The Democrats held both chambers of Congress under Obama, creating a real opportunity for single-payer healthcare—yet he and they refused to pursue it. Had they established that system, Americans would now be in the streets defending it fiercely. Instead, we got a government shutdown over the modest goal of more affordable premiums. The dysfunction is staggering.
For years now, the Democratic Party’s core message has been little more than “we’re not Trump.” That’s a hollow pitch unless you’re offering genuine change that prioritizes working people over financial interests. Right now, the status quo serves finance capital, not labor.
There’s an unspoken class war happening in New York City. The Mamdani campaign exemplifies this struggle, but it’s operating without the institutional support it needs. We lack formal structures for waging class-based political battles, largely because our elected officials typically belong to the very class we’re challenging.
This article gets it right: we need both organizational infrastructure and a clear vision for change.
We are missing an opportunity in America. Look at who is at the No Kings March. Retired people like me. I was a quality professional with decades of experience discovering and promoting visions and best practices. Yet, I am not employable to do this work. No one will hire me or use my experience. I talk to people daily who want to use their experience and expertise to make things work again. The resignation in their eyes tell me they do not see a path. A woman told me yesterday: I used to be important to the organization i worked in. I have so much left to give. No one will even approve me to volunteer. I am 75.
Corbin, I think the conversation you are having is happening across a number of platforms in the free media biosphere. We need candidates and advocates who can articulate a vision of economic democracy with a large helping of social and climate justice. Because of the trauma we are experiencing as a nation, a mass movement is evolving across a broad spectrum of people, that share the desire for the kind of profound change this vision entails. Our moment of a Third Reconstruction is emerging and we need to keep articulating in as specific ways as possible what that will look like. Thank you for your profound and plain spoken articulation. I would love to see you, Joy Reid, the guys from Wolves and Sheep and Mike Nellis all get together for a public forum on what comes next and how do we get there. I am sure there are plenty of others as well. Right now The Lever has a brilliant podcast on how Montana folk are conspiring to overturn Citizens United by changing the rules of what corporations can do in their state. We are living under the worst threat to freedom in our lifetime, yet we are also living in the best time to bring about the world we want to leave to our grandchildren.
Excellent ideas. The vision thing is unfortunately also a meme that pops up to be thrown around. But what you have argued for is the outline of a Plan. The New Deal was a plan, first in outline then in specifics. You have the ability to make a plan as do many others. The Democrat elite did not want a plan. It used the language of identity politics to cover their submission to Republican politics based on starving government. The lack of plan was deliberate as you point out. But I believe the elements for a plan for another New Deal are in your head (and other people’s). Where and how to put this —in an organized effective way—into the actual struggle in the DP? That is the question.
That vision has NOT changed in spite of ALL the pretense by the operatives and their partisan stooge flying monkeys to the contrary. When a sure-to-pass bill was scheduled to go on the floor to establish single payer health care in CA, the operatives of that party and probably their governor, Newsom, had it pulled from the floor before it could be heard.
The two parties are one cartel in perpetuating the "your money or your life" flow of working class wealth into the pockets of a small wealthy ruling class. It is the most efficient method of looting the citizens of the country ever devised, and has been placed on steroids by enabling private equity to own the doctors and nurses too. The ruling class owning the corporations, including hospitals and clinics, know that control over workers' and their families' health care is the ultimate scepter which they can wave to rule their workers. Threat of loss of health care keeps workers working under exploitive and abusive conditions.
The shameless partisan political pretense is the opposite of what the American people know they need, and the parties' operatives have absolutely no intention of meeting that need. That's a reason for the unending flow of Mothership Vortex nuisance texts and emails invading our privacy and homes, soliciting money for a party that can never tell us what this party has COMMMITTED to be FOR. As long as this lack of vision brings in the money, and prattled "platforms" are never enacted, there is zero incentive to provide leadership and provide actual intentional governance.
The job of the partisan stooges is to try to shame the citizen voters from holding the operatives of their own party accountable in their support of what is actually a murderous system of health care. Every time you hear "False equivalence!!" and "The other party is much worse!" that is coming from a partisan stooge virtue signaling us to get in line, NOT hold our own party accountable, and continue to support a murderous system. It has worked for the stooges for decades.
After decades of passively murdering their own citizens through such a health care system for profit, it is not surprising that these same parties' operatives are the ones figuring they can pound the tub to successfully herd their rank and file into cheer-leading for a for-profit genocide as well.
What an indictment of our country for her to admit, on the one hand, that this country would eventually demand single-payer healthcare and then turn around and say we will never have it because the moneyed interests won’t allow it.
Bernie Sanders was educating the people at the time of her quote about how America's "health care" system was a lone aberration in a world of developed nations. I interpreted Clinton's comment as loyalty signaling to the monied interests bribing her party not to allow a real health health care system to replace the for-profit lucrative looting system the parties protected. The message communicated: "Your looting is safe with me."
Ive seen too much evidence to suggest the Clintons still control the Democratic Party. Until this changes, nothing we've seen in the last 40+ years will either.
They seem to be shadow operatives, along with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who were very instrumental in ending the real Democratic Party and converting it into the Republican Lite Corporate Auxiliary. Biden fell all over himself trying to jump fast enough and high enough when Netanyahu ordered him to crush the first amendment rights of protesters and take away academic freedom from American universities. NOT ONE Democratic-elected stood to tell Netanyahu no one elected him to govern Americans or run American universities. Independent Bernie Sanders did.
Bernie has always told it like it is. He'd have won in 2016, but the DNC decided it was "Hillary's turn." Bernie even campaigned for her after they screwed him. He's a man on a mission, and we don't always agree with him, but he might be the last man standing!
Your vision is perfect. I know the institution that broke us but it’s so hard for others to know unless you’ve spent your life deep inside it, which most haven’t. It’s our schools. They are rotten to the core and people don’t get it because fascist-like administrators took them over four decades ago and teachers live in fear of telling you this. The few of us who aren’t afraid have been crying out at WhiteChalkCrime.com and EndTeacherAbuse.org since 2002, but people don’t get it. This country is like a bag of groceries with a rotten lemon it doesn’t know about slowly ruining everything in the bag. Trust me. It’s our schools. They’re our country’s upbringing. We’re being raised by wolves. Read my book A Graver Danger and you’ll know what we need to do to turn this ship around.
I get it seems simplistic-not an issue that merits our attention. But it won’t after you read what’s going on. Our called-to-teach teachers used to be the soul of this nation. Now that we’ve been exiled, we’re a nation without a soul.
Thanks for letting me know. Education is a lonely, very hard to understand world that I’m shining light on so we can fix the institution designed to produce vibrant, caring citizens. The fact it produced Trump lovers should be enough to know it’s why democracy fell apart, but it isn’t because people do not know education like those of us who were in it. I welcome your feedback after you read it—and need reviews to help the algorithm. What you described is the subtle surface dysfunction. My book goes into the root cause of the dysfunction. Also look at the stories at EndTeacherAbuse.org. You will relate.
I will read your book. When I was still teaching, I was constantly frustrated that just as I was learning how to implement the “next new thing,” they would change it. Things that were non-negotiables (They HAD to be done) one year were taboo the next. Having taught in four states over the course of nearly forty years, I watched education become something I no longer understood and no longer wanted to be a part of.
That healthcare in this country is the way it is is no accident. The overlords want us to die when we're no longer of use to them. They want (and have) an enslaved underclass to do the tasks they still need humans for, and when we are too old or sick to do those tasks they want us gone (leaving THOSE bills for our next generations, to keep them enslaved to the overlords).
"We don’t need better players for a rigged game. We need to define a new game entirely. Only then will we find the leaders capable of playing it."
I know two people who should sit at the table to "define a new game" and that's Sally Fallon from the Weston A. Price Foundation and Joel Salatin, head farmer at Polyface Farms. Just sit them down for an hour and ask them a simple question "what is your definition of health" then ask "how do we get there"?
You will have the best people defining a new game and maybe, just maybe, willing to serve as leaders.
Agree wholeheartedly and healthcare is always a great talking point because everyone uses it and needs it. I’ve worked as a clinician for 30 years and have seen the effects of corporate takeovers of smaller and independent practices. They have gradually altered the system such that small practices are difficult to maintain. They have gradually t
Agree wholeheartedly and healthcare is always a great talking point because everyone uses it and needs it. I’ve worked as a clinician for 30 years and have seen the effects of corporate takeovers of smaller and independent practices. They have gradually altered the system such that small practices are difficult to maintain. The four horsemen of the healthcare apocalypse are huge healthcare monopolies, health insurance, pharmacy monopolies and exorbitant malpractice costs. Clinicians are pressured to increase productivity, e.g. profits by spending as little time with patients as possible, often looking at their screens rather than us. With corporate medicine, it’s difficult to even get appointments so we turn to fast food medical practices where nobody knows your name. Seems easy to sell a vision of a better system since we all experience this. Except the rich of course- who pay cash for private doctors
Single payer must be better than Medicare. Every senior knows how complicated, confusing and expensive Medicare coverage can be…with penalties if you don’t sign up at the right time, and the shell game of the competing private insurers. Universal free would make all of lives better. better yet would be a national health service which would eliminate insurance, malpractice and corporate pharmacy control over drugs available and their pricing.
The vision is there. Third Way democrats basically corporatized the Democratic party. They can become the conservative party (they can call themselves what they are: Eisenhower Republicans), and the people who want THE PEOPLE to govern (formerly Thomas Paine liberal Democrats) take back their party.
Corbin...how do we get you elected chair of the Democratic Party? It needs you badly!
The Democrats held both chambers of Congress under Obama, creating a real opportunity for single-payer healthcare—yet he and they refused to pursue it. Had they established that system, Americans would now be in the streets defending it fiercely. Instead, we got a government shutdown over the modest goal of more affordable premiums. The dysfunction is staggering.
For years now, the Democratic Party’s core message has been little more than “we’re not Trump.” That’s a hollow pitch unless you’re offering genuine change that prioritizes working people over financial interests. Right now, the status quo serves finance capital, not labor.
There’s an unspoken class war happening in New York City. The Mamdani campaign exemplifies this struggle, but it’s operating without the institutional support it needs. We lack formal structures for waging class-based political battles, largely because our elected officials typically belong to the very class we’re challenging.
This article gets it right: we need both organizational infrastructure and a clear vision for change.
We are missing an opportunity in America. Look at who is at the No Kings March. Retired people like me. I was a quality professional with decades of experience discovering and promoting visions and best practices. Yet, I am not employable to do this work. No one will hire me or use my experience. I talk to people daily who want to use their experience and expertise to make things work again. The resignation in their eyes tell me they do not see a path. A woman told me yesterday: I used to be important to the organization i worked in. I have so much left to give. No one will even approve me to volunteer. I am 75.
Corbin posted a volunteer link in an article earlier this week:
https://bit.ly/AU_volunteers
Corbin, I think the conversation you are having is happening across a number of platforms in the free media biosphere. We need candidates and advocates who can articulate a vision of economic democracy with a large helping of social and climate justice. Because of the trauma we are experiencing as a nation, a mass movement is evolving across a broad spectrum of people, that share the desire for the kind of profound change this vision entails. Our moment of a Third Reconstruction is emerging and we need to keep articulating in as specific ways as possible what that will look like. Thank you for your profound and plain spoken articulation. I would love to see you, Joy Reid, the guys from Wolves and Sheep and Mike Nellis all get together for a public forum on what comes next and how do we get there. I am sure there are plenty of others as well. Right now The Lever has a brilliant podcast on how Montana folk are conspiring to overturn Citizens United by changing the rules of what corporations can do in their state. We are living under the worst threat to freedom in our lifetime, yet we are also living in the best time to bring about the world we want to leave to our grandchildren.
Excellent ideas. The vision thing is unfortunately also a meme that pops up to be thrown around. But what you have argued for is the outline of a Plan. The New Deal was a plan, first in outline then in specifics. You have the ability to make a plan as do many others. The Democrat elite did not want a plan. It used the language of identity politics to cover their submission to Republican politics based on starving government. The lack of plan was deliberate as you point out. But I believe the elements for a plan for another New Deal are in your head (and other people’s). Where and how to put this —in an organized effective way—into the actual struggle in the DP? That is the question.
This is great and IMO 100% on the mark. A couple of questions:
Does it take a charismatic leader to be the reference point for the vision?
Which of the new organizations springing up are headed in the right direction?
I know of Run for Something, Justice Democrats, Sunrise, DSA, Voters of Tomorrow, More Perfect Union. Are there others?
Hillary Clinton clearly gave the actual Democratic Party operatives' vision: "America will NEVER EVER" have single payer healthcare."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-single-payer-health-care-will-never-ever-happen/
That vision has NOT changed in spite of ALL the pretense by the operatives and their partisan stooge flying monkeys to the contrary. When a sure-to-pass bill was scheduled to go on the floor to establish single payer health care in CA, the operatives of that party and probably their governor, Newsom, had it pulled from the floor before it could be heard.
The two parties are one cartel in perpetuating the "your money or your life" flow of working class wealth into the pockets of a small wealthy ruling class. It is the most efficient method of looting the citizens of the country ever devised, and has been placed on steroids by enabling private equity to own the doctors and nurses too. The ruling class owning the corporations, including hospitals and clinics, know that control over workers' and their families' health care is the ultimate scepter which they can wave to rule their workers. Threat of loss of health care keeps workers working under exploitive and abusive conditions.
The shameless partisan political pretense is the opposite of what the American people know they need, and the parties' operatives have absolutely no intention of meeting that need. That's a reason for the unending flow of Mothership Vortex nuisance texts and emails invading our privacy and homes, soliciting money for a party that can never tell us what this party has COMMMITTED to be FOR. As long as this lack of vision brings in the money, and prattled "platforms" are never enacted, there is zero incentive to provide leadership and provide actual intentional governance.
The job of the partisan stooges is to try to shame the citizen voters from holding the operatives of their own party accountable in their support of what is actually a murderous system of health care. Every time you hear "False equivalence!!" and "The other party is much worse!" that is coming from a partisan stooge virtue signaling us to get in line, NOT hold our own party accountable, and continue to support a murderous system. It has worked for the stooges for decades.
After decades of passively murdering their own citizens through such a health care system for profit, it is not surprising that these same parties' operatives are the ones figuring they can pound the tub to successfully herd their rank and file into cheer-leading for a for-profit genocide as well.
What an indictment of our country for her to admit, on the one hand, that this country would eventually demand single-payer healthcare and then turn around and say we will never have it because the moneyed interests won’t allow it.
Bernie Sanders was educating the people at the time of her quote about how America's "health care" system was a lone aberration in a world of developed nations. I interpreted Clinton's comment as loyalty signaling to the monied interests bribing her party not to allow a real health health care system to replace the for-profit lucrative looting system the parties protected. The message communicated: "Your looting is safe with me."
Ive seen too much evidence to suggest the Clintons still control the Democratic Party. Until this changes, nothing we've seen in the last 40+ years will either.
They seem to be shadow operatives, along with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who were very instrumental in ending the real Democratic Party and converting it into the Republican Lite Corporate Auxiliary. Biden fell all over himself trying to jump fast enough and high enough when Netanyahu ordered him to crush the first amendment rights of protesters and take away academic freedom from American universities. NOT ONE Democratic-elected stood to tell Netanyahu no one elected him to govern Americans or run American universities. Independent Bernie Sanders did.
Bernie has always told it like it is. He'd have won in 2016, but the DNC decided it was "Hillary's turn." Bernie even campaigned for her after they screwed him. He's a man on a mission, and we don't always agree with him, but he might be the last man standing!
Your vision is perfect. I know the institution that broke us but it’s so hard for others to know unless you’ve spent your life deep inside it, which most haven’t. It’s our schools. They are rotten to the core and people don’t get it because fascist-like administrators took them over four decades ago and teachers live in fear of telling you this. The few of us who aren’t afraid have been crying out at WhiteChalkCrime.com and EndTeacherAbuse.org since 2002, but people don’t get it. This country is like a bag of groceries with a rotten lemon it doesn’t know about slowly ruining everything in the bag. Trust me. It’s our schools. They’re our country’s upbringing. We’re being raised by wolves. Read my book A Graver Danger and you’ll know what we need to do to turn this ship around.
I get it seems simplistic-not an issue that merits our attention. But it won’t after you read what’s going on. Our called-to-teach teachers used to be the soul of this nation. Now that we’ve been exiled, we’re a nation without a soul.
Please read my book. You can request a free PDF at EndTeacherAbuse.org.
Thanks for letting me know. Education is a lonely, very hard to understand world that I’m shining light on so we can fix the institution designed to produce vibrant, caring citizens. The fact it produced Trump lovers should be enough to know it’s why democracy fell apart, but it isn’t because people do not know education like those of us who were in it. I welcome your feedback after you read it—and need reviews to help the algorithm. What you described is the subtle surface dysfunction. My book goes into the root cause of the dysfunction. Also look at the stories at EndTeacherAbuse.org. You will relate.
Education didn't produce MAGA. The lack of it did.
Exactly!
I will read your book. When I was still teaching, I was constantly frustrated that just as I was learning how to implement the “next new thing,” they would change it. Things that were non-negotiables (They HAD to be done) one year were taboo the next. Having taught in four states over the course of nearly forty years, I watched education become something I no longer understood and no longer wanted to be a part of.
That healthcare in this country is the way it is is no accident. The overlords want us to die when we're no longer of use to them. They want (and have) an enslaved underclass to do the tasks they still need humans for, and when we are too old or sick to do those tasks they want us gone (leaving THOSE bills for our next generations, to keep them enslaved to the overlords).
Yay, Amerikkka is Great!
How about THE NEW NEW DEAL
"We don’t need better players for a rigged game. We need to define a new game entirely. Only then will we find the leaders capable of playing it."
I know two people who should sit at the table to "define a new game" and that's Sally Fallon from the Weston A. Price Foundation and Joel Salatin, head farmer at Polyface Farms. Just sit them down for an hour and ask them a simple question "what is your definition of health" then ask "how do we get there"?
You will have the best people defining a new game and maybe, just maybe, willing to serve as leaders.
I'm with Bob Lindahl!
https://www.instagram.com/publicinterestarts/
Thanks for putting the notice at the bottom of the page telling me I'm Subscribed, otherwise I'd subscribe again. Thanks for great thoughts.
Agree wholeheartedly and healthcare is always a great talking point because everyone uses it and needs it. I’ve worked as a clinician for 30 years and have seen the effects of corporate takeovers of smaller and independent practices. They have gradually altered the system such that small practices are difficult to maintain. They have gradually t
Agree wholeheartedly and healthcare is always a great talking point because everyone uses it and needs it. I’ve worked as a clinician for 30 years and have seen the effects of corporate takeovers of smaller and independent practices. They have gradually altered the system such that small practices are difficult to maintain. The four horsemen of the healthcare apocalypse are huge healthcare monopolies, health insurance, pharmacy monopolies and exorbitant malpractice costs. Clinicians are pressured to increase productivity, e.g. profits by spending as little time with patients as possible, often looking at their screens rather than us. With corporate medicine, it’s difficult to even get appointments so we turn to fast food medical practices where nobody knows your name. Seems easy to sell a vision of a better system since we all experience this. Except the rich of course- who pay cash for private doctors
Single payer must be better than Medicare. Every senior knows how complicated, confusing and expensive Medicare coverage can be…with penalties if you don’t sign up at the right time, and the shell game of the competing private insurers. Universal free would make all of lives better. better yet would be a national health service which would eliminate insurance, malpractice and corporate pharmacy control over drugs available and their pricing.
The vision is there. Third Way democrats basically corporatized the Democratic party. They can become the conservative party (they can call themselves what they are: Eisenhower Republicans), and the people who want THE PEOPLE to govern (formerly Thomas Paine liberal Democrats) take back their party.