Maybe a single payer approach may be less expensive, and cover more people?

Uwe Reinhardt sighs from The Great Beyond, as he hears people reading this article from The American Prospect, complete with a couple of handy charts, and asking why we can't have what he supported most of his adult life.

Henry Kissinger was a self-promoting war criminal, and part of the military-industrial complex

This New Yorker essay-review of a new book on Henry Kissinger is okay, but not nearly as great as it could have been. The essay-review backs into Kissinger's ambition, his phony "realism" in foreign affairs, and the monstrous things he did as a National Security Council adviser to Nixon, and later Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford. What the essayist never quite understands, however, is Kissinger's place in American foreign policy of the past sixty-five years. The writer thinks Kissinger's influence is overstated in our popular perceptions, and that there is some mythology at work, as much from Kissinger as both his detractors and sycophants. This is close to reality, but not nearly enough. What needed to be made explicit is Kissinger is overrated in terms of any real knowledge about European history, his abjectly ignorant and racist assumptions about "Third World" history and politics, and how Kissinger was simply a very public part of the American foreign policy establishment. The essayist is correct Kissinger styled himself a "realist," and he was--though in a most cynical sense of self-promotion. Kissinger lacked Hans Morgenthau's and George Kennan's integrity, and that is why he is still feted among the elite power corridors in American political life through today. 

The most insightful Kissinger biography remains Sy Hersh's 1983, The Price of Power, notwithstanding the New Yorker essayist's glib and highly inaccurate dismissal of Hersh's book. The essayist is wrong to dismiss Hersh's book as describing Kissinger as "an unhinged paranoiac." I read Hersh's book in its first release in 1983, and often used the book as a guide to which I returned again and again. In approaching Hersh's book for the first time, I did not come to the book as a newcomer on the subject, as I already had extensive knowledge about Kissinger, including reading various books on the Nixon administration, Nixon's foreign policy in Cambodia, Chile, Iran, and, of course, in Vietnam. In college, at Rutgers, I had read Kissinger's book on nuclear weapons, and had a professor at Rutgers who studied under Kissinger. The professor would tell us students stories about Kissinger, from the mundane, such as how boring Kissinger was as a lecturer, to more substantive information, including the details of the Nixon administration wiretaps on Kissinger's former subordinates at the National Security Council, including Roger Morris and Morton Halperin, who had naively joined Kissinger in working for the Nixon administration, thinking Kissinger was going to end the War Against Vietnam.

Other than the early life of Kissinger well told in this essay, not much dealt with in Hersh's book, it is Hersh's book which remains a powerful, wide-ranging, informative and exciting read. The essayist's description does no honest service in describing the book. There is information the essayist would have known had he truly engaged with Hersh's book. For example, Hersh had the goods on Kissinger playing double agent in advising the Humphrey and Nixon campaigns during the 1968 presidential election, making the supposition The New Yorker essayist makes about Kissinger likely getting a nod in a Humphrey administration more accurate than the essayist appears to know. Hersh also showed, contrary to Kissinger's denials, Kissinger went along with, and supported the wiretaps on his own aides. However, Hersh admits Kissinger had reason to believe Morris, Halperin, or Watts were the people leaking information about the Nixon administration's secret and illegal bombings of Cambodia to the New York Times reporters (Edwin Beecher and Hersh himself), though the wiretaps failed to show that. Hersh also understood, as did William Shawcross in Shawcross' book on Nixon's policies in Cambodia, that the idea for "Vietnamization" came from US Generals Abrams and Wheeler. The policy is not something Nixon or Kissinger thought up themselves. The idea was to increase bombings in North Vietnam, bomb the "sanctuaries" in Cambodia, and even bomb Laos--with the goal these peasants and their communist leaders would beg for peace on US terms. In pursuing this set of policies, these military and political leaders ignored our own military's analyses of bombings' effects on non-developed nations' civilian populations, which tends to be that such people become more entrenched, and feel they have nothing to lose by continuing the fight against a foreign invader. All of these men were highly overrated as military or political strategists, and operated from an assumption of racist superiority and cruelty.

The essence of Hersh's political-journalistic biography is that Kissinger was a player who rose to the top levels of the American military-industrial complex and establishment. Hersh also exposed Kissinger as overrated with respect to his historical scholarship, narcissistically arrogant, and an ass-kisser of those who held political power.  It is a terrible thing for the essayist to reduce Hersh's book to a partial sentence that makes Hersh's book sound dramatically ridiculous.*

Overall, I found the essayist to have been unaware of what Chomsky correctly sees as continuities in American foreign policies. The focus on Kissinger as a merely self-promoting individual is fine as far as it goes. However, the essayist failed to see how Kissinger knew how to envelop himself within the heart of the American post-World War II foreign policy establishment, almost from the start of his career. The American Empire is a machine, though it is a machine which does not operate cleanly or efficiently in the sense of a lockstep. Nonetheless, there is a clear pattern of duplicity from foreign policy spokespeople and leaders. There is a pattern of the promotion of sociopaths who populate the foreign policy establishment, and those who promulgate policies which thrive on cruelty and destruction, nearly always in an effort to enforce corporate power and "expanded markets." There is rarely any public understanding of the various foreign policy moves as anything other than mere "mistakes" or seeing our mayhem, death, and destruction as somehow occurring because we are too nice. One has to read the internal memoranda, and parse the words of our leaders and their advisers, to see the ugliness and cruelty beneath. The New Yorker could have had any number of more informed writers review the new Kissinger biography, and failed in its choice of essayists.

* The irony, too, is the essayist may not have been aware of the novelist Joseph Heller's acerbic, brilliant novel, Good as Gold (1979), which was as thin a veiled attack on Kissinger as could be. Heller was incensed at the mythology surrounding Kissinger, particularly Marvin and Bernard Kalb's (two then-major television news reporters) ridiculously fawning biography of Kissinger. Heller knew a lot of insiders at Harvard, DC, and elsewhere, and did his own research into Kissinger, which led to the novel, which exposed Kissinger nearly as brilliantly as Hersh did four years later. And yes, I read that novel when it was released. I remember reading the novel in its initial release, and was stunned at how well Heller had captured Kissinger as Bruce Gold, the book's protagonist. Good as Gold was a type of novel more prevalent in the early 20th Century than by the late 1970s or certainly today, where a novelist takes a major or even not so major cultural or political figure, and sharpens their pen to puncture the person. The legendary journalist, screenwriter, and novelist, Ben Hecht, wrote Count Bruga (1926) and A Jew in Love (1931), which were thinly veiled attacks on political and cultural figures, one in Europe, and one in the US. A Jew in Love has very ugly anti-Semitic overtones, though Hecht was himself Jewish in his religious tradition. Hecht later repented about this, and became a devotee of the most reactionary and militant strains of Zionism, which is itself a wild topic to pursue additional reading. Somerset Maugham wrote a darkly mischievous take on Paul Gauguin, in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), which also provided a brilliant understanding of a tormented artist at work on his art. Maugham later wrote a whimsically mischievous take on the then-high and mighty, but late, British Empire era novelist, Hugh Walpole, in Cakes and Ale (1930), though some thought there were elements of the then only recently deceased, Thomas Hardy, of whom I remain a great fan, having read every Hardy novel, and a couple of biographies. These examples of this type of novel are only the ones I have read. There are many, many more of this type of novel in the history of novels over the past two centuries.

Hypocrisy all around on the Reade-Biden matter

I have said from the start that this allegation from Tara Reade against Biden is about corporate media bias, and particularly CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, as the bastions of corporate media liberals and NeverTrump conservatives--elitists all. There is no doubt in my mind that, if Reade had made this allegation against Bernie Sanders, we would have seen Tara! Tara! Tara! at all these outlets--and every damning bit of information against Reade (fraud, Putin-love, etc.) would have been greeted with attacks on the person raising those issues, not poor Tara, the "victim."  I have consistently said we should be far more careful to examine circumstances, and to ask tough questions of the accused and accuser, especially after a number of years have gone by, and to ask for corroboration pro- and con regarding the accused and accuser.  But, that was not the standard the National Organization for Women, corporate media "feminist beat" writers, and politicians in the Democratic Party of recent vintage have given to any number of men. Suddenly, though, we have to defend Joe Biden with all the arguments we were previously told we should never make against any woman accuser.

When people say, What about Trump? I respond Trump is not relevant to this point made above.  We already know Trump, and Republican politicians, media, and voters have no credibility on this subject. Also, unlike Biden, Trump has a pattern of at least four women who have made the very type of allegation of grabbing women's private parts, and Trump's own admission on the Access Hollywood show tape (also contained as a link within the previous link).  

Again, though, what I am trying to focus on, and it is stunning to me how few understand me when I try to say this, is the hypocrisy from all these players in the Republican and Democratic Parties, and their media allies. Here is a very good National Review op-ed (I know, National Review and me have been sorta friendly lately for their great attacks against Trumpist lies regarding the coronavirus) regarding Reade's allegations and Democratic Party hypocrisy, especially compared to Dr. Ford's allegations against Kavanaugh. The op-ed reminded me how Dr. Ford could not recall, and was not consistent, about precisely when or where the incident with Kavanaugh and his buddy took place.  See this one sided take on Dr. Ford, but one that we can readily identify in style as to how Reade's allegations are being discussed among Democratic Party stalwarts, such as this ex-prosecutor writing in USA Today about Reade. Ford's inability to be consistent about where and when was on top of her having offered no corroborating evidence from any witness, other than her psychologist or psychiatrist starting in 2012, decades after the event. One may ask why Dr. Ford didn't come forward when Kavanaugh had sailed through to become a judge on the second highest court in the land, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. I know that is not the same as a Vice President, but surely she ought to have heard about that or heard his name, as that does make some news. The NR op-ed does a good job (not everywhere, but certainly on everyone but AOC, which was a stretch) of showing Democratic Party hackery in their rallying around Biden, who is rarely if ever questioned as to his lies over the years at the establishment media, as one tries to make sense of Reade's allegation.*

However, here is right-wing, Republican operative and partisan, Mona Charen, with an op-ed (which the NR article linked to, showing great integrity on the part of the NR writer) showing Republican mendacity and hypocrisy regarding the Tara Reade allegations. She, at least, is making a more consistent case because she was a vociferous defender of Kavanaugh, and has been a major opponent of the entire "believe women" premise, to a point where I have felt like more of a feminist than Charen for decades--I have read Charen for over a quarter century.  

I just wish people would stop trying to explain to me why we should not believe Tara Reade. I get that Reade's allegation merits skepticism. What these people don't get is how all these people who screamed for believing Dr. Ford against Kavanaugh, and continue to scream against Trump, are suddenly using the very type of arguments they said nobody should ever use against an accusing woman. I didn't buy into that standard then, and I don't buy into it now.  What I also consistently say is corporate media--whether FoxNews, AONN, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, Washington Examiner, NY Times, NY Post, etc.--is elitist and corporatist, and that media is not our friend. That media can bury or exult us, depending upon whether the pooh-bah who run it like you or not.  The sooner we as citizens get this, the better off our Republic will be.

* And yet, regarding Dr. Ford's allegation against Kavanaugh, I ended up believing Ford because Kavanaugh had so pathetically lied about the meaning of the various sexual innuendos in his yearbook, and his drunken sprees and black outs, and showed no sympathy for Ford at all--or the one other woman, who was clearly seen by the football players as "loose"--and who had no idea she was seen that way, which hurt her terribly in a public spotlight.  Biden's responses included some word salad, par for his course, but he looked a lot better than Kavanaugh in his denials, and again, the Reade allegation is very different from every other woman, and Reade's own previous statements just last year, as to Biden. But those people who she confided the sexual assault story in the 1990s cannot be just ignored, either, unless one says, maybe she was making that up for sympathy back then. Also, while Biden lies about various issues and events, I don't see anything close enough to the allegations, unlike with Kavanaugh. It is, therefore, a house of mirrors--and it is why I am focused far more on the hypocrisy in standards and the way corporate media did its best to bury the story for so long. The difference between now and a decade or so ago is, but for, social media and YouTube, the story would have stayed buried. 

Biden or NotBiden?

There are two well written, but diametrically opposed, essays on whether to endorse Biden or not endorse Biden at this point, which I believe any concerned citizen who are not Trumpist should read.  The first one, which is saying endorse and vote for Biden, is from a former 1960s radical, Max Elbaum.  Elbaum sees Trump as an existential threat to the Republic. The second is from a Salon writer, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, who cites much more factual data, and comes to the conclusion Biden is not worth supporting, nor is the Democratic Party's national leadership worth supporting.  I stand with the latter strategically in May 2020 because it is ridiculous to me to endorse Biden without making him concede the moment, and without making the Democratic National Committee, and their enablers in corporate media, sweat with fear.  One may criticize both articles for not stating the best argument the other has offered, but I think lurking beneath Elbaum's essay is the historical analogy to Germany in the period of 1932-1933, as Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and Germany was off to the races toward World War II and the Holocaust.

With respect to that analogy, I ask readers to look, once again, at the last footnote in my long post from a few weeks ago. I am more clear than ever that the whole "Don't be like the German Communists, who gave us Hitler" argument is wrongheaded, and is a reflection of a failure of historically-based reading comprehension and judgment that is being weaponized for the profesional-managerial and business classes. If we read that footnote at the end of my long post, we see it is German Social Democrats who failed, not the Communists. The German Social Democrats did not want a coalition. They wanted capitulation, and demanded the Communists trust them when, just a few years before, the German Social Democrats had stood with the business classes against the Communists at a time when the Communists had the upper hand in the general strikes pervading major cities in Germany. Yes, the Comintern, in November 1932, had told the German Communist Party not to coalesce with the Social Democrats, who they called Social Fascist (owing to that previous experience, one must say). However, if World War I proved anything, it was that people more often go with their nations more than an international ideology. Had the German Social Democrats offered real compromise to the Communists, there would have been a split among Communists, and the ones in the Reichstag who were elected would have likely and largely agreed to that coalition. 

Worse for those using the wrongheaded analogy, the reason Hitler gained power at the end of 1932 and the start of 1933 was because the business community coalesced with monarchists and leading Catholic clergy to demand Hindenburg put Hitler in charge, even though the Nazis, in the time between the July 1932 and November 1932 elections, lost 35 seats in the Reichstag and lost five percent of their already far less than majority of the vote (37% to 32%, in round numbers). Finally, does anyone think the Social Democrats were going to tell the Brits and French that reparations would no longer be paid, and use mass government investment to put Germans to work in the searing days of the Great Depression?  They were passive-defensive in their entire approach to politics.  Thus, I say we have the whole 1932-1933 German political history story backwards.  The German Communists were not free of blame, but certainly not the main causes for Hitler's rise. 

So, with that excursion into historiography completed, where are we today? I agree with the former 1960s radical we are potentially in a fascistic and perhaps Nazi-like moment with respect to Trump. However, I also agree with the Salon writer that Biden and the business class are completely failing to understand the moment, and must restore the social contract with fundamental reforms they continue to refuse to do. Elbaum misses the significance of Biden suddenly bringing on board Larry Summers as a top adviser, and how the VP short list includes only corporatists like himself. The corporate Dems are the Social Fascist/Social Democrats if one wants to use the analogy in any proper way. Further, as with the business class with Hitler, it is clear the business class has essentially thrown in their lot with Trump, as this article in The New Yorker shows (though the article makes Prescott Bush sound like a near "liberal," when he was an enabler of Hitler in the 1930s, and a supporter of fascist reaction through World War II and beyond). What The New Yorker article shows is the comfortable will almost always be more likely to side with fascists and Nazis for purposes of holding onto their personal wealth. However, when we look at the weak, passive-defensive worldview of the corporate Democrats, we see how the way in which I interpret the German political-historical period of 1932-1933 is playing out in a way which shows how the corporate Democrats and business class are coalescing in a manner which is leading to a second term for Trump. They hold the political power, and are not interested in broadening any coalition that would enact reforms to help regular people. They are the ones ignoring the cries of the people, and are content to have half of Americans not vote, as those are more often the poor and working class. They think they will be able to keep the comfortable comfortable, rather than focus on the needs of the working classes and the poor. These people have no respect for their children's future. They have no respect for people of color, other than hanging with the Oprah-Whoppi set, and virtue signaling with people like pro-white/anti-minority criminal justice system supporter, and corporate tool, Kamala Harris. They are the ones who work much harder to defeat the large progressive base in the Democratic Party, and would rather risk a second term for Trump.

If the corporate Democrats had any strategic political sense, and truly wanted to defeat Trump, Sara Nelson would be on the vice president nominee short list. Nelson is truly pro-labor to get labor voters out in Rust Belt states. And we already know minority voters are much smarter about not looking at superficialities as skin color for a candidate. The two top candidates African-Americans and Latinos supported were Biden (mostly older African-Americans) and Sanders (younger African-Americans and Latinos across ages). They will see very clearly how Sara Nelson is on their side.

I hope this is finally clear to Boomers and Oldsters. You want to protect your children's and grandchildren's future? Don't give in to the Biden Inevitability this early in the negotiations, especially as we see the rank hypocrisy with respect to the Tara Reade allegations. Stand up and with the Millennials and Gen-Zers. As I keep saying, the Kids are not only alright.  The Kids are right.  We Boomers and Oldsters are the ones who should be lectured, and, really, it is past time to bury the bad historical analogy about how Hitler gained power in Germany--or at least more properly apply it to the people in power, not the outsiders.

The murder of an African-American jogger in Georgia is the latest in the pattern of American institutional and cultural racism

I realize now how much I don't miss on FB my Trumpist high school classmates, now retired in Florida, and living on union pensions or accumulated wealth owing to white privilege as much as any individual gumption, who were all in favor of George Zimmerman, while telling me how Treyvon Martin was a "thug." With this latest killing of an unarmed young African-American male, we see white supremacist, anti-African American racism rearing its head from behind the shadows again. The stupid looks on their faces in their mug shots, where they seem to wonder why anyone would think they have done wrong, is coupled now with the classic white racist lie about motivation, i.e. "African-Americans coming into our neighborhood to commit crimes--so all African-Americans are suspected 'thugs.'" 

It may be interesting to compare how the Newark, NJ rebellion/riots started in 1967. An African-American taxi driver named John Smith was pulled over and beaten by white police officers serving the entire city of Newark. It seems someone in the white ethnic part of Newark had described an African-American as committing a robbery there, but had nothing else other than skin color to describe the person. The police, after beating the crap out of Smith, said, "Tell your (n-word) friends to stay out of our neighborhoods." I am going from memory here, as the wording was set forth in Tom Hayden's "Rebellion in Newark" (Hayden had been working in Newark and had an on-the-ground view of what was happening), so it is not an exact quote, but the circumstances are essentially correct. This beat down of John Smith, which was rather typical of the Newark police department (an audit after the rebellion/riot proved this), was enough for the African-American community in Newark. As spontaneous protests began, the police response was of course oppressive--and well, people familiar with the Newark riots know what happened next.  I should say, too, I learned from an elderly neighbor of ours in Avenel, NJ, where I grew up, who owned a movie theater in Newark, which was unharmed in the rebellion/riots.  He was an old Italian guy, who, ironically, knew my great-grandfather, who owned a nearby pizzeria in the 1930s.  Tony Feo was the movie owner's name, and he told me, without knowing a thing about Tom Hayden or Hayden's book, that what happened was African-Americans fighting back against racist cops, largely Italian and Irish heritage, he admitted. I asked him why his movie theater was not hit with the property based violence, and he replied it was likely because he treated the little black kids the same as white kids, and if they were a little short in money, he would let them in to see the latest films.  He said, during the near week of violence, there were black men with guns stationed outside his movie theater--he didn't ask for that, it was just done--and whenever he needed to go from his home or to the theater, there were armed black men to take him to and from the location.  This was true for his daughter, who was still living with him at the time.  This conversation I had with Tony Feo was around 1972, a year before we moved from Avenel to Colonia, NJ.  It was not until a couple of years later I came across the Tom Hayden book, and was stunned at how much of what Hayden said had been confirmed by Tony Feo, who, trust me, was no big liberal.  He just saw what he saw and reported it to a young man, me, willing to listen.

I bring up this example so we don't go completely "To Kill a Mockingbird" on the South per se, where we in the North and West get to go, "tut-tut" against white Southerners, as if "we" are the enlightened people. Yes, it remains true the American South is overall the most violent and virulent region in the United States History of racist violence against African-Americans. However, it is not as if the North or Western regions are so wonderfully enlightened, either. The truth we need to face and continually remind ourselves about is we live in a nation where there are embedded racist attitudes within institutions and in our culture. Our nation is not unique in this, of course. However, that racist culture and history remain a stain on any of our professed Fourth of July philosophical values.

This guy. The Funky Academic speaks!

Irami Osei-Frimpong.

He takes awhile to get to the point, but man, the points he makes along the way, and his quick recall of deep American history, is off the charts (Though The Wife said, Oh my, he sounds like you, Mitchell!). Yeah, he does, but I love his phrasing about what rights really mean, which is securing the social conditions to truly be free. And his inside information about what the Biden camp said to the Congressional Black Caucus is classic neo-liberal virtue signaling over real reform.  He makes one or two errors in his fast speaking, calling Trump Obama's predecessor, and says blacks have "superior" savings to whites, when he goes on in detail to show he meant "inferior."  He is asked at one point what he wants, and he gets it, federal jobs guarantee, as he knows how private sector employers don't often hire African-Americans, and the federal government is the employer of last resort, and often first resort for African-Americans, just as it was for Irish immigrants in northeast America in the late 19th Century.

The mask is off

William Barr on the abrupt dismissal of the charges against Michael Flynn, traitor: "History is written by the winners."

The thing I say about the Trump administration and the modern Republican Party is the mask is off. It is why I don't join in with the new found love for George W. Bush, and have no use for Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, and the NeverTrump Republicans who show up so often on MSNBC, and even on CNN. These people merely perfected a dog whistle for decades, and then finally lost control of that whistle when Trump said what people were thinking inside the Republican coalition.