A Debate Like No Other: One for the Ages

Watching the classic debate between the fictional candidates in West Wing, Matt Santos (Jimmy Smitts) vs Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) I could only say, "If only." If only a real debate could be like that, where the moderators stay out of the way and the candidates get to speak as long as they want and then respond to what the other says. But no, I thought, that could never happen in real life.

Tonight, however, I was proved wrong. 

Rachel Maddow and Mark Todd were masterful at serving up the questions and then getting quickly out of the way. And they asked all the questions I wanted to ask: Bernie, are you electable?  Why would you not simply be the next Barry Goldwater or George Magovern, an extremist beloved by a cult following but defeated in 49 states?  Hillary, how can you say you are not in the pocket of Goldman Sachs when you accept $675,000 in "speaker's fees" from them? 

Hillary had the tougher job, in defending taking the money. Basically she said, well, I was cashing in, but that never affected my vote or my vigorous pursuit of Wall Street when it came to voting for regulation and legislation to rein in Wall Street's excesses.  She scored points for saying you have insinuated I'm corrupt for accepting this money, an  "artful smear" on my character.  Bernie deftly side stepped that by saying, essentially, I'm not saying you are corrupt, but I am saying, as a system, it stands to reason Goldman Sachs and the others wouldn't be spending money on politicians if they thought this was not a good investment. When Wall Street Banks spend millions lobbying for regulation and Congress votes for deregulation, don't you think there might be a connection?

Bernie is pointing to our systems of legal bribery, where Congressmen can accept money as long as there is no specific deal for a specific vote.  Hillary responds by saying, Bernie nobody can be pure enough for you: President Obama, Barney Frank, nobody is up to your standards; wake up and live in the real world.

Well, Bernie says, the truth is the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Anyone who saw "The Big Short" or read "Liar's Poker" will know what he is talking about. 

We all have to swim in the same water, Hillary was saying, and she was basically admitting its a toxic system, but you have to swim in the polluted water if that's what you've got. Bernie is saying, no, I won't dive into that scummy pond. I'm going to decontaminate the pond. 

The wonderful thing about the two of them was how they managed to recover from their own tempers, to get past their very apparent, very real anger, and move on. Bernie took pains to agree with Clinton, when he could and she with him.

He refused to take the bait about demanding a recount in Iowa. He shrugged it off. We are talking about two delegates out of 2500, he said. Get past it.  And he reaffirmed his disinterest in her email problems, saying there was already a process in place and he would not politicize it, which was pretty crafty, actually, because he never said it was unimportant. 

Even the final summary statements were worth watching. Hillary was all polished and prepared, saying she was aware some people in New Hampshire were saying they would vote for Bernie if they voted their hearts but for Hillary if they were voting with their heads and then she wrapped up her nicely shaped and well rehearsed summary by saying she hoped voters would bring both heart and head to the voting booths. It was professional and well crafted, but too clever by half and that's why people don't connect with her. She's too well coiffed. 

Bernie, on the other hand, demonstrated why he has won hearts. He started off by saying his father came to America at age 17 and didn't speak English and would be amazed, had he lived to see his son running for President. This is the sort of thing Marco Rubio trots out all the time, but coming at that particular moment in the night, and put in the tone of wonderment Bernie struck, I found myself almost tearing up. It was like his wordless ad, "Looking for America." There is just something so decent and humble and likable about the man. 

I'm just sorry I didn't record it. Maybe it's on youtube.

The Essence of the Argument: Can You Be a True Progressive without Being a Revolutionary?

When was your last stress EKG?

"Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding."
--Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

Democrats are actually having a substantive debate right now. Bernie has said Hillary is a progressive on some days and Hillary points to the times she has accomplished progressive goals, like passing the Child Health act and says, "Well, I was progressive that day." 

Her point is, of course, it's nice to rant and rail but if you want to get elected and if you want to govern and pass legislation, you have to compromise.

Bernie says, that would be a good formula for another era, but when you are faced with Mitch McConnell and his right wing mob and a reactionary Supreme Court, you cannot simply elect a single President and expect anything to change.

A good woman, but that ship has sailed

Tracing the history of the four years prior to his Second Inaugural, Lincoln, in his humble way, remarked about how wrong he and all his countrymen had been, as they drifted into the Second American Revolution which was the Civil War. Lincoln himself thought the slaves could be freed without disrupting the essence of Southern life, and Republicans of his time thought with time, they could persuade Southerners they did not need slaves to continue their cherished way of life, which is to say, their dominance over Negroes, the cotton economy and their highly stratified society which resembled our present 1% owning most of the wealth. Most Southerners were poor or middle class and did not own slaves, but they liked the idea that someday they might, might have a plantation and get rich. 

So Lincoln thought, well, the large majority of whites in the South will eventually realize slavery wasn't worth going to war and change would happen as reasonable men made reasonable choices.  But, as he described in his wonderful address, he was wrong; everyone was wrong; the only choices turned out to be drastic choices and so war came; a revolution came. 


This is the insight Bernie grasped early last year: The system we need to change, although it protects only the top 1% is so thoroughly infiltrated into our national fabric, so tenaciously protected by coordinated power, money, judicial perversity, there is no gentle, gradual, gradual way to change it. 

When you look at a malignancy, you see tendrils penetrating deeply into surrounding healthy tissue and you realize that excising just a piece of it, nibbling at its edges or probing its center will not excise it.  When you decide to renovate the house and you uncover the walls, you find you have to do so much more than you expected, as the foundation is cracked and the wiring has to be replaced.

Mr. Sanders keeps pointing to the big problems:  with the Supreme Court having handed Citizens United to the Koch brothers, big money now can control who sits in Congress and, sometimes, the White House.  You can't just paint over the walls by placing a new Congressman in office if he is still stuck pursuing big money donors. Nothing changes but the color of the paint and the name on the door. If you do not wash Congress clean of the Tea Party Republicans, elected to destroy government, sent to Washington to sit on their hands and do nothing or to shrink government, then electing a progressive President changes nothing.

Hillary says she can get things done by working the game from inside the White House.  President Obama tried that.  He met nothing but intractable resistance from Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and the whole array of Republicans who want to shrink government so small they can drown it in their bathtubs. 

Is it enough to elect Hillary, to claim the White House and to keep it out of the hands of the Republicans? Or do we need to gamble on the idea of trying for genuine change which might rip control of the economy and the government from the hands of the 1/10 of 1%?

As James Baldwin observed, slavery hurt not just the slaves, but their masters.
If we really did redistribute wealth, so the bottom 80% now made $80,000 a year rather than $40,000, this huge population would create huge new markets and they would spend, buy homes, cars, go on vacations, invest in stocks and the people at the top would actually become more secure because the economy and the nation would be more secure.

Right now many of that small group of 300,000 people (roughly 15,000 families) are fabulously wealthy, but they are nervous. Walk around their estates with them and you sense their unease, their sense they might lose everything tomorrow. Where that anxiety comes from is anyone's guess. Guilt? (I don't deserve this and my Marie Antoinette moment is coming.) Insight--all this is built on a phony economy.  Who knows?  But if the nation shared a sense that what we have, where we've arrived is fair, then everyone would be more secure and wealthier and happier.

Memo to Bernie: Put her on the ticket

Boldness: The Bernie vs Hillary Argument

Counsels Caution: Acceptance of the Real World

Says We Will Never Get Change If We Don't  Try

Writing in Salon, Robert Reich gets at the essence of the choice for Democrats and the nation. Here's the link.

Robert Reich in Salon   



What he is basically saying is we have tried the working within the system approach for 7 years with President Obama and the guys trading credit default swaps at Goldman Sacks and Morgan and all the Wall Street firms are still making billions and still behaving as if their ponzi schemes are not hurting everyday people. 

The Republicans still control Congress and have stymied every effort to actually govern.

The T Party, like the Dixiecrats before them, have the power to derail efforts at any meaningful reform.

Invoking Teddy Roosevelt who busted the trusts and got a progressive tax system which taxed the rich more than the poor, Reich says sometimes you have to aim high to hit the target.

When I was in college, we all hated the system we labored under which meant the first elective course I got to take was in my senior year after satisfying all the requirements for my major, my pre medical course and "distribution" requirements to insure I had a "well rounded" education.  The whole idea of education had been corrupted by the pursuit of good grades.  Ira Magaziner came around with the idea that education ought to do more than just prepare a resume for use as a merit badge in applying for jobs or graduate school and he proposed a system where grades were optional. This was radical. A revolution. Everyone said it would never get past the faculty, not to mention the president of the university and the board of trustees, but events conspired and it was adopted and the result was that education improved at the university and the school, which had been the last choice for students applying to the eight schools in the Ivy League moved up to fourth, after Harvard, Yale and Princeton.  

So sometimes, revolutions do succeed and when they do, results can exceed expectations.

It hasn't happened often in American politics, but it has happened: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, all Presidents who led successful, if painful revolutions. 

Are we ready for a revolution?

Hillary, Mother Jones, The Girl in the River

This morning I am thinking about women. 

I have just read a New York Times piece in the Sunday Review by a woman who wants to love Hillary but finds herself ambivalent, which runs right next to a piece about Bernie Sanders, his deep but very narrow appeal. The reservations this erstwhile ardent Hillary advocate voices are inchoate. What she is really seems to be  saying is it's so much easier to love a purist than a compromiser, a knight errant driven by passion for righting wrongs, than a pragmatist who will not spit in the eye of the oppressor but will sit down with him and negotiate. 

She does remind us of Hillary's performance at the Benghazi hearings, where she sat, unruffled, through the smarmy, slimy, absurd rantings of the Republican jackasses across the floor from her and with withering clarity made fools out of each and every one of them.

Yesterday, after watching a public television program about the vile history of the destruction of miners' unions in West Virginia, I read about one of the giants of that struggle, Mary Jones, Mother Jones.  Mother Jones walked into mining towns in West Virginia which were built, owned and ruled by mining company owners and were nothing more than plantations where the slaves mined coal instead of picking cotton. She was engaging in a battle as quixotic as that faced by Bernie Sanders, trying to rally the down trodden against all the coordinated forces of money and power. 
 When the miners responded to the machine gun and rifle fire of the owner's private enforcers with shootings of their own, Mother Jones was arrested, tried, convicted, ultimately set free and she trudged off to fight more battles elsewhere in West Virginia and in  Colorado.  
By today's standards, she was no feminist: She believed women belonged in the home, raising children, but she believed to protect the home, women had to get out into the world and work for labor unions, harass strike breakers and "raise Hell." She thought suffrage beside the point, saying, "You don't need to vote to raise Hell."

And then there is the story about the documentary "A Girl in the River" about a Pakistani woman who defied her parents by marrying the man she loved, to which her father responded by abducting her, pointing a pistol at her head and pulling the trigger, stuffing her body in a bag and throwing her in a river. She, miraculously, survived and the father was charged with attempted murder, but in Pakistan, this was called an honor murder. Had he been a better shot and killed the daughter and had he been charged, he would have been set free as long as the rest of the family forgave him. 

He is still  proud of his deed, even though he did not succeed in murdering his daughter, he says the rest of community now respects him for restoring honor to his family and, furthermore, no other girl in their family will ever consider trying to marry for love, rather than marrying the man their father has chosen.

This story made me think of the woman who is at the center of the Europe which is currently receiving the flood of young, mostly Muslim men who are deserting  Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in search of a better world. Angela Merckel, the woman who is the President of Germany is exercising her power to welcome men fleeing the collapse of societies ruled by  intolerance,  13th century notions of "honor" and male dominance.  The same value system which brings chaos to the Middle East, that system of belief which places women at virtually the same level of existence as cattle or, at best, dependent children, which is defended by fathers with guns aimed at the heads of their daughters, which forgives and embraces murder when it is done to defend male pride, is no different in its cruelty and malevolence from that of the mine owners whose paternalism justified their enslavement of coal workers. 

Nobody should vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. 
I still prefer Bernie.

But who can deny that when you tally up the points, women do tend to be the drivers of positive change in the world?

Before Bernie: There was Mother Jones

Reading about Mother Jones, Mary Harris Jones, I am reminded of that Paul Simon line to the effect of when I think of what I was taught in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.  History was my favorite subject until college, but the "history" we read had not a word about Mother Jones or Jane Addams or the violent strikes in Colorado or the industrial police state in West Virginia coal mines in towns like Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, where coal mine owners kept workers literally under the gun, machine guns of hired private police, and where the workers owed their souls to the company store.

But now, owing to the wonders of the internet, I can read about Mother Jones and fall in love across time and space with a woman impressionable young men should be reading about, by whom they should judge the young ladies in their own lives.

If great conflict brings out great actions and great character then Mother Jones was destined for greatness from the start, in County Cork, Ireland, where the potato famine drove her family from Ireland to Toronto. 

In Toronto, she was sent to free public schools and, in fact was paid a small sum to stay in school, in an enlightened program Bernie Sanders would have to love. She became a teacher, but found her assigned school so depressing, she moved to the United States, where she married a union organizer in Memphis, had four children, only to see them all, husband and children, die from yellow fever. Moving to Chicago to establish a dress shop, she saw that literally go up in flames in the great Chicago fire. 

It was the natural world of disease and fire which devoured her early life, but it was the world created by men which inspired her to greatness. Leading a Children's Crusade against the abuses of American industrial might, pointing out that children were working rather than going to school, she tried to get photographs of children who worked the mills and mines, many of whom were missing fingers or limbs, published in newspapers who refused, for fear of offending their corporate advertisers.

She marched to Teddy Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, New York, where the Progressive President refused to see her, but she embarrassed enough Congressmen to motivate stronger child labor laws.

Oddly, while the people's champion, the man elected by "the people" refused to see her, John D. Rockefeller did not refuse and having spoken with her, he decided to investigate her charges about the conditions of his workers.

She had strong convictions about the importance of family:  She insisted men ought to be paid enough so their wives could stay home to raise the children. Women at work meant children unsupervised and that was the source of juvenile delinquency she said.  Today's feminists will not be wearing Mother Jones T shirts, but she also saw the potential of woman power, organizing mine worker's wives to intervene against strike breakers arriving on trains in West Virginia towns. 

The villainy of those coal towns and their corporate masters in southern West Virginia is mind boggling.  At least the Southern slave owner fed and clothed his slaves, but the West Virginian coal mine owners required their workers to live in company shacks, to pay exorbitant rent, to shop for their food, clothes and tools at the company store, at prices which put them into debt to the company and so the coal mine owners deftly managed to enslave the workers, who lived under spotlights from towers above their homes, manned by private police forces, armed with machine guns and rifles.

Into all that, walked Mother Jones, determined to organize the workers. She cultivated the role of "mother," wearing old fashioned clothes, calling the miners her "boys." You can well imagine why.  A woman alone, speaking with men. So she de-sexualized herself and played the role of "mother" and cleverly avoided that line of attack. 

She was jailed, sentenced to twenty years only to be freed and to strike again. 

She reportedly spoke in an enchanting Irish brogue, her voice getting deeper and more moving as she became more emotional through her addresses and she had a magnetism the most ardent Bernie adulators would appreciate, as she insisted the preachers at the churches the coal miners attended had it wrong. The reward was coming in Heaven, the preachers said, but Mother Jones told them their reward should be a bit of Heaven in the here and now on Earth. 

She opposed female suffrage. "You don't need the vote to raise Hell!" she said.  She opposed anything which might draw women away from the home, where she believed the primary role of women belonged.

Can you imagine her running for office today? She's pro labor, fundamentalist family, endorses the woman at home, but urges women to protest and organize, is for free public education. We don't know  where she stood on abortion. But you know who she would stand with on immigration. 

I never learned about Mary Harris Jones in my public school education. I can well imagine why.  Her story is too incendiary. Can you imagine children going home to their Southern Baptist parents in Montgomery County, Maryland telling them about what they learned about the evil capitalist coal miners and the fight against them led by an agnostic woman? Not going to get past the County School Board curriculum committee.

But thanks to Bill Gates and the United States Government we have the Internet and that has made all the difference. 

Mary Harris Jones for the $20 bill!

Kathryn Schulz: Dead Wrong about The Making of a Murderer

In the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz decries the makers of "Making of a Murderer" for conducting an investigation of the murder trial of Steven Avery with no rules guiding them other than the imperative for good ratings. She says that of a documentary 10 years in the making--as if the driving motivation for a project requiring that sort of tenacity could be self aggrandizement. 

She details the anger the show has generated, aimed primarily at the police of the Manitowoc,  Wisconsin where Avery lived because the series presented evidence they had planted the most damning evidence and framed Avery, motivated by the lawsuit Avery filed against them after they discovered he was innocent of an attempted rape but with held that evidence so Avery remained behind bars for 8 more years.

Schulz points to evidence that Avery's DNA was found on the RAV 4 belonging to the dead woman which she says "could not have been planted."  This was said to be a drop of perspiration with Avery's DNA.  Now, I am not a forensic molecular biologist, but I have enough science to ask the questions: 1. How can anyone tell what was found was perspiration? 2. Does perspiration, which, generally speaking has lots of fluid and electrolytes but no cells contain enough DNA to be reliably analyzed? 3. Why could police have not obtained sweat from Avery? 

Schulz is, of course, correct: the makers of the series were bound only by their own sense of justice and decency, but that strikes me as a pretty substantial boundary.

The real point of the series is made by Avery's remarkable, decent and exemplary lawyers, who say the point is we are all dealing with uncertainty in trials like this. They say we should not be any more certain of his innocence than we are certain of his guilt, but when in doubt, you do not convict in a murder trial.
Avery is likely beyond unsavory--as a 20 year old he doused a cat with gasoline and set it on fire.

What is not in doubt is the Manitowoc police brought suspicion upon themselves in so many ways as to make any conviction a travesty:
1. They manipulated the "discovery" of the victims RAV 4 on Avery's property by a woman who claims she was guided by God to the car.
2. They "found" the car key to the RAV-4 in Avery's bedroom after the room had been searched 4 times by both non Manitowoc police and by the county cops previously and the key conveniently had only Avery's DNA but not the DNA of the woman who owned it. Subsequently, photos of the murder victim holding a set of keys revealed the incriminating key was attached to other keys, as most people do, but only the single key is "found" by police. Even if Avery had murdered her and kept a single key, why would he have kept that piece of incriminating evidence? In fact, Avery had a car crusher on his junk yard not 100 yards from where the car was found, partially covered by tree branches like some bashful stripper, as if someone wanted to pretend to cover up but really wanted you to see underneath.
3. The prosecution presented a FBI test for EDTA in the blood which, if it were found, would have proved the blood was planted. No EDTA was found, but, as the defense expert testified that meant only the EDTA, if present, was below the limits of detection of the test. The testimony of the FBI agent was astonishingly suspicious, as he started blinking uncontrollably under cross examination and claimed that although 6 samples were submitted he tested only 3 but he still knew the 3 untested samples had no EDTA in them. 
4. The interrogation of Avery's "accomplice," his nephew Brendan revealed he was mentally incompetent.  He is led step by step to agree to the story the police outline for him and after confessing to the crime asks when he can go home to do his homework. He clearly does not understand he has just "confessed" to murder. The fact the police would even charge him in the face of the videos of his interrogation is among the most astonishing things about this series.

5. And lastly, am I the only one this bothers? No body!  Yes, we all know the magic of DNA, but really, burnt bits of bone which still have enough undamaged DNA to positively identify the missing woman? One of the big issues here is: Well, if it wasn't Avery, who would have done this?  After looking at those Manitowoc officers is it really conspiracy insanity to imagine the victim, Teresa, in a witness protection program somewhere?

Ms. Schulz misses the forest for the trees: It is true the film makers selected and edited to make their points, but some facts are plain and incontrovertible and there are enough of those to lead any reasonable person outside the state of Wisconsin to believe the local police were and likely still are corrupt and their case against Avery, even if he was the killer, was so dirty, it should never have gone to trial.

The Washington Post Spins Fantasy About Bernie

The Washington Post decries Bernie as just another politician spinning fantasy.
To wit, the editors of the Post believe to advocate a single payer system for medical insurance, or even the option for a government Medicare-for-anyone who wants it, is sheer fantasy in the America of 2016.  Sanders's argument:  "It works in Sweden and every other major industrialized country, why would it not work here?"  is met with the argument of American exceptionalism by the Post. 

The editors argue that Medicare for all would not save all that much money and would result in diminished earnings for doctors and hospitals. 
This, actually, is the real  fantasy. 

 I once tried to calculate what the administrative costs mean for the American health care system. It's a tough estimate,  because nobody really seems to know how many hangers on there are in the system, between the insurance agents who sell health insurance, the Human Resources people at every company,  who spend most of their time negotiating with health insurance companies for good prices, the teams of "billers" in every doctor's office whose job is to spend all day every day fighting claims through insurance companies, the clerks on the other end, in the insurance companies who are busy denying claims, the marketing people for the insurance companies, but a conservative estimate of all these people involved in the financial and commercial side of American medicine is likely between 5 and 10 million people. If the average salary of all those hangers on is $50,000 (an estimate, I am told is very conservative) then there is $500 billion dollars in "waste" in our current system--"waste" in the sense of money spent which does not go to treating patients but only to financing the system. If you divided this by the 500,000 physicians in the country that comes to about a million dollars per doctor, which would not represent a loss of income for most of them, for 99% of them. 
Of course, not all of that would go to physicians, but the point is, there is way more money going to the financial part of our health care system than goes to the providers of health care, which is why our spending on "healthcare" dwarfs that of any other "advanced" country.  We spend it on middlemen. They spend on the folks who actually provide the services.

Cutting out the middlemen  would mean displacement and unemployment for a lot of middelmen who currently are employed to do work which is superfluous and unnecessary to the real  mission of the enterprise of American health care, which is, as I understand it, to provide health care for patients as opposed to salaries for clerks and salespeople.

It would also mean that patients would likely be seen by physicians as opposed to nurse practitioners much more often, because the main reason nurse practitioners are seeing so many patients now is that it cost corporations and insurance companies about a quarter as much for a NP as for a MD.

The Post says Americans would never stand for the "rationing" of medical care which the Brits and the Canadians and the Swedes all tolerate without a peep of protest. Of course, as anyone who watches Prime Minister's Questions knows, the Brits do no tolerate inadequacies in their health care system. But in Britain, if you have a beef with your provider, you can take it to the House of Commons where you will get a more sympathetic hearing than you are likely to ever get from Blue Cross. The fact is, the private insurance companies have been rationing care for years in the United States.  We'll accept rationing from private commercial concerns but we go ballistic when it's the government saying no. 



This is the reality. What the Post endorses is the fantasy.