A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner
Tikkun Daily
September 11, 2009
[Passage omitted] President Obama knows that a single-payer program — extending Medicare to everyone — is far more rational than what he has proposed to Congress, but he also believes that eliminating the insurance companies, hospital chains, and other medical profiteers would require a battle beyond his current capacities.
To address any of these problems fully would require a fundamental challenge to the old Bottom Line. Obama would have to call for a New Bottom Line — to advocate for defining governmental and private corporate policies as “rational,” “productive” or “efficient” not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and our capacities to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur mystery of the universe.
He actually reached in that direction momentarily at the end of his health care speech to Congress by seeming to endorse Senator Ted Kennedy’s “large-heartedness: a concern and regard for the plight of others” which he defined as “our ability to stand in other people’s shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand.”
Yet over and over again in the details of his plan it was not this large-heartedness that he championed, but a belief in the positive outcomes of the competitive marketplace. What Obama omitted from mention is that the ethos of that marketplace, which rewards selfishness and materialism and “looking out for number one,” as the “common sense” that guides individual as well as governmental behavior, is a product of the fear that we cannot count on others, that there will be no one there to take care of us, and that we must therefore maximize our own advantage lest someone else do so for themselves in ways that will permanently hurt or undermine us.
Obama can’t help us overcome that fear until he does so himself. He has to allow himself to know, and then help Americans to understand, that most people actually do want to help each other, get delight in being caring and loving, feel fulfilled when they are able to improve the well-being of others. Most people already know this about themselves, but are unsure whether its true of their neighbors or others. Obama’s most important contribution would be to fight for policies based on this understanding and to challenge those who believe the world is filled with people who are primarily self-seeking and aggressive. Unfortunately, he can’t do that while remaining loyal to the centrist ideology and its insistence that the aggressiveness manifested in the current competitive marketplace, is what will produce the greatest good for the greatest number.[passage omitted]
Imagine, for instance, if Obama had started his speech with the idea of “we are all in this together” that he ended it with, and then applied that to each specific part of his program. Sadly, that was impossible precisely because his actual program is in conflict with this at several points. He won’t support health care reform that raises the deficit. How can that be justified by a President who raised the deficit to help bail out the people who caused the banks and investment companies to fail all of us! He promises not to give any benefits to immigrants-but then “we” are not “all in it together!” He is willing to use government to coerce people into his plan those who would not voluntarily join, but not to force insurance companies to lower the prices (for example, by regulating their prices at the expense of lowering their profit rates or simply by creating Medicare for All. He tries to make a public option plausible by comparing it to public community and state colleges, but also assures the insurance companies that they have nothing to worry about from his plan because “the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.” Yet the public option will not be open to those of us who already have private health care insurance. These limitations guarantee that the public option will not achieve the goal of lowering prices or obscene levels of profits. Public universities and community colleges have never been able to sustain themselves on the tuitions of those who use them. If that had been the requirement from the start, tens of millions of Americans would never have obtained the benefits of a public education that enabled them to get better jobs and go on to make valuable contributions to society in turn. If the principle had been that these colleges could not contribute to state or federal deficits, they would long ago have folded. So where is the “we” who are “all in it together” when crippling the only part of his plan that really makes an attempt at a universal solidarity? [passage omitted]
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine (www.tikkun.org) , chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives (www.spiritualprogressives.org) and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco (www.beyttikkun.org).