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Alice Waters: ‘Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook,’ Part 2 (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer continues his conversation with Alice Waters, renowned chef and food activist, and the founder and owner of the famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif.

The two discuss the universality of enjoying food, the artistic vision behind Chez Panisse, and Waters’ new book, “Coming to My Senses.”

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the full transcript below, listen to part 1 of the interview here, and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

—Posted by Emily Wells

Full transcript:

Robert Scheer: Hi, I’m Robert Scheer, and this is Scheer Intelligence. Today we’re continuing our conversation with legendary chef, restaurateur, and author Alice Waters. Her new book is Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook. For those of you who don’t know about Chez Panisse, if you ever get to Berkeley you should eat there. I would argue it’s the best restaurant in America, my own sake–

Alice Waters: Goodness. [Laughs]

RS: I’ve eaten in quite a few, and I’ve eaten in quite a few around the world. And what I love about it is its simplicity, frankly. You know, I never thought I would be thrilled to be served a piece of fruit at the end of a meal; but, you know, then you eat this apple or plum or mulberry or something, and you just say, wow. That is actually the best one I’ve ever had. And why? Because somebody bothered to pick it when it was the right time. I remember you once told me, I was–I have a Sicilian, had a–he’s now passed away, Pete Zacchino, a Sicilian guy, my wife’s father. And I was making pasta for him, I was growing my own basil and tomatoes up in Sacramento, and I made the pasta from scratch and cut it with a knife; I actually didn’t have a machine. And made this whole thing, and I remember you gave me a tip, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but you told me, don’t pick the basil just before you serve, pick it in the morning. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s the way I remember it. And you gave me this tip, because it’ll be more flavorful or something. And you know, and your book reeks with that kind of advice; you know, don’t burn the garlic; you know, garlic is really important to your–

AW: Really important. [Laughs]

RS: Really important. And you know, know when the growing season is, and when’s the best time to get that plum or what have you. And what strikes me in your book is that it didn’t have to be food. You were looking for an area where you can control the integrity. You were looking for a center of idealism. And this thing I read before, when you said when my campaign failed you were disappointed ‘cause I came close to winning but didn’t win, but you were looking for some environment that you could control to a considerable degree. It turned out the restaurant was such a place.

AW: Well, I–I felt like food could get to everybody. I mean, good food could. And so that I–it’s a little bit like winning them over. Getting them to taste something they’d never tasted before. And then they would come back to the restaurant and want to eat something again. And it’s a very important idea in the philosophy of Carlo Petrini, who started the slow food movement. And it’s why I am part of that movement. Because he was trying to win people over with taste, so that you would be on the search to have that, to find that again, and you’d end up at the doorsteps of the organic, sustainable farmers. Which is what happened with me, around finding ingredients for Chez Panisse. I was only looking for taste; maybe because I lived in Berkeley I was a little bit looking for organic farmers, but not really. I was such a Francophile, and I was going to find that flavor of something I had eaten when I lived in France. I wanted the oyster to taste that way. And I ended up on the beach [inaudible 4:23], and I was opening the oyster right there on the beach, and it tasted like the ones I had in France.

RS: But even though you are a proud Francophile, and I don’t deny that, you have great respect for other cuisine. And in your book, Coming to My Senses, you praise Indian food and you praise Chinese food, and Italian food and so forth. So you’re not a French snob in any sense. And what I like–I actually prefer your cafe upstairs, I’ll be honest; I eat there every chance I get, I really like it a lot. I don’t eat downstairs that much, not because I got anything against downstairs–although, you know, it’s a little more than my budget is comfortable with three times a week or something–upstairs, I’ll eat anytime I’m in Berkeley. I try to get in, it’s not always easy. And what I love about it is the simplicity. It doesn’t put on airs. You know, it says pizza can be a great food. Or something like nettles, which were discarded, or what is the other thing you found in the river that people weren’t using. You have some great scene where a snobbish mother of one of your friends criticizes you for something that they always threw away. I don’t know, your friend Eleanor.

AW: We do use nettles on the pizza–

RS: Yeah, and people were not using nettles, right?

AW: No, ah–they’re a weed. They’re everywhere. And our farmer just sent a whole bag of them down to us, and he said these are so nutritious, and if you cook them with garlic they’ll be great. And then we tried them on a pizza with a little pecorino cheese, and it’s like the most successful pizza we have at Chez Panisse.

RS: Yeah. And let me just say, by the way, this is not some forlorn cause we’re pushing here. Because you’ve had great victories. I mean, again, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you certainly have been as effective as anyone in raising our consciousness about food. And in a way that doesn’t have to be pricey, doesn’t have to be rare ingredients of the, you know, some truffle or something. Garlic, for instance, the celebration of garlic is the celebration of a food that was, you know, in the common cuisine of most Italians and of many French and so forth.

AW: And Chinese. It’s a kind of universal herb.

RS: Yeah, Chinese, of course, yeah. And clearly has some health value, considerable health value and so forth. And so I think that the point here is that some revolutions succeed. I mean, you know, we’ve seen that, and in the more overtly political, we’ve seen the Women’s Movement; you discuss that quite a bit, female consciousness and so forth. You have a business run by a strong woman, and you brought in women chefs and so forth; that has succeeded. The gay movement has succeeded in changing a lot of our thinking. We go down, there’s been victories in Civil Rights and so forth. But food is an area where we’re not just talking any longer about improving it; we actually have a mass movement now–I think you deserve a great deal of the credit–for widespread recognition that you are what you eat, that it can be very tasty. I want to get to that, by the way. You are not in favor of suffering for suffering’s sake. And you’re not in favor of dumbing down things. And you have a very interesting discussion in your book about why you didn’t associate with Flower Power or hippieism. You actually preferred–and this is a distinction I have not seen mentioned often–you preferred the Beats, who came earlier, you know. And the people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, you know. You–and maybe we should talk about that a little bit, your feeling that there ought to be intellectual content, there ought to be excellence, there ought to be complexity, and it ought not to be just throwing something into a pot, getting stoned, and consuming it for calories, right?

AW: Well, I always felt that the hippie movement was really kinda dropping out. Just not, ah, wanting to confront what was going on, wanting just a different kind of life. And I do appreciate the gardeners who went out and wanted to grow their own, without any question. But to just cook without sort of reading a cookbook, just putting things together, and–I just felt like somebody wasn’t paying attention. And I’m sure that some people were, but I was kind of offended by the gatherings that I went to. And again, my sense of making the table look beautiful, and having a little ritual associated with gathering at the table, they were very important to me. And setting the table–I guess I learned that when I was a child, because we always had to eat together as a family. Come together at 7 o’clock when my dad got home, and we would have dinner. It’s really about a kind of aesthetic, for me.

RS: You know, the whole Chez Panisse enterprise is informed by a cast of really interesting people who take ideas seriously, and the choices we have in life seriously. Somebody like Tom Luddy plays a very important role in Coming to My Senses. And for people who don’t know Tom Luddy, he’s been a marvelous figure in educating us about film. He put on the Telluride Film Festival, he had the Berkeley Film Archive, he worked with Francis Coppola as a producer on many interesting projects. And he was instrumental–you know, true confessions, he’s a former boyfriend of yours, and so forth, but the fact of the matter is–and you treat your former boyfriends very kindly in this book. I’m not saying they don’t deserve it. But in the case of Luddy, he established Chez Panisse as kind of a watering hole for the most interesting filmmakers in the world. If they came through this part of California, Northern California, they went to Chez Panisse. And you know, a great documentary filmmaker, like Les Blank is somebody you describe in your book. And you know, made very important films, particularly about food. You describe Coppola, Francis Coppola and his wife, you know, major figures that came by. You know, it was a place, and is still a place, for conversation as well as eating.

AW: Absolutely.

RS: Yeah, so describe that a little bit. I mean–and the very name of the restaurant, of course, comes from a famous film. So tell us about it.

AW: Well, I loved that idea of bringing people together and really creating something that none of us could imagine, that’s really greater than the sum of the parts. And I think that having people who are filmmakers, having a conversation with people who are dancers, who are artists–it is really important to me that we have lots of different people who want to eat at the restaurant. So that it has young people, it has older people, it has people that are in lots of different professions. And I always want to be friends with people who have restaurants. I talk about that a lot, how the influence of Cecilia Chiang has influenced me, and she’s somebody who’s 98 years old now and she still is coming to the restaurant for dinner. There’s a life that, feeling that is very important for me. And I know that other people who come, like that–that they don’t feel like they have to behave in a certain way, that they can be themselves. And I don’t want the restaurant to feel like we’re pushing them into our way of thinking and feeling.

RS: [omission for station break] It’s interesting, you know–when I was a kid, I grew up on the other side of the Hudson in New York–your mother reminded me a little bit of my mother. And your mother’s somewhat better educated, she was a woman who pushed to get to college and so forth. But I used to listen to someone on the radio because my mother had him on the radio, a guy named Carlton Fredericks. I have not heard that name, encountered that name until I read your book. And I thought, my goodness, my mother was listening to the same guy that your mother was, and he was talking about nutrition.

AW: Wow.

RS: You know, Carlton Fredericks. And you are the living embodiment of a number of his ideas about healthy food, right? You know, someone totally forgotten. Another person that comes up in your book, Eleanor Roosevelt, and FDR, and my early childhood feelings about Eleanor Roosevelt in particular. And there you were in New Jersey, quite a bit younger than me, but still. You know, and you’re an embodiment, in a way. Your mother admired Eleanor Roosevelt; your mother in her way was a strong woman. And you know, Alice Waters does not get pushed around by anybody. [Laughter] I mean, I know; I’ve known you for a long time, and you ran my congressional campaign, so I know. You know, in the book, you make it sound like you drove me around; that’s garbage. You told me when to stop speaking, when to start speaking, you told me–you know, I have a memory of that, by the way. You had me saying in the book, by the way–one little correction, let me get my turn here–a little correction. You say that I had you answer the phone. I, I–ah, OK–

AW: [Laughs]

RS: But the fact of the matter is, I remember you, and my goodness, this was 1966; how old were you then?

AW: Twenty-three.

RS: And you were telling me, no, you didn’t make that point clear, and you have to add this, and so forth, and why aren’t we talking to those people, but don’t stay too long, ‘cause you got four other things to go. And that’s why, you know, I relied on you so heavily. And it’s interesting that in so many ways–and that’s why I started this interview by talking about, we all come from someplace. You are actually the realization of your mother and a number of your aunts and so forth that you mentioned in your book. It’s what I loved about the book. It’s–you came from somewhere. You came from generations of women who had aspirations to break out of the roles that they were assigned. You know, and so you became very early on a no-nonsense, no one’s going to tell Alice Waters what she can do, and how to run a restaurant or anything. Including some very headstrong, egotistical male chefs. After all, if there’s a group of men that must be very difficult to deal with, it’s chefs, male chefs, right? I mean, and if there’s an industry that’s been dominated by machismo, it’s the food industry, chefs. And you came along, and you said, no; I have my standards, I have my ideas, and that’s going to be there. And so you know, but this book is particularly important because it culminates with a victory. It says that someone can be in college, not knowing what they quite want to do, rejecting the advice of everybody who tells you what you should do. And you reinvented the world to suit your standards. And you had standards; you had strong feelings about a whole range of things long before you ever came to Berkeley. And then you tried different things, and they didn’t quite work out well. And as you say, and I think it’s a really powerful sentiment, you wanted an environment that you could control. But not so that you could make it easy; it’s really an environment that would leave you without any excuses. If that restaurant fails on any night, it’s on your watch.

AW: Oh, I believe that. I believe that.

RS: Yeah. So you created an environment in which you are tested every single night. I mean, that’s why I hate cooking, because I have a sense I’ll fail with every dinner when I try a dish. And I’ve thought about that a lot when I eat at Chez Panisse. You know, I think, wait a minute, what if the olives are not good? You know, what if the bread is a bit stale? And you know–

AW: I hope you’ll tell me.

RS: Yeah. Well, let me just ask you about some of these other people that are in your book who are so–we’ve talked about some of the film people, and they are incredible. Werner Hertzog, I mean, there’s a whole who’s-who of really interesting filmmakers from throughout the world who’ve passed through Chez Panisse and continue to do so. But you have other people. You know, talk about David Goines and his artistic contribution to Chez Panisse. I mean, the whole graphic movement.

AW: You know, I really wanted to create a place that I wanted to live in. I mean, I wanted it to be beautiful in this aesthetic way. And so I asked David Goines whether he would design a menu and posters every year for the restaurant. I wanted his art in the restaurant. And it was like that with many of my friends. I mean, I wanted Tom’s filmmakers there; I wanted to be inspired by the people who came and who ate there. And I wanted to hear what they had to say, not only about the food, but about their world. And so, and when you’re in a restaurant, you’re really in it; you’re always cooking when other people are relaxing. And you’re on duty. And so I wanted that world to come to me. And the way that it could come, or would come, is if I made this food, that was irresistible, an environment that they felt relaxed.

RS: You know, it’s interesting. You have resisted franchising. And Peet’s, I remember I once saw an interview with the fellow who started Peet’s. And he said he wouldn’t franchise because he wouldn’t be able to control the quality, and so forth. And then of course, Peet’s has franchised; I guess other folks bought it and moved on. Schultz, who started Starbucks, and then he came back to manage it ‘cause he said the smell was gone; you couldn’t get the smell, I don’t know, he had some theory about that. But you have, you did have Franny’s named after your daughter, you had a restaurant. You were going to open a place up in San Francisco, as I recall, or you were considering it. But in the main, you’ve kept to that one restaurant in that one house that you first rented and then bought, on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Was that also part of a search for integrity, that if you get too big, you lose it?

AW: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I would lose, also, my life, in a way. Because I don’t want to be on a plane flying to New York to my restaurant and flying back every week. I don’t want to even drive across the bridge and come back. I like to know the people who I’m working with. They’re my good friends. This is not–I’m never hiring someone just because they have the skills; if I have to be in the restaurant for a long period of time, I want to have a rapport that’s even beyond food. And I want to be connected in that way. I mean, it really feels like, I call it the family of Panisse. Because it is like that for me. I want to know the customers when I go in. I can’t imagine having a whole lot of restaurants and moving around and–it’s not the reason that I wanted to have the restaurant in the first place.

RS: So let me conclude this by asking, do you think you’re winning, we’re winning, on the food question? I mean, we certainly see “organic” everywhere, whatever the word means. We don’t see “fair trade” very often, so we don’t know whether the people picking the beans are being paid. “No GMOs” and so forth, I mean, there’s a lot of language out there. You can hardly go into, I went to Safeway this morning to get something I needed, and I saw, every sign was organic this or this, or they buy locally; I don’t know whether any of that’s true or not.

AW: You have to ask. [Laughs]

RS: And now Amazon has bought Whole Foods. That’s the richest guy in the world, you know, in this enormous company, and now they’re going to ship it everywhere.

AW: It’s shocking. It is. And it’s the reason that we have to go back to school. We have to go into the public schools, and we have to teach our children. We have to feed our children differently. And it’s why I’ve been involved with the Edible Schoolyard project, because we’re not going to be able to change this fast-food culture. We have to teach our children differently, and we have to feed them differently. And so 23 years of working in a particular school in Berkeley, the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, with middle-school children, a thousand of them, who speak 22 different languages in their homes, is a great test group. And we learned very quickly that we could win them over. If they grew the food and they cooked it, they all ate it. And it wasn’t a cooking class, and it’s not a gardening class, per se. It’s a math class and a science class in the garden. Or it’s a history class and a language class in the kitchen. But I know these children, after they’re engaged in this interactive way, that they fall in love, not only with food, but with these values of civilization. They like to sit at the table. They even like to clear the table. They speak to each other differently. It’s so beautiful to watch. And so I know that this can happen in the public schools. But we need to make an intervention. And I think if we come through the cafeteria door and bring those organic, sustainable farmers with us, that we will change public education in America.

RS: Finally, we’re up against the same issue we were up against in the sixties with Berkeley. How do you prevent cooption? How do you prevent selling out? And when you have a situation where now Whole Foods stands for, you know, oh, the big–well, I mean, they’re the much-advertised, you know–

AW: But they don’t.

RS: –and then they get bought by the richest guy and his Amazon, who’s also the guy who does every other bloody thing to destroy bookstores and everything else–what is really going to happen to those organic farmers? You know, I just–

AW: Well, that’s why I want schools to support them. I want to buy the food for the schools directly, without any middleman, from the farmers who take care of the land. It’s just what we’ve been doing at Chez Panisse. We have one farmer that we support entirely. He makes a really good living farming, and he loves it. We give all our compost back to his farm, and he brings us the vegetables. Now, this could happen with schools. It could. And it should. And it’s like we would feed the children the most nutritious food, and the farmers would bring the values of the land to the schools. And I think with one in two children having diabetes in the future, and childhood hunger just rampant, that we have a moral obligation to feed children food that is deeply nourishing. And in a way that makes them feel like we care about them. Now, that’s what the family table was in this country, but 85 percent of the kids in this country don’t eat one meal with their families. So we have to bring them back to that table at school. And if we make the lunch and connect it to the academic subjects, we’ll have the time and attention to care for the children and have them digest these values, these human values.

RS: OK. Well, basically what I’m getting out of this, and we can conclude on this, is read the labels carefully.

AW: Go to the farmer’s markets, and–

RS: Yeah, go to the farmer’s market. But more than that, you know–

AW: Don’t buy from the big stores.

RS: And also, you know, it’s not just a question of growing your own, but really, how did garlic get to be so complicated? Right?

AW: Right, right.

RS: You know, I mean, and we all have a historic memory, a family memory, of sitting at a table. We all know–look, c’mon, we all know we enjoy it–I’ll just give one little confessional story. Chez Panisse saved my marriage. I’ve now been married 41 years, and because my wife was, Narda Zacchino had become the deputy editor of the Chronicle, I was still down at the LA Times, and I was teaching at USC for eight years. And I noticed, every time I came up here and she picked me up at the airport or something, we’d start having a fight. And I did something really brilliant. I booked–and it cost me a lot, but you know, I could have done it upstairs, I actually did it downstairs at Chez Panisse–I said I’m coming every Thursday night. I said I’ll get the nine o’clock sitting, don’t pick me up at the airport, I’ll take BART, I’ll get there. At Chez Panisse they don’t let you use cell phones; they will have this menu that is really quite serious, you have to contemplate. And there’s a ritual to it, whether you eat upstairs or downstairs, you know. There’s a ritual to it, that what it requires is that you get reacquainted with the person or the people that you’re eating with. You think about the food a bit. You contemplate, you savor it, right.

AW: I hope.

RS: And well, I got that. And to me, what is really great about this story is, you grew up at the time coming out of the Great War, the great World War II, where the mass culture had come into dominance, total dominance. TV dinners, frozen food, mechanization of everything. And you retained a memory–I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me you retained a memory of family values and connection, and then you saw it being lost, and you wanted to restore it. If I take this book seriously. I mean that’s, to my mind, the big idea of this book. Right?

AW: I think you’re right. [Laughs]

RS: You know, that whether it’s in China, rural China, whether it’s in India, whether it’s Ireland, or it’s Guatemala, the whole idea of people breaking bread at a table with friends, family, having conversation, savoring the food, worrying about its preparation, admiring. As you said, before you had Chez Panisse you used to have dinners for all of these hyperactive people, and then there was one time when they just sat at, during the day, where they sat and thought. And thought about the food, thought about each other. So I guess that’s the takeaway in Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook. Alice Waters, thanks for doing this, you know, for old times’ sake.

AW: Oh, thanks, Bob.

RS: So it’s a good thing I failed in my campaign for Congress. You found another career. [Laughter] I want to thank our producers, Rebecca Mooney and Josh Scheer, for doing this here at the Northgate Studios at UC Berkeley, which is very fitting, the Graduate School of Journalism, quite close to Chez Panisse. We have Harriet Rowan, who has been a patient engineer getting us all together. And in KCRW in Santa Monica it’s Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

Trade Wars and Diminished Credibility

As Jonathan Swift once noted: “There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.”

That’s the operative motto for all things Trump, one that makes analyzing the gap between what he thinks and what he tweets much easier. Along those lines, my former boss from my Goldman Sachs days—Gary Cohn—just resigned from his White House post as chief economic adviser to the Chaos Producer in Chief. This was ostensibly in protest against the president’s  announcement  about imposing steel and aluminum tariffs. The next day, Trump signed the order sealing that deal, citing his actions as a “matter of necessity for our security.”

Along the way, he said there would be no exemptions to the tariffs, then said there would be—for Canada and Mexico. Trump glowed in the light of his new-found power grab over trade agreements, leaving himself room to decide which countries would be “in” and “out” with respect to these and other tariffs in the future. And that was the week that was in Trump World.

The timing of Cohn’s departure certainly put a wrench in his plans to convene executives dependent on steel and present their case against steel tariffs to Trump. Instead, Trump signed the tariffs order flanked by steel and aluminum workers supporting it. Speaking of steel, Cohn’s nerves were seemingly made of that metal. At Goldman, he was the man who regularly waded through deals without losing his cool (unlike Trump). On 9/11, I witnessed him directing traders to keep trading oil as shreds of debris and billows of smoke engulfed the windows of the Goldman trading floor, only a few blocks away from the World Trade Center.

He became president (or number two) at Goldman, continually handling the less “cool” behavior of chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who remained above him in the pecking order for decades. Cohn commanded daily activities at Goldman that led to the firm’s creation of shady financial instruments that were later at the core of the financial crisis. Under Cohn, Goldman was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers. The firm morphed, for government subsidy purposes, into a bank holding company, though it handled scant deposits from regular people. It did this to retain access to Federal Reserve support, as it has done, over the past decade. Cohn was also at Goldman when it reached a $5 billion settlement with the Department of Justice over its consistent misconduct regarding mortgage-related securities from 2005 to 2007.

That type of conflict-meets-crisis readied him for his government service. When Cohn came up against Trump, the president’s flavor-of-the-minute trade policy hawk, Peter Navarro, met “Globalist Gary” head on. Then Cohn’s Trump administration career was over.

The financial news media didn’t take Cohn’s departure well. Past transgressions forgotten completely, it considered Cohn, one of the few adults in the room, another Trump appointee biting the dust, pointing to what we already know: Inconsistency is the only constant in this White House.

The Tariffs

When Trump added imported steel and aluminum to his list of already announced tariffs for solar panels and washing machines, members of his own party joined the world in expressing their disapproval. Many business sectors reliant on raw steel expressed fears that the tariffs would ultimately lead to major job losses, not gains, throughout that U.S. economy. Though the action invoked Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, the rest of the world knows that imported steel costs don’t represent security risks, whereas the alienation of allies actually does.

As European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said: “We strongly regret this step, which appears to represent a blatant intervention to protect U.S. domestic industry and not to be based on any national security justification.” He vowed that Europe would retaliate.

There were three sets of tariffs proposed by the Commerce Department, run by billionaire Wilbur Ross, and the latest, a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports, are the harshest so far. For the president to circumvent Congress on tariffs, it must allegedly alleviate what would otherwise be a national security risk. That’s just the loophole Trump used to ostensibly deliver on his campaign promises to American steelworkers. The problem is that the tariffs could wind up hurting those and other workers, as well as American consumers, instead. It would also add fuel to the fire in an already existing trade war.

Why is it already existing? Because Trump’s entire isolationist posture and dogma have already caused U.S. allies and adversaries to seek tighter relationships with each other, from a currency and trade agreement perspective. The latest tariffs are another element on the path away from diplomacy (which could be better used to create agreements that truly benefit workers on all sides of our borders) and toward the street-yard bullying tactics Trump adheres to.

Reactions from around the world were of anger. , in which Japan and China are key participants, their historical differences set aside, in efforts to forge non-U.S. trade relationships.

The U.S. remains in a precarious economic situation, as does the world, and that means Trump’s trade war and nationalism, coupled with bank deregulation, could inflict more risk on depleted economies. That path would be a truly disastrous one for the U.S

U.K. Holds Emergency Meeting About Poisoning of Ex-Spy

LONDON—British government security ministers held an emergency meeting Saturday to discuss the poisoning of a Russian who spied for Britain as police backed by soldiers continued to search the town where he was attacked with a nerve agent.

The meeting led by Home Secretary Amber Rudd is similar to the ones convened after extremist attacks and other threats to national security. It will cover the latest police and intelligence reports from Salisbury, where a military-supported investigation has turned to the cemetery where the ex-spy’s wife and son are buried.

Police are looking for clues to what sickened Sergei Skripal, 66, a former Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted of spying for Britain, and his daughter, Yulia, 33. They remain in critical condition, poisoned with what authorities said was a rare nerve agent.

The father and daughter were found unconscious on a bench near the River Avon in Salisbury on March 4. A local restaurant and pub have been searched and remain closed to the public. Police also are collecting evidence from Skripal’s house, as well as at the gravesites of his son and wife.

Skripal was convicted in 2006 of spying for Britain and released in 2010 as part of a spy swap. The former intelligence agent lived out of the public eye in Salisbury, 90 miles (140 kilometers) southwest of London.

A friend of his daughter’s, Irina Petrova, told The Associated Press that Yulia Skripal enjoyed England but preferred living in Moscow, where she made her primary home.

“She’s not a typical Russian,” Petrova said. “She was so easygoing. Even when something happened to her dad, she never spoke of any problems. And neither did her mother. They were so alike. Never did they speak of problems. Even in difficult times, they always had smiles and pleasant faces, not grumpy.”

Petrova described Sergei Skripal as “a good, kind man” and said it was terrible that the “whole family disappeared in basically one instant.”

Police have not released details about the specific nerve agent used in the attack. One theory is that the Skripals were poisoned in his house before visiting a restaurant and a pub and becoming ill.

British officials say there is not a public health threat but some residents have become alarmed by the site of investigators wearing extensive hazardous material protection gear.

About 180 marines, soldiers and air force personnel with expertise in chemical weapons, decontamination and logistics have been called in to help with the probe and to remove vehicles that may have become contaminated.

In China, Critics of Ending Term Limits Are Being Silenced

BEIJING—The day China’s ruling Communist Party unveiled a proposal to allow President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely as Mao Zedong did a generation ago, Ma Bo was so shaken he couldn’t sleep.

So Ma, a renowned writer, wrote a social media post urging the party to remember the history of unchecked one-man rule that ended in catastrophe.

“History is regressing badly,” Ma thundered in his post. “As a Chinese of conscience, I cannot stay silent!”

Censors silenced him anyway, swiftly wiping his post from the internet.

As China’s rubber-stamp legislature prepares to approve constitutional changes abolishing term limits for the president on Sunday, signs of dissent and biting satire have been all but snuffed out. The stifling censorship leaves intellectuals, young white-collar workers and retired veterans of past political campaigns using roundabout ways to voice their concerns. For many, it’s a foreshadowing of greater political repression ahead.

The result has been a surreal political atmosphere laced with fear, confusion, and even moments of dark comedy that undermines the picture of swelling popular support for the measure being peddled relentlessly by state media.

“There’s a lot of fear,” said Ma, who writes under the pen name Old Ghost. “People know that Xi’s about to become the emperor, so they don’t dare cross his path. Most people are just watching, observing.”

Once passed, the constitutional amendment would upend a system enacted by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1982 to prevent a return to the bloody excesses of a lifelong dictatorship typified by Mao Zedong’s chaotic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

Party media say the proposed amendment is only aimed at bringing the office of the president in line with Xi’s other positions atop the party and the Central Military Commission, which do not impose term limits.

Its passage by the National People’s Congress’ nearly 3,000 hand-picked delegates is all but certain. But observers will be looking to see how many delegates abstain from voting as an indication of the reservations the move has encountered even within the political establishment.

After Ma’s post on Chinese social media went viral two weeks ago, the 70-year-old writer decided to switch to Twitter, which can only be accessed inside China using a virtual private network, to continue issuing warnings about China moving dangerously backward.

“The police have not visited me yet,” he told The Associated Press on Friday from his Beijing home. “But I’m preparing for it.”

Ma remains in the capital, but some well-known dissidents and potential troublemakers have already been “holidayed” — bundled off to faraway cities, their travel expenses paid by state security. Retired elders from the Communist Party’s liberal wing have been warned to stay quiet.

The government’s censorship apparatus had to spring into action after the term limit proposal was unveiled, suppressing keywords on social media ranging from “I disagree” to “shameless” to “Xi Zedong.” Even the letter “N” was blocked after it was used as part of an equation for the number of terms Xi might serve.

Yet, occasionally, dissent has surfaced through the cracks.

On Wednesday, International Women’s Day, law students at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing — Xi’s alma mater — hung red banners that ostensibly celebrated the school’s female classmates but also satirized national politics.

“I love you without any term limits, but if there are, we can just remove them,” read one, while another banner declared that “A country can’t survive without a constitution, we can’t go on without you.”

University administrators weren’t amused. A student witness said the banners were quickly removed and notices posted requiring campus shops to register students who use printers to make large banners.

Chinese studying overseas have been more blunt. Posts in recent days popped up at the University of California, San Diego, with Xi’s picture and the text “Never My President” and spread to more than eight overseas universities, said Lebao Wu, a student at Australian National University in Canberra.

To be sure, Xi’s confident, populist leadership style and tough attitude toward official corruption has won him a significant degree of popular support.

Sipping on a Starbucks drink in Beijing’s business district on Friday, a 56-year-old surnamed Zhang who works in insurance said citizens desired freedom, but wanted a powerful leader who could deliver stability and wealth even more.

Letting Xi rule indefinitely “will strengthen the party’s leadership and offer the quickest path toward development,” Zhang said. “We need a powerful leader. People need an emperor in their hearts. The Western idea that you are not alive unless you are free has not taken root in people’s hearts.”

However, a 35-year old IT industry worker surnamed Huang said her friends were concerned about China returning to the Mao era.

“I saw on (state broadcaster) CCTV’s evening news that they were saying everyone fully supports the constitutional amendments, but no one asked us for our opinion. Our opinion is quickly censored,” she said. “This is China. What can we do about it?”

Neither would give their full names as is common among Chinese when commenting on politics.

Even some of the government’s most outspoken critics have been reluctant to loudly criticize the constitutional amendment.

He Weifang, a well-known blogger and law professor at Peking University, limited his remarks this week to the observance that the constitutional amendment proposal contained 21 articles, and if a delegate supported some articles but opposed others, he or she was entitled to vote against it.

He, who lost his job once for supporting the late dissident writer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, declined to discuss the term limit amendment, saying the subject was “a bit sensitive.”

Others haven’t held back, driven by an urgent sense that their country is at a crucial point in its history.

Li Datong, a former editor of the China Youth Daily state newspaper and one of the few voices of open opposition, said delegates know the amendment is wrong but no one has the courage to speak out. He compared Chinese citizens to Germans who allowed Adolf Hitler to seize power in the 1930s.

“I know that just a few ordinary Chinese citizens coming out and expressing their opinion will not change anything, but I’m doing this so I can face future generations,” Li said.

“When they look back at this time, I don’t want them to say, ‘Not a single person in China stood up and opposed this.’ When people talk about Nazi Germany, they always ask why the people living during that time didn’t do anything about it,” Li said. “I want to be able to face my past.”

In the run-up to the vote, congress delegates have lavished extra praise on Xi. The party boss of a northwestern province that contains a significant Tibetan population compared him to a living Buddhist deity.

“If you do good things for the people, bring good lives to the people, you should be able to keep serving forever,” said Zhou Shuying, an artist and delegate representing a rural county about 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of Beijing.

“I’m speaking from the bottom of my heart,” she said, then paused to make sure reporters heard her clearly. “I’m really speaking from the heart.”

Ethiopian-Israelis Decry Family Separation as Discriminatory

JERUSALEM—Zemenech Bililin has not seen her sisters in more than a decade, since she immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia with part of her family. Now a 19-year-old infantry soldier in Israel’s military, Bililin says she is outraged that she is fulfilling her duties as a citizen but the state is shirking its responsibility to bring her relatives to Israel.

Bililin’s family is one of hundreds that have been split between Israel and Ethiopia over what they say is an inconsistent immigration policy, and whose fate hinges on an Israeli government decision over whether to allow for their reunification. Ethiopians in Israel say the bitter public feud to unite with long-lost relatives has exacerbated a feeling that the state discriminates against its Ethiopian minority.

“It’s shocking in my opinion. They only do this to us, to our ethnicity,” said Bililin. “The state should take responsibility and stop abandoning the Jews.”

The issue faces a critical juncture next week, when the government is tentatively scheduled to decide whether to allocate funding to bring as many as 8,000 Ethiopians to Israel to reunite with their families.

Israel clandestinely airlifted thousands of Ethiopian Jews from the country in the 1980s and 90s, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the ancient community to the Jewish state and help them integrate. About 140,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel today, a small minority in a country of over 8 million. But their assimilation hasn’t been smooth, with many arriving without a modern education and then falling into unemployment and poverty.

As far as Israel is concerned, the drive to bring over Ethiopia’s Jewish community officially ended in the 90s, but amid pressure from lawmakers and family members, successive Israeli governments have opened the door to immigration by a community of descendants of Ethiopian Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity under duress about a century ago.

Although many of them are practicing Jews, Israel doesn’t consider them Jewish, meaning they are not automatically eligible to immigrate under its “law of return,” which grants automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. Instead, the government must OK their arrival.

Community members have been permitted to immigrate over the last two decades in limited bursts that have left hundreds of families torn apart.

Nearly 8,000 people in Ethiopia are hoping to immigrate, among them Bililin’s sisters, who as married women applied to immigrate separately.

In 2015, Israel agreed in principle to bring over the remaining Ethiopians who have Israeli relatives, vowing that it would be the last round of Ethiopian immigration and clearing the way for the arrival of 1,300 people last year.

Israel says it has continued to greenlight the community’s immigration on humanitarian grounds but it also has set a slew of requirements on those waiting in Ethiopia, in part to prevent what could be an endless loop of immigration claims.

Avraham Neguise, an Ethiopian-Israeli lawmaker in the ruling Likud party who chairs the Israeli parliament’s Absorption and Diaspora Committee, accused the government of dragging its feet and in turn damaging the Ethiopian community’s already brittle relationship with the state.

“The government is pursuing a discriminatory policy by not having the remaining Ethiopian Jews immigrate,” he said. “There’s no doubt that it harms the community’s trust.”

While Ethiopians have made strides in certain fields and have reached the halls of Israel’s parliament, many complain of racism, lack of opportunity, endemic poverty and routine police harassment.

Those frustrations boiled over into violent protests three years ago after footage emerged of an Ethiopian-Israeli in an army uniform being beaten by police. Thousands of Ethiopian Jews and their supporters blocked main highways and clashed with police in a bid to draw attention to their plight, including what they say is unchecked police brutality against their community members.

Activists have been lobbying the government to approve the immigration, penning letters to Israeli officials and sharing their poignant stories of separation in parliamentary committees. They see the issue as an easily solvable one that has needlessly shattered families and marooned people in a troubled country.

“Daughters are getting married in Israel without their mothers at their side. Sons are going to war and not returning without having their fathers there to bury them. We’re talking about human lives here,” said Alisa Bodner, a spokeswoman for Struggle for Ethiopian Aliyah, an activist group.

The community expected to see funding for immigration in the proposed budget, which is expected to come up for a vote as early as next week. But they were stunned when it was absent from preliminary versions of the budget.

The anticipated estimated cost of flying all 8,000 people to Israel along with housing and social services is roughly 1.4 billion shekels, or about $400 million, a sizeable figure but a tiny fraction of a nearly 500 billion shekel ($143 billion) national budget, according to an official from the finance ministry. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss a budget that has not yet been passed.

Neguise and the activists are engaged in a last-minute push to have the families’ plight included in the upcoming budget and to do so the Israeli government must vote on the issue, which could happen on Sunday. However, it is unclear whether the government would agree to bring all of the Ethiopians to Israel, or just limited numbers as in the past.

Regardless of the outcome, hundreds of people are expected to protest outside parliament the following day demanding action.

Israel’s Finance Ministry said it was up to the government to decide on the issue. There was no immediate comment from Israel’s prime minister’s office.

The Ministry of Immigration and Immigrant Absorption said “the subject of the continuation of Ethiopian immigration is on the government’s agenda.” But with the government embroiled in a coalition crisis over separate issues, the plight of the Ethiopians may not be its top priority.

“It’s intensely painful. I miss them like crazy,” Bililin said about her sisters. “(The government) doesn’t understand that pain.”

Ex-Patient Kills Three at Veterans Center, Then Himself

YOUNTVILLE, Calif.—The gunman who killed three people who work for a California program that treats veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder was kicked out of the program, a relative of one victim said Friday.

Albert Wong, 36, [who also killed himself,] was identified as the man who went to The Pathway House therapy center on the sprawling campus of the largest veterans homes in the country and took a psychologist and two executives hostage, authorities said.

Wong slipped into a going-away party for two employees of The Pathway Home, authorities said.

Gunshots were fired around 10:30 a.m. after he arrived at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville but nothing more was heard from him or the women until their bodies were found at about 6 p.m., authorities said.

Wong’s rental car was found nearby. A bomb-sniffing dog alerted on the car but no bombs were found, only a cellphone, authorities said.

Killed were program Executive Director Christine Loeber, 48; Clinical Director Jennifer Golick, 42; and Jennifer Gonzalez, 29, a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System.

“These brave women were accomplished professionals who dedicated their careers to serving our nation’s veterans, working closely with those in the greatest need of attention after deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan,” The Pathway Home said in a statement.

Gov. Jerry Brown said flags would be flown at half-staff at the capitol and said that he and his wife “are deeply saddened by the horrible violence.”

Golick was the top psychologist at the nonprofit home, which treats combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

She called her husband, Mark, around 10:30 a.m. to say that she had been taken hostage, Bob Golick said.

Mark didn’t hear from her again, Malick said.

It was “far too early to say if they were chosen at random” because investigators had not yet determined a motive, California Highway Patrol Assistant Chief Chris Childs said.

However, Golick’s father-in-law said she had recently ordered Wong removed from the program.

Wong had been an Army infantryman who served a year in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012. He held a number of service awards, including one for expert marksmanship with a rifle.

Yountville, about 53 miles (85 kilometers) north of San Francisco, is one of the Napa Valley’s most upscale towns, located in the heart of wine country.

A sheriff’s deputy responding to an emergency call Friday morning got into a shootout with the gunman but wasn’t injured.

Highway Patrol Sgt. Robert Nacke said negotiators were unable to make contact with the gunman throughout the day.

Larry Kamer told The Associated Press that his wife, Devereaux Smith, was at a morning staff party and told him by phone that the gunman had entered the room quietly, letting some people leave while taking others hostage.

Smith, a fundraiser for the nonprofit Pathway Home, was still inside the facility’s dining hall and was not allowed to leave, he said.

Police evacuated the property and closed off nearby roads to the veterans complex, which houses about 1,000 residents.

Army veteran and resident Bob Sloan, 73, was working at the home’s TV station when a co-worker came in and said he had heard four gunshots coming from the Pathway Home. Sloan sent alerts for residents to stay put.

A group of about 80 students who were on the home’s grounds were safely evacuated after being locked down, Napa County Sheriff John Robertson said. The teens from Justin-Siena High School were at a theater rehearsing a play.

“They were a distance away from the shooting situation,” Robertson said.

The state Veterans Affairs department said the home that opened in 1884 is the nation’s largest veterans home and cares for elderly and disabled residents.

Yvette Bennett, a wound-care supply worker who supplies the veterans center, was turned back when she tried to deliver what she called urgently needed medical supplies for two patients inside.

Of all the medical institutions she has worked with, “this is the most placid, calm, serene place,” she said. Earlier this week, when she last visited, she asked a doctor, “What’s your magic here?”

“And then 48 hours later this happens,” Bennett said.

When a Trillion Dollars’ Worth of Bombs Is Not Enough

For the New York Times, the US is always lagging behind the Russian menace. Previously, the Times has told us how America was losing the “scramble for the Arctic” (8/30/15) and falling behind in election-meddling (3/4/18). Now it’s in the realms of cyber and nuclear war that the Times sees dangerous gaps.

In “A Russian Threat on Two Fronts Meets an American Strategic Void” (3/5/18), reporters David Sanger and William Broad passed along the worries of Washington—as expressed by a few military higher-ups, some guy from the arms industry mouthpiece known as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a disembodied “The United States”—that Trump didn’t have a coherent strategy for dealing with cyber and nuclear threats from Russia. The front-page subhead warned, “Russia has ramped up its arsenal, US has done little in response.”

So what does a “little” response look like? Since taking office, the Trump administration and Congress—citing the Russian challenge as one of their major rationales—have increased the military budget by about $80 billion, or roughly 13 percent, the largest increase since the aftermath of 9/11, and 70 percent greater than the entire Russian military budget of $47 billion. (Note that in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Soviet military budget was bigger in real termsthan that of the United States—and yet the USSR still managed to lose the Cold War.)

Additionally, Trump has reportedly asked for a “black budget” of over $80 billion for covert operations ($30 billion more than previous reports), and pledged more than $1.2 trillion to building up the United States’ nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, $200 billion more than Obama asked Congress for when he announced the plan two years ago.

And Trump has, again, asked to increase the military budget by even more—to $716 billion—for 2019. All this, of course, is omitted from Sanger and Broad’s piece, which largely paints the United States as bumbling around without any idea how to combat the always-one-step-ahead-of-us Russians.

While the framing paints an image of the US doing nothing at all, the article’s text is a little less daft, focusing primarily on a “strategic void,” or what some “experts” believe is a lack of “strategy.” Although there’s no indication the US military has ceased to carry out strategic objectives laid out before Trump took office, one can grant this vague premise (it’s difficult to know what degree of “strategic” PowerPoint presentations would satisfy Sanger and Broad), but omitting the unprecedented amounts of money and resources Trump has spent on the military under the guise of combating Russia—to say nothing of his sending “lethal aid” to Ukraine (something Obama long declined to do)—is a massive omission.

As usual, the United States, when it’s not being painted as bumbling, is presented as simply responding to threats in a defensive manner:

And in the nuclear sphere, the Trump administration has yet to offer a strategy to contain or deter Russia beyond simply matching the weapons buildup.

Here again, the US only responds to threats, it never instigates them; the US is only “matching [Russia’s] weapons buildup,” not inciting one. The fact that the US’s most recent nuclear “revamp” began in earnest in 2014—long before Trump announced his campaign, much less moved into the White House—is not mentioned.

Later on, apparently unable to find a specific party or person to quote, Sanger and Board paraphrase the general impression of the entire US government (emphasis added):

By comparison, the United States is still uncertain how to make use of its cyberweapons after spending billions of dollars to build an arsenal. It is concerned that the Russians—along with the Chinese, the Iranians and the North Koreans—could easily retaliate against any attack, striking American banks, utilities, stock markets and communications networks.

Somehow the whole of the US government is “uncertain” how to make use of all their fancy new toys, and is “concerned” that Russia and other Bad Guys could harm us. Who, exactly, feels this way? The Times doesn’t narrow it down beyond “the United States.”

The effect of the article—by intent or accident—is to justify even more military spending, as Trump and Congress plan yet another massive military increase for 2019. And this is where the rub comes, around paragraph 16:

“We must no longer think in terms of building just ‘limited’ missile defense capabilities,” concluded a report that was issued last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

“The United States should begin the journey to develop a next-generation missile defense.” It called for pursuing a “space-based kill layer” that would try to shoot down swarms of enemy warheads and missiles—a step that would go beyond the Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” research on space arms, and no doubt prompt new rounds of reaction from Mr. Putin and the Russian military.

Here the Times quotes CSIS doing what CSIS was set up and specifically funded to do: push for the US to buy ever-more elaborate and exotic weapons systems from the arms makers who bankroll the think tank (FAIR.org, 8/12/16). Sanger and Broad have an itch, and CSIS has come along to scratch it: There’s a “void” in response to the Russian threat and, oh, here’s this “strategy,” by a Very Official group with “Strategic” right in its name, and it’s calling for an obscene amount of spending on new missile systems that blow things up from space.

Who would possibly build such a system? By sheer coincidence, five of CSIS’s top 10 corporate funders—Lockheed Martin, Leonardo Finmeccanica, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman—are positioned to do just that. As the New York Times (8/8/16) itself reported in August 2016, after it obtained a cache of private emails from the organization, CSIS is little more than a lobbying arms of the weapons industry:

As a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies did not file a lobbying report, but the goals of the effort were clear.

“Political obstacles to export,” read the agenda of one closed-door “working group” meeting organized by Mr. Brannen that included Tom Rice, a lobbyist in General Atomics’ Washington office, on the invitation lists, the emails show.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, drone-makers that were major CSIS contributors, were also invited to attend the sessions, the emails show. The meetings and research culminated with a report released in February 2014 that reflected the industry’s priorities.

“I came out strongly in support of export,” Mr. Brannen, the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Kenneth B. Handelman, the deputy assistant secretary of state for defense trade controls.

But the effort did not stop there.

Mr. Brannen initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations, which also included setting up a new Pentagon office to give more focus to acquisition and deployment of drones. The center also stressed the need to ease export limits at a conference it hosted at its headquarters featuring top officials from the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps.

As FAIR (5/8/17) noted last summer, when documenting CSIS’s love for the Lockheed-built THAAD missile system in South Korea, 30 out of 30 times when they weighed in on the wisdom of a weapons system, it was in support—an entirely predictable trend for a group largely supported by those who make such systems. When asked by FAIR via email if CSIS had ever publicly opposed a new weapons purchase or deployment, CSIS did not respond.

The stakes for these marketing efforts are hardly trivial. The Aerospace & Defense index “is already up nearly 6 percent year to date,” Barron’s (2/26/18) noted last month, “compared to a 2.8 percent gain for the S&P 500, while Boeing, Lockheed and Raytheon all sport double-digit gains in 2018.” Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the US’s second-largest defense contractor and CSIS’s second-biggest arms-industry donor, Boeing, has seen its stock more than double, from $159 to $345 a share.

The same New York Times/CSIS itch-and-scratch combination, as FAIR (Extra!, 10/16) reported at the time, was used when the Times insisted the US was “lagging behind” Russia in the Arctic, citing another CSIS report. And guess how that one turned out? As we noted the following fall:

In May [2017] the torrent of media articles hyping the “Arctic gap” asserted by CSIS and the US military paid dividends, with Congress allocating an additional $1 billion to the Navy’s budget to pay for icebreaker ships.

While the contracts are not awarded yet, Lockheed Martin—one of CSIS’s top donors—is said by market analysts the Motley Fool (7/24/16) to be an “obvious choice” to build the new fleet. Their runner up to build the new icebreakers? Huntington Ingalls Industries, who also donated generously to CSIS.

We’re seeing this play out once again. CSIS releases a report saying the Russians are getting the better of us, major outlets like the New York Times uncritically spread this message, their reporting is used as further evidence we need more military spending, that military spending is lavished on CSIS’s clients (d/b/a “donors”). Meanwhile, CSIS is treated as a neutral, objective “Washington think tank,” and its well-documented (by the Times itself!) conflicts of interest in pushing its funders’ weapons systems go unmentioned.

At the very least, one would hope that if the Times is going to handwring about how the largest military in the history of the world by a factor of 10 is leaving a “void” of influence, perhaps they can consult a group that isn’t paid millions of dollars to fill that void when discussing how best to do so.

The Health Care Bait-and-Switch

On the campaign trail in January of 2016, Hillary Clinton told Iowa voters that Bernie Sanders’ single payer health care proposal was an idea whose time would never come. “People who have health emergencies can’t wait for us to have a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass,” said the presumed shoo-in for president. Two years later, one-third of Democrats in the Senate have endorsed Sanders’ Medicare for All Act and half the Democrats in the U.S. House have signed on to Rep. John Conyers’ Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, HR 676. Polls show 75 percent of Democrats favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American,” and 31 percent of the public at-large wants health care to be the first problem the Democrats tackled if they win the White House in 2020.

Predictably, however, Hillary Clinton’s favorite think tank is still trying to make sure single payer health care never happens. The lavishly funded Center for American Progress (CAP) last week unveiled their counterfeit, sound-alike health care plan, dubbed Medicare Extra for All, whose sole purpose is to distract and confuse a public that is demonstrably “ready” for single payer. The CAP scheme, like Obamacare, keeps the private insurance corporations at the center of the money-stream, doesn’t cover everyone, charges fees, co-pays and premiums, doesn’t save much money, and would fail to provide millions with adequate coverage. “CAP’s plan maintains the current tiered system in which some people have private health insurance, those with the greatest needs have public health insurance, some people will have inadequate coverage and others will have no coverage at all,” writes Dr. Margaret Flowers, of Health Over Profit. “By offering a solution that sounds good to the uninformed—‘Medicare Extra for All’—but continues to benefit their Wall Street donors,” said Flowers, “Democrats hope to fool people or buy enough support to undermine efforts for NIMA,” or National Improved Medicare for All, the comprehensive single payer plan supported by the activists like Flowers.

National Improved Medicare for All would save half a trillion dollars a year on administrative costs and another $100 billion on reduced drug costs, according to Flowers. “The CAP plan maintains the complicated multi-payer system that we have today,” she said. “At best, it will only achieve 16% of the administrative savings of a single payer system and it will have less power to reign in the high costs of care.”

The CAP scheme would leave the link between employment and health coverage intact, keeping workers ultimately dependent on the whims of their bosses for healthcare coverage. “When people who have private health insurance lose their job or move, they risk losing their health insurance,” said Flowers. “NIMA creates a health system that covers everyone no matter where they are in the United States and its territories.”

The Obama-Scam, Repackaged

The Center for American Progress is running the same bait-and-switch con that Barack Obama played in the set-up to his Affordable Care Act. Bruce Dixon and I were introduced to Obama’s healthcare scam in June of 2003 when we engaged the then candidate for the U.S. Senate in a month-long telephone and email conversation, at The Black Commentator. At the time, Obama was trailing the field of candidates and in need of every Black vote in Illinois. Dixon and I had just learned that Obama had joined the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the corporate money-bag operation for the right wing of the party founded by white southern Democrats including Bill Clinton and Al Gore. On top of that, he’d recently removed his 2002 (mildly) anti-war speech from his campaign website, apparently to get in line with George Bush’s triumphal “Mission Accomplished” speech, the previous month. Obama denied that he’d become a member of the DLC, and claimed his website was undergoing “routine” updating. (Years later, when the war was clearly lost, Obama’s team would resurrect “The Speech” as proof of his early anti-war credentials.)

Dixon and I decided that the best way to determine if Obama should be in the DLC or not, would be to put him to a three-question “bright line” test on the issues of war, health care and U.S. membership in the NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. If the candidate answered all three questions correctly, then he should not be a member of the DLC. If he failed, then the DLC was where he belonged, and voters should make their decisions, accordingly.

We presented our bright line questions to Obama in the June 19, 2003, Cover Story of the publication:

1. Do you favor the withdrawal of the United States from NAFTA? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

2. Do you favor the adoption of a single payer system of universal health care to extend the availability of quality health care to all persons in this country? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

3. Would you have voted against the October 10 congressional resolution allowing the president to use unilateral force against Iraq?

Note that we specified “a single payer system of universal health care.”

Obama used weasel-language to fudge his answers to the Iraq War and NAFTA questions. On health care, he wrote:

“I favor universal health care for all Americans, and intend to introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end in the U.S. Senate, just as I have at the state level. My campaign is also developing a series of interim proposals—such as an expansion of the successful SCHIP program—so that we can immediately provide more coverage to uninsured children and their families.”

Obama left out the words “single payer.” Only after he became president, six years later, would it become clear that his definition of “universal” health care meant only that all Americans would be required to enroll in an insurance program—just as states require that all drivers be insured.

Despite his use of weasel-wording in all three answers, we at The Black Commentator gave Obama a passing grade. “BC is not seeking to martyr Barack Obama on a left-leaning cross,” we wrote.

(Our actual motive in 2003 was fear of being labeled “crabs in a barrel” for undermining the prospects of such an attractive, progressive-sounding, young Black up-and-coming politician—a failure of political nerve for which I will forever be ashamed.)

A year and a half later, in the week before Obama was sworn into the Senate, he told me that the country was not “ready” for single payer. But, if he really believed that, he would not have spent the next four years misleading the people through his calculated misuse of the term “universal.”

“Universal” was Obama’s bait-and-switch to confuse the public, much of which continued to wishfully assume that he favored some kind of single payer plan. Once he got in office—and after announcing that “all entitlements, including Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, would be “on the table” for cutting under his administration—Obama banished single payer advocates like Rep. Conyers from the White House and quite publicly allowed the for-profit healthcare corporations to write his Affordable Care Act, with its “universal” mandate that added many of millions of new “customers” for the industry.

The Democratic Leadership Council disbanded near the end of Obama’s first term in office. Faux-progressives claimed a victory. “One of the things that’s happening right now in Democratic politics is that progressives are winning the battle for the party,” said Progressive Congress president Darcy Burner. “The corporate-focused DLC type of politics isn’t working inside the Democratic party.”

That was nonsense. The DLC went out of business because it had won its battle for corporate hegemony in the party. By 2011, Obama had revealed himself as a full-blooded austerity (and war) president, and was still seeking his “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans. The “progressives” were defenestrated (thrown out of the White House windows) and humiliated in his first year, and were not to rise again until Bernie Sanders, the nominally non-Democrat, made his bid for the White House in 2016—with single payer healthcare at the tip of his spear.

Sanders’ version of single payer is “highly flawed,” said Health Over Profit’s Margaret Flowers, who is also co-director of Popular Resistance, but, “the fact that the Democrats are proposing something that sounds like NIMA means we are gaining power.” The legislation “calls for a four-year transition period, during which the newly improved Medicare would first insure all children and adults 55 or older, then expand gradually to cover all adults,” writes the Huffington Post.

The Sanders bill’s endorsers in the Senate include a number of obvious Trojan Horses, such as Cory Booker, a deeply reactionary politician who could have been the “first Obama” had he won prominent office just a few years sooner (see The Black Commentator, April 4, 2002, “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree.”) He was among 13 Democrats that voted against creating a reserve fund to allow Americans to import cheaper drugs from Canada, lamely claiming that it didn’t address consumer protection issues. Booker and others are joining the pro-single payer bandwagon to weaken it from the inside, while his allies in the Clinton camp and their Center for American Progress scheme to extend the life of for-profit healthcare under the Medicare brand.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is the greatest negative motivator for single payer. He last month proposed new rules that would allow sale of short-term insurance policies that omit “essential health benefits”—what Sen. Ron Wyden calls “junk insurance”—to allow the market to work its miracles. But the people are learning that the market will kill you.

Glen Ford is the executive editor of Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Summit Plan Too Easy on North Korea? U.S. Rejects Criticism

WASHINGTON — The White House tried to swat away criticism Friday that the U.S. is getting nothing in exchange for agreeing to a historic face-to-face summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said North Korea has made promises to denuclearize, stop its nuclear and missile testing and allow joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. But questions remained over exactly what North Korea means by “denuclearize” and what the U.S. might be risking with a highly publicized summit that will build up Kim’s stature among world leaders.

“Let’s not forget that the North Koreans did promise something,” Sanders said, responding to a reporter’s question about why Trump agreed to a meeting — unprecedented between leaders of the two nations — without preconditions.

She added: “We are not going to have this meeting take place until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea.”

Still, the White House indicated that planning for the meeting was fully on track.

The previous night’s announcement of the summit marked a dramatic turnaround after a year of escalating tensions and rude insults between the two leaders. A personal meeting would have been all but unthinkable when Trump was being dismissed as a “senile dotard” and the Korean “rocket man” was snapping off weapons tests in his quest for a nuclear arsenal that could threaten the U.S. mainland.

North Korea’s capabilities are indeed close to posing a direct atomic threat to the U.S. And the wider world has grown fearful of a resumption of the Korean War that ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.

The prospect of the first U.S.-North Korea summit has allayed those fears somewhat. The European Union, Russia and China — whose leader spoke by phone with Trump on Friday — have all welcomed the move.

North Korea’s government has yet to formally comment on its invitation to Trump. South Korea said the president agreed to meet Kim by May, but Sanders said Friday that no time and place had been set.

The “promises” on denuclearization and desisting from weapons tests were relayed to Trump by South Korean officials who had met with Kim Monday and brought his summit invitation to the White House. Trump discussed the offer with top aides on Thursday. Some expressed their reservations but ultimately supported the president’s decision to accept it, according to U.S. officials who were briefed on the talks and requested anonymity to discuss them.

Still, some lawmakers and foreign policy experts voiced skepticism about the wisdom of agreeing to a summit without preparations by lower-level officials, particularly given the lack of trust between the two sides. North Korea is also holding three American citizens for what Washington views as political reasons.

“A presidential visit is really the highest coin in the realm in diplomacy circles,” said Bruce Klingner, a Korea expert at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, adding that Trump “seemed to spend it without getting anything in return, not even the release of the three U.S. captives.”

Some say Trump could be setting himself up for failure amid doubts over whether Kim has any intention to relinquish a formidable atomic arsenal that he has made central to his personal stature and North Korea’s standing in the world. Kim would also boost his own standing by becoming the first of the three hereditary leaders of North Korea to sit down with an American president.

Evans Revere, a former senior State Department official experienced in negotiating with North Korea, warned there is a disconnect between how the North and the U.S. describes “denuclearization” of the divided Korean Peninsula. For the U.S. it refers to North Korea giving up its nukes; for North Korea it also means removing the threat of American forces in South Korea and the nuclear deterrent with which the U.S. protects its allies in the region.

“The fundamental definition of denuclearization is quite different between Washington and Pyongyang,” Revere said, noting that as recently as Jan. 1, Kim had vigorously reaffirmed the importance of nukes for North Korea’s security. He said that misunderstandings at a summit could lead to “recrimination and anger” and even military action if Trump were embarrassed by failure.

“There is good reason to talk, but only if we are talking about something that is worth doing and that could be reasonably verified,” said former Defense Secretary William Perry, who dealt with North Korea during President Bill Clinton’s administration. “Otherwise we are setting ourselves up for a major diplomatic failure.”

The White House maintains that Kim has been compelled to reach out for presidential-level talks because of Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure.”

“North Korea’s desire to meet to discuss denuclearization — while suspending all ballistic missile and nuclear testing — is evidence that President Trump’s strategy to isolate the Kim regime is working,” Vice President Mike Pence, who has visited the region, said Friday in a written statement.

However, other presidents have lodged economic sanctions against North Korea, as Trump has. And the North has made a habit of reaching out after raising fears during previous crises, with offers of dialogue meant to win aid and concessions. Some speculate that the North is trying to peel Washington away from its ally Seoul, weaken crippling sanctions and buy time for nuclear development. It has also, from the U.S. point of view, repeatedly cheated on past nuclear deals.

Without question, the North wants a peace treaty to end the technically still-active Korean War and drive all U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, removing what it says is a hostile encirclement of its territory by Washington and Seoul.

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville, Matthew Lee, Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin and Tracy Brown in Washington, and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul contributed to this report.

‘Angels in America’ Teaches Us How to Survive Under Trump

“The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of ‘Angels in America'”

A book by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois

In one of my high school theater classes, our (admittedly ambitious) teacher asked me and my best friend to read a scene from Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America.” And not just any scene: He wanted us to act out the breakup between Prior Walter, who has been diagnosed with HIV and is suffering terribly, and his lover, Louis Ironson, who is in the process of leaving Prior because his illness has become too much for Louis to handle. The assignment could have interacted badly with our heightened teenage emotional states, but instead, I remember it as a moment that deepened our friendship and began my love affair with Kushner’s remarkable two-part play.

That our teacher assigned an excerpt of “Angels in America” to public high school students in the early years of the millennium was one indicator of just how far Kushner’s play had come, from controversy to classic, since versions of it began to be performed in workshops in the late 1980s. I offer that memory not merely as an argument but as a caveat: I am, in many ways, the ideal audience for Isaac Butler and Dan Kois’ marvelous new oral history of the play, “The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of ‘Angels in America.'” The book will be incomprehensible to people who are not familiar with “Angels in America,” and it may not hold the interest of those whose familiarity with and interest in the play are merely passing. For those who do attempt it, though, “The World Only Spins Forward” is a vital book about how to make political art that offers lasting solace in times of great trouble, and wisdom to audiences in the years that follow.

Click here to read excerpts from “The World Only Spins Forward” at Google Books.

The first lesson “The World Only Spins Forward” offers artists is in creating work that is inspired by a given moment but not constricted by it. “Angels in America” is specifically about the dawn of the AIDS crisis and the ascendant Reagan revolution, but Kushner’s play treats those events as portals into larger conversations.

As Monica Pearl, a professor of English and American studies at the University of Manchester, tells Butler and Kois, it’s possible to look at the events “Angels” describes as safely in the past. But it’s also true that “AIDS exposed all the difficulties that were roiling under the surface anyway”—“homelessness, drug addiction, oppression against gay people”—and given that, it’s impossible “to relegate AIDS into history because none of those problems have gone away.”

The broader conditions that can produce a political crisis haven’t been vanquished, either. The economic conditions that formed a backdrop to the 2016 presidential election are part of a shift former Congressman Barney Frank tells Butler and Kois he began to observe in the 1970s: The loss of America’s economic position in the world primed some American voters to embrace the conservative social politics of organizations such as Moral Majority as a means of reconstituting their identity.

“Angels in America” isn’t about Trumpism, but it is about what Oskar Eustis, who helped incubate “Angels,” describes as “the life-and-death struggle of figuring out who we are” as Americans and what kind of nation we want to live in. That question is posed in different ways in different eras, but it never really goes away.

“Angels in America” is also a wonderful testament to the need to balance anger and forthright moral condemnation with other emotions, not merely as a matter of making art that feels more than didactic but as a means of survival. The play is immensely funny, a perfect example of what Princeton University assistant professor of theater Brian Herrera tells Butler and Kois is the soul-replenishing power of camp, a style of presentation that also has the ability to expose its targets as ridiculous. It’s loving, and it gives its characters room to grow: Mormon Hannah Pitt, who initially rejects her son Joe when he comes out to her, is not the villain of “Angels in America” but instead evolves to become one of its heroes. And “Angels” argues for the value of forgiving even the worst, most damaging people.

Gregory Wallace, who played the nurse Belize in a production of the show that ran from 1994 to 1995, reflected on one of the most surprising turns in the play: Belize’s ultimate goodness to Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man and one of the architects of the Reagan revolution. At a time of bitter division, that kind of thinking is often caricatured as weak or morally compromised, but Belize’s experience suggests that this sort of grace has benefits as much for the person who bestows it as for the person who receives it.

“Belize is not always very friendly but he is generous, often begrudgingly so,” he told Butler and Kois. “As our country goes off the rails, more and more so each day, I find myself asking if I am capable of that sort of generosity with the people I so vehemently disagree with. I’m not so sure, but I do think Belize is onto something when he says ‘Maybe … a queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness.’ ”

And “The World Only Spins Forward” makes the case that artists shouldn’t underestimate their potential audiences. When “Angels in America” went on national tour, there were some worries about how it would play outside coastal enclaves. But Carolyn Swift, who played the Angel in that production, found that “so many mothers would come to us backstage after the show and say ‘My son is dying,’ or ‘I just lost my son.’ We were still in the middle of the epidemic, and we were in places where those losses hadn’t been recognized.”

Not all art can be “Angels in America,” and few who aspire to Kushner’s scope will achieve the status of his masterwork. But “The World Only Spins Forward” was fascinating to me not only because it fueled my obsession but also because it helped me think about the sort of art that I crave right now: work that’s more than angry or condemnatory, work that takes the long view, work that refuses to give up hope.

“Angels in America” ends with a blessing: “More life.” In a political moment that is draining the vitality and generosity from so many of us, we need art that can give us that gift all over again.

Alyssa Rosenberg blogs about pop culture for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

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