just take the next step up to a bill modeled on the original VA system or the UK’s NHS.
So we have been writing a model healthcare bill… one that is completely democratic in structure and operation. It will be built and operated from the community up… not the top down. It essentially becomes its own government which is not subject to interference by the President or his appointees. Physicians and other medical professionals will be paid salaries commensurate with their training and the difficulty of their positions. Actually, our Model Bill will be the perfect model for how a new truly democratic government can be built from the ground up! Here's our URL: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
This is a great piece of inspirational writing, but what are the steps that I as an individual can take to help move the needle? In other words, I think framing the problem and solution is important, but if you can identify specific things regular people can do with some of their free time, that would be helpful too.
I think helping people to understand the problem of privatization and why we need to turn that around is a place to start. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to give my dollars to Elon Musk who is now trying to destroy our country. NASA should be the only agency studying travel to space and building spacecraft.
What is the weakest link in this capitalist system of parasitic self-destruction????? It is not public debt, the national debt, which is backed by almost an unimaginably huge infrastructure and land/water base that can be manipulated in a valued way, just like private property or the 'power' of capital. What is the weakest link? It is private, corporate debt. You know, the debt that gets borrowed away by corporate powers borrowing public money from the Fed and its ilk. This is the money/valuation shuffle that Bernie talks about. Rob Peter, pay Paul, create debt, re-define it as paper valuation based upon public consumption while the paper constantly gets stuffed into private coffers. The stock value is manipulated upward, the infrastructure owned by corporate gets manipulated upward as well. A massive, massive bubble financed by public money lending called savings and consumption. What allows this to continue? Interest, which is just extortion created by lawyers to further bilk the public and keep them on the edge of wetness. Why is credit card interest so High???? The answer is found in Why the corporate subsidies are so High. Extortion. Graft. Payola. Interest on the public debt is Private Interest paid to Private banks. Who owns Private banks? Private corporations. This is the reverse sieve that everyone experiences daily via consumption - prices go up, quality goes down, interest on money borrowed by corporate is 1/10 of what interest is for public use. Theft from both ends. Why was Hugo Chavez so reviled by corporate 'murka? Why, so long ago, were the socialized govts. of Iran, Iraq, Portugal, Chile et. al. destroyed by Kermit Rockefeller and his gang of economic hit men? Inflation is a definition of the extortion level of capitalism, and it is never below zero. Why are huge tax breaks given to wealth? Because not only do the wealthy not want to pay taxes, they want to extort even more via Interest they do NOT pay of their borrowing while the public pays huge interest for its borrowing, FROM THEM. Kill the parasites. Kill private banking. Kill for-profit corporations. The public MUST own everything it uses to survive. That is how you destroy INTEREST, the giant sucking sound heard round the world. The least efficient practice of living a biotic life in a synthetic world run by LIES and Extortion and bully Laws that strip the citizen consumer of any power. In effect, chattel slavery via so-called capitalist economics. BS to that. It is 0000000000000000000000000.1 percent efficient. Why? Just look honestly at the trainwreck this planet is in. All due to human avarice. Bernie is right. Citizens United is the head of the snake. Corporate privacy is corporate piracy.
YES!! Read The Master Plan by David Sirota. It describes in detail how the right played the long game my entire life and got us to where we are now. The left needs a similar long term vision and a step by step plan to get there. I hate everything about the right except for their ability to think long term and plod away at their goals. You got to hand it to them...they're right where they wanted to get to decades ago through exercising patience and persistence.
I took a quick scan of the Mission for America. Wow! About 12,000 words in the website summary alone with thousands of pages in the underlying detailed PDFs. At glance a very comprehensive and well done document in terms of reconstruction goals and flushing out what a Green New Deal means. And that’s great. What’s also needed as a companion document is a social and political strategy to get the super-majorities and progressives elected, from school boards to municipal/state/federal and judicial positions, necessary to enact the Mission. This is first and foremost a social issue. If we don’t address the social construct as well as the economic and political structures, at best all we’ll get is the pendulum swing of incremental change countered by conservative backlash.
Agreed. We need a public option to counter any economic activity that has an inelastic demand. Health care is the best example of this. Education is close. Water and utilities are already functional monopolies, but exploit people when they are private. Power supply using natural resources should be public, not just regulated. One item missing from your proposal is public land, the commons, that Trump, MAGA, Republicans are trying to privatize. We need to keep ecological health as a centerpiece of our entire governance. It is not there for exploitation. It has a right to exist in a healthy state apart from us. Therefore, it needs management that keeps it healthy as priority number 1. This issue may not win elections, but it is crucial to survival, perhaps even more than our healthcare system.
Keep going. This is exactly the kind of conversation that we need to have, the plans we need to write, and the consensus we need to build. The mission for America, Innovating for the public good (https://innovatingforpublicgood.org/), and the work we are doing at Public Money Action are all based on a basic understanding that the right has changed the basic rules of the game to favor Capital. While we still win tactically, they have a broader strategy and have thus gained more power. And how do you return power to Labor? Point #16 for mission for America is a start - but why is that not point #1? This is where the people and the votes are!
And why does it not include a Federal Job Guarantee to pick up any workers who their plan misses? We have over 25% functionally unemployed (Lisep.org), and the best way to get more power for Labor is to create a public option - direct job creation - a floor under which no American can fall, and under which no company can pay. https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pn_2018_3.pdf
And a quick note: the debt is not a problem per se, see the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, among others. The public dent, or US treasury market (they are the same thing!), = Private sector savings, dollar for dollar. It's an accounting identity. As John Maynard Keynes said, We can afford anything that we can actually do." Modernmoneylab.org
Onward.
Thanks so much for mentioning Stephanie Kelton's work! I made a similar comment.
Corbin, I just reviewed Mission for America and was in complete agreement with you and Saikat Chakrabarti on all of it until I got to the section on Nuclear. Nuclear power, to paraphrase Amory Lovins, is an extremely expensive, incredibly dangerous and highly toxic methodology for boiling water. And it is not needed. See Mark Jacobson, Stanford U. professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for all the detail that you and Saikat need to change this section of Mission for America so it aligns with the progressive values that fuel your work. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/
Thank you.
The Right has been planning this for DECADES. They were willing to take temporary losses to build the bigger program and it seems they have won beyond their wildest dreams. They have an easily manipulated, egotistic, senile madman as President, a Congress that appears to be afraid of its own shadow and a SCOTUS that seems not to have attended any law schools.
WE, the PEOPLE, need to ACT with determination and vigor to oust this charade of a government, to rewrite a Constitution for these times and to become Lincoln's dream of a government of, by and for the people.
We also need to do something about propaganda outlets. Otherwise, they will bad mouth and undercut and lie about everything, turning people against the efforts.
FDR used the power of the government to directly & immediately help Americans & fight WW2. He started Social Security to protect the elders, he start Unemployment Insurance & hired 15 million out of work Americans. He directed private industry to produce the planes, tanks, trucks needed to fight Nazis & generously supplied Russia who did most of the fighting against Hitler's hoards. We need a government that builds public hospitals, public energy companies, public pharmaceutical companies. The current system is sick with greed & cannot help Americans.
In their book Stellar, Tony Seba and James Arbib describe how any community that wants a future can start building it today around the disruptions being created by artificial intelligence, renewable energy, electric transportation, self driving, and precision fermentation. They say we can either come together to create the wealthiest, healthiest, most extraordinary civilization in history, or join the ranks of every other failed civilization. Even as conservatives do their best to create a failed civilization, there is nothing to stop the left from quietly creating a stellar future for those of us who want one.
We can build the new structures/systems even while the old ones are still around. You live in the old house until the new house is built.
Corbin..... please become better informed on what Medicare for All is before writing anymore about it! Your piece is very good except for getting M4A completely wrong! I am inviting you to go to the website of National Single Payer (NSP) and to attend some of our Zoom meetings so you can see for yourself that what we are proposing will NOT put ANY money into the existing healthcare system. The current system is worthless. The entire goal of M4A is to COMPLETELY REPLACE the existing system with one that PROHIBITS PROFIT and all commercial insurance entirely…. NO MORE MIDDLEMEN!
All the hospital failures, medical bankruptcies, denials of claims, law suits, healthcare deserts, and unaffordability are due to the presence of PROFIT and the conflict of interest inherent in any health system where profit exists. M4A eliminates profit!
M4A is a system where funding is based on the NEED of those in the community served…. NOT on the need for any entity to make a profit or even break even. And M4A will reduce what we are now paying by HUNDREDS of BILLIONS/YEAR... while providing 100% of all medical needs for every resident in the US for life.
In fact, those of us in NSP have become concerned that because almost all the private practices have been gobbled up by ACOs, it may be better to just take the next step up to a bill modeled on the original VA system or the UK’s NHS.
So we have been writing a model healthcare bill… one that is completely democratic in structure and operation. It will be built and operated from the community up… not the top down. It essentially becomes its own government which is not subject to interference by the President or his appointees. Physicians and other medical professionals will be paid salaries commensurate with their training and the difficulty of their positions. Actually, our Model Bill will be the perfect model for how a new truly democratic government can be built from the ground up! Here's our URL: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
This is a great piece of inspirational writing, but what are the steps that I as an individual can take to help move the needle? In other words, I think framing the problem and solution is important, but if you can identify specific things regular people can do with some of their free time, that would be helpful too.
Our modern troubles started when Reagan privatized everything. This would undo that damage.
I think helping people to understand the problem of privatization and why we need to turn that around is a place to start. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to give my dollars to Elon Musk who is now trying to destroy our country. NASA should be the only agency studying travel to space and building spacecraft.
What is the weakest link in this capitalist system of parasitic self-destruction????? It is not public debt, the national debt, which is backed by almost an unimaginably huge infrastructure and land/water base that can be manipulated in a valued way, just like private property or the 'power' of capital. What is the weakest link? It is private, corporate debt. You know, the debt that gets borrowed away by corporate powers borrowing public money from the Fed and its ilk. This is the money/valuation shuffle that Bernie talks about. Rob Peter, pay Paul, create debt, re-define it as paper valuation based upon public consumption while the paper constantly gets stuffed into private coffers. The stock value is manipulated upward, the infrastructure owned by corporate gets manipulated upward as well. A massive, massive bubble financed by public money lending called savings and consumption. What allows this to continue? Interest, which is just extortion created by lawyers to further bilk the public and keep them on the edge of wetness. Why is credit card interest so High???? The answer is found in Why the corporate subsidies are so High. Extortion. Graft. Payola. Interest on the public debt is Private Interest paid to Private banks. Who owns Private banks? Private corporations. This is the reverse sieve that everyone experiences daily via consumption - prices go up, quality goes down, interest on money borrowed by corporate is 1/10 of what interest is for public use. Theft from both ends. Why was Hugo Chavez so reviled by corporate 'murka? Why, so long ago, were the socialized govts. of Iran, Iraq, Portugal, Chile et. al. destroyed by Kermit Rockefeller and his gang of economic hit men? Inflation is a definition of the extortion level of capitalism, and it is never below zero. Why are huge tax breaks given to wealth? Because not only do the wealthy not want to pay taxes, they want to extort even more via Interest they do NOT pay of their borrowing while the public pays huge interest for its borrowing, FROM THEM. Kill the parasites. Kill private banking. Kill for-profit corporations. The public MUST own everything it uses to survive. That is how you destroy INTEREST, the giant sucking sound heard round the world. The least efficient practice of living a biotic life in a synthetic world run by LIES and Extortion and bully Laws that strip the citizen consumer of any power. In effect, chattel slavery via so-called capitalist economics. BS to that. It is 0000000000000000000000000.1 percent efficient. Why? Just look honestly at the trainwreck this planet is in. All due to human avarice. Bernie is right. Citizens United is the head of the snake. Corporate privacy is corporate piracy.
They need to do what Teddy Roosevelt did against monopolies
YES!! Read The Master Plan by David Sirota. It describes in detail how the right played the long game my entire life and got us to where we are now. The left needs a similar long term vision and a step by step plan to get there. I hate everything about the right except for their ability to think long term and plod away at their goals. You got to hand it to them...they're right where they wanted to get to decades ago through exercising patience and persistence.
Let's add the United States Postal Service to the bucket. It used to be the premier delivery service to each and every postal drop. We need it again.
I took a quick scan of the Mission for America. Wow! About 12,000 words in the website summary alone with thousands of pages in the underlying detailed PDFs. At glance a very comprehensive and well done document in terms of reconstruction goals and flushing out what a Green New Deal means. And that’s great. What’s also needed as a companion document is a social and political strategy to get the super-majorities and progressives elected, from school boards to municipal/state/federal and judicial positions, necessary to enact the Mission. This is first and foremost a social issue. If we don’t address the social construct as well as the economic and political structures, at best all we’ll get is the pendulum swing of incremental change countered by conservative backlash.