The Liberal Naomi Klein Lies Against RFK Jr., for Joe Biden

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Many voters in America’s Democratic Party admire the popular writer Naomi Klein, who invented the phrase “The Shock Doctrine” to describe neoliberalism, but the neoconservative-neoliberal, British Labour Party and American Democratic Party, British Guardian newspaper (which is funded by billionaires from both countries and has a large readership among America’s Democrats) did an attack opinion piece by her, against RFK Jr., implicitly supporting his opponent in the Democratic Party’s 2024 Presidential primary elections, in which article she pretended neutrality (and didn’t so much as even mention his electoral opponent — the alternative to RFK Jr. — Biden, whom she was there campaigning for without so much as even mentioning).

The article’s hazy headline (hazy so as to avoid appearing to be at all partisan) was “Ignoring Robert F Kennedy Jr is not an option: Given the strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum. Ignoring him is not an option”, and she buried in her commentary the hazy allegation against him, that he is against the belief that defines the Democratic Party more clearly and unanimously than any other belief, which is the belief that America must institute a “single-payer healthcare system,” otherwise known as socialized health insurance that will be available to all Americans. In the context of all the rest of her haziness (which unfortunately doesn’t turn off readers; it’s not recognized by them to be the traditional style for manipulative propaganda, not for honest news or news-commentary) was buried this startling allegation, in the form of — of course — a hazy phrase (“brushed off”), but this was a phrase which nonetheless left an impression that would startle any Democrat, because it appeared within the entire article’s context of implying that the candidate RFK Jr. is just a slickster, no ‘real’ progressive. This hazily made allegation thus stood out as being the most startling of her attacks against him.

Here is her lead-in to that attack:

Myth #4: He is a populist.

When you hear someone railing that “Our democracy is devolving into a kind of corporate plutocracy,” while telling heartwrenching stories about people having their food stamps slashed amid massive corporate bailouts and handouts, it’s easy to assume that this same person plans to do something bold and courageous to address those injustices.

Kennedy says his campaign is one of “broad-based populism.” It isn’t. Progressive populists make tangible economic offers: tax the rich and give poor and working-class people more money and supports; some call for nationalizing key industries to pay for it.

Kennedy is not actually proposing any of this. On Fox, he would not even come out in favor of a wealth tax; he has brushed off universal public health care as not “politically realistic”

First of all, her statement there that “On Fox, he would not even come out in favor of a wealth tax” lied because she linked that word “not” to a Fox News interview of him that didn’t even mention a wealth tax — or any tax. He didn’t say there anything of the sort that she alleged. But the even bigger lie here is what came next.

Here was the interviewer’s question (Q) about socialized health care, followed by his answer (A):

14:15   … Q: As you know, every other developed

14:21   nation in the world has Universal Health Care. Do you support Universal Health Care through a medicare-for-all program

14:27   or something similar? A: You know, my, um, my, I, I would say my my highest

14:34 ambition would be to have a single-payer program which, you know, with [there being] people who want to have private

14:41   programs, [they] can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody, I don’t know how

14:48   politically realistic that is, but, you know, if you ask me if I were designing the system from the beginning, that’s

14:54   what I would do. Um, you’re right the system now is broken, uh, we take, you know, we pay the most for

15:03   healthcare in the world, we, I think, we’re 79th, we’re behind like Costa Rica and Cuba in terms of health[care] outcomes, we have

15:10   the highest level of chronic disease in the world of any country. You know, that means neurological diseases, autoimmune

15:16   diseases, allergic diseases like peanut allergies,

15:22   food allergies, uh eczema, anaphylaxis asthma,

15:27   and, uh, and we we pay more than anybody else. We we also consume more

15:34   pharmaceutical products. I think we take more, I think we take three to four times as many drugs per

15:41   capita than Europeans do. And they’re not making us healthier. The third

15:47   largest cause of death in this country after cancer and heart attacks is now pharmaceutical drugs.

15:53   Oh, Americans are the sickest country in the world. This is the sickest generation we’ve ever had,

15:58   and we we spend 4.3 trillion dollars on health care every year. Eighty percent of

16:04   that goes to treating chronic disease, and to me the the worst, you know, the

16:09   most alarming, metric: when I was a boy, um, six percent of Americans had chronic

16:15   disease. Today, by 2006, 54 percent; and, you know, I’m sure

16:21   it’s gone up since then. I mean, it’s half our children are debilitated for life from a chronic

16:27   disease, and, uh, and, you know, the pharmaceutical industry is making a lot of money on that, selling us the EpiPens.

16:34   the Albuterol inhalers, the anti-seizure medication,

16:39   the insulin shots, and all that, and they’re making a killing — they make, you know half a trillion dollars a year

16:46   but it’s not good for our country, and what we need is public health agencies that are actually focused on public

16:52   health rather than advancing the pharmaceutical paradigm and profits.

That is obviously no “brush off.” (Or, if it is, then no U.S. Presidential candidate — other than his own campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich — has not given that question a “brush off.”) No U.S. Presidential candidate has ever terrified the enormously profitable U.S. sickness-care corporations even nearly as much as RFK Jr. does. Have they, perhaps, hired Ms. Klein, to help put him down?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.