Career Biography – Page 2 – education and deconstruction.com

Dr. Folkman’s War

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The Book of the Week is “Dr. Folkman’s War, Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer” by Robert Cooke, published in 2001.

In the 1970’s, Judah Folkman was a competent surgeon and a very popular professor at Harvard Medical School, but his first love was medical research. He hypothesized about why and how a tumor grows. He inferred that blood vessels grow toward a tumor, but was unable to provide proof for a very long time. He was ostracized for having this radical idea, so he had difficulty attracting enthusiastic graduate students to assist him, and with getting funding for his research.

Traditionally, university medical studies in laboratories had been funded by government grants. Profiteering from patents and medical products resulting from research was considered sleazy in scientific circles. In 1974, Harvard broke the taboo and partnered with the large, profit-making organization called Monsanto.

Even after receiving generous funding, Dr. Folkman worked around the clock simply because making new medical discoveries requires months or years of blood, sweat and tears. The materials required to do experiments can be expensive, messy, odorous and pose unanticipated problems. For a while, Folkman’s lab was working with vast quantities of cow and shark meat (and other obscure, problematic materials) because the animals’ cartilage contains no blood vessels.

Even after the doctor’s studies yielded exciting breakthroughs, media articles influenced the medical community and the public in ways that were harmful to Folkman’s research operations. There were even accusations of fraud against him. It turned out that in his team’s haste to treat cancer patients, many errors were made. Time was of the essence, and procedures for organized data collection were lacking. Folkman wasn’t deliberately trying to deceive anyone.

Folkman was a rare bird in that he was quite altruistic with his time and talents. His patience and persistence allowed him to ignore his detractors and the naysayers (most of whom were jealous). He eventually acquired an area of expertise that not only spawned a new way of thinking about cancer treatment, but also led to treatments for other medical conditions, and whole new industries, including biotech. He also helped shatter a myth in cancer treatment. But this additional idea of Folkman’s still might not be fully accepted in oncology circles (due to GREED), even two decades after the writing of this book.

This is what he learned: The approach to cancer-drug delivery to a tumor of:

“low [dosage] and slow [buildup over the long-term]” was shown to be superior to

“might makes right” and come in with guns blazing; in the past, it was hoped that immediate, large doses would eliminate the tumor before metastasis, and before the patient died from the deaths of too many healthy cells that were also killed in the process.

In other words: The patient’s treatment should begin with a low drug dosage, and if that proves ineffective, increase the dosage gradually until it is effective. Folkman’s experiences with patients showed that that was the successful way to go, and he even saw a few miraculous cures.

Read the book to learn many more details on Folkman’s trials and tribulations and the reasons for them, and what transpired when he finally found vindication.

Yuri Andropov

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The Book of the Week is “Yuri Andropov, A Secret Passage Into the Kremlin” by Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, published in 1983.

“But the same man who, with the aid of his all-powerful organization, had put them in the saddle was now, while continuing to use them, discrediting them in every way he could, perceiving them no longer as reliable allies but as dangerous rivals in the struggle for power.”

No, not everyone’s favorite former American president. Yuri Andropov.

Born in July 1914 just north of the Caucasus, as a Soviet politician, Andropov manipulated the situation in Hungary in 1956, and helped plan the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He benefited from the power vacuum resulting from executions ordered by Josef Stalin. Khrushchev (Soviet supreme leader until his ousting in 1964, to be replaced by Brezhnev) inspired pride in Russian-ness, replacing the Communist Party with the Russian Party. But one-party rule still prevailed in the empire.

In May 1967 Andropov was named head of the then-KGB and was elected to be a member of the Politburo. His ultimate goal was to hold onto all of the territories over which Moscow ruled. The following year, he was involved in political machinations in Czechoslovakia.

Brezhnev– a sick, old man desperately clinging to power, acquired a reputation for having a passive leadership style. He was under the delusion that all was well, but behind the scenes, Andropov as head of the KGB was quite manipulative. The latter employed the usual thought-control techniques of dictators. One was divide and conquer. At the tail-end of the 1970’s, he began an insidious KGB propaganda campaign through mailed letters and pamphlets, insinuating that three Politburo members and Brezhnev’s wife were Jewish, and that Brezhnev himself was a Zionist. If the smears were true, the victims would be socially stigmatized– given the then-anti-Semitic bent of the USSR. This got the government’s factions fighting among themselves.

In April 1982, Andropov had the KGB secretly invite (rebellious) young-adult children of Politburo members to a (then-politically incorrect) Nazi rally at Pushkin Square in Moscow to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Parents and teachers of the youths wouldn’t have wanted them to attend the event. In this way, the Politburo members’ reputations were damaged.

Andropov launched other initiatives such as the anti-corruption ones in Azerbaijan and Soviet Georgia that turned the former into a police state. Azerbaijan would have become a military dictatorship, but for the fact that it, along with all the other Soviet satellites, had to report to the central government in Moscow, with its layers and layers of bureaucracy. In Georgia, starting in 1978 or so, all manner of government functionaries accused of financial crimes were arrested, jailed, tortured, killed– for five years running.

Andropov used Stalin’s trick of exploiting free labor to give an economic boost to his empire. By criminalizing all manner of minor transgressions (petty hooliganism, drunkenness, lateness for work, theft of any kind– because the Communist government owns ALL), scores of otherwise law-abiding citizens were thrown into the Gulag, where they were put to work.

Read the book to learn how Andropov played his cards correctly in many other ways in order to become the head honcho of the Soviet Union (hint: linguistically and agriculturally in Georgia, militarily in Poland, politically in the 1980 U.S. presidential election; in terms of the Pope’s nationality; etc.).

The Life and Times of the Shah

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The Book of the Week is “The Life and Times of the Shah” by Gholam Reza Afkhami, published in 2009. This tome (whose roughly chronological contents were organized by political issues, which made it redundant in spots) provided a history of two leaders known as “shah” or king, of Iran, and global context, beginning with the father, Reza Khan, born in a village near the Caspian sea in 1877. Iran’s first Constitution was written in 1907.

A 1919 agreement signed between Persia (which became known as Iran in 1935) and Great Britain basically stated that the former was to become a colony of the latter. Reza Khan and his fellow Iranian government officials chafed under the agreement and refused to sign it. Iran’s soldiers were resentful that Britain’s military arrogantly came to train them. Nevertheless, the Iranians did approve of Britain’s taking control of northern Iran, a region of Cossacks (anti-Bolshevik Russians).

In October 1919, Mohammad Reza (the shah-to-be) was born. February 1921 saw his father survive a failed coup, declare martial law and arrest tens of members of the old-line Iranian aristocracy. In the 1920’s, there was a shuffling around of governmental cabinet members, and no real improvement in the country’s affairs. Diverse tribes with their various rivalries populated Iran’s different regions. But Reza Khan was a social democrat and a nationalist– the people should take pride in being Iranian, irrespective of tribe or religion. He believed in: the English system of law, compulsory education, land reform and separation of church and state.

In December 1925, the leadership committee in Iran, called the Majlis, named Reza Khan king of Iran, or shah. His son was named crown prince, and at twelve years of age, was sent to boarding school in Switzerland. By 1933, the shah was fed up with foreign powers’ exploitation of Iran’s oil. He signed an agreement giving Iran more control, although Iran lacked the expertise and resources for maximizing profits from all things oil-related. Even so, the years 1938 to 1941 saw Iran profit handsomely due to Britain’s straitened circumstances in its dire need for fuel. However, Reza Khan had to tread lightly with all parties (the Allies and Axis nations) because any party could take over Iran.

In September 1941, after a series of untoward events, under British pressure, shah Reza Khan went into exile in Mauritius and eventually South Africa, transferring power to his son. In 1942, in exchange for declaring war on Germany, Iran became a candidate for membership in the then-proposed United Nations. Meanwhile, there was domestic unrest in connection with a newly formed Iranian political party called the Tudeh, which was neither Communist nor revolutionary, at least initially.

By the end of WWII, the Soviets were entrenched in the Tudeh party, and occupied the northern region of Iran, eager to acquire the oil in Azerbaijan. The Iranians had regained control by summer 1947, but martial law had to be declared. Again. For, against the wishes of ordinary Iranians, their government had signed an oil agreement with the Soviets.

After a few more years of international shenanigans and posturing, and violent domestic gyrations, in March 1951, Iran nationalized its oil industry. The British believed this action was going to hinder the modernization of Iran. Nevertheless, by summer, Iran had formed its own oil company, snubbing Britain’s oil company– which was co-owned with Iran and had been in Iran’s industry-oligopoly for decades. In October 1952, Iran broke off diplomatic relations with the British.

American president Dwight Eisenhower was concerned that Iran would cave in to Soviet influence. Also in 1952, Iranian citizens were expressing their displeasure with their government’s actions, through street protests and rioting. Political opponents of Iran’s prime minister were arrested. The shah didn’t want to be deposed, so he dismissed the prime minister, and held a people’s referendum on whether to dissolve the Majlis. Although voters were physically harassed, dissolution won out, thanks to a secret CIA operation dubbed TPAJAX. Alpha males (the kind who later fancied themselves as James Bond) in the American and British intelligence services claimed credit for the regime alterations. The shah and his queen flew to Baghdad (a place friendly to Iranians at the time) for a tabloid distraction– er, uh, diplomatic visit– until things calmed down. Unresolved oil issues prompted Iran to resume diplomatic relations with Britain in December 1953. In August 1954, an oil consortium was formed.

In the mid-1950’s, Iran’s economy began to improve due to various factors, including U.S. aid, oil profits, and anti-Communist regional alliances of Iran’s neighbors. As a world leader, the shah considered his job to be head of human resources of his government’s top leaders, pursuant to Iran’s Constitution. He looked at the two-party system of the United States, and liked what he saw. However, in summer 1958, in the shah’s view, “We did not have the security guarantees that NATO enjoyed” so Iran signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviets. But in March 1959, it signed a bilateral defense treaty with the United States.

After clearing various hurdles, Iranian women got the right to vote in January 1963. However, the shah failed to see a future power struggle he would have with the ayatollah Khomeini, whom he had arrested and exiled (to the unwise location of Paris) in June 1963. As is well known, Khomeini wanted to make Iran a theocracy. In autumn 1964, Iran signed a controversial piece of paper with the United States in connection with court jurisdiction and adjudication of crime-cases of U.S. military personnel and U.S. embassy workers in Tehran.

Khomeini and his followers were livid at America’s double standards and the fact that the shah was an American puppet. Too, in the next several years, for various reasons, Iran’s energy needs couldn’t be entirely satisfied by oil and gas, so it was looking into nuclear power plants. By the mid-1970’s, Iran had become a storage dump for nuclear waste.

By summer 1975, the shah was starting to get too big for his britches, even though he had brought certain aspects of democracy to Iran. His government was on its way to one-party rule. His new political movement would be governed by three major sources which contradicted each other: Iran’s Constitution, the Shah-People Revolution, and the imperial order. That last one conflicted with whether the shah was the ultimate authority over the governing of his country (in later years, there was a conflict also with the authority of Iran’s top military leader), but he was a king, indefinitely.

The United Kingdom is also a Constitutional monarchy, BUT the head of the royal family is merely a figurehead, while the prime minister and government bodies have all the power to, and do, all the work of governing the country. Those bodies can be forced to resign pursuant to a vote of no-confidence– between formally scheduled election days, which increases uncertainty in the system and for the people governed.

In the United States, the First Family is not supposed to be a royal family. Its system does have problems, but uncertainty due to resignations en masse is not one of them. The two major parties keep each other’s power in check. The president is always a member of one or the other.

Anyway, by spring 1977, the international community was pressuring Iran to curb its human rights abuses. Oops. It was already too late. The shah was unable to see the writing on the wall: that Khomeini was a threat to his power (even from Paris!); and that he was giving mixed signals by declaring martial law but at the same time, failing to train Iran’s law enforcement officers to control crowds and instructing them to refrain from firing on street protesters to quell violence in Iran’s major cities. So there appeared to be chaos and anarchy. Not to mention revolution.

Khomeini’s propaganda had been inflaming the masses for years. One tabloid item in spring 1979 from the government of the Bahamas revealed that the shah kept a large quantity of money in Swiss bank accounts. Unsurprisingly, the shah and his queen went into exile. In the next year or so, protesters angrily surrounded every residence in the world where they were temporarily tolerated.

In the shah’s absence, Iran’s military was rudderless because its members had always practiced blind obedience to the shah. Besides, Iran’s law enforcement and security personnel had always thought of themselves as ordinary Iranians, so they didn’t want to harm people like themselves.

Read the book to learn about: how, in the regime’s last several years, the U.S. mishandled Iranian foreign policy and misjudged Khomeini; plus much, much more. Here’s a little ditty that explains how Americans can keep our country from becoming a Constitutional monarchy (or theocracy), like that of Iran’s:

VOTE

sung to the tune of “Vogue” with apologies to Madonna.

SHOP around.
Election time is in the offing.
Find out where YOU need to go.
(shop around)

You elect the people who’ll help you improve,
the LIFE that-you-know.
(life-that-you-know)

You can get ACtive in politics,
or just research candidATES today.

I know a time when you can make the change.
It’s called election day
and you can make-the-losers pay.

So c’mon, vote.
Feel your power-as-an-American.
hey hey hey
C’mon, vote.
Not all nations HAVE what we have.
(you know you can do it)

All you need is your own registration.
So use it. You count, rich or poor.
(both rich and poor)
It’s democracy. Show-you-believe-in-the-process.
More VO-ters open the door.
(open up the door)

It makes no difference if you’re Left or Right,
if you’re pro-this or pro-that.
Free and fair elections ensure sta-bi-li-ty.
You’re a civics star,
yes that’s what you are.
(you know it)

C’mon, vote.
Feel your power-as-an-American.
hey hey hey
C’mon, vote.
Not all nations HAVE what we have.
(you know you can do it)

Leaders need to govern well,
not just deny and cover up.
Soul is in society.
That’s where we feel so LIStened to.
Learn from mistakes, keep us safe.
Get things DONE-on-the Congress floors.

Vote.
Feel your power-as-an-American.
hey hey hey
C’mon, vote.
Not all nations HAVE what we have.
(you know you can do it, do it, do it)

(vote vote)
(Leaders need to govern)
(as Amer-i-cans)
(vote)
(Leaders need to govern)
(not all nations)

Adolf Hitler, Juan Peron, Milosevic and Marcos
Kim Il-sung, Saddam Hussein
got 99-percent-of-votes-in-their-name.
“The people love me” they did gloat.

Others seized power, you should note:
Joseph Stalin, Pinochet,
Khomeini, Papa-Duvalier.
They had weapons, they used force.
Mao-Tse-Tung had no remorse.

Gaddafi, Franco, Castro too.
Kim Jong-un, is anything new?

Leaders with an attitude,
some of whom the U.S. wooed.
Don’t put up with bad government.
Take a position.
You can make a dent.

(vote vote vote vote)
(vote vote)
(oooh, you’ve got to)
Feel your power-as-an-American.
(oooh, you’ve got to do it)
Not all nations HAVE what we have.
(oooh, you’ve got to)
Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.

Misfire

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The Book of the Week is “Misfire, Inside the Downfall of the NRA” by Tim Mak, published in 2021. This volume told the all-too-frequent story of alpha-male executives with hubris syndrome, who use their employer as their personal piggy bank, and bankrupt them. That of the National Rifle Association (NRA) was just the latest in a series of such scandals in recent decades.

As it began to go belly up, the NRA had 76 people on its board of directors, a few of whom were celebrities. They received no salary, but took ridiculous advantage of their expense accounts, and at the same time, and, in an obvious conflict, some were tasked with overseeing the NRA’s finances.

A power vacuum that started in the late 1980’s allowed Wayne LaPierre to assume the most powerful executive position in the organization by 1991. His colleagues– the NRA’s officers, and executives of its outside communications agency — manipulated him in order to form a cult of personality around him. This way, they, too, could partake of all the first-class travel, shopping and host of other aspects of a luxury lifestyle through their outsized salaries and expense accounts.

After the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting in December 2012, the NRA became even more sociopathic, throwing up distractions in its messaging. It was already aggressively– as it had been since 1977– defeating every bit of firearms-restriction-legislation it possibly could using not only its money, but also its ability to influence politicians and voters through its network of priceless, powerful contacts; even to its own financial and reputational detriment. It argued that politicians should seek to improve America’s mental health system, and that everyone in the country had a right to own a firearm for the purpose of self-defense!

Countless, cowardly politicians have caved under pressure to the NRA’s demands; they voted against even weak proposed laws that would restrict gun acquisitions and gun usage, that would hardly have made a dent in sales of firearms, because they wanted to get reelected. As is well known, the NRA was a monster-sized lobbyist and political donor. It had a mean-spirited cancel-culture: publicly shaming its ex-employees on social media if they criticized it, even years after their employ.

Beginning in April 2019, a decades-long power struggle resulted in an orgy of litigation between and among the NRA, its communications agency, and its law firm, whose main go-to executive had become besties with LaPierre. That executive, too, was availing himself of the benefits derived from financial crimes of excess typical of these kinds of organizations.

Read the book to learn all about it. Wayne LaPierre has been just one (of those countless who are actually caught!) of a few poster boys whose financial crimes borne of excessive greed have been exposed, but sooo few organization leaders such as he, are punished for their misdeeds. Here are a few others, who were actually punished (and the year in which they went to jail):

2005, Dennis Kozlowski

2005, Bernie Ebbers

2006, Jack Abramoff

2007, Richard Scrushy

2012, Bernie Madoff

And here is the song they sing when caught:

I TOOK IT EASY

sung to the tune of “Take It Easy” with apologies to the Eagles.

Well, I got out on BAIL.
You can’t put me in JAIL.
I got SEVen sins on my mind.
Whistleblowers betrayed me.
Prosecutors flayed me.
My lawyers are close friends of mine.

I took it easy.
I took it easy.

Don’t believe the evil liars who say I’m guil-ty.

I live it up while I still can.
I hid my assets. Then it hit the fan.
I found a place to make my millions.
I took it easy.

Well I’m STILL your leading male.
I’m just too great to fail.
My claques, flacks and sycophants all aGREE.
I DID nothing wrong.
I’ll delay this CASE so long you’ll give up on punishing me.

Come on, payyy me,
my bonus and sa-alary.
I have no doubt that friends in high places are gonna SAVE me.

TaxPAYERS lose. I win.
You’ll never catch ME again.
So eat your heart out. Look at ME grin.
I took it easy.

Well, I got out on BAIL.
You can’t put me in JAIL.
I got NO remorse on my mind.
No matter how much you hover,
you’ll NEVER recover, all the money you say is not mine.

I took it easy.
I took it easy.
Don’t believe the evil liars who say I’m guil-ty.
Come on, payyy me,
my bonus and sa-alary.
I have no doubt that friends in high places are gonna SAVE me.

Oh, I got it easy.
YOU’RE the one who’s slea-eazy…

The King of Fifth Avenue

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The Book of the Week is “The King of Fifth Avenue, The Fortunes of August Belmont” by David Black, published in 1981.

Belmont was born in December 1813 in Alzey, the Jewish agricultural ghetto in Germany. Belmont got a member of the Rothschild family to convince his father to let him study the English language. Thanks to his grandmother’s contact with the Rothschilds’ family business (the most famous financial-services business in Europe), Belmont got a job. By 1830, he was making good money in high finance.

The summer of 1837 saw financial ruin in New York City, but Belmont was a take-charge kind of guy. Upon discovering that the American agents of the Rothschilds had gone out of business, he declared himself the new agent, hanging up a shingle bearing his name in a storefront on Wall Street. He used the Rothschild name to grow his company making investments and lending money. In 1844, he became an American citizen.

Descendants of the Knickerbockers (old, wealthy Dutch and English aristocrats in New York City) and other American-born people were anti-immigrant. They were also anti-Semitic, smearing the (Jewish) Rothschilds’ agent Belmont, especially when he jumped into politics, supporting the Democrat James Buchanan for president in 1852. But after Franklin Pierce won the nomination, Belmont backed Pierce instead.

Both the Democrats and the Whigs expressed anti-corporate feelings. But the former opposed Wall Street while the latter opposed foreign capitalists. The Whigs were mostly Wall-Streeters.

When Pierce won the election, James Buchanan turned out to have less political power than Belmont would have liked. Belmont desired to have the U.S. buy the territory of Cuba from Spain, and if Buchanan had been named secretary of state, he could have appointed Belmont a U.S. diplomat who could go to Naples to negotiate a deal. In August 1853, Belmont himself was appointed secretary of state but other events led him to go on a business tour of Europe with his family instead. He became head of the Democrat party in June 1861.

The summer of 1863 saw draft riots in New York City. The rebellion was led by conscripted men who couldn’t afford to pay $300 for someone else to soldier for them in the American civil war. Blacks suffered the most deaths during the violence, scapegoated as the cause of the war.

In the late 1860’s, Belmont became interested in horse-racing, buying land on which to build a racetrack. He became president of Leonard Jerome’s racetrack in the Fordham section of the Bronx.

Read the book to learn of a boatload more history and Belmont’s family history in 1800’s America, in politics and war, especially.

Steinbrenner

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The Book of the Week is “Steinbrenner, The Last Lion of Baseball” by Bill Madden, published in 2010.

George Steinbrenner was born in July 1930 in Ohio. At fourteen years old, he was sent by his father to military school. He was groomed to inherit his father’s Great Lakes shipping company.

In late 1972, he got investors together to buy the New York Yankees baseball team from the media network CBS. His financial interest was the largest, however, so he was the face of the team. After the 1974 baseball season, he was indicted for committing felonies by making illegal, individual and corporate political contributions to the former late president Nixon’s reelection campaign. He never spent a day in jail, but was fined. The then-commissioner of Major League Baseball (MLB) Bowie Kuhn was out to get him for other reasons, though.

Nevertheless, in 1977, after just five years of ownership, Steinbrenner’s Yankees won the World Series, “… in spite of clubhouse dissension, a crazy manager [Billy Martin] and an even crazier owner.” This was due to overwhelming hitting talent. That is the most crucial skill required for a winning baseball team. The reason is– there is limited opportunity to score, unlike with all other major professional American sports (football, basketball, hockey and soccer). In baseball, a team must get its players on the bases and run around those bases in order to win the game. In all the other games, when there is a turnover, any player from the team on defense, can score on the spot.

Aspects of Steinbrenner’s character rubbed people the wrong way. His frequent dishonesty, temper tantrums, impulsive decision-making, micro-management, and excessive spending to recruit players for the Yankees caused emotional burnout and sky-high turnover among his employees. Even so, starting in 1976, there was a major change in the legal rights of Major League players– called free agency– that prompted the average player’s 1975 salary of $44,676 to rise by 1980 to $143,756. Steinbrenner was willing to pay top dollar for the players perceived to be the absolute best prospects for his Yankees, and also for his top executive team.

In 2004, the Yankees’ payroll was $185 million. Beginning in 2005, Joe Torre became the then-highest paid MLB manager, with a $19.2 million, 3-year contract. The following year, Brian Cashman became the then-highest paid general manager with a $4.4 million, 3-year contract.

Read the book to learn much more about Steinbrenner’s career as a professional baseball-team owner, and the constantly changing cast of characters who helped him navigate the Yankees’ ups and downs.

Dianne Feinstein

The Book of the Week is “Dianne Feinstein, Never Let Them See You Cry” by Jerry Roberts, published in 1994.

Born in June 1933 in San Francisco, Feinstein was the oldest of three sisters. Her uncle inspired her to become a politician. In November 1969, she was sufficiently popular to get elected not only to the board of supervisors of San Francisco, but also get elected its president. However, in 1974, she lost her primary campaign for mayor, though she was good at fundraising, and adopted moderate views on most every issue.

A number of traumatic events occurred in the mid to late 1970’s in the Bay Area, some of which ignited controversy around Feinstein:

Beginning in October 1973 – the “Zebra” killings, which left fifteen dead and fanned the flames of racial tension in San Francisco;

February 1974 – Patty Hearst’s kidnapping in Berkeley;

January 1975 – mail bombs were sent to San Francisco politicians but were defused by law enforcement;

Beginning in 1975, the New World Liberation Front (NWLF) sent threatening messages to Feinstein and other local politicians, that they better help the poor or else;

August 1975 – San Francisco police officers and firefighters went on strike;

September 1975 – assassination attempt on president Gerald Ford in San Francisco;

December 1975 – an explosive device failed to go off, that might have killed Feinstein’s teenage daughter at their residence, and the NWLF claimed responsibility in demanding better prison conditions;

November 1978 – murders and mass suicides at the compound of Jim Jones’ cult in Guyana, and around the same time, the mayor of San Francisco and a member of the board of supervisors were shot and killed.

With regard to the last two aforementioned deaths, “The speed with which the lobbying began reflected the political reality that a massive vacuum of power had suddenly opened in the polarized city.” Within days, the opportunists made Feinstein mayor.

In May 1979, when the verdict and sentence on San Francisco’s political murderer was announced, rioting ensued around City Hall.

Feinstein had a reputation for favoring gay rights, up until her actions during the above rioting. Also, in late 1979, local religious authorities of various stripes convinced her to veto a bill that conditionally treated co-habitating lovers like common-law marriage partners so that they got certain government benefits. After that, gays criticized her. But, she acted early and often and decisively to stem the AIDS epidemic beginning in 1983.

In summer 1982, she signed a bill that banned handguns in San Francisco. She started by turning in her own handguns. Nevertheless, California state courts ruled that the city’s law was unenforceable. Unsurprisingly, her gun-control stance did not sit well with the NRA. In 1983, her enemies tried to petition for her to be recalled as mayor.

Read the book to learn much more about Feinstein’s political career, all of which was spent in a male-dominated field, and a quarter century of which was spent in an urban area with a unique geographic, demographic and political composition.

The Last Idealist

WARNING: This is a long post.

“They watched him bang away at Berkeley and other campuses, a man nearing eighty-one commanding the attention of student crowds usually scornful of anyone over thirty.”

NOT Bernie Sanders. Norman Thomas.

The Book of the Week is “Norman Thomas, The Last Idealist” by W.A. Swanberg, published in 1976.

Born in November 1884 in Marion, Ohio, Thomas began attending divinity school in 1908, pursuant to his parents’ wish for him to become a Presbyterian reverend, like his father. He espoused the political ideology of a socialist, believing that antisocial behavior could be eliminated if people the world over were provided with a decent standard of living, as there would be no class resentment.

However, Thomas’ marriage to an heiress allowed him to live better than those he aided financially. Initially, the couple lived on an ethnically mixed, high-crime block in East Harlem, among Irish, Jews, Italians and Hungarians. He ministered to parishioners and established social programs at various churches.

Thomas was a charismatic public speaker and a pacifist, keeping busy “eight days a week” with all kinds of political, social and religious groups. He rubbed shoulders with the political influencers of the day, including president Woodrow Wilson. During WWI, he asked the president to refrain from conscripting conscientious objectors– both the devout and those who held sketchy religious beliefs like atheists (and agnostics like himself).

Thomas got in trouble and was forced to resign from his various groups for pacifist speechifying and distribution of pacifist publications (which were censored)– a clear and present danger once America entered WWI. Conscientious objectors and pacifists like himself were getting arrested and jailed. He railed that all Americans had a right to free speech (and later helped found the ACLU); hypocritically, the country was fighting the war in order to combat the fascist Prussians.

Although in 1917 Thomas endorsed the Socialist Party candidate Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York City, Thomas actually delayed joining the Party until the end of the war. Hillquit thought Thomas could be instrumental in getting more Gentiles to join, as the New York City chapter was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Both the Socialist and Communist parties ran candidates for mayor even though they knew they would lose. Each hoped to convert the members of the other’s Party to join their own. The socialists’ enemies smeared them all as Bolshevists (though only a few were on the far left fringe), as the Russian Revolution heated up.

In the 1920’s, the ruling class committed a lot of violence against the working class when there occurred labor unrest. The Palmer raids resulted in beatings, arrests and jailings. The government reasoned that violence was a necessary (temporary!) evil in restoring democracy. That was the same thinking of the Communists in America who felt the Soviets were creating the right kind of political system, but that the oppression would eventually cease.

Thomas wisely stayed Socialist through the decades, as he saw that Communists were totalitarian. Nevertheless, he was conflicted, as he took heart in the fact that the Russians fought against Fascism: by aiding the Loyalists in Spain during its civil war, and during WWII. Some American Communists were thrown for a loop after Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939; others, when Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s human rights abuses and atrocities in 1956.

In 1920, New York State Assembly speaker Thaddeus Sweet, a Republican, took the undemocratic action of suspending five New York State Assembly members just for being in the Socialist Party. Their constituents included sixty thousand voters in New York City. The Assembly voted 145-2 to expel them altogether. They were accused of seeking to break up traditional families, being anti-religious, and opposing capitalism.

In 1933, membership in the Socialist Party reached its peak, numbering about nineteen thousand. But those who had been spellbound by the shrewd, entertaining Thomas, began to back FDR instead; the latter began to offer similar social programs and was already president. Many voters thought the evils of capitalism had caused the Great Depression. Others turned to hatred spouted by rabble rousers like Father Coughlin, Hitler and Mussolini.

In the 1930’s, there were heated discussions, debates and decisions that never pleased everyone, between and among all the different factions (Communists, Trotskyites, Old Guard, Militant-Centrist, etc.) in election years and at political conventions. Up until 1936, they used various communications outlets to spread their gospel: the Rand School, the Jewish Daily Forward, a radio station, publications like the New Leader, and a summer camp.

In 1940, the American Labor Party favored FDR, who supported capitalism and war. Thomas acted as a spoiler, as he was still an anti-capitalist and pacifist. He bristled at Britain’s colonialism in India. Jews in New York City felt the need to fight Hitler, so their allegiance lay with FDR, especially after December 1941.

Arguably, Thomas engaged in hypocrisy in his choosing to ally with the Nazi-friendly Charles Lindbergh, but only because the latter wanted America to stay out of the war. Lindbergh, and Joseph P. Kennedy were the kinds of individuals who attached themselves to Hitler because they thought Germany would win the war. That way, in the end, they’d be on the winning side. They would get the spoils. Fortunately, on WWII, they guessed wrong.

Fast forward to spring 1960. After the U-2 incident, Thomas wrote, “… in the widely played game of peacetime espionage, we lie and cheat like the rest of them– only better, we now boast, because of our technical skill. In the anarchy of sovereign nations there are no morals, there is no crime, except to be caught.”

In summer 1963, Thomas, a Princeton University graduate, got his article published in the alumni magazine. He expressed his dismay that the school received a bit more than half (!) of its total budget from federal grants. He wanted to know what proportion of those were made on behalf of the Pentagon. No word on whether anyone answered him. Later, Thomas was bothered that the younger generation was rooting for the NLF and the Vietcong rather than trying to lobby LBJ to stop the Vietnam War. He advised them to wash, instead of burn, the American flag.

In the mid to late 1960’s, Thomas was able to push his causes because his articles were printed in the national, high-circulation Life and Playboy and Esquire magazines; he also did TV interviews with highly rated shows. Unfortunately, publicity is only a small ingredient that is part of the planning process in getting people to adopt causes. Thomas, even with all his popularity, lacked the other ingredients on and off during the entire course of his career: funding and executing (actually getting elected to office).

Read the book to learn of the numerous elective offices for which Thomas ran as a Socialist and his adventures in connection therewith globally: speaking, publishing and socializing with diplomats; of the details of decades-long Socialist Party infighting; the shocking revelation that came to light about the CIA in 1967; and much, much more.

ENDNOTE: This blogger would like to clarify once and for all, what characterizes a few different economic and political systems.

First:

With SOCIALISM, the people collectively own entities, and share and share alike. These can be profit-seeking businesses. The government can own entities that provide essential services, that should not be profit-seeking (but some of their subcontractors are, anyway), such as libraries, welfare, healthcare, early childhood education, infrastructure, and social programs.

With COMMUNISM, the government owns profit-seeking entities (businesses) in whole or in part (as in the former Soviet Union and China). So yes, these include public-private partnerships in which there are clearly outrageous conflicts of interest that result in patronage and profiteering. So, arguably, the former Soviet Union and China have both Socialism and Communism to a large degree.

Also, see a bunch of this blog’s posts: Wikinomics, Here At the New Yorker (beginning with the 9th paragraph), Street Without A Name, Against the Grain, Crossing the River, and Patriot Number One. Lastly, see a bunch of excerpts from this blog’s posts:

Klima got a job with a construction crew [in Czechoslovakia in the 1950’s], where he got his first taste of socialism in action. “No one could earn more than was necessary for daily subsistence.” The government was stealing the economic surplus from the people. That was why corruption came into play. He was pressured into joining, surprise, surprise, the Communist Party. He said, “I was stunned by how the environment bubbled over with rancor, continual suspicion, malicious gossip, and personnel screening.”

Fast forward to 2007. Dubai’s small population of about a million citizens (mostly royal family members) allowed the government to adopt a socialist policy of generous entitlements, including an average annual $55,000 in stimulus money, and low-cost or no-cost: cooling of their lavish homes, car-fuel, food, education, healthcare, and water.

In late 1993, mayor Chirac [in Paris, France]– a socialist at heart– agreed to start a (no-charge) ambulance service for the homeless in Paris. By 1995, via the city council, against the wishes of the socialist (federal) government, he provided free medical care to 150,000 homeless people.

In the early 1920’s, “After 2 decades of debate and agitation, the rise and fall of Populist, Progressive and Socialist parties…” and lots of labor unrest, there was general consensus between government and American business “… that the role of government was not to supersede or control the corporation, but to legalize and legitimize it by regulating its excesses.” [As is well known, capitalism flourished until the late 1920’s.]

Because East Germany was a police state with a socialist mentality, the people availed themselves of a free university education. Merkel got hers, as well as a doctorate in nuclear physics. In exchange, she was required to work for the government for a specific period.

They examined democratic, autocratic and socialistic models of leadership. The most mature group was found in the first model. The second spawned a form of Nazism. The third model’s group members displayed resentment of lazy and non-cooperative individuals.

Although Communism preaches godlessness, the supervising Soviet government [in East Germany] allowed some religious activity among the local citizens. Merkel’s family was spied on by the Stasi- the secret police. It was cost-effective and efficient. For, all the socially dangerous elements (potential subversives) were in one place.

For four decades, Czechoslovakians forced to live under Communism had been told everything was great. In January 1990, Havel truthfully told his countrymen that the nation was in an economically, infrastructurally, environmentally and ethically horrible state. The younger generation who had been born into the Soviet mentality– unless they were dissidents– were obedient robots. So converting people to a capitalist, liberated, honest way of thinking was very difficult.

Blakely thought that bringing capitalism to them [Siberian people] would be a good thing. However, they soon developed an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Once they were made of aware of their severe deprivation by the media and increased their connections with the rest of the world, they became depressed. Previously, they had been happy due to their ignorance of how materially poor they were.

After the Korean War, the Communist Party of North Korea oppressed business owners– who were considered evil capitalists, but praised farmers and peasants– who were considered virtuous; they served the Party. Adults were forced to attend self-criticism meetings every Saturday morning. The meeting leaders punished them by making them stand up against the wall while others stared at them. Around the time she started school, Jang and her mother went to a theater for the first time. They saw a movie written by their fearless leader, Kim il-sung. Of course, it ended happily because the peasants conquered the landlords.

Once in power [in 2000, Communist] Putin actually kick-started the Russian economy by nationalizing oil companies, and taking control of the gas industry and television.

In order for any native (Chinese) to prevail at a journalism career, joining the Communist Party was mandatory. This involved attending Party conferences on some weekends.

Under Vladimir Lenin in 1918 Russia, “The very notion of pleasure from flavorful food was reviled as capitalist degeneracy.” Millions died of starvation under [Communist] Stalin in 1927 when he took over the means of grain production.

It examines the issue of whether Berlusconi practiced Fascism, not necessarily through creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, but through monopolistically broadcasting propaganda in the guise of education, to the masses. He combined his business dealings with politics to amass a staggering amount of power, with the usual conflicts of interest that come with the territory.

He [Charles Koch] became a convert to it [Libertarianism] in its most extreme form. It espouses the belief that a purely capitalist society is the best economic system. This means total deregulation, no entitlements such as government-administered retirement or medical plans, no unions, no socialism of any kind, no income tax, and a government whose role is only to protect citizens and property from each other and outsiders, and from fraud. As a result of their political mentality, Charles and David could have cared less about the environmental destruction and wrongful deaths their company caused due to poorly maintained oil and gas pipelines. Perhaps to salve his conscience, David made huge donations to cultural institutions, especially in New York City. The liberals (hypocritically) gratefully accepted the money, notwithstanding David’s political activities that led to rack and ruin.

In the early 1990’s, [Soviet] leader Boris Yeltsin became a convert of [Jeffrey] Sachs. The result was mass corruption. On the other hand, this has helped the United States and other nations with already evolved [mostly] capitalist systems to maintain their economic dominance in the world. This blogger is not saying such a goal is right or wrong, but merely suggesting that this might have been Sachs’ goal.

***

Strom Thurmond’s America

The Book of the Week is “Strom Thurmond’s America” by Joseph Crespino, published in 2012.

Born in December 1902 in South Carolina, Thurmond grew up in the small-town farming community of Edgefield. His father was an attorney and his family was wealthy and aristocratic.

In 1929, Thurmond became schools superintendent in his hometown. He favored giving a teachers a raise and extending the academic year, funded by the state through a beer tax. He entered into a legal apprenticeship under his father, and in 1933, as a Democrat, was elected to South Carolina’s state senate. Three years later, he became a circuit-court judge, traveling around the state to preside over county-court cases.

During the Depression, the way Thurmond and his fellow southern Democrats defined themselves as “liberal” allowed them to support FDR’s New Deal in order to provide financial aid for white farmers and low-skilled industrial workers in their districts.

After fighting in WWII, Thurmond ran for governor as a Democrat. He was a white-supremacist, mudslinging, drama-queen, populist demagogue while campaigning. Although he did some good things, his actions were always politically expedient. In 1947, he actually delivered on a promise to have South Carolina law enforcement and FBI agents round up 31 (white) men who were suspects in the lynching of a black man. However, a jury of twelve white men acquitted the suspects.

At the time, the United States was helping to establish the United Nations– an international body that concerned itself with respecting human rights. There was pressure on the state of South Carolina to help America maintain a good reputation in that regard, so Thurmond spoke in favor of a federal anti-lynching law. Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats wanted to continue to prevent intermingling of blacks and whites so as to not contaminate the genes of the latter. He therefore denigrated every one of president Truman’s civil rights proposals.

And Thurmond was always arguing for state-level laws. To that end, in 1948, he ran for president on the States’ Rights ticket (a third party) in order to play the spoiler against Truman to kill civil rights legislation. But postwar, he returned to a lucrative law practice.

Thurmond then sided with corporate America and the kings of industry in oil, cattle, sugar planters, mercantile and shipping entities, steel, coal, and textiles, etc. He became rabidly anti-Communist and anti-union. Up until 1950 in South Carolina, voting for the Republican Party was NOT anonymous. If one wanted to do so, one had to request a ballot at the polls when he or she voted.

Thurmond ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1954 as a write-in candidate (due to the previous officeholder’s death) even though his fellow Democrats were less than thrilled that he had disloyally run as a third-party candidate in 1948.

A litany of events and groups influenced voters in the South: the Korean War, the Democratic National Committee, the federal goings-on, the CIO, the NAACP, the national labor movement, the upward mobility of urbanites, and backlash (by whites) against southern blacks consequent to Truman’s civil rights legislation.

In the early 1960’s, Thurmond executed a series of far-right-wing campaigns that failed. For one, he pushed for the Nike-Zeus missile program that would help America respond to an attack by the U.S.S.R.; another had him holding hearings to stop JFK from scotching a military education initiative that would spew anti-Communist rhetoric. Finally, in September 1964, Thurmond announced he was a (Barry) Goldwater Republican.

Two prominent legal minds (William Rehnquist and Robert Bork) expressed their opinions that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would lead to a tattletale culture when it came to civil rights violations. Another indicator of the mentality of then-conservatives was that of blaming the Supreme Court for its pro-desegregation stance in a 1969 ruling in a major case, instead of blaming president Nixon.

Two years later, however, in 1971, Thurmond hired a black staffer (!) He needed to repair his reputation after he backed conservative Democrat congressman Albert Watson, who agreed with him on civil rights issues but ran a dirty campaign in 1970. Thurmond needed to woo moderate Republican voters to get reelected in 1972. Nevertheless, he stuck with Nixon until the end.

In sum, the current COVID face-covering issue in American schools is as controversial as desegregation-busing was from the mid-1960’s into the mid-1970’s. Shortly before he was reelected in 1972, Thurmond actually said, “If it [busing] improves the quality of education, then busing is good. If it doesn’t, then I think it’s bad.” According to their respective memoirs, busing was good for Vernon Jordan, but was socially traumatic and a hardship for Donna Brazile.

So letting local officials decide, pursuant to the majority of their constituents’ preferences, might have been a better policy. And if local officials acted against those preferences, then community organizing and political activism in neighborhoods that believed in education, would likely lead to some changes in the next election year. Dissatisfaction would reach critical mass eventually, in those districts.

Incidentally, in 1975, Senator Joe Biden listened to his constituents in his state of Delaware. He wrote a bill making race irrelevant to assignment of students and teachers to schools.

Read the book to learn of: the skeleton in Thurmond’s closet, his presidential-run results, his one-man filibuster, the historical events (Supreme Court cases and election campaigns) that compelled him to change with the times (or else he would see the end of his political career), the differences between his style of campaigning and that of Jesse Helms, and much more.

The Most Dangerous Man In Detroit

The Book of the Week is “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor” by Nelson Lichtenstein, published in 1995.

Born in September 1907 in West Virginia, Walter Reuther was of German ancestry, raised Lutheran. He quit high school to learn the tool and die trade. In February 1927, he and a friend moved to Detroit for better pay and hours. He eventually made his way to Ford Motor Company, where he quickly rose through the ranks before the Great Depression hit America.

In the early 1930’s, Ford opened a plant to manufacture its Model “A” in the Soviet Union. Americans who believed in socialism were aware that the Stalin-led Soviet government ruled via one party– the Communist, and was perpetrating human rights abuses. But they liked certain economic aspects of its experimental “Five Year Plan.”

Beginning in early 1933, Walter and his brother Victor bicycled a distance of approximately twelve thousand kilometers during the nine months they were meeting with their European political contacts in various countries. In spring 1933, they were already seeing Fascist oppression in major German cities. In late 1933, they began working in a few Soviet industrial complexes to see labor and political conditions for themselves.

By the late 1930’s, the famine caused by Stalin’s disastrous agricultural-reform program prompted peasant-farmers to go to work in the factories that made steel, cars and tractors. In mid-1934, since they were foreigners and skilled middle-managers (training workers in tool and die making), Walter and Victor were permitted to travel between Stalingrad and Moscow to visit construction projects, collective farms and tractor factories. They were chaperoned by Party bureaucrats. They got special treatment, so perhaps they did not see the abuses suffered by unskilled workers. Their experiences led them to believe that the Soviet system was far less of a police-state than Germany’s.

Walter and Victor wanted to believe so badly in a Soviet workers’ paradise that they rationalized away the serious problems (such as impossible-to-meet production quotas, and reports of fancifully high numbers of vehicles manufactured). In 1934, on supervised tours, the brothers also took a look at labor conditions in China and Japan. October 1935 saw them return to the United States.

On May Day of 1936, in major cities across America, various political groups were speaking in the public square with the goal of unionizing workers; some of them– the Socialists, Proletarian and Communist parties– united to form a Popular Front (the joke in Spain was, “the girl with the Popular Front”).

By the mid-1930’s, the auto industry (which included carmakers, parts suppliers, tool and die makers, etc.) consisted of about a half million union members, thirty thousand of whom were in the United Auto Workers (UAW), a national union. In autumn 1936, Walter became a member of that union’s executive board. He planned and got employees to execute work-stoppages and sit-down strikes in order to get the big automakers like GM, Ford, Chrysler and Dodge to grant collective bargaining rights exclusively to the UAW. Other workplaces such as U.S. Steel were inspired to take such actions, too.

Ford was particularly hostile in its anti-union activities, as it had an in-house security department that spied on workers, fired some, and used violence against photographers. GM took measures to protect against productivity losses by rotating its parts suppliers and building new plants in different locations.

In the late 1930’s, Walter launched propaganda campaigns with the distribution of leaflets, and ran pro-union candidates in local political elections in Midwestern cities. In October 1945, he knew that his UAW workers couldn’t win their strike on just solidarity and militancy. He needed support from other ordinary Americans and the federal government. In January 1946, union workers in a bunch of other industries struck, too; electrical, meatpacking, steel milling, and iron mining.

By the late 1940’s, the power of the unions and corruption in government skyrocketed, so that organized crime used bribery, patronage-contracts and and physical violence in order to rule the “… construction industry, short haul trucking, East Coast longshoring , and the bakery and restaurant trades.”

It is a little-publicized datum that in 1962, president Kennedy granted a cut to all taxpayers that favored corporate America, which also got tax breaks. The rich got richer. That same year, members of the UAW executive board included 21 Caucasians, and one African American, whom they knew wouldn’t buck the status quo.

By then, Walter, a liberal, realized he had been incorrect in thinking that the American labor movement would eliminate discrimination in the workplace when the unions and the economy were strong. But he was still stubborn in insisting on an all-or-nothing egalitarianism. Others of his political ilk, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson were willing to compromise with the Dixiecrats (Southern Democrats who opposed civil-rights legislation) to make a little progress rather than none. The following year, Walter had become more flexible, as he was friendly with JFK and his brother.

In July 1967, the race riots in Detroit resulted in the deaths of 43 people and $250 million in property damage. The mayor, and the governor of Michigan assigned a 39-member panel of leaders and influencers in the community to suggest solutions for quelling hostilities. Various actions were taken; among the major ones:

throwing money at low-cost housing;

hiring of black workers at Ford and GM; and

throwing money at black community groups

but nothing seemed to help. The automakers moved their plants from Detroit to Troy and Dearborn.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information on Walter’s trials, tribulations, triumphs, and disputes with the AFL and CIO (unions competing against, and with different views from, the UAW); the growing-pains of the labor movement– how it was affected by: the WWII years (hint– the government ordered it to make war weaponry), political elections, regulation of pricing / wages / production in the steel industry, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War; how and why different automakers’ compensation structures changed, and much more. See this blog’s post “See You In Court” for more information on the pros and cons of unions in America.