Rich Lives Matter More: How Robert Kennedy Got to be U.S. Attorney General

A 19 year old black man hits another man over the head with a bear bottle. He is arrested by cops, charged with assault or even attempted murder. He is convicted and serves 2 years in jail. After that he is a felon, and so can't get a job, and ends up in a life of crime.

That is a believable story in the United States of America. Some variation of it has happened millions of times in our history. It could have been a true story in the 1920s, or 1950s, or in 2015.

Now consider this quote from The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson:

At a bar "Magnuson, happened to be already celebrating his birthday there, and his friends began singing Happy Birthday to him. Infuriated over what he apparently regarded as an intrusion into his celebration, Bob walked up behind Magnuson and hit him over the head with a beer bottle, sending him to the hospital for stitches." This was just an example of a pattern of illegal, criminal, violent behavior. In another fight friends said "Bobby would have killed him if we didn't pull him off."

Now there are many reasons an act of violence does not result in jail time. Much violence is simply hidden, as when the victim can't ID the assailant, or has his or her own reasons to avoid the police.

Anyone who thinks all white men and women carry get out of jail free cards with them, should take a look at prison statistics (there are about 120,000 white males in federal prison on any given day in the USA with about 77,000 black men).

Some times violent men avoid jail because they have good lawyers. Some times that may be a public defender, but more generally for serious violence only a private lawyer will do. As a result, black or white, having money for lawyers is the main prerequisite

Some violent men get off scott free because they are part of a system of corruption. That would include cops, friends of cops and judges and politicians, and other connected people.

The Bob above is better known as Bobby or Robert Kennedy. He is better known for being the brother and United States Attorney General of President John F. Kennedy. Bobby was assassinated and died on June 6, 1968. President Kennedy was assassinated and died on November 22, 1963.

Are you surprised? I am. I thought I knew quite a bit about the Kennedy family. Only recently I read Robert Kennedy's The Enemy Within, which is mostly about his (later successful) attempt to jail Jimmy Hoffa. Robert did not mention that he acted like a psychopath at least as late has his college years.

In this particular case the violent criminal was the son of one of the most powerful men in the world, Joseph Kennedy, a billionaire (when there were only a few in the world) who maximized profits by dancing back and forth over the imaginary line separating business from organized crime. Apparently no charges were every brought against Bobby for anything he did. The American Bar Association found nothing objectionable about his ethics. He joined the Justice Department, then became Joe McCarthy's henchman in his anti-communist crusade. And at last, through nepotism, the highest figure in American law enforcement.

My own, anecdotal experience in life confirms the picture. Mainly I stay away from criminals and crime. I figure being a political dissident in America is dangerous enough. But three friends of mine have been involved in crimes that were slightly more than petty. Two, probably binging on drugs, copied a scene out of Cool Hand Luke and one of them was caught. One friend, a cook, punched the restaurant owner in the face during an argument.

All three were white. The cook was charged with assault, convicted, and spent over a year in jail. One thief, as I said, got away. I later learned he followed Bobby's path, getting a law degree and a job at the Justice Department. The one who was caught was quickly released and only orally reprimanded by a judge. I don't know what he did for a career.

The difference? The cook was poor and had poor parents and a public defender. The thief had rich parents, with connections to the intelligence community, and an expensive lawyer.

I know black and hispanic and Native American Indians all get treated worse by law enforcement and the courts. But being white and poor or working class is no picnic.

One more anecdote comes to mind. If you are going to be a terrorist, it pays to be from a rich, powerful family. Ask Patty Hearst.

Black lives matter. We need to do more to end all forms of racism. But we also need to give the same justice to people who commit crimes regardless of their economic status and ability to hire lawyers of various levels of competency.

Robert Kennedy, The Enemy Within, and Labor Unions

Robert Kennedy is rapidly fading from the national consciousness. Only those of us who lived through the period of his activity remember him. At best younger people know him as the assassinated brother of President John Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy wrote a number of books. Lately I have been reading what is perhaps his best known book, The Enemy Within [Harper & Brothers, New York, 1960]. I am reading it as part of my study of the influence of organized crime on business, society and politics (and vice-versa). See, for instance, Uncle Raymond Clinton, Or Is Hillary Still Mobbed Up? [May 25, 2015]

It is possible that Robert titled The Enemy Within more aptly than he knew. Enemy mainly chronicles Kennedy's investigations of Hoffa and the Teamsters Union and associates. It paints a pretty grim picture of how bad things can get when a union is corrupted or mobbed up. But it also shows how glaringly narrow-visioned Robert Kennedy was, and raises the question of whether, at the time it was written, Robert Kennedy knew where the Kennedy family wealth came from.

Today it is well known that Joseph Kennedy, Robert's father, was an important organized criminal, in addition to being an important legitimate business and political figure. In popular culture you can see that illustrated in the later seasons of the TV series Boardwalk Empire, for instance.

But in the 1950's Robert (born in 1925) certainly acted as if he was ignorant of where the money came from that made for a luxurious childhood, a Harvard education, law school, a career in the Justice Department, and working at a high level for Congress at an early age.

As I waded through this often tedious book about dead crooks and the men who investigated them, I came upon this delightful passage:

Fortunately, our work was not without its lighter moments. There is an office building on Fourteenth Street in New York City whose tenants include a number of labor unions. Knowing that some of these unions were under investigation, and suspecting that perhaps the building was owned by a racketeer or perhaps even by "The Mob," Walter May, Paul Tierney, and Bellino checked the records. They were shocked to learn who owned the building.

It was my family.

Of course the investigation stopped there. Had some other reputed mob family owned the building, Robert would have kept digging like a terrier.

Many researchers have alleged that Robert did indeed know his dad had been a mobster, at least in the distant past, based on what Robert (and his brother John, then a Senator and also on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations) avoided investigating.

But something else is obvious in the book. Kennedy crucified the Teamsters and James Hoffa. It helped turn the nation against unions in general. Republican politicians, Hollywood and the business propaganda machine went on a decades-long spree telling Americans that all unions are corrupt, that every member is a Union Thug.

But on page after page, where does most of the corruption come from? From the businesses that employ teamsters. Hoffa & crew misuse union dues, to be sure. But the extra money is coming from business owners who find it is good business to pay Hoffa, say, $100,000 in cash to get results that save $1 million on the payroll end.

Democratic unions, run honestly by elected officials responsible to their members, has always been a goal to almost all union members. Corrupting those unions has been a goal of employers and organized crime, which are often the same thing.

There are some reasonably honest businesses too, perhaps a majority. But a careful examination of the record shows that the interface between organized crime and profit-taking is a loose one. In addition to the Joe Kennedy types who move money back and forth gracefully between criminal enterprises (like importing whiskey during Prohibition), stock market scams, and legitimate businesses, there are the many CEOs and stockholders who don't mind making a little extra money by dumping toxic wastes, failing to invest in worker safety, or selling dangerous and shoddy products to consumers.

Most people are complex, and the more successful they are, the more complex they have to be. Joe Kennedy amassed a vast fortune at other people's expense, but it is hard to criticize the job he did helping to set up the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). If it weren't so tedious, that story would make a good "It takes a Thief" type TV series.

Maybe, if elected President, Robert Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War his brother started. Maybe he would have led America to Camelot. Maybe he would have expiated the sins of his father. On the other hand, his regime might have been the most corrupt and hypocritical in U.S. history. We'll never know.

Republicans, Loaves and Fishes

It's one of the those rare moments when I find myself in (temporary) alignment with Wall Street. A bunch of crazy Republicans with guns want to kill the Government so badly they are willing to take the whole economy down with them.

Wall Street Republicans have always been aligned with Main Street Republicans, but the corporate assault on Main Street thinned the ranks pretty well. At some point Wall Street strategists (of course I'm generalizing here: some, not all of them) and conservative corporate strategists decided they needed reinforcements if they were going to run the nation to their liking. Those reinforcements came mainly in the form of Conservative Christians. This started in the 1960s, and would be more important in the long run that The Beatles or LSD.

The alliance went pretty well (for Wall Street) for a few decades. Wall Street and the corporate elite supplied the money. To the Christians they offered rhetoric about abortions and prayer in public schools. The Christians got to worshipping Free Market Capitalism almost as if it came out of the Bible. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush illustrated how well the system could work when it was working.

But as deluded as Christians are, they are not quite unthinking zombies. They have lively egos, and many started thinking they should actually be in charge, not the Wall Street boys. They are pushing economic ideas that would have seemed primitive to Jesus himself, like returning to using Gold as money.

They tend to be Old Testament guys, because the New Testament contains a lot of messages they don't want to here. Like loving people [John 13: 34], paying your taxes [Luke 20: 25], wolves in sheep's clothing [Matthew 7: 15] and holding all things in common [Acts 4, 32].

In short, they forgot the Loaves and Fishes [Luke 9: 12-17]

• But he said to them, "Give them more to eat". They said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fishes." ... For they were about five thousand ... He took the five loaves and two fishes, and looking to the sky, he prayed over them, and broke them, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude. And they did eat, and were all filled.

Medicare and Social Security are the loaves and fishes of modern America. If you can provide them, you can get by with all kinds of other kinds of business and government folly. You can talk up the Republican God, Free Market Capitalism, all you want, but people want jobs with good pay, homes, and a safe environment. Republican experiments this last decade with free markets have led to homelessness, joblessness, and hopelessness.

Having forgotten to bring out the loaves and fishes, Republican politicians, and particularly Tea Party pea brains, will be abandoned by the crowds, and crucified in the next round of elections. I am guessing they will lose ten seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in California alone in 2012, the way things are heading.

Hopefully the Republican Party will implode. If America remains a two party system, hopefully the new 2nd party will be based on sane, pragmatic, modern thinking. We still have to save the environment, which is going downhill at a rapid pace. We have to make things right for ordinary working people. That means disassembling the corporate security state and the concentrations of wealth that have emerged since President Kennedy started cutting the top tax rates on the wealthy back in 1962. We would not need to tax the rich at such high rates if they used their profits to hire more workers at better pay, but they have shown over and over again that they (as a class) are incapable of behaving responsibly.

Barack Obama, Vietnam, and Afghanistan

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961. President John F. Kennedy (Democratic Party) had been in office only a few months, but he had already shown that his liberal domestic policy posture was for getting votes. On foreign policy he was not going to be out-anti-communism ed by anyone. His predecessor, President Dwight David Eisenhower, as a former military commander, had not been someone the generals at the Pentagon could easily push around. But Kennedy was the son of a billionaire who had been a mere lieutenant before entering politics.

Eisenhower, who had been on General MacArthur's staff in Asia before becoming Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, had no desire to waste U.S. troops in Vietnam. But Kennedy allowed himself to be talked into escalating American troop presence in what was essentially a civil war, and one that was not even really about communism.

An awful lot of dead people later, Vietnam was united and the imperialist powers France and the United States and their local allies were fully expelled. That was 1975. Barack Obama was 14 years old, attending a private prep school. It can hardly be doubted that growing up during the Vietnam War must have had some impact on the young Obama.

Yet Barack would not have worried about being drafted into the military because conscription ended in 1973, when he was 12 years old. He did not need to make a choice that would have real consequences for himself.

Despite getting a B. A. in political science from Columbia University in 1983, Barack failed to learn the basic lessons of the Vietnam War. Not the ethical lessons, not the political lessons, not the economic or military lessons. And since he did not learn those lessons, the Marines and the Taliban will continue to duke it out. America may even win the war, that is unlikely but not impossible, but it does not matter. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was ethically, politically, tactically and strategically wrong; the U.S. has already lost so much, a mere victory, however defined, cannot make up for the losses.

Eisenhower was a general; Kennedy a lieutenant; Barack was never even a private. If he had been a war resister, that might have given him some backbone to resist pressure from the military-industrial complex and its hawkish political friends.

President Lyndon B. Johnson (a Democrat) was responsible for almost all the escalation of the Vietnam War. President Richard M. Nixon (a Republican) was responsible for getting the U.S. out of the war. I don't think parties matter much in this kind of situation. Timing matters. If Kennedy had not been assassinated, if Johnson had lost to Goldwater in the 1964 election, or if Humphrey had won in 1968 instead of Nixon, the trajectory would have been about the same.

Afghanistan, like Vietnam, has its various ethnic groupings, but none of them really want to be ruled by the United States. The allies of the U.S. in Afghanistan today are mainly the same people who allied with Russia (aka the USSR) in the prior war, and they are allies for mostly the same reasons. If there are six Taliban left in the country when the U.S. finally does declare a victory, within five years of the withdrawal of U.S. troops the Taliban, or their rough equivalent, will have regained control of most of the country.

The only way to keep Afghanistan under U.S. control is to keep U.S. soldiers there permanently. And even that may not work. As with Vietnam, the U.S. will probably end up controlling only its own military bases.

It was not just propaganda, leaders in the U.S. were genuinely worried that if they did not defeat the Vietnamese communists (who were really nationalists), the entire globe would be thrust into darkness. In reality once they kicked the U.S. out, the "Communists" behaved pretty much like everyone else. They did intervene in Cambodia, but they had good reason, and they withdrew as soon as they could. The Vietnamese have proven to be a peaceful, productive people. They did not cooperate much with the Chinese or Russian communists. They liked communism for its own sake, not because they wanted to be subordinate to China or Russia.

The people of Afghanistan are not the enemies of the United States. And in a large way, the people of Afghanistan are the Taliban. Leave them alone, and they will leave us alone. Al-Qaeda extremists should have been dealt with by other methods than invading an entire enormous country.

Instead of doing the right thing, President Obama succumbed to pressure from the Pentagon. Like Kennedy and Johnson and even Nixon, he will go down in global history as a war criminal. If the histories are written by honest people.

Barack Obama: Will He Dick Nixon Us?

Barack Obama has promised some of his supporters to end the United States occupation of Iraq. Slowly, to be sure, but surely. Recently he has been accused of waffling on the issue, but in any case he appears to be substantially different from John McCain on this issue. Voters trapped in the two party fish net who are against the war have nowhere to go. The idea of voting for Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney - well, the press is treating her like she does not exist, so the idea cannot even occur to them.

This brings us right back to 1968. For young Obama supporters who skipped over or forgot that period of U.S. history, allow me to recapitulate. We were deep in a war with Vietnam, allied to the government of South Vietnam, which had been set up by the U.S. (and at times rearranged) after the French left in the 1950s. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had kept us out of an active military role in Vietnam until 1960. Liberal darling (but really a Cold Warrior) President John F. Kennedy sent thousands of U.S. military "advisors," many of whom in fact were observed engaging in combat. Then after JFK was assassinated President Lyndon Johnson was worried that he would be accused by John's brother Bobby, and conservative southern Democrats, and the entire Republican Party of losing Vietnam if the communists took over South Vietnam. So he sent in hundreds of thousands of troops, carpet bombed North Vietnam, and became the U.S.'s best known international war criminal after Harry "I dropped the bomb" Truman (also a Democrat).

Lyndon Johnson decided not to run in 1968, he had become so unpopular. His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, was the Democratic Party nominee. Richard Nixon, who had been Dwight David Eisenhower's Vice President, was the Republican Party presidential nominee.

Hubert Humphrey said he was for continuing the war. Richard Nixon said he had a plan to end the war. While there were many other issues in the 1968 election, without a doubt Nixon won because he had a reputation for being fiercely anti-communist, yet made hay on an unpopular war by having a plan for "peace with honor."

Nixon was not just deluding the American people; he was deluding himself. The North Vietnamese were not scared by his threat to use nuclear weapons. So Nixon started negotiating, and started reducing American troop levels. At the same time he tried to brush back the communist advance with ferocious military maneuvers up to and including the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, which was a sanctuary for the communists.

The Democrats, and those to the left of the Democrats (a substantial group at the time), were happy to forget Humphrey and Johnson's troop buildup. They hated Nixon with a blinding passion that made rational analysis and action impossible. Ask any 55 to 85 year old Democrat today who was responsible for the Vietnam War, and almost all will blame Richard (Dick) Nixon. By the end of his term in office we were out of Vietnam, but that did not matter. He even made nice with the Chinese Communists, something no Democratic Party president had dared to do, but got no credit for it from Democrats.

Which brings us back to Barack Obama. George W. Bush involved the U.S. in a war against Iraq followed by an occupation. John McCain, though he was not Vice-President, finds himself in the position of Hubert Humphrey in 1968: an advocate for an unpopular policy. There is no reason to think that in practice John McCain will get the troops out of Iraq any slower than Senator Obama. If McCain says the troops are coming out (after he is elected) you know he can take on the Pentagon brass and the golden calf Republicans. Obama, on the other hand, will have to watch his right flank.

Obama has already promised to transfer at least some of the troops in Iraq to the Afghan front, where the war is going badly at the moment. Don't be surprised if he sends some "advisors" to Somalia as well.

If either President Obama, or President McCain, starts withdrawing troops from Iraq, there is the real possibility that there will be a fundamentalist Islamic takeover. I don't care; that would be an internal matter for Iraq; the U.S. has no business there. But both McCain and Obama would be under heavy pressure to recommit.

The most likely scenario at this point is that Barack Obama will become President. I am capable of hope; I hope he is a good President. But I won't be surprised if he just muddles through like most of our past Presidents. I won't even be surprised if he expands the war and is a failure on domestic issues. On the other hand, maybe he'll surprise us like "Tricky Dick," did. China was not an issue in the 1968 campaign. But by getting us out of Vietnam, opening relations with China, and creating the Environmental Protection Agency, in retrospect President Nixon outshines all the Democratic presidents of that era.

Quagmires: Bush's Iraq and Kennedy's Vietnam

Barack H. Obama is being promoted as another John F. Kennedy. Given his likely nomination and presidency, this is a good time to compare real Kennedy to the Democrat Party propaganda image of him. As a standard of comparison I'll use the current President, George W. Bush, because his record is still relatively fresh in people's minds. We'll start with the foreign wars of these two Presidents; other parallels will have to wait for later essays.

The Iraq War has been called a quagmire, as was the Vietnam War. The image of armies wading into swamps and disappearing in the mud was nearly literal in the Vietnam War. Iraq is a desert country; dying of thirst in the desert, or sinking into the sands, would be a more appropriate metaphor for U.S. military efforts there.

John Kennedy was the son of a billionaire; his political ambitions were backed by a lot of money. He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard. His thesis was published in book form as Why England Slept and made him famous at an early age. He asserted that World War II was caused by England's appeasement of Adolph Hitler. After World War II Kennedy was vehemently anti-communist and was a strong supporter of Joe McCarthy's red-baiting. He had won a seat in the House of Representatives in the 1946 elections and voted against many of the New Deal programs of Harry Truman. In 1952 he was elected to the US Senate, then re-elected in 1958. In 1960 he beat Vice-President Richard Nixon to become President of the United States largely because Nixon's record on civil rights alienated voters in the southern states who had been willing to vote for Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy had a poor civil rights voting record and was supported by segregationists (racists) in the Democratic Party.

JFK had become involved in Vietnam long before his presidency [See Stanley Karnow's Vietnam, A History] as a supporter of Catholic anti-communists. Dwight Eisenhower had "lost" North Vietnam, but actually that had been a pretty good deal because the Vietminh would have easily won nationwide elections. When Kennedy took office the U.S. had less than 500 military personnel in Vietnam, and they really were advisors. That was not anti-communist enough for John, who gradually increased American involvement in the civil war there. His "advisors" in Vietnam numbered 16,000, flew South Vietnamese army troops into battle, bombed and strafed "the enemy," and were seen by U.S. journalists engaging in combat. The South Vietnamese army was not half as interested in fighting communism as John Kennedy was, and kept trying to negotiate deals for a "neutral" government including the Vietcong, but Kennedy (and then Johnson) threatened to cut off all U.S. aid if a peace deal was made. Not happy with Ngo Dinh Diem's prosecution of the war, Kennedy gave the nod to a coup. Which was followed by a series of coups as corrupt Vietnamese military leaders fought each other for power.

In summary: Kennedy took the U.S. deeper into a quagmire. In retrospect it is easy to see that the Vietminh, while communist, where not just following orders from Moscow or Peking. They would eventually form an independent communist regime that has never been a threat to U.S. security.

George W. Bush was way different from John. F. Kennedy. He went to Yale instead of Harvard. His family was rich, but no where near as rich as the Kennedy family, but his grandfather Prescott Bush had been a Senator and his father George H. W. Bush served as President from 1989 until 1993. George followed a slightly different path, publishing no best-sellers, not seeing combat during his military service, but graduating from Harvard Business School and setting up a business in the oil industry. He became governor of Texas in 1995 and was elected President of the United States in 2000.

President Bush inherited the Iraq War from the Clinton administration, which in turn inherited it from the original George Bush (W.'s father). During the Clinton administration it was a low-level war mainly consisting of an economic embargo, "no-fly zones," and the occasional bombing run.

After the September 11, 2001 attack by Al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the American public was looking for vengeance. Al Qaeda was then based in Afghanistan, so the U.S. attacked that nation when its government refused to cooperate. By then it was long standing U.S. policy to want to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

In contrast to John Kennedy, who snuck U.S. troops into Vietnam, tried to hide the reality that they were engaged in combat, and tried to deny that he had anything to do with the coup against Diem, George W. Bush was open about his intention to have a full-scale war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. However, Bush also lied. He falsely claimed that Iraq was developing atomic and chemical weapons. His problem was there was no real just cause for war. Iraq had never attacked the United States.

Like Kennedy in Vietnam, Bush misunderstood the situation in Iraq. He thought the Iraqi people would welcome a U.S. victory, then quickly set up a stabile democratic regime that would be able to develop the country along Western lines. Bush appears to not have contemplated a prolonged U.S. mission in Iraq. But as with the anti-communist politicians and sects of South Vietnam, the anti-Saddam politicians and sects of Iraq have been more interested in their internal rivalries than in following the U.S.'s desires.

So the Iraq quagmire will be handed over to whoever wins the U.S. presidential elections of 2008. If history is any guide, things will only get worse. Lyndon Johnson ran in 1964 as a Democrat considerably to the left of Kennedy who would keep us out of war in Vietnam, but he sank us way deeper into the quagmire. Richard Nixon ran as a moderate Republican in 1968 saying he had a plan to get us out of Vietnam right away, but the North Vietnamese did not cooperate, so the war just kept getting bigger until Nixon finally withdrew all American troops in 1973.

The Democratic Party gained control of the House and Senate in the 2006 elections largely because the American public wanted to see U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq. Two years later it is the Democratic Party's quagmire. Neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama had the will or leadership skills to end the occupation despite being prominent leaders of a party that controls Congress. Clearly Senator McCain intends to continue the war if elected.

While fine points can be argued, George W. Bush and John F. Kennedy were products of the same mind set and conducted themselves in practically identical manners. To change U.S. foreign policy, the people of the United States themselves must change their mind set and then have the courage to elect new politicians who will govern effectively. We need to take a broom and clean away all the old Democratic Party and Republican Party politicians.

Vietnam: Harry Truman's War?

Democratic Party partisans like to remember Vietnam as Richard Nixon's war. Clearly that view is merely propaganda. Richard Nixon ended American involvement in the war, accepting the political consequence of a defeat of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies by the communist party of Vietnam. It is true that the peace plan Nixon had when elected in 1968 did not work out (basically, peace through victory), and a lot of people died needlessly during further years of bloody fighting, with U.S. troops involved until 1973. But it was Richard Nixon's war by inheritance only.

Former president Lyndon Johnson gets most of the blame for the Vietnam War. He deserves it. He was, of course, the leader of the Democratic Party, so its partisans like to try to pretend he did not exist, except when you start talking about Civil Rights. Lyndon Johnson was the first Democratic Party President of the United States who really fought for civil rights [possible exception: Harry Truman].

Lyndon Johnson became President when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. At that time the United States had a major presence in South Vietnam, mainly providing economic and military aid to the puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem. But the U.S. already had 16,000 military personnel stationed in South Vietnam. We had a naval fleet off the coast of Vietnam (including off North Vietnam) and a large military presence in our nearby former colony, the Philippines. While Diem was a Vietnamese nationalist who did not like taking orders from the U.S., his ability to fight to retain his hold on South Vietnam was nearly totally dependent on U.S. aid. So in effect South Vietnam had become a U.S. colonial possession with a government that was semi-autonomous. Just like under the old French colonial system. Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. Navy faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident in order to justify even greater U.S. military intervention. When Johnson left office in early 1969 the U.S. had 550,000 troops on the ground in South Vietnam and was bombing North Vietnam on a daily basis.

Democratic Party partisans hate it when you blame the war on John F. Kennedy. They like to say that if Kennedy had lived he would have with withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam. Some conspiracy theorists believe that Kennedy was getting reading to pull the plug; that was why he was assassinated. It is not that there is absolutely nothing to support this view, but the support is thin. The basic facts speak for themselves: when Kennedy entered office the U.S. had 500 military advisors in South Vietnam. When he died he left 16,000 U.S. soldiers there. That sounds like a solid escalation of the conflict to me.

But hey, most sources put the number of U.S. military men in South Vietnam when Ike left office in 1961 at 500. I heard a Democratic Party hack say the Vietnam War was a Republican Party war because Dwight Eisenhower was the first to send military advisors to Vietnam. This takes us back to 1953, when a variety of Vietnamese nationalist groups were trying to oust the French colonial rulers. The communists, or Vietminh, were the largest group and were the only serious military threat to the French. The U.S. was providing most of the money and military material that enabled the French army to fight. Then in 1954 the Geneva Conference was held. The French agreed to withdraw from Vietnam. A non-communist but nationalist regime would take temporary control of the South. The Vietminh took over in the North. A nationwide election was to take place within 2 years. The Vietminh would have easily won a nationwide election, but might have allowed non-communist parties to be part of the government.

The U.S. and France, however, were determined to stop communism from spreading. The gave the governance of South Vietnam to Ngo Dinh Diem and his crew. No national elections were held. The communists were not particularly strong, militarily, in the south. U.S. aid and a handful of advisors, along with continued French ownership of important businesses, were all that were needed during the Eisenhower years. Of course Richard Nixon was Eisenhower's Vice-President, and was as anti-communist as the Kennedy brothers were at that time. It should be noted that one of Diem's big supporters in the U.S. in the 1950s was Senator John F. Kennedy.

But the whole idea of aiding the French to defeat the Vietminh goes back to Harry Truman. Both parties and the media blamed him for losing China to the communists. He (and most high-ranking Americans) saw communism as monolithic. He did not want to involve U.S. troops. So he paid the French to fight the Vietminh, which they were happy to do, given the economic benefits to France of retaining their colony.

To add some irony to the situation, Vietnam had been one of the sore points that had led to the conflict between the U.S. and Japan in World War II. In Vietnam during World War II the French were happy to follow the orders of Hitler's puppet Vichy regime in France, and Hitler's orders were to do what the Japanese occupiers said. So when the U.S. was trying to get guerillas to fight Japan, which in Indochina meant fighting the French army, it trained and armed -- the Vietminh! Then, instead of punishing the French in Indochina for siding with the Nazis, the U.S. backed their continued control of the colony!

So which president is to blame for the Vietnam War? Take your pick. Or think of it this way: the U.S. has a ruling elite. The elite rules regardless of which party is in power. And a policy, once set, can go on for decades no matter how stupid or inhumane it is.

recommended reading: Stanley Karnow's Vietnam, A History

What To Expect From a Democratic President

What can we expect from a Democratic President?

If you believe in social justice and peace, the record is not encouraging it. I'll review the highlights before analysing the potential of an Barack Obama presidency.

The first Democratic Party President of the United States was named Andrew Jackson. He was, in short, a murderer and genocidal maniac. He thought nothing of killing white gentlemen who disagreed with him over minor points. He had a 16 year old boy volunteering in stead of his older brother in the War of 1812 executed for not kowtowing to him. He traded in slaves, breaking up families. He provoked Native Americans to defend their land so he and his friends could exterminate them and steal the land. I can't think of a more brutal, unjust person in American History.

But the monstrous nature of Andrew Jackson's "frontier" personality is not the key take-away from his administration. The ruling class, which Jackson belonged to, needed two parties in order to rule effectively. These parties have to be competitive, and they have to control sections of the population that are sometimes at odds with one another. Andrew Jackson was used as a nucleus of a party, the same Democratic Party that we have today, that kept newly enfrachised, relatively poor, white male voters in line with ruling class interests by poising them against even more oppressed workers: women, Native American Indians, and African American slaves.

After losing the Civil War the Democratic Party established a strong base in the former states of the Confederacy and allied itself with corrupt, mostly Catholic, urban machines in the Union states. The Republican Party became the preferred party of industrialists and Wall Street by 1872. Still, there were times when the true leaders of the ruling class preferred a Democratic Party President. In particular, when a big grab was planned involving a war.

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was made President. He was portrayed at the time, and is portrayed in most "standard" (approved by the powers that be) history books as a liberal peacemaker. He maneuvered the U.S. into World War I, which resulted in major economic gains for the Morgan family and the like. He talked about peace and international borders based on national self-determination. But he kept the Philippines enslaved by the U.S. and was an overt racist and segregationist. I would go on about what a jerk he was but moving on ...

When the possibility of real social reform came to the United States in the Great Depression, in stead we got President-for-Life Franklin D. Roosevelt. After the Democrats in Congress blocked Herbert Hoovers' attempts to provide relief for distressed Americans, the measures Hoover had advocated were passed under Rooosevelt. But something far more ominous was done as well: the power of the Federal Government was vastly strengthened. And the real agenda was war, which Roosevelt prepared for with more vigor than he committed to his welfare programs. Roosevelt demanded that the Japanese give up their colonies while the French and British were to be allowed to keep their Asian colonies. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, because the astonishingly large fleet of battleships in the harbor were being readied for an attack on Japan to follow up on a war ultimatum Roosevelt had already issued to the Japanese.

Harry Truman is the only executive of any nation to order the use of atomic weapons in war, and against civilians.

John F. Kennedy is the former Democratic Party politician who is most often compared to Barack Obama. They both went to Harvard Law School. Kennedy was young when elected President. Kennedy was a racist who refused to follow up on progress made towards recognizing the civil rights of African-Americans during the Eisenhower administration. But he gave racism a liberal gloss by upholding the Warren Court decisions in rhetoric, if not in reality.

Kennedy was favored by the ruling class because they needed some dirty jobs done. Communist insurgencies were at work in virtually every country in the world when Kennedy took office. Kennedy began a 16 year global reign of terror against people who dared to rebel against Wall Street. He invaded Cuba. The invasion of Cuba failed because the Cuban people did not rise up against Castro as Kennedy had deluded himself into believing. He upped the ante in Vietnam. He supported the ongoing colonial policies of the French and British. But most important, he lowered tax rates for rich Americans. The war against the poor in the rest of the world was to be financed by taxes on the backs of American workers.

Why was Bill Clinton made President? The ruling class loved Bill. He pushed through trade globalization treaties that would have been resisted by grass-roots Democrats if a Republican president had been pushing them. He feinted left on medical care and then used the leftover "reform" energy to set up the rapacious HMO system. He did nothing about global warming in 8 years in office. He had U.S. war planes attack Iraq on a daily basis for 8 years, enforcing a cruel embargo and the "no-fly zone."

So why does the ruling class need a Barack Obama in the President's office so badly now? It is not just that people are tired of George W. Bush. Something bigger is up.

I am just speculating here. I don't think it is the "war on terror." Islamic fundamentalist warriors could be controlled with an extra billion dollars or so a year to the CIA, not the hundreds of billions of dollars per year the wars on the people of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan have cost. If it is just a matter of money you could let the Taliban take over Afghanistan again and then finance a guerilla insurgency against them that would keep them too bogged down to do much on an international scale.

At the top of the capitalist food chain analysts and decision makers may pay attention to detail, but promoting Barack Obama to the Presidency is part of a big picture. It could have to do with the global food shortages that have emerged in the past few years and appear to be accelerating. Maybe we are about to do major military intervention in Africa and need to put a black face on that. Most likely, though, working class Americans are about to have the economic screws put to them in a way we have not seen since the Rockefellers turned their machine guns on us over a century ago. On the other hand there is something happening that even I don't know about. An unknown unknown.

But Barack Obama knows. You don't get the kind of free-ride from major corporate media that the Obama campaign has gotten without there already being a tacit understanding in place.

Barack Obama simply does not have the spine to stand up to a bunch of powerful men in the situation room of the White House. The guy has never made waves in any political office he has held, and he won't as President.

Bad things are going to happen. Obama's job will be to tell his progressive and middle class and rich-liberal supporters to get in line and follow orders.

I hope I am wrong, but things really don't look good from where I'm sitting, peering out at the world and back into history.

Elections: 2008 and 1960

There are a lot of candidates in the field hoping to be elected President of the United States of America in 2008, or at least to feed on campaign contibution and media attention in the mean time. No one stands out and there are many wild cards both within the "major" parties and outside. Michael Bloomberg, billionaire mayor of New York may run. I hear the Green Party may have a very attractive, non-Nader candidate. If former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani is the Republican nominee there will almost certainly be an independent, ultra-right candidate. And never underestimate the Libertarian Party.

Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it, just like those of us who do study history. I have been rethinking basic interpretations provided by the corporate media and academic thinkers (who are seldom as far apart as they like to pretend) and want to share some thoughts on the 1960 elections. Usually 1960 is cast as the victory of a liberal Democrat, John F. Kennedy, over a conservative Republican, Richard Nixon. But a lot of actual facts don't fit that neat picture. Just for instance Nixon was a Quaker, a group often associated with radical left politics, and Kennedy was a Catholic, usually a group associated with conservative to fascist politics (with many exceptions, notably Catholic Worker and Liberation Theology). Here is a map of who won the 1960 electoral college votes, state by state:

What is that strange Byrd thing? Why, it is the 15 electoral college votes that went to Harry Byrd, who was not even a candidate. Certain unpledged electors could stomach neither the Republican Nixon nor the Catholic Kennedy, so they gave their votes to Byrd. Kennedy ended up with 303 electoral votes to 219 for Niixon, so even if Nixon really won Illinois, as is widely alleged, Kennedy would still have won the election.

The key thing to see in this map, that most people have been taught not to see, is that Kennedy was the candidate that white racists voted for. It was not just a marriage of convenience. President Eisenhower, pushed by Vice-President Nixon, had been implementing the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in the South. Kennedy, as a Democrat, was part of a long standing agreement to support segregation to get votes in the South.

John F. Kennedy was an astute student of rhetoric, but a bad President (unless you are a racist, nationalist, and militarist). He did less than Eisenhower and Nixon about civil rights: he had to if he wanted the Southern electoral college votes again in 1964. He was a war criminal who okayed the invasion of Cuba; the fact that the invasion was repulsed by the people of Cuba hardly lessens his guilt. He was the son of a rapacious capitalist; he had been a supporter of the Red Scare when it was politic; he said Eisenhower was not tough enough on Communism. His only lasting legacy was the space program, which was mainly about regaining military supremacy over the Soviet Union while putting the expenses outside the military budget.

The truly sad thing is that Nixon turned to the dark side between his defeat in 1960 and his election in 1968. He inherited a war with Vietnam from Johnson. (Before Lyndon Johnson, American troops in Vietnam were primarilly for advising and training the South Vietnamese army that was going to defeat the commie terrorists. Every American President since James Buchanan in 1856 has inherited the War Against Asia, however.) He became a war criminal by invading Cambodia and Laos as well as by continuing attacks on civilians.

I think the ultimate solution to fixing American politics would include returning the President to the position intended by the Constitution: an administrator who carries out policies made by Congress. But that won't be one of the choices in 2008. Ladies and gentlement, if you have money place your bets; if you don't, you are still allowed to vote in the primaries and general election.