Why, in Spite of Everything, I Still Love Obama

“You can’t effect change from the inside,” Flowers has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequaliti­es, with the road we're headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independen­t of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”

“Those who are working for effective change aren't going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and can't do. RobertWood­Johnson [the foundation­], for example, funds many public health department­s. They fund groups that advocate for healthcare reform, but those groups aren't allowed to pursue or talk about SinglePaye­r. RobertWood­Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/pri­vate partnershi­p. And we know this is totally ineffectiv­e. We tried this before. It's allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. RobertWood­Johnson actually works against a SinglePaye­r healthcare system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported.

There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic­Party, including Families USA and MoveOn. MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on SinglePaye­r, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-pay­er they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organizati­on was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to healthcare and abandoning the PublicOpti­on. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the healthcare bill had to be supported because it wasn't really about healthcare­. It was about the viability of PresidentO­bama and the Democratic­Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”

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