If there’s a silver lining to what’s happened over the last several months with healthcare reform, the Citizens United decision, the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat, and discussions about the need to reform the filibuster, that silver lining is this: it’s ripped the mask off of the real problem we’ve been struggling with. It’s made it obvious that we are suffering from the degree to which our government institutions have been captured by corporations. We are dealing with a problem in which too many elected officials on both sides of the aisle serve the interests of those corporations more than the people they’re supposed to be representing.

Too many of our Representatives, too many of our Senators, and too many of the people in the White House act based on what’s best for multinational corporations and their CEOs, not the American people.

Want proof? Well, an obvious case is the public option. It’s supported by a large majority of the American public. It reduces the deficit. It provides an additional choice for the American people, who are struggling with healthcare markets dominated by one or two insurers who are generally colluding to keep prices and profits high. It’s an incredibly populist and popular policy. And yet there were those in the House who fought against it tooth and nail, and Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman did it in for the Senate version of the bill - in order to protect insurance companies. Apparently, for them, insurance company profits and CEO bonuses are more important than functioning markets or the well-being of the vast majority of American families and small businesses.

[I]t's useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that's warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands. It didn't happen overnight, of course, and the devolution has been analyzed and decried by a host of writers and thinkers in these very pages [of The Nation]. It's also not the first time. Indeed, the story of the American Republic is the never-ending task of redistributing power that always seems to collect and pool and re-form, a cycle in which we break up the power trusts, only to find them reassembling, Terminator 2-like, and requiring yet another dose of the founders' revolutionary fervor to be broken up again. The central and unique paradox of our politics at this moment, however, is that our institutions are so broken, the government so sclerotic and dysfunctional, that in almost all cases, from financial bailouts to health insurance mandates, the easiest means of addressing the first set of problems is to take steps that exacerbate the second. - Chris Hayes in The Nation (emphasis mine)

My dad called this morning to catch up on life. As the hub of the extended family, he calls around to his children and his siblings roughly once a week and tells everyone what’s going on with everyone else. He and I talk politics some, but we tread carefully: he’s an old school Nebraska Republican who watches Fox News, and I’m a progressive politician who blogs on DailyKos. There’s some space between our political views.

This morning we chatted a bit about healthcare reform and about Ben Nelson. And while we were talking, I realized that he was just as frustrated with the gridlock in DC and the corporate capture of government as I was. The only difference was that he believed the Democrats were the cause of the problem. When I pointed out not all Democrats were – but his Senator, Ben Nelson, was – he and I both laughed. And then we moved the conversation onto my siblings and their latest news.

There's a word for a governing philosophy that fuses the power of government and large corporations as a means of providing services and keeping the wheels of industry greased, and it's a word that has begun to pop up among critics of everything from the TARP bailout to healthcare to cap and trade: corporatism. Since corporatism often merges the worst parts of Big Government and Big Business, it's an ideal target for both the left and right.

....

But the corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest--and increasingly, that's the only kind of change we can get. - Chris Hayes in The Nation (emphasis mine)

Next week, there’s going to be a test in Congress. A real litmus test about whose side various Representatives and Senators are on. It’s a stunningly straightforward bill – only two pages long – that would simply remove the antitrust exemption for health insurers. It would keep insurers from being able to collude and price fix, requiring them to compete in the marketplace for business.

Unlike nearly everything else that’s been done in the last year, this bill is completely uncompromised – no deals have been cut to water down the bill in favor of health insurance companies. It is an unambiguously populist bill, and a clean cut against corporatism. It’s building off of work that key progressives in the House, including Reps. DeFazio, Slaughter, and DeGette, have been teeing up for years.

Yesterday, Reps. Tom Perriello and Betsy Markey, the lead sponsors of the bill, had a press conference in the snow in DC. And the insurance industry was scared enough to show up and start passing out information indicating that if they had to compete with each other and stop colluding, that would somehow result in insurance prices going up. I kid you not.

So here’s the deal: we need to watch the bill, and see who’s on which side. And then, I think, we need to make a really big deal of it. Because this is the first unambiguous litmus test we’ve had, and it’s so straightforward that even my Republican dad will agree. Vote against this bill, and it means you’re in the pocket of the insurance companies. Very, very simple.