IMPEACHMENT TIME:
IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."
Special to BuzzFlash
Thursday, May 5, 2005
By Greg Palast
Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over
it.
The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight
months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the
President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to
remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."
For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me,
"Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror
and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are
shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor."
And if this ain't it, nothing is.
The memo uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan
by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into
supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.
A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering.
However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives.
Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case
was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was
less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this and other
governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and
conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence
before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty,
condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough
review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community
distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons."
We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let
Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity.
Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days
before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished.
You should parse the entire memo -- reprinted below -- and see if you can make
it through its three pages without losing your lunch.
Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the
New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of
the Times of LONDON on Monday.
It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair's political
career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday,
Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved
overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution
which requires only a vote of the Labour party's members in Parliament.)
But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of
Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story.
Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print."
My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more
incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But
in the US press … nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a
story for "over there."
The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections.
And the US media could print nothing else.
Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on
death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably
called US journalism thought it worth a second look.
My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people
is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so
easy to do.
Greg Palast, former columnist for Britain's Guardian papers, is the author of
the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Subscribe to his columns at www.GregPalast.com Media requests to
contact(at)gregpalast.com Permission to reprint with attribution granted.
http://www.gregpalast.com/index.cfm
[Here it is - the secret smoking gun memo - discovered by the Times of London. -
GP]
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson,
John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan,
Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should
be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's
regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was
likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an
attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be
immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with
the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam
among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in
attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and
WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC
had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on
the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the
aftermath after military action.
CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3
August and Bush on 4 August.
The two broad US options were:
(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air
campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30
days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).
(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air
campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with
the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.
The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and
Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also
important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:
(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.
(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.
(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a
discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi
divisions.
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to
put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most
likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the
timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It
seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the
timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening
his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea
or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in
the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification
for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base
for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence,
humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could
not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be
difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and
legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD
were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.
There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the
political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key
issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political
strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was
workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.
For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if
Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam
could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.
The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan
unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests
converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences.
Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would
continue to play hard-ball with the UN.
John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when
he thought the threat of military action was real.
The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military
involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the
US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important
for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.
Conclusions:
(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military
action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any
firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a
range of options.
(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be
spent in preparation for this operation.
(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military
campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.
(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN
inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.
He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in
the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.
(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.
(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider
legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.
(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)
MATTHEW RYCROFT
(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)
Greg Palast, former columnist for Britain's Guardian papers, is the author of
the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Subscribe to his columns at www.GregPalast.com Media requests to
contact(at)gregpalast.com Permission to reprint with attribution granted.
http://www.gregpalast.com/index.cfm
Monday, May 09, 2005
Friday, May 06, 2005
Good Mothers/ Great Mothers
Great Mothers and Good Mothers
By Dolores Huerta, AlterNet
Posted on May 6, 2005, Printed on May 6, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21944/
Dolores Huerta is an Honorary Chair of DSA
Mothers today often say they are concerned about what's happening to America. But most feel they just can't afford the time or the childcare expense to "get involved." Some are afraid they will shortchange their kids somehow, by taking them along on neighborhood canvasses or to nonprofit or political group meetings. But I ask mothers today, "how can you afford not to get involved?"
The situation today for children and mothers in America is urgent. Asthma and autism rates in some places are up 400 percent from 20 years ago; one of every six American moms now have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies; 200 species become extinct every day; our water, food, and air are now becoming more neurotoxic and carcinogenic instead of less for the first time since 1968; and more children fall into poverty and homelessness each year than ever since the great depression. Our children's future is bleak unless far more of us act now. Now more than ever is the time to get involved and get our children involved with us.
Getting our kids involved with us in political action develops their conscience and confidence in their own power to do good. I remember once when I had my six-year-old, Angela, the one who's a registered nurse now, and we were at this picket line at the Safeway, during the grape boycott. And here's this little kid standing in front of the store, passing out leaflets, telling people, "Don't shop here, because the grapes have poison on them." She was turning away more people than the adults!
In fact I would often take them out of school to do these things, because they learned more on the outside. They learned the way to become powerful was by organizing.
We mothers have to help make the world safer not only for our children, but for other people's children too. Because if all children are not safe, no child is safe. Our nation is making a disastrous mistake thinking we can have security from people: There is only security with people. Hate will always find a way around or under a "security system."
I know many mothers reading this are wondering how to get involved if they can't afford babysitters or are just overwhelmed. Yet so many mothers, like one or two of my own daughters, spend so much time driving kids to sports practice or work extra time to buy expensive things. These mothers could instead take time off from sports to volunteer on campaigns or at homeless shelters. When sports overtakes civic engagement, democracy dies. If your child was seriously ill, you would not think twice about giving up soccer. What is the difference between that and our child's society and planet being in critical condition? Political involvement is the medicine for curing a sick society and planet.
Some mothers who say they have not time to get involved are busy working long hours to buy things they don't really need. Why not work less, live more simply, so you can spend more time on activism and with family. If most mothers would only spend an hour or two a week doing activism, imagine the huge difference that would make to our nation and our children.
The tough truth is that using sports, schedule, or income as reasons not to get involved is a failure of responsibility and imagination. You've got to figure out ways to do it. Below are just six.
1) If the campaign/organization lacks childcare, help them organize it. On-site babysitters can be recruited from colleges or other parent volunteers.
2) Even if there is no childcare, your child can come with you to meetings, phone banks, etc. You can keep most kids occupied for a couple of hours with crayons, paper, books, play dough, and stories on CDs.
3) Ask moms who aren't actively engaged if they would watch your kids while you campaign. These mothers can then feel they're making a contribution. If there's ever a time to ask for help, it's now.
4) Lower your homemaking standards. I always used to say that for every bed I didn't make while organizing farmworkers, some poor farm worker got a $1/hour more.
5) If you're a single mother, find another mother with a kid your age or older, and your kids can keep busy together.
6) If you can't find childcare or bring your child(ren) with you, you can always use the internet and work from home e-mailing, or better yet faxing representatives, and e-mailing your friends ways to get them involved, or volunteering to help organizations as a researcher.
So there is no need for a conflict between being a good mother and being civically engaged. As a fellow activist mom once said, "How can you be a good mother today, and not be politically involved!" After all, it is for our children's safety, our number one responsibility as mothers, that we must stand up for human rights, health care, and environmental justice now, for everyone, and not just the privileged few. Indeed, I believe education's highest purpose is to teach our children what is and how to fight injustice. And if we parents don't teach them to be an activist for justice, who will? By "activist," I simply mean that you care about your family and your country enough to want to take action to insure your government is being used for your family's health, education, and safety, rather than to make the rich richer or to rob your tax dollars to pay for unnecessary wars based on lies, leaving the next generation in dire debt, more insecure than ever before in our history.
In other words, there are good mothers and there are great mothers. Great mothers are good mothers who, in addition, get involved with their kids to bring more health and justice into the world, not only for themselves, but for all families for generations to come.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21944/
By Dolores Huerta, AlterNet
Posted on May 6, 2005, Printed on May 6, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21944/
Dolores Huerta is an Honorary Chair of DSA
Mothers today often say they are concerned about what's happening to America. But most feel they just can't afford the time or the childcare expense to "get involved." Some are afraid they will shortchange their kids somehow, by taking them along on neighborhood canvasses or to nonprofit or political group meetings. But I ask mothers today, "how can you afford not to get involved?"
The situation today for children and mothers in America is urgent. Asthma and autism rates in some places are up 400 percent from 20 years ago; one of every six American moms now have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies; 200 species become extinct every day; our water, food, and air are now becoming more neurotoxic and carcinogenic instead of less for the first time since 1968; and more children fall into poverty and homelessness each year than ever since the great depression. Our children's future is bleak unless far more of us act now. Now more than ever is the time to get involved and get our children involved with us.
Getting our kids involved with us in political action develops their conscience and confidence in their own power to do good. I remember once when I had my six-year-old, Angela, the one who's a registered nurse now, and we were at this picket line at the Safeway, during the grape boycott. And here's this little kid standing in front of the store, passing out leaflets, telling people, "Don't shop here, because the grapes have poison on them." She was turning away more people than the adults!
In fact I would often take them out of school to do these things, because they learned more on the outside. They learned the way to become powerful was by organizing.
We mothers have to help make the world safer not only for our children, but for other people's children too. Because if all children are not safe, no child is safe. Our nation is making a disastrous mistake thinking we can have security from people: There is only security with people. Hate will always find a way around or under a "security system."
I know many mothers reading this are wondering how to get involved if they can't afford babysitters or are just overwhelmed. Yet so many mothers, like one or two of my own daughters, spend so much time driving kids to sports practice or work extra time to buy expensive things. These mothers could instead take time off from sports to volunteer on campaigns or at homeless shelters. When sports overtakes civic engagement, democracy dies. If your child was seriously ill, you would not think twice about giving up soccer. What is the difference between that and our child's society and planet being in critical condition? Political involvement is the medicine for curing a sick society and planet.
Some mothers who say they have not time to get involved are busy working long hours to buy things they don't really need. Why not work less, live more simply, so you can spend more time on activism and with family. If most mothers would only spend an hour or two a week doing activism, imagine the huge difference that would make to our nation and our children.
The tough truth is that using sports, schedule, or income as reasons not to get involved is a failure of responsibility and imagination. You've got to figure out ways to do it. Below are just six.
1) If the campaign/organization lacks childcare, help them organize it. On-site babysitters can be recruited from colleges or other parent volunteers.
2) Even if there is no childcare, your child can come with you to meetings, phone banks, etc. You can keep most kids occupied for a couple of hours with crayons, paper, books, play dough, and stories on CDs.
3) Ask moms who aren't actively engaged if they would watch your kids while you campaign. These mothers can then feel they're making a contribution. If there's ever a time to ask for help, it's now.
4) Lower your homemaking standards. I always used to say that for every bed I didn't make while organizing farmworkers, some poor farm worker got a $1/hour more.
5) If you're a single mother, find another mother with a kid your age or older, and your kids can keep busy together.
6) If you can't find childcare or bring your child(ren) with you, you can always use the internet and work from home e-mailing, or better yet faxing representatives, and e-mailing your friends ways to get them involved, or volunteering to help organizations as a researcher.
So there is no need for a conflict between being a good mother and being civically engaged. As a fellow activist mom once said, "How can you be a good mother today, and not be politically involved!" After all, it is for our children's safety, our number one responsibility as mothers, that we must stand up for human rights, health care, and environmental justice now, for everyone, and not just the privileged few. Indeed, I believe education's highest purpose is to teach our children what is and how to fight injustice. And if we parents don't teach them to be an activist for justice, who will? By "activist," I simply mean that you care about your family and your country enough to want to take action to insure your government is being used for your family's health, education, and safety, rather than to make the rich richer or to rob your tax dollars to pay for unnecessary wars based on lies, leaving the next generation in dire debt, more insecure than ever before in our history.
In other words, there are good mothers and there are great mothers. Great mothers are good mothers who, in addition, get involved with their kids to bring more health and justice into the world, not only for themselves, but for all families for generations to come.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21944/
Terrorist Negroponte begins new job
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-intel7may07,0,1349042.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Negroponte Faces Rebuilding Job in U.S. Intelligence
By Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writer
6:52 PM PDT, May 6, 2005
WASHINGTON — Computers are being unboxed, newly hired staffers are forced to double up in tiny cubicles, and the smell of fresh paint fills the air in a carefully guarded brick building around the corner from the White House.
Still under construction, the offices at the new Executive Office Building are home for the next few months to John Negroponte, the nation's first director of national intelligence. But Negroponte has a far more difficult construction project ahead: rebuilding the nation's badly battered intelligence agencies.
Negroponte already has started filling President Bush in on the latest haul from U.S. espionage and bugging operations, taking over the crucial early morning presidential intelligence briefing less than a week after he was sworn in April 21. Negroponte also attends the president's meetings with members of the Cabinet and other senior officials.
He thus has ended a decades-old tradition in which the CIA chief delivered the presidential briefing each morning and frequently functioned as a Cabinet-level adviser. The move signified Negroponte's powerful role as America's chief spy -- and puts him in the spotlight if the nation suffers another major intelligence failure.
Congress created the DNI job last fall, based on the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, which documented glaring gaps in U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. Under the law, the director has immense -- although largely undefined -- authority to set policy, impose directives and streamline America's vast, $40 billion-a-year intelligence system.
Just finding office space has proved a challenge, however.
A senior intelligence official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity Friday at the DNI offices, described the current arrangement as "our transient quarters." He said Negroponte and his planned staff of 500 to 700 people will move next fall to "temporary quarters" on the top two floors of a new building at Bolling Air Force Base, which lies across the Potomac River from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The DNI's ultimate headquarters is still unknown, as is much of the long-term organization and operation. Officials are moving cautiously, creating one job at a time, in an effort to better control the nation's 15 intelligence services.
"This is an evolving thing," the senior intelligence official said, displaying a diagram of new jobs, responsibilities and lines of authority in the DNI's office. "We're beyond chalk. . . . Now we're on paper."
As a start, Negroponte has appointed four top deputies to supervise intelligence collection, analysis, interagency management and liaison with the White House and other intelligence "customers."
Thomas Fingar, an intelligence veteran who has been assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was put in charge of the DNI's analysis unit. The State Department's tiny intelligence bureau repeatedly challenged the CIA over the quality of intelligence before the war in Iraq, but was overruled. Nearly all the pre-war U.S. intelligence on illicit Iraqi weapons later proved inaccurate.
Fingar's analysis unit also will take over the National Intelligence Council, which issued an erroneous national intelligence estimate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in October 2002. He will become the council's chairman.
Also named was David R. Shedd, a special assistant to the president for intelligence programs, as chief of staff; Ambassador Patrick F. Kennedy, a career member of the U.S. foreign service, as chief of intelligence management; and Mary Margaret Graham, a veteran CIA operations officer, as head of intelligence collection.
In a statement issued by his office, Negroponte said he has spent "a lot of time searching for good people" and was delighted that "such dedicated and experienced individuals" have agreed to join his office. "I am confident that those who are not yet announced are of equal caliber," he added.
Negroponte Faces Rebuilding Job in U.S. Intelligence
By Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writer
6:52 PM PDT, May 6, 2005
WASHINGTON — Computers are being unboxed, newly hired staffers are forced to double up in tiny cubicles, and the smell of fresh paint fills the air in a carefully guarded brick building around the corner from the White House.
Still under construction, the offices at the new Executive Office Building are home for the next few months to John Negroponte, the nation's first director of national intelligence. But Negroponte has a far more difficult construction project ahead: rebuilding the nation's badly battered intelligence agencies.
Negroponte already has started filling President Bush in on the latest haul from U.S. espionage and bugging operations, taking over the crucial early morning presidential intelligence briefing less than a week after he was sworn in April 21. Negroponte also attends the president's meetings with members of the Cabinet and other senior officials.
He thus has ended a decades-old tradition in which the CIA chief delivered the presidential briefing each morning and frequently functioned as a Cabinet-level adviser. The move signified Negroponte's powerful role as America's chief spy -- and puts him in the spotlight if the nation suffers another major intelligence failure.
Congress created the DNI job last fall, based on the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, which documented glaring gaps in U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. Under the law, the director has immense -- although largely undefined -- authority to set policy, impose directives and streamline America's vast, $40 billion-a-year intelligence system.
Just finding office space has proved a challenge, however.
A senior intelligence official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity Friday at the DNI offices, described the current arrangement as "our transient quarters." He said Negroponte and his planned staff of 500 to 700 people will move next fall to "temporary quarters" on the top two floors of a new building at Bolling Air Force Base, which lies across the Potomac River from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The DNI's ultimate headquarters is still unknown, as is much of the long-term organization and operation. Officials are moving cautiously, creating one job at a time, in an effort to better control the nation's 15 intelligence services.
"This is an evolving thing," the senior intelligence official said, displaying a diagram of new jobs, responsibilities and lines of authority in the DNI's office. "We're beyond chalk. . . . Now we're on paper."
As a start, Negroponte has appointed four top deputies to supervise intelligence collection, analysis, interagency management and liaison with the White House and other intelligence "customers."
Thomas Fingar, an intelligence veteran who has been assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was put in charge of the DNI's analysis unit. The State Department's tiny intelligence bureau repeatedly challenged the CIA over the quality of intelligence before the war in Iraq, but was overruled. Nearly all the pre-war U.S. intelligence on illicit Iraqi weapons later proved inaccurate.
Fingar's analysis unit also will take over the National Intelligence Council, which issued an erroneous national intelligence estimate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in October 2002. He will become the council's chairman.
Also named was David R. Shedd, a special assistant to the president for intelligence programs, as chief of staff; Ambassador Patrick F. Kennedy, a career member of the U.S. foreign service, as chief of intelligence management; and Mary Margaret Graham, a veteran CIA operations officer, as head of intelligence collection.
In a statement issued by his office, Negroponte said he has spent "a lot of time searching for good people" and was delighted that "such dedicated and experienced individuals" have agreed to join his office. "I am confident that those who are not yet announced are of equal caliber," he added.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Progressives in Latin America Unite
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=28530
Progressive Governments, Unite
Raúl Pierri
MONTEVIDEO, May 2 (IPS) - Representatives of the progressive parties currently governing Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay met in the Uruguayan capital to establish a platform for ongoing joint political coordination.
Promoting energy cooperation, sharing experiences in social policies, and adopting a unified stance in international trade negotiations and with respect to the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were the key issues discussed at the Apr. 28-29 conference.
"The reason for this gathering is to exchange experiences and identify vital cooperation issues," Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's foreign policy adviser Marco Aurelio García told IPS.
"For me this is an unprecedented event. We have never before found ourselves in a similar situation. During my years of political activity, I had many contacts with other leftist movements in the region, but there is a difference now -- we are no longer in the opposition," he added.
Brazil was also represented in the meeting in Montevideo by President Lula's chief of staff, José Dirceu, while Argentina was represented by Senator Cristina Fernández, who is also President Néstor Kirchner's wife, and by the president's cabinet chief, Alberto Fernández.
The Chilean delegation was headed by former defence minister Michelle Bachelet, of the co-governing Socialist Party, the front-runner in the polls for the December presidential elections.
Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez inaugurated the meeting, accompanied by Foreign Minister Reinaldo Gargano and Minister of Education and Culture Jorge Brovetto.
The conference, "Progressive Governing Parties and the Political Juncture in the Southern Cone", was convened by Uruguay's leftist ruling Broad Front coalition and sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German non-profit political foundation "committed to the advancement of public policy issues in the spirit of the basic values of social democracy".
The gathering drew leaders from left-leaning political sectors whose history and origins vary widely.
Argentina is governed by the Justicialista (Peronist) Party, founded by Juan Domingo Perón, who served as president during three periods between 1946 and 1974. The party's original social commitment was lost under the leadership of president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who followed free-market policies and carried out a wave of privatisations.
After Argentina's late 2001-2002 economic, political and social collapse, Néstor Kirchner, also from the Peronist party, emerged as the only alternative to Menem's return to power, and today he heads a centre-left government, which some see as a return, in some respects, to Peronism's roots.
In neighbouring Brazil, the governing Workers Party (PT) was founded in 1980 by socialist workers and movements. Lula, a former steelworker and trade unionist, became president in January 2003 after three failed attempts.
But today, radical sectors of the Brazilian left accuse Lula of modifying his stance towards the multilateral financial institutions and the industrialised countries of the North, and of moving increasingly towards the centre, and towards social democratic positions.
Chile, meanwhile, has been governed since 1990 by the centre-left Concertación Nacional por la Democracia (Coalition for Democracy), an alliance of social democrats, Christian democrats and socialists.
In March 2000, Ricardo Lagos became Chile's first socialist president since Salvador Allende, who died in the 1973 coup that ushered in the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Uruguay was the last country in the Southern Cone region to elect a left-wing government. The Broad Front, which won last year's elections, was created in 1971 by socialists, Christian democrats, social democrats, communists, dissidents from the two traditional parties, and members of the former guerrilla Tupamaros National Liberation Movement.
Many members of the leftist and centre-left parties governing the Southern Cone countries today suffered political persecution -- including prison, torture and exile -- during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.
At last week's meeting, Senator Fernández, the first lady of Argentina, was the driving force behind the idea of expressing as a bloc the parties' opposition to the policy dictates of the World Bank and IMF.
"We agree on the need to express our rejection of the nonviable guidelines established by the multilateral lenders in Latin America, which have had such appalling consequences for our societies," she told IPS.
The senator said the aim of the meeting was not to issue a joint statement referring to the multilateral lending institutions, but rather to discuss concerns and how to operate in foreign debt negotiations.
The four countries in question have taken different stances with regard to the multilateral lenders. Argentina is negotiating a new agreement with the IMF, which is pressing the government to find a solution for the 25 percent of bondholders who refused to accept the recent debt-swap.
Brazil announced in March that it would not renew its loan agreement with the IMF, although that does not mean it plans to abandon the fiscal austerity policies the government has followed. And last Friday, Lula said the aim of his administration was for Brazil never to need financial assistance from the IMF again.
Uruguay recently renewed its accord with the IMF, and Economy Minister Danilo Astori said the country has never been so dependent on the IMF as today, because of the high level of foreign debt contracted in the past few years.
Fernández also stressed the need for progressive governments in South America to back Latin American nations with fragile democracies, citing the case of Ecuador, whose president was removed by Congress on Apr. 20 after eight days of massive street protests.
Her concern was shared by the Uruguayan foreign minister. "We hope these meetings, in which the progressive forces in the region will be taking part, can serve as support for countries suffering democratic instability," Gargano commented to IPS.
The leaders agreed to hold periodic meetings like last week's. The next will take place in August in Buenos Aires, and the following is scheduled for November, in Chile.
Bachelet said now was the time to take advantage of the fact that the governments in the Southern Cone region see eye to eye, to coordinate and share information on social policies.
Bachelet, one of the governing coalition's possible presidential candidates and the favourite in the polls, said she would study the Social Emergency Plan that Uruguay's new government has begun to implement, to address the needs of the poorest of the poor.
She compared it to similar programmes that the Chilean government has adopted, like "Chile Solidario" and "Chile Barrio".
"The extreme social inequalities in our countries are among the major common challenges that we all face. These social plans are essential initiatives that require an integral focus," she told IPS.
"Today is the time for us to establish targets, timeframes and measures to jointly adopt. We are at a historic juncture because we now have progressive governments. We are in conditions that couldn't be any better, to translate the ideas for which we have worked into concrete action," she added. (END/2005)
Progressive Governments, Unite
Raúl Pierri
MONTEVIDEO, May 2 (IPS) - Representatives of the progressive parties currently governing Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay met in the Uruguayan capital to establish a platform for ongoing joint political coordination.
Promoting energy cooperation, sharing experiences in social policies, and adopting a unified stance in international trade negotiations and with respect to the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were the key issues discussed at the Apr. 28-29 conference.
"The reason for this gathering is to exchange experiences and identify vital cooperation issues," Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's foreign policy adviser Marco Aurelio García told IPS.
"For me this is an unprecedented event. We have never before found ourselves in a similar situation. During my years of political activity, I had many contacts with other leftist movements in the region, but there is a difference now -- we are no longer in the opposition," he added.
Brazil was also represented in the meeting in Montevideo by President Lula's chief of staff, José Dirceu, while Argentina was represented by Senator Cristina Fernández, who is also President Néstor Kirchner's wife, and by the president's cabinet chief, Alberto Fernández.
The Chilean delegation was headed by former defence minister Michelle Bachelet, of the co-governing Socialist Party, the front-runner in the polls for the December presidential elections.
Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez inaugurated the meeting, accompanied by Foreign Minister Reinaldo Gargano and Minister of Education and Culture Jorge Brovetto.
The conference, "Progressive Governing Parties and the Political Juncture in the Southern Cone", was convened by Uruguay's leftist ruling Broad Front coalition and sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German non-profit political foundation "committed to the advancement of public policy issues in the spirit of the basic values of social democracy".
The gathering drew leaders from left-leaning political sectors whose history and origins vary widely.
Argentina is governed by the Justicialista (Peronist) Party, founded by Juan Domingo Perón, who served as president during three periods between 1946 and 1974. The party's original social commitment was lost under the leadership of president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who followed free-market policies and carried out a wave of privatisations.
After Argentina's late 2001-2002 economic, political and social collapse, Néstor Kirchner, also from the Peronist party, emerged as the only alternative to Menem's return to power, and today he heads a centre-left government, which some see as a return, in some respects, to Peronism's roots.
In neighbouring Brazil, the governing Workers Party (PT) was founded in 1980 by socialist workers and movements. Lula, a former steelworker and trade unionist, became president in January 2003 after three failed attempts.
But today, radical sectors of the Brazilian left accuse Lula of modifying his stance towards the multilateral financial institutions and the industrialised countries of the North, and of moving increasingly towards the centre, and towards social democratic positions.
Chile, meanwhile, has been governed since 1990 by the centre-left Concertación Nacional por la Democracia (Coalition for Democracy), an alliance of social democrats, Christian democrats and socialists.
In March 2000, Ricardo Lagos became Chile's first socialist president since Salvador Allende, who died in the 1973 coup that ushered in the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Uruguay was the last country in the Southern Cone region to elect a left-wing government. The Broad Front, which won last year's elections, was created in 1971 by socialists, Christian democrats, social democrats, communists, dissidents from the two traditional parties, and members of the former guerrilla Tupamaros National Liberation Movement.
Many members of the leftist and centre-left parties governing the Southern Cone countries today suffered political persecution -- including prison, torture and exile -- during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.
At last week's meeting, Senator Fernández, the first lady of Argentina, was the driving force behind the idea of expressing as a bloc the parties' opposition to the policy dictates of the World Bank and IMF.
"We agree on the need to express our rejection of the nonviable guidelines established by the multilateral lenders in Latin America, which have had such appalling consequences for our societies," she told IPS.
The senator said the aim of the meeting was not to issue a joint statement referring to the multilateral lending institutions, but rather to discuss concerns and how to operate in foreign debt negotiations.
The four countries in question have taken different stances with regard to the multilateral lenders. Argentina is negotiating a new agreement with the IMF, which is pressing the government to find a solution for the 25 percent of bondholders who refused to accept the recent debt-swap.
Brazil announced in March that it would not renew its loan agreement with the IMF, although that does not mean it plans to abandon the fiscal austerity policies the government has followed. And last Friday, Lula said the aim of his administration was for Brazil never to need financial assistance from the IMF again.
Uruguay recently renewed its accord with the IMF, and Economy Minister Danilo Astori said the country has never been so dependent on the IMF as today, because of the high level of foreign debt contracted in the past few years.
Fernández also stressed the need for progressive governments in South America to back Latin American nations with fragile democracies, citing the case of Ecuador, whose president was removed by Congress on Apr. 20 after eight days of massive street protests.
Her concern was shared by the Uruguayan foreign minister. "We hope these meetings, in which the progressive forces in the region will be taking part, can serve as support for countries suffering democratic instability," Gargano commented to IPS.
The leaders agreed to hold periodic meetings like last week's. The next will take place in August in Buenos Aires, and the following is scheduled for November, in Chile.
Bachelet said now was the time to take advantage of the fact that the governments in the Southern Cone region see eye to eye, to coordinate and share information on social policies.
Bachelet, one of the governing coalition's possible presidential candidates and the favourite in the polls, said she would study the Social Emergency Plan that Uruguay's new government has begun to implement, to address the needs of the poorest of the poor.
She compared it to similar programmes that the Chilean government has adopted, like "Chile Solidario" and "Chile Barrio".
"The extreme social inequalities in our countries are among the major common challenges that we all face. These social plans are essential initiatives that require an integral focus," she told IPS.
"Today is the time for us to establish targets, timeframes and measures to jointly adopt. We are at a historic juncture because we now have progressive governments. We are in conditions that couldn't be any better, to translate the ideas for which we have worked into concrete action," she added. (END/2005)
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cranks on the border; and the press
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-minutemen1may01,0,4100431.story
The 15-Second Men
By Marc Cooper
May 1, 2005
What if the media staged a stunt — or helped stage a stunt — and nobody came?
Would the media still cover it? Would California's governor get suckered in?
In the case of the recently concluded Minuteman Project, which vowed to blockade the southern Arizona border with more than 1,000 volunteers during the entire month of April, the answer, unfortunately, was a resounding yes.
For two solid weeks, thousands of news stories cascaded from the hardscrabble border zone, focusing on what was, in reality, a group of True Believers whose real numbers were tiny.
Though the Minuteman organizers vowed that 1,600 or more mad-as-hell volunteers had signed up for duty and that "potentially several thousands" would participate in the kickoff rallies during April Fools' weekend, turnout was an unmitigated flop — less than a tenth of the promised throngs showed up at the rallies. The entire Minuteman spectacle, indeed, easily qualified for that journalistic catchall phrase, "a fizzle," but virtually none of the news media reported it as such.
On its opening day, I could count no more than 135 participants, even at the two kickoff public rallies along the Arizona border. At one near the border town of Douglas, two dozen reporters and a handful of TV cameras swarmed over no more than 10 Minutemen — most of them sitting in lawn chairs or in pickup truck beds. During the entire kickoff weekend, the media troops clearly outnumbered the Minutemen. And in the days that followed, piecing together the various reports and reading between the lines, it's obvious that the Minuteman numbers dwindled to no more than a few dozen at a time. If that many people marched down Hollywood Boulevard for any cause, who'd report it?
Indeed, only 18 days into the monthlong project, the effort collapsed. Predictably, a few hundred illegal immigrants had chosen not to cross in that area during the media ruckus. Minuteman organizers preposterously declared victory, claiming they had shut down the border to illegal immigration and packed off home. Even then, most news reports failed to acknowledge the project's obvious failure — which may explain why on Thursday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger offered sappy praise for the fiasco.
But the notion of platoons of gun-toting yahoos combing the U.S. border and possibly confronting (if not shooting) illegal crossers or even Border Patrol agents was just too much of a temptation for a sensation-driven media to resist. The streets of picturesque Tombstone were, all of a sudden, jammed with mammoth satellite trucks as reporters, camera operators, technicians and writers combed the tourist saloons for their story like modern Wyatt Earps stalking the Clanton gang. No one in the media, it seems, wanted to be the one who told his or her boss that they had trekked out to the border for no reason. So the media shut their eyes and obediently played their role as enablers to the publicity-starved organizers. That too-common Faustian bargain of modern media was quietly negotiated: We'll put you on the air or get you in the paper if you give us good copy. Show us a few guys with guns so we can get our story and go home.
"They came by the hundreds," is how the Los Angeles Times breathlessly led its first-day report out of Tombstone, only to tell us deeper in the story that the actual number of Minutemen who showed up were "200 or so." A Times follow-up three days later got us closer to the truth when Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist admitted: "This thing was a dog-and-pony show designed to bring in the media and get the message out, and it worked."
It worked so well that less than a week later another Times reporter filed a 1,200-word of profile of Gilchrist, an obscure, retired Orange County accountant. Even though, by then, the Minuteman Project was into its 11th day, the reporter made no mention of the actual status of his collapsing border event.
The situation along the U.S.-Mexican border continues to sink into chaos, and Congress and the White House do little more than aggravate things. In spite of billions of dollars spent to bolster the line, every year hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of desperate migrants manage to evade the human, physical and environmental barriers and make the crossing to wind up as our maids, nannies and gardeners.
More than 3,000 died trying to make the crossing in the last decade — 10 times more than all those who perished trying to jump the Berlin Wall.
It's a complex and vexing issue that is getting hotter by the day. Now more than ever the public needs news media that are serious, thoughtful and analytical, not compliant suckers for the wound-up partisans and pandering politicians who are increasingly likely to inflame or obfuscate the issue with goofball dog-and-pony shows.
Marc Cooper is a contributing editor of the Nation, a columnist for L.A. Weekly and a senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He can be reached through www.marc cooper.com.
The 15-Second Men
By Marc Cooper
May 1, 2005
What if the media staged a stunt — or helped stage a stunt — and nobody came?
Would the media still cover it? Would California's governor get suckered in?
In the case of the recently concluded Minuteman Project, which vowed to blockade the southern Arizona border with more than 1,000 volunteers during the entire month of April, the answer, unfortunately, was a resounding yes.
For two solid weeks, thousands of news stories cascaded from the hardscrabble border zone, focusing on what was, in reality, a group of True Believers whose real numbers were tiny.
Though the Minuteman organizers vowed that 1,600 or more mad-as-hell volunteers had signed up for duty and that "potentially several thousands" would participate in the kickoff rallies during April Fools' weekend, turnout was an unmitigated flop — less than a tenth of the promised throngs showed up at the rallies. The entire Minuteman spectacle, indeed, easily qualified for that journalistic catchall phrase, "a fizzle," but virtually none of the news media reported it as such.
On its opening day, I could count no more than 135 participants, even at the two kickoff public rallies along the Arizona border. At one near the border town of Douglas, two dozen reporters and a handful of TV cameras swarmed over no more than 10 Minutemen — most of them sitting in lawn chairs or in pickup truck beds. During the entire kickoff weekend, the media troops clearly outnumbered the Minutemen. And in the days that followed, piecing together the various reports and reading between the lines, it's obvious that the Minuteman numbers dwindled to no more than a few dozen at a time. If that many people marched down Hollywood Boulevard for any cause, who'd report it?
Indeed, only 18 days into the monthlong project, the effort collapsed. Predictably, a few hundred illegal immigrants had chosen not to cross in that area during the media ruckus. Minuteman organizers preposterously declared victory, claiming they had shut down the border to illegal immigration and packed off home. Even then, most news reports failed to acknowledge the project's obvious failure — which may explain why on Thursday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger offered sappy praise for the fiasco.
But the notion of platoons of gun-toting yahoos combing the U.S. border and possibly confronting (if not shooting) illegal crossers or even Border Patrol agents was just too much of a temptation for a sensation-driven media to resist. The streets of picturesque Tombstone were, all of a sudden, jammed with mammoth satellite trucks as reporters, camera operators, technicians and writers combed the tourist saloons for their story like modern Wyatt Earps stalking the Clanton gang. No one in the media, it seems, wanted to be the one who told his or her boss that they had trekked out to the border for no reason. So the media shut their eyes and obediently played their role as enablers to the publicity-starved organizers. That too-common Faustian bargain of modern media was quietly negotiated: We'll put you on the air or get you in the paper if you give us good copy. Show us a few guys with guns so we can get our story and go home.
"They came by the hundreds," is how the Los Angeles Times breathlessly led its first-day report out of Tombstone, only to tell us deeper in the story that the actual number of Minutemen who showed up were "200 or so." A Times follow-up three days later got us closer to the truth when Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist admitted: "This thing was a dog-and-pony show designed to bring in the media and get the message out, and it worked."
It worked so well that less than a week later another Times reporter filed a 1,200-word of profile of Gilchrist, an obscure, retired Orange County accountant. Even though, by then, the Minuteman Project was into its 11th day, the reporter made no mention of the actual status of his collapsing border event.
The situation along the U.S.-Mexican border continues to sink into chaos, and Congress and the White House do little more than aggravate things. In spite of billions of dollars spent to bolster the line, every year hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of desperate migrants manage to evade the human, physical and environmental barriers and make the crossing to wind up as our maids, nannies and gardeners.
More than 3,000 died trying to make the crossing in the last decade — 10 times more than all those who perished trying to jump the Berlin Wall.
It's a complex and vexing issue that is getting hotter by the day. Now more than ever the public needs news media that are serious, thoughtful and analytical, not compliant suckers for the wound-up partisans and pandering politicians who are increasingly likely to inflame or obfuscate the issue with goofball dog-and-pony shows.
Marc Cooper is a contributing editor of the Nation, a columnist for L.A. Weekly and a senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He can be reached through www.marc cooper.com.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Arnold and immigration
Polls Push Governor to the Border
As his popularity wanes, Schwarzenegger revisits a Republican mainstay: illegal immigration.
By Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writer
April 30, 2005
SACRAMENTO — If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to speak out forcefully against illegal immigration seems familiar, it is. The governor is using a well-worn tactic to seize public attention amid plummeting approval ratings, analysts and others said Friday.
Speaking to reporters, Schwarzenegger on Friday likened the armed Minuteman group that has roamed the Arizona-Mexico border looking for illegal immigrants to a "neighborhood patrol" that has succeeded where the government failed. A day earlier, he called their work "fantastic" and chastised the Bush administration for failing to secure the border.
Schwarzenegger also had said Thursday that a Spanish-language billboard characterizing Los Angeles as a Mexican city was "divisive," a comment echoed by conservative groups. Last week, the governor said the U.S. should "close the borders" — a remark his staff said was imprecise and for which he later apologized.
The governor outraged Latino activists and his Democratic opponents with his comments, but he was treading an often effective path, analysts said. Republicans have used California's permeable border as political fodder for years. And Schwarzenegger was elected in 2003 after demanding that people in the state illegally not be issued driver's licenses.
"It wasn't just Republicans who were upset that [former Gov.] Gray Davis signed a bill granting licenses to illegal immigrants," said Elizabeth Garrett, director of the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics.
But by highlighting the Minuteman group this week, Garrett said, Schwarzenegger may have unnecessarily aligned himself with a fringe element and given Democratic opponents, already in political high dudgeon, another tool to use against him.Administration officials scoffed at suggestions that they had a calculated plan to buoy sinking poll numbers by attacking illegal immigration.
Schwarzenegger, they said, was simply addressing a controversial issue, billboards for KCRA-TV Channel 62 that show the words "Los Angeles, CA" with the "CA" crossed out to make the ads read "Los Angeles, Mexico."
When he made the comment praising the Minuteman group, he was responding to a question, as he was when he said earlier that the border should be closed.
Rob Stutzman, his communications director, cautioned against over-analyzing Schwarzenegger or his intentions. He said the governor remains committed to the multipart agenda he unveiled in January for changing state government.
"So any issue that he speaks on that may be popular to the public is somehow pandering to poll numbers?" Stutzman said. "That to me is an absurdity."
Schwarzenegger stood by his comments Friday: "I think the most important thing to note is I am a champion of immigrants," he said at a news conference. "I promote immigration. I am an immigrant myself. I think it's extremely important that we do it in a legal way."
He also said the federal government should step up patrols. "Their job is to secure the borders, and they have not done their job. And when the government — the state or the country — doesn't do its job, then the private citizens go out and it's like a neighborhood patrol."
Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, said the governor may well be speaking from the heart: Many legal immigrants are resentful of undocumented immigrants.
But Cain added a caveat: Many of Schwarzenegger's top advisors worked for former Gov. Pete Wilson, who rode the issue of illegal immigration in the mid-1990s by campaigning for Proposition 187, which denied state services to illegal immigrants but which was later overturned by courts.
"They have played this card before," Cain said. Focusing on immigration, Cain added, "probably gets people away from obsessing on his defeats. It's possible this is a conscious strategy, but I also believe this is true to his heart."
The polarizing debate over Proposition 187 has been blamed for sinking the Republican Party in California and allowing Democrats to dominate Sacramento — until Schwarzenegger came to power.
Assemblyman Dave Jones, a Sacramento Democrat and former advisor to former U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, said Friday that Schwarzenegger is invoking the border in a conscious effort to shore up his approval ratings — which have fallen 20 points since January — and distract Californians from his troubled policy agenda.
"That's the consistent theme here," Jones said. "There's a deliberate effort on his part — I think out of desperation with regard to what's happening to his poll numbers and public response to his initiatives — to shift the debate away from the things he's trying to do in California, because people are rejecting those things."
In January, Schwarzenegger unveiled a wide-ranging government overhaul that included merit pay for teachers, automatic curbs on the state budget, sweeping changes in the public pension system and a new way of determining voting districts. Under pressure from unions and Democrats, Schwarzenegger has retreated from or been pushed to compromise on each of the issues.
Schwarzenegger also is facing a Republican Party upset about repeated conciliations with Democrats on key issues and about the influence of liberals, such as his wife, Maria Shriver, over policy and the direction of the administration.
Schwarzenegger, political analysts said, can use the issue of immigration — one the public understands well — to get people in his party energized and on his side. One senior aide told the governor recently: "At least when you make a gaffe, make one that jumps you 10 points in the polls."
Indeed, it's not just conservatives who believe illegal immigration is a problem. A Los Angeles Times poll taken just before the 2003 recall election showed a majority of Californians disagreed with Davis' decision to allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses. The poll found 63% of likely voters disapproved of the law, including 68% of self-described moderates and 40% of Latinos
But Wayne Johnson, a longtime GOP political consultant, said he worried that Democrats could turn Schwarzenegger's remarks into a political liability by alienating Latino voters.
"I am personally an advocate for going overboard in making sure that everything we say and do recognizes the future of the Republican Party in California relies on Hispanic voters," Johnson said. "Who is buying the new cars? Hispanic surnames. Who is sending their kids to college? Hispanic surnames. Who is starting new businesses? Hispanic surnames."
Shaun Bowler, a professor and California government expert at UC Riverside, said the Republican Party is putting intense pressure on elected officials to turn more conservative on immigration because of the Minuteman Project and other groups. Schwarzenegger may be able to appease his fellow Republicans at small political cost, he said.
"You get various groups that will complain about this, but voters don't so much," Bowler said. "And so it's an easy shift in policy for him."
But on Friday, some of the most forceful criticism of Schwarzenegger's comments came from Latino officials and activists, who said he is out of step with most Californians and a political opportunist.
"I don't think the governor is a racist. I don't think Pete Wilson is a racist," said state Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres.
"I think they are encouraging scapegoating of people in this country for political purposes," Torres said, "and I think that is the lowest form of political behavior."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arnold30apr30,0,7929804.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Times staff writers Peter Nicholas and Andrew Wang contributed to this report.
As his popularity wanes, Schwarzenegger revisits a Republican mainstay: illegal immigration.
By Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writer
April 30, 2005
SACRAMENTO — If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to speak out forcefully against illegal immigration seems familiar, it is. The governor is using a well-worn tactic to seize public attention amid plummeting approval ratings, analysts and others said Friday.
Speaking to reporters, Schwarzenegger on Friday likened the armed Minuteman group that has roamed the Arizona-Mexico border looking for illegal immigrants to a "neighborhood patrol" that has succeeded where the government failed. A day earlier, he called their work "fantastic" and chastised the Bush administration for failing to secure the border.
Schwarzenegger also had said Thursday that a Spanish-language billboard characterizing Los Angeles as a Mexican city was "divisive," a comment echoed by conservative groups. Last week, the governor said the U.S. should "close the borders" — a remark his staff said was imprecise and for which he later apologized.
The governor outraged Latino activists and his Democratic opponents with his comments, but he was treading an often effective path, analysts said. Republicans have used California's permeable border as political fodder for years. And Schwarzenegger was elected in 2003 after demanding that people in the state illegally not be issued driver's licenses.
"It wasn't just Republicans who were upset that [former Gov.] Gray Davis signed a bill granting licenses to illegal immigrants," said Elizabeth Garrett, director of the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics.
But by highlighting the Minuteman group this week, Garrett said, Schwarzenegger may have unnecessarily aligned himself with a fringe element and given Democratic opponents, already in political high dudgeon, another tool to use against him.Administration officials scoffed at suggestions that they had a calculated plan to buoy sinking poll numbers by attacking illegal immigration.
Schwarzenegger, they said, was simply addressing a controversial issue, billboards for KCRA-TV Channel 62 that show the words "Los Angeles, CA" with the "CA" crossed out to make the ads read "Los Angeles, Mexico."
When he made the comment praising the Minuteman group, he was responding to a question, as he was when he said earlier that the border should be closed.
Rob Stutzman, his communications director, cautioned against over-analyzing Schwarzenegger or his intentions. He said the governor remains committed to the multipart agenda he unveiled in January for changing state government.
"So any issue that he speaks on that may be popular to the public is somehow pandering to poll numbers?" Stutzman said. "That to me is an absurdity."
Schwarzenegger stood by his comments Friday: "I think the most important thing to note is I am a champion of immigrants," he said at a news conference. "I promote immigration. I am an immigrant myself. I think it's extremely important that we do it in a legal way."
He also said the federal government should step up patrols. "Their job is to secure the borders, and they have not done their job. And when the government — the state or the country — doesn't do its job, then the private citizens go out and it's like a neighborhood patrol."
Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, said the governor may well be speaking from the heart: Many legal immigrants are resentful of undocumented immigrants.
But Cain added a caveat: Many of Schwarzenegger's top advisors worked for former Gov. Pete Wilson, who rode the issue of illegal immigration in the mid-1990s by campaigning for Proposition 187, which denied state services to illegal immigrants but which was later overturned by courts.
"They have played this card before," Cain said. Focusing on immigration, Cain added, "probably gets people away from obsessing on his defeats. It's possible this is a conscious strategy, but I also believe this is true to his heart."
The polarizing debate over Proposition 187 has been blamed for sinking the Republican Party in California and allowing Democrats to dominate Sacramento — until Schwarzenegger came to power.
Assemblyman Dave Jones, a Sacramento Democrat and former advisor to former U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, said Friday that Schwarzenegger is invoking the border in a conscious effort to shore up his approval ratings — which have fallen 20 points since January — and distract Californians from his troubled policy agenda.
"That's the consistent theme here," Jones said. "There's a deliberate effort on his part — I think out of desperation with regard to what's happening to his poll numbers and public response to his initiatives — to shift the debate away from the things he's trying to do in California, because people are rejecting those things."
In January, Schwarzenegger unveiled a wide-ranging government overhaul that included merit pay for teachers, automatic curbs on the state budget, sweeping changes in the public pension system and a new way of determining voting districts. Under pressure from unions and Democrats, Schwarzenegger has retreated from or been pushed to compromise on each of the issues.
Schwarzenegger also is facing a Republican Party upset about repeated conciliations with Democrats on key issues and about the influence of liberals, such as his wife, Maria Shriver, over policy and the direction of the administration.
Schwarzenegger, political analysts said, can use the issue of immigration — one the public understands well — to get people in his party energized and on his side. One senior aide told the governor recently: "At least when you make a gaffe, make one that jumps you 10 points in the polls."
Indeed, it's not just conservatives who believe illegal immigration is a problem. A Los Angeles Times poll taken just before the 2003 recall election showed a majority of Californians disagreed with Davis' decision to allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses. The poll found 63% of likely voters disapproved of the law, including 68% of self-described moderates and 40% of Latinos
But Wayne Johnson, a longtime GOP political consultant, said he worried that Democrats could turn Schwarzenegger's remarks into a political liability by alienating Latino voters.
"I am personally an advocate for going overboard in making sure that everything we say and do recognizes the future of the Republican Party in California relies on Hispanic voters," Johnson said. "Who is buying the new cars? Hispanic surnames. Who is sending their kids to college? Hispanic surnames. Who is starting new businesses? Hispanic surnames."
Shaun Bowler, a professor and California government expert at UC Riverside, said the Republican Party is putting intense pressure on elected officials to turn more conservative on immigration because of the Minuteman Project and other groups. Schwarzenegger may be able to appease his fellow Republicans at small political cost, he said.
"You get various groups that will complain about this, but voters don't so much," Bowler said. "And so it's an easy shift in policy for him."
But on Friday, some of the most forceful criticism of Schwarzenegger's comments came from Latino officials and activists, who said he is out of step with most Californians and a political opportunist.
"I don't think the governor is a racist. I don't think Pete Wilson is a racist," said state Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres.
"I think they are encouraging scapegoating of people in this country for political purposes," Torres said, "and I think that is the lowest form of political behavior."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arnold30apr30,0,7929804.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Times staff writers Peter Nicholas and Andrew Wang contributed to this report.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
While Crucial Programs Starve
Fiddling While Crucial Programs Starve
Has the U.S. become like ancient Rome, in love with costly conquest?
Robert Scheer
April 26, 2005
Notice the price of gasoline lately? Isn't it great that we have secured Iraq's oil? And as Congress signs off on yet another huge supplementary grant to supposedly protect U.S. interests in the Mideast, our president pathetically begs his Saudi buddies for a price break. As the fall of Rome showed, imperialism never pays.
Of course, back in 2003, conquering Iraq looked like a great package deal, what with all that oil — second only to Saudi Arabia — and the manufactured photo ops of cheering Iraqis. So what if those pesky weapons of mass destruction weren't really there? So what if no solid links to Al Qaeda are ever found? This was a win-win, as the corporate guys like to say: Not only would we be able to conduct this operation for next to nothing, we would be welcomed with flowers.
"There is a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money," then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress days before the war, in testimony on the potential costs of invading Iraq. "We are talking about a country that can finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." In the real world, however, this turned out to be utter nonsense.
With approval of the latest spending bill, taxpayers will have been forced to cough up more than $300 billion for the war to date — above and beyond the annual $400-billion Pentagon budget — and tens of billions for a bungled reconstruction. Even if the United States can lower its troop commitment to 40,000 troops in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists optimistically anticipate, the war could still end up costing U.S. taxpayers up to $646 billion by 2015, according to Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. If insurgency, corruption and incompetence continue to plague the U.S. occupation as they have steadily for the last two years, however, the number could surge to a trillion dollars or more.
We need to put such gargantuan numbers in some perspective. The emergency funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly $80 billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan only through September. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.
Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life.
Similarly, with roughly 10% of what we've spent in Iraq, we could make up the $27-billion federal funding shortfall in paying for Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which tells public schools that they will be all but scrapped if they don't improve — yet it doesn't provide the means to do so. This number comes from a lawsuit filed by school districts in Texas, Michigan and Vermont and the National Education Assn., the nation's largest teachers organization.
Sadly, these domestic failures provide a far greater long-term threat to our nation's security than the hyped-up claims surrounding our foreign adventures. Abroad, we must "support our troops" at all costs — even if the cost is their lives — while at home, the nation's leaders are all about tough love.
"Government is not here to do everything for everybody," admonished Missouri state Rep. Jodi Stefanick, a Republican representing suburban St. Louis. "We have to draw the line somewhere." Just not in Iraq, apparently.
Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is considered patriotic and where demagogues who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-building are deemed valorous. Wolfowitz, for example, has been rewarded for his ignorance and arrogance with the top job at the World Bank.
It is not too late, however, for us to wake up and recall that, in the end, once militarism trumped republicanism, the glory that was Rome proved to be a hollow boast.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Has the U.S. become like ancient Rome, in love with costly conquest?
Robert Scheer
April 26, 2005
Notice the price of gasoline lately? Isn't it great that we have secured Iraq's oil? And as Congress signs off on yet another huge supplementary grant to supposedly protect U.S. interests in the Mideast, our president pathetically begs his Saudi buddies for a price break. As the fall of Rome showed, imperialism never pays.
Of course, back in 2003, conquering Iraq looked like a great package deal, what with all that oil — second only to Saudi Arabia — and the manufactured photo ops of cheering Iraqis. So what if those pesky weapons of mass destruction weren't really there? So what if no solid links to Al Qaeda are ever found? This was a win-win, as the corporate guys like to say: Not only would we be able to conduct this operation for next to nothing, we would be welcomed with flowers.
"There is a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money," then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress days before the war, in testimony on the potential costs of invading Iraq. "We are talking about a country that can finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." In the real world, however, this turned out to be utter nonsense.
With approval of the latest spending bill, taxpayers will have been forced to cough up more than $300 billion for the war to date — above and beyond the annual $400-billion Pentagon budget — and tens of billions for a bungled reconstruction. Even if the United States can lower its troop commitment to 40,000 troops in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists optimistically anticipate, the war could still end up costing U.S. taxpayers up to $646 billion by 2015, according to Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. If insurgency, corruption and incompetence continue to plague the U.S. occupation as they have steadily for the last two years, however, the number could surge to a trillion dollars or more.
We need to put such gargantuan numbers in some perspective. The emergency funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly $80 billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan only through September. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.
Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life.
Similarly, with roughly 10% of what we've spent in Iraq, we could make up the $27-billion federal funding shortfall in paying for Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which tells public schools that they will be all but scrapped if they don't improve — yet it doesn't provide the means to do so. This number comes from a lawsuit filed by school districts in Texas, Michigan and Vermont and the National Education Assn., the nation's largest teachers organization.
Sadly, these domestic failures provide a far greater long-term threat to our nation's security than the hyped-up claims surrounding our foreign adventures. Abroad, we must "support our troops" at all costs — even if the cost is their lives — while at home, the nation's leaders are all about tough love.
"Government is not here to do everything for everybody," admonished Missouri state Rep. Jodi Stefanick, a Republican representing suburban St. Louis. "We have to draw the line somewhere." Just not in Iraq, apparently.
Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is considered patriotic and where demagogues who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-building are deemed valorous. Wolfowitz, for example, has been rewarded for his ignorance and arrogance with the top job at the World Bank.
It is not too late, however, for us to wake up and recall that, in the end, once militarism trumped republicanism, the glory that was Rome proved to be a hollow boast.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Saturday, April 16, 2005
How to steal an election in Mexico
Greetings from Mexistan
As democracy goes south of the border, the Bush administration is notably silent.
By Harold Meyerson
It may be just about the most inspiring sight imaginable: hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the main square of some capital city, demanding democratic self-rule. "They're doing it in many different corners of the world," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week, "places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the other hand, Lebanon, and rumblings in other parts of the world as well. And so this is a hopeful time."
It is a process in which the United States claims more than an observer's role. The business of America, says President Bush, is spreading democracy. "The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people, you must learn to trust them," Bush said in his inaugural address this January. "Start on this journey of progress and justice and America will walk at your side."
Unless, of course, you're Mexican.
Apparently, there are several kinds of capital city rallies. There are those in Kiev, where multitudes turned out to protest the subversion of a national election and the attempted murder of the opposition leader. There are those in Beirut, where people gathered to protest the murder of an opposition leader and to demand self-determination. These were outpourings that our government encouraged.
And there was the one last Thursday in Mexico City, where 300,000 protesters filled the Zocalo, the great plaza in the middle of the city, to show their outrage over the decision of their Chamber of Deputies to keep that nation's opposition leader from running for president next year.
The government had not murdered the opposition leader, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador; it merely proposed to imprison him -- and thereby disqualify him for the presidency -- because someone in his city government disregarded a court order to stop construction of a short access road leading to a hospital, over land that was acquired by Lopez Obrador's predecessor but whose ownership was still in dispute.
For this the congressional deputies from Mexico's two conservative parties -- President Vicente Fox's PAN and the PRI, which had governed Mexico for six decades before Fox was elected in 2000 -- voted almost unanimously last Thursday to strip Lopez Obrador of his official immunity, with the clear goal of imprisoning him and knocking him out of the 2006 presidential race. Not coincidentally, all polls show Lopez Obrador -- standard-bearer of the left-leaning PRD -- to be the front-runner in that contest.
And what was the response of our government? Did we invoke the president's mighty line that leaders of government with long habits of control must learn to trust their people? Did we tell the crowds gathered in the Zocalo that America walks at their side?
Not quite. While Condi Rice waxes eloquent about our concern for democratic rights in Central Asia and the Middle East, the most the Bush administration has managed to say about democracy in the unimaginably faraway land of Mexico has been the comment of a State Department spokesman that this is an internal Mexican affair.
Democracy may be all well and good, but Lopez Obrador is just not Bush's kind of guy. As mayor of Mexico City, he's increased public pensions to the elderly and spent heavily on public works and the accompanying job creation. He's criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement as a boon for the corporate sector and a bust for Mexican workers. (As economist Jeff Faux has documented, while productivity in Mexican manufacturing rose 54 percent in the eight years after NAFTA's enactment, real wages actually declined.) He's opposed to Fox's plan to privatize Mexico's state-owned oil and gas industry -- a stance that probably doesn't endear him to the Texas oilmen currently employed as president and vice president of the United States.
Worse yet, Lopez Obrador's populist politics and smarts have made him the most popular political leader in Mexico today. The much touted "free-market" economics of President Fox have done nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Mexicans. Lopez Obrador's victory in next year's election would mark a decisive repudiation of that neo-liberal model. Coming after the elections of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Hugo Chavez (repeatedly) in Venezuela, it would be one more indication, a huge one, that Latin America has rejected an economics of corporate autonomy, public austerity and no worker rights.
So, democracy in Ukraine? We'll be there. Lebanon? Count on us. Kyrgyzstan? With bells on. Mexico? Where's that? Maybe they should move to Central Asia, change their name to Mexistan and promise to privatize the oil. That's the kind of democracy the Bush guys really like.
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Harold Meyerson, "Greetings from Mexistan", The American Prospect Online, Apr 14, 2005. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
As democracy goes south of the border, the Bush administration is notably silent.
By Harold Meyerson
It may be just about the most inspiring sight imaginable: hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the main square of some capital city, demanding democratic self-rule. "They're doing it in many different corners of the world," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week, "places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the other hand, Lebanon, and rumblings in other parts of the world as well. And so this is a hopeful time."
It is a process in which the United States claims more than an observer's role. The business of America, says President Bush, is spreading democracy. "The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people, you must learn to trust them," Bush said in his inaugural address this January. "Start on this journey of progress and justice and America will walk at your side."
Unless, of course, you're Mexican.
Apparently, there are several kinds of capital city rallies. There are those in Kiev, where multitudes turned out to protest the subversion of a national election and the attempted murder of the opposition leader. There are those in Beirut, where people gathered to protest the murder of an opposition leader and to demand self-determination. These were outpourings that our government encouraged.
And there was the one last Thursday in Mexico City, where 300,000 protesters filled the Zocalo, the great plaza in the middle of the city, to show their outrage over the decision of their Chamber of Deputies to keep that nation's opposition leader from running for president next year.
The government had not murdered the opposition leader, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador; it merely proposed to imprison him -- and thereby disqualify him for the presidency -- because someone in his city government disregarded a court order to stop construction of a short access road leading to a hospital, over land that was acquired by Lopez Obrador's predecessor but whose ownership was still in dispute.
For this the congressional deputies from Mexico's two conservative parties -- President Vicente Fox's PAN and the PRI, which had governed Mexico for six decades before Fox was elected in 2000 -- voted almost unanimously last Thursday to strip Lopez Obrador of his official immunity, with the clear goal of imprisoning him and knocking him out of the 2006 presidential race. Not coincidentally, all polls show Lopez Obrador -- standard-bearer of the left-leaning PRD -- to be the front-runner in that contest.
And what was the response of our government? Did we invoke the president's mighty line that leaders of government with long habits of control must learn to trust their people? Did we tell the crowds gathered in the Zocalo that America walks at their side?
Not quite. While Condi Rice waxes eloquent about our concern for democratic rights in Central Asia and the Middle East, the most the Bush administration has managed to say about democracy in the unimaginably faraway land of Mexico has been the comment of a State Department spokesman that this is an internal Mexican affair.
Democracy may be all well and good, but Lopez Obrador is just not Bush's kind of guy. As mayor of Mexico City, he's increased public pensions to the elderly and spent heavily on public works and the accompanying job creation. He's criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement as a boon for the corporate sector and a bust for Mexican workers. (As economist Jeff Faux has documented, while productivity in Mexican manufacturing rose 54 percent in the eight years after NAFTA's enactment, real wages actually declined.) He's opposed to Fox's plan to privatize Mexico's state-owned oil and gas industry -- a stance that probably doesn't endear him to the Texas oilmen currently employed as president and vice president of the United States.
Worse yet, Lopez Obrador's populist politics and smarts have made him the most popular political leader in Mexico today. The much touted "free-market" economics of President Fox have done nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Mexicans. Lopez Obrador's victory in next year's election would mark a decisive repudiation of that neo-liberal model. Coming after the elections of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Hugo Chavez (repeatedly) in Venezuela, it would be one more indication, a huge one, that Latin America has rejected an economics of corporate autonomy, public austerity and no worker rights.
So, democracy in Ukraine? We'll be there. Lebanon? Count on us. Kyrgyzstan? With bells on. Mexico? Where's that? Maybe they should move to Central Asia, change their name to Mexistan and promise to privatize the oil. That's the kind of democracy the Bush guys really like.
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Harold Meyerson, "Greetings from Mexistan", The American Prospect Online, Apr 14, 2005. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
Friday, April 15, 2005
News and Notes: Spring 2005
News and Notes : Spring 2005
As reported in prior issues, we completed a reconsideration of the role of the Anti Racism and Latino Commissions within DSA. In response we have decided to end publication of our newsletter Our Struggle/Nuestra Lucha. In its place we will use our new blog. It is at http://www.antiracismdsa.blogspot.com Many other organizations have switched over to electronic communications.
DSA is preparing for its national convention in Los Angeles in November of 2005. The convention will be important for the organization. If willing, you should get yourself selected as a delegate. Contact the national office of DSA for instructions.
dsa@dsa.org
Bob Wing described our current situation well in his analysis of the 2004 elections. “The 2004 presidential contest was a warning shot across the bow of all progressives. While the president and the Republican pundits vastly overstate their "mandate," progressives need to become clear on the motion of racial politics if we are to get ourselves in shape for the coming battles.”
This charge gives us much work to do. In Sacramento we have decided to work for now with Progressive Democrats of America ( www.pdamerica.org) as a vehicle for working within and outside of the Democratic Party. But PDA, for all of its promise, has begun like most left projects with a largly White leadership. They were excellent at recruiting African American voices to their founding convention.
At the time of this writing it looks as if Antonio Villaraigosa will be elected Mayor of Los Angeles following in the footsteps of Henry Cisneros and A. Peña. And the California legislature now has a Latino caucus of 26. Even as this growth of voting power occurs, there is a distinct shift to the center within Latino politics. Even with of caucus of 26 the legislators can not achieve equal funding or quality schools for students of color. And, they are not really trying to . See the blog http://www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com
In California and most states unfair tax system damages our schools. We rank about 37 in the nation in per pupil expenditures. And, the recent study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project reveals once again that California schools are failing Latinos, Blacks, and low income Whites. We grossly under fund our schools, and we get reading and math results appropriate to our funding levels. This inadequate funding is confirmed each year in the state budgets and the Latino Caucus does not try to change this. They accept inequality as inevitable.
To return to the evaluation of Bob Wing of our ally United for Peace and Justice,
”The good news is that people of color--African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, Asian Americans and Arab Americans--surged to the polls in unprecedented numbers and voted overwhelmingly in opposition to the Bush agenda despite an unprecedented Republican attempt to intimidate them. People of color constituted about 35 percent of new voters and, despite their dazzling diversity, showed uncommon political unity.
A key lesson of this election is that progressives and Democrats need to stop chasing the Republicans to the right and instead adopt a clear vision that mobilizes our main social constituencies and wins new allies. Only a long term strategy that draws deeply and skillfully from the high moral ground of peace, jobs and equality and refuses to cede the South and Southwest to the right can enable us to staunch the country's longstanding movement to the right. Otherwise what Lani Guinier calls the "tyranny of the (white) majority" will continue to lead us into authoritarianism and empire.
The bitter truth is that the election marks a substantial and dangerous victory for the rightwing forces in this country.”
In a sense both parties have failed the people. Elected officials have a minimal responsibility to protect our democracy. They have not. Instead, both parties redistrict, gerrymander, and conspire to gain a few more seats at the table. And, our democracy is weaker for this.
The working people, people of color, do not have- in most cases- representatives in our government nor a party which fundamentally represents our interests. Both mainstream parties are dominated by corporate interests, as illustrated by their unity on ‘free trade” , on tax cuts, on the war and other corporate agendas.
Our task then is to figure out where to go from here. We invite you to join us in this quest.
As reported in prior issues, we completed a reconsideration of the role of the Anti Racism and Latino Commissions within DSA. In response we have decided to end publication of our newsletter Our Struggle/Nuestra Lucha. In its place we will use our new blog. It is at http://www.antiracismdsa.blogspot.com Many other organizations have switched over to electronic communications.
DSA is preparing for its national convention in Los Angeles in November of 2005. The convention will be important for the organization. If willing, you should get yourself selected as a delegate. Contact the national office of DSA for instructions.
dsa@dsa.org
Bob Wing described our current situation well in his analysis of the 2004 elections. “The 2004 presidential contest was a warning shot across the bow of all progressives. While the president and the Republican pundits vastly overstate their "mandate," progressives need to become clear on the motion of racial politics if we are to get ourselves in shape for the coming battles.”
This charge gives us much work to do. In Sacramento we have decided to work for now with Progressive Democrats of America ( www.pdamerica.org) as a vehicle for working within and outside of the Democratic Party. But PDA, for all of its promise, has begun like most left projects with a largly White leadership. They were excellent at recruiting African American voices to their founding convention.
At the time of this writing it looks as if Antonio Villaraigosa will be elected Mayor of Los Angeles following in the footsteps of Henry Cisneros and A. Peña. And the California legislature now has a Latino caucus of 26. Even as this growth of voting power occurs, there is a distinct shift to the center within Latino politics. Even with of caucus of 26 the legislators can not achieve equal funding or quality schools for students of color. And, they are not really trying to . See the blog http://www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com
In California and most states unfair tax system damages our schools. We rank about 37 in the nation in per pupil expenditures. And, the recent study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project reveals once again that California schools are failing Latinos, Blacks, and low income Whites. We grossly under fund our schools, and we get reading and math results appropriate to our funding levels. This inadequate funding is confirmed each year in the state budgets and the Latino Caucus does not try to change this. They accept inequality as inevitable.
To return to the evaluation of Bob Wing of our ally United for Peace and Justice,
”The good news is that people of color--African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, Asian Americans and Arab Americans--surged to the polls in unprecedented numbers and voted overwhelmingly in opposition to the Bush agenda despite an unprecedented Republican attempt to intimidate them. People of color constituted about 35 percent of new voters and, despite their dazzling diversity, showed uncommon political unity.
A key lesson of this election is that progressives and Democrats need to stop chasing the Republicans to the right and instead adopt a clear vision that mobilizes our main social constituencies and wins new allies. Only a long term strategy that draws deeply and skillfully from the high moral ground of peace, jobs and equality and refuses to cede the South and Southwest to the right can enable us to staunch the country's longstanding movement to the right. Otherwise what Lani Guinier calls the "tyranny of the (white) majority" will continue to lead us into authoritarianism and empire.
The bitter truth is that the election marks a substantial and dangerous victory for the rightwing forces in this country.”
In a sense both parties have failed the people. Elected officials have a minimal responsibility to protect our democracy. They have not. Instead, both parties redistrict, gerrymander, and conspire to gain a few more seats at the table. And, our democracy is weaker for this.
The working people, people of color, do not have- in most cases- representatives in our government nor a party which fundamentally represents our interests. Both mainstream parties are dominated by corporate interests, as illustrated by their unity on ‘free trade” , on tax cuts, on the war and other corporate agendas.
Our task then is to figure out where to go from here. We invite you to join us in this quest.
Race and the Election of 2004
The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004
By Bob Wing
(Bob Wing is national co-chair of United for Peace and Justice and was the founding editor of War Times/Tiemp de Guerras newspaper and ColorLines magazine.)
The 2004 presidential contest was a warning shot across the bow of all progressives. While the president and the Republican pundits vastly overstate their "mandate," progressives need to become clear on the motion of racial politics if we are to get ourselves in shape for the coming battles.
Many spin doctors would have us believe that the story of the 2004 election turns on evangelicals and moral values, the better to advance their rightwing agenda in both the Democratic and Republican parties, not to speak of the halls of power.
But an examination of the exit polls shows something very different (though not at all new): the centrality of race in U.S. politics. The bad news is that the Republicans, trumpeting their program of aggressive war and racism, swung the election by increasing their share of the white vote to 58 percent. This represents a four-point gain over 2000; a 12-point gain over 1996 and a grim18-point gain over 1992.
The good news is that people of color--African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, Asian Americans and Arab Americans--surged to the polls in unprecedented numbers and voted overwhelmingly in opposition to the Bush agenda despite an unprecedented Republican attempt to intimidate them. People of color constituted about 35 percent of new voters and, despite their dazzling diversity, showed uncommon political unity.
A key lesson of this election is that progressives and Democrats need to stop chasing the Republicans to the right and instead adopt a clear vision that mobilizes our main social constituencies and wins new allies. Only a long term strategy that draws deeply and skillfully from the high moral ground of peace, jobs and equality and refuses to cede the South and Southwest to the right can enable us to staunch the country's longstanding movement to the right. Otherwise what Lani Guinier calls the "tyranny of the (white) majority" will continue to lead us into authoritarianism and empire.
The bitter truth is that the election marks a substantial and dangerous victory for the rightwing forces in this country. Despite a presidency marked by numerous impeachable offenses; despite daily exposure by the press over many months of the administration's lying and incompetence; despite both a disastrous war and an unprecedented loss of jobs; despite an impressive effort by the Democrats, unions and allied groups to mobilize and protect the vote; despite a massive voter turnout led by African American voters; despite the fact that people of color constituted 23 percent of all voters as opposed to 19 percent in the last election, the president turned a 500,000 vote loss in 2000 into a 3.5 million vote victory and the Republicans increased their majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Progressives have much to be proud of in our tremendous effort and substantial impact in the 2004 presidential election. But we must also face the fact our loss was not the result simply of the Republicans having more money or of a low voter turnout. The Republicans flat out organized us and methodically found white voters receptive to their racist program of "permanent war on terrorism at home and abroad."
THE MYTH OF THE EVANGELICALS AND THE RIGHTWARD MOTION OF WHITES
There has been much talk by the punditry about how the evangelicals were the key to the Republican victory. They counsel the Democrats to move to the right to remain politically competitive. There was indeed a tremendous mobilization of Christian religious conservatives (and National Rifle Association members) to work the campaign for the Republicans. They were the critical ground troops for the Republicans but they were not the critical voters.
Alan Abramowitz points out, "Between 2000 and 2004, President Bush's largest gains occurred among less religious voters, not among more religious voters." Among those who attend church weekly or more, his gain was only one point. But among those attending services a few times a month he gained 4 points. From those attending a few times a year, he increased his share by 3 points and from those who never attend services he racked up a 4-point gain.
The emphasis on the evangelical vote is a smokescreen motivated by the attempt by Republicans (and conservative Democrats) to move the country rightwards. Meanwhile, most pundits, left and right, refuse to squarely face the white elephant in the room: race.
The Republican victory turned almost exclusively on increasing its share of the white vote. In 2000 Bush won the white vote by 12 points, 54-42; in 2004 he increased this to a 17-point margin, 58-41. That increase translates into about a 4 million vote gain for Bush, the same number by which Bush turned his 500,000 vote loss in 2000 into a 3.5 million vote victory this time around.
This increase came mainly from white women. Bush carried white men by 24 points in 2000 (60-36) and increased that margin by only one point in 2004 (62-37). But he increased his margin of victory among white women from only 1 point in 2000 (49-48) to 11 points in 2004 (55-44). This accounts for a 4 million plus vote swing for Bush. (Women of color favored Kerry by 75-24.)
Another overlooked exit poll result is that Kerry actually increased the Democrats' share of the vote among rural and small town voters and held steady among suburbanites. However, his share of the vote in cities fell considerably. In cities of 500,000 or more Kerry won 60 percent of the vote, compared to 71 percent for Gore. Bush increased his big city vote by 13 points, from 26 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2004. We are apparently looking at a significant rightward motion among white women in big cities, a real blow to progressive strategy.
CONTROVERSY OVER THE LATINO VOTE
The other issue that has disguised the centrality of race in this campaign has been the National Exit Poll (NEP) survey of the Latino vote. The poll concluded that Latinos voted for Kerry by 53-44, a steep decline from Gore's 62-35 victory among Latinos in 2000. But the NEP's results are self-contradictory. Larger Latino exit polls show a tremendous Latino turnout that went for Kerry by as much as 68 percent.
Since the NEP polls only 13,000 voters, the size of the sample for Latinos was very small and therefore probably not very accurate. Latinos make up eight percent of the electorate, and their geographic location (more urban) and income/education (lower) are quite different from the majority white population that shapes the polling sample.
In addition, the NEP does not include the numerous Latino nationalities in appropriate proportions. This is important because these nationalities differ politically. For example Cubans tend to vote much more Republican than all other Latino groups, while Puerto Ricans tend to vote more Democratic.
More importantly the NEP's conclusion about the national Latino vote is not compatible with its own state-by-state polling results. For example, the NEP says that Bush won a mind-bending 64 percent of Latino votes in the South, the region with the most Latino voters (35 percent of the national total). But it simultaneously reported that Bush won 56 percent of Latino votes in Florida, the state where Cuban Republicans make up most of the Latino vote and 59 percent of the Latino vote in Texas. Something is clearly wrong when it is reported that the two states where Latinos are most likely to vote Republican voted less Republican than the South as a whole.
Indeed it is statistically impossible for both the NEP's results for individual states in the South and its conclusion that 64 percent of all Latinos in the South voted for Bush to be correct.
The William C. Velásquez Institute, as it has for many elections, performed a much larger exit poll of Latinos. The Institute polled 1,179 Latino respondents in 46 precincts across 11 states, and took into account the unique demographic characteristics of Latinos. Its survey concluded that Kerry won the Latino vote by 68-31, a strong showing in the face of unprecedented efforts by Republican operatives and Catholic priests to sway Latinos the other way.
It also found that 7.6 million Latinos voted, a record number that represents an increase of an impressive 1.6 million (27 percent) over 2000. This turnout was even more remarkable considering the widespread attempts by Republicans to intimidate Latino voters and the chronic shortages of Spanish language ballots.
Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Velásquez Institute, concludes, "President Bush tried unsuccessfully to increase his support among Latinos. The Democratsmessage appears to have resonated with Latinos.
REPUBLICAN BREAKTHROUGH AMONG BLACKS?--NOT
The Republican spin-meisters, as well as some "centrist" Democrats, are even claiming a Republican breakthrough among African American voters based on appealing to conservative Christian values. However, veteran political consultants Cornell Belcher and Donna Brazile counter: "Those who trumpet inroads by Bush into the African American vote ignore history and show a strong prejudice against basic arithmetic."
The NEP concluded that Kerry won the black vote by an overwhelming 88-11 percent. Although this is two points fewer than Gore won in 2000, those two points are well within the margin of error of the poll. Even if correct, the results indicate that Bush received a lower percentage of the black vote than Nixon, Ford, Dole or Ronald Reagan in 1980.
This outcome is even more notable when one considers that, according to a Nov. 17 public memo by Belcher and Brazile, fully 60 percent of African Americans in the key battleground states, where the Republicans messaged heavily against abortion and gay marriage, consider themselves "born again Christians."
Their polling also indicates that, "The more likely African Americans are to be frequent church goers, the more likely they are to identify themselves as a strong Democrat." Clearly when pundits argue that the Republicans won by appealing to "moral values" or "evangelicals," they should really qualify their statements racially.
Perhaps most importantly, Belcher and Brazile point out that more than three million new black voters thronged to the polls in 2004, accounting for more than 20 percent of the total voter increase. They also erased the traditional 6-10 point voter participation gap between whites and blacks and increased their percentage of all voters from 10 percent in 2000 to almost 12 percent this year.
Black voters defeated the unprecedented Republican voter intimidation and suppression effort in the run-up to the election. Belcher and Brazile conclude that, "The real story is the reawakening of civic participation by African Americans in 2004."
ASIAN AMERICANS TREND DEMOCRATIC
Asian Americans also surged to the polls in historic numbers and, in all their great internal diversity, voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
The political trajectory of Asian voters has been striking. Like most immigrant groups, most Asians have historically registered and voted Democratic. However, as their incomes rose and the percentage of Asian voters who had fled Asian socialist countries climbed as a result of the 1965 immigration reform act, many became "Reagan Democrats" in the 1980s. By the 1990s a higher percentage of Asians were registered as independents than any other racial/ethnic group.
Asians were not included in national exit polls until 1992. In that election, won by Clinton, their Republican and independent bent showed through, with Bush Sr. receiving 55 percent of the Asian vote, Perot 15 percent and Clinton only 31 percent. However, since 1992 Asians have turned strongly toward the Democrats. Clinton won 43 percent in 1996, Gore won 54 percent and Kerry at least 58 percent. This trend is probably connected to the hard right turn of the GOP in the 1990s, especially its fierce attacks on immigrants.
The NEP sample of Asian American voters was tiny, as Asians represent only 2-3 percent of all voters. By contrast, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund conducted a multilingual, non-partisan poll of 11,000 Asian voters in eight states. Mindful of the diversity among Asians, it surveyed them in 23 Asian languages and dialects as they left 82 polling places in 20 cities in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Michigan and Illinois.
AALDEF executive director Margaret Fung said: "The record turnout of Asian American voters demonstrated our community's extraordinary interest in the electoral process this year." A tremendous 38 percent of Asian voters reported that they were first time voters despite what AALDEF called "an array of barriers that prevented them from exercising their right to vote."
The poll found that Asian Americans favored John Kerry over George Bush by 74-24 percent. First timers voted for Kerry by 78-20. A Los Angeles Times poll of 3,357 California voters found that 64 percent of Asian Americans voted for Kerry and 34 percent for Bush.
NATIVE PEOPLES VOTE IN FORCE
The National Congress of American Indians spearheaded Native Vote 2004, a nationwide voter registration and turnout effort. In a press release dated Nov. 3, NCAI President Tex Hall reported, "Native voters turned out to the election polls in greater numbers for this election day than any other in history." The release documented voter turnout successes across Indian country, including a doubling of Native voters in Minnesota. This show of political force was especially impressive considering widespread reports of Native voter intimidation by Republicans.
Although no exit polls on Native peoples are available, the county-by-county map of the 2004 vote indicates that the Native vote was largely Democratic. In addition, the NEP results by race shows the "Other" vote (which includes but is not limited to Native voters) as going for Kerry by 57-43. A Democratic Native vote would be in line with historical trends and pre-election polling.
The NCAI states that "The 2004 election will be the first time Native votes will be quantified in a way to benchmark the population for future elections" and that "rising political clout [by Native voters] will only grow going forward."
ARAB TURNAROUND
The only available analysis of Arab American voters indicates a major political about face by this group. According to a Zogby International poll, George Bush carried the Arab vote by 46-38 in 2000, with a strong 13 percent choosing Ralph Nader. The final Zogby poll for 2004 found Kerry winning by a landslide 63-28-3.
Arab voters contributed to Kerry's slim victories in Michigan, where they represent 5 percent of voters, and Pennsylvania, where they constitute 1.5 percent of the electorate. The Zogby poll indicates that Bush carried Arab Orthodox voters by one point, Arab Catholics favored Kerry 55-34-5 and Arab Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Kerry, 83-6-4. Both immigrant and U.S. born Arab voters went strongly for Kerry.
There are no figures available on Arab American voter turnout but, according to the Arab American Institute, there was an unprecedented Arab Get Out the Vote effort spearheaded by Yalla Vote. The Institute reports that Arabs organized GOTV efforts in 11 states that directly contacted at least 300,000 Arab American voters.
The Bush administration has rudely informed Arab Americans that they, like other immigrant groups from the Global South before them, are not just part of the "melting pot." They are also a group that is singled out by the government, the media and much of the public for racist stereotyping and harsh treatment.
As they have been increasingly treated like a racially oppressed group, Arab Americans have responded by voting like other people of color.
Taken together, people of color represented 23 percent of the total vote, but they accounted for about 35 percent of Kerry's tally. Their sense of political urgency was demonstrated by the fact that they represented about 35 percent of first time voters in this election. They are, unquestionably, the main base of the Democratic Party and the most avid anti-Bush constituencies.
White people and people of color are tremendously diverse groups and neither vote uniformly, but they are clearly trending in opposite political directions. How can we staunch the one and encourage the other?
LOOKING BACKWARD, LOOKING FORWARD
The political map of Election 2004 has a depressing but telling resemblance to the pre-Civil War map of free versus slave states and territories. And, although blacks and other people of color now have the right to vote, the outcome of the electoral college vote in the South shows that the 55 percent of black voters who still reside there have as little impact on the presidential race today as they did when they had no right to vote at all.
The same disenfranchisement afflicts Latinos in the Southwest and Native voters in the heartland. Quiet as its kept, the racist remnants of slavery and the Monroe Doctrine are alive and well in the political life, institutions and consciousness of Americans of all colors and classes up to today.
Racism--at home and abroad--is a central element of the Republican "moral values" and strategy. And racism is conciliated if not actively promoted by the Democratic focus on winning more white voters by moving to the right while taking voters of color virtually for granted.
The Democratic refusal to mount a fight for electoral reform and for the Southern vote leaves all its residents to the tender mercies of racist white fundamentalists, oil magnates, sugar barons and militarists. And it disarms progressives' ability to invoke the political and moral weight of the fight for racial and economic justice that still has deep Southern roots. And so it also is with urban racism and the burgeoning issue of immigrant rights concentrated (though by no means exclusively) in the Southwest.
It is about time for progressives, including those in the Democratic Party, to show the same basic common sense that the right has demonstrated. We should prioritize the issues and organization of our most powerful social bases as the foundation upon which to extend our influence to the population at large. It is time to stop chasing the Republicans--and the money--to the right. It is time to develop and fight for a coherent progressive political vision and set of policies that appeal to the positive sentiments of all people, and to fight for this vision over the long haul.
The fight for social and economic progress now, as in the past, cannot be won without challenging the racist, militarist right in its historic Southern heartland and its deep Southwestern echoes. We must have the confidence that skillfully doing so will win increased support from whites as well as people of color.
This is not just rhetoric. The future of our country and the well-being of the world depend on us. We cannot stop the right's incessant drive to dominate the world's resources and to steamroll all opposition to that program unless we pose a clear alternative. A powerful vision of peace, jobs and justice is our only chance to mobilize the democratic sentiments and courage of all the people of our country.
This is a delayed posting of this essay. Our web site was not functioning well at the time of the original posting.
By Bob Wing
(Bob Wing is national co-chair of United for Peace and Justice and was the founding editor of War Times/Tiemp de Guerras newspaper and ColorLines magazine.)
The 2004 presidential contest was a warning shot across the bow of all progressives. While the president and the Republican pundits vastly overstate their "mandate," progressives need to become clear on the motion of racial politics if we are to get ourselves in shape for the coming battles.
Many spin doctors would have us believe that the story of the 2004 election turns on evangelicals and moral values, the better to advance their rightwing agenda in both the Democratic and Republican parties, not to speak of the halls of power.
But an examination of the exit polls shows something very different (though not at all new): the centrality of race in U.S. politics. The bad news is that the Republicans, trumpeting their program of aggressive war and racism, swung the election by increasing their share of the white vote to 58 percent. This represents a four-point gain over 2000; a 12-point gain over 1996 and a grim18-point gain over 1992.
The good news is that people of color--African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, Asian Americans and Arab Americans--surged to the polls in unprecedented numbers and voted overwhelmingly in opposition to the Bush agenda despite an unprecedented Republican attempt to intimidate them. People of color constituted about 35 percent of new voters and, despite their dazzling diversity, showed uncommon political unity.
A key lesson of this election is that progressives and Democrats need to stop chasing the Republicans to the right and instead adopt a clear vision that mobilizes our main social constituencies and wins new allies. Only a long term strategy that draws deeply and skillfully from the high moral ground of peace, jobs and equality and refuses to cede the South and Southwest to the right can enable us to staunch the country's longstanding movement to the right. Otherwise what Lani Guinier calls the "tyranny of the (white) majority" will continue to lead us into authoritarianism and empire.
The bitter truth is that the election marks a substantial and dangerous victory for the rightwing forces in this country. Despite a presidency marked by numerous impeachable offenses; despite daily exposure by the press over many months of the administration's lying and incompetence; despite both a disastrous war and an unprecedented loss of jobs; despite an impressive effort by the Democrats, unions and allied groups to mobilize and protect the vote; despite a massive voter turnout led by African American voters; despite the fact that people of color constituted 23 percent of all voters as opposed to 19 percent in the last election, the president turned a 500,000 vote loss in 2000 into a 3.5 million vote victory and the Republicans increased their majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Progressives have much to be proud of in our tremendous effort and substantial impact in the 2004 presidential election. But we must also face the fact our loss was not the result simply of the Republicans having more money or of a low voter turnout. The Republicans flat out organized us and methodically found white voters receptive to their racist program of "permanent war on terrorism at home and abroad."
THE MYTH OF THE EVANGELICALS AND THE RIGHTWARD MOTION OF WHITES
There has been much talk by the punditry about how the evangelicals were the key to the Republican victory. They counsel the Democrats to move to the right to remain politically competitive. There was indeed a tremendous mobilization of Christian religious conservatives (and National Rifle Association members) to work the campaign for the Republicans. They were the critical ground troops for the Republicans but they were not the critical voters.
Alan Abramowitz points out, "Between 2000 and 2004, President Bush's largest gains occurred among less religious voters, not among more religious voters." Among those who attend church weekly or more, his gain was only one point. But among those attending services a few times a month he gained 4 points. From those attending a few times a year, he increased his share by 3 points and from those who never attend services he racked up a 4-point gain.
The emphasis on the evangelical vote is a smokescreen motivated by the attempt by Republicans (and conservative Democrats) to move the country rightwards. Meanwhile, most pundits, left and right, refuse to squarely face the white elephant in the room: race.
The Republican victory turned almost exclusively on increasing its share of the white vote. In 2000 Bush won the white vote by 12 points, 54-42; in 2004 he increased this to a 17-point margin, 58-41. That increase translates into about a 4 million vote gain for Bush, the same number by which Bush turned his 500,000 vote loss in 2000 into a 3.5 million vote victory this time around.
This increase came mainly from white women. Bush carried white men by 24 points in 2000 (60-36) and increased that margin by only one point in 2004 (62-37). But he increased his margin of victory among white women from only 1 point in 2000 (49-48) to 11 points in 2004 (55-44). This accounts for a 4 million plus vote swing for Bush. (Women of color favored Kerry by 75-24.)
Another overlooked exit poll result is that Kerry actually increased the Democrats' share of the vote among rural and small town voters and held steady among suburbanites. However, his share of the vote in cities fell considerably. In cities of 500,000 or more Kerry won 60 percent of the vote, compared to 71 percent for Gore. Bush increased his big city vote by 13 points, from 26 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2004. We are apparently looking at a significant rightward motion among white women in big cities, a real blow to progressive strategy.
CONTROVERSY OVER THE LATINO VOTE
The other issue that has disguised the centrality of race in this campaign has been the National Exit Poll (NEP) survey of the Latino vote. The poll concluded that Latinos voted for Kerry by 53-44, a steep decline from Gore's 62-35 victory among Latinos in 2000. But the NEP's results are self-contradictory. Larger Latino exit polls show a tremendous Latino turnout that went for Kerry by as much as 68 percent.
Since the NEP polls only 13,000 voters, the size of the sample for Latinos was very small and therefore probably not very accurate. Latinos make up eight percent of the electorate, and their geographic location (more urban) and income/education (lower) are quite different from the majority white population that shapes the polling sample.
In addition, the NEP does not include the numerous Latino nationalities in appropriate proportions. This is important because these nationalities differ politically. For example Cubans tend to vote much more Republican than all other Latino groups, while Puerto Ricans tend to vote more Democratic.
More importantly the NEP's conclusion about the national Latino vote is not compatible with its own state-by-state polling results. For example, the NEP says that Bush won a mind-bending 64 percent of Latino votes in the South, the region with the most Latino voters (35 percent of the national total). But it simultaneously reported that Bush won 56 percent of Latino votes in Florida, the state where Cuban Republicans make up most of the Latino vote and 59 percent of the Latino vote in Texas. Something is clearly wrong when it is reported that the two states where Latinos are most likely to vote Republican voted less Republican than the South as a whole.
Indeed it is statistically impossible for both the NEP's results for individual states in the South and its conclusion that 64 percent of all Latinos in the South voted for Bush to be correct.
The William C. Velásquez Institute, as it has for many elections, performed a much larger exit poll of Latinos. The Institute polled 1,179 Latino respondents in 46 precincts across 11 states, and took into account the unique demographic characteristics of Latinos. Its survey concluded that Kerry won the Latino vote by 68-31, a strong showing in the face of unprecedented efforts by Republican operatives and Catholic priests to sway Latinos the other way.
It also found that 7.6 million Latinos voted, a record number that represents an increase of an impressive 1.6 million (27 percent) over 2000. This turnout was even more remarkable considering the widespread attempts by Republicans to intimidate Latino voters and the chronic shortages of Spanish language ballots.
Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Velásquez Institute, concludes, "President Bush tried unsuccessfully to increase his support among Latinos. The Democratsmessage appears to have resonated with Latinos.
REPUBLICAN BREAKTHROUGH AMONG BLACKS?--NOT
The Republican spin-meisters, as well as some "centrist" Democrats, are even claiming a Republican breakthrough among African American voters based on appealing to conservative Christian values. However, veteran political consultants Cornell Belcher and Donna Brazile counter: "Those who trumpet inroads by Bush into the African American vote ignore history and show a strong prejudice against basic arithmetic."
The NEP concluded that Kerry won the black vote by an overwhelming 88-11 percent. Although this is two points fewer than Gore won in 2000, those two points are well within the margin of error of the poll. Even if correct, the results indicate that Bush received a lower percentage of the black vote than Nixon, Ford, Dole or Ronald Reagan in 1980.
This outcome is even more notable when one considers that, according to a Nov. 17 public memo by Belcher and Brazile, fully 60 percent of African Americans in the key battleground states, where the Republicans messaged heavily against abortion and gay marriage, consider themselves "born again Christians."
Their polling also indicates that, "The more likely African Americans are to be frequent church goers, the more likely they are to identify themselves as a strong Democrat." Clearly when pundits argue that the Republicans won by appealing to "moral values" or "evangelicals," they should really qualify their statements racially.
Perhaps most importantly, Belcher and Brazile point out that more than three million new black voters thronged to the polls in 2004, accounting for more than 20 percent of the total voter increase. They also erased the traditional 6-10 point voter participation gap between whites and blacks and increased their percentage of all voters from 10 percent in 2000 to almost 12 percent this year.
Black voters defeated the unprecedented Republican voter intimidation and suppression effort in the run-up to the election. Belcher and Brazile conclude that, "The real story is the reawakening of civic participation by African Americans in 2004."
ASIAN AMERICANS TREND DEMOCRATIC
Asian Americans also surged to the polls in historic numbers and, in all their great internal diversity, voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
The political trajectory of Asian voters has been striking. Like most immigrant groups, most Asians have historically registered and voted Democratic. However, as their incomes rose and the percentage of Asian voters who had fled Asian socialist countries climbed as a result of the 1965 immigration reform act, many became "Reagan Democrats" in the 1980s. By the 1990s a higher percentage of Asians were registered as independents than any other racial/ethnic group.
Asians were not included in national exit polls until 1992. In that election, won by Clinton, their Republican and independent bent showed through, with Bush Sr. receiving 55 percent of the Asian vote, Perot 15 percent and Clinton only 31 percent. However, since 1992 Asians have turned strongly toward the Democrats. Clinton won 43 percent in 1996, Gore won 54 percent and Kerry at least 58 percent. This trend is probably connected to the hard right turn of the GOP in the 1990s, especially its fierce attacks on immigrants.
The NEP sample of Asian American voters was tiny, as Asians represent only 2-3 percent of all voters. By contrast, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund conducted a multilingual, non-partisan poll of 11,000 Asian voters in eight states. Mindful of the diversity among Asians, it surveyed them in 23 Asian languages and dialects as they left 82 polling places in 20 cities in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Michigan and Illinois.
AALDEF executive director Margaret Fung said: "The record turnout of Asian American voters demonstrated our community's extraordinary interest in the electoral process this year." A tremendous 38 percent of Asian voters reported that they were first time voters despite what AALDEF called "an array of barriers that prevented them from exercising their right to vote."
The poll found that Asian Americans favored John Kerry over George Bush by 74-24 percent. First timers voted for Kerry by 78-20. A Los Angeles Times poll of 3,357 California voters found that 64 percent of Asian Americans voted for Kerry and 34 percent for Bush.
NATIVE PEOPLES VOTE IN FORCE
The National Congress of American Indians spearheaded Native Vote 2004, a nationwide voter registration and turnout effort. In a press release dated Nov. 3, NCAI President Tex Hall reported, "Native voters turned out to the election polls in greater numbers for this election day than any other in history." The release documented voter turnout successes across Indian country, including a doubling of Native voters in Minnesota. This show of political force was especially impressive considering widespread reports of Native voter intimidation by Republicans.
Although no exit polls on Native peoples are available, the county-by-county map of the 2004 vote indicates that the Native vote was largely Democratic. In addition, the NEP results by race shows the "Other" vote (which includes but is not limited to Native voters) as going for Kerry by 57-43. A Democratic Native vote would be in line with historical trends and pre-election polling.
The NCAI states that "The 2004 election will be the first time Native votes will be quantified in a way to benchmark the population for future elections" and that "rising political clout [by Native voters] will only grow going forward."
ARAB TURNAROUND
The only available analysis of Arab American voters indicates a major political about face by this group. According to a Zogby International poll, George Bush carried the Arab vote by 46-38 in 2000, with a strong 13 percent choosing Ralph Nader. The final Zogby poll for 2004 found Kerry winning by a landslide 63-28-3.
Arab voters contributed to Kerry's slim victories in Michigan, where they represent 5 percent of voters, and Pennsylvania, where they constitute 1.5 percent of the electorate. The Zogby poll indicates that Bush carried Arab Orthodox voters by one point, Arab Catholics favored Kerry 55-34-5 and Arab Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Kerry, 83-6-4. Both immigrant and U.S. born Arab voters went strongly for Kerry.
There are no figures available on Arab American voter turnout but, according to the Arab American Institute, there was an unprecedented Arab Get Out the Vote effort spearheaded by Yalla Vote. The Institute reports that Arabs organized GOTV efforts in 11 states that directly contacted at least 300,000 Arab American voters.
The Bush administration has rudely informed Arab Americans that they, like other immigrant groups from the Global South before them, are not just part of the "melting pot." They are also a group that is singled out by the government, the media and much of the public for racist stereotyping and harsh treatment.
As they have been increasingly treated like a racially oppressed group, Arab Americans have responded by voting like other people of color.
Taken together, people of color represented 23 percent of the total vote, but they accounted for about 35 percent of Kerry's tally. Their sense of political urgency was demonstrated by the fact that they represented about 35 percent of first time voters in this election. They are, unquestionably, the main base of the Democratic Party and the most avid anti-Bush constituencies.
White people and people of color are tremendously diverse groups and neither vote uniformly, but they are clearly trending in opposite political directions. How can we staunch the one and encourage the other?
LOOKING BACKWARD, LOOKING FORWARD
The political map of Election 2004 has a depressing but telling resemblance to the pre-Civil War map of free versus slave states and territories. And, although blacks and other people of color now have the right to vote, the outcome of the electoral college vote in the South shows that the 55 percent of black voters who still reside there have as little impact on the presidential race today as they did when they had no right to vote at all.
The same disenfranchisement afflicts Latinos in the Southwest and Native voters in the heartland. Quiet as its kept, the racist remnants of slavery and the Monroe Doctrine are alive and well in the political life, institutions and consciousness of Americans of all colors and classes up to today.
Racism--at home and abroad--is a central element of the Republican "moral values" and strategy. And racism is conciliated if not actively promoted by the Democratic focus on winning more white voters by moving to the right while taking voters of color virtually for granted.
The Democratic refusal to mount a fight for electoral reform and for the Southern vote leaves all its residents to the tender mercies of racist white fundamentalists, oil magnates, sugar barons and militarists. And it disarms progressives' ability to invoke the political and moral weight of the fight for racial and economic justice that still has deep Southern roots. And so it also is with urban racism and the burgeoning issue of immigrant rights concentrated (though by no means exclusively) in the Southwest.
It is about time for progressives, including those in the Democratic Party, to show the same basic common sense that the right has demonstrated. We should prioritize the issues and organization of our most powerful social bases as the foundation upon which to extend our influence to the population at large. It is time to stop chasing the Republicans--and the money--to the right. It is time to develop and fight for a coherent progressive political vision and set of policies that appeal to the positive sentiments of all people, and to fight for this vision over the long haul.
The fight for social and economic progress now, as in the past, cannot be won without challenging the racist, militarist right in its historic Southern heartland and its deep Southwestern echoes. We must have the confidence that skillfully doing so will win increased support from whites as well as people of color.
This is not just rhetoric. The future of our country and the well-being of the world depend on us. We cannot stop the right's incessant drive to dominate the world's resources and to steamroll all opposition to that program unless we pose a clear alternative. A powerful vision of peace, jobs and justice is our only chance to mobilize the democratic sentiments and courage of all the people of our country.
This is a delayed posting of this essay. Our web site was not functioning well at the time of the original posting.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
CAFTA and Central American workers
CENTRAL AMERICA UP IN ARMS OVER CAFTA
By David Bacon
truthout
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/041305LA.shtml
PUERTO CORTEZ, HONDURAS (4/12/05) -- When the Honduran Congress took up ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement last year, over a thousand demonstrators filled the streets of Tegucigalpa, angrily denouncing the effort. Congress ratified CAFTA anyway, but the crowd was so angry that terrified deputies quickly fled.
"We chased them out, and then we went into the chambers ourselves," says Erasmo Flores, president of the Sindicato Nacional de Motoristas de Epuipo Pesado de Honduras (SINAMEQUIPH), the union for Honduras' port truckers. "Then we constituted ourselves as the congress of the true representatives of the Honduran people, and voted to scrap Congress' ratification."
Similar demonstrations have multiplied across Central America, and just weeks ago police shot into a crowd of protestors in Guatemala, killing one. Meanwhile, however, growing controversy has not helped the treaty's main supporter, US President George Bush, to find the votes he needs to pass it in Washington.
While admittedly an act of political theater by the leftwing Bloque Popular, the Honduran protest showed dramatically how unpopular the agreement is in Central America, at least among workers and farmers. This is quite a change from Mexico, where the promises of then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari deceived large sections of Mexican society, especially its labor unions, into supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1991 and 92. While US workers might suffer job loss, Salinas cajoled, Mexican workers would get those jobs. The country would be come a "first world" economy, he promised, with first world living standards.
The truth was bitter. Currency devaluation cost the jobs of a million Mexicans in the first year after NAFTA went into effect alone. While US President Bill Clinton bailed out investors threatened by the crash, it came at the cost of Mexico's oil, which then had to guarantee the loans, instead promoting economic development. Tying hundreds of thousands of low-wage maquiladora jobs to the US economy also made them vulnerable to it. When consumers north of the border stopped buying goods during the 2000-2001 recession, 400,000 border workers were laid off. And export-industry wages, far from rising, remained flat, while prices of milk, tortillas, gasoline, bus fare and most working-class necessities skyrocketed.
But the most devastating effect on workers came from privatization, enforced by NAFTA's mandate to make Mexico more investor-friendly. As ports, railroads, airlines, mines, telephones and many other large national enterprises were sold off, sometimes for just a fraction of their worth, new private owners cut labor costs by slashing jobs and gutting union contracts. In NAFTA's first decade, Mexico's privatization created more billionaires than any other country in the world.
CAFTA is built on the same political premise. It seeks to reinforce the transformation of Central American economies, maintaining a low standard of living as a means to attract investment in factories producing, not for an internal market, but for export to the US. Understandably, this vision is hardly popular among workers and unions. But hundreds of thousands of Central American jobs are already tied to export production, and the Bush administration can and does use them as bargaining leverage, threatening economic disaster by raising the specter of import barriers against countries that won't adopt CAFTA.
CAFTA promises to extend the harmful impacts of NAFTA to Mexico's weaker southern neighbors. Most Central American nations currently belong to the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which requires participating countries to uphold internationally recognized labor norms. Using the example of NAFTA's notoriously ineffective labor side agreement, CAFTA only requires that governments enforce their own laws, which are often far weaker.
Central American public sector workers have been especially keen observers of the Mexican experience. Honduras' longshore workers' union has twice beaten back government efforts to privatize the docks of Puerto Cortez, successfully mobilizing the whole town in the process. "We put our union's assets, like our soccer field and clinic, at the service of the town," explains Roberto Contreras, a union officer and Honduran representative for the International Transport Federation. "When the government tried to privatize our jobs, we told people that if we didn't cooperate to defeat it, the whole town would lose, not just the port workers."
In El Salvador, huge protests accompanied government efforts to privatize the healthcare system. And in Costa Rica, a massive strike by public telephone and electrical workers forced the government to withdraw from CAFTA negotiations in 2003.
On March 9, Guatemala's National Civilian Police sealed off the streets around the Guatemalan Congress after it voted to ratify CAFTA, and then used clubs and teargas against almost 2000 demonstrators. Following the vote, popular organizations began mounting highway blockades throughout the country, effectively halting commerce and travel. At a blockade in Colotenango, at the Puente Naranjales crossroads, police and the army fired on the crowd. Juan Lopez Velásquez was killed, and nine others wounded by bullets.
Ironically, the Bush administration has had more success strong-arming Central American countries than their more powerful South American neighbors, or the US Congress. In 2003 the World Trade Organization talks in Cancun collapsed amid huge protests, and later in Miami, the big South American economies of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela told the administration they had little interest in its carefully-orchestrated march towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Even in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the administration could only muster a one-vote 216-to-215 majority in the US Congress to give it fast track trade negotiating authority. Almost all observers agree that if Bush had the votes to ratify CAFTA, he would have introduced it into Congress long ago. The fact that the agreement has been negotiated, has been ratified in most Central American countries (although amid bullets, clubs and chanting protestors), and has yet to be introduced for ratification in Washington, is the best indication that CAFTA's political support is shrinking, not growing.
While Bush and the agreement's corporate backers still want it, it's getting harder for them to point to anyone else who does.
By David Bacon
truthout
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/041305LA.shtml
PUERTO CORTEZ, HONDURAS (4/12/05) -- When the Honduran Congress took up ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement last year, over a thousand demonstrators filled the streets of Tegucigalpa, angrily denouncing the effort. Congress ratified CAFTA anyway, but the crowd was so angry that terrified deputies quickly fled.
"We chased them out, and then we went into the chambers ourselves," says Erasmo Flores, president of the Sindicato Nacional de Motoristas de Epuipo Pesado de Honduras (SINAMEQUIPH), the union for Honduras' port truckers. "Then we constituted ourselves as the congress of the true representatives of the Honduran people, and voted to scrap Congress' ratification."
Similar demonstrations have multiplied across Central America, and just weeks ago police shot into a crowd of protestors in Guatemala, killing one. Meanwhile, however, growing controversy has not helped the treaty's main supporter, US President George Bush, to find the votes he needs to pass it in Washington.
While admittedly an act of political theater by the leftwing Bloque Popular, the Honduran protest showed dramatically how unpopular the agreement is in Central America, at least among workers and farmers. This is quite a change from Mexico, where the promises of then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari deceived large sections of Mexican society, especially its labor unions, into supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1991 and 92. While US workers might suffer job loss, Salinas cajoled, Mexican workers would get those jobs. The country would be come a "first world" economy, he promised, with first world living standards.
The truth was bitter. Currency devaluation cost the jobs of a million Mexicans in the first year after NAFTA went into effect alone. While US President Bill Clinton bailed out investors threatened by the crash, it came at the cost of Mexico's oil, which then had to guarantee the loans, instead promoting economic development. Tying hundreds of thousands of low-wage maquiladora jobs to the US economy also made them vulnerable to it. When consumers north of the border stopped buying goods during the 2000-2001 recession, 400,000 border workers were laid off. And export-industry wages, far from rising, remained flat, while prices of milk, tortillas, gasoline, bus fare and most working-class necessities skyrocketed.
But the most devastating effect on workers came from privatization, enforced by NAFTA's mandate to make Mexico more investor-friendly. As ports, railroads, airlines, mines, telephones and many other large national enterprises were sold off, sometimes for just a fraction of their worth, new private owners cut labor costs by slashing jobs and gutting union contracts. In NAFTA's first decade, Mexico's privatization created more billionaires than any other country in the world.
CAFTA is built on the same political premise. It seeks to reinforce the transformation of Central American economies, maintaining a low standard of living as a means to attract investment in factories producing, not for an internal market, but for export to the US. Understandably, this vision is hardly popular among workers and unions. But hundreds of thousands of Central American jobs are already tied to export production, and the Bush administration can and does use them as bargaining leverage, threatening economic disaster by raising the specter of import barriers against countries that won't adopt CAFTA.
CAFTA promises to extend the harmful impacts of NAFTA to Mexico's weaker southern neighbors. Most Central American nations currently belong to the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which requires participating countries to uphold internationally recognized labor norms. Using the example of NAFTA's notoriously ineffective labor side agreement, CAFTA only requires that governments enforce their own laws, which are often far weaker.
Central American public sector workers have been especially keen observers of the Mexican experience. Honduras' longshore workers' union has twice beaten back government efforts to privatize the docks of Puerto Cortez, successfully mobilizing the whole town in the process. "We put our union's assets, like our soccer field and clinic, at the service of the town," explains Roberto Contreras, a union officer and Honduran representative for the International Transport Federation. "When the government tried to privatize our jobs, we told people that if we didn't cooperate to defeat it, the whole town would lose, not just the port workers."
In El Salvador, huge protests accompanied government efforts to privatize the healthcare system. And in Costa Rica, a massive strike by public telephone and electrical workers forced the government to withdraw from CAFTA negotiations in 2003.
On March 9, Guatemala's National Civilian Police sealed off the streets around the Guatemalan Congress after it voted to ratify CAFTA, and then used clubs and teargas against almost 2000 demonstrators. Following the vote, popular organizations began mounting highway blockades throughout the country, effectively halting commerce and travel. At a blockade in Colotenango, at the Puente Naranjales crossroads, police and the army fired on the crowd. Juan Lopez Velásquez was killed, and nine others wounded by bullets.
Ironically, the Bush administration has had more success strong-arming Central American countries than their more powerful South American neighbors, or the US Congress. In 2003 the World Trade Organization talks in Cancun collapsed amid huge protests, and later in Miami, the big South American economies of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela told the administration they had little interest in its carefully-orchestrated march towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Even in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the administration could only muster a one-vote 216-to-215 majority in the US Congress to give it fast track trade negotiating authority. Almost all observers agree that if Bush had the votes to ratify CAFTA, he would have introduced it into Congress long ago. The fact that the agreement has been negotiated, has been ratified in most Central American countries (although amid bullets, clubs and chanting protestors), and has yet to be introduced for ratification in Washington, is the best indication that CAFTA's political support is shrinking, not growing.
While Bush and the agreement's corporate backers still want it, it's getting harder for them to point to anyone else who does.
After the empire
After the Empire by Emmanuel Todd
Review by Thom Hartmann
In 1976 -- long before American conservatives would claim that Ronald Reagan's 1980s debt-driven massive military spending "bankrupted" the Soviet Union -- French demographer and author Emmanuel Todd wrote a best-selling book titled La Chute finale (The Final Fall), predicting the imminent fall of the USSR. He based his projection, in large part, on a careful study of the increase in infant mortality in that empire, one of the leading indicators of the health of a nation.
Time proved him right, and hindsight tells us that Reagan and Bush had nothing whatever to do with the fall of the USSR, con claims notwithstanding. It rotted from within, something that I witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s visiting both the USSR and several of its captive states, and living a year in 1986-1987 within 30 miles of Soviet-dominated East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Any 70s or 80s visitor to the USSR or its vassal sates, in fact, could have come to the conclusion that -- barring a world war -- it was an empire about to expire, and the CIA and others in the American, European, Israeli, and Japanese intelligence services had been saying the same thing since, in some cases the 1960s.
Yet it was Emmanuel Todd who captured Europe's attention by explicitly saying that the Soviet Emperor had no clothes - and doing so in a way that was widely discussed across Europe. Thus, when my best friend and former business partner Jerry Schneiderman and I found ourselves in Budapest in early November, 1989, the week before the Berlin Wall fell, as East German refugees were streaming into the country and the Soviets seemed helpless to stop it, we discovered that the reaction of the Hungarian shopkeepers and bartenders we talked with was a resigned shrug: "We knew it was coming. Everybody knew it was coming." Other than, of course, the average American.
Now comes Emmanuel Todd to predict the fall of another empire: America.
In Après l' empire ("After The Empire"), a runaway bestseller across Europe and in Japan, Todd points out that many of the same demographic and historic indicators that led him to boldly predict the looming collapse of the Soviet system can now -- with some variations that are even more alarming -- be applied to the United States.
Every American should read this book. First, we must read it to understand how Europe, Russia, China, and Japan (among others) view us. Second, we must read it because its logic, facts, statistics, and conclusions are unassailable.
The main thesis of Todd's book is that America is posturing, playing the role of the leader of the "free world" and head of the new American Empire, when, in fact, we are militarily, economically, and morally bankrupt -- and the rest of the world knows it. In fact, he suggests, much of the posturing is for the consumption of the domestic American audience, as the rest of the world (with the exception of a few dependent Third World nations) knows we're already in decline and perhaps even ready to implode.
Economically, twenty-five years of conservative Reaganomics -- "free trade" elevated to a virtual religion (including complicity by Clinton in signing GATT/WTO and NAFTA) -- and the massive budget and trade deficits that have resulted from this, have turned the United States from an independent manufacturing powerhouse and the world's leading creditor into a bankrupt nation with little manufacturing capacity left, dependent on other nations for the imports that maintain our unsustainable standard of living. The result is that the US "has become the center of a system in which its number one job is to consume rather than produce."
"If the United States has greatly declined in relative terms as an economic power," writes Todd, "it has nevertheless succeed in massively increasing its ability to siphon off wealth from the world economy. Objectively speaking, America has become a predator; ... [and] is going to have to fight politically and militarily in order to sustain the hegemony that has become indispensable for maintaining its standard of living."
In his concluding chapter, Todd writes, "The United States is unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized to maintain its level of consumption -- at its present cruising speed that subsidy amounts to 1.4 billion dollars per day."
Referring to the "bizarre behavior" of the Bush administration's America, Todd asks the question -- in italics for emphasis -- "How does one deal with a superpower that is economically dependent but also politically useless?"
In "The Fragility of Tribute" chapter, Todd suggests the world won't -- or can't -- long continue to support our "parasitic" lifestyle by loaning us money to sell us goods, while we export our manufacturing industries and hollow out our internal productivity. "The most likely scenario" he sees as a result of this "is a stock market crash larger than any we have experienced thus far that will be followed by a meltdown of the dollar -- a one-two punch that will put an end to any further delusions of 'empire' when it comes to the US economy."
Our moral bankruptcy, Todd suggests, is the result of these same economic and political policies emanating from the radical right (neoliberals) in America, and are rapidly morphing our nation from a democracy into an oligarchy.
Without irony, he notes, "It is a surprising return to the world of Aristotle in which oligarchy may succeed democracy." As "American society is changing into a fundamentally unegalitarian system of domination..." he notes that this turnaround of increasing rule by the rich in America and a wiping out of our middle class "explains the strained relations between the United States and the rest of the world. The progress of democracy around the world is masking the weakening of democracy in its birthplace [America]." The result? "...the United states is beginning to lose its democratic characteristics..."
Because America has become a "parasitical" nation of importers of oil and goods from around the world, paying with debt, Todd says, "From now on the fundamental strategic objective of the United States will be political control of the world's resources."
Thus we have had to invent a "myth of global terrorism" so we can convince ourselves that our projection of power into oil-rich regions of the world is to "save" both America and the world from "terrorists." Because our military power is insufficient to take on any serious foes, we rattle sabers, proclaim "Axis of evils," and attack essentially defenseless nations, while proclaiming our efforts great military victories comparable to the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II.
The world, Todd notes, isn't buying it. And they're getting tired of our constant hectoring about "democracy" even as we cut back on civil liberties and economic opportunity at home, support "strategic" dictators abroad, and are increasingly ruled by oligarchic families.
Which brings us to his third conclusion -- that we have become militarily impotent. Todd notes that, "In the childlike universe of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, only physical force matters." Thus, we stir up problems in the militarily weak (but oil rich) Arab world, destabilizing the entire planet. This is not a situation European and Asian powers take lightly. Europe, Todd notes, "cannot accept indefinitely the continuous disorder in the Arab world sponsored by the United States..."
The result is clear, he says. "But make no mistake, all the ingredients are there for a serious conflict between Europe and the United States in the near future." Such a conflict could be devastating to the US.
Dissecting -- and dismissing -- numerous American "strategic" books like Zbigniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," Todd notes that our leaders in the post-Carter world have always taken the lazy way out, rather than building the strategic alliances and offering the moral leadership that would have been necessary to maintain America as the moral, economic, and political international leader we were before Reagan began the destruction of the traditional American way of life.
In part, this has been the result of the capture of our political system by oligarchs, powerful rich interests including multinational corporations with little allegiance to America (or any nation). "This is why," he notes, "the United States' export of its specific model of unregulated capitalism [necessary to sustain oligarchy] constitutes a danger for European societies, as well as for Japan...."
The result of our export of privatization, deregulation, and unrestrained oligarchic capitalism (called "the liberal model" in Europe) is that "the constant attempts to foist the liberal model onto the strongly rooted and state-centered societies of the Old World is in the process of blowing them apart -- a phenomenon that can be observed nowadays in the regular gains of the far right in a number of recent elections. Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria have all been affected."
Rush Limbaugh/Newt Gingrich politics have led to the rise of a neofascist right in America, and our export of these ideas are inspiring the return of right-wing politics in Europe, threatening to tear apart the social fabric of that continent.
Todd notes that Portugal and Spain are the least affected by these ideas, because of their recent experience with Franco's fascism.
But our increasing moral bankruptcy (detention without trials, phony war on terror), economic bankruptcy (living on debt borrowed from Europe, China, and Japan, along with the dramatic oligarchic trends in America toward richer rich, poorer poor, and the loss of the middle class), and military impotence (leading us to loudly attack relatively defenseless countries to create "show victories" and a "bloody vaudeville show" in Iraq) are causing many in Europe to reevaluate their relationship with -- and support of -- America.
If they decide to throw their lot in with Russia and Iran instead of the US -- and Todd suggests this is a growing probability -- then the result is "easy to predict."
"The United States," he says, "will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population."
And this, he suggests, may be a good thing, long term. "What the world needs is not that America disappear but that it return to its true self -- democratic, liberal, and productive."
One can only hope that America will return to the ideals we held prior to Reagan, and do so with a minimum of damage to our working class. Reading Emmanuel Todd's book "After The Empire" will help crystallize in your mind so many of these issues, and help provide a roadmap for Americans to a return to domestic and international political sanity, hopefully as soon as the 2006 elections...
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
Poor nations must work together : Lula
Lula: Poor nations must unite to change world
By Tansa Musa
Reuters
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L11555267.htm
April 1, 2005
Developing countries must unite to change the balance
of power in the world and face the challenges of
globalisation together, Brazil's president said on
Monday on the first leg of a five-nation African tour.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has sought to
expand ties with Africa, both to boost his profile as a
developing world leader and to build on historical
links between Brazil and Africa.
"There's a need to reinforce South-South cooperation in
the face of the challenges of globalisation that
confront particularly developing countries," a joint
statement from Lula and Cameroon's President Paul Biya
said.
Brazil has also been at the forefront of a campaign at
the World Trade Organisation challenging U.S. subsidies
for cotton farmers and Brazilian companies are
increasingly looking to Africa for business
opportunities.
During his stay in Cameroon, Lula called for increased
trade between developing countries to eradicate poverty
and hunger. He also reiterated that poor nations should
work together to end huge subsidies paid by rich
countries to their farmers.
"We have to change the balance of power in the world,"
he said at a banquet in Cameroon on Sunday night. "We
can no more continue to be passive spectators of
decisions that have a direct effect on our destiny."
Lula started his trip in the central African country of
Cameroon on Sunday and landed in oil producer Nigeria
on Monday evening. He is due to visit Ghana, former
Portuguese colony Guinea-Bissau and Senegal
Lula said he supported Africa's drive for greater
representation on the U.N. Security Council while
Cameroon expressed support for Brazil's bid to get a
permanent seat.
Brazil and Cameroon signed accords on agriculture,
fisheries, culture, sports and higher education but the
details were not immediately available.
Brazil and Cameroon established relations in 1960
shortly after the central African country's
independence. In 1979, the Brazilian embassy closed for
economic reasons. It reopened two years ago and Lula
said this time it was for good.
And we in the U.S., must work in solidarity with this effort.
By Tansa Musa
Reuters
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L11555267.htm
April 1, 2005
Developing countries must unite to change the balance
of power in the world and face the challenges of
globalisation together, Brazil's president said on
Monday on the first leg of a five-nation African tour.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has sought to
expand ties with Africa, both to boost his profile as a
developing world leader and to build on historical
links between Brazil and Africa.
"There's a need to reinforce South-South cooperation in
the face of the challenges of globalisation that
confront particularly developing countries," a joint
statement from Lula and Cameroon's President Paul Biya
said.
Brazil has also been at the forefront of a campaign at
the World Trade Organisation challenging U.S. subsidies
for cotton farmers and Brazilian companies are
increasingly looking to Africa for business
opportunities.
During his stay in Cameroon, Lula called for increased
trade between developing countries to eradicate poverty
and hunger. He also reiterated that poor nations should
work together to end huge subsidies paid by rich
countries to their farmers.
"We have to change the balance of power in the world,"
he said at a banquet in Cameroon on Sunday night. "We
can no more continue to be passive spectators of
decisions that have a direct effect on our destiny."
Lula started his trip in the central African country of
Cameroon on Sunday and landed in oil producer Nigeria
on Monday evening. He is due to visit Ghana, former
Portuguese colony Guinea-Bissau and Senegal
Lula said he supported Africa's drive for greater
representation on the U.N. Security Council while
Cameroon expressed support for Brazil's bid to get a
permanent seat.
Brazil and Cameroon signed accords on agriculture,
fisheries, culture, sports and higher education but the
details were not immediately available.
Brazil and Cameroon established relations in 1960
shortly after the central African country's
independence. In 1979, the Brazilian embassy closed for
economic reasons. It reopened two years ago and Lula
said this time it was for good.
And we in the U.S., must work in solidarity with this effort.
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