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The House Health Care Reform Bill Doesn’t Suck!

by Jon Greenbaum

I was drinking screwdrivers with my 80 year old grandfather in the kitchenette of his Coney Island coop apartment. He leaned across the table, pointed his finger at the table and said in his thick Yiddish accent, “It was not a revolutionary moment. You have to understand that.”

I didn’t get it. Grampa was a member of the Communist Party. He and the other members of the bagel bakers union would go down to striking bakeries and physically enforce the picket with their five foot three inch Russian Jewish bodies. Nobody dared cross the line. These guys took on NYC Marshalls who were trying to evict tenants in the Bronx. The Marshalls retreated, covered in blood. That was the political landscape that FDR entered.

The New Deal came out the other side.

The New Deal was messy, bold and creative but it wasn’t a revolution. Half a lifetime later, I understand what my grandfather was saying. One of the highlights of the New Deal was Social Security, one of the reforms that helped transform American society, but socialism it wasn’t.

In fact Social Security began as a lame compromise. Southern racist Congressional representatives made sure that the deal excluded “domestic workers” and “agricultural workers,” thereby shutting out many if not most black and brown Americans. And government didn’t even nationalize the whole pension system. It allowed the private pension system to continue. And that’s with guys like my grandfather running amok in inner cities around the country, causing nightmares for the FBI.

But Social Security isn’t so bad for a half-assed compromise that started as an incremental reform. Before Social Security older Americans were totally on their own and half of all senior citizens descended into poverty.

As an American, you currently have the unique status, among all citizens of western democracies, of being absolutely on your own when it comes to health care. Every day nearly 2,500 people file for bankruptcy due to medical costs. Over 20,000 Americans die every year due to lack of health insurance. That’s more than three times the amount of people who were killed by terrorist attacks on 9/11.

And that is what this fight is about.

It isn’t a revolutionary moment. We aren’t closing down the docks like they did in Poland or shutting down the thruways like they did in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine or storming the parliament like they did in Georgia. The elites in DC won’t be poring over the Kern Commission 2.0 Report about the health care reform riots. But, nonetheless, we have a chance to write a new chapter in American history.

President Obama isn’t just advocating for “health care reform.” He is calling for changing the rules of the game. What is on the table isn’t the clean, elegant solution that would be provided by a single payer system (Despite a vibrant grassroots movement, there are less than a handful of Senators who would even consider it. Why? See above paragraph). But what is on the table represents meaningful change. It’s not revolutionary but it may transform the entire health care system.

The House bill is significant. We would be adding health care to education and Social Security as fundamental government guarantees. And in doing so we would be strengthening American resolve for government that is responsive to all Americans, not just the privileged few.

If my grandfather were alive today we’d probably argue over the merits of the current proposal. I’d say it stinks that the public plan would initially only be available to a small percentage of Americans, perpetuating the employer-based health care system and he might argue that some unions would benefit. We’d talk about how the plan needs to include legal immigrants (Americans with green cards are shut out of federal assistance programs for five years). I’d urge him to call up Senator Schumer to tell him to stand up against Max Baucus’ concessions to the Republicans and he’d hem and haw, tempermentally allergic to that kind of thing. But we’d both be impressed about how this approach successfully allowed the Left to capitalize on the Obama victory and keep the White House and Congressional leadership engaged in the health care reform battle as long as it has. And, incredibly, this approach has enabled progressive groups to grab a seat at the table in the negotiations.

Although the Republicans are stalling and the health insurance industry is spending gazillions to coopt reform and Rush Limbaugh is just flat out lying to his dittoheads, the process is still fluid and many Congressional reps and Senators are actually listening to their constituents. This is the time to give them specific feedback on components of the reform package. Health Care for America Now is forming rapid response networks to generate constituent feedback (phone calls) on Congressional reform developments. Call the Metro Justice office at 325-2560 to sign up.

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The Corporate Agenda for Public Schools: Is Brizard on Board?

Superintendent Brizard

Superintendent Brizard

by Jon Greenbaum

My daughter came home from Wilson High School one afternoon and told me the new Superintendant, Jean Claude Brizard, had recommended that the students read The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman’s anecdotal tribute to the global expansion of the corporate world. The book is notorious for completely ignoring the structural and geopolitical causes of increasing global poverty. That was the first red flag. The next red flag was at a Parent Council meeting where the superintendent read a passage of a book. The book, written by a former military officer, offered us the advice that schools should be run more like businesses. I thought to myself, “Does he mean AIG, GM or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?”

On the American Association of School Administrators website Brizard recommends a third book, a business management guide entitled Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. The book was recommended to him by NYC Superintendent Joel Klein who currently is enjoying a 22% approval rating among parents. Brizard comments that the current teacher contract negotiation model is out of line with sound business management.

With Brizard eliminating over 200 teaching positions in the Rochester City Schools it is fair to start asking what his agenda is. We know that Brizard is a Broad Institute Fellow. He has talked publicly about consulting with other Broad (rhymes with “road”) Fellows. What is this Broad Institute and who is Eli Broad?

Billionaire Eli Broad

Billionaire Eli Broad

Billionaire Eli Broad is one of the wealthiest men on the planet. With Bill Gates Broad he funded and launched the Strong American Schools initiative, seeking to move Presidential candidates in the ’08 election to embrace national education standards (enforced with high stakes testing), merit pay and longer school days and years. Sure enough, these issues have been embraced by the Obama administration. The billionaires have put the public schools in their sights and they are pulling the trigger.

In The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools Steven Miller and Jack Gerson outline the corporate agenda for schools and identify the players.

According to Miller and Gerson, “The Broad Institute trains school superintendents, school boards and even union leaders in what they consider ‘appropriate corporate approaches.’ A central problem for corporate privatizers is the issue of governance, i.e. who has legal authority over the schools. Broad favors state take-overs (New Orleans, Washington DC, Oakland, Ca, St. Louis) or mayoral takeovers (Chicago, Pittsburg, attempted last year by Villaregosa in LA) to eliminate messy interference from the public.”

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Mayor Duffy only started to make noises about mayoral control after Brizard came to town.

The Gates Foundation also financed the National Commission on Skills in the Workplace Report entitled Tough Choices or Tough Times. Miller and Gerson report that the Commission is advocating for “(a) replacing public schools with what the report called “contract schools”, which would be charter schools writ large; (b) eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards—their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the “contract schools; (c) eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and (d) forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16).”

Miller and Gerson continue, “These measures, taken together, would effectively cripple public control of public education… They would leave education policy in the hands of a network of entrepreneurial think tanks, corporate entrepreneurs, and armies of lobbyists whose priorities are profiting from the already huge education market while cutting back on public funding for schools and students.”

The charter school movement, originally championed by progressive parents and teachers who sought to create innovative schools with more flexibility within the big bureaucratic system, is now being led by the corporate world. Charter schools are now big business.

Charter school initiatives have grown exponentially and with decidedly mixed results. Eli Broad got in on the action in Oakland after California seized the school district after it supposedly “could not pay off a state loan” according to Miller and Gerson. “After 4 years of state-appointed administrators, the district was further in debt than ever with little positive to show for it. In fact, the state takeover was virtually a hostile corporate take-over by billionaire Eli Broad, who hand-picked all important district personnel. Since the community had lost its voice, 42 of 98 schools have been closed, charterized or made into ‘small schools’… To support this effort, corporate forces came forward to raise more than $40 million for OUSD ‘to redesign the central office’ and refused to allocate even a penny of this money to the classroom. However, administrators are leaving the schools at an alarming rate, the highest in the state, despite the money.”

So far Brizard has followed the Broad management playbook, breaking up Franklin, decentralizing budgets to individual schools, laying off teachers and advocating for a longer school year and mayoral control. How far will Brizard follow Broad’s corporate lead?

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