Pushing for municipal broadband. Support for organic food. What do these seemingly unconnected positions have in common? Simple: They all are suffused with a deep animus toward corporations and an equally fierce determination—among progressive activists and politicians—to transform the U.
But for most progressives, this anticorporatism extends well beyond the tech sector. It has become a general operating principle, the go-to policy formula for righting wrongs and achieving other societal goals—a conviction so firmly held that it is no longer just the means to an end; it is, for many, the end in and of itself. This has not always been so. For more than a century, starting in the s and continuing through to the s, most progressives accepted that large corporations were a permanent and even valuable part of American economic life, to be balanced with other forces, such as unions, and sometimes to be regulated.
Today, however, a growing share of progressives view large corporations as inherently problematic, if not malicious. To be sure, America faces serious challenges, such as excessive income inequality and a tattered safety net. Rather than evaluating policymakers on whether they support policies that generate progressive outcomes—getting broadband to rural areas, fostering drug development, addressing global warming, helping workers get training—they now judge policymakers almost exclusively on whether they advocate for positions that would restrict, restrain, or replace the corporate sector.
Very few on the anticorporate left will acknowledge that anticorporatism is their true goal, yet their disdain for those who shop at Walmart, get coffee at Starbucks, or patronize other large corporations, is palpable.
They realize that while many voters may rightly support more regulation and more progressive taxation, most oppose shrinking the corporate sector, especially since half of private sector workers are employed by large companies. As a result, the anticorporate Left camouflages its real endgame by calling for policies that enjoy near-universal support: lower prices, more privacy, more fairness, more broadband, safer food, fighting climate change, cheaper drugs.
But the policies they embrace as solutions are primarily designed to restrict, restrain, or replace the corporate sector—a silver-bullet solution, they believe, for all of the above, but also an end in and of itself.
It happens to be the case that when it comes to advancing those and many other progressive goals, large corporations have a demonstrably better track record than small firms do, but that rarely enters into the debate. There has been an anticorporate fringe in American politics since large industrial corporations first emerged after the Civil War. Anticorporate sentiment has risen and fallen in relationship to economic conditions and political responsiveness.
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Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Single-payer government health insurance has been a dream on the left for decades, but it was never a politically realistic option. In crafting the Affordable Care Act, the administration intentionally avoided describing the individual mandate as a tax—a tacit admission that doing so could have sunk the bill.
After the bill became law, however, the administration turned around and argued before the Supreme Court that the mandate was , in fact, a tax.
The Court upheld the mandate as an exercise of an enumerated government power to levy taxes. The recently publicized comments of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber about the deception involved in promoting the Affordable Care Act demonstrate that such chicanery has become intrinsic to modern progressivism. Most Americans already had health insurance and a doctor with whom they felt comfortable. To secure support for the ACA, therefore, Obama had to promise repeatedly that those happy with their current health plans and doctors could keep them.
But ACA requirements resulted in the cancellation of many insurance plans, causing patients to lose access to their doctors. As the Affordable Care Act goes fully into effect, the losers will become more visible. If people had known the truth about Obamacare in , the bill would almost certainly have been defeated.
If they had known it in , Obama would likely have lost his reelection bid. The architects of Obamacare needed these deceptions, in part, because more people are becoming aware of the financial burden of unfunded liabilities. As a result, it is not as easy to slough off costs on future generations. A voluntary program, CLASS was required by law to be financially self-sustaining, meaning that it would need large numbers of young and healthy people to sign up for it—a dubious prospect.
Riding a wave of dissatisfaction with the new law, Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in Since Obamacare never had bipartisan support, the Democrats would have been hard-pressed to pass amendments to improve it under the best circumstances; their legislative losses made the question academic. This difficulty underscores a key problem with central planning: the world is unpredictable.
Just as no military plan survives contact with the enemy, no program of government benefits, and certainly not one as ambitious as Obamacare, can anticipate the changing circumstances in which it will operate. Struggling with problems of implementation and public resistance, the administration has held off enforcing inconvenient parts of the law, such as the one requiring businesses to offer health-care insurance to their employees by That provision was delayed by one year.
The Supreme Court will soon determine the legality of yet another Obama administrative action that appears to contradict the plain language of the Affordable Care Act. Nevertheless, the Treasury Department has adopted regulations offering such subsidies, arguing that they advance the overall purpose of the ACA.
Authorizing subsidies for federal exchanges is vital to the future of Obamacare, particularly because sign-up numbers have been disappointing. Should the Supreme Court rule that the administration lacks this authority, though, any attempt to provide authority through legislation will lead to wholesale revision of Obamacare in the Republican Congress. On foreign policy, Joe Cirincione, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a nonprofit international policy organization, praised Biden for saying the U.
But I understand it. It's hard to argue with his political calculations," said Cirincione, the former president of the Ploughshares Fund, an anti-nuclear weapons activist group. Brad Bauman, the former executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Biden has overall "been exceeding my expectations," but he worries that the window to act on immigration is closing.
It is telling that when Biden faced vocal criticism from immigration activists and others for capping the number of refugees allowed to enter the country at levels set by former President Donald Trump, he quickly backtracked. She said that his refugee policy reflected the "atrocious" immigration record of the Obama administration but that he is "showing basic competence after Trump" in addressing Covid IE 11 is not supported.
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