BOOK REVIEW/Graeme S. Mount, “Chile and the Nazis: From Hitler to Pinochet” (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002) $19.99, paper.

“At the end of World War II, if some prescient commentator had described the terror regimes that … dominate Latin America [in the late 1970’s], liberals would have derided this visionary for spelling out the likely consequences of a Nazi victory.”-Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman.

Book-burning, torture chambers, mass executions, the appointment of Nazi officials to top government posts, and raw anti-Semitism in the media did not go out of fashion with Hitler’s defeat by the Allies.

As a matter of fact, these Nazi-style practices were energetically resurrected in Chile under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who led the bloody US-coordinated coup. The coup resulted in the death of democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, a socialist firmly committed to a democratic path, and plunged the country into barbarism during Pinochet’s gore-spattered18-year reign.

But where German Nazism was almost universally condemned, the Pinochet regime found eager allies among the US government and, and even more ironically, the Jewish state of Israel. While most Americans imagine their government to be following a benevolent, idealistic foreign policy based on promoting democracy, the reality has been more sordid. As several authors have carefully documented, the US hired Axis war criminals and adapted Nazi counter-insurgency manuals to assist in fighting leftist guerrilla movements in Greece, Malaya and elsewhere.
As with the blatantly anti-Semitic dictatorship of Argentina of the 1970’s and 80’s, America’s leaders strongly embraced a tyranny deeply associated with Nazi-tinged tactics and symbols.

 ‘An accumulation of arsenic’: How US planned to poison Chilean democracy Following the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973 in Chile, US officials’ denial of any US involvement could not have been more fervent or categorical.  But contrary to some liberals’ belief the the CIA was acting as a rogue agency running amok, James Petras and Morris Morley documented in”The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government “ (1975, Monthly Review Press) that the CIA was merely following the directives of a civilian officials committed to the destruction of democracy in Chile.

“As (then-CIA director) William Colby and others have pointed out, the CIA was carrying out orders fashioned by the Committee of 40 and the White House.” New dimensions of the US intervention have recently been uncovered. As startling as earlier revelations were, they pale beside newly-declassified documents surfaced by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive . Kornbluh, editor of the “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier of Atrocity and Accountability,” encountered an astonishingly frank cable sent by CIA officials in Langley to their operatives in Santiago Chile on Sept. 27, 1970.

Above all, the CIA called for a resolute commitment to thoroughly poisoning democracy in Chile.
The cable’s authors in the CIA chillingly urged:
“However, we must hold firmly to the outlines or our production will be diffused, denatured, and ineffective, not leaving the indelible residue in the mind that an accumulation of arsenic does.”

A Yugo-quality system at Cadillac prices: that describes our appalling health system very precisely.

 In Wisconsin, we are particularly hard-hit: Expansion Management--a publication aimed at the Corporate Masters of the Universe who decide which plant stays open and which new one opens up--lists Wisconsin as tied for 3rd highest insurance premiums.

This is a deadly blow to Wisconsin's economic competitiveness. As Republican businessman Jack Lohman put it, "Free-market medicine is killing our free-market businesses."

Yet the prospect of fundamental reform like the Healthy Wisconsin plan that passed the State Senate sends shivers down the spines of the private insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. The private insurance companies would be rendered largely irrelevant in Wisconsin under this plan, and if they choose to enter the market at all, they will be tightly regulated.

Similarly, the major drug companies know that a plan like Healthy Wisconsin will lead to the government using its bargaining power to negotiate fair prices for drugs for Wisconsin citizens. So the cries of outrage from politicians like Mike Huebsch, who are sponsored by the campaign donations of the health insurance-drug-medical complex, are quite predictable.

WHERE ARE DEMS ON THIS?
But it is disappointing to see some Democrats, mostly at the national level, fighting to keep insurance companies deeply involved in our healthcare. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is one of the worst offenders with insurer-centered legislation. At the state level, we have State Rep. Robert Ziegelbauer bizarrely declaring, "This really is an ideological battle going on in our society. Do we want Soviet-style central planning, or do we trust individuals to make their own health care decisions. It's really that simple."(Manitowoc Herald-Times, 3/6/07)

Gov. Jim Doyle's comment at the State Democratic Convention, that advocates of Health Wisconsin were not operating in "the real world," cannot be classified as helpful either. Much of the progress in Wisconsin will depend on Doyle and Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton using their offices to drive home the need for fundamental reform. Perhaps the passage of Doyle's more incremental approach in the budget may make him more receptive to fundamental reform and more audacious in confronting those blocking reform.

What Wyden and Ziegelbauer don't grasp are the following points:

a) The private insurance industry has swallowed healthcare, like a giant Anaconda snake devouring smaller prey. The Anaconda must get fed before anything reaches further into the system, hence the astronomical bureaucratic costs and dismal outcomes of US healthcare. If anyone is issuing Soviet-style dictates to doctors and patients, it is the private insurers seeking the maximum profit.

b) The single-payer model championed in Michael Moore's new movie has been a great success in diverse societies, from Canada to France to Taiwan. At half the cost, citizens of these societies are permitted to see their doctor more often, remain in the hospital until they recover enough to go home, and are generally far more healthy.

c) In a single-payer system like Canada or France's, doctors remain in private practice and hospitals remain in the hands of private non-profits. There is no government takeover of healthcare; the big change is the elimination of the parasitic and utterly useless insurance industry.

d) Contrary to what defenders of the status quo claim (and even some reformers like SEIU PResident Andy Stern, Ron Pollack of Families USA and Prof. Jacob Hacker), Americans are ready to embrace the single-payer alternative.

Here's what Business Week concluded 5/16/05 in reviewing its poll results:"67% of all Americans think it's a good idea to guarantee healthcare for all US citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting."

DOCTORS GETTING READY FOR REFORM,TOO
More recently, the Medical Society of Minnesota surveyed its membership, with the results released in March, 2007. An overwhelming 64% of Minnesota doctors preferred enactment of a single-payer system.

n response to popular sentiment, the private insurers, drug companies, and their allies have already showered $5 million on the presidential candidates of both parties, with the aim of maintaining a highly profitable status quo.

But the prairie fire of revolt for a single-payer health system may soon be raging out of control.

It was trulybizarre to view media coverage of the Democratic debate last Thursday in Las Vegas.

It was as if the storyline, "Clinton rebounds forcefully" had been written weeks in advance by the press corps, without regard to what actually happened that night in Las Vegas.

Clinton, confronted with John Edwards' argument that the nation needs more than a choice between "Corporate Republicans" and "Corporate Democrats," tried to avoid confronting the issue by accusing Edwards of "mud-slingining" and using talking points from the Republican playbook (as if any Republican could be insufficiently slavish to corporate interests!).

Clinton was clearly unwilling to brand herself as a Democrat with a "people first" orientation (as her husband did so effectively--and deceptively--in his 1992 campaign before he fought all-out for NAFTA). All she could so was spew out an accusation.

Nonetheless, Edwards' clean but cutting comment was interpreted by the mainstream media as yet another sign that the once-sunny Edwards has become "too angry."

And while Barack Obama's performance was widely reported as shaky, his proposal that Social Security cuts be headed off by tax income above $97,500 (currently untaxed for Social Security) came off very solidly. When Hillary Clinton attacked with a truly Republican-style charge that it would mean a trillion-dollar tax increase, Obama responded with a set of powerful jabs that really rocked Clinton and scored a devastating knockout, in my observation. He drove home that only the wealthiest 6% earn more than $97,500.

Yet this dramatic moment passed without comment in most of the media, and it was like the knockout punch never happened.

However, Clinton was trying to make an important point, however weakly expressed, that $97,500 means very different things in different parts of the country. If you are living in New York City or San Francisco, the insanely high housing prices and overall cost of living may require some adjustment. But this doesn't undermine Obama's basic point.)

Still, Clinton and Obama have very misleadingly spread the notion that Social Security is in deep trouble. This simply isn't the case.

The vastly-expanding productivity of the economy will allow the government to keep paying out benefits even as the ratio of wageearner to Social Security recipient shrinks. While a Social Security shortfall is predicted many decades from now, minor fixes like the one suggested by Sen. Obama or a small 1% payroll tax increase would provide the needed repair. (See Paul Krugman's recent NY Times column on this subject or go to the Center on Economic and Policy Research website www.cepr.net where my friends Mark Weisbrot and Dean Baker, academically-trained economists, refute the Bush-promoted panic over Social Security in clear and understandable language.)

There is absolutely no need for a "bi-partisan commission"--traditionally the means by which the ruling class uses both parties at once to make the public swallow castor-oil public policies--on Social Security as suggested by Clinton.

CLINTON'S POSITIONS VS. THOSE OF HER BASE
Once more, the debate revealed the gaping canyon between the issue positions of Hillary Clinton and those of the moderate-inccome women who are her most loyal base became clear once again. Her hawkish stance on the war, her insurer-centered health plan, and her role as the biggest recipient of medical, insurance, and Wall St. cash would all make her base mighty nervous. But media coverage has done a poor job of conveying her basic viewpoints.

Hillary Clinton's response on the "human rights or national security" question at last week's debate in Las Vegas was downright chilling.

Keep in minder her ardent support for the Iraq War in 2002 (she not only voted to move toward war, but also voted against Sen. Levin's amendment that called for exhausting all peaceful and diplomatic means before war was initiated, her recent vote for the neo-cons' resolution on Iran, and her willingness to keep US troops in Iraq on combat missions as late as 2013.

Here's an excerpt from the NY Times transcript:

MR. BLITZER: You say national security is more important than human rights.Senator Clinton, what do you say?
SEN. CLINTON: "I agree with that completely. I mean the first obligation of the president of the United States is to protect and defend the United States of America. That doesn't mean that it is to the exclusion of other interests."

Clinton tried to soften this with a pro forma, CYA statement: "And there's absolutely a connection between a democratic regime and heightened security for the United States."

But this provides little reassurance given her voting record and public statements.

Hillary Clinton supported aggressive (and illegal) military intervention by the US in Iraq (which she still hasn't repudiated.

She is also surrounded by people like her chief advisor Mark Penn (whose PR firm Hill & Knowlton represented Blackwater USA and the government of Colombia, notorious for letting right-wing death squads operate with virtu.

While it is not totally clear what role will be played by James Carville, long-time advisor to both Clintons (and supposedly neutral commentator on CNN following last Thursday's debate) keep in mind that he has collected big money from the anti-democratic coalition of big business and wealthy whites who sought to depose Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and also provided advice to "Goni," the highly unpopular champion of privatization in Bolivia. Demonstrations against the privatization of vital services like water resulted in mass slaughters by police and government forces, heightening public outrage against Goni's regime. (Rachel Boynton's film on Carville and Paul Begala's consulting firm, "Our Brand is Crisis," fills in a lot of this information.)

 Finally, Clinton backs the US-Peru trade agreement that enshrines corporate power over democratically-derived legislation, as with NAFTA which allows corporations to sue governments if a law prevents them from making the maximum possible profit. (Clinton stumbled when asked about NAFTA, finding it hard to criticize except to say "it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would." her commitment to human rights and democracy in shaping US foreign policy is highly suspect.

James Carville and Paul Begala, Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 349 pages, $24.


Beware of Washington Beltway insiders masquerading as streetfighting men.

While attempting mightily to deliver a road map to victory, Democratic consultants Paul Begala and James Carville, in Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future,” offer a souped-up version of the same tepid, timid, Clintonesque politics that has left the Democratic Party wandering in the wilderness.

The book’s key bit of strategic advice is highly revealing:”We’re asking interest groups—some of the most powerful organizations on the left—to back off a bit.” In reality, Begala and Carville’s term “interest groups” is code for the majority of rank-and-file Democratic voters who stand far to the left of most Democratic congressmen and recent presidential candidates in opposition to US imperial adventures like Iraq, the outsourcing of US jobs, and for a single-payer healthcare plan.

BLAMING THE ACTIVISTS
By slyly suggesting that the party’s Left is simply composed of impatient unions, feminist, civil rights, anti-war, and environmental groups who insist on weighing the party down with unpopular baggage, Begala & Carville seek to avoid dealing with the gulf between corporate-funded Democratic officeholders and their constituents eager for a party that fights for their interests. Striving mightily to enforce artificial unity in the name of electing Democrats—whether it is a principled progressive like Russ Feingold or a conservative, contributor-appeasing Joe Lieberman—to defeat the Republicans’ collection of money-grubbing moralizers and neo-con war-mongers, Begala and Carville continually slide over difficult questions in their book.

As Carville recently told Newsweek, “The American people are going to be ready for an era of realism. They’ve seen the consequences of having too many ‘big ideas.’” Clearly, readers of Take It Back will not be overwhelmed with “too many big ideas.”

Yes, Take It Back contains much useful material on the stunning greed, arrogance, and incompetence of the Bush administration. But it largely comes up empty on the basic choice facing the party: will it continue to play to big campaign contributors on issues like job outsourcing and privatization of public services, or will it seek to re-bond itself with an increasingly restive and alienated base that seeks a party of conviction and commitment?

Because of Carville’s involvement in tenaciously promoting the job-exporting North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and more recently as a consultant in behalf of elite forces seeking to overturn the democratic election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and promoting an unpopular pro-privatization candidate in Bolivia (recorded in the documentary “Our Brand is Crisis” by Rachel Boynton) , the book loses a substantial amount of credibility. Carville’s tough-talking populism appears to be a smokescreen for a deeply-rooted affinity for the powerful that is especially apparent on issues of global injustice.

On the positive side of the ledger, Carville and Begala, veteran Democratic advisors who remained on the outside of the hapless Kerry campaign machine, must be credited with offering some sage tactical advice, if not a grand strategy. Moreover, they forcefully denounce the Iraq War, which is something that cannot be said of leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton or Rahm Emmanuel, who generally confine their criticisms of the war to tactical issues rather than grappling with the immorality of the contrived and brutal occupation.
TWO PARTIES INSIDE THE DEMS
But one of “Take It Back”’s biggest deficits is its unwillingness to confront the fact that the Democrats are really two very different parties seemingly headed on a collision course. The conflict between the corporate-based Dems and the grass-roots forces may not sharpen fully by this year’s mid-term elections, but seems certain to flare up into a civil war by the 2008 presidential primaries.

On the one hand, there is the party of the Clintons, Wall Street bankers like Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council, and Rubin’s new Alexander Hamilton Project, appropriately named after the thoroughly anti-democratic first treasury secretary They remain steadfast in pushing for more corporate-style globalization (translation: outsourcing of family-supporting US jobs with nothing remotely comparable to replace them) regardless of the impact on the Democrats’ most loyal, bedrock constituencies—working people, African-Americans and Latinos.

Hillary Clinton is even comfortable having right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of FOX News, hosting a fundraiser for her. This wing of the party remains content to passively watch the Bush Administration in the hope that it will choke itself on its own greed, with the Dems doing no more than decrying a “culture of corruption” (despite plenty of Democrats like Rep. William Jefferson plaguing beleaguered New Orleans). They imagine themselves being bold when they invoke the less-than-inspiring call for “competence” (recall how effective that was for Michael Dukakis in 1988).

They maintain disciplined and cowardly silence about the morality of the Iraq war, torture, “special rendition,” and massive civilian deaths. But at the grass-roots and fast-growing“net-roots” (activists connected by the Internet) level of Democratic voters, there is enormous outrage at the Iraq War, “preventive war,” outsourcing and the crushing of middle-class dreams, and America’s lack of a sensible health systemthat cuts out the insurance companies so central to the Clintons’ defeated plan.

This wing of the party has a few heroes in Congress: Sens. Russ Feingold, Dick Durbin, and Barbara Boxer, Reps. John Conyers, Cynthia McKinney, Tammy Baldwin, Barbara Lee, and Gwen Moore, among others. But with the exception of Feingold, the party leadership has joined with the prestige media in marginalizing these critical voices in favor of choosing Democratic spokespeople who confine their criticisms of the Bush Administration to safe, specific examples of unchained greed and incompetence.
WASHINGTON WIMPS VS. GRASSROOTS WARRIORS
Fueling the grass-roots’ huge frustration is the Washington Democrats’ unwillingness or incapacity to articulate these grievances with any force or sincerity. The canyon between the Washington wimps and the grass-roots warriors seems to grow day by day. Only the mounting outrages of George II’s rule sustains a tenuous alliance between the two wings of the Democrats, in the hope that the 2006 mid-term elections will create a Democratic majority in at least one house.

At moments, Carville & Begala take the DC Democrats to task for their utter unwillingness to stand up and fight, on any issue and at any time. They note, for example, that most key Democratic leaders remained silent when the Republican tax plan rendered some nine million children’s families ineligible for child tax credits while heaping $13 billion in new breaks on corporations.

“Too many Democrats—indeed, most Democrats—went along with screwing poor kids and sucking up to corporations. What the hell use is it to have a political part if you’re not going fight something like that? What the hell were the Democrats waiting for, some thing more important? What the hell does this party stand for, anyway?”

For one thing, the party doesn’t stand for universal health care, an issue of staggering importance to American families and with immense political stakes. ”Health care is more than a moral issue; it’s an economic issue, it’s a jobs issue, and it’s a competitiveness issue,” they correctly argue. Healthcare for US autoworkers amounts to about $4 per hour per worker, which increasingly drives production out of the US. Despite paying roughly twice what France does on a per-capita basis, the US ranks just 37th in overall health system efficacy.

Yet the party has continually failed to unify on the obvious rational solution—a single-payer system that eliminates the enormous cost, frustration, and inefficiency wrought by placing insurance corporations at the heart of the healthcare system. While offering some solid political advice—simplicity in offering an alternative and making health a “values issue”—Carville & Begala themselves shy away from the only clear-cut solution of a single-payer Canadian-style system and instead tepidly call for an expansion of Medicaid to cover all children and the working poor, along with allowing businesses to gain tax credits for buying into the federal workers’ group health plan.

Along with failure at the level of strategy and program, Democrats have been out-fought at the most fundamental level, Begala & Carville argue persuasively. “Democrats have failed at the basics: defining their message, attacking their opponents, defending their leaders, inspiring their voters.” The Kerry team’s ineptness provides a distressingly rich trove of examples: the absence of any memorable message from the campaign; the strict commandment against attacking the Bush administration during the Democratic convention; the painfully slow response to the Swift Boaters’ slurs; the shallow retort to the Republicans’ outrageous claim in Arkansas and West Virginia that Kerry intended to outlaw the Bible, and the decision to focus on a litany of issues rather than a consistent “narrative” about Bush’s America and an alternative vision.

As Carville once put it, the Kerry campaign operated “a perpetual committee listening to a perpetual focus group.” Despite Bush’s seemingly insurmountable tide of issues going against him in 2004—a wave of job outsourcing, soaring health costs and growing numbers of under-insured, and mounting revelations about the Bush team’s determined and deceptive effort to draw the US into an increasingly ill-fated war in Iraq—Kerry and his band of insular campaign advisors managed to still lose the election.
LACK OF MESSAGE, LACK OF COMMITMENT
Carville and Begala assert convincingly that the lack of an over-arching message for Kerry prevented him from taking advantage on these and other compelling issues. “Having a message allows voters to make sense of the specific issues,” they write. “Not having a message causes issues to lose their resonance.”

Thus, Kerry lost a Democratic state like West Virginia by 13 points, with contrived social issues like gay marriage and gun control filling the vacuum created by the absence of a distinct, compelling message from Kerry and the Democrats. Take It Back provides thus provides some valuable insights.

But it falls far short of its promise to help ordinary Democrats “take back their party.”

Apart from urging a slightly surlier tone toward Bush from Democratic congressmen, Begala and Carville seem basically content to leave the party in the hands of its current owners.
(An earlier version of this review appeared in The Progressive Populist in 2006)