You can do whatever you like Terry, but blaming Obama for not enacting single payer is illogical. Knowing the landscape in Congress, What could he have done to bring single payer to fruition?
Talk about how important it is (especially for those millions of people who can't afford health care), how almost every developed country in the world has a single payer health care system, and how the Republicans are fighting it for their corporate donors (Big Pharma and insurance industry who make huge profits off of the system in place). That way you set them up to pay a political price for their criminal behaviour, even if you can't push it through. At the same time you tie
them to the oligarchy, shooting their fake populist ploy out of the water.
But Obama and other Corporate Democrats can't do that, because they too are beholden to special interests! That's why they cosy up to neocons now and legitimize Republicans instead of tying them to trump at every turn, so he takes them down with him.
I've been watching some videos with political commentators espousing their views on Obama. They all say that though Obama may have done a few good things, his presidency was a huge disappointment, especially when contrasted with that enormous hope for change (well-crafted PR) that got him elected.
But what struck me most was this video with Noam Chomsky from 2010. A member of the audience gives examples of what happened in the past when exaggerated high hopes were dashed (leading to the return of De Gaulle, as well as the rise of Thatcher and Reagan). He then asks what could happen in the US if that process is repeated. Watch Chomsky's reply (I'll type out the best parts below the video):
Obama made it primarily because the financial institutions who have enormous power in the country, mainly thanks to Reagan and Clinton, preferred him to McCain. So they poured money into the Obama campaign.
(...)
One technique is, if you really want to create an uninformed electorate, you have to keep issues off the agenda. Both of the political parties are commonly well to the right of the population. It's important to keep issues off the table to make sure people don't know what they are.
(...)
So, what will the result likely be? My suspicion is an erosion of the base for the Obama campaign, because people will be disillusioned - they shouldn't be, but they will be and its understandable - and a very significant backlash. There's a major, a huge group of people in the country who feel they have serious grievances. The grievances go back to the 1970s.
The shift of the economy from production to finance, which was a huge shift that took place - primarily under Reagan and Clinton and then of course Bush even more extreme - and that's left a lot of people out in the cold. A majority of the population have seen their wages and incomes stagnate for 30 years. Their benefits declined, you know, services declined, infrastructure collapsed, and so on.
And they're not happy about it. They want to know: Why is this happening to me? If you listen to talk radio, you get a good sense of it. The standard person is saying something like: You know, I've done everything right. I'm a hard-working, decent, white Christian. I've done everything right. Why is this happening to me?
Well, who is going to give him an answer? They're not going to get an answer from the Republican Party, saying: Yeah, that's the policies we designed to shaft you for a couple of rich people. And they're not getting an answer from the Democratic Party, saying: Well, that's pretty much our policy too, except maybe not so extreme.
And so they get an answer from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who tell them: Well, I got an answer. It's the rich Liberals who own the banks and run the government and own the media, and don't care about the fly-over people. They only care about the rich folk on the two coasts. They want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and the unworthy poor. And so on.
So, that's your problem. If that's the only answer you're going to get, people are likely to believe it. And we've seen... we've had experiences like this. It's unfortunately reminiscent of late Weimar Germany, where there were also people with grievances, and they were getting an answer, a crazy answer, a horrible answer, that happened to take over,with consequences we know about.
I'm not saying that's going to happen here, but the similarities are not insignificant.
I think that if the people with real grievances that Chomsky refers to (half the US population makes less than 30K per year, I believe, and that's often based on non-liveable wages) get shafted again, the next Trump won't be a bumbling, vulgar reality show celebrity, but a real fascist.
And so it is of paramount importance that those people get an honest answer in the next few years, a real vision espoused by people that aren't easily smeared with being in the pocket of the oligarchs. The Republican Party isn't going to do it. And neither will the Corporate Democrats, because they can't. Both will resort to lies, half-truths and hollow PR phrases to incite and divide.
But Bernie Sanders is showing how it can be done, by offering an alternative to extreme right (GOP) and just plain right (Corporate Democrats/Republican lite). I think that the 'easiest' way to accomplish this, is for the real progressive movement to take over the Democratic Party. And for that Corporate Democrats need to either be removed from their positions, or feel sufficiently threatened to actually start acting on the will of the people. All the way, not just gestures.
To determine who is a Corporate Democrat, you look at four things:
1. Campaign contributions
2. Voting record
3. Over-all presentation in the media
4. Their positions on single payer health care, free college, bank regulation, minimum wages, money out of politics.
These four things combined should give an indication of where a politician stands on the spectrum.
Shall we have a look at the 'fine' Nancy Pelosi first? Or do we talk about Obama some more? We could discuss how many children were killed by his drone program (and him using that as a
joke), for instance. Or how his bail-out of the banks benefited the 'tax payers' (read 1%) and how no banker or hedge fund manager went to jail, while thousands of people got evicted out of their homes.
Or maybe a more positive, pro-active thing to do, would be to look at how the progressive movement is gathering, uniting, presenting candidates that have vowed not to accept corporate campaign contributions, and then actively support that?
God, I wish I was American. There's so little I can do from here, even though my child will be affected by what happens in that crazy US of A.