Source: In These Times
Liz Nikazmerad is a rarity in American labor: a local union president under the age of 30, displaying both youth and militancy. For the last two year years, she has led the 180-member Local 203 of the United Electrical Workers (UE), while working in the produce department of City Market in Burlington, Vermont. Thanks to their contract bargaining, full-time and part-time employees of this bustling community-owned food cooperative currently enjoy good medical benefits.
But that wasn’t always the case in Nikazmerad’s past non-union jobs, nor is it any assurance that UE members won’t be forced to pay more for their health care in the future. To curb medical cost inflation and related cost-shifting to workers, the UE has long advocated that private insurance plans be replaced with publicly funded universal coverage.
Four years ago, a newly elected Vermont governor, Peter Shumlin, took a promising first step in that direction at the state level. His Democrat-dominated legislature passed Act 48, which laid the groundwork for creating a comprehensive public insurance plan called Green Mountain Care (GMC).
Not all activists deemed GMC to be truly “single-payer,” because of potential legal or political obstacles to the inclusion of Vermonters currently covered through Medicare, the Veterans’ Administration, and even some “self-insured” plans offered by local employers. However, Act 48’s blueprint for getting everyone else into a more rational, cost-effective healthcare system, financed by taxes, was generally hailed as a great breakthrough.
Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) first required Vermont to operate a private insurance exchange until 2017, when a federal waiver permitting further experimentation might be granted. Despite this delay, Shumlin was still reassuring Vermonters, as recently as last fall, that a brighter health care future lay just a few years ahead.
By January 8, when the governor began his third term, that promise had dimmed so much that Liz Nikazmerad and several hundred others weren’t there to applaud his inauguration in Montpelier. Instead, frustrated advocates of health care reform staged a sit-in at the state capitol, chanting and singing, unfurling banners and refused to leave in protest against the governor’s abrupt abandonment of universal health care six weeks after his re-election.
“People had fought for this a long time,” Nikazmerad says. “It was a huge win and to have the rug yanked out like that was very upsetting. People were very emotional about it.”
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The message of much mainstream propaganda is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse. This is why all forms of resistance, from Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain to Latin American “populisms,” should be fully supported. A recent interview of mine, first published in Mexico and then reprinted in some other Latin-American countries and in El Pais, may have given a thoroughly wrong idea of where I stand towards the recent populist trend of radical politics. Although the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela deserves a lot of criticism, we should nonetheless always bear in mind that it is also the victim of a well-orchestrated counter-revolution, especially of a long economic warfare. There is nothing new in such a procedure. Back in the early 1970s, in a note to CIA advising them how to undermine the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, Henry Kissinger wrote succinctly, “Make the economy scream.” High U.S. representatives are openly admitting that today the same strategy is applied in Venezuela; a couple of years ago, former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said on Fox News that Chavez’s appeal to the Venezuelan people,“only works so long as the population of Venezuela sees some ability for a better standard of living. If at some point the economy really gets bad, Chavez’s popularity within the country will certainly decrease and it’s the one weapon we have against him to begin with and which we should be using, namely the economic tools of trying to make the economy even worse so that his appeal in the country and the region goes down … Anything we can do to make their economy more difficult for them at this moment is a good thing, but let’s do it in ways that do not get us into direct conflict with Venezuela if we can get away with it.”
This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/A-Brief-Clarification-about-Populism-20150424-0013.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english
The message of much mainstream propaganda is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse. This is why all forms of resistance, from Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain to Latin American “populisms,” should be fully supported. A recent interview of mine, first published in Mexico and then reprinted in some other Latin-American countries and in El Pais, may have given a thoroughly wrong idea of where I stand towards the recent populist trend of radical politics. Although the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela deserves a lot of criticism, we should nonetheless always bear in mind that it is also the victim of a well-orchestrated counter-revolution, especially of a long economic warfare. There is nothing new in such a procedure. Back in the early 1970s, in a note to CIA advising them how to undermine the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, Henry Kissinger wrote succinctly, “Make the economy scream.” High U.S. representatives are openly admitting that today the same strategy is applied in Venezuela; a couple of years ago, former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said on Fox News that Chavez’s appeal to the Venezuelan people,“only works so long as the population of Venezuela sees some ability for a better standard of living. If at some point the economy really gets bad, Chavez’s popularity within the country will certainly decrease and it’s the one weapon we have against him to begin with and which we should be using, namely the economic tools of trying to make the economy even worse so that his appeal in the country and the region goes down … Anything we can do to make their economy more difficult for them at this moment is a good thing, but let’s do it in ways that do not get us into direct conflict with Venezuela if we can get away with it.”
This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/A-Brief-Clarification-about-Populism-20150424-0013.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english
