TheMillerCircle.org

We consistently hear that a single payer health care system, the only economically viable health plan that has been formulated, will never see the light of day as a legislative priority. Well, now it appears that the backup option of a government-sponsored  heath insurance program, which was initially discussed and planned to compete with private insurance companies, is also in trouble in the Senate and of course,  for all the wrong but known reasons. Now that the government insurance plan survived committee challenges in the House, the target has shifted to the Senate, where the opposition to the government insurance option includes numerous moderate Senate Democrats. The private for-profit health insurance companies have drawn a “line in the sand,” as Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) told a National Journal health care panel at a meeting this past March. The July 15th issue of the Washington Spectator has an article on the current state of the government option as part of a health care reform package in the Senate. Despite the fact that the government-run option has come out of House committees, Ignagni and several other chieftains of high profit health care systems believe they have a good chance of killing that portion of health care reform in the Senate. Currently twenty-two Democratic senators are obstructing the government-run insurance program. Former Vermont Governor and Democratic Party chairman (whose work went a long way in getting Obama elected) is leading a national campaign through his Democracy for America advocacy group (standwithdrdean.com). This group maintains a running count of members of Congress who support or oppose the government plan option. Among the twenty-two are Harry Reid (NV), Max Baucus (MT), Evan Bayh (IN), Mark Begich (AK), Michael Bennet (CO), Robert Byrd (WV), Maria Cantwell (WA), Thomas Carper (DE), Kent Conrad (ND), Byron Dorgan (ND), Dianne Feinstein (CA), Kay Hagan (NC), Herbert Kohl (WI), Mary Landrieu (LA), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Bill Nelson (FL), Marky Pryor (AR), Jon Tester (MT), Mark Udall (CO), Mark Warner (VA) and Ron Wyden (OR). Independent Joe Lieberman is also opposed to the bill, but the more heroic independent, socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont supports the legislation. So, forget the Republicans, it’s the Democrats on the fence we have to worry about.

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I.F. Stone

This past June 18th was the 20th anniversary of the death I.F. Stone (1907-1989), muckraker extraordinaire.  In recognition of the date, Amy Goodman interviewed D.D. Guttenplan on Democracy Now radio: he is the author of  “American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone.” If you wanted to nominate any single writer for journalistic integrity, in my book, I.F. Stone would be the gold standard. I first encountered I.F. Stone in the 1960s, when I discovered his little publication gem the “I.F. Stone’s Weekly.” I promptly subscribed and continued my subscription for several years until he folded the publication in 1971. In that year, I remember receiving an envelope in the mail, with a note signed by I.F. Stone thanking me for my subscription and giving me a cash refund, which conformed to the penny, what he had calculated to be the value of the remaining  portion  of my subscription. It must have taken him some effort to personally write notes like that, since his Weekly had grown to a readership of 70,000 and was basically a one man operation. For a relatively small   fee, you could subscribe to Stone’s weekly publication and learn things about our government and international events that you would not hear about from any other source, or if you did, it would often be the case that the source you heard it from would have been jostled into pursuing a story because of hearing about it first from Stone. There was really no one like him. Unfortunately for us, Stone lived before his truly needed time, as we find ourselves desperate for someone of his caliber today in the face of corporate-controlled news centers, all for reasons that he never would have imagined during the prime of his journalism career. Insider journalists considered Stone to be one of their key sources in tracing down stories, but also setting the journalistic agenda and the once high standards of news reporting.  But,  It wasn’t always flashy and never came in the form of a single sound bite.  It was Stone’s  belief that governments lie, but in doing so, they leave behind the damning evidence in their own publications–a clear paper trail–it’s up to you to find it.  In the case of the U.S. Government, government documents from many different sources could be scrutinized for the nuggets of information that would disprove what the government was trying to put out as the reasons for its actions. His advice was to begin reading government documents backwards, going to the index first.

I.F. Stone's Weekly

I have commented on how we created a false enemy to keep our military complex intact at the end of WW II, create U.S. hegemony over the rest of the world and began marching down the road of a series of major Folly Compounding misadventures, with a philosophy of “military empire” that still grips our government and a sizable portion  of our economy.  That misstep took place because Truman was a hardliner on foreign policy and unraveled many of the plans and ideas that FDR had expressed for the post-war recovery period, particularly with respect to Russia. That shift in policy towards a hard line position made it inevitable, that when the French lost the battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and had to abandon their colonial ambitions in Vietnam, we would step in to replace the French, using an anticommunist rhetoric, initially claiming that the Vietcong got their funding and military support  from the Russians and Chinese. Our national propaganda was to adopt the “domino theory” to fend off the advancing wave of communism. If South Vietnam fell to the communists, all of Southeast Asia would be lost. One of the earliest challenges to this idea was brought to national attention by I.F. Stone. He scoured through government documents related to captured weapons and, using the hard data in those documents, showed that the majority of Vietcong weapons that had been captured in South Vietnam, were manufactured in the U.S. and other Western countries, meaning that they were obtained from the South Vietnamese that we were training and equipping at the time. The Vietcong got their weapons from the South Vietnamese, not Russia or China. Because of that kind of evidence, Johnson had to invent the Gulf of Tonkin episode (which never took place) and blame the North Vietnamese for interfering with U.S. policies, using that fictitious event to escalate the war in South Vietnam. I.F. Stone was a major force in getting the anti-Vietnam War protesters focused on some of the important lies that the U.S. government was using to start and keep us in that disastrous war. I always had the feeling that by reading Stone’s weekly publication, I was a member of the “most informed club.” It was that simple. It was like his Weekly came with a prepaid veracity stamp on it. If his weekly was still published, it might amount to the only print publication available in which hard-nosed, independent news reporting was available to us.

Through his weekly publication and other sources, Stone lived through and wrote about the depression, WW II, the birth of Israel, the Cold War, Zionism, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights and multiple presidencies. He was a prescient force on almost everything he wrote about. Stone  was blacklisted from television as a commentator for asking questions that were too tough when he participated in one of the first episodes of “Meet the Press.” A single episode that got him thrown off and removed from television is described by D.D.  Guttenplan on Amy Goodman’s show, from which I quote below:

” And on this particular morning, the person he was battling with was a guy called Dr. Morris Fishbein. Now, in the ’40s, Morris Fishbein was the most famous doctor in America. He was the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, and he was the person that the medical and pharmaceutical industries put up to oppose socialized medicine, or national health or a national health insurance. He was the person who coined the phrase “socialized medicine” as a means of discrediting national health insurance [Truman supported a National Health Insurance Act].

Fishbein had described the proposals for national health insurance as a step on the road to communism. And so, Stone said to him, “Dr. Fishbein, given that President Truman has already spoken out in favor of national health insurance, do you think that that makes him a dangerous communist or just a deluded fellow traveler?” You know, and it’s familiar, isn’t it? And—” Stone was blacklisted for 18 years from television for his remarks and interview with Fishbein.”

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The recent death of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, and early architect of the Vietnam War, provided us with an opportunity to more seriously address what,  for America, is the equivalent of the big bang theory–how we got to where we are today? Until the close of WW II, we were a non-militarized country, so the America we have today is historically a brand new iteration of itself. McNamara, in his book and in the documentary made of it–The Fog of War, dealt with Vietnam as a bad war, a unnecessary choice, and an unwinnable conflict. The war itself destroyed Johnson’s Presidency and revived Nixon’s political career, such that, once elected to the Presidency,  Nixon and Kissinger pursued an expanded war into Cambodia and Laos, with an ultimate disastrous consequence for the future of all those living in Cambodia (Pol Pot’s  Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979; 1.5 million deaths) and a death toll of 4.5 million in North and South Vietnam (not including war year deaths in Cambodia and Laos), including nearly 60,000 Americans killed during the conflict (more if you included the 1.7 x the rate of civilian suicides committed by soldiers who had served in the Vietnam War).

McNamara’s conclusion about the ill-conceived nature of the war drew strong criticism from the war supporters who felt betrayed by the very man that had led them into the conflict and significantly escalated the war, but also the man who couldn’t finish the job (LBJ fired him, but made it look like a job transfer to the World Bank). Revisionists want to argue, as McNamara did on some occasions, that it was not so much whether the Vietnam War was a wrong war, but whether the manner in which it was pursued was too costly to American and Vietnamese lives–a good example of bad American efficiency (there weren’t enough My Lia’s). Could the war have been won with a better military strategy? Did the liberal cowards on the home front quit on the war too early? The cowardice-at-home theory is alive and well, recently revived by the Swift Boaters of America, as they accused John Kerry of not deserving the title of war hero.  After all, McNamara was not a military strategist, though he hired a few who couldn’t possibly bring a military victory to his table. No one could. We were fighting intense nationalism, not an ideology and that makes all the difference in the world. To his death, McNamara was conflicted by not asking one simple question about the Vietnam War (see below).

In all of the discussions I have heard recently, springing up from news of McNamara’s  death, not once did I hear a thoughtful comment or a deeper probing question, one that should be on the minds of all Americans, as they ponder their perpetual wars of ignominious choices, such as those in Korea and Vietnam, but particularly the Vietnam War. The missing question is this: if the Vietnam War was a bad war, a mistaken war, an act of selecting a false enemy, didn’t that mean we should be examining whether or not the Cold War, Vietnam’s  predecessor and master guidance system, was also based on a false notion, a bad ideology, one that didn’t correctly identify the real world?  If Vietnam was the wrong war, wasn’t Korea another wrong war? And, if Korea was a wrong war, wasn’t the Cold War itself a bad choice to make, derived from a wrongful view of the world? This seems to be a hard question for Americans to address, because if the Cold War wasn’t necessary or was another bad war, it meant that America probably didn’t have any real enemies at the close of WW II–we created them. Without our fictitious enemies, we could have torn down the Pentagon as scheduled (it was made of non-reinforced concrete to conduct WW II and was scheduled to be torn down as America was supposed to demilitarize) and managed to get on making a truly better world, not the one we have now. As Geoffrey Perret points out in his insightful book “Commander-in-Chief: How Truman, Johnson and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future,” the sudden death of FDR in 1945 put Truman in the vortex of decision making in which he innately took a hard right turn, primarily because he didn’t like the Russians and he would, in a few months, have “the bomb.” Truman also loved the military and military power. He also, according to historian Perret,  used drugs to help affirm his decision-making. FDR was not going to allow the French to go back into Vietnam, but when the French argued with the Truman administration that they would re-enter Vietnam to help fight communism, the switch was turned on and all of America’s light bulbs supporting the Cold War went into an “ON-STATE” where they remain to this day, even though communism is not perceived to be a threat, unless you count Cuba and North Vietnam.  A few strokes of Truman’s pen made it impossible for those that would follow to see the world through a proper pair of spectacles–Ho Chi Min was not a communist– he was a nationalist who wanted to unite his country and throw out the French: initially, he thought Truman might help, but his letters to Truman, drawing from Thomas Jefferson’s writing in the Declaration of Independence, went unanswered and unheeded.

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