A little more than a week ago, I proposed a Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In and Counter-Conference to be held in Washington, DC as a response to the First Meeting of the Administration’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, sardonically called by some the “steal our retirements commission,” on April 27th. The Counter-conference would also be a response to the Conference scheduled by The Peter G, Peterson Foundation’s (PGPF’s) “fiscal summit” on April 28th. This conference will be full of notables but won’t include even a single economist who doesn’t share the neo-liberal view of fiscal sustainability, centered around budget deficits, the national debt, and the debt held by the public to GDP ratio. The PGPF Conference, some powerful Senators and the President’s commission are spearheading a very broad-ranging campaign to persuade the American people that austerity is necessary for ordinary Americans (as if we haven’t had enough of that since the crash of 2008), including cutbacks on entitlements while, at the same time, the same people do all they can to preserve one of the periodic “great barbeques” in American history where well-off people accumulate immense wealth by looting the few resources owned by working people. It’s the purpose of the teach-in Counter-conference to oppose this deficit hawkism point of view with a alternate new economic paradigm offered by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that offers opportunity, balanced growth, and public purpose, in place of austerity, private irresponsibility, and hopeless Hooverism.

The story that hasn’t been told enough is that the rising cost of private insurance is hurting corporate America. It’s been a terrible strategic mistake. Progressives could have a powerful ally in the fight against Big Insurance/PhRMA: Corporate America itself.

Consider that even Wal-Mart, which spends far less than its peers just to offer it’s employees a junk insurance package, spent an average of $3,500 a year per employee on health insurance in 2002. The way to beat UnitedHealth Care and Blue Blue Cross is by offering Wal-Mart a public plan that is cheaper, yet offers better benefits: Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It.

Allowing any person, business or local/state agency to buy into Medicare is not single-payer, because it allows private insurance to continue to operate. But unlike the other falsely-advertised “robust public options,” Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It will actually lead to a public plan that covers at least 164 million Americans and will control cost. It makes real the false rhetoric for the public option.

I think we are all pretty tired of watching Obama play “Lucy and the Football” with his Democratic base. As for his relationship with the Republicans and Blue Dogs, he is either stubbornly codependent (victim of political learned helplessness) or cravenly selling out the public trust. He has been granted the slack that was his due. But he seems lost to gamesmanship at the price of statesmanship and real reform.

Can and will the public option progressives get seriously behind Conyers HR Bill 676 Single Payer – Medicare for All (with Weiner) that will come up for a vote soon in the Fall in the House? It would be a courageous act of political will to realign so dramatically.

Obama’s latest idea for curing the meltdown: highly leveraged non-recourse loans to the banksters to buy up toxic misunderstood assets. Talk about a moral-hazard giveaway at taxpayer expense.