Doug Henwood slouches further toward Gomorrah

I noticed Henwood's name among commenters on Seymour Hersh's original "welcome" piece on Substack last week.

Henwood, with whom I've tangled before, which led to him blocking my original Twitter account,  maybe is himself a COVID minimalist or worse if he also follows Vinay Prasad's Substack. He's also a paid subscriber to Modern Monetary Theory tout Stephanie Kelton's Substack, and Doug used to laugh at MMT touts like Michael Hudson and Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. Again, PAID, not free, subscriber; this is far worse than somebody sensible on Twitter following some nutbar for free.

I said then that I might have to do a small sidebar piece about Doug, and here I am.

Previous tanglings?

First, six years ago? The Electoral College for electing U.S. presidents, while tangentially connected to slavery, was NOT "all about slavery." 

Second, not too much later? Jim Crow was NOT a class-based issue. As I noted, Jim Crow was in place across the South before the steel industry took off in Birmingham, Alabama and other things. I soon thereafter noted Henwood and running buddy Adolph Reed (punked by Barack Obama about 25 years ago) largely ignored the likes of Franz Fanon.

Third? And what led Henwood to block me, since Reed isn't on Twitter? Reed's anti-Black Lives Matter stance on death by cop. (For the unknowing, Reed is Black himself; he also, like Henwood, Chomsky and others, is one of those hard-core leftist duopolists.) Anyway, as part of his argument, Reed cited the high death by cop rate in the large White (in his mind) New Mexico. As I noted, in an extensive takedown, New Mexico being largely White would be huge news to the massive amount of Hispanic and American Indian residents of a state that, already 6 years ago, had been majority-minority for 20 years, and nearly that for decades before. I then noted that the American Indian death by cop rate was even higher nationally than the Black one.

Anyway, back to what I noted above, about the hypocrisy, it would seem, of him paying to follow Kelton, too. Several years ago, he did a big take down of MMT at Jacobin. I blogged about it, calling my piece "MMT is Maoism, or New Ageism."