The right-wing scumbags were after America’s Bernie Sanders last week. Having succeeded in defeating Labour in the elections over here, and Corbyn’s campaign to bring prosperity, dignity and empowerment to the British working class, they’re trying to do the same to America’s working people. They’ve started attacking Bernie’s cause of Medicare for All, whereby American people’s medical bills would be paid by the American state. 40 million people in the Land of the Free can’t afford medical insurance. 40,000 people every year die because they can’t afford medical treatment. In some states, people are hoarding medicines, including those prescribed by vets for animals, because they can’t afford drugs. But the Republicans and their corporate masters once again have started attacking Medicare For All in the interests of keeping the private healthcare companies’ profits high, and America’s working and lower middle class poor and sick. And they’ve also launched a few more personal attacks on Bernie himself. Last week several videos appeared on YouTube claiming that a member of his campaign team was a violent Communist.
I’m not surprised that a Communist would work for Sanders. The American Communist party seems to have a history of joining mainstream left-wing movements. Sometimes its to try and take them over, as Marxist parties have tried to do elsewhere in the West. And sometimes it’s simply to help them in their attempts to improve conditions for working people. In the 1950s and ’60s, I think, a number of Communists were found working for the Democrats.
They tried similar tactics over here with Jeremy Corbyn. Apart from smearing him as a Trotskyite and Stalinist, they also attempted to discredit him through one of his campaign team, Seaumas Milne. Milne really is a Stalinist, who continues to support the old thug. His views on Stalin are genuinely disgusting, but that doesn’t discredit everything else he does. His books and articles tearing modern capitalism to shreds are still excellent. And just because Milne admires the brutal dictator, it doesn’t follow that Corbyn does, and the chance of Milne setting up a similar dictatorship in Britain, even if he wanted to, is absolute zero.
There have been similar attempts to discredit other socialist parties and leaders through their employment of or work with Communists. I’ve been reading Bhaskar Sankara’s superb The Socialist Manifesto. This is his call for radical change in America, and its transformation into a genuinely socialist state in which workers actually manage the companies in which they work, share the profits, and enjoy a welfare state comparable to those of Europe, only rather more expanded. The first few chapters are a history of socialism in various countries from its Marxist roots. This covers the rise of Social Democracy in Germany, Communism in Russia and China, social democracy in Sweden and socialism in America. America has, surprisingly, a very long tradition of socialism and working class parties. But these failed to make it into mainstream politics through factionalism, inept leadership, missed opportunities and violent opposition from the American state and capital. Private corporations hired armed thugs to put down strikes, along with the police and army. The Communist party also contributed to this through its factionalism, its blind obedience to the Comintern line even when this conflicted with the local party’s and American people’s own interests in favour of that of the Soviet state’s, and attacks on rival socialist parties. They caused the collapse of one working class, socialist organisation by infiltrating it in order to turn it into a Communist satellite. At which point everyone else in the organisation left. The Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party did the same thing in Britain in the 1970s when they infiltrated the Anti-Nazi League.
But there also were instances where Communists and reformist socialists attempted to work together. This happened in the Congress of Industrial Organisations, founded in the 1930s by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers’ union. The CIO had a large rank and file, but needed skilled leaders and organisers, and so drew on those from other socialist organisations. When it was pointed out to him that a large number of them were members of the Communist party, Lewis replied, ‘Who gets the bird? The dog or the hunter?’
Quite.
American Communism’s actually rather interesting, as it saw itself as firmly in the tradition of the American Revolution. And in contrast to the dull, crushing boredom of the Soviet Communist party, it also seems rather fun. The Party had a very strong social side to it, holding youth dances and other social events. It was also very strong on reaching out and defending Black Americans, which explains how Jackie Walker’s parents met. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist, and her father was of Jewish Russian descent. They met at a Communist civil rights event, if I remember properly.
They also revered the American Revolution and were, in their way, as patriotic as other Americans. When the Daughters of the American Revolution forgot their annual commemoration of Paul Revere’s ride, they had a man dress up as an 18th century minuteman and ride down Broadway in New York. They proclaimed ‘The DAR forgets, but the Communist party remembers!’ Another of their slogans was ‘Communism is 20th Century Americanism!’
Bernie Sanders is very far from being a Communist. His views are far more like those of mainstream European social democrats. There isn’t much about nationalisation in his book, Our Revolution, though he does favour worker cooperatives. He also doesn’t want to nationalise American healthcare. He just wants the government to pay people’s medical bills – hardly a radical suggestion from the European perspective. The Germans have had it since Bismarck’s Socialist Laws of 1875. But that, and Bernie’s concern to expand the American welfare state, restore union power and give working people proper employment rights – in effect, to undo forty years of Reaganomic misgovernment – is too much for American capital.
Communism fell in the 1990s. But socialism is alive and reviving. The world as well as America needs Bernie in the White House.
So let’s making Socialism 21st Century Americanism and Britishism!
Here’s a story that acutely shows the difference between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson: how they spend their Christmas hols. Zelo Street reported just before Christmas that the Scum was maligning Corbyn for disrespecting Her Maj. They found out that he wouldn’t be watching the Queen’s Speech on TV, and so threw themselves into another bout of righteous anger. However, the stats apparently show that Corbyn wouldn’t be alone. Something like ninety per cent of Brits don’t watch the Queen’s Speech either. Which means that if the Scum really represents 21st century Britain, 90 per cent of its staff are going to either. So it’s a case of more Tory press hypocrisy.
But Corbyn had good reason not to watch the Queen’s Speech. He does something rather more worthwhile on Christmas Day. He helps out at his local homeless shelter, something he’s done for years. He was also giving presents to underprivileged children.
But what of Johnson? To what worthy cause does this statesman of Churchillian stature – or so he sees himself – devote himself at the festive season?
The question’s a joke. He doesn’t.
Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, are preparing to jet off to Mustique to see in the New Year. That’s a private island in the Caribbean, home to the extremely rich. Johnson and partner will be staying with the von Bismarck’s, the descendants of 19th century German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Jagger has property there, and the island was the holiday destination of such royals as Princess Margaret and the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall.
Zelo Street quoted a number of Tweets from people, who really weren’t impressed with Johnson, and compared him very unfavourably with Jezza. They included
“Jeremy Corbyn spent Christmas helping the homeless and giving presents to children. Boris Johnson is flying off to the luxury Caribbean island of Mustique at the hospitality of the Von Bismarck family. Boris is working every day, you see, very hard to get Brexit done … Nothing says ‘man of the people’ quite like Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds’ £20,000-a-week Caribbean holiday villa … Nothing sticks it to those ‘elites’ like holidaying on a private Caribbeanisland after putting a couple of cronies in the House of Lords”.
And the article concluded
‘You voted Bozo to “Get it done”? It was you getting done. And now you all know it.’
Absolutely. Tory scaremongering and hypocrisy stopped people voting for a man, who would have worked tirelessly and genuinely improve the lives of ordinary people. And instead they elected an incompetent, narcissistic hedonist with a hatred of the poor, the disabled, gays and ethnic minorities.
But somehow Johnson is a ‘man of the people’. Which tells you all you need to know about how the Scum and Tory press see us.
Great news from across the Pond. According to today’s I for Thursday, 11th April 2019, the left-wing Democrat senator, Bernie Sanders, has launched his ‘medicare for all’ scheme to replace America’s current insurance-driven healthcare system with one in which the American state would pay people’s medical fees. The I’s report, ‘Sanders launches ‘healthcare for all’ plan, on page 25 runs
The US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders revealed his “Medicare for All” plan yesterday, shaking up the 2020 election by reopening the debate over his call to eliminate private health insurance.
Four of the senators who are rivalling Mr Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination are set to sign on to the updated single-payer healthcare proposal. The bill’s reintroduction promises to shine a light on Democratic presidential candidates’ disparate visions for the long-term future of American healthcare.
Some Democratic contenders, including former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, have criticized Sanders’ measure, which they say is political infeasible.
Under Medicare for All, Americans would no longer pay premiums or face insurance deductibles as the government-run system replaced private health insurance offered through employers.
This really is what America needs. Badly. Something like 20 per cent of all Americans can’t afford medical insurance, and, according to the statistics cited by Sanders in his book, Our Revolution, every year 40,000 Americans die because they can’t afford medical treatment. In some parts of the US, people are hoarding medicine because they have difficult affording it, and even use medicines prescribed by vets for animals. They’re even heading over the border to Mexico for dental treatment because it’s much, much cheaper over there. And medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the Land of the Free. The progressive American Left have been wondering for a long time why it is that the other nations of the Developed World can afford universal healthcare, but American can’t.
Opposing him, naturally, is the American private healthcare industry, the Republicans, and the Corporate, Clintonite Democrats. I think Hillary Clinton said several times that the country couldn’t afford state medicine, parroting the ideas of the Republicans. And if she didn’t say, her daughter, Chelsea, certainly did. And over here, the Tories and Blairite Labour, as well as the ‘Centrist’ Change UK, also want to privatise the NHS. Blair’s health secretary, Alan Milburn, wanted to see the NHS reduced to a kitemark on services provided by private healthcare providers. I don’t think Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize the American healthcare system. He just wants the state to pay for its citizens’ healthcare, as Germany has done for its people since Bismarck’s ‘Socialist Law’ of 1871 or so. And one of the reasons that there has been such opposition in British politics to Jeremy Corbyn is because he has promised to renationalize the NHS. Corbyn’s policies are massively popular, which is why the Right, both within and outside the Labour Party, has been reduced to smearing him as a Communist, or a supporter of Irish Republican terrorism – as we’ve seen from the Tories, the Right considers Loyalist terrorists perfectly acceptable – and now a raging anti-Semite, despite the plentiful evidence to the contrary.
The NHS is being destroyed before us, and if this continues, we will reach a situation like America, where it’s increasingly unaffordable to all but the very affluent. We need Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10 in Britain, and Bernie Sanders over in America. A transatlantic partnership that would roll back the horrors of neoliberalism, and start giving working people in both countries the healthcare they need and deserve.
I’m published many articles on this blog attacking the claim that Nazism was a form of socialism. It’s essentially a Conservative smear, intended to put people off anything remotely socialist, like state medical care, strong trade unions, an extensive and effective welfare state or the nationalisation of important industries, by associating these policies with the horrors of the Third Reich. The standard arguments for the socialist nature of the Nazi party is that they called themselves socialists and there were socialist elements in the 1922 Nazi party programme. In practice, however, Hitler was very firmly for private industry and was only willing to consider nationalisation if a business or agricultural estate was failing. He considered businessmen part of the biological elite following Social Darwinist ideology, and definitely did not want the workers to share in the profits of the companies they worked for. He was also bitterly opposed to ‘Marxist’ socialism, which meant not only Communism but the reformist socialism of the SPD, anarchism and the trade unions. The anti-capitalist elements of Nazi ideology were based on the Italian Fascist corporate state, which had its roots in syndicalism, but also in Italian Nationalism. And even then the Nazis in power did not create anything resembling the Italian corporatist system.
But aside from styling themselves ‘socialist’ to steal the clothes of the genuinely socialist parties and movements, the Nazis were also strongly influenced by extreme right-wing radical ideologues, who saw themselves as Conservatives. One of these was Moeller van den Bruck, whose 1923 book, The Third Reich, provided the Nazis with the name of their new order. Hitler met van den Bruck a year before the book’s publication, and was greatly impressed. So impressed that he wanted van den Bruck and himself to work together. But van den Bruck refused. Van den Bruck also called for a form of patriotic, indigenous German socialism, but considered himself a revolutionary Conservative. Noel O’Sullivan describes his views on pp. 144-7 of his book Fascism (London: J.M Dent & Sons 1983). He writes of van den Bruck’s view of Conservatism and revolution
Moeller’s starting-point, like that of other radical conservatives, was the belief that the only relevant form of conservative doctrine in the modern world is one which begins by accepting and embracing revolution, instead of by rejecting or suppressing it. ‘Conservatism and revolution co-exist in the world today’, Moeller wrote, with the result that the task now is to evolve ‘a conservative revolutionary thought as the only one which in a time of upheaval guarantees the continuity of history and preserves it alike from reaction and from chaos’. In the same context, he explained that ‘conservatism and revolution would destroy each other, if the conservative had not … the political wisdom to recognise that conservative goals may be attained even with revolutionary postulates and by revolutionary means’. The essence of the new, radicalised conservatism, then, is that it ‘seizes directly on the revolution, and by it, through it and beyond it saves the life of Europe and of Germany’. (pp.144-5).
On the following pages he describes the similarity between Moeller’s radical conservatism and Nazism. These were
Revolutionary conservatism was not the ideology of a party, but an entire worldview.
Revolutionary conservatism has no doctrine, but was a ‘war for life, for the nation’s freedom’.
Revolutionary conservatism was against rationalism and thus parliamentary democracy, capitalist economics and Bolshevik socialism.
This was to be achieved through a native, corporate German socialism which had descended from the remote past in the form of guilds and professional bodies.
This last point seems to me to be an attempt to find a suitable model from German history for corporate state of the type Mussolini was creating in Italy.
O’Sullivan then goes on to discuss how radical conservatism like van den Bruck’s could easily lead into Nazis, and van den Bruck’s reasons for rejecting the older, traditional form of conservatism. This was the older conservative ideal was too static to gain the support of masses. Hence the fall of the Second Reich of Bismarck and the Kaiser. The Third Reich, however, would have as its task the conquest of the political apathy of the masses. O’Sullivan concludes
In this respect, the affinity between the Nazi ideal, on the one hand, and Moeller’s vision of a ‘conservative revolution’ which could create a Third Reich, on the other, needs no comment: both envisaged a Third Reich based on the activist fervour of the masses. (p. 147).
Clearly van den Bruck’s revolutionary conservatism differs considerably from modern, parliamentary conservatism. Van den Bruck’s conception of it was an attempt to create a revolutionary, socialistic form of the old conservative opposition to political liberalism, based as this was on parliamentary democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, and ‘Bolshevik socialism’, which meant everything from Communism to democratic, reformist socialism. Modern Conservatism, however, has borrowed considerably from 19th century Liberalism in its promotion of free trade capitalism and parliamentary democracy, even if this latter is becoming increasingly restricted through legislation designed to keep the poor and ethnic minorities from voting under the pretext of combating voter fraud. On the other hand, modern Conservatism still retains the vehement hostility to trade unions and genuine socialist politics, which are being condemned by the right on both sides of the Atlantic as ‘cultural Marxism’. And there is a section of the Tory party, whose views and membership frequently intersect with the overtly Fascist parties and organisations.
This therefore poses a problem for those, who maintain that the Nazis must be socialists, because they claimed they were. By that standard, the conservative element in Nazism must also be taken seriously and accepted, because Moeller van den Bruck, whose ideas paralleled theirs and which they partly adopted, saw himself as a Conservative, albeit of a radical, revolutionary type. But don’t expect anyone in the Republican Party in America and the Tories over here to do so. Despite their support for Fascist monsters like Pinochet and other Latin American butchers and torturers, they’re very keen to deny they have any connection to real Fascism, which is really just socialism. At least, for the purposes of public propaganda.
Hillary Clinton was due to appear at the Cheltenham Literary Festival today, 15th October 2017, undoubtedly as part of her tour promoting her book, What Happened? In it, she tries to examine and explain how she came to lose the American presidential election to the orange maniac, whose now bringing us just that little bit closer to war with Iran, and nuclear Armageddon. Various American progressive and radical news shows, like The Young Turks, the Jimmy Dore Show and Secular Talk have extensively reviewed her book and ripped it to shreds very effectively. Some of the videos are quite long, but the problem with Hillary’s campaign can be summed up very simply: her. Clinton is a horrible person, and a horrible candidate. She is part of the corporate elite, personally corrupt in the sense that she is very much in the pocket of Wall Street and big business, and a warmonger, who was ramping up international tensions with Russia and China unnecessarily even before she lost the election. Now it’s even worse as she and the other corporatist Democrats try to cast the blame on Russian interference, rather than look much closer to home to the weakness of Clinton herself. She is massively out of touch with ordinary, working American people.
A majority of the population now want single-payer healthcare, like the rest of the Developed World. And which the Germans have had since Bismarck’s ‘Socialist Law’ of the 1870s, when the real Iron Chancellor tried to crush the rise of Germany’s Social Democrats by stealing a bit of their thunder. While Bernie Sanders has shown how America could easily afford it, and it would be cheaper both for the state and for ordinary Americans, Killary herself has declared that it’s ‘utopian’. Which is why it been working very well in Germany and the Scandinavian countries for more than a hundred years, and the French and Swiss have similar systems which mix state payment and private insurance. But this is still too far-fetched and difficult for the world’s only superpower.
Her record gets much worse when it comes to Black Americans. Bill Clinton was so popular with America’s Black population, and had the same easy charm that many of their politicians and celebrities have, that he was hailed as ‘the first Black president’. But Bill and his wife were responsible for putting in place the legislation that’s seen a massive proportion of Black men jailed for drug offences. She drew an artificial distinction between crack and ordinary cocaine, to make it appear that the one favoured by Blacks was a greater threat than the other, and so deserved greater punishment. Pushing this legislation, she talked about the threat of ‘superpredators’ at a time when this term was nearly exclusively used to describe young Black men.
On the world stage, she was responsible for arming Islamist rebels in Libya so that they overthrew Colonel Gaddafy. Gaddafy was certainly no saint. He was a dictator, who tortured and locked up his political opponents. But he kept the nation together and made sure that his country was paid a fair price for their oil after it had been run as an Italian colony from the late 19th century onwards. During the decades of his people’s struggle for independence, one third of the population was killed. It was a secular state, albeit one where the official ideology, as laid out in his Green Book, was a mixture of Islam and Arab socialism. There was free education and free healthcare. Libya was the most prosperous African country, and Gaddafy himself stood up for the continents’ rights in global affairs. And while he used the Islamists to assassinate his political rivals elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, they weren’t allowed to terrorise his people.
After Gaddafy was toppled, the country descended into civil war between rival factions, including the Islamists. It is still divided between two completing authorities. Its education and healthcare systems have been destroyed, and the Islamists have seized control of large parts of the country.
And then there’s the issue of the coup in Honduras. Up until 2012 or so, this had a liberal president, who actually wanted to raise the living standards of the peasants and urban working class, who were desperately poor, as well as protect the land and livelihood of the country’s indigenous peoples. And, as usually happens in South and Central America when the establishment is faced with the threat of a liberal regime, he was overthrown by a right-wing coup. This installed a Fascist dictator, who started rounding up, imprisoning, killing and torturing opposition leaders, activists and trade unionists. America has legislation designed to prevent it from supporting foreign coups. Killary decided to get around this by officially declaring that the coup wasn’t military, so that America could continue giving aid to the Fascist government.
And in her own party, Hillary was in cahoots with the head of the Democratic National Convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so that Democratic nominations were fiddled to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. Sanders was by far the better candidate, with far greater appeal to working Americans. But he’s a self-declared ‘Democratic Socialist’, who wants single-payer healthcare, a renewed American welfare state, stronger trade unions, and an altogether better deal for America’s poor and working people. And unlike the Clinton’s, Bernie has genuinely taken an interest in promoting the welfare of America’s ethnic minorities. He was one of the first, if not the first, mainstream American politician to go to the reservations of America’s First Peoples to seek their views on improving conditions for them.
But this was all too much for Hillary, whose entire electoral strategy consisted of turning against the party’s core constituency amongst blue-collar workers, Blacks and other minorities, to appeal to Republicans. Just like the Clinton’s mate, Tony Blair, pursued the Tory vote as the expense of the British White working class over here.
But Killary can’t accept any of that, and so blames everyone else in her book except herself, including Jill Stein, the head of the Green Party. Clinton’s tried to present herself as some kind of feminist, whose victory in the election would somehow be a step forward for America’s women, despite the fact that she would do nothing for them. Bernie was much more popular amongst the female population, because he promised women – and men – work and proper healthcare. As did Jill Stein. Stein was a doctor. I put up one of her election broadcasts I found on YouTube, in which Stein talked to a group of women about the necessity for a single-payer healthcare system. She stated unequivocally that it was especially needed for America’s women. And I don’t doubt for a moment that Stein’s absolutely right. From what I’ve seen, the cost of giving birth alone under the American private medical system is tens of thousands of dollars, so much so that American couples have to spend years saving up and then worrying if it’ll bankrupt them before starting a family. It’s a situation that also shows how hollow the Republicans’ concerns about the falling American birthrate is. Their solution is to try to ban abortion. I think Mussolini in Fascist Italy also did that. But he also passed legislation to give Italian women state aid in raising a family. It was part of the Fascists’ reactionary campaign to take women out of the workplace and back in the home and the kitchen, but even then it was far less reactionary in its methods than that of contemporary Conservativism.
The electorate knew that Hillary wasn’t going to do anything for ordinary women, and so voted for the other candidates. And so Killary responded by trying to smear Sanders as a misogynist, just as the Blairites in the Labour party tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn over hear. It hasn’t worked.
And Killary’s still trying to present herself as some kind of feminist ‘everywoman’. When she appeared on America’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon a few days ago, the show’s female writers and a tearful Miley Cyrus also appeared to write ‘thank you’ notes to her praising her for being such an inspiration to them. The Humanist Report produced the video below rightly critiquing not just Hillary, but also the other mainstream comedians, who have politicos on their show, whether the comedians are Fallon, Bill Maher or whoever. He attacks them because they are using their comedy to promote a corporatist agenda regardless of whether the politicians are from the Democrats or Republicans. The Report’s presenter urges his audience to watch intelligently and critically. They can’t and shouldn’t censor, but they should hold presenters and broadcasters, even himself, up to a higher standard.
I am very definitely not a Humanist, but it’s an excellent point that can’t be repeated too much. Here’s the video.
I wonder just how many of the really tough questions have been or will be put to Hillary at the Cheltenham Literary Festival today. My guess is that they’ll ask some awkward questions, but nothing too hard or likely to make her feel uncomfortable.
As for Hillary’s appearance in Britain, I was talking about it to a friend of mine in Cheltenham the last time I was up there a week or so ago. He told me that one of his American friends had wondered what she was doing over here. The obvious answer is that Britain has a special relationship with America, and American politics directly affects this country, and indeed the rest of the world. But his reply was different. He said: ‘Because you owe us an apology’.
When George ‘Dubya’ won the election in 2000, Americans went on social media to apologise to the rest of the world. I think something similar is needed now. But instead of ordinary Americans apologising, it should be Hillary apologising to the ordinary Joes and Josies across the US for being such a transparent corporate shill that she lost to someone as bigoted, stupid and murderous as Trump.
Yesterday I put up a story from the I, which reported that over half of British dentists were planning to leave the NHS in the next few years. If that happens, courtesy of Jeremy Hunt and the Tories’ plan to privatize the NHS, British dentistry might end up looking very much like this.
In this video from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano comment on a story broadcast on NBC. The news team there visited the town of Los Almagadones in Mexico, which now styles itself the ‘dentistry capital of the world’. The town has a population of 5,000, but has more than its fair whack of dentists. It has 600 practicing dentists, working in more than 300 clinics. 114 million Americans lack dental insurance, and so can’t afford dental treatment. And so some make the journey south of the border to get their teeth fixed.
Dore states that this will explode the myth of American exceptionalism – the idea that America is innately superior to every other nation. Clearly it isn’t. Not if many of its citizens are reduced to going abroad for healthcare. Dore points out that the stories of Canadians coming to south to America for their medical treatment is largely a myth. But the story that Americans are going to Mexico are very real.
He and Placone and Zamora also use the story as an opportunity to lambast the continuing racism against Mexican and Hispanic migrants in the US. Americans are going south of the border for what is known as ‘dental tourism’, but the Mexicans aren’t organizing mass protests or trying to shame them.
The three joke about the idea of combining tourism with dentistry, including building a combined nightclub and dental surgery, before Dore rounds of the video with a well-aimed attack on Hillary and the corporate Democrats. These are the politicos, who rigged the Democratic nominations so they could steal it from Bernie Sanders and give it to Killary. And she and they care only for the immensely rich, and are entirely happy to deny ordinary, middle class working Americans with single-payer healthcare. Because free, universal healthcare is ‘utopian’, despite the fact that the Germans have had it ever since Bismarck in the 19th century.
Bernie Sanders in his book describes vividly the deplorable lack of affordable healthcare in America. Many counties lack doctors, let alone hospitals, because the area is too poor to support one according to the law of free market economics. He tells how one Sunday every month, one of the dental surgeries in Virginia provides free dental treatment. People are so desperate for it they actually sleep in their cars overnight.
This is what British healthcare is going to be like, if Theresa May and the Tories get back in.
Today’s Counterpunch has a piece by the radical, progressive Democratic politician, Bernie Sanders, reblogged from the New York Times. In it, Sanders discusses the outrageous scandal that 28 million Americans have no medical coverage, despite the fact that their country spends more on healthcare than almost any other nation. He points out that this is because the insurance-based healthcare system is designed not to give Americans access to decent healthcare, but to enrich the companies’ executives and shareholders. He describes how many Americans cannot afford healthcare, and are forced to cut down on the drugs they need, simply because they cannot pay for them. He argues that the experience of Canada, and the Medicare programme brought fifty years ago, both show that single-payer healthcare is cheap, popular and effective.
He states that he intends to introduce a bill for Medicare for All into Congress next Wednesday, and outlines how he envisages an initial four year transition period from the current American system. He also makes it plain that there will be concerted opposition to his proposal.
His piece begins
This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?
We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be about.
All over this country, I have heard from Americans who have shared heartbreaking stories about our dysfunctional system. Doctors have told me about patients who died because they put off their medical visits until it was too late. These were people who had no insurance or could not afford out-of-pocket costs imposed by their insurance plans.
I have heard from older people who have been forced to split their pills in half because they couldn’t pay the outrageously high price of prescription drugs. Oncologists have told me about cancer patients who have been unable to acquire lifesaving treatments because they could not afford them. This should not be happening in the world’s wealthiest country.
Americans should not hesitate about going to the doctor because they do not have enough money. They should not worry that a hospital stay will bankrupt them or leave them deeply in debt. They should be able to go to the doctor they want, not just one in a particular network. They should not have to spend huge amounts of time filling out complicated forms and arguing with insurance companies as to whether or not they have the coverage they expected.
Even though 28 million Americans remain uninsured and even more are underinsured, we spend far more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation. In 2015, the United States spent almost $10,000 per person for health care; the Canadians, Germans, French and British spent less than half of that, while guaranteeing health care to everyone. Further, these countries have higher life expectancy rates and lower infant mortality rates than we do.
The state and state-funded healthcare systems of the European countries have contributed immensely to their people’s health and wellbeing, ever since Bismarck introduced it in Germany in 1875 in an attempt to steal working class votes away from the socialist SDP.
And it’s driving the Reaganites and Thatcherites of the corporate sector up the wall, because it denies them so much of the juicy profits that comes from the insurance-driven sector. That’s why the Tories over here have been privatizing the NHS piecemeal by stealth ever since the days of Maggie Thatcher. It’s why the corporate bosses of the big healthcare firms, like the fraudster Unum, came over here at the beginning of New Labour’s tenure in office to lobby Blair to privatize the NHS.
And it’s part of the reason the Blairites, Tories and Lib Dems, and their paymasters in big business and lackeys in the media, including the Beeb, fear and hate Jeremy Corbyn, as the Republicans and the corporatist Democrats around Hillary Clinton despise Bernie Sanders in the US.
Any civilized country has to demand proper medicine for its people, regardless of the demands of the corporatists to keep it the expensive privilege of the affluent. So, go Bernie! And may Corbyn also win in his fight to renationalize the NHS.
A few days ago I put up a post about the nightmare, alternative future described by the British SF novelist Stephen Baxter in his novel, Titan. Baxter’s a writer of hard SF, a subgenre in which the fiction is nevertheless grounded in solid, known science fact, though often with an element of artistic license. Titan was written in 1995, and is partly set in the decaying America of the first decades of the 21st century. A militantly anti-science president, Maclachlan, has been elected with the support of the Ku Klux Klan and Christian fundamentalists. Maclachlan shuts down NASA for good after a shuttle disaster. The launch complexes are closed down. Those that aren’t demolished become simply tourist attractions, as do the agency’s headquarters and mission control. One of these, a museum to the Apollo moon landings, is altered so that it promotes instead the spiritual experiences many of the astronauts did have during their missions. Maclachlan also introduces legislation demanding that only the Aristotelian cosmology of Thomas Aquinas, with its crystal spheres, is taught in schools. What is left of the agency is given over to the USAF under the paranoid and nationalistic General Hartle, who is very much like the rogue American General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s classic nuclear black comedy, Doctor Strangelove.
Against this, the agency attempts to launch one last, great space mission, a crewed voyage to Titan, where the Cassini probe has found evidence of active biological chemistry.
I commented in my post on the remarkable similarity between the policies of the fictional Maclachlan and Donald Trump. Maclachlan is fiercely nationalistic, and withdraws American peacekeepers from their stations around the globe, as well as pulling America out of NAFTA and the various other free trade agreements. America also pulls out of the World Bank and the IMF, and the UN is kicked out of New York. Like the real anti-Semites of the America Far Right, Maclachlan believes that the US is under ‘Israeli occupation’. Maclachlan also dismantles the country’s welfare programmes, especially those benefiting Blacks and other minorities, and starts building a wall with Mexico.
He also devises a policy to deal with America’s increasingly aging society: euthanasia chambers for the unwanted or neglected elderly. These are euphemistically called ‘Happy Booths’. There’s a very touching scene in which the last, fictitious surviving Apollo spaceman, Marcus White, is gassed to death in one of these chambers by a couple of nurses, who are every bit as malign as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. By this time, however, White is so confused with dementia, that he is lost in the delusion that he is back as a middle-aged man at NASA in his prime, suiting up and breathing the pure oxygen in preparation for another flight to the Moon.
This is interesting, as it completely turns on its head one of the truly despicable pieces of propaganda the Republicans were running ten years ago to make sure the American public didn’t get single-payer healthcare. Instead, we had Sarah Palin and the rest of the maniacs screaming that the introduction of single-payer healthcare, where all Americans would have free medical treatment financed by the state, would lead to ‘death panels’. Palin herself made a speech about how she didn’t want her children facing them. The idea was under a socialist system, medical care would be rationed. Those individuals deemed to be a waste of state money and resources, such as the elderly, would thus be humanely killed.
It was a disgusting piece of propaganda, based partly on the murder of the disabled in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were also pro-euthanasia, producing propaganda forms with titles such as I Don’t Want to Be Born. It was also based partly on the vile views of some of the founders of the Fabian Society, particularly H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, who were very much in favour of eugenics and the sterilization of the biologically unfit.
Unfortunately, many Americans were taken in by this bilge. There was a BBC report on the truly horrific state of American healthcare, in which a clinic offering free treatment in California immediately attracted 50,000 + prospective patients. These are the 20 per cent of Americans, who couldn’t afford their private healthcare before the introduction of Obamacare. The Beeb’s reported also attracted the attention of Republican supporters, who’d believed all the rubbish they’d been fed by Palin and her stormtroopers. One of these was an elderly man, who rushed up to the Beeb’s crew and shouted ‘Your healthcare system stinks!’ When they politely asked him how so, he looked confused, and began to mutter about ‘death panels’.
There are no death panels in Britain, or anywhere else with a socialized, or state-funded medical system. As for Germany, state financing of medical treatment for the workers was introduced by Bismarck in the 1870s, nearly fifty years before the Nazis seized power. There is a problem, where dying individuals may be refused treatment of expensive and/or experimental drugs or other procedures on the NHS because the costs far exceed any chance of success. This is very much a controversial issue, as we’ve seen the past week with the parents fighting to send their dying son over to America for treatment. However, there are no death panels.
The ‘Happy Booths’ described in the book are a piece of artistic invention by Baxter. Conventional Christian morality rejects euthanasia for the same reasons it has traditionally ruled out abortion, except in certain very restricted circumstances. This is because both judge that there are certain forms of human beings, such as the unborn and the disabled, who are held not to have the same rights to life. If it is permitted to kill the disabled and the unborn, it is argued, there is a danger that the same attitude will spread to other groups also considered inferior, like the Jews and other ‘untermenschen’ in Nazi Germany. And Baxter is aware of this, as elsewhere in the book he describes how the British relative of one of the astronauts, stricken by CJD or ‘Mad Cow Disease’, is going to a euthanasia clinic even though their parents consider it unchristian.
A president dependent on the support of right-wing Christian fundamentalists would alienate a sizable part of his constituency if he did. What happens instead is that, through its hostility to state medicine and the welfare state, Republican politicians of Maclachlan’s type make it impossible for the poor, severely ill to support themselves. Hence Bernie Sanders’ chilling statistic that 50,000 Americans die each year because they cannot afford private medical treatment.
This is basically the same attitude of Tory party under David Cameron and Theresa May. They have extended the sanctions system and the Work Capability Tests to make it as difficult as possible for the unemployed and the disabled to quality for state support. The result of that has been that researchers at Oxford University found that in 2015 alone, 30,000 people died through the Tories’ austerity policies. And Mike over at Vox Political reported yesterday that, according to the Skwawkbox, there’s a nasty clause in Universal Credit, which means that the claimant has to find a job in two years, or they lose their benefit.
This is a right-wing ‘genocide of the disabled’, as Mike, Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Tom Pride and the Angry Yorkshireman have said on their blogs, and Jeffrey, one of the great commenters here, has said on this. But it’s carefully hidden. The victims aren’t actually killed, they’re simply left to die. And the few politicos, who dare to call it what it is, are denied their ability to sit in parliament.
On Friday Mike commented on a piece in the Disability News Service about Mr. Jared O’Mara, a disabled Lib Dem MP, who has called the Tories’ policies towards the disabled ‘eugenics’, and stated that they want disabled people to ‘suffer and die’. Mr. O’Mara is to be commended for the way he tried to tackle Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the DWP and therefore the government’s chief minister responsible for implementing this policy. However, Mr. O’Mara finds it impossible to find anywhere in the House of Commons to sit during debates. There is insufficient seating for all 650 MPs, and there is no form available for disabled MPs to fill in stating that they have particular seating needs. As Mike says, this is all very suspicious.
As a religious person, I can’t say I’m happy about the anti-religious stance of Titan. I went to a Christian college for my undergraduate degree, and some of the students were Creationists. I am not saying that their literalist reading of the creation story in Genesis is correct, but I have to say that they were, by and large, decent people. Those I met weren’t racists or political extremists, and I know that one or two were actually left-wing. I also can’t say that they were anti-science, outside of the very specific field of evolution. Moreover, since the election of Donald Trump there has been the emergence of a religious Left in America, something which couldn’t have been predicted when Baxter wrote the book back in the 1990s. One of the authors of the collection of articles attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, pointed out that the Neo-Cons were not necessarily going to be politically dominant for ever. Kansas, and many of the other mid-western Republican states, had in the 1920s been centres of the Social Gospel movement, which combined Christianity and Socialism. It’s possible that as more Americans recognize how truly disgusting Trump and his party are, Christians over the other side of the Pond may return to it.
However, Trump and his administration are anti-science. The Republican party is strongly opposed to climate change, and so there has been a concerted attack on environmentalism since Trump took office. Legislation protecting America’s glorious natural heritage has been repealed, and federal scientists responsible for monitoring the environment have been effectively gagged. They may not publish any scientific papers supporting climate change, and the federal agency itself has been effectively gutted.
Titan also portrays a future suffering from global warming and catastrophic climate change, as do very many of the SF novels written during the same decade, such as Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather. So far Trump hasn’t wound up NASA, though I don’t doubt that the agency is still under considerable pressure to keep expenses under control. But the real harm is being done by Trump’s deliberate rejection of climate change to appease powerful donors from industry, particularly the Kochs in big oil. This denial of climate change, and that of the other world leaders, will lead to the deaths of millions worldwide. If it hasn’t already.
‘Red’ Ken Livingstone in his book, Livingstone’s Labour, also has some very interesting things to say about how the capitalist classes’ deep involvement with Nazism and Fascism so discredited Germany and Italian Conservatism, that they presented themselves in a pseudo-Socialist guise after the War.
As regards the parties of the right, the creation of stable political structures was more complicated than merely rebuilding the economy and creating military alliances. The right-wing parties, and in a number of countries the bulk of capital, was deeply compromised by collaboration with Fascism and Nazi occupation. In the initial post-war period fight-wing parties had to pretend they were on the left – or at least not of the right. The West German Christian Democrats, in their 1947 programme, stated that the ‘capitalist economic system’ had not served the interests of the German people, and called for ‘a new order built right from the ground’ based on ‘an economic system of collective ownership’. Alcide de Gasperi defined the Italian Christian Democrats as ‘a party of the centre moving towards the left’. the Belgian Social Christian Party proclaimed itself as ‘an inter-class party, whose main objective was to achieve social and economic justice in a united, democratic Belgium’. (P. 175).
Both the Italian and German Christian Democrats were partly formed from the remains of the pre-War Roman Catholic parties, such as the Catholic Centre Party in Germany. These had been originally founded to protect Roman Catholics in the new countries which emerged after the campaigns of Bismarck, Garibaldi and Cavour. Wilhelmine Germany was the creation of Protestant Prussia, which fought a political battle with the Church – the Kulturkampf – over control of education, while liberal Italy was secular, often aggressively so. The Catholic Centre party had adopted some of the attitudes of Christian Socialism, while rejecting the class struggle and the abolition of private property. Clerics and activists for the party founded Christian trade unions and co-operatives. It was this, leftward element in these parties’ constitutions that they chose to stress to avoid condemnation as collaborators with Nazism and Fascism after the War.
And just as early post-War Conservatism tried to distance itself from Nazism and Fascism, so British Conservatives are very quiet about the support they also gave Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain. Winston Churchill hailed Mussolini as ‘the Italian lawgiver’ in his History of the Second World War. Orwell in one of his books talks about the British stock exchange cheering General Franco, and ‘Gracchus’, the author of Your MP, lists the various Tory MPs, who voted against the welfare state and actively supported Nazi Germany.
This has nearly all been written out of history. The official hagiographies of Churchill present him as a fierce opponent of Fascism, even though he wasn’t. He merely objected to the Fascist countries threat to British power. And Thatcher’s 1987 party political broadcast for the elections featured images of zooming Spitfires and the rest of what the satirist Alan Coren dubbed ‘the Royal Conservative Air Force’ to hammer home the message of how patriotic and anti-totalitarian the Tories were.
Thatcher’s own assault on the trade unions and the working class, and the continued campaign by her successors, Major and Cameron, show that this is far from true. Cameron in particular is deeply authoritarian, and in favour of a pervasive government secrecy, in which the upper classes rule without restraint and the working class have to obey unquestioningly. And they were deeply concerned with the totalitarian project of controlling the past. Michael Gove, when he was education minister, wanted an official, pro-Tory view taught, and ranted about how misleading Black Adder Goes Forth Was, despite the fact that it was comedy, not fact. The totalitarian desire to control absolutely is still deeply ingrained in modern Conservatism.
I’ve blogged several times about Donald Trump and the very strong similarity between his rhetoric and racial politics and those of the Fascists, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Trump is racist, and preaches a violent intolerance towards political opposition, as well as Mexicans and Muslims. However, reading Karl Dietrich Bracher’s The German Dictatorship: The Origin, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1971) I was also struck by the extremely strong parallels between Trump, the American Republican party, and the 19th century precursors of Nazism in the various anti-Semitic movements in Germany.
In the first chapter ‘The Preconditions’, Bracher devotes an entire section to ‘The Role of Anti-Semitism’, pp. 52-64, in which he discusses the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, anti-Semitic racial stereotyping, and the social and political origins of organised anti-Semitic parties and organisations, like Adolf Stoecker’s Christian Social Party and Wilhelm Marr’s League of Anti-Semites, as well as other, minor, anti-Semitic political parties such as the Social Reich Party and the German Reform Party. He notes that German political anti-Semitism had its origins in the social disruption caused by industrialisation, the development of capitalism, and urbanisation. They were also attempts to draw the masses away from Socialism and the SPD to give their support to the traditional, Conservative-authoritarian social order.
He also discusses how the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany was a response to the influx of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution during the spate of pogroms that erupted throughout the Russian Empire in the 1880s. On page 55, Bracher writes
But when the optimism of the Enlightenment began to give way to an irrational volkisch nationalism, the idea of the eternally ‘demoralizing’ role of the Jew began to take root. His assimilation seemed impossible; his character was unalterably negative. The religious difference became a moral one; the image of the secularized Jew was based on a mythical-deterministic concept, a combination of reaction and impotence, hatred and fear. The quintessence of this type of anti-Semitism was the fear of the dark world of the ghetto and of the conspiratorial workings of ‘international Jewry’ as told of in pamphlets and novels since the turn of the century, a fantastic mixture of falsified and misunderstood Jewish works and stereotyped invention. The influx of Jews from the ghettos of the East furnished daily proof and arguments for the fear and hatred of the unknown. At the same time, their presence was held responsible for the problems and difficulties which changing social and economic conditions wrought in the lives of a people in an industrial society brought up on pre-industrial social ideals. According to Wilhelm Marr, Bismarck’s Reich was practically a ‘New Palestine’, which in all vital respects was under Jewish alien domination. The right-wing, anti-Bismarck opposition was a mainstay of this early wave of the 1870s and 1880s, when conservative Protestant and anti-liberal Catholic forces forged a temporary alliance.
There are glaringly obvious parallels with today’s refugee crisis, and the rhetoric surrounding Muslims, in which they are considered to be unassimilable into modern democratic society. As for Marr’s description of the Bismarckian Reich as a ‘new Palestine’, this sounds very much like the anti-Semitic rhetoric from the American Nazi Right, which describes the contemporary liberal American government as ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government.
American Conservatives, like the Republicans, try to contrast Socialism with democracy. They pose as defenders of the latter against Socialism, which is always portrayed as totalitarian, and practically synonymous with Communism and Nazism/Fascism. Hence all the rhetoric claiming that Obama, who actually isn’t even particularly liberal, is really a Communist-Nazi-Muslim. One Trump supporter interviewed by Jordan Cheriton, stated that he wasn’t going to vote for Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a ‘Democratic Socialist’. The young man stated that Sanders, as a Socialist, would govern totally, even telling Americans how they should lie in bed.
Apart from being a grotesque distortion of Socialism, it also ignores the fact that some of the anti-Semitic movements in 19th century Germany did have a quasi-democratic character. One of the leading anti-Semitic politicians in Germany at the time was Otto Boeckel, a folklorist and the author of a pamphlet Die Juden – die Koenige unserer Zeit (The Jews – Kings of Our Time). Boeckel also published a paper, Reichsherold, which Bracher states ‘had a pronouncedly progressive, anti-clerical, anti-capitalist tenor. It propounded near-radical democratic ideas’. Boeckel himself was political quite liberal, and broke with the League of Anti-Semites because he found them too conservative, founding his own Anti-Semitic People’s Party. Boeckel became the first independent anti-Semite to be elected to the Reichstag after he won an election in a Conservative stronghold near Marburg in 1887. Boeckel himself wanted the segregation of Jews and Gentile Germans.
The League of Anti-Semites also demanded laws to prevent further Jewish integration and assimilation into German society. It based these on similar measures elsewhere, such as contemporary American laws against Chinese immigration. (p. 60). And one of the other, most successful anti-Semitic politicians of this period was Hermann Ahlwardt. Ahlwardt, like Boeckel, won his seat an Conservative district, this time in a rural seat near Berlin. Bracher writes of him that
He had neither organization nor funds ,but he travelled tirelessly through the countryside to preach his anti-Semitic, anti-aristocratic gospel to the peasants. His campaign was directed against ‘Jews and Junkers’, against the racially marked ‘parasites’, the ‘predatory beasts’ and ‘contaminators’. He used socialist arguments to indict the economic ‘exploiters’ who were abusing notoriously blind ‘Germanic’ trustfulness. His contention that were it not for Jews, only half of all existing laws would be necessary held particular appeal. (P. 61.)
In 1895 the Anti-Semites, with the support of some conservatives, tried to introduce into the Reichstag a resolution by Ahlwardt to stop Jews being admitted into Germany. This was rejected by 167 votes to 51, and the anti-Semites consequently went into decline. In 1893 the Anti-Semitic parties, in total, had held 16 seats. In 1912, this had gone down to seven.
Unfortunately, their influence persisted as they became allied with the conservatives, who also adopted their anti-Semitic rhetoric.
(Y)et they remained an influential latent force when tactics dictated collaboration with the Conservatives, who furnished both funds and respectability. The radicals became demagogic auxiliaries, and the Conservatives themselves incorporated anti-Semitic slogans in their platforms, as in the so-called Tivoli Programme of the Berlin party congress of 1892. The agrarian interest groups (the Farmers’ League (Bund der Landwirte) and the German National League of Commercial Employees (Deutsch-nationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband), organized in 1893, became staunch backers of this course. The individual splinter groups now were replaced by the institutionalisation of anti-Semitism within the framework of an anti-Marxist, nationalistic, traditionalist ideology. The year 1893, the year of transition, also saw the founding of the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), which was conceived of as the vanguard in the fight against the continuing influx of ‘eastern Jews’, the electoral victories of the SPD in the Reichstag elections of 1893, and the policies of Bismarck’s successor, Caprivi. (p. 63).
The similarities between Ahlwardt then and Trump today seem close. Ahlwardt was an independent, who campaigned without the backing of a major political organisation. The Trumpenfuhrer is, of course, an extremely wealthy man, campaigning for the nomination for one of the two main American parties. He is, however, also claiming to be an outsider. His campaign is self-funded to a greater extent than his electoral rivals, as the big business donors he approached refused to finance him. He has turned this to his advantage by claiming to be some kind of underdog attacking the corporate control of politics. Despite the fact that he is part and parcel, if somewhat estranged, of that same corporate control.
Trump and his rival for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz, want to end Muslim immigration to the US. They also want heavier surveillance of Muslim communities. Trump would like the remaining Muslims in America to be forced to carry identification documents, while Cruz wants heavier police patrols in Muslim areas. It’s also been suggested that what they really want is Muslims’ segregation into ghettos. There’s an obvious parallel there with Ahlwardt’s plan to halt Jewish immigration into Germany, and legislation to keep them separate from Gentiles.
There is some hope offered in these parallels, in that the fortunes of the Anti-Semites after the defeat of Ahlwardt’s immigration bill suggests that if Trump and Cruz’s demands for similar laws against Muslim immigration, those will also decline. It also shows that there is nevertheless a continuing danger of a resurgence of the racist extreme Right, if their policies and rhetoric are taken over by mainstream Conservatives.
Even if Trump isn’t Hitler, or even Mussolini, ready to pitch America into the nightmare of racial persecution and authoritarian, one-party dictatorship, his rise, like that of the organised anti-Semites in Wilhelmine Germany, may lay the groundwork for the emergence of just such a dictatorship at a later date. The German anti-Semites and Conservatives promised to save their people and their way of life, from the threat of big business, Socialism, and foreign – Jewish – immigration. Trump and Cruz need to be stopped, if not for us, then certainly for our grandchildren.
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