Health and Human Services

Agriculture is always the most socialised sector of any economy that has it. This Government wants it to be taken over by giant transnational agribusinesses, in the way that it wants the American healthcare corporations to take over the National Health Service, so the small family farmers have to be sent to the wall in the way that various healthcare interests have to be eradicated. But what of healthcare in the United States? Like Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth or Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will struggle to be confirmed by a Senate in which even the Republicans had chosen to be led by John Thune. There is still a lot more to the Grand Old Party than Donald Trump. Perhaps he is smoking them out for primary purposes?

On Gaetz, Lee Fang sets out that, "His record speaks for itself. From his perch on the House Judiciary Committee, Gaetz has promoted a surprisingly consumer-friendly agenda, routinely breaking with his GOP colleagues on crucial votes. He previously supported legislative measures to break up Silicon Valley monopolies, sharply regulate the online data broker industry, ban noncompete employment contracts, and an end to the practice of forced arbitration, among other corporate accountability votes. He has also taken maverick positions on reducing FBI surveillance powers, cutting certain arms supplies to Saudi Arabia and [boo, but this is a wakeup call for Trumpolatrous social conservatives] legalising marijuana." Do read the whole of Fang's article. Kamala Harris would certainly not have nominated an Attorney General as good as the undeniably imperfect Gaetz.

Hegseth and Gabbard have annoyed all the right people, making them better than Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Kristi Noem, Elise Stefanik or Mike Huckabee, none of whose views and not all of whose persons would have disqualified them from the same positions in a Harris Administration. In the case of their views, at least, quite the reverse, in fact. But all that the likes of John Bolton can find to bemoan about Hegseth is his inexperience; sadly, Hegseth's Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult tattoos are unlikely to translate into pro-Outremer policies.

Gabbard, on the other hand, has driven the neocons, so to speak, Crazy. For all that she is yet another pro-doper, you cannot say better than that of a Director of National Intelligence. On so many other issues, she is so good, and often far better than Trump was last time. Let us see her place all the war pigs in both parties on the Quiet Skies domestic terror watchlist on which they placed her. Just as Gaetz was avenging himself upon those in the Department of Justice who had tried the oldest trick the liberal book against him, one of their two textbook accusations of witchcraft. They are already trying the other one, too.

Kennedy, though, while he is anti-war, economically egalitarian by American standards, and accordingly averse to erosions of civil liberties, is also an anti-industrial Malthusian, an anti-vaxxer, and a very liberal Catholic indeed, who therefore lacks the philosophical foundation of a truly radical alternative. Those of us who preferred serious politics never had any truck with ethnic or generational sentimentality at all, much less even in the face of this. You know who, for a time, you were. From the ultimate Democratic dynasty, Kennedy will have a particular struggle to be confirmed. But it would almost be worth seeing the American healthcare system handed over to him right when Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Alan Milburn, Paul Corrigan and Tony Blair had thought that they were on the brink of realising New Labour's founding dream of handing over the NHS to the interests that had hitherto controlled that system. Now for an Agriculture Secretary who would render their nefarious schemes equally void in that area.