An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.
Bernie Sanders arrived in Ann Arbor in late winter, his future to be decided
in two days. Thousands of students thronged the University of Michigan
campus, gripping their blue-and-white signs, one so overcome with
emotion she battled back tears
as Sanders spoke. Above a sea of expectant faces, his name was spelled
out in enormous, yellow block letters: B.E.R.N.I.E. The students held
them high and wouldn’t let go.
Few could pack a house
like Sanders, who was thundering through a second campaign that was
supposed to lead him, finally, to the White House. If Michigan was going
to be his last stand, it was as good a place as any to be, to feel,
once more, a mass of bodies stretching toward him. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez urged the students to bring five friends each to the polls.
Sanders told them, quite simply, that he was going to win.
“We’re
taking on Wall Street. We’re taking on the insurance companies. We’re
taking on the drug companies. We’re taking on the fossil fuel industry,”
the senator declared. “We’re taking on the military-industrial complex.
We’re taking on the prison-industrial complex.”
As the warmth of
the afternoon bled into an evening chill, the college students, and
Sanders himself, could believe it was all still possible: free health care, free college, an end to fossil fuels through a far-reaching Green New Deal.
All he had to do, in that wintry stretch of March 2020, on the eve of
the most deadly pandemic in U.S. history, was triumph again in the
erstwhile hub of labor power in America. He could catapult himself,
after a rough Super Tuesday against Joe Biden, into a brilliant spring.
He could march, heroically, into the Democratic convention.
“Michigan is the most important state coming up on Tuesday,” Sanders said.
The Wolverine State had been a vital proving ground in 2016, where Sanders managed a shocking upset
over Hillary Clinton and regained enough momentum to be a force at the
turbulent convention that summer. Sanders, a tireless defender of
organized labor and a fierce critic of free-trade agreements, had found a
receptive audience in the deindustrialized state, particularly with the
disaffected white, working-class voters who, he warned, were drifting
out of the Democratic Party. After Donald Trump had blasted open
Clinton’s blue wall and swept
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Sanders could no longer be
dismissed as a relic or a gadfly. Instead, he was the prescient leftist
who diagnosed the Democratic establishment’s chronic myopia.
Four years later, Sanders was facing down Biden in a state where he had bested Clinton in 73 of 83 counties. A redux could still be in the offing.
Instead, on March 10, Biden swept every single county. The Sanders campaign, held
to less than 40 percent of the vote, was effectively over. It was, in
the fraught tale of democratic socialism in the United States, a deeply
dispiriting chapter for the many leftists who dreamed of so much more.
The mainstream breakthrough of socialism on the national stage, which
seemed so possible in 2019 and 2020, had not come to pass. Three years
later, it’s not clear whether it ever will. If positive views of
capitalism have slipped since 2019, some evidence suggests perceptions of socialism have, too.
It
would be crude to reduce the state of socialism in the United States to
the performance of two presidential campaigns. Or to assess its present
condition at all without accounting for what came before: decades and
decades of absolute futility. In 2023, socialism is still, relative to
even a decade ago, enjoying a remarkable resurgence. There are close to
160 Democratic Socialists of America–backed politicians in elected
office nationwide. The organization itself, which embodies socialism as
much as any in this country, boasts just over 80,000 members; before
Sanders’s first presidential campaign, there were barely 6,000. DSA
lawmakers include Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps the most famous member of
Congress, and a host of influential local legislators. There are now
functioning and growing socialist caucuses in the Minnesota state
legislature, the Los Angeles municipal government, and the New York
state legislature, where socialists successfully pressured
the centrist governor to permit the state to build and own renewable
energy infrastructure. Brandon Johnson, the new mayor of Chicago—a city
with a long tradition of conservative Democratic governance—is not a
member of DSA, but he was enthusiastically supported by the rank and
file of Chicago’s socialists.
Sanders himself, who turns 82 in September, finished a two-year stint chairing
the Senate’s influential Budget Committee and now heads up the Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. It’s a powerful perch from
which he was able to excoriate
Howard Schultz, the longtime Starbucks CEO, over his hostility to labor
unions. If Sanders has failed to bring single-payer health care to the
United States or make public colleges tuition free, he has forced a
reorientation of the Democratic Party away from the neoliberalism of the
Carter and Clinton and even Obama years to its current labor-friendly,
welfare state–embracing posture. It is difficult to imagine Biden canceling
a major chunk of student loan debt—as he attempted to do, only to be
blocked by the Supreme Court—without two successive Sanders presidential
campaigns. The renewed embrace of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, as
found in Biden’s green industrial policy, can be traced in no small part
to Sanders winning tens of millions of votes. Last year, Biden and the
Democratic-controlled Congress invested over $300 billion in climate provisions, more than any other sitting government in U.S. history.
The
post-2016 explosion of DSA, the rise of AOC, and the dramatic increase
of proudly left-wing House members stem in part from Sanders’s
influence. Ocasio-Cortez herself had been a volunteer on the 2016
campaign. At the same time, DSA has managed to work in concert with
other influential leftist organizations that are not socialist, like the
Working Families Party and Justice Democrats, to help increase the
number of socialists in elected office.
Yet the socialist story in
the United States, as is true of most movements, is no longer one of
relentless ascent. A few years after the onset of the pandemic—with an elevated crime rate in many cities; lingering inflation; the dissipation of anti-Trump zeal, even with the man himself running again—DSA has actually shed backers. Kicking off in 2020, a recruitment drive
aimed at boosting membership to 100,000 never reached its goal, and
that target is no longer touted so publicly. More broadly, socialist and
socialist-friendly politicians have faced roadblocks on the local and
federal levels, running into resistance from entrenched Democratic
institutions, donors, and, yes, voters. Perhaps most important: Sanders
was never elected president, and the larger left is bereft of any
prominent or scandal-free standard-bearer as Biden seeks to again claim
the Democratic nomination. Marianne Williamson, an author and
self-identified progressive, is running again after polling poorly in
the 2020 race and dropping out. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the
environmentalist and vaccine skeptic, is attempting
the libertarian-populist lane against Biden, though his alliance with
Steve Bannon and other far-right figures will limit his appeal to the
Democratic electorate. Sanders himself, in a nod to the changing mood,
has already endorsed Biden.
The Vermont senator’s dream of a
united and unstoppable mass coalition of working-class voters has yet to
materialize. A socialist—or even a run-of-the-mill progressive—vote
remains rooted,
for the most part, with the college-educated, though gains have been
made elsewhere. Establishment Democrats are far more on guard than they
used to be, fundraising heavily and campaigning aggressively to ensure
they don’t suffer the fate of Joe Crowley, the Democratic congressman
and party boss AOC felled to claim her seat.
Crucially, working-class Democrats and independents remain, on
cultural and public safety questions, more moderate than many leftists
would like. Black Democrats in Philadelphia chose as their next mayor a
woman who wants to reinstate
a version of stop-and-frisk and hire more police. Some Latino voters
with family history in countries like Cuba and Venezuela continue to be
wary of any socialist. In New York, Eric Adams, a corporate-friendly
Democrat popular in the African American and Afro Caribbean
neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, has made resentment of socialism a
cornerstone of his mayoralty. “You water the tree of freedom with your
blood,” he said
in a Memorial Day speech. “We sit under the shade of that tree of
freedom protected from the hot rays of socialism and communism and
destruction that’s playing out across the globe.”
Just
as vexing, for those who long for a true Sanders successor, is that
even some of the most left-wing members of Congress would rather not
identify as socialist at all. Sanders famously kept
a portrait of Eugene Debs, the legendary socialist leader, in his
office. His chosen successor in Vermont, a former schoolteacher who
proudly ran and won with his backing last year, won’t say the S-word.
“I
don’t think it matters for my constituents here,” Becca Balint,
Vermont’s new at-large congresswoman, told me. “As somebody who has been
kind of shackled to a label my whole life as a queer person, I don’t
have a whole lot of interest in other people defining me. I always say,
if people want to know who I am, I’m a scrappy little dyke.”
Balint
is newly arrived to Congress, but Ro Khanna, who co-chaired Sanders’s
2020 campaign, is not. A Silicon Valley Democrat, Khanna has been
touring the country over the last year touting
his version of “economic patriotism,” a proposed New Deal–style
investment in distressed communities that would make Sanders proud. He
is not running for president in 2024, but it’s plausible he’ll be a
contender in the future—one possible heir to the Sanders legacy.
There’s
one catch: Khanna is, very explicitly, not a socialist. In fact, he
joined a Republican consensus and a large share of moderate Democrats in
voting for a House resolution that directly condemned
socialism earlier this year. (The “Squad” of young, leftist Democrats
who were elected starting in 2018—AOC most prominent among them—voted
against it.) Khanna wanted to make clear that, for all the ways he
admired Sanders, there would be no ambiguity over how he views American
capitalism.
He’s completely for it.
“I
am an FDR Democrat. I believe that we can empower the working class,
bring new factories to small towns, [and] create economic opportunity
for Black and brown communities with a free enterprise system that
rewards work,” Khanna told me. “There is not a tension between
innovation, entrepreneurship, technology, production, and improving life
for working families.”
It can sometimes feel as if the reluctance
to embrace the term extends even to those whose reputations are
inextricably bound to it. Earlier in the year, Ocasio-Cortez produced a video
for Instagram answering a question often posed to her and her allies:
“How do you respond when people accuse you of being a ‘socialist’?”
Speaking
in a whisper—AOC was imitating the popular online ASMR videos, which
may cause the viewer to relax, be comforted, or even fall asleep—the
congresswoman argued that “most people” don’t know what capitalism or
socialism is and that they aren’t capitalists, in part because they lack
“capitalist money” and aren’t billionaires.
“The
label doesn’t matter as much as just talking about policies. That’s
easier to understand,” she continued. “Do you think people should die
because they can’t afford insulin? Do you think that fossil fuel CEOs
should decide whether the planet gets set on fire? Me neither.”
“Unionize
your workplace. Start a worker cooperative. If it’s too extreme for
working people to own the means of production, why is it OK for private
billionaires to own the means of production?”
Though she embraced
tenets of socialism—worker-owned companies, strong labor unions,
opposition to for-profit health care—it was notable that Ocasio-Cortez
nevertheless declined to identify as a socialist to her millions of
followers. She also seemed to skirt over the fact that many American
socialists would consider millionaires, as well as those earning well
into the six-figure range, too wealthy. An investment banker raking in
$350,000 or a corporate attorney making somewhere shy of $1 million is
not typically any friend of the American socialist—yet they may, in
Ocasio-Cortez’s formulation, be exempt from opprobrium.
Lauren
Hitt, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, insisted the congresswoman
still identifies as a democratic socialist. She said the video was
designed as a guide for interacting with those who are hostile to the
concept of socialism though open to the policies themselves.
But
what, in 2023, distinguishes a socialist from a progressive or
left-leaning Democrat? What will keep socialists, who already campaign
in Democratic primaries, from being swallowed whole into the party,
co-opted, and eventually marginalized? These are questions the most
dedicated socialists are grappling with today, as they pass, perhaps,
their high-water cultural mark—friendly organs like the podcast Chapo Trap House and magazine Jacobin
are no longer fresh upstarts, and they have very large followings—and
settle into a new middle age, defending their gains and straining,
somehow, to become power brokers at the national level who might
fundamentally reorder American capitalism for a socialist future.
There are two functioning, active vehicles for socialism in the United States: DSA and Socialist Alternative.
DSA is far larger (SA boasts about 1,000 members nationally) and has
many more of its own in elected office. DSA members, in virtually every
instance, campaign in Democratic primaries. (Five years ago, I ran
myself in a Democratic primary for state Senate in New York, and tried
and failed to secure DSA backing.) Socialist Alternative, meanwhile, has
a more radical
prerogative: build a socialist, worker-based third party to oppose
Republicans and Democrats alike as soon as possible. Many members of
DSA, an organization with a diffuse leadership structure and a
multitiered endorsement process that empowers local chapters over a
centralized executive, want a third party, too, but will make
accommodations for the American duopoly. SA won’t.
Kshama Sawant, a Seattle City Council member who has drawn
headlines for the better part of a decade for her furious opposition to
Amazon, and who touts giving away, each year, a large portion of her
six-figure salary, is SA’s lone elected member. She takes a dim view of
DSA’s electoral strategy.
“After a meteoric rise in the membership
of DSA nationally, you’re seeing an organization in utter crisis,”
Sawant argued. The Seattle council member is among a cohort of
socialists who lament that Sanders never ran a third-party campaign or
attempted to build out such a party after he lost to Clinton in 2016. A
vocal faction, especially online, lambasted Squad Democrats in the House
for failing
to force a vote in early 2021 on Medicare for All, Sanders’s prized
single-payer health care plan, by withholding support for Nancy Pelosi’s
speakership.
In response to Sawant, Chris Kutalik, a DSA
spokesperson, said the group remains “light years ahead” of where it was
in its “takeoff period” between 2016 and 2021. “Even with setbacks, we
still have wind in our sails. We are still the largest socialist
organization since the 1930s, with chapters in all 50 states,” he added,
estimating that DSA currently has close to 160 elected officials at all
levels of government, and insisting “that number continues to grow with
each cycle.”
Socialists
in both organizations grapple with the question of how to hold their
own accountable. For now, SA, with one elected official, can only
confront this challenge in a mostly theoretical sense; in fact, Sawant announced
earlier this year that she wasn’t seeking reelection. But rank-and-file
democratic socialists have found themselves at odds, at times, with the
politicians they helped elect. There’s the Brooklyn state senator who co-sponsored
a bill to aid public housing that some socialists believe is a back
door to privatizing the housing stock. There’s the Chicago alderman who faced censure
from the local DSA chapter for supporting a municipal budget that it
argued did not sufficiently cut police funding. And there’s the Boston
DSA chapter that considered
expelling a state representative for a variety of offenses, including
supporting a “milquetoast” stabilized-rent program and endorsing a
non-DSA candidate in a contentious race; he dropped his affiliation
before facing discipline.
If a DSA-endorsed politician is also a
Democrat in a Democratic caucus, whom do they answer to first? DSA or a
Democratic majority leader? For Sawant, the answer is clear enough. “The
Democratic Party is not the place for the working class to win any
victories or build anything long-lasting,” she said. “It’s proven to be a
dead end. The majority of DSA leadership continues to go down that
road.”
All socialists—whatever their affiliation—long for the
birth of a socialist United States. The most left-wing Democratic Party
in at least 40 years is already here. But is that as much as anyone can
hope for?
What
is a socialist, anyway? And why is a mainstream, center-left American
political party now harboring a far larger number of them than it did
10, 20, or 50 years ago? In the early decades of the last century, it
would have been unimaginable for a self-identified socialist to compete
as a Democrat. For one, Democrats and Republicans were sometimes viewed,
almost equally, as tools of the capitalist class, where industrialists
and big city bankers found their willing foot soldiers. Liberals and
reformers existed in both parties, but so did overriding hostility to
communism and its socialist offshoots, both of which rapidly gained
popularity at the tail end of the nineteenth century.
Eugene Debs,
a gifted orator and militant labor leader, won renown for standing up
to the exploitative railroad companies of the Gilded Age. He viewed
labor struggle as a war between classes—the factory owner and the
employee—and advocated for public ownership of the means of production,
whether they be factories, mines, or railroads. Debs was never a strict
theorist, and his socialism, which would electrify
the Socialist Party of America that he founded in 1901, owed as much to
Walt Whitman and Protestantism as it did to Karl Marx. He called
socialism “Christianity in action” for simply recognizing the “equality
in men.” Unlike many labor leaders of his era, Debs argued for the
admission of Black people and women into his railway union, and cared
more about racial uplift than other white socialists.
The
Socialist Party was for women’s suffrage, public ownership of trusts,
minimum-wage laws, the abolition of child labor, and the eight-hour
workday. In large cities and rural counties alike, the new party found
immediate popularity, with Debs as its national standard-bearer. By
1911, the party had elected,
by a conservative estimate, 1,141 Socialists to local office in 36
states. They controlled cities as large as Milwaukee and Berkeley, and
elected two members of Congress. Debs ran for president as a Socialist
five times, winning as much as 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912. (In 2000, Ralph Nader won less than 3 percent on the Green Party line.)
But the Socialist Party could
rise only so far against the Republican-Democratic duopoly. Then, as
now, there was no European-style Parliament with proportional
representation to incubate third parties. In keeping with Duverger’s
Law, a single-member district, winner-take-all electoral system was
always going to punish organizations that operated outside the
mainstream and shrink the number of viable political parties. Democratic
and Republican political machines dominated most local governments, and
Socialist candidates found themselves having to compete against the
combined might of two larger parties that wanted them to go extinct.
Still, in 1920, five socialists entered
the New York state legislature. They were in their late twenties and
early thirties, and all of them took office in the wake of the Palmer
raids and the first Red Scare. The speaker of the New York state
Assembly, a Republican, called the socialist lawmakers “un-American”
traitors “allied with the forces of Soviet Russia in an attempt to
institute in this country a new form of government and a dictatorship of
the proletariat.”
In a matter of months, the Assembly would vote
to expel all five socialists. “The real reason we Socialists were
unseated,” Samuel Orr, one of the assemblymen, argued, “was not because
we made disloyal remarks or committed disloyal acts, but because we had
agreed to put through bills that would reduce the price of milk and
frustrate the transit corporations from boosting the rate of fares.”
“So you see,” he added, “that our efforts were against the capitalists.”
After
their expulsion, all five men regained their seats in special
elections. The Assembly, again, successfully expelled three of them,
while motions targeting two of the socialists failed. Still, out of
solidarity, the survivors resigned. Though three of them would return to
elected office a third time, none would rise higher than the lower
house of the state legislature.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the
Socialist Party vied with the more radical American Communist Party for
influence. The onset of the Great Depression cast doubt on the very
future of capitalism, and many thousands of young Americans suddenly
became, in the years before Joseph Stalin’s atrocities were widely
known, committed communists (pro- and anti-Stalinist factions would war,
ideologically, throughout the decade and beyond). With Debs’s death in
1926, Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister drawn into the Socialist
Party because he was a pacifist opposed to World War I, became
the party’s leader. He gained fame, starting with a run for New York
governor in 1924, for his perennial campaigns; beginning in 1928, he ran
six consecutive times for president.
It
was Roosevelt, perhaps more than any politician, who represented the
grand triumphs and failures of American socialism. Much of the early
platform of the socialists—federal support for the poor and elderly, the
end of child labor, the empowerment of labor unions—was eventually
enacted by the liberal flanks of the Democratic and Republican parties.
And if militant unions could still side with socialists and communists,
many of the most influential, mainstream organizations were increasingly
enmeshed with the Democrats. Roosevelt, with his far-reaching New Deal
programs, staunch defense of organized labor, and creation of Social
Security, was as socialist, arguably, as any U.S. president could be—and
he was still a capitalist, never veering much from the Democratic machines that supported his campaigns.
If
socialist rule persisted in certain locales, like Milwaukee,
officeholders could not continually repel Democrats or reformist,
liberal Republicans. The Soviet Union’s rise and the onset of the Cold
War made all leftism, particularly socialism, deeply suspect, and a new
Red Scare would drive much of it underground. American socialists would
be called upon to answer for Soviet totalitarianism and Castro’s Cuba.
Debs, with his rousing
speeches harkening to the Declaration of Independence and Abraham
Lincoln, had strained to make socialism distinctly American. For the
second half of the twentieth century, he would have been judged, on that
count, a failure.
The Democratic Socialists of America was not founded
until 1982. The Socialist Party had been dead for a decade. Communists,
in the glitz of the Reaganite ’80s, were, at best, anachronistic
curiosities. Michael Harrington, a political theorist and writer best
known as the author of The Other America, an influential study of poverty, launched
DSA with an idea that seemed, in the period at least, quite
far-fetched: Outright socialists could run in Democratic primaries and
win. It was an inside-outside strategy, anathema to old-school leftists
but likely necessary in a winner-take-all, two-party system. Unlike the
Greens, who would come to embody mostly futile left-wing protest
candidacies, DSA refused to form its own ballot line or even become an
actual political party.
A few prominent Democrats, like David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York, were members—he delivered a welcoming speech
to a meeting of the Socialist International organized by DSA at the
hospital workers’ union in 1990. But democratic socialists played no
tangible role in electoral politics. There were hardly
more than a few thousand of them nationally. Little changed in the
1990s and 2000s. David Duhalde, a 20-year DSA veteran who now chairs the
DSA Fund, the group’s sister educational nonprofit, recalled attending
meetings where most members were in their sixties—a blend of college
professors and various white-collar retirees. DSA’s youth chapters had
mostly collapsed. “There really wasn’t a ton of activity. It was more of
an affinity group,” Duhalde told me.
Sanders himself did not join
DSA but always maintained warm relations with the Harrington acolytes.
Though he famously never ran in a general election as a Democrat in
Vermont, he had effectively become one when he was elected to the Senate
and began caucusing with the party. His days as a fledgling third-party
activist were long behind him. In 2005, when he decided to run for the
Senate, he didn’t need DSA’s support; still, the DSA hosted several
small house party fundraisers where attendees made direct contributions
to his campaign, according to Duhalde.
The rise of Barack Obama,
two years later, would thrill and then embitter a generation of
leftists. Millennials curious about socialism were drawn to the
charismatic, history-making Illinois senator, especially as he
successfully repelled the avatar of the Democratic establishment,
Hillary Clinton. In office, however, Obama veered to the economic
center, tapping Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff and allowing
fiscal moderates like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to steer the
recovery from the economic crash. Populist energy on the right flowed
into the race-baiting Tea Party movement, while leftists rushed
to Occupy Wall Street, which blossomed in the fall of 2011 and petered
out the following spring, a victim of its relative amorphousness.
There is no socialist resurgence in the United States, though, without Occupy. Young protesters were educating themselves, joining socialist reading groups organized by Jacobin, the new socialist intellectual organ, and preparing for what might come next. In 2015, to little initial fanfare,
Sanders decided to run for president. The ranks of DSA swelled, as the
organization lined up enthusiastically behind his candidacy against
Clinton. DSA ballooned
even further in the wake of Trump’s shock victory a year later;
activist rage needed somewhere to go. Soon, DSA could boast among the
best volunteer-run get-out-the-vote operations anywhere, dispatching
hundreds of people to campaigns the group chose to endorse.
Socialists
were everywhere, running and winning in Democratic primaries for city
councils, state legislatures, and Congress. Nikil Saval, an author and
former editor of the left-leaning intellectual journal n+1, was one such socialist. Inspired by the Sanders campaign, he became an organizer in Philadelphia and dethroned
an establishment Democrat in 2020, winning office as a state senator.
Saval is sanguine about socialism’s future—and how its ideas on the
economy and health care, at least, have penetrated the mainstream.
Still, he feels socialists have a long way to go to establish their vision of governance here.
“Nowhere
could you say socialism is governing in any real way, nor can you say
we have made real inroads into questions that are at the heart of
socialism, about ownership, about worker control,” Saval said. “All
those things are sobering.”
Are
socialists and progressives meeting the working class where they are?
Both DSA and the Working Families Party, a liberal hybrid of activists
and labor unions, have embraced defunding police departments, an aim
that has lost popularity in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, where gun violence at least temporarilyskyrocketed beginning in 2020. DSA’s official platform calls for the eventual abolition
of all police departments and prisons, as well as the repeal of any
local ordinance that criminalizes the drug trade. For the rural towns
and urban neighborhoods ravaged by the opioid epidemic, these platform
planks are unlikely to find much purchase—and in some cases have been
downright toxic. Even in Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s murder,
voters rejected a measure to replace the police department.
Dustin Guastella, a former DSA member and the director of a Teamsters local in Philadelphia, believes there has been an “anti-social” turn in socialist thought that, he fears, will undermine their strength in the long-term.
“The
DSA’s current platform endorses freeing all prisoners, defunding and
even abolishing the police, and decriminalizing whole swaths of illegal
activity. All this at the very moment when drug overdoses, street crime,
and gun violence” have reemerged as national crises, Guastella said.
“There is a real disconnect between the appeals of the left and the
present despair of the working class and the poor. None of this is
promising for the left’s political project.”
In Philadelphia, the
Working Families Party, which functions more like a political action
committee and a node for various activist groups than like a strict
political party, invested heavily last spring in Helen Gym,
a former city council member vying to become the city’s next mayor.
Philadelphia’s DSA chapter never offered a formal endorsement but urged
its membership to vote for Gym, an inveterate critic of capitalism with
socialist sympathies. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez visited the city to stump for her. The hope was that Gym, an Asian American, could repeat Johnson’s success in Chicago: galvanize the Black working class and win over left-leaning whites.
On that count, Gym failed. And, in retrospect, her only
path to victory may have been winning over the upscale white voters who
chose the candidate who placed just ahead of her: a former city
controller who identified as a reformer but had few ill words for
capitalism. Rather than become a battle between the proletariat and the
bosses, the Philadelphia mayoral race morphed into something of a status
struggle between wealthy, college-educated voters and those a few rungs
away on the ladder of affluence and privilege—the already gentrified
versus the gentrifiers. Meanwhile, the Black working class ignored both,
overwhelmingly backing Cherelle Parker, a Democrat who has vowed to hire hundreds of new police officers and increase the number of civilians searched by them.
Maurice Mitchell, WFP’s national director, pointed to the amount of cash spent against Gym, especially
by way of Jeff Yass, a right-wing billionaire. “This is why I say our
trajectory is not linear. In the beginning, I don’t think a lot of these
forces and concerns took us seriously, and it’s kind of, like, first
they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. We’re in
the ‘fight you’ phase,” Mitchell said. “We’re gonna stay in that phase,
and we need to appropriately adjust our electioneering to the fact that
when there’s a clear progressive, organized capital and their interests
are going to take us seriously.”
The current structure of DSA also
presents challenges for winning any kind of larger breakthrough with
national Democrats. Some of the older allies of Harrington have argued it has evolved away from his original vision, growing too sectarian. In 2020, the group declined to endorse Biden against Trump, though the much smaller version of DSA, in decades past, would at least always urge
a Democratic vote in general elections. As of midsummer, DSA was not
poised to endorse Biden or any other candidate, including the leftist
philosopher Cornel West, who mounted his bid on the newly created
People’s Party line before announcing
his switch to the Green Party. West announced too late to line up DSA
consideration before its convention in August, but he was unlikely to
garner significant support from the socialist organization anyway. “The
vast majority of DSA’ers do not favor backing a symbolic campaign,”
Duhalde said.
As DSA has grown, it has treated endorsements in a
far more stringent manner. To win one, a candidate must apply and be
willing to identify as a democratic socialist. Biden never did either of
these things. DSA members today also care more about volunteer
capacity. Endorsement debates revolve around whether the membership can
be organized to have a genuine impact.
“DSA was never going to
endorse Joe Biden in 2020, for two reasons. First, we voted at our 2019
convention that the only Democratic presidential candidate we’d support
that cycle was Bernie Sanders,” Duhalde said. “Second, Biden wanted our
endorsement as little as we desired to give it to him, which all but
ended any road to official backing.”
Socialism
today is carried along parallel tracks: continued success in certain
localities, with an uncertain future at the national level. Infiltrating
the Democratic Party may be easier than kneecapping it with third-party
bids, but mainstream, center-left Democrats are a resilient bunch,
particularly when they, like Biden, manage to pivot leftward. Leftists mocked
the pundits who likened Biden, in the early months of his presidency,
to a neo-Roosevelt, yet there are, for socialists in particular,
unsettling parallels. Through bipartisan infrastructure legislation
(which Squad members opposed, unsuccessfully, believing they could
secure a better bargain with a more ambitious legislative package that
included also passing the Build Back Better Act) and the Inflation Reduction Act,
Biden has pumped tens of billions of dollars into the economy,
permitted Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and possibly launched a
green industrial revolution. Even Roosevelt, for all the ways he
co-opted the ascendant socialists and communists by broadening the New
Deal, never won an endorsement from Norman Thomas. But Sanders
immediately backed
Biden when he announced his reelection bid, declaring that, with Trump
running again, the “last thing this country needs” is a “right-wing
demagogue who is going to try to undermine American democracy or take
away a woman’s right to choose, or not address the crisis of gun
violence, or racism, sexism, or homophobia.”
A
spokesman for the Democratic National Committee couldn’t have said it
better. And that’s a daunting reality no socialist can immediately
overcome, as long as Trump or anyone like him remains formidable. Fears
of a fascistic presidency swallow up nuanced ideological debates over
capitalistic excess. Sanders—who was not made available for an interview
for this story—does not appear to have been interested in using his
remaining leverage over Biden to trade an endorsement for any
second-term promises. In the twilight of his career, he reintroduced his
Medicare for All bill and watched it founder in another Congress. There
doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy for ever advancing it; there
simply aren’t enough votes in the House and the Senate. (After Democrats
retook control of the House five years ago, support flaked away
as some Democrats who had celebrated the concept of single-payer health
care in prior years feared being too closely associated with the bill
as it came theoretically closer to passage.) With Republicans back in
charge of the House, momentum has only slipped further. Even activists
have quieted. Among progressives, interest has grown in trying to expand
Medicare coverage in other ways, including lowering the age eligibility
threshold.
There is an argument to make that Sanders, at least in
the last two decades, has been more a social democrat than a socialist,
pining as much for the state-managed capitalism of Denmark as for a
purely redistributionist utopia. What connects Sanders to Debs, however,
are his class-based appeals to voters—and they may be what divide him
from the next generation of leftists in Congress who are, like
Ocasio-Cortez and Balint, as much focused on social justice debates.
When pressed on whether she believed Sanders’s talk of socialism placed a
cap on his national support, Balint pointed instead to Vermont’s
overriding whiteness and suggested he wasn’t as successful as he needed
to be in reaching nonwhite voters.
The Squad Democrats who are DSA
members embrace more fully the most controversial elements of the
organization’s platform—those that Sanders, with his overlooked
moderating streak, rejects. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez
all want to aggressively reduce the size and scope of local police
departments. Ocasio-Cortez has called for the decriminalization of all drug consumption. Tlaib and Omar back
the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, with its push for
nonviolent boycotts of Israel to curtail violence against Palestinians.
Sanders, who is both Jewish and a critic of Israel, opposes BDS, and
many more conservative lawmakers have alleged it is antisemitic. Even in
the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, Sanders rejected the idea of defunding the police.
BDS,
for a moment, even threatened to fracture DSA. In 2021, chapters of the
organization in Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Orlando, and Las Vegas called
for the expulsion
of Jamaal Bowman, an AOC ally who represents the suburbs of New York
City, after the congressman voted to fund an Israeli missile defense
system and refused to support BDS. Bowman was ultimately not expelled,
and many socialists rallied
to his defense, pointing to the fact that the leftist Democrat
supported many of their other priorities, including Medicare for All and
the Green New Deal. But when Bowman faced down more conservative
primary challengers in 2022, he never applied for a national DSA
endorsement. He won anyway.
For now, absent Sanders or anyone like
him running a viable campaign for president, socialists and the broader
left will have to content themselves with these kinds of fights. There
are more local Democratic primaries, certainly, to be won, and it’s not
impossible to imagine a dedicated socialist winning City Hall in a small
or even major U.S. city. India Walton, a Black socialist in Buffalo,
New York, actually won the city’s mayoral primary two years ago, only to lose
to the incumbent Democrat when he ran a write-in campaign and was
bolstered by Republicans; she subsequently lost a race for the Buffalo
Common Council this summer.
Susan Kang co-hosts the podcast Left on Red,
which seeks to speak with the socialist activists doing the day-to-day
fieldwork instead of the wide array of leftist pundits and media critics
weighing in from afar. She is a DSA member herself, working in her day
job as an associate professor of political science at the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice in New York. Kang believes, in her study of
left-wing movements, that the sliding DSA membership numbers are beside
the point—influence is what matters, she argues, and the Democratic
Party is going to have to reckon with socialists, inside and outside of
government, for years to come. If Adams, the mayor of New York City,
wants to stamp out socialism altogether, Chuck Schumer, the Senate
majority leader, is now inviting DSA legislators in New York to meet
with him and discuss policy. Even Biden is probably more of a liberal
president, on matters of economic policy, than he ever intended to be.
“Democrats who want to create winning coalitions and win victories can’t
ignore socialists,” Kang said. Of course, given that Democrats, in the
U.S. political system, will perpetually have a stranglehold on any path
to power, socialists may never be able to shuck them either.
Democratic Socialists Are Fueling a Hot Labor Summer
From
strike support to training organizers and supporting union drives, DSA
members are helping to build a fighting labor movement.
NEW YORK — “There
is a war on the working class in this country and the only way we are
going to win is by building an army of organizers,” says Anthony
Rosario, a former UPS driver with Teamsters Local 804. He adds: “And you’re it.”
Rosario is speaking as part of the second annual Red Hot Summer event
in late June, organized by the Young Democratic Socialists of America
(YDSA). More than 25,000
people tuned into the six-week labor training and political education
series. The event is among a handful of projects spearheaded by YDSA and
its parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Caitlyn, 23, helped organize the Red Hot Summer program in 2022 as YDSA leaders saw how much interest members had in supporting labor. “The
end of the Bernie [Sanders presidential] campaign morphed into a summer
salting project,” she explains. (Caitlyn is now an organizer with
Teamsters for a Democratic Union.)
Salts—labor organizers who seek jobs at nonunion workplaces—have
traditionally been paid by unions. Lately, DSA has been training salts
on a voluntary basis as a means of growing the labor movement and making
it more militant. The number of DSA members actively involved in
salting has not been disclosed publicly, but a survey shows nearly 2,000 members have expressed interest and DSA has conducted more than 800 one-on-one follow-up calls.
It’s part of a long socialist tradition. Socialists were instrumental in building the labor movement at the turn of the 20th
century, organizing across industries and agitating for the eight-hour
workday and a minimum wage, among other now-standard U.S. labor
practices. Socialists became generally less visible in organized labor
after Congress expelled Communist Party members from union leadership in
1947 through the Taft-Hartley Act, and the power and ranks of unions and socialists saw a steep decline as the second half of the 20th
century took a neoliberal turn, but socialists have remained invested
in labor. Socialists were among the founders of Teamsters for
a Democratic Union in 1976, for example.
With the recent popularity bump in labor and socialism, especially
among youth, DSA is positioning itself to revive the movements hand in
hand. In 2017, DSA voted to make labor
a national priority and established a central labor coordinating body.
Through independent fundraising efforts and the establishment of a labor solidarity fund in 2022, DSA has raised some $400,000 for local labor struggles, including for striking teachers in Oakland, Calif., and Nabisco workers in Portland, Ore.
In March 2020, DSA joined forces with
the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America — among the
militant unions expelled from the CIO during the Cold War under the
pretext of communist sympathies — to support organizing work during the
Covid-19 pandemic. The effort snowballed; as of June, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee is involved in 186 active campaigns and has assisted in union wins at Trader Joe’s, a Manhattan theater and a hospital in Austin, Texas, among others.
Other DSA efforts have also been involved in the wave of retail and restaurant organizing. Atulya Dora-Laskey, 24, a worker at the first unionized Chipotle restaurant, says the union victory “would
not have been possible without the early guidance, resources and
support” of Michigan’s Greater Lansing DSA chapter. Meanwhile, YDSA has
gone campus by campus to recruit graduates into salting at union
organizing hotspots like Amazon and Starbucks.
DSA also organized a national Strike Ready
campaign this summer to support the Teamsters, who are now led by
President Sean O’Brien, a candidate backed by Teamsters for a Democratic
Union. The threat of a strike lent leverage to the Teamsters in big
contract negotiations with UPS. DSA turned members out to weekly pickets
and trained 238 “solidarity captains” to be on hand for a strike, while 107 local chapters passed “strike
ready” resolutions. Less than a week before the strike deadline, the
Teamsters announced a tentative agreement with UPS that the union says
commits the company to $30 billion in spending, which includes raises, air conditioning in all new trucks and an end to the much-hated “two-tier”
employment system that disadvantages new hires. (As this issue went to
press, the union had not yet voted.) O’Brien credited “a credible strike threat around the country” for “the most historic contract we’ve ever had.”
DSA hopes to replicate its Strike Ready campaign with the United Auto
Workers — which recently elected a slate of reform candidates to
national leadership — as contract negotiations with the Big Three
automakers progress.
Sean Orr, a UPS steward with Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago, says he’s seen dozens of UPS coworkers join DSA as a result of Teamster solidarity campaigns.
“I’ve talked to folks in the Teamsters
since, and they still refer back to [Hunts Point] as an example of what
they want to see out of allies,” Orr says. He’s referring to the 2021 strike by produce market workers in the Bronx for a $1 wage increase and sick days, led by Teamsters Local 202 and supported by more than 100 DSA members, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “That’s the kind of solidarity we need to see in our movement a lot more.”
Here are four propositions about unions that are, I think, indisputable:
1. The single greatest crisis
facing unions is the long term decline in union density. Once upon
a time, one in three American workers was a union member. Now it’s one
in ten. That figure has been steadily going down for decades. If we
don’t make it start going up again, organized labor is on a slow path
to death.
2. Unions are more popular today than they have been since 1965.
There are tens of millions of Americans who like unions, and who would
like to have a union, but who are not union members. We also happen to
have a pro-union president and a labor-friendly NLRB. The opportunity for new union organizing right now is historically strong.
3. The only way to take
advantage of this opportunity to organize millions of new union members
is… to do the organizing. The number of new unions that spontaneously
organize themselves
is very small. To raise union density, there must be many, many more
union organizers out there organizing, translating the grassroots
enthusiasm into actual new unions.
4. The existing institutions
that are responsible for flooding the streets with all of those new
union organizers are unions. They are not doing it. Nor have they been
doing it for decades. We know this not only by the fact that they are not spending adequate money on organizing, but, more directly, by the fact that union density keeps going down. The numbers are proof.
Why is it that unions, the only things that exist to do new
union organizing, do not organize enough new union members? Unions will
tell you that there are many reasons — hostile labor laws, corporate
union-busting, difficult political climates. There is some truth to all
of these explanations, but they are also a bit like stopping and sitting
down while a wild dog is chasing you, because running is tiring. Sure
it is, but that’s not much consolation when you’re dead. There always
have been, and always will be, political and corporate forces hostile to
unions. That does not change the fact that unions must find a way to
organize, or else die.
Apart from the shifting social and political and economic
conditions of the world, there is an inherent structural reason why
unions do not organize enough. It is this: Unions are supported by dues
money paid by current members. The overwhelming internal political
incentive of any union’s leadership is to serve the needs of current
members. (And indeed they must!) But this ensures that new
organizing — which is to say, spending the dues money of current members
on work that benefits people who are not members — will always lack
a natural internal political constituency inside of unions, other than
the minority of people who are ideologically motivated by a belief in
the labor movement.
This is just the union version of the dynamic that is
familiar from every local government: People want their tax money spent
in ways that benefit them. It’s a form of selfishness, but the sort of
natural low-level selfishness that is a part of human nature. In unions,
this tendency manifests itself by underspending on new organizing. The
current members always have needs, and their needs get prioritized. The
result has been a half century of declining union density, with the vast
majority of people having no union to protect them.
Sign up for our weekend newsletter
A weekly digest of our best coverage
This general situation is familiar
to generations of union radicals who have tried and (usually) failed to
harangue unions into organizing the masses. Continuing to struggle
against these built-in structural barriers is not the best use of our
precious time. Today’s favorable conditions for new organizing won’t
last. Instead, what we need is a new structure that can make new
organizing happen without being held back by the internal politics
of unions.
The bulk of new union organizing, therefore, needs to be
moved out of unions and into its own dedicated thing. We need a new
institution that does a single task: New organizing. An institution
staffed by organizers whose single job is to help non-union workers
unionize their workplaces. A new organizing center that only does
new organizing.
When the workers have won their unions, they can be placed
into existing unions that can do the contracts and grievances and
enforcement and all of the other normal union stuff. But new organizing—the
job on which the future of the entire labor movement depends — is too
important to be relegated to an afterthought within unions that are
focused on catering to current members. We need to build something new
that does not have any mixed incentives. Its success can be judged
entirely on the number of people it unionizes.
This sort of national organizing center would require a lot
of funding. The obvious place for it would be inside of an existing
national labor group like the AFL-CIO. And in fact the AFL-CIO last year
created the “Center
for Transformational Organizing” (CTO) funded by a dues increase on
member unions, that is supposed to do, you know, transformational
organizing. The structure of this is promising, but the reality of it
is not.
The CTO has existed for a year, and has not done any transformational organizing. In light of the urgency of the task, its $11
million could have been spent in an afternoon: Pick five or six
existing unions that are actually doing organizing, and divide the money
between them, to increase their organizing. (I can give you a list!
Call me!) If the CTO is not going to do this, they should be deeply
immersed in big organizing campaigns of their own already. The lack of
results so far is not inspiring.
Another model that already exists is the Emergency
Workplace Organizing Center (EWOC), a joint project of the Democratic
Socialists of America and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine
Workers of America. It is essentially a volunteer-driven coalition of
organizers that will help anyone who contacts them start the organizing
process. EWOC has the spirit that we need, but not the scale. In terms
of resources, EWOC is a tent set up in the backyard, when what we need
is a skyscraper.
What we need is a new structure that can make new organizing happen without being held back by the internal politics of unions.
Imagine a new organization that combines the
everyone-in ideological commitment of EWOC with the structural
advantages of the CTO. If existing unions directed much of their current
organizing budgets into one big pot, the funding for such an
organization would be significant. It could hire an army of organizers.
It could scale nationally. It could target industries aggressively, and
it could promote an EWOC-like open door that would help any worker
anywhere start the organizing process. Most importantly, it would not
suffer from the mixed incentives that have historically restrained
unions from doing enough organizing. It would do numbers, or it would be
a failure. Simple.
Most of today’s unions are already failing, but since union leaders
are not being judged on the metric of new organizing, their jobs are
secure, and they can keep on failing in peace. With a dedicated
organizing center, that would not be the case.
Once you create this new organization, fund it, staff it, and give it
independence, it can also seek out new funding streams on its own. Its
annual budget would need to be big. But considering the fact that our
job is to organize the work forces of companies that are worth billions
or trillions of dollars, we should not be staggered by big numbers. It
is money well spent.
Organizing is hard work. It will be hard whether we do an inadequate,
ad hoc job of it, as we are now, or whether we do it systematically and
wisely, as I am proposing. What we know is this: We must do a lot more
new organizing, and our current system for doing so doesn’t work. Time
to try something different.
If we, the American labor movement, continue to fail, we will have no
one to blame but our own laziness and obstinacy. The people who suffer
for our sins will be all the workers who need a union, but will never
get one, because we never got around to helping them.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times.
He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for
Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
NYC municipal retirees celebrated Medicare’s anniversary last week, outside the offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand — this week they had more reason to cheer. Photo by Joe Maniscalco
By Bob Hennelly
New
York City’s 250,000 municipal retirees recently got a form letter from
the Office of Labor Relations announcing Mayor Eric Adams’
administration is no longer abiding by its September 1 deadline for the
implementation of its Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan, which the New York
City Organization of Public Service Retirees [NYCOPSR] has been
successfully fighting in court.
The
mass mailing was a reiteration of a July 7 announcement on the OLR’s
website posted soon after State Supreme Court Judge Lyle E. Frank issued
a preliminary injunction against the city proceeding with its plan.
Frank’s ruling also derailed the city’s July 10 deadline for retirees
who wanted to keep traditional Medicare to opt out of the profit-driven
Aetna Medicare Advantage plan.
Lyle’s
injunction prohibited the city from removing retirees or their
dependents from their current health-coverage plans until after the
lawsuit brought by the New York City Organization of Public Service
Retirees is resolved.
The
Adams administration is appealing, but in the meantime, has suspended
the implementation of the controversial plan. Former Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s administration also suffered similar legal defeats which
delayed implementation. Ultimately, the city was sent back to the
drawing board when the Emblem/Anthem Medicare Advantage plan was
withdrawn from the running.
“Petitioners
have by clear and convincing evidence met the requisite burden for a
preliminary injunction by exhibiting the likelihood of ultimate success
on the merits, the prospect of irreparable injury in absence of
injunctive relief, and the balance of equities weighing in the
petitioners’ favor,” Judge Frank wrote in granting the temporary injunction.
Retired
UFT member Paula Rogovin, who taught in city schools for 44 years, was
ecstatic when she got her OLR mailing this week.
“When
I received a letter from the Office of Labor Relations Employee
Benefits Program stating that ‘All current health plans remain in
effect’ and that ‘No retiree will be moved into the new Aetna Medicare
Advantage PPO plan,’ I was overjoyed,” Rogovin told Work-Bites. “My
first thought was how thankful I am to the retirees and others who
fought so hard to protect our Medicare health plan from the Medicare
Advantage rip-off.”
Marianne
Pizzitola, a retired FDNY EMT and president of the NYCOPSR cautioned
that OLR’s letter doesn’t mean retirees have prevailed, “because the
city is actively appealing the court’s ruling and trying to press
ahead.”
“The
NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees is pleased with the Court
granting a preliminary injunction stopping the City from forcing us into
the Aetna Medicare Advantage plan, thus diminishing our earned and paid
for health benefits and blocking our access to Federal Medicare that we
paid for since our first paycheck,” Pizzitola wrote. “Mayor Adams has
been spreading the big lie that the plan is better, when it will cost
senior citizens and the disabled more money and prevent access to many
of their current doctors or specialists like cancer centers and skilled
nursing and rehab.”
Pizzitola
continued, “We now push on, while also pushing our City Council
Legislation sponsored by Council Member Charles Barron D-Brooklyn),
Intro 1099, which requires the city to provide a Medigap plan like we
have had since 1967. Retirees are not a ‘detriment’ to the city as
[Mayor Adams] has been quoted. We built the city, rebuilt it after
9/11, and built our unions. It is bad actors trying to dismantle labor
strength by alienating retirees — that’s the detriment.”
The
drive by the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] and the City
of New York to push 250,000 municipal retirees out of traditional
Medicare and into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage Plan, so the city
can realize what it says will be a $600 million annual windfall, goes
back to former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration.
Mayor
Eric Adams’ administration, like the de Blasio administration before
it, along with the MLC, maintain the Aetna Medicare Advantage takeover
can be done without any diminishment in healthcare for retirees. In
their court filings, NYCOPSR offered sworn affidavits from municipal
retirees documenting the switch to Aetna will, in fact, undermine their
existing healthcare with catastrophic consequences
This
week, Council Member Tiffany Caban (D-Queens) was the latest member of
the Council to sign on the NYCOPSR’s legislation to protect and preserve
their access to traditional Medicare.
In
addition to Barron and Caban, other Council Members include,
Christopher Marte (D-Manhattan), Erik Bottcher (D-Manhattan), Kristen
Richardson-Jordan (D-Manhattan), Linda Lee (D-Queens), Shekar Krishnan
(D-Queens), Lynn Shulman (D-Queens) Ari Kagan (R-Brooklyn), Joann Ariola
(R-Queens), Alexa Aviles (D-Brooklyn), Shahana Hanif (D-Brooklyn), Inna
Vernikov (R-Brooklyn), Robert Holden (D-Queens).
Last
year, in hopes of shoring up its financial position, the city said
municipal retirees could opt to keep their current health coverage if
they didn’t want to participate in its Emblem/Anthem Medicare Advantage
plan — by paying a $191 premium to continue their existing GHI senior
plan.
That
set off a major backlash with retirees asserting that their
premium-free healthcare was a form of deferred compensation that the
city could not rescind. The NYCOPSR mobilized quickly and went on to win two reounds in state court challenging the city's implementation of its healthcare reset.
While
the city retirees were drawing their battle lines with Mayor Adams and
the heads of the MLC — who supported the conversion to Medicare
Advantage — the national healthcare program was hitting a dubious
milestone with just over half of seniors enrolled in the private
for-profit Medicare Advantage plan.
Last month, a delegation of 70 NYCOPSR members went down to a rally on Capitol Hill
organized by “Be a Hero,” a national non-profit, that’s fighting the
increasing privatization of Medicare. At that event, Congressional
leaders, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told a large
crowd that for-profit Medicare Advantage Plans overcharged the federal
government $75 billion a year, while denying and delaying care to 85,000
people.
Rep.
Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), who were both in attendance at
the rally have introduced the “Save Medicare Act” which would prohibit
so-called Medicare Advantage plans from using “Medicare” in their titles
or advertising because they say it amounts to a false claim.
“Only
Medicare is Medicare — it’s really that simple,” Pocan said. “Six
percent of people in 2021 had their claims automatically rejected and
then when they went to dispute it 80 percent of those were approved. It
shows that they were automatically delaying and disapproving care for
people who need it. The top two companies that year had a 12 percent
denial rate, nearly one in ten.”
Rep.
Katie Porter (D-CA) recounted her firsthand experience with her father,
who was a farmer battling cancer linked to his occupational exposure to
agricultural pesticides but was “boxed out” of the specialist he needed
by his Medicare Advantage plan. “These confusing and complicated
networks and purposeful refusal of price transparency make it impossible
for patients to choose the best care,” Porter said. “Medicare Advantage
takes the problem of private insurance and imports them into Medicare
infecting our best and most effective healthcare system with the ills of
putting profits before patients.”
“Medicare
Advantage is neither Medicare nor an advantage,” said Rep. Barbera Lee
(D-CA). “Congress needs to end this deception and that’s what it is.”
According to the Lever news website, a “2022 investigation by
the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services
found that in 2019, 13 percent of the total prior authorization requests
denied by Medicare Advantage plans would have been covered under
traditional Medicare, leading to an estimated 85,000 additional care
denials. That year, Medicare Advantage plans also wrongly denied 18
percent of payment claims — covering an estimated 1.5 million claims —
reducing the likelihood that doctors will recommend the costliest yet
often most effective care, for fear of not being paid”
