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Thursday morning drive bys--January 30, 2020

* Andrew Yang keeps telling us our nation's job losses are only due to automation. I wish Yang would speak privately with maybe Thea Lee of the Economic Policy Institute or Lori Wallach from Public Citizen about how trade deals set political-economic rules that favored low wage nations against higher wage nations in races to the bottom, and how even in wealthy Silicon Valley, there were casualties.  And of course Bernie Sanders strongly opposed the favored nation status for China, while the corporate Democrats joined with most Republicans to push it through.  

* A conservative, er, right wing columnist is amused at establishment Democratic hatred of Sanders. It is the pro corporate bias he is describing, but if he said that, he may have to look into the mirror, too.

* The Daughter continues to be a leading correspondent at UCLA's Her Campus.  Here is her latest column the organization published, which is on the oppressive nature of women's fashion and accoutrements.  Her archives are here.  I laughed when I read the latest column because, for years, I would be the one to go clothes shopping with her (The Wife and The Daughter would have too many fights), and I would remark to womens' sales store people how fascism and fashion are very close in sounds, and there is a reason for that when it comes to women's fashion. Women's fashion is designed to make women continually feel inadequate, and worse, it is women who are most judgmental, compared to men, about what clothes, make up, etc. women must wear--while us men wear clothes which have not changed in over a century.  The Daughter laughed when I reminded her of that. 

* Ryan Grimm, of The Intercept and more and more The Hill, nails the irony how Republican strategists are making the same mistake as Democratic strategists made about Trump in 2015 and 2016--and how Trump senses he may bargain for more than he expects if Sanders were to win the nomination.   

* If one reads a good Reagan bio carefully, and goes back into newspaper archives from the 1970s, one finds Reagan ran a highly divisive and bitter primary against Republican presidential incumbent, Gerald Ford, and barely lifted a finger for Ford in the fall election against Jimmy Carter. He would appear at rallies for Ford and barely mention Ford's name, if at all.  Reagan would rail against establishment Republicans in the Republican National Committee during the period 1977-1979, as he geared up to run for president again in the 1980 Republican primary, which had a crowded field, and where Reagan was the oldest candidate ever to run in a Republican Party or Democratic Party primary.  It is too bad I have not been able to find anything on the Internet about all this, as the hagiography and noise from recent elections crowds out anything I can find substantively on the topic.  Lou Cannon's monumental biography of Reagan deals with this to some extent, but not as much as it should for our current purposes, where Sanders is essentially the Reagan of this time period.  It is in this context I read this article about how Tom Perez, a footman for corporate Democrats who is called the Party's national chair, has stacked the decks on the main committees with anti-Sanders people.  I hope the movement which Bernie is developing as he runs for president--unlike most other candidates who are running for president on their own personal vanity--continues to swell and grow.  With the various articles in this week's premier papers, The Washington Post and The New York Times, and television pundits gritting their teeth, we will see even more frenzied attacks against Bernie.  This FAIR.ORG piece is helpful to show how corporate media will imply anti-Semitism against Bernie, even if it means employing anti-Semitic tropes against Bernie.  The history of the capitalist press and corporate media is they will become hysterical and spread falsehoods to protect the capitalist and corporate executive class.

* And I was thinking of the eclectic 1967 era band, Giles, Giles & Fripp's Thursday Morning when writing the drive bys this morning.  As prog rock fans know, the little pop outfit, GG&F, later turned into the mammoth woolly psych-prog band, King Crimson (yes, this is the great Rolling Stone article from last year about KC's signature opening song, which is so ironic as the band received such bad press from Rolling Stone in the hey day of the 1970s under the odious Jann Wenner).

Wednesday morning, Six A.M. Drive Bys (January 29, 2020)

* Today's LA Times contains a powerful story about a grieving husband, whose wife died in one of our nation's patented gun massacres, and the criminal defense lawyer representing the killer, who united over the criminal defense lawyer's request for justice against corrupt "jailhouse snitches." This is a beautifully written article and provides the proper type of information to allow us to understand how, too often, DA offices are corrupted through these types of maneuvers, and how people are wrongly accused. In this case, there was no doubt about the perpetrator as it was an open and obvious gun massacre. But the widower began to realize there was a whole lot of injustice underneath and in the halls of justice, and felt he had a duty to help the lawyer who was fighting for others' lives.  One thing I found interesting was the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," where a DA who was definitely part of the scandal received a promotion after Todd Spitzer beat the odious William Rackauckus, the long-serving, highly partisan and ultimately corrupt DA (in my not humble opinion), while the criminal defense lawyer saw, quite properly, that Spitzer, too, is a player, though definitely preferable to Rackauckus.  The other interesting thing is how Kamala Harris and her successor, Xavier Beccera, both players, swept the OC DA office's jailhouse snitch scandal under the rug.  That is how players play.

*  This is important historical news, though I am not sure many care about the details anymore.  John aka Ivan Demjanjuk was a low level guard at a Nazi death camp who, in the 1980s, was wrongly accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" at the camp.  I had sympathy for the fellow because he was old and already growing feeble when first arrested, and had entered the US as part of the type of "Operation Paperclip" programs our nation engaged in (yes, in American culture, one has to have seen "Captain America: Winter Soldier" to even learn about the name of that operation), which went well beyond recruiting Nazi scientists.  My take was, Demjanjuk lived an uneventful and innocuous life here, after a life in Europe where he was simply swept up by events beyond his control.  This is not Dr. Mengele or Goering.  This was not Richard Gehlen, who was a leading SS Official who our nation later helped install as head of the military of the then West Germany.  My position on Demjajuk, of course, put me at opposite poles with the increasingly odious Simon Weisenthal Center, for which I say, I would welcome their hatred of me.  Anyway, this new evidence shows Demjanjuk was likely lying about whether he was at a particularly horrible death camp, Sobibor.  Demjanjuk was still merely a guard, and not a leader there.  Demjanjuk had been arrested again, convicted, and sentenced, for being a guard at Sobibor.  He eventually died never seeing his adopted homeland, the US, again.  I am less surprised about this New revelation than the SWC because I had always believed Demanjuk was either lying or unable to recall, due to feebleness, whether he was at  Sobibor at any given time in those war years. There was other evidence I found persuasive. This new photographic evidence is simply more reason to believe Demjanjuk was at Sobibor, but it still shows he was not in charge.  Yes, I am falling into "They were only following orders," but I also think at some point justice turns into revenge for these historically cataclysmic crimes.  And, again, anyone familiar with Operation Paperclip programs, again, much more than recruiting scientists, where top Nazis were not only spared, but put into positions of power for our nation and in West Germany, should be cautious about beating up on guards who lived decent lives for decades after that world war.  

* Interesting how Wells Fargo executives can commit massive fraud and not lose their right to vote. But hold up a liquor store and get $800 in cash and booze, well, so long voting rights.

* This story about the recruitment process for Kobe Bryant is amazing.  Then Clippers' coach Bill Fitch essentially talked Kobe out of considering the Clippers in 1996.  Even then, Fitch and other execs knew how bad Sterling was as an owner.  Heck, I knew then how Sterling used the Clippers' losses to lower his overall taxes from his vast real estate holdings.  The Clippers were bad on purpose during most of those years, and he paid very little to coaches, executive officers, and the like, and players knew they would be nickeled and dimed, in relative terms, compared to other teams, starting with the famed Lakers.  Oh, and for anyone who calls Kobe a "rapist," you may wish to read this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and maybe look at the intersectionality between racism and sexism, and, further, check your (I am assuming you are likely white if you think Kobe is a rapist) white privilege at the door.  That criminal case never should have been brought, and it was best left to the civil tort system.  Want to stand up against male violence against women?  Keep the focus on Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and even people like Clinton and Trump, for starters.  The Kobe sexual assault case was far more murky and, while nobody will know what exactly happened, seasoned prosecutors have said it was not a criminal case that should have been brought. In other words, a little more humility than calling a guy who was largely exemplary (he had an affair with a trainer at one point near the time of that incident, but was a monk on the road) a rapist.  Oh, and that apology?  Anyone who believes that is an admission needs comprehension skill lessons, and does not have the first understanding of how these are crafted to be giving something to everyone, and all Kobe gave the accuser was a nod to her version of events--while making clear he thought the encounter was consensual. 

* And yes, the title of this post is an homage to Simon & Garfunkel's first album.

Too often, those attacking authors for cultural appropriation are making racist assumptions and use racist language in the cause of anti-racism

The LA Times published this morning an article which adds to the controversy over the just released novel, American Dirt. The writer, Esmeralda Bermudez, who is originally from El Salvador, starts out arguing the novel is bad because American Dirt's author, Jeanine Cummins, is not from Central America or Mexico, and how the book supposedly suffers from that fact.  However, the writer appears to realize how weak and horrible that argument is and pivots to lack of diversity in the upper echelon of the publishing industry.  That is the best point, but the writer is not content with making that the initial point, though the Times' editor wisely recognized that should be the point.

Bermudez's criticisms of the substance of the novel, however, are without merit.  First, she finds it ridiculous that the main character in the novel owned a bookstore and had money available for the trip from Mexico to the US and had access to money through ATMs.  That happens to be realistic as we know many immigrants from Mexico have flown in rather than walked in and have access to cash from their native nations.  Also, it does not seem to bother Bermudez that she herself is from El Salvador, not Mexico. She simply had a very different experience than the novel's character, who , though realistic, is admittedly not as typical as the more recent immigrants from Mexico or Central America.  Worse, Bermudez reveals a comprehension deficit in another criticism of the novel when she quotes a passage about a kiss that is then described as of the neck of a person whose skin is brown. Bermudez claims the character was noting the brown skin, exclaiming that should have been obvious to the character. However, the passage shows the narrator is the one describing for the reader the color of the skin being kissed on the neck. This is pathetic for Bermudez who, throughout her article, implies her literary superiority over Cummins based essentially upon Bermudez's mere status as an El Salvadoran refugee.

The only worthwhile point Bermudez makes is our nation's publishing industry lives and dies by largely white audiences and is promoting a novel by a non-Mexican author who wrote about the Mexican migrant experience. I totally get this latter reason to be angry.  But the personal attacks against the American Dirt author undercut any belief that there may be empathy in artistic or literary creations. In fact, one Latino professor of English from Rutgers-Newark was quoted as criticizing Cummins' book for having the nerve to include "social justice" within the narrative! Oh, Heavens!  Social realism!  A review of the novel's author Cummins' Wiki page reveals how earnest Cummins was in researching and writing her book, and how she was honestly attempting to tell a sympathetic story about struggle and desperation of Mexican immigrants. 

Again, I am all for diverse voices in the publishing industry and other artistic industries.  I am not, however, for racist attacks on people who write books about those who are not from their group or groups, and where the writers with empathy.  To listen to the "cultural appropriation zealots" crowd, we should be banning Sinclair Lewis' Kingsblood Royal, written in 1947, a book that was a great attack on American racism. Kingsblood Royal told the story about a white guy who naively discovers he is 1/32 black, and how both whites and black town members react.  It is a novel filled with complexities and layers of ambiguity.  Lewis was friendly with the part white, part black, head of the NAACP, Walter White, knew of White's background, and had followed White's suggestion that Lewis write a novel about the social construct known as race. Through Walter White, Lewis met with various African-Americans, and then drew upon his experience with whites who were racist.  Later editions of the book contained introductions from prominent black authors, such as Charles Johnson, praising the book for its brilliant insights and creativity in its depictions of African-Americans.  Was Lewis engaged in an act of cultural appropriation? Lewis had no African-American background and yet he dared to write the book. There is also the infamous story about the novel, Famous All Over Town (1974), which was hailed as the new and great Latino novel about life in a Los Angeles barrio--until it was discovered the author, listed as "Danny Santiago," was a nom de plume for an old white, blacklisted-for-being-a-Red man, who, due to the blacklist, found himself living in an actual barrio for over a decade.  The author wished to tell the story of what he observed, and even Latino writers initially praised the book as the most accurate book of life in west coast barrios.  Finally, we note American Dirt has been favorably compared to John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.  But, John Steinbeck grew up in fairly middle class surroundings in California (Dad was Monterey County Treasurer and Mom was a schoolteacher), had never been a dirt farmer (though he worked on a family member's farm as a youth), went to Stanford and majored in English, and had never lived in Oklahoma or Nebraska.  I guess that is "cultural appropriation," too.

It is time to be even more blunt.  When writing Kingsblood Royal, it is not as if Sinclair Lewis donned blackface and made insensitive and stereotypical remarks about African-Americans. It is not as if the author of Famous All Over Town was racist and wanted to reenforce negative stereotypes regarding Latinos living in barrios. It is also not a situation where Jeanine Cummins had racist motives or was not accurate in most of her descriptions.  Each of these creative people wrote from a deep seated empathy with the people described in the books.  They wrote from a place where art elevates and unites us.  Yes, there is a structural racism issue within the publishing industry.  Let's directly focus on that, and not make ridiculous and mean spirited, and yes, racist attacks against authors who have empathy about the people they are reporting on and writing about.   Let's say it straight and clear:  Too often, cries of "cultural appropriation" are an abuse of anti-racist language and are racist statements posing as anti-racism.  We all bleed the same color, and race and ethnicity are social constructs.  The key is whether we have empathy for each other.  And, again, if an institution is not diverse, then it must be reformed and changed.  That is where the focus should be.

UPDATE JAN. 30, 2020:  Namwali Serpell, a UC English professor, originally from Zambia, has a skeptic's take on empathy, but one I ultimately reject as essentially a rephrasing of a nihilistic and existential sensibility, circa 1950s Camus and Sartre.  At some point, sentimentality, which the greatest living politically oriented mind of our time, Barbara Ehrenreich, calls "joy," is what is most necessary as we move toward Bernie's proposed policies.

UPDATE FEB 11, 2020: The NY Times has a review that runs through the same nonsense line of attacks, and again fails comprehension 101 regarding a particular passage, the same exact one as the LA Times book reviewer.  Again, here is the passage that so perplexes these reviewers:

Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin. 

The reviewer then writes:

In all my years of hugging my own sister, I don’t think I’ve ever thought, "Here I am, hugging your brown neck."Am I missing out?

What the reviewer is missing out on is reading comprehension. This is a book written for a majority white book reader audience to humanize brown skin, and the book further reminds us of the social construct of skin color being sadly significant for most of us humans of every skin color. Worse for this reviewer, Latino authors have used the same description style. Example, in Chilean woman author, Isabel Allende's classic House of the Spirits (1982), she writes at page 228 of her book, "Blanca slept with her head resting on the smooth brown stomach of her lover." Or here, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic, and still assigned reading in schools with high Latino populations, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) where Marquez writes, at page 36, "They were men and women like them, with straight hair and dark skin..." And at page 76, Marquez writes, "That woman bothered him. The tan of her skin, her smell of smoke..." Oh, those anti-Latino racists Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez! And lest anyone think, well, these books are old, here is a passage from a series of short stories from Marquez from 2006, in the book, "Strange Pilgrims," where he opens a story (at page 54 of the book) saying a woman was "beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread..."

These book reviewers who are ripping Cummins, whose grandmother was Puerto Rican, by the way, are using racist language in a cynical service of anti-racism. And anyone can rip a novelist for being too in love with a particular metaphor, as Cummins is with birds, and quote an awkward passage or two.  Again, this is a cynical book review.

Oh well. I'm deep into reading my sixth novel from late novelist May Sarton, alternating with FO Matthiessen's long neglected 1941 book on art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman.

Your corporate media in action

Evan Halper, and his trusty co-elitist writer, Janet Hook, are on the prowl in Iowa, searching out those folks undecided between Biden and Sanders.  What is amusing about the article is how they must opine.  And boldly.  This is how they describe the two candidates:

They are locked in an ideological struggle for Democrats’ 2020 nomination that pits the politically moderate Biden, a classic party insider, against the liberal Sanders, a blow-up-the-system outsider. And yet they appeal to some of the same voters. (Links in original)

I clicked on the link for Sanders and found no phrase "blow-up-the-system," or any of the individual words.  And since when is reform a blowing up of a system?  And since when is putting in different people to run the party a blowing up of a system?  Oh, and don't think we didn't notice the "moderate" label given to Biden, when Biden's views on $15 minimum wage, trade treaties, the bankruptcy bill he and Republicans pushed through, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and the Iraq War were and have been opposed by the majority of Americans.  

I should feel great that my original prognostication about this primary being about Bernie v. Biden is proving accurate, after months of me feeling, well, maybe I was wrong.  But let's unpack this opinion laden news article a bit further.  

In the newspaper business, there is a phrase known as burying the lede, where the most important information is buried inside the article.  And here we have it, folks.  Deep down at paragraph 12, we get this:

Many blue-collar Democrats attracted to Biden remain uncommitted, and their interest in what Murray calls “an old-school, working-class Democrat who fights for you” creates an opening for Sanders. “Biden and Sanders share this sense that they both came through the school of hard knocks,” he said.

That is the real story, isn't it?  Polling data has been clear Sanders' supporters are resolute and committed to Sanders.  But that is not how Halper and Hook want to phrase that fact.  Instead, they rely on the "Bernie has a ceiling and it is very low" argument.  Here are the two writers at paragraph 13:

For Sanders, who must expand his base of support beyond the die-hards who will be with him no matter what, that large group of uncommitted working-class voters offers perhaps his best opportunity.

With at least ten candidates still on the ballot for the Iowa caucuses, that ceiling is more than enough to build momentum. Further, with DNC rules that a candidate must get 15% of the caucus or primary vote to have a delegate, or else the candidate is treated as getting a zero, this creates an opportunity for further, significant momentum for Sanders. What is treated as a fact is how Biden somehow transcends party lines, with a link designed to make someone think the "fact" will be proven.  Yet, the link is only to a debate where Biden was himself saying that.  The true stubborn fact is Bernie is transcends party labels, with Republicans and independents who supported him in 2016 and are more likely to do so again in 2020 in the Rust Belt, where the Democratic Party's presidential nominee must win.  I have said from the start Bernie's appeal is based upon people now knowing his name and trust that he says what he means.  This is why the uncommitted Biden supporters compared to Bernie stalwart supporters is key to understand how this Iowa caucus may go.  Also, as Bernie has surged in the last three months, this idea of a "natural" ceiling is so much nonsense.  Momentum breeds momentum, as anyone who looks at how candidates develop, whether it was John Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, or Trump in 2016.

For reporters who are supposed to be "on the ground," Halper and Hook appear to have mostly spoken to party leaders, not many supporters outside that leadership, and of course they found the conventional wisdom they sought--where Biden's actual record of supporting Wall Street over Main Street, unnecessary wars, and the bi-partisan charade for the wealthy, are avoided like the plague.  Those facts are presented as a mere argument from "(t)he Sanders team...."  

The article ends with a non-leadership, retired, and likely white guy from Des Moines who supported Bernie in 2016, but who is now concerned with beating Trump--so he is leaning toward Biden because of "electability," a favorite narrative from corporate media.  This fits Halper's and Hook's worldview, too, and it is more worthy of note how the two reporters never spoke to any voters (as opposed to party leaders or activists) who are young, a person of color, or anyone currently in a union.  

This is why I am not surprised to see today the NY Times editorial board, still hoping and praying for a brokered convention come July, endorsed two candidates, corporate Democratic Party candidate (3% average in the main polls) Amy Klobuchar and the now increasingly wounded Elizabeth Warren.  Should anyone be surprised the NY Times generally feels Democrats should be nicer to Wall Street?  This is historical, too, as The Smithsonian reminded or informed readers how the NY Times and other corporate or wealthy people owned newspapers responded to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler.  

Admittedly, it is not as if Bernie went out of his way to seek the Times' endorsement.  In his interview with the NY Times editorial staff, Sanders said people are angry and some have gone for racist appeals, in part because the two parties have failed, and even the NY Times has failed people (the link is to the interview transcript, and one should type "failed" in Find and find the quote).  Then, Sanders admitted, at the end of the interview, he doesn't do "bullshit" very well.  And one notes in the clip for the "bullshit" comment, and this clip about racism and voters, how uncomfortable these superficially diverse people are with Bernie.  For Bernie does make their diverse, but elite, skins crawl, as a corporate Democratic Party commentator once infamously said on MSNBC.  And of course, the person currently covering the Sanders campaign for the Times, Sydney Ember, is part of America's economic royalty and has been strongly anti-Sanders in her reporting.

Ladies and gentlemen, your corporate media.  They are not your friend.  And they will not report the revolution, at least in any way that resembles reality, and really never have.  It is not that they publish "fake news" in the way Trumpists say.  It is just that one has to translate language from corporate speak, and to read in a wider and more critical scope as to what is highlighted, what is not highlighted, and what is often ignored.  One must, alas, know more about history, rhetoric, and studies of press criticism to fully grasp how language manipulates, but those of us who are versed in such things do owe a duty to call out the biases in this respect. 

Drive-bys for Sunday, January 18, 2020

The Los Angeles Times has some important articles in its Sunday paper, not surprisingly. For all my criticism of corporate bias in the LA Times, it remains one of the most important newspapers of the past 50-60 years. It is often reliable in its presentation of facts, has a scope and breadth that most newspapers cannot compete with, and I find its reporters generally knowledgeable, if often ringed in to protect their jobs from the more corporate oriented editors and publishers.  The history of Los Angeles is tied up with the history of the Los Angeles Times, as this wonderfully brilliant biography of a former publisher, Otis Chandler, explained.  Anyway, here we go:

*Here is a great backgrounder piece on Adam Schiff (D-CA), and why anyone who sees Schiff as a "leftist" is delusional. He is a law and order type guy, a veritable Boy Scout in demeanor and actions, and is nothing like the people he is chasing after. He is certainly ambitious, and a corporate Democrat, however.

*Here is a great backgrounder on the potential upcoming screen/television writers' strike.  The Times is at the top of the heap on the topic of the film and television industry. 

* Inside Beltway thinker Doyle McManus writes a decent opinion oriented article about Bernie Sanders' foreign policy, much better than the horrible one at the NYRB I commented about earlier this morning.  He criticizes Sanders for being naive, but that is par for the course, and silly when one compares the hubris and naivety of the foreign policy establishment.  So many "mistakes," people like McManus intone over the years, instead of recognizing the patterns of deceit, delusions, and again naivety in the foreign policy establishment. 

*Shouldn't this trove of documents about GOP gerrymandering be as important as DNC emails?  Funny how it isn't. Well, it does reflect corporate values and interests.

* The official editorial from the Times today on housing is important reading.  One need not agree with its trajectory or overall view to see how thoughtful the Times is being on this important topic.

*This is my vote for the second best op-ed you'll read today.  It captures my long believed point about the bias against city dwellers in American political cultural discourse over the past 150 years.  It is entitled, Trump says he loves America, but he sure hates cities, by Windsor Mann, who is no far leftist, either. 

* The best op-ed you'll read?  Here.  It is entitled, Slavery's Golden State History.  It tells us things Californians may not want to know, but which shows how much slavery is caught up in nearly all aspects of American history.

* Flint, Michigan; environmental injustice against minority communities; and the list goes on.  Add this dumping of jet fuel over Cudahy to this list of shame.

* And finally, Michael Hiltzik analyzes the China deal from Trump in ways we will never see on corporate broadcast media.  The corporate cable news media is too busy promoting body language experts.  And yes, I agree with Glenn Greenwald's conclusion set forth in the link about MSNBC being a "f-ing disgrace."  At least when I compared, in passing, Trump's weird body language with people at the G-7 and with Putin, I did not claim to be an expert on the topic, and Trump's body language was certainly obvious.  The "expert" the odious Joy Reid (a noted Bernie hater from way back) put on television strikes me as an overrated hack, based upon her previous statements per the article to which I linked.

A nomination for worst article in the NYRB for 2020: Foreign Policy Establishment edition

I have found a candidate for worst and dumbest article published this year in the New York Review of Books. Who knows if the NYRB will top this one, especially if Bernie Sanders does as well as people are thinking in being a top tier presidential nomination contender. I know Michael Tomasky is out there, with his higher brow conventional wisdom, waiting in the wings. I remember Tomasky as a writer at The Village Voice and New York Magazine, when he wrote with true outside-the-Beltway wisdom about the Hillary Clinton health insurance fiasco, and the limits of Hillary Clinton's ideas. But after he left the Voice, he became more of a neo-liberal than anything else in particular, publishing largely fawning articles and books about Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.  But let's get to why this Jessica T. Matthews piece, entitled Do the Democrats Have a Foreign Policy? is so bad. First, the title is misleading. Three quarters of the piece is devoted to almost cliched attacks on Trump, as if NYRB readers are unaware of how Trump has twisted the entire foreign policy debate in America by mimicking different aspects of it while sowing chaos throughout the world.

Second, Matthews, for someone whose mother was the famed historian, Barbara Tuchman, who wrote about the folly of those in power, and tragedy for powerful people who saw reality on the ground, reveals a classic folly-driven and arrogant foreign policy establishment worldview.  Here is how Matthews describes Bernie Sanders' foreign policy worldview:

Warren and Sanders agree on many things, but while she errs in saying too much, he barely touches on foreign policy. You have to scroll far down the Sanders website to find the little he has to say about it. He speaks cogently on the stump about the need to “privilege diplomacy,” to work more closely with allies, and to favor a posture of “partnership, rather than dominance,” but he has not gone beyond such generalities except in calling for changes in the US–Saudi relationship and ending US support that prolongs the killing in Yemen. His long-standing opposition to American interventions in Latin America and his approval of governments that profess concern for the poor have led him to express support for highly repressive leftist regimes in the likes of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia. This could well prove to be heavy political baggage in a presidential election.

Let's unpack this paragraph.  First, "highly repressive leftist regimes in the likes of Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia."  Says who?  The Sandinistas were the least repressive regime in Central America in the 1980s (outside of Costa Rica, of course), particularly compared to the military dictatorships the US supported and lavished military training and hardware in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.  In those US client states, it was a matter of policy for their regimes to torture and murder, under US training, nuns, priests, doctors, nurses, teachers, and labor organizers.  Our nation's leaders supported a virtual bloodbath, and the Contras, fighting against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, were adept at killing such classes of people in Nicaragua, while promoting the drug trade in the United States.  Further, Sanders' support for Evo Morales in Bolivia is relatively well understood as marginal, but I don't recall anyone outside of very far right wingers calling Bolivia "highly repressive" during Morales' tenure.  In fact, Bolivia was far more open, and hospitable to historically repressed people in Bolivia under Morales than ever before, and was a functioning open government for the most part. As for Venezuela, the US tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002--presumably with Matthews' approval--and was largely a free country in the political sense for most of his tenure.  Yes, there were some issues that arose during Chavez's tenure, but nothing like a truly repressive dictatorship, say, in Saudi Arabia, and nothing as bad as Israel's continuing repression of Palestinians in the West Bank, to take two examples that make people such as Matthews squirm at a DC cocktail party.* 

Second, I winced at how she plays into the nonsense that Warren has the specifics, and Bernie's only about vagaries. Matthews speaks about Warren's specifics in other paragraphs, and so we have to respond to each assertion. Matthews, ignoring Bernie's very clear attacks on the military-industrial complex, which no other candidate even mentions, says "Warren and, to a lesser degree, Klobuchar are the only candidates who have had the courage to address the country’s mushrooming defense budget ($738 billion for the coming year), which now consumes more than 60 percent of all federal discretionary spending." (footnote omitted) Warren only said she would cut part of the military budget to pay for her Medicare for All proposal.  But Matthews wants readers to forget the fact Bernie has voted against every Trump era military budget, while Warren has supported them.  And I am sure Matthews supports the new NAFTA 2.0, as did Warren, and which Bernie, acting on behalf of international human rights, labor, and environmental groups, opposed. Matthews wants readers to forget about Bernie's long, very specific record of opposing US military interventions, not just with Iraq, and for reasons that show far greater understanding of the motives and details of American foreign policy.  He knows exactly what I am talking about in the previous paragraph about Central and Latin America.  I doubt none of the others--except possibly Mayor Pete, from Mayor Pete's Marxist Gramscian loving Dad--even know about this horrific record.  I doubt Matthews will run into a former DC cocktail party member, Peter Beinart, but maybe if she took the time to read this article from Beinart, she may not be as dismissive of Sanders' foreign policy proposals.  

Matthews touts Warren, saying Warren's "website lists sixty-nine policy plans." (My emphasis) Well, I looked at Warren's campaign website, and I don't see that number of specific foreign policy plans at all.  Here is the section of plans called "Foreign Policy for All," which is at least as vague as what Matthews accuses Bernie of being.  One also sees nothing about sixty-nine plans in the section marked "Foreign Policy." One has to "jump" (the word on the website) to "all plans" to see a laundry list alright, and appears to add up to sixty-nine proposals.  However, apart from helping vets and military housing, most are a rehash of her domestic policy concerns. Unlike Warren, Bernie is recognized as one of the leading advocates for military veterans, and has the highest campaign contributions from veterans and military personnel for primarily that reason. The only other two related categories in her "Foreign Policy for All" link are about rebuilding the State Department--as if Bernie wouldn't? as if Biden wouldn't?--and  reducing corporate influence at the Pentagon. As if Bernie isn't talking about that?  Really?   If I worked for Politifact, Matthews' statements comparing Sanders and Warren foreign policy proposals would be deemed highly misleading and mostly false.

Last summer, Matthews wrote a very reliable and informative piece on what she called the "indefensible" US military budget, and an overview of the budget over the past decades, showing how it eats up 60% of the discretionary US budget nearly every year.  I guess I should have known better about her for not even mentioning Bernie Sanders' opposition to the budget she rightly found indefensible.   What I can't believe is the NYRB editors did not see through this current piece, and reject it.  

Oh well. As I say, let's watch out for the NYRB falling into establishment oriented, but sly attacks on Bernie Sanders as this primary season finally arrives in full view.  It is a holdover from the Slivers-Epstein days, I suppose, where, after they first casted out Chomsky, and then later, I.F. Stone, they more often showed fealty to American foreign policy establishment worldviews than not.

*I have homework to do this morning, so I leave the verification for doubters to themselves to research the statements made in the above paragraph. I admit trying in the past to find some of the sourcing for these statements, and finding a dearth on the Internet outside of far-left sources that may not be seen as credible to doubters.  One must read books such as former NY Times reporter, Stephen Kinzer's books on Guatemala and Iran, and one of his latest, Overthrow, or the work of Raymond Bonner, another former NY Times reporter, for starters, and, for an overview of American foreign policy in the region, from former foreign policy insider, William LeoGrande.  Another laser overview of this intentional policy of murder in Central America can be found in Penny Lernoux's Cry of the People, which predated the Reagan overdrive into murder in the 1980s.  I can guarantee Sanders (and certainly me) would wipe out Matthews in any direct foreign policy debate. Sadly, she is no different from those who get into power curve establishment, which is why her blithe, glib phrase about "highly repressive left-wing regimes" statements is so classic, and irksome.

Felon disenfranchisement laws: An idea whose time has passed?

I have read the Florida Supreme Court's advisory opinion--meaning it is still enforceable, but was one where there were no express parties to litigation--as to the Florida legislature's law, which the governor signed, that felons must pay all financial obligations imposed in the felony sentence before being allowed to vote.  I must admit I was shocked to read the amendment sponsors had said and admitted, in their arguments in favor of the original Amendment 4, passed with 60% of the vote, payment of fines and other restitutions in the four corners of the sentence had to be paid before felons could vote again.  I therefore found the Florida Supreme Court is correct to opine the later legislature's law regarding payment of all obligations under the sentence is consistent with the intent of the Amendment 4. The only dissenting judge said he agreed with the majority on the conclusion, but raised the concern, that I also have, that the majority of Florida justices are relying too much on textual readings and not enough on extrinsic evidence, as texts are almost invariably ambiguous.

What a lot of people may not know is that, in felony sentences, if there are financial obligations of a more civil nature, courts will add those civil monetary obligations into the criminal sentencing order. Thus, a felon may serve his or her time but still not be fulfilling the part of the sentence that deals with money or financial obligations.

At this point in our nation's history, and, as part of our society recognizing how criminal laws and enforcement have been bound up with the nation's racist practices and philosophies, I am wondering why it is that we disenfranchise people committed of crimes at all. I have been reading through this article from Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality, March 3, 2018, and finding it fascinating and potentially persuasive analysis.  The gist of the extensive article is the focus on the language of the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution regarding voting rights.  The amendment states:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. (Emphasis added)

I admittedly had not looked as carefully into this issue, as I should have, and had assumed we are only talking about people serving their sentences in terms of time or duration. However, the Florida Supreme Court showed me the ACLU and other organizations fighting for felon reenfranchisement haven't looked beyond that too carefully, either, as they should have known how criminal courts tack on monetary obligations akin to a civil proceeding. 

Let's look at the matter this way? Does a person found liable in civil fraud or civil assault and battery lose their right to vote? Not at all.  How about the executives at DuPont who knowingly allowed workers and surrounding communities to be poisoned, which led to early and often painful deaths to thousands and potentially millions of people?  Are you kidding?  Just ask Eric Holder, Obama's Attorney General, who never prosecuted any of the corporate executives at DuPont. Instead, it is all resolved in civil lawsuits, mostly paid with insurance company money, not their own money, even though the conduct is essentially the same as what a criminal court would find. Yes, the burdens of proof are significantly different.  In a civil case, the burden of proof on the plaintiff, the party suing, is preponderance of the evidence, which is essentially just over 50% certainty in the liability of the person. In a criminal case, the prosecutor's burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, which, in percentage numbers, tends to correlate to around 80% certainty.  This is why I often say this is how a criminal case jury acquitted O.J. Simpson for murder of his ex-wife and her friend, but a civil case jury found O.J. liable for wrongful death of the ex-wife and her friend. It is also the case most criminal defendants are unrepresented or have harried public defenders, while the corporate executives have top litigators in the nation representing them, who are able to create doubt much more effectively--and let's face it, these defendants look like nice people, don't they?  And of course, most of the corporate executives are white people.  Coincidence? I think not.

The question I have then is why should someone who served a criminal sentence for the criminal felony still be disenfranchised simply for not paying the monetary obligation that was not reimbursed? The Florida Supreme Court appears to be correct that the sponsors of Florida's Amendment 4 admitted the service of the time included payment of financial obligations.  They properly saw no room, in response to the narrow question they chose to answer, to find some financial obligations set forth in the sentence may not be covered, a position a few of the amicus briefs had advocated. 

For me, I am leaning toward a conclusion that none of these felon disenfranchisement laws may get past the 15th Amendment's statement that no person may be deprived of the vote on the basis of skin color or "condition of servitude." The irony for conservatives, as with those Florida Supreme Court Justices, and Justices like Scalia and a few others, who want texturalist interpretations of statutory and constitutional laws, with textualism meaning only reading the language of the text of a statute or constitutional provision, and rejecting extrinsic evidence, which would include legislative history and constitutional and other history, is conservative justices may eventually be forced to find nearly all felon disenfranchisement laws to be unconstitutional, as the word "servitude" speaks much more, in a "common sense" way (that is a hallmark phrase in textualist analysis), to time served or being served, not financial obligation.  One may look to the dictionary definitions and not find the word "servitude" easily translates into anything other service that occurs over time, or, in the property law context, the ability of one person to use another person's land--again, something not really monetary.  

Of course, if one uses extrinsic evidence, which is studying the history of laws in our nation, we find reasonably persuasive evidence that felon disenfranchisement laws have existed before and, most importantly, after the enactment and ratification of the 15th Amendment. However, the law review article I cited above makes the point we should not simply look at the history of the fact of these legislative pronouncements.  We should look more critically through this history and recognize the inherent racism behind most of these laws, and ask ourselves, do we want to rely upon laws passed with racist intent to continue barring felons from voting?  We know how rich people, generally white, get away with paying civil fines and restitution and never get criminally prosecuted, while the poor, which have overrepresentation of minorities (skin color and ethnicities) for felonies that deal with drug possession, larceny, and violent crimes.  Some may want to draw the line at violent crimes, but as I learned last year about Vermont, Maine, and other nations, which have long not drawn the line at violent crimes in allowing those still serving time in jail for felonies to vote, I am not seeing how society is harmed in allowing felons who have completed their time served or those who are still serving time should be barred from voting.  I see no empirical evidence these people are voting in reckless ways or undermining society.  Here is a portion of the Atlantic article from September 2019 about the topic of allowing prisoners with felony convictions to continue to vote:

In May, Tyler Orvis, a 36-year-old man from Hinesburg, Vermont, got out of prison with more than a year to go before Americans will vote for president. He plans to cast his ballot for Bernie Sanders in 2020 if the Vermont senator secures the Democratic nomination. Otherwise, he will vote to reelect President Donald Trump.

Tyler Orvis sounds like some of my wife's relatives from the Midwest, who cast their primary vote in 2016 for Sanders and ended up voting for Trump.  These are not "liberals" in the sense we normally see the term bandied about.  These are people who feel the boot of the Establishment on them, and maybe they are not as reckless as some of us like to think.  But to deny them that right to vote strikes me more and more as morally indefensible. 

Therefore, the most important question is one the Florida Supreme Court refused to consider, which is why it said in the beginning it would only answer the governor's narrow question about the legislature's post-Amendment 4 statutory law.  That most important question is whether any felon who has served the time of the sentence, or is serving time, should be barred from voting.  For me, as a student of our nation's deeply racist history, I am finding it harder and harder to justify any law that bars a felon who served his or her time or currently serving time from voting.  I am finding hard to understand the logic behind the sentiment that simply because one has been convicted of a crime,  why that person should be barred from voting.  For the phrase "condition of servitude" does not necessarily mean only those who have served their time, but who are still serving their time following a felony conviction. How about that, textualists? 

For those who want to argue from extrinsic evidence of constitutional and political history, those who make such an argument should have to defend against the point that those laws have been primarily rooted in our nation's terrible history of racism.  I am not yet sure one way or another whether that point is persuasive in the sense of being convincing to make all felon disenfranchisement laws void under our nation's Constitution. However, reading the Indiana law review article, there is a reasonable case to be made in that regard.  If accepted, the felon disenfranchisement laws, including for those currently serving sentences, would be voided.  And, again, ask ourselves?  Where is the evidence of reckless, destructive voting from felons, and how is it any different than the rest of us?

UPDATE FEB 19, 2020: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal appellate court which covers the Florida and immediate surrounding states, has found the payment of legal financial obligations (LFOs) under Amendment 4 unconstitutional under federal voting rights to the extent it bars voting rights to those who are indigent or otherwise cannot repay the money portion of sentence.  It is well worth the read if one is a lawyer especially.  However, if one is not, the appellate court ruled unanimously in its three judge panel, voting rights require a court to exercise heightened scrutiny, instead of giving the state voters and state itself the benefit of the doubt; there is clear evidence of deprivation of voting rights when many felons simply lack the money to pay nearly anything, as their lives are already ruined to a great extent; and the amendment portion may be severed and still give the felons the right to vote in Florida.  The appellate court found the voters were not as well informed to know people who had no money were going to be deprived of the right to vote.  As I said above, I think the framers of the amendment had knowledge, but is that enough for the people who voted to have that knowledge?  I certainly saw nothing in the media reports about this twist, and did not understand Amendment 4 to contain a loophole to drive a Mack truck through to deprive upwards of 80% of felons from voting.  We will see what the larger panel does with this decision, and then what the US Supreme Court does with this decision.  We will also see whether the US Supreme Court will put a hold on the entire Amendment to stop any felons from voting this year.  They may do that, which will tell us how they will uphold the LFO requirement before allowing felons to vote.

There was deep rancor between two neoliberal candidates in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary, too. They came together at the end.

I have already written about why this imbroglio about a single private meeting a year ago, now suddenly brought up first through Elizabeth Warren aides to a corporate media dying to attack Bernie Sanders, falls squarely on Warren. It is not as if the private conversation is reflective of Bernie's off the cuff and more prepared public remarks over 35 years, as he has consistently supported women running for president, and being president. If he had said what Elizabeth Warren and her campaign aides said to her, why would he not have put it directly to Tulsi Gabbard when she had her private meeting with Bernie Sanders to announce she, too, was running for president? The reason for this leak was to demonize Sanders right before the primary, and that cynical strategy is far more important than the content of it. And worse, this divides the progressive forces at a time when there is a desperation in the corporate Democratic Party offices and campaigns, and where corporate media is, again, dying to stop Sanders first and foremost.*

I don't really want to talk about this again, as I agree with Jane Sanders, that it is time to stop. And toward that end, I want to remind readers and anyone who cares about progressive values and campaigns to recall how bitter the feud between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was, when both were essentially neoliberals with highly similar views, and how, just weeks before the Iowa caucus, there were accusations from the Obama campaign that the Clintons were acting in a racist way toward Obama. See this Politico story from January 11, 2008. By that point, I was talking in my old blog (MF Blog) about HillObamaBiden, as all three represented neoliberal worldviews, and yet were somehow getting personal against each other. And here is an op-ed from Ryan Cooper in 2015, reminding people of how nasty it got between Obama and Clinton:

As the first primaries got underway in 2008, and Obama began to slowly pull ahead, the Clinton camp resorted to increasingly blatant race- and Muslim-baiting. It started in February, when Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, endorsed Obama in a sermon. In a debate a couple days later, moderator Tim Russert repeatedly pressed Obama on the issue, who responded with repeated reassurances that he did not ask for the endorsement, did not accept it, and in fact was not a deranged anti-Semite. That wasn't enough for Clinton, who demanded that Obama "denounce" Farrakhan, which he did.

About the same time, a picture of Obama in traditional Somali garb (from an official trip) then appeared on the Drudge Report, and Matt Drudge claimed he got it from the Clinton campaign. After stonewalling on the origin question, the campaign later claimed it had nothing to do with it. A Clinton flack then went on MSNBC and argued that Obama should not be ashamed to appear in "his native clothing, in the clothing of his country."

.... 

Then there was Bill Clinton comparing Obama's campaign to that of Jesse Jackson's unsuccessful run in 1988. The capstone came in May, when Hillary Clinton started openly boasting about her superior support from white voters. (Links in original)

Clinton and Obama eventually made nice with each other, and became very close. There was also the deal made, just before the convention, where Clinton was promised the position of Secretary of State, something Clinton coveted almost as much as the presidency. 

It is also true that some Clinton supporters never got over the primary rift. A group of largely white women formed a group called PUMA, originally meaning Party Unity My Ass, and they were bitter, angry, and not a little racist in denouncing Barack Obama, even at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. They even formed a fundraising PAC website in July 2008 and tried to change the meaning of the acronym to People United Means Action, which is pathetic as one asks "Which people?" Moreover, it bears repeating more Clinton primary voters in 2008 voted for McCain-Palin than Bernie primary voters voted in 2016 for Trump-Pence. Yet, these corporate Democratic die-hards for the Clintons are precisely the type of people who, in 2016 and through now, have lectured, hectored, and condescended to Bernie fans who had believed in creating a movement for progressive values, not just one flavor of neoliberal over another. Obama didn't need those people then as he expanded the voting electorate, which is precisely what Sanders and his campaign have been saying.

The point, however, is simply this: Progressives and activists should be tamping down this imbroglio and finding peace as we finally head into the voting in this long and winding primary season. Whatever wounds suffered these past few days should heal. The difference between now and 2008 is the corporate media is the true opponent here, and CNN's conduct during the debate earlier this week shows this, full stop.** My take is Elizabeth Warren remains a fundamentally decent person who would make a better president than most anyone else in the race,*** but Bernie remains the only one who understands the need to build a movement of voters, post-election, to take on the oligarchy that continues to undermine working people and the poor in America, and often wants to make war to divert and divide the working classes and the poor, and gobble up the world's riches on behalf of themselves. 

* I remain convinced Warren herself initially did not want to leak the statement Sanders supposedly made in the year old private conversation, but that her campaign advisers, feeling desperate, and angry over the purloined and leaked Sanders' volunteers' voter calling script, went ahead without Warren's express approval. Then, when it was gleefully reported without even consulting with Bernie Sanders's campaign, Warren herself felt compelled to go forward to not diss her own campaign staff. This happens when a campaign is foundering in polls, and trying to defeat a rising opponent. The script, however, was a nothing burger, and Warren's reaction that she was being "trashed" was terrible hyperbole, as the script merely said the following for volunteers to say, when calling someone who identified himself or herself as leaning toward Warren:

I like Elizabeth Warren. [optional] In fact, she’s my second choice. But here’s my concern about her. The people who support her are highly educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what....She’s bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.

As I said on FB and in conversation with people, why did nobody ask Warren's campaign to produce their scripts they are using to call people, and what they say about Sanders when the person says they are supporting Sanders or leaning toward Sanders? I have seen people on FB and in conversations who like Warren, in fact, trash Bernie as too old, too left, and too cranky. That is far more personal and trashy than what that leaked script said, as the script's statements about the base of Warren's support are true, per the consistent polling and campaign contribution data of the past six or seven months of this run up to the first voting in the primary. I am speculating Warren, again influenced by her campaign advisers, who love going negative as a professional class (I don't know her advisers, but I do know how campaign advisers operate over the decades), doubled down on her hyperbolic reaction to the script and the decline in support, according to the polling data, and, faced with the leaks from her campaign advisers, decided to go public with her interpretation of her year old private conversation with Sanders. A sad and desperate move, but one we saw as Clinton was falling behind Obama in Iowa in January 2008. 

** It is a sad and continuing commentary on the corporate media that Teen Vogue has been, for years now, offering better political analysis. See their take on the imbroglio here.

*** Sorry, Yang Gang, but Yang has shown neoliberal worldviews in his various policy positions as the race has gone on, and is letting global corporations off the hook by overstating the automation and not mentioning the trade deals in the decimation of the mid west and elsewhere in the US. His stances against a federal minimum wage and jobs guarantee, and his weak plan on health insurance, without even a public option, show he has assesses no value to unions and challenging corporate domination of the planet.

Drive by comments on the Iowa Debate held on January 14, 2020

I was at my first class for my "alternative licensure" public school teacher's program at our local community college last night and missed the debate. Still, I read about it thereafter.

I laughed at the LA Times coverage of last night's debate because the main article summarizing the debate did not focus on Bernie's foreign policy answers, while the LA Times reporters live blogging the debate--which I read late last night--said it was his strongest moment, as did the writers at The Nation magazine. I give the Times writers credit for not focusing too much on the personal imbroglio between Sanders and Warren, though.

The Times did have two inside the front page section articles on the imbroglio, however.  In reading the articles, I winced as I read Warren's big applause line about she and "Amy" being the only ones to never lose an election. First, neither has run for president before and Biden and Bernie have. Biden never lost a race except for president and Bernie since winning the first time in 1990 for Congresspeople, has never lost a race except for president. And remember, Nixon lost in 1960, lost the gov race in 1962, and then won in 1968. Reagan lost in 1976 and then won in 1980. 

But what really stood out to me was Warren's opening phrasing on the subject, where she said, "now that this issue has been brought up." I was stunned because it was Warren herself who brought up this issue, in a most cynical move, intending to imply Sanders is a sexist (or else why bring it up at this point at all?). I immediately flashed onto Nixon, and said to myself, That is so Nixonian. Nixon would say, after planting and building on stories of liberal opponents being soft on Communism, "some say my opponent is soft on Communism, but not me." 

Then, for Warren not to shake Bernie's hand, and stand there with arms folded showed a streak that is not nice at all, and was pathetic to me. Yes, Bernie could have said there was a misunderstanding, as I have. However, based upon his entire--and I mean entire--history of a strong belief in women becoming the president of our nation, Bernie had more than the right to deny the accusation. Rebecca Traister, a person who was willing to criticize HRC in 2015-2016 from time to time, but a real Bernie hater in that period, has provided a more subtle analysis saying there is no sexism in believing a woman can't win in 2020 against Trump. Still, that was the intended implication in the initial leaks to the press, and it is why this imbroglio falls squarely on Warren. At this point, one wonders, as does Traister, what it does for both campaigns. Sad how trivialities over a single conversation can lead to ignoring substantive issues in this dangerous time. I am not feeling too hopeful about our species right now...:(

And on some further substance, I really winced at the CNN questioner who asked Bernie why a single payer medical insurance plan would not bankrupt the country.  That questioner earned her paycheck for her corporate executive bosses.  How many times do we have to repeat that the Koch Bros. funded study, designed to show single payer is bad, instead showed single payer saves trillions--yes, trillions--over the current system.  And worse, how come nobody gets asked about the cost of saving or ending the ACA/Obamacare, or adding a public option?  The discourse we have in the corporate owned media is precisely tuned and designed to promote the interests of the private insurance companies at the expense of public health.  The late Ure Reinhardt, Princeton professor specializing in medical insurance economics, understood this from painstaking years of research and analysis, and his conclusions are unassailable.  Yet, here we stand with corporate media propaganda pushing fear into people's heads.

God, I hope this imbroglio with Warren's accusation goes away.  We have way too important things to argue about.  However, if it continues to be discussed, I am now hoping it backfires on Warren for the cynical moves she has made, and be criticized for that handshake refusal after the debate.  Don't count on corporate media punditry to see things that way, but one wonders how that will be interpreted.

More fallout, and who benefits? Putin.

This threat from the UK, i.e. to pull away from a deeper alliance with the US, complicates Boris Johnson's publicly stated plan to bring the UK closer to the US rather than Europe. If this threat is followed through, the UK may have to consider, um, China, or er, Russia. 

The Putin plan, which includes using his compromised protege in the White House to undermine US alliances in Europe, Asia, and now the UK, sure is working well for Putin.

What I continue to note is how much I detest the American Empire, and find myself uncomfortable worrying about Trump's national security threat with the strange bedfellows such as Max Boot or other Cold Warriors.  I also understand the complicated Russian-based history of the Crimean region in Ukraine, particularly after Stalin's genocide of the kulaks, and replacement with Russian nationals there.  I understand the point made against US intervention against Assad, which is Assad at least is a secular oriented dictator, unlike the ISIS and Shi'ite Muslims who live in a world more akin to the 14th Century, except for their own version of Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.  Further, I have long wondered at what NATO has been doing once the Soviet Union collapsed, why Europe just doesn't pay 100% for its own militaries, and was a hawk about US intervention in the former Yugoslavia region starting in 1991 through 1996, but then, became more convinced by Chomsky's arguments in 1998, as Milosevic was falling already and the argument over intervention was whether there should be UN troops brought in (Serbian parliament position) or NATO troops brought in (US and European position).  As it turned out, UN troops were eventually brought in after relentless US bombing of the region, and horrible casualties and destruction, and Kosovan reprisals were nearly as bad as the initial Serbian attacks.  In short, a mess. 

That mess is the usual fare for a foreign policy bent on Empire and continual interventions. The question remains whether a foreign policy based upon diplomacy and a true last resort use of force (such as the good our nation was actually doing with respect to the Kurds, and who Trump simply walked away from, to the benefit of Turkey, Iraqis who mean us no good, and ultimately Russia) can work.  I continue to believe the climate change crisis provides the opportunity to lessen tensions as we move forward as a planet.  I continue to believe we are at a point in the development of a global economy, one which I have long opposed on the basis of it being corporate-oriented and anti-people and anti-environmental, where we may be able to lift up people out of poverty in a way that is humane, and which provides strong birth control to people transitioning from subsistence farming to factory and other service worker statuses.  However, within this belief is a concern that the US simply leaving the world affairs stage in internal chaos, and leaving a vacuum for Russian and Chinese oligarchs, combined with global corporate power, is an invitation to the worst sort of return to feudalism, and the potential for mass murder on a scale that would outdo the more limited geographical carnage of World War I and the post-World War I Bloodlands of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

I don't control a thing.  I write only to make sure I am not just raving at the Folks' television set, where they still watch corporate cable news (thankfully, they are watching more and more TCM and sports, which lessens the effect of corporate propaganda that limits the scope of debate, discourse, and deliberation).  But these are dangerous political times, times where we are losing faith in open government (what we used to call small "d" democracy and small "r" republican values), and where I see our salvation in one person, this time Bernie Sanders.  We lose him, and I see nobody who can truly carry his vision in the presidency--and with imperial presidencies reinvigorated after the 9/11/2001 attacks on the US, this is an extra dangerous moment.  The majority of our nation's Boomers and addled Oldsters are in full "I've got mine/Get off my lawn" mode*, and would easily end open government, freedom of movement, and a culture that embraces pluralism, freedom of expression, and diversity in religion, genders, clothes worn, and music and the arts heard, seen, or created, all for "security" with as much white supremacy as can be gotten away with.

I have not felt this way about an American election year since 1968 when my near 11 year old self felt something change when RFK was gunned down in Los Angeles on June 5th of that year  This is what I call a focal point year, a phrase I used in the original sci-fi opening to my novel about RFK surviving 1968.  It means we are dependent on one person who can unite across the usual barriers and who has vision to move us forward in the best sense, and not backward in the worst sense.  For those who argue against the hero in history, they are too focused on institutions.  To those who affirmatively think institutions are the only way we evaluate a society or historical moment, they are missing the emotional and often very human ingredient of the right person at the right time. Both individuals and institutions matter. However, right now, what is doubly troublesome is our society is far more unequal and the institutions are far more geared away from workers than in 1968, even while the corporate Human Resources Departments are more sensitive to diversity of the social constructs of race, ethnicity, and gender that have often created independent "cultures" over millennia.

Meanwhile, I find I have to get into what are, to me, petty arguments on FB about other candidates, including Warren, who I continue to be disappointed with for not understanding precisely these issues and how to change direction in a manner that does not leave behind a significant number of working people and the poor.

* Look at what happened in this small Connecticut town's Board of Education. An election turned on the removal of a Native American type of high school mascot.  Nothing about people voting on questions of budgets, trauma-based learning, modes of learning, etc.  All corporate media style of outrage and hurt feelings.  The photo shows who showed up at a meeting where the more politically correct mascot name was removed.  A later article showed a photograph of young people and Native Americans in the community came out to protest the reinstatement of Native American type of mascot, known as "The Redmen."  One hates to see generations fight, as there are going to be so many exceptions to the "generalizing," but that is part of what may be coming in the chaos if we do not elect a person with vision of a more humane way. Worse, there is the "I've got mine" endemic in labor unions, where workers in Nevada are critical of single pay Medicare for All because they happen to have a good insurance plan for now--though I bet it does not allow them to travel outside the state for cancer, heart or other care; and they don't realize under the single payer system, they won't worry about losing their jobs and can actually bargain directly for better wages and work conditions.  Sigh.  We are then back to Michael Harrington's astute, and possibly too optimistic analysis, that we return to socialist principles with open government as a foundation and the respect for individuals rendered as important as community.  Harrington's pleading hope was to look at the wreckage from corporate power and oligarchs and say, When all else fails, let's try to be nicer to each other and help each other.

Seeds of Brexit sowed inside Thatcherism

This extraordinary review (in the London Review of Books) of the 1,000 plus page Volume III (!!!) of the Thatcher biography informs us, rather less than directly, how Thatcher ensured the later European Union's weakness, arising from her hostility to a European project, and then wanted to expand the European super government to Eastern Europe, which is what led so many of them to freely move to Great Britain, England and Wales largely, that set up the backlash in those two areas. 

The reviewer, David Runciman, has buried the lede in my not humble view, but I understand how he was more caught up in the Tory male led coup against Thatcher in 1990 and John Major, her protege and then heir apparent for the personal enemies she made, ascending to the prime minister position.  I get why he would focus on the fourth term win for the Tories over a divided Labour Party with a leader who overestimated his ability to overcome the challenges he faced. But in the end, it is disappointing he did not recognize more directly how Thatcher's right wing politics continue to infuse and energize British political diminution and eventual self-destruction.  He sort of says this at the end of his piece, but he seems to not understand the anti-Establishment impulse that led to Corbyn's ascension into the leadership of the Labour Party is a harbinger of more divisions among the working and middle classes inside Great Britain, at a time when the finally coming Brexit will highlight and exacerbate those differences.

Elsewhere in the LRB is Susan Pedersen, reviewing two other books about the Thatcher-Blair era, and recognizing the continuities, much as I have long recognized the continuities between the Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama eras.  Here is an early paragraph showing her astute understanding of the past forty years and our roles as Boomers in this devolution on both sides of the Atlantic:

"We have a term, then (i.e. neo-liberalism) but we’re only now beginning to have a history. It leans towards intellectual genealogy (neoliberalism traced to the Mont Pelerin group, or to Austrian economists, or American neocons) or to institutional analysis, as each element of our global order (tax havens, financial markets, welfare-to-work systems, enterprise zones) is brought under the microscope. But there is a bottom-up history of neoliberalism to be written too: a history, perhaps, of how the most common and human desires – for decent homes, better schools for our children, better healthcare for our parents, richer and happier lives – were used to help bring a solidaristic social order down under the rubric of ‘choice’. How on earth do we understand that? These two smart, forensic, geographically situated, and analytically complementary accounts of aspects of the postwar order offer some clues. (I should say that I know both the authors.)"

As I have said about us Boomers, and the addled Oldsters, we are all complicit.  And here is another source of proof for my observation about mass complicity among us Boomers and Oldsters. I give you Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who stole from the Red Line mass transit money for Baltimore and handed it out to whiter and wealthier suburbs for infrastructure work, all while self-dealing.