Why the Left Should Celebrate Scott Brown's Senate Victory

Republican Scott Brown's Senate victory may ironically turn out to be a win--in certain respects--for the pro-choice movement as well as for the poor and working class. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate have devised dueling health care reform bills that amount to little more than full body massages with happy endings for the health insurance industry and the Conference of Catholic Bishops. With Brown's Senate victory, we may now find ourselves in the perplexing situation of potentially being temporarily saved from the ravages of messianic crony capitalism as a result of misguided, xenophobic teabagger charges of "socialism" and the Republican wing of our one-party system's willingness to undermine at all costs our center-right President's health care "reform" agenda--even if that agenda actually benefits their masters in the medical-industrial complex in the short term. 

The best health care reform bill our Democratic-controlled House could come up with  (a) contained the Stupak amendment; (b) included a "generous" expansion of Medicaid eligibility criteria to include individuals and families with incomes up to 150% of the federal poverty line--a family of 4 with two adults working full-time earning minimum wage would likely not qualify (150% of the federal poverty line for a family of 4 is $22,050); (c) imposed a mandate on the public to purchase health insurance from either a private insurer or the "public option", where the most affordable plans would be those with the highest deductibles and worst coverage; (d) omitted the Kucinich amendment despite popular support for such a provision; (e) punishes the uninsured by imposing a 2.5 % penalty tax on income up to the average cost of an insurance policy.

The Senate's health care reform bill was worse, and it was crafted in the context of a filibuster-proof Democratic supermajority. The Senate version (a) would finance health care "reform" by imposing a 40% tax on high-cost health insurance plans--so fuck all of you blue collar union workers who opted for a lower salary in exchange for better health insurance for your families, you are going to have to foot the bill for these "reforms"; (b) doesn't even pretend to include a public option; (c) includes a less "generous" expansion of Medicaid coverage to individuals and families who earn up to 133% of the poverty level--one is forced to wonder why they even bothered; (d) requires everyone to be covered by private insurers and imposes a $750 per person annual penalty up to $2,250 per family or 2% of taxable income, whichever is greater; (e) would let states opt out of including plans with abortion coverage on the exchanges and require anyone with abortion coverage to write two separate premium checks -- one for the abortion coverage and one for the rest.

In yet another "teachable moment", Obama stated that he preferred the Senate version to the House version because he preferred financing these reforms via a tax on so-called Cadillac coverage insurance plans--regardless of an individual's income--to imposing a 5.4% tax on individuals earning more than half a million dollars per year and couples earning more than $1 million per year. 

Let that fact sink in for a moment. Allow it to stew for awhile.  If you aren't furious, you should re-evaluate your claim of being on the "left". 

Are there a few positive crumbs in each version of the health care reform bill?  Certainly.  Most notably, the bills would end (or dramatically reduce) discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But who among us would be willing to trade away a woman's right to control her own body for such paltry--and that is being generous--"benefits" (which are counterbalanced by mandates to purchase coverage and provisions to punish the uninsured)? Who among us is willing to accept the rawhide chew they tossed us if it means watching the poor get penalized for "refusing" to purchase health coverage when confronted with the choice of purchasing a shitty health plan or eating?

I harbor no illusions about the Republicans' opposition to ObamaCare. Their opposition is not grounded in altruism or significant ideological differences. It is at best a faux-populist co-optation of the mantle of leadership from a shrill, ignorant, and largely racist cadre of uninformed ditto-heads. Any Congressional Republican who claims to oppose the Senate's version of the health care bill due to ideological stumbling blocks (e.g., "it is the first step towards socialism") is a liar. No, the Republicans want to frame what is perhaps the biggest coup for the health care industry in recent history as "socialism" so they can enact an even bolder corporatist agenda in the future. By thwarting ObamaCare, they will have struck a potentially fatal blow against our radical lefty (and black, "not that there's anything wrong with that") President with the terrorist-sounding name and his "socialist" agenda--at least in the eyes of the uninformed American public.  Unfortunately, any differences between Obama and his predecessor are so inconsequential as to be negligible, which means that 'Murka will continue its relentless march to the right, pushing the boundary of what it means to be "right-wing" into previously unexplored--and terrifying--territory.

Nevertheless, I agree with the teabaggers when they say "kill the bill", albeit for vastly different reasons.  To those people who are bemoaning  the loss of the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, I ask you: How have the Democrats taken advantage of this majority thus far to help the poor and the working class?

If Brown's victory in Massachusetts helps facilitate the demise of what could be the biggest victory for anti-choice zealots since Roe vs Wade, then I am thrilled he won. If Brown's victory paradoxically annihilates one of the most brazen examples of crony capitalism in recent memory, then the left should be celebrating this development! If Brown's victory is, as some pundits maintain, a referendum on Obama's presidency that foreshadows a Republican victory in 2012, then perhaps progressives' dramatic disappointment with the Obama mirage combined with a "changing of the guard" (charade that it is) will rouse the remnants of the American left from its complacency to begin fighting…at long last, to begin truly fighting against the capitalist plutocracy, free from any illusions that there is a Democrat messiah they can vote for who is just waiting in the wings to come down and save them.

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