Kabuki Theater presents: The Great Bipartisan Summit

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Finally. In the words of Modo, our president “came down from the mountaintop,” and has decided to get bipartisan with this whole healthcare dealy.

President Obama said Sunday that he would convene a half-day bipartisan health care session at the White House to be televised live this month, a high-profile gambit that will allow Americans to watch as Democrats and Republicans try to break their political impasse.

If you’re experiencing a strong sense of deja vu, it’s because we’ve been here before.

March, 2009: The president gathered some 120 people representing varying facets of the industry — from doctors to patients to health insurers to the drug industry — along with lawmakers to discuss ways to reform the U.S. health system.

It is true that Republicans are determined to act as obstructionists. They have no plan. Actually, their plan is de-plan. My favorite example of this is the note Sarah Palin wrote on her hand for her big Tea Party speech. Palin originally wrote “budget,” then crossed it out and wrote “cuts.” That pretty much sums up the Republican Party right now. They have no plans for governance, but they do have slogans that are both myopic and superficial like “down with government” and “tax cuts for everybody!” Ask Colorado Springs how that will end.

Or, as Krugs points out today, ask Poland:

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Sound familiar?

However, Republicans are not the only barrier between the American people and reform. The Democrats are acting as obstructionists, too, except corporation donations are preventing the leading party from making real, good change.

Part of the problem is that the president thinks he can talk to Senators like Shelby, who are willing to fuck over the country for a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center, like they’re adults. The other part of the problem is that these bipartisan summits may all be Kabuki theater, since the lion’s share of healthcare negotiations took place behind closed-doors, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries already won.

Progressives are right to bemoan the state of the Democratic Party, but it’s not as though President Obama is a stupid man, who doesn’t know how to negotiate. It’s that there’s a serious lack of motivation here. The goal was never to fix healthcare. The goal was to preserve corporate cash for the right party, while also throwing enough crumbs to the serfs so they wouldn’t — ya’ know — riot when their children started dying.

What we have in America is an unhealthy combination of corporatism and obstructionism. Yes, Shelby is an asshole, but he’s an asshole on behalf of Northrop-Grumman and the military-industrial complex just as Chris Dodd is an asshole on behalf of Citigroup and Chuck Schumer is an asshole on behalf of Goldman Sachs.

I’m no fan of the Senate. I think Senators (particularly from sparsely populated states) are invested with way, way too much power. However, the House of Representatives is also soaked with corporate cash, so there is plenty of blame to go around. At every level of government, the corporations have complete and total control.

Where I disagree with Krugs is that it’s not specifically Republicans who have paralyzed the system. The fault lies within both parties. Both parties took cash from the private healthcare industry. Actually, the Democrats took more bribes donations.

Progressives have been wondering aloud why Dems (and the president) seem so timid at a time when the country badly needs a FDR. Clearly, Americans wanted the country to move left. That’s why they unequivocally rejected the Bush era by handing over a huge majority to Democrats.

Well, they’re timid (and willing to hold endless Kabuki summits) because the real deals are already done. The corporations won (again). Krugs is right: the system is broken, but the cogs are clogged with corporate cash, and the solution won’t be as easy as handing over power to the other political party.