I Sure Hope Elizabeth And Bernie Join Forces To Crush Conservatives Biden And Trump

The Bernie's Back Rally in Queens yesterday was massive-- 25,872 in the park and what looked like almost as many outside. People were watching from the bridge and there were so many people trying to get to the park that the blocks around it had to be closed to traffic. Watch AOC's inspiring and heart-felt endorsement of his campaign:





A few days ago, Leila Ettachfini, writing for Vice slammed Hillary-brand feminists-- who helped brings Trump-- who are whining that AOC's, Ilhan's and Rashida's endorsements of Bernie "isn't feminist." She wrote that some women "saw the decision to support Sanders as a betrayal of the progressive ethos. Among them was Jane Eisner, the director of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, who jumped to criticize the representatives’ decision in a since-deleted tweet. 'I find it fascinating that women of color overlook female and minority candidates to endorse a white guy,' Eisner wrote." I don't wonder why she decided to delete the tweet.

Even as Sanders and Warren themselves have taken great pains to treat each other cordially in public, some of Warren’s supporters have been especially vocal in their criticism of the democratic socialist’s supporters so far this cycle. Political pundit Emily Tisch Sussman, for example, argued in September that anyone supporting Sanders over Warren was inherently sexist because Warren’s “plans have evolved” and are “more detailed” than Sanders’.

But it’s safe to assume “The Squad” doesn’t need white feminists to help them understand which candidate best supports their feminist principles. The criticism is especially rich, considering Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley have each achieved numerous milestones when they were elected in 2018. Collectively, they represent the first Muslim women in Congress; the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress; the first Somali-American in Congress; the youngest woman in Congress; and the first Black women elected to Congress by Minnesota and Massachusetts.

To decry their or anyone’s support for Sanders over Warren as anti-feminist is less than helpful to the greater cause of gender equality, and more of an oversimplification of what feminism actually is—or is supposed to be. By removing the agency of these women of color to choose a candidate that best aligns with their political ideology, critics are reducing complex politicians to one-dimensional figures.

That is not how any of these women see themselves. Omar, in a video explaining her endorsement, said she had decided to endorse Sanders because he “built a movement and continues to build a movement that transcends gender, ethnicity, religion.”

Like Sanders has been for decades, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib all identify as democratic socialists-- a fact that places them in stark contrast with Warren, a self-described “capitalist.” All three representatives have been supportive of Warren and many of her policies throughout the campaign trail. Ocasio-Cortez and Warren have worked together as lawmakers to usher the Green New Deal to Congress. Just last week, Tlaib and Warren put out a video together about the impact of environmental racism in Detroit.

But to act as if Warren is inarguably the evolved form of the Vermont senator is simplistic at best. Sanders’ policy proposals on many issues that affect women could be considered more progressive than Warren’s—specifically when it comes to addressing low-income women of color. While Warren wants to reduce rents for Americans by 10 percent, Sanders supports national rent control. While Warren only recently changed her previously unwaivering pro-Israel views, Sanders has condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestine since the 1980s. And while Warren’s newfound support of Medicare for All has left some questioning her commitment to the issue, Sanders has supported single-payer healthcare for decades.

“It’s good to see [Sanders and Warren] working together to push the national conversation further left,” Moumita Ahmed and Kat Brezler, co-founders of the group Feminists for Bernie Sanders, said in a statement to VICE. “Still, he is anti-capitalist, she is not. We don’t see a future for true feminism without a future that is no longer burdened by capitalism.”

Considering their politics, the congress members’ decision to support Sanders over Warren shouldn’t surprise anyone. As the people with the most progressive records in Congress, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib’s endorsement of the candidate with the most progressive policy proposals makes sense, even if that candidate doesn’t mirror their own identities.

“Voting for a woman doesn’t mean voting for policies that support women,” said Ahmed and Brezler. “Conflating the two is a dangerous display of identity politics.”

Warren is trying hard to find another progressive woman or group of progressive women to counter the move by AOC, Ilhan and Omar. Katherine Clark (MA) and Deb Haaland (NM) already have and they are both solid progressives, but few people have heard of either and fewer will be swayed by their endorsements. My dream ticket is Bernie/Elizabeth for 2020 and then Elizabeth at the top of the ticket in 2024. The real nightmare would be if Bernie and Elizabeth splits the progressive vote and we wind up with Status Quo Joe as the nominee, the only Democrat Trump would be able to beat. Biden's reactionary negative attitude towards Medicare-For-All helps explain why many progressives don't want anything to do with him and won't vote for him-- and not just at primary time. Ben Palmquist tackled it for readers of In These Times last week. "Biden and other centrists," he wrote, "are deploying cynical arguments to defend the for-profit insurance system. We shouldn’t buy it... While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have defended a Medicare for All system that would guarantee healthcare as a right, other more centrist candidates have sought to undercut such a plan-- and they’ve been led by Joe Biden... [T]he Biden campaign has been testing messages designed to undercut support among Democrats for Medicare for All. The survey, commissioned by Wall Street-funded Democratic think tank Third Way, road-tested fear-mongering rhetoric that was crafted by the for-profit health insurance industry-- and sounded a lot like Republican talking points. Biden isn’t alone. In the last debate on September 12, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris and Beto O'Rourke all joined him in falsely suggesting that people would lose choice and freedom under a Medicare for All system.

This portrayal of private insurance plans as bastions of choice and freedom isn’t just misguided, it serves to defend profit-hungry companies at the expense of the millions upon millions of Americans who would benefit from guaranteed health care and financial security provided by a single-payer, Medicare for All system.

Biden and his ilk make the critical mistake of conflating coverage with care. They assume that people “covered” by subsidized private insurance plans can actually get care, and can do so without going broke-- but that’s simply not true.

From 2005 to 2018, some 60 million Americans per year-- including one half of the insured population-- were forced to skip or delay medical care. In 2016, a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in partnership with the New York Times found that 85 million Americans were in medical debt. Of those, roughly 6 in 10 were insured.

The government can help extend private coverage to more people, but insurance companies will keep pushing costs onto us, keep dropping treatments, medicines, and doctors from their plans, and keep denying our claims. The only real solution is universal, guaranteed healthcare.

The attacks on Medicare for All also betray an impoverished understanding of freedom as a choice between insurance products. But people don't want a choice between Aetna and Cigna. They want the freedom of guaranteed healthcare; the freedom to choose their doctor, hospitals and treatments; and financial freedom from insurance, hospital and drug bills.





The flip side of freedom is coercion, and while centrist Democratic candidates may raise alarms about government coercion, they ignore the countless ways that insurance companies coerce people every day. They force people to pay ever-higher premiums, deductibles, out-of-network fees and copays. They force people to forego dental, reproductive and mental healthcare, as well as prescriptions. They force people to stop seeing the doctors they want to see by narrowing networks. And they force people into poverty by denying insurance claims and refusing to pay medical bills.

While claiming to recognize healthcare as an inviolable human right, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Harris and O'Rourke also ignore the deep inequities produced by the multi-payer insurance system they defend. The plans put forward by Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar would leave millions of people uninsured, and though Harris and O’Rourke’s would get everyone coverage, none of these plans would guarantee all medically necessary care.

The current fractured insurance system carves people into categories according to their economic and family characteristics, favoring some while denying care to others. By selectively imposing coverage restrictions and cost sharing, the system grants different people different access to different plans that cover different doctors, different hospitals, different medical conditions, different body parts, different treatments and different medicines.

Such a system favors people who live in areas with high employment over those where there’s low employment, workers in big firms over workers in small firms, workers in full-time jobs over those in part-time jobs, and workers in formal employment over workers who are self-employed or do informal work. It favors people older than 65 or younger than 26 over those in the middle, people with high incomes over people with middle-and-low incomes, people with family wealth over people who don’t have savings, and people who are married over those who are single.

Rationing care on the basis of these non-medical economic indicators is incompatible with guaranteeing healthcare as a right, and also reproduces racial and gender inequities. Because the most robust coverage is reserved for those with formal full-time employment in lucrative economic sectors, comprehensive care is disproportionately denied to Black and brown communities facing high unemployment, immigrants working in low-wage industries, and women working in part-time jobs and unpaid domestic labor.

Separate-and-unequal coverage doesn’t just hurt those at the bottom. By accepting and institutionalizing the notion that some people are more deserving than others, tiered coverage is precisely what makes U.S. healthcare both precarious and vulnerable. This vulnerability breeds fear of losing one’s coverage, which for decades has been exploited to stifle reforms and feed relentless attacks on public programs and social solidarity.

Medicare for All, in contrast, would guarantee a single standard of care to everyone. The plan introduced by Sanders in the Senate would provide all medically necessary care, comprehensive long-term care, mental health, reproductive, dental, vision and all other care people need. Everyone in the United States would be guaranteed seamless care from cradle to grave, freeing us up to move in and out of jobs and relationships without worrying about medical care, and we’d never have to deal with an insurance company or medical bill again. Healthcare would be provided to all of society as a public good like fire protection rather than as an individually rationed commodity. What’s more, Medicare for All would do all this for less than it would cost to keep propping up the private insurance system.

While Biden and Third Way may be polling language to attack such a Medicare for All system, the case is clear: the “freedom” to “choose” for-profit insurance is a false choice. Medicare for All is wildly popular because it would finally provide comprehensive healthcare to everyone. Democratic leaders should stop using insurance industry talking points and Republican fear-mongering to tell people otherwise.