Adam Carl Has Two First Names

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[adamcarl]

What We're Saying When We Praise Obamacare

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when Republicans and Democrats, whichever party was in the minority, truly behaved as the "loyal opposition." Politics was still bare-knuckled, to be sure, and there were profound and honest disagreements on policy, but there were certain things on which one could almost always count: politics ended at the water's edge, for one, and rarely did an elected official question a colleague's patriotism or loyalty. Sure, there was the occasional Joe McCarthy, but that was the exception, not the rule—and even McCarthy occasionally broke with his own party, or voted in a bipartisan manner. Above all, Senators and Representatives regularly worked across the aisle to get things done, and socialized with each other to boot; doing so was not considered treason by rank-and-file party members, and legislators wouldn't be subjected to a primary challenge for the twin heresies of collegiality and compromise. 

It's not exactly a secret, for example, that in the 1980s, keenly conservative president Ronald Reagan and outspoken liberal House Speaker Tip O'Neill had a great amount of affection for one another, and worked together often on legislation, even if "working together" was defined as relentless deal-making and compromise. Even "controversial" bills such as The Social Security Act of 1935 and the amendments to it in 1965 which created Medicare and Medicaid—though demonized and denounced by many prominent conservative politicians at the time—ultimately passed with substantial GOP support. Contrast this with the Affordable Care Act, a hugely consequential piece of legislation for both our society and economy, which passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber. The GOP opposition to the bill, for mostly political reasons that have been analyzed ad nauseam elsewhere, was as unwavering as it was pathetic.

That brings us to the 5 year anniversary of Obamacare, and Democrats are generally bullish about the law. Many articles have been published from a left-leaning side of the debate, gleefully pointing out that all the dire predictions about the laws effects from Republicans in 2010 have not been born out by reality. Jobs haven't been lost, the deficit hasn't ballooned, the economy hasn't crashed, premiums haven't skyrocketed, millions of people have joined the ranks of the insured, the vast majority of these people are satisfied with their coverage, premiums are getting paid on time, nobody's grandmother was killed by a bureaucrat, and on and on. In fact, as it stands now, only a potential 5-4 Supreme Court vote on a silly four word technicality could possibly kill this law, and that decision is still pending. But if the Court dismantles the law, it will be, according to most objective reports, a demonstrably successful law it is dismantling. Obama himself has been proudly pointing out that he was right, and his critics were wrong, and Democrats, by and large, have been gloating along with him.

But there's something left unsaid by both parties about the law's apparent success, and its something my fellow liberals would do well to take to heart. And that is that the Affordable Care Act is exactly the health law we would've ended up with if Democrats and Republicans still worked together like they used to.

A truly liberal law reforming health insurance would look like a European-style "single payer" system, whereby the government pays doctors and hospitals directly from tax revenue, and all citizens are covered. (Indeed, many of us on the left—this blogger included—still pine for such a system.) Conversely, a conservative law would consider such "socialized medicine" to be sacrilege and go to great lengths to preserve the private insurance market.

A more modest liberal law, then, would at least include a government-run insurance plan as one choice for consumers, in order to compete with the private insurers and keep them honest. Conservative lawmakers would consider such a “public option” to be unfair competition at best, more evil socialism at worst, and likely not vote "aye" on a bill that included one.

Liberal legislators, if they agreed to preserve the private insurance market, would at least include extremely generous subsidies for those who can't afford coverage, add a vast, mandatory expansion of Medicaid for the poor, and force all states to set up a health care marketplace. A scaled back, more conservative version of such a law—if Republicans, in turn, agreed to a compromise—would make those subsidies a little less generous, make the Medicaid expansion more modest (and optional), and perhaps request a way for states to opt out of creating a marketplace if their governors chose not to play along.

So what, then, is Obamacare? It's not a single payer system. There is no public option. It preserves the private insurance market. The subsidies offered to help people pay for coverage are are relatively modest, Medicaid expansion is optional (that part took a little judicial intervention), and a federal exchange was built to accommodate the citizens of those states whose governors don't wish to participate. And although the law forces insurers to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing condition (and forcing private companies to do virtually anything is anathema to modern conservatives), it off-sets that potentially financially devastating requirement by guaranteeing these same companies millions of new customers via the individual mandate to purchase coverage—a mandate that, although disavowed by them now, was originally a conservative idea to encourage personal responsibility. 

Is the law perfect? Not by a long shot. But it is exactly the law one can imagine getting after marathon bargaining sessions between Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. Instead, the Democrats essentially negotiated with themselves—liberal wing vs. Blue Dogs—and with the powerful health insurance lobby. But the end result was the same. The ACA is, in letter and spirit, a bipartisan law... and most Democrats are proud of it, and brag that it's working.

So while today's Tea Party-bullied Republican caucus is disingenuously demonizing a law that very easily could've been drafted by its own party, so the Democrats are praising a law they wrote that includes parts the GOP could easily have concocted.

Sure, maybe a purely progressive version of the law would be even better; perhaps an even more conservative version of the law would have been a pointless, horrible failure. But the fact remains that the law we actually have, the one that has several components for each party to embrace and several for each party to hold its nose and accept, is working—and it's working because of the kind of political compromise that used to be a daily occurrence in Washington, and ought to be again. It's just that in this particular case, the Democrats compromised with themselves, because the opposition party—the one sadly now in the majority—has become so irrational, intractable, and dishonest.

Regardless, if you are a Democrat who thinks Obamacare is swell, and you're proudly touting the various metrics by which it is succeeding to friends, family, co-workers, and social media, you would be wise to keep in mind that the law that is succeeding has many conservative principles integrated into it. It is a law that very easily could've come out of a bipartisan committee, if the current opposition were still remotely loyal, or even passably reasonable.

[adamcarl]

There’s No Such Thing as a Gay-Hating Christian

Let’s say you’re a Democrat and you announced something like, “I can’t support raising the minimum wage, or expanding access to the polls, or welfare for the poor, because I’m a Democrat.” That would make no logical sense, right? After all, those are key tenets of the Democratic platform.

Similarly, let’s say you’re a Republican and you claimed, “I can’t support tax cuts, or defense spending, or lifting regulations on business, because I’m a Republican.” Again, total nonsense, I think we can agree. People would rightly look at you like you were nuts.

Certainly, neither of those statements would pass muster in a court of law if argued in some sort of evidentiary way.

And yet, some (and I emphasize SOME) self-identified Christians have absolutely no problem saying, with a straight face, “I can’t follow anti-discrimination laws, because I’m a Christian, and my faith requires that I reject others.”

Based on the words of the New Testament, the idea is just as bizarrely nonsensical as the political examples above. Jesus was quite famously all about loving thy neighbor as thyself, and judging not lest ye be judged, and on and on in this generous vein of inclusiveness and brotherhood. It seems to me that accepting everyone and leaving the rest to God is as key to being a Christian as caring about climate change is to being a member of the Green Party.

There is no admonition from Jesus to be hateful, or judgmental, or to shun your neighbors in His name. Almost every single point the Biblical version of Jesus made in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere flies directly in the face of “I demand the right to discriminate against others because I’m a Christian!”

Sorry, that’s just not what you’re signing on to when you accept Christ as your lord and savior. And yet that is precisely what anti-LGBT Christians do when they insist upon the right to deny service to gay customers, or fire gay employees, and attribute it, quite grotesquely, to their faith.

I know it’s a pipe dream, and not workable in any real sense, but as I ponder these despicable anti-LGBT/”freedom to discriminate” bills—like the one governor Mike Pence just signed into law in Indiana—passing under the guise of “religious liberty,” I can’t help but wish that any religious business owner challenged in court over alleged discrimination was forced to demonstrate exactly where the main and actual tenets of their faith demand such animus and personal rejection of others.

Merely attributing your bigotry to your faith mistakenly, or perverting your faith to fit your preconceived prejudices, should not be enough. A simple assertion of “this is what my religion requires” should not suffice to subvert the Constitution, or even general common decency.

Now in fairness, I believe that even if your religion DID explicitly demand that you reject others, and judge your neighbor, and so on, it still shouldn’t be enough to override the Constitution in a secular society. But at the very least, one ought not be able to outrageously claim Christianity as cover for what is clearly the antithesis of Christianity. At least not without the majority looking at you like you’re out of your mind, or laughing in your face. Because seriously, I’ve read the New Testament… and if it’s anything like a political platform, the idea of spiteful, judgmental Christians ignoring the Golden Rule and instead demanding the freedom to persecute others as they themselves have been persecuted, ought to be considered just as flat-out crazy and cognitively dissonant as an anti-tax cut, military-hating, Big Government-loving Republican.

You may think you’re a Christian, and you may call yourself a Christian, but you’re not a Christian. ‘Cause there’s no such thing as a gay-hating Christian.

[adamcarl]

I Sued Actors’ Equity (And I Liked It)

As Steven Leigh Morris recently wrote in the L.A. Weekly, “Over the past two decades, L.A.’s 99-seat theaters have been responsible for some of the most dynamic, innovative and evocative theater to be found anywhere.”

This was almost not the case. If Actors’ Equity had had its way in the mid-to-late 1980s, L.A. theater in intimate venues might've been eradicated. Some claim that was Equity’s goal at the time—to destroy the so-called “Waiver” theater in L.A. that had been in existence since 1972, whereby houses with fewer than 100 seats could avoid onerous union contracts and afford to use professional actors, with very few restrictions. Others claim the union was simply trying to fix what ailed the original Waiver agreement and make it fairer for its members. Whether the deal needed minor tweaks or a complete overhaul, the so-called Waiver Wars erupted in earnest in 1988 when AEA was perceived to be acting in bad faith, and it got ugly. After a pitched battle, Waiver was ultimately replaced with what is now known as the “99-Seat Plan.”

Whatever its motives were, Equity did not succeed in killing intimate theater in Los Angeles, accidentally or otherwise. Instead, because of pushback and compromise, and an eventual lawsuit from whence the 99-Seat Plan sprang, intimate theater has thrived—and it has not thrived at the the expense of mid-sized theaters, as many detractors had wrongly prognosticated. However, despite its demonstrable success, as Morris notes, "AEA has had a long history of hostility to the plan, which was essentially thrust upon it by its own membership. Terms of changing it were agreed to in an out-of-court settlement in 1989, after 15 Equity members sued their own union.”

I was one of the 15 so-called “dissident” members who was a plaintiff in that lawsuit. I am decidedly pro-union, but I believed strongly then, even as a teenager, that my now former union was on the verge of eliminating intimate theater in Los Angeles, and with it the wonderful opportunities that smaller houses presented to union actors. And I was convinced that AEA would, at some point, try again—and be willing to be underhanded in doing so, if past was prologue. Whatever its legacy—and I’ll leave that to others more well-versed than I to debate—our settlement put in place certain safeguards in case Equity tried to make future wholesale changes to the new Plan, and 99-seat-or-fewer theaters, employing union actors, continued to make an enormous cultural contribution to our city.

Well, I believe just as strongly as I did in ’88 that AEA is again on the verge of destroying intimate L.A. theater. With its upcoming referendum on a thoughtless, Draconian new plan it has concocted, the union is piggybacking on the otherwise noble fight to raise the minimum wage across the country, and using it as a pretext to fight an unrelated battle it has long been itching to re-litigate. Like neo-cons invading Iraq after 9/11, it is seizing a perceived opportunity to achieve what has been a dormant long-term goal, and it is doing so under the pretense that it is fighting for what is in its members' best interests. AEA imagines, no doubt, that it will ultimately be greeted as a liberator; liberating exploited actors, it would have us believe, from the clutches of greedy “producers” who want to take advantage of these poor sods’ collective desire to ply their craft at any cost.

Naturally, it’s all nonsense. The vast majority of “producers” of plays under the 99-Seat Plan are actors themselves, many a part of member companies—a substantial chunk of which will eventually disappear if Equity gets its way. These “producers” are artists facilitating art, and they are more akin to public schoolteachers who have to pay for their own supplies, than they are to some wily investor who’s figured out a way to make a buck on the backs of the vulnerable and the desperate. Make no mistake: AEA’s current proposal is not a noble fight for actors’ rights; this a self-aggrandizing power play, and a travesty-in-the-making.

I admit I can’t fully comprehend the grievances the union has long been nursing toward 99-seat theater in L.A., and I don’t understand why AEA has decided it suddenly needs to profoundly change the terms of what I believe has largely been a wildly successful Plan. To steal and paraphrase a line from the Humane Society, "No actors were harmed in the making of these productions.” Are there parts of the plan that can be fixed, perhaps brought into line with current fiscal realities, without taking drastic measures with devastating consequences? That’s certainly a reasonable proposition. In fact, our ’89 settlement created a still-extant Review Committee made up of equal parts plaintiffs' reps and AEA reps, to consider any proposed changes to the 99-Seat Plan moving forward, so it’s not as if eventual modifications were beyond contemplation. But from what I’ve seen, AEA's current proposal amounts to the nuclear option. Why not, as Bill Clinton said of the welfare program, “Mend it… don’t end it”?

Because seriously, when was the last time you heard of a producer under the 99-Seat Plan getting rich on the backs of poor actors? Who, pray tell, are these bogeyman producers with money falling out of their pockets? Could it be that they don’t actually exist? You almost have to be a masochist to produce 99-seat theater in L.A. Nobody—and I mean nobody—is doing it to get rich. And now AEA wants to take away the only incentive to do it at all: the mere fact that it CAN be done, and done well.

Demolishing the vast majority of some of the most exciting theater in a major American city, demolishing experimentation, demolishing innovation, and demolishing opportunities for its L.A. members—largely against their will—how does that serve the membership?

As Morris pointedly asks, “How exactly are producers of plays in small theaters, knowing ahead of time that their productions will lose money, abusing the actors who essentially volunteer their talent and have the right to leave at any time in rehearsal or performance for any reason? How does preventing union actors from working in such shows, or diminishing the status of such shows, better the actors’ situations or foster the art form?”

Both great questions. The answers, of course, are “They aren’t” and “It doesn’t.”

I am not a current member of Actors’ Equity, and haven’t been for a couple of decades, so I no longer have a dog in this hunt as an insider or a “dissident.” Not only don’t I have a clue about the inner-workings of the Review Committee our settlement created, but I am not even as active a member of the L.A. theater community as I would like to be. And yet I’m witnessing the current contretemps with a very heavy heart.

As a lover of theater, a lover of intimate theater, a lover of LOS ANGELES intimate theater, a lover of my friends who are deeply immersed in Los Angeles intimate theater, and as a proud former member of what was in my opinion one of the finest 99-seat member companies in our city’s history—The Colony, now an Equity house—I can say without a moment’s hesitation that any attempt by AEA to gut the 99-Seat Plan—to make producing quality theater in small venues in Los Angeles with union actors impossibly unaffordable for most—is a tragedy. And not the cathartic kind we pay to see.