The Right Christian

By Theron Dash

While some of you contemplate an early moment in the Christian gospels, I have been thinking about the final moments in one of them. The Apocalypse. And I've come to the conclusion that it's all true. The anti-Christ is here. His name is George W. Bush.

It doesn't matter if he is sincere, if he is a "good person" in his denying heart. He fulfills the prophesies. He sows discord in the Middle East. He brings destruction through deception. He has somehow convinced Americans that the Republicans are against Big Government and for Fiscal Responsibility as he inflates federal power and plunges the nation into debts and it will take generations of suffering to recover from---and that's the best case scenario.

He has apparently convinced ordinary Americans that he is on their side, as he impoverishes them, yokes their very health and livelihoods to the whims of conscienceless corporations. He convinces them he is protecting them even as he abandons them with impunity. And he tells them he's born again.

He ignores global heating, defiles the air, delivers the water to corporate bullies, slices away the lungs of the planet. He has managed to get Congress to pass a law that allows him to invade Denmark if he doesn't get his way with the International Court at the Hague. He is bringing on the apocalypse, grinning all the way.

If you think capturing Saddam has turned things around in Iraq, just wait awhile. He seems to have bullied Europe into talking concessions on loans, but payback is inevitable. You can bully people when you're strong, but few bullies get much help from their victims when they themselves are hurting.

He is getting plenty of help from Democrats who still would rather fight among themselves than win an election. And he still has his minions, who are smart, ruthless and will do anything to win. Expect Saddam's trial to be televised during the Democratic Convention this summer.

It's not hopeless. But it's essential to understand that we're dealing with Biblical proportions.

What's Really Going On Part 2

The first part of the domestic Plan has been obvious for awhile. The Bush Conspiracy found a way to reward its rich supporters and corporate cronies with a huge tax cut (the richest bunch of them will reap $8 million this year just on the cut) and thereby forcing government to "shrink" (that is, turn over its legitimate functions to corporations) because state governments and the federal government won't have enough tax money to meet the needs of the people.

It had to be done this way because voters haven't fully bought into the GOP message of destroying government. They like the rhetoric all right, but when it comes down to the decisions, they'd rather have the services, the protections, the functions of government that seed the economy, encourage a vibrant society, fulfill our common commitment to justice and a civilized society.

But the GOP of today has also found their fatal flaw---people want a robust government but they don't want to pay the taxes that support it. So promise them everything, especially tax cuts. It's a very successful strategy that can't last any longer than the machinations of Enron, and it will have even more tragic results. But that's all right, because the corporate interests that Bush represents will make plenty of money anyway. That's the second part of the Plan that we didn't quite understand.

Because the basic conundrum is obvious to everybody: if the rich keep stealing from the not rich, they will have all the money, and nobody will be making enough to buy the consumer products that currently drive the economy. So pretty soon the consumer economy will collapse and lots of corporations will stop making profits. Can't they see this?

We got the answer from James K. Galbraith in an article in the October issue of The Progressive entitled "Why Bush Likes A Bad Economy." "The oil, mining, defense, media, and pharmaceutical firms who form the core of their constituency rely on monopoly power, patents, and the control of public resources for their profits," he writes. "They do not depend, very much, on strong consumer demand."

So we have seen the future and it is called Urinetown. The premise of the play of that name is that all public and private toilets are controlled by corporations, who demand a fee. That's what will happen as government is forced to shed social security, education, social services, etc. and they are picked up by private interests, who will display all the compassion and cost efficiency of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Of course the Bushies know which focus group buttons to push. They prey on the apparent common sense notion that business can be more efficient than government, because a profit motive is incentive to cut waste and fraud, and to please customers. You know, what would buying a Big Mac be like if government was in charge of hamburgers? Pretty scary, right?

In the real world however we all should have learned by now that pleasing customers is hardly necessary for making profits, and that the method of choice for many huge corporations is fraud on a scale no government bureaucrat could dream of. Lying, manipulating, bilking people out of their life savings, their future and their very lives is standard procedure these days, as long as the quarterly report is favorable. For even making a profit isn't the main goal---the goal is SHOWING a profit, quarter by quarter, stock blip by stock blip.

They make money by manipulating the systems---the financial systems, through favorable laws, secret deals and simply pushing money around. There are billions to be made that way once they get their hands on Social Security.

Then there are the unfortunate differences between businesses and government, one of which is a very painful lesson for a town in California, as reported on Friday's "Now" on PBS: businesses can move somewhere else, but governments can't. In this case it was the biggest corporation and most successful retailer in the world, Wal Mart, that extracted millions of dollars from a local government for the construction of its store in their municipality, promising that government even more in tax revenues over the long run. But the long run never happened. The month the government made its last payment to Wal Mart, the corporation announced it was closing that store and building a couple more in nearby municipalities. So Wal Mart stole the money, and now will add further injury by further destroying the remaining tax base as it drives smaller retailers out of business.

That's how consumer businesses are surviving these days: by cutting costs the Wal Mart way: paying way less than a living wage to employees, treating them shamefully, forcing mini-management to act unethically and illegally, and when they aren't making a "competitive" profit (that is, enough money to keep expanding like a nightmare cancer) they go elsewhere. In this of course they follow the shining example of manufacturers and now service businesses that take their plants and office parks to other countries where wages are miniscule and health, safety and environmental regulations are even more fictional than they've become in America.

Yes, it's likely that Governor Arnold would prefer to move his government to South Korea, but unfortunately it's stuck in California. Maybe he'll get a nice payoff loan from Bush in exchange for trying to deliver the state’s votes to him in November, but in the meantime the schools are quickly dwindling to a state of depressed disorganization, the vitality is being leached out of the bones of public institutions that will cripple California for years to come. And it's happening in most other states as well, though perhaps less dramatically.

In California the Governator precipitated a crisis by cutting the motor vehicle fee increase (which was actually a reinstating of fees that had been cut just a few years ago when the state was flush.) That money had been destined to go to hard-pressed localities to support basic services. So it meant cutbacks in fire protection and police, and the now famous basic function of government: the roads don't get fixed. And health and social programs incidentally would have also suffered, along with thousands of children, elders and sick people.

But the Governator dramatically rescued the state from his own destructive act. Sort of like how the Terminator is the bad guy in the first movie but comes back as the good guy in the second movie? In this case, the Governator issued an emergency order to fund the localities out of other state revenues, specifically by making additional cuts in the budgets of the two state university systems. Very dramatic, perhaps illegal, but hey, he was elected to be an action hero, and a little dictatorial power is part of the script.

In the meantime, the universities have been hacking away at themselves for several years already, and are looking at cuts of up to 30% next year, even before this last bit. Now there are rumors that the most prestigious state funded universities are looking for ways to go private. If UC Berkeley and UCLA, for instance, succeeded in doing that, the collapse of state higher education for the middle class would probably follow in a big hurry. This might result in a reverse Gold Rush, except, where are people going to go? South Korea?

What's Really Going On, Part 1

They said it couldn't be done, but the Dash Brothers have been walking around in stunned silence, thanks to the increasingly tragic and increasingly surreal situation in Iraq.

"The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naïve radicalism married to an operational incompetence," writes Robert Kuttner in the November American Prospect. "A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces. These people are out to remake the world, with little sense of risk, proportion or history."

Of course we've been saying all this for months, and as we've also said, one remarkable feature of this context is that the above analysis has quickly become the conventional wisdom among several if not nearly all of the Democratic candidates for president, as well as the established "liberal" or what's left of the Left within the ruling class, from Washington to Hollywood, the Nation magazine to Doonesbury. It took years for this kind of critique made by outsiders demonized as radical leftists to enter the public commentary of establishment liberals during the Vietnam sixties and seventies.

And if this analysis has any impact on the 2004 presidential election, we suspect political historians will refer to this past week as a key moment. That's because two sets of events happened almost simultaneously. One set was a series of almost incredible missteps and disasters for the Bushies.
Just hours before Bush himself was scheduled to get on the phone to heads of state of France, Germany, Canada and Russia, to pitch them on forgiving debt to Iraq and otherwise help the U.S. get out of this mess without going into bankrupt Depression, the Pentagon announced that major reconstruction contracts would be banned from going to companies in France, Germany, Canada and Russia. This carries the policy of preemptive destruction to new heights.

The fallout from this appalling act has already caused international furor, and will likely lead to incalculable consequences, probably in a number of small and subtle ways that will add up to real damage to U.S. internal security and interests in the world. But it may have greater consequences domestically and politically. There are lots of people supporting Bush in Iraq who don't have the resources to ignore consequences to themselves. The Bush government may feel free to plunge the country into massive debt, and strain society to the limit by sending thousands of National Guard weekend warriors to get picked off one by one in the Middle East, but American families will feel the real pain. Nobody except well paid ideologues are going to be happy that the U.S. is alienating allies who could help and share the burden. Now it will take a change of administration for that to happen.

Stories in the Boston Globe and elsewhere are already charging that this policy, ostensibly to reward Bush's allies among other nations, is more likely to reward only Bush's allies in U.S. business, because the countries excised from consideration are precisely the countries that have companies with the capabilities to compete for major contracts.

Shortly after this Pentagon announcement, another Pentagon office announced that Halliburton, one of the two U.S. companies to benefit most richly from the occupation of Iraq, has overcharged the government for gasoline. Every report mentions that Halliburton was headed by vice-president Cheney.

These reports hurt immediately because they say that things are not likely to get better in Iraq in the future. Other reports dramatized how wrong things are going right now. Besides the guerrilla war and terrorist bombings, the growing suspicion that more civilians are being killed and injured and the charges that information about all of this is being covered up, there was the report that between a third and half of the recently recruited new Iraqi army has quit. We assume this is going to set back the timetable for turning over security and so on to Iraqis.

That's the first set of events. The second set concerns the political opposition. Al Gore, whose timing was suspect in his own 2000 campaign, came up with a thunderbolt of timing and surprise. He unexpectedly endorsed the candidacy of Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination, before even the first caucuses in Iowa let alone the first primary in New Hampshire.

The endorsement by the man who won the popular vote in 2000 is politically powerful, but what's more important is the basis for it. Gore said it was because of Dean's position on foreign policy and the war in Iraq specifically. Until now, the zeitgeist was unsure what issue was going to be emphasized in the election, the war or the economy. Of course they are related and they will both be debated, and no one knows which will be more important to voters ten months from now. But Gore's endorsement put Iraq at the top for the political moment. He emphasized its importance by saying he endorsed Dean now because the issue is so important, Democrats need to be uniting behind one candidate with this message ASAP. And the events described above as the first set, all happened shortly afterwards, making Gore's move not only bold but prescient.

Dean had other good news this week, solidifying his position at the frontrunner. But even if another candidate emerges later, Gore's endorsement has set the bar. And if it happens, this week may have been crucial to ending the Bush reign in 2004.

The Speed of Right and the Right to Lie


With a little historical memory, the speed of change in what you hear through the media about Iraq is really amazing. It took years for members of Congress (except for the few usual mavericks) to gingerly question the Vietnam war, and they were very careful just how much they could challenge. Even George McGovern in 1972 had to be fairly circumspect. And almost anyone from 1965 to 1974 who condemned leaders for the war risked being pilloried for being unpatriotic. Questioning the motives of Nixon and Kissinger was left to anti-American radicals and radical playwrights.

Six months ago we were writing in these columns about the post Iraq war freeze on criticism, citing the most feeble notes of questioning by reporters who were summarily quashed.

But try listening to a bona fide presidential candidate, a retired army general yet, Wesley Clark. He is saying out loud what only the most “extreme” (i.e. knowledgeable and sensible) observers and experts were saying just before and just after Iraq II, about weapons of mass destruction, motives for going to war, the overall highjacking of the post-9/11 emotion, the perils of occupation and “reconstruction.” He’s questioning the veracity of the President and his puppets (or puppeteers.)

The amazing thing isn’t so much that all these folks were right, and we’re forced to watch the tragedies inevitably unfold as U.S. violence injects growth hormones into anti-western insurgencies. The startling thing is that the opposition critique has become establishment so quickly.

But that’s an observation without much effect, for it doesn’t change things much, and unless one of several Democrats is elected President, it never will. Part of the reason is that no matter how fast the truth catches up, lies are faster. And lies work.

There probably isn’t a more salient or depressing fact about American politics these days than that: lies work. Get enough powerful officials with powerful rich friends to say the same thing over and over, and lies work. You get the war you wanted, a cynical and dangerous fraud instead of real health care help. Buy enough TV time and tell the right lies, and you can convince poor people in Alabama to vote against tax reform which would benefit them more than any other group. That’s what happened in the referendum there, and the role of TV is particularly clear in the companion fact that a higher proportion of poor voted against reform than did the rich, who were going to see their taxes go up. So were corporate taxes, which even after being raised would be nowhere near what corporations pay in other states, and that’s where the money for all the lying ads came from.

Lies work also because there is no legal, moral or cultural opposition to them. Lies of all kinds get on the air as long as they’re in political advertising, with no legal penalty or remedy. Lies are so outrageous and frequent that there is no cultural sanction—the public isn’t scandalized by them, especially if the lies are exciting enough. The excitement is more important than the truth. Besides, these are focus group tested lies. They are lies crafted to evoke particular fears, or play to particular prejudices.

Political lies paid for by corporations don’t get newspapers too upset. After all, their existence depends on pages full of corporate lies called advertising.

The Right to Lie is the lifeblood of the Rabid Right. It’s become a kind of science: the rapid-fire attack of one lie after another, the more sensational and provocative and outrageous the better, because that gets more attention. By the time a lie can be confronted, ten more have replaced it (gone but not forgotten.) This is augmented by the slick lie, the well-done lie by highly paid and highly skilled professional liars in concept and execution. There is a gleeful excitement to all this. Lying is great for the adrenal glands. Lying brings people together. Can you top this one? How did you get them to fall for that one? Let’s work together and blitz them with one Big Lie. Repeat it and repeat it. They’ll try to refute it, but by next week we can refer to it as if were proven truth. Because everybody will remember it. Lying is fun. It’s the game of politics. It’s how you win the right friends and influence the right people. So you won’t wind up being one of those wimps sitting on the sidewalk singing Kumbaya, or living in a hovel or a cardboard box. No more sniveling: lie your way to power. It’s easy, it’s fun and it’s oh so profitable.

So maybe some folks are getting away with telling some uncomfortable truths. But don’t worry, there are more lies on the way. The Bushies will have a quarter of a billion dollars to play with, and that’s just the A team. Corporations have trained us and acculturated us to the thematic lie, the specific lie, the implied lie, the bold lie, the narrated and dramatized lie, the visually dazzling lie. Crash some images together, create the right emotion and the same corporations that sell you drugs you don’t need will sell you the candidates who will make sure that those drugs stay really really expensive.

They’ve dumbed down the country, shafted schools to build prisons, and they’re busy sealing the deal with all morons all the time television. But you can’t blame the victims here. Most people know they’re being lied to. It’s just hard to live thinking the worst of the people running your world. And the lies are so many, and they are so good at finding the vulnerabilities, that they still work. As long as lies and liars get a free ride, we’re going nowhere but down the drain.

Democracy? Or Something Else?

President G.W. Bush has done his vision thing. He claims that his vision is to bring democracy to the Middle East. But his record in Iraq tells a different story. There he is bringing a particular kind of imitation democracy: the kind with pay-to-play elections, and above all, one dominated by the military corporate political complex, with global corporations as the dominant governors and beneficiaries. It is a corporate democracy without labor unions, or protection for workers, families or the environment.


What's going wrong in Iraq? Bloody political struggles, vicious guerilla warfare, the chaos of the tragically unforeseen or just inadequate planning, the accumulating consequences of self-righteousness and hubris---all these are widely reported and discussed. But just reading the newspaper and surfing the net yields another answer, as bitter as any and more familiar than most: greed.

The dots are there to be connected. They outline a portrait of corporate greed, arm-in-arm with political greed, an all-too familiar marriage in America, now being exported instead of democracy.

The United States government has taken on the responsibility of running and rebuilding Iraq. But even now, some 70% of the Iraqi workforce is unemployed. High unemployment preceded the war to some extent, but there were government subsidies for basic needs that now are gone. The army of some 400,000 men was disbanded, without pay or pension. The country's manufacturing has shut down. Basic services like electricity and water are still spotty and uncertain. For a society with a substantial middle class, with an urbanized and educated population, this is catastrophe. This is slow motion forest fire, combined with daily earthquakes.

And, of course, it is recipe for violence. For the angry and desperate, modern arms are easily obtained. It is apparently easy to steal as well from virtually unguarded American ammo dumps; military manpower has reportedly been diverted to searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction. This is not to claim that all the violence is spontaneous and unorganized, nor to attempt to identify any of the perpetrators.

What is the American occupation doing about all this? Apart from recruiting for a security force and hiring a few Iraqis to pick up trash and scour sewers for paltry wages, the U.S. is providing a huge object lesson in how corporate democracy works.

Most of large contracts for Iraq's reconstruction have gone to a small number of U.S. corporations, and as the Center for Public Integrity recently reported, most were large donors to the Bush 2000 campaign. The corporations with the closest ties to Bush and members of his administration are among those reaping the biggest benefits.

San Francisco based Bechtel and its subsidiaries alone got 10 contracts worth more than $1 billion. (Several of its officials serve on important Bush administration boards, and former Bechtel executive and Bush advisor George Shultz remains on its board of directors.) But the star so far is energy conglomerate Halliburton, which vice president Cheney ran until 2000. Thanks largely to its Iraq contracts, Halliburton's sales rose 39% in the third quarter this year to over four billion dollars. The profits of its Kellogg, Brown and Root unit operating in Iraq quadrupled on an 80% increase in sales. In just three months, KBR delivered an operating profit of $34 million on revenues of $900 million. Its contracts in Iraq were worth more than $2 billion.

These profits were registered while two U.S. Members of Congress accused KBR of importing gasoline into Iraq at inflated prices, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill. (This is not the first time KBR has been accused of gouging the U.S. government. In 1997 the company was sued for overcharging the U.S. army on plywood.) Iraqi importers are bringing in oil and gasoline for much less, as Halliburton itself admits. Which raises a very interesting question: why are U.S. companies getting contracts to do what Iraqi companies could be doing? After all, Iraqi companies and professionals built much of what needs to be re-built. Wouldn't the sane-not to mention the decent-thing be to give Iraqis these contracts, and employ Iraqi workers?

One answer is that this may be happening, in a way. Bechtel claims to be employing some 30,000 Iraqis. Iraqi companies are indeed subcontracting to do reconstruction work, but these contracts are controlled by huge American corporations. According to at least one usually dependable as well as eloquent Iraqi blog ("Baghdad Burning" at www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com) these Iraqi firms are doing so often at much lower costs than U.S. corporations estimated. The documented case of the Iraqi gasoline importer lends credence to this generalization. But the blog goes on to assert that savings doesn't go either to the Iraqis or back to U.S. taxpayers. It goes in the pocket of the corporations that overestimated the costs and got the contracts. This is certainly worth investigation by American journalists.

There are other disquieting assertions. U.S. companies are importing unskilled labor from Southeast Asia and elsewhere to work on their projects in Iraq. Officially this is because of security concerns, but getting workers at less than Iraqis would be paid adds to corporate profits. Labor journalist David Bacon has also charged that the Bush administration is systematically destroying labor unions in Iraq, and ignoring labor rights in its planning for Iraq's future. "Baghdad Burning" reports that Iraqi businesses must go through the KBR corporation, rather than the provisional government, in order to do business in their own country. This observer within Iraq concurs with western journalists who conclude that there is a concerted effort to privatize even basic services in Iraq, so global corporations rather than any Iraqi government will essentially control Iraq.

Journalist Bacon claims that none of the $87 billion just appropriated by Congress will go to Iraqi workers or to the Iraqi unemployed. (Others assert that there is no indication within the bill of how the figure of $19 billion for reconstruction was arrived at, nor are there provisions for how it will be spent.) If workers and the unemployed are left out, at least the Bush administration is consistent. That $87 billion is money that will not go to the unemployed in America (and despite the purported spurt in growth this quarter, more jobs were lost). None of it goes to hard-pressed workers or their families: to the parents who will see their Social Security dwindle and the children who will have their futures mortgaged by deficits. Short-sighted greed rules here in the U.S. as well. Yet no one will be surprised if those same corporations currently at the trough for Iraq, soon pony up again to contribute to the Bush war chest, expected to exceed $200 million for the next campaign.

What might be expected of the American electorate is a complex question. But even considering the other factors operating in Iraq, it's not hard to see how such bold greed would contribute to the kind of violence and tribulation we are probably just beginning to see there. It also provides a picture of what the Bush Vision truly means.

Global week in review: the Dash Brothers of the Roundtable


PHINEAS
Gathered again at the old Drink & Think, to mull over the events of the week, with some mulled wine perhaps.

GABRIEL
Weak mulled wine.

MORGAN
Very weak.

CHRISTOPHER
Any good news?

THERON
Depends. Civilization continues its increasingly swift decline into self-annihilation accompanied by tragic self-parody. Is that good or bad?

MORGAN
The Yankees lost.

PHINEAS
There you go.

CHRISTOPHER
What's the first legalese phrase any of us learned?

GABRIEL
Any rebroadcast of the pictures and accounts of this game without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited.

CHRISTOPHER
You got it.

THERON
The war against terrorism got clarified. According to one of the Generals, it's the Christians against Islam.

CHRISTOPHER
The Crusades 2003. Another sequel.

MORGAN
It's more like Judeo-Christianity/Islam against Buddhism. That's the real conflict, in effect. On every level.

THERON
I don't know, you've got to give Dick Cheney credit. He said there were al qeda in Iraq and sure enough, there are.

GABRIEL
A whole new meaning to self-fulfilling prophesy.

THERON
Pretty soon there'll be WMD too.

PHINEAS
Speaking of Halliburton, our reconstruction money is not only going to good old lobbyist-heavy American companies instead of the Iraqi companies and professionals who built the stuff in the first place-you know, the stuff we bombed-but our efficiency minded companies there are hiring cheap labor from really poor countries to improve their bottom line, while half of the Iraqi workforce is unemployed.

THERON
Lessons in free enterprise don't come cheap.

PHINEAS
The Red Cross got bombed. The idea that wars had rules was always absurd in a way. But now that wars don't have rules---

THERON
Like pre-emptive defense?

PHINEAS
Exactly--then it's beyond absurd. It's not absurd horror. It's pure horror.

CHRISTOPHER
That's what we've got cable news for--absurd horror.

GABRIEL
How about them Democrats?

MORGAN
It's Anybody But Bush. And Lieberman.

GABRIEL
Look at the best seller list--all those liberals.

MORGAN
Only if you have "lies" in the title. The public may not know much. The public may not want to know much. But they know everybody is lying. And they want everybody to know that.

THERON
So to sum up: Iraq is fiery chaos, as are southern California suburbs and the sun. You know, the solar flares thing. Anything else?

CHRISTOPHER
The Kansas City Chiefs were kind of fun to watch this week.

PHINEAS
We're coming closer and closer to some ultimate understanding of our place in the universe.

MORGAN
And some woman at a coffee bar will get the final insight just as the Vorgons destroy the planet to make way for a cosmic bypass.

PHINEAS
Something like that. Though truth is stranger than even science fiction.

THERON
Happy Halloween!

Here it comes...

Here's Allen Ginsberg in a 1982 interview talking about his sudden realization of 1958: "And so in 1958, on Independence Day, I wrote an essay saying that America was going to have a nervous breakdown, and that part of the cause of it could be located in that year's 30 billion dollar military budget and the growth of the military police state; that one aspect of it was the persecution of the junkies and the drug people who were basically sensitives who may or may not have been fucked up but needed compassion and medical care rather than Swatsika-like police agencies chasing them down with guns, calling them fiends, which is a terrible violation of the human spirit to create a class of people in America called fiends,--I mean, it's diabolical...once you realize you've got a class of armed police calling another group fiends you've really got a situation so surrealistic and hallucinatory and violent that there could be no outcome but some massive nervous breakdown in America when people find out that they've not only been lied to but drawn into a dream of reality which is not only false but painful and bitter and murderous."

So you notice that the total military budget he's talking about is about half of what Bush is asking for the military for Iraq alone this year. Thirty billion could buy you a nuclear arsenal in those days. And now we have the ongoing War on Some Drugs, which is the war on the class of fiends, losers, non-white cultures and non-corporate capitalists. Maybe the junkies today are more than proportionately more dangerous in some ways, but likely mostly to themselves.

What's interesting here is: how long has it been since anybody has called this a violation of the human spirit? Who talks like that anymore? Here in this false and painful and bitter and murderous nightmare of reality. Maybe it's a stretch to see the street junkies as sensitives, but on the other hand, many addicts are, or were. We hear a little more about treatment now thanks dubiously to Rush Limbaugh, but basically the war goes on.

How did we avoid that nervous breakdown? Denial is apparently a very powerful thing, aided by shopping. Our prisons are chock full of black men, but of course no racism is involved. The poor were joined by the working poor and now by the lower middle class and the middle middle a family crisis or two behind in being driven to insolvency and therefore homelessness by medical bills. But to talk about the rich paying a fair share of taxes is to engage in class warfare.
We dare not ask why terrorists find supporters in their countries, any more than we ask why people in our cities and towns turn to drugs. Well, they sure can't turn to us.

Think about this: everybody knows that more people are murdered in America than anywhere else. (We don't count revolutions and genocides of course.) So we get tough on crime and we watch cop show after cop show after cop show, all those tough smart guys solving homicides and struggling with the perverse legal system to make the bad guys pay because somehow this helps the dead victims. But what we don't know, can't admit, sure can't face, is that there are fewer homicides in America than suicides.

(cue: song) Here it comes...here it comes...

Film at 11

by Morgan Dash

On the night that the conglomerate media candidate claimed victory, the Turner Classic Movie Channel happened to be running all three Boris Karloff Frankenstein films. A fine counterpoint and counterpart to what must have been shown on the cable news channels.

I expect to be watching the Turner Classic Movie Channel exclusively for the foreseeable future. Thank you and goodnight from California.

Dictatorship Made Easy

One of us here at American Samizat suggested some months ago that the Bush Administration attack on Iraq, and in fact its basic response to 9-11, would reverberate throughout the world, emboldening new violence from friend as well as foe. The evidence of this sad unfolding continues its deadly march.

Allies most conspicuous in their frequent, continuing and escalating assertion of the right to various new violent policies have been Israel and Russia. Israel's attack on Syria is the latest instance. It may have been a single attack on a terrorist base, but it shattered the precedents that had limited violence in the region, with consequences that could be extremely dire. The U.S. had little choice but to agree that Israel could attack a sovereign nation in order to fight terrorism.

The point is not that any specific move is or isn't justified by circumstances. But that violent reaction is now the first reaction, a first resort rather than only with the most extreme justification. Iraq did that, and so did the response to 9-11, a combination of cynical exploitation and giving in to the reflex of fear, a sad abdication of leadership and an even sadder abdication of the people's responsibilities in a republic.

Israel is not the only instance. In moves that have not made conspicuous headlines here, Russia has recently asserted its right to preemptive strikes on other countries, and it has followed the Bush administration in considering the use of so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. While the U.S. has in fact used weapons in Iraq that push closer to the definition of nuclear, and the Bush administration wants to pursue several avenues of research into smaller scale nuclear weapons, Russia has suggested it might actually use battlefield nukes. But about the only people who noticed were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the city governments protested such a policy.

There is little that the U.S. can say about other nations breaking peaceful precedents or consensual restraints without being more obviously hypocritical than usual. The Bush administration is encouraging a more violent, more dangerous world.

George Orwell pointed out that what dictatorships require more than anything else is an enemy. That includes dictatorships of the proletariat, and this brazen attempted dictatorship of the oligarchy. But what the Bush administration is creating is a world of enemies. All the better to scare you with, my dears.

Stanley Crouch points out that the real lesson of the death camps is often missed, and it is that a supposedly educated, advanced, modern society is not automatically saved by those conditions from committing acts of genocidal barbarism. This may be the greatest country in the history of the world and all that, but that's no guarantee of virtue or self-knowledge.

Let's get a little perspective here. Nearly a month after a hurricane brushed by, one of the wealthiest communities in the world (in suburban Virginia) is still without telephone service. Millions of people were without electricity for days and some for weeks. These and other accidents and acts of nature reveal vulnerabilities that aren't likely to be addressed by bombing people in foreign countries. Our homeland isn't even secure against hurricanes, let alone terrorism. In our homes we are not secure against illness or unemployment. At the same time the health care system is falling apart because the health insurance system is crazed and collapsing under its own weight, it is more and more acceptable morally, culturally and socially for medical care to be denied those who need it but can't pay, and for those who can't get decently paying work or any work at all to slip into homelessness from the middle class in a matter of months.

Out of fear and self-righteous denial, lost in a televised delusion, we are becoming a cruel and callous people. We may wallow in our sentimental attachment to the television tragedy of the hour, but we are numbed to the crises around us. As long as we are distracted by speed and yoked to the chariots of fashion as we cycle endlessly through the maze of earn and spend, blind to our real motivations and the consequences of our public attitudes and actions, we will continue to be so easy to manipulate that dictatorship may as well be automated, carried out by computer chips in every appliance of our lives.

Can they recall?

In little more than 24 hours, the CA polls will open for the recall election. What will voters be thinking about? Will they recall the reasons so many thought Bush was more likable than Gore and therefore should be president, because 4 years of him on TV would be easier to stomach? Or that there was really no difference between Bush and Gore so it didn't matter which one you voted for, or especially if you voted for someone else?

Do they recall that when they took out their frustrations on their ballots, the U.S. was at peace, and the federal government had huge surpluses predicted into the indefinite future--enough to fix social security and Medicare and redress the inequities and injustices and meet the federal responsibilities pretty much everybody agrees on, but that the Reagan-Bush era bled of funding?

Arnold was a bad idea before, and for California, quite possibly a tragic idea. Now of course it's worse. On Sunday the allegations against him virtually disappeared from TV news. But to read a detailed story about even the latest round (which brings the number of women lodging accusations to 15) is to be convinced that there's something really wrong here.

Hold your nose, California, and vote against recall. Vote for Bustamante. Despite the conventional wisdom, which is puzzling at best, that he has run a bad campaign, he remains the most viable, honorable and most attractive candidate. He'd probably make a better governor than Davis. He'd certainly shake things up, and the issues would be defined for all to see, instead of this murky muddiness coming out of Sacramento.

But what we definitely don't want is the kind of whim and denial in the voting booth that gave us Bush, war, confusion, billions of dollars of debt and responsibilities way into the future, crippling our own country, causing untold suffering and hardship, and leaving us more vulnerable than ever.

Unfortunately this sorry circus probably won't even be over soon---the vote counting may turn into another extended nightmare. Yet as weird as this campaign has been (when the guy who promoted the recall ends up advising people to vote against recalling Davis, and one of the candidates drops out and throws her support against the recall) this isn't virtual reality. What happens Tuesday will have real consequences for real people throughout California, the U.S. and the world. As well as for the world that will face beings not yet born.

Fairness

In the last frenzied weekend of the recall campaign, the Arnold army is screaming that he isn't being treated fairly. Arnold is being accused of a variety of possibly criminal acts, allegedly committed at various times and in various places over the past thirty years. As of Saturday, the number of women publicly making these charges reached 11. The election is Tuesday.

The rhetoric on both sides heated up, with Governor Davis suggesting some of the alleged offenses are of a criminal nature, and likely to distract a governor from governing the state. At the same time, Arnold charged that Davis was behind these "dirty campaign" tactics, and his campaign manager fumed that the L.A. Times was politically motivated, and not fit to own a printing press.

The Los Angeles Times newspaper, which broke these stories, claims it printed them as soon as they were deemed ready, using ordinary professional journalistic standards. Arnold's opponents claim they are not the sources of the stories, nor has any evidence surfaced that they are.

A barrage of such charges so close to election day allows little time for point by point refutation, and unleashing them at this time certainly seems unfair. But the entire recall process is unfair. Apart from its basic injustice, especially when it resembles a prosecution of a duly elected governor on unspecified crimes, the recall does not follow the normal rules of elections. The Arnold campaign didn't balk at the comparatively short period of campaigning when it was to Arnold's advantage.

As a major celebrity, Arnold had an easy time promoting his candidacy. Major media was quivering at his feet. His visibility and celebrity persona behind a feckless but focus group tested emotional message moved the polls. Together with the money this celebrity and this apparently foregone coronation attracted, his millions bought still more air time for slick celebrity commercials. There was not very much time to look at his ideas, his policies, his past, and his fitness for office. Millions got a chance to see and hear him. No one got a chance to know him.

In a normal campaign cycle, these allegations might well have surfaced weeks or months before the election. The Arnold people must have hoped they would outrun this barrage. They didn't quite make it. Arnold may still become governor, but it's not clear he could govern.

Still, there is another issue of fairness that is quite troubling. Last week the polls seemed to indicate that Arnold would win. Someone interpreted the numbers to a single story line: it was an Arnold vs. Davis race. This despite the actual poll numbers which showed Governor Davis being recalled by a margin greater than that between Arnold and his main challenger, Cruz Bustamante.

This so-called campaign began with a media blitz of Arnold images. Despite that first barrage, early polls showed Bustamante ahead. He was actually seen on television news and interview programs a few times after that. Then new polls showed Arnold ahead, and Cruz completely disappeared. Even after these allegations became news, the pictures were still of Arnold and occasionally of Davis. Bustamante had to be content with debating the other Republican on state PBS stations.

Cruz Bustamante is Latino. He has been criticized for championing, and being supported by, California Indian casinos. In a week that saw a powerful white male media creation get booted from a sports show for a "racially insensitive" (and pretty stupid) comment concerning a black quarterback, there was no visible awareness of the racial implications of this campaign and how it is covered.

But even apart from issues of fairness concerning race, there are basic issues of fairness in covering elections. As electronic media in this country grew, a civic culture that treated elections as serious matters and news as important, together with laws and FCC regulations such as "equal time" provisions and the Fairness Doctrine, generally ensured as a matter of course that the major candidates would get fair and more or less equal treatment. There would be some attempt at balance, and it was likely that on every news report, what each major candidate said and did that day would be reported. On television, pictures of one candidate would invariably be followed by pictures of the other.

As limited as it was (especially on non-major candidates) all of that is gone now. The basic fairness necessary for fair elections has been sacrificed to the same market-driven, celebrity-dependent and sensationalist priorities as rule entertainment and commercials.

The Reagan era death of the Fairness Doctrine has permitted the wholesale takeover of radio and cable TV talk by self-righteous, self-promoting rabid right know-it-alls. The wholesale takeover of broadcasting frequencies and cable bandwidth by a handful of conglomerates keeps discourse within profitable bounds. They have all learned how to push the glandular fight-or-flight buttons of the public, and so they compete for the highest numbers with lowest common denominator violence seasoned with eye-candy and brain-nicotine.

After all those sweaty monosyllabic epics, Arnold the Barbarian should have figured out by now that he who lives by the sword can die by the sword after the next commercial.

Arnold Inflames Racism Against California Indians: Not To Be

We thought it would be classism that defined the California recall campaign, but maybe we were wrong. It's turning out to be racism.

We thought that Bustamante's call to tax the rich and the corporations at higher rates would inspire the traditional Republican reflex, always done with a straight face, of charging "class warfare." Instead, we've got Arnold, the Aryan strongman, inciting race warfare. And he's doing it with great success, it seems.

It's really the only explanation for the traction he's getting by making false charges against American Indians and the casinos that some tribes operate. It is of course true that the casinos provide money for these tribes to contribute to politicians, just as corporations provide money to contribute to politicians. But we don't hear about corporations or the rich having undue influence, or not paying their fair share to the state government. We hear Arnold braying his false charges about the tribes not contributing, even though they do pay millions of dollars directly to the state, as well as relieving the state of millions of dollars more they would be spending for social services and schools and health in a number of communities.

Arnold, who makes his money in one branch of entertainment, is pandering to the guilt involved in a different form of entertainment. The kind of people who gamble are not much different from the kind of people who go to Arnold's movies, but actors are no longer considered innately sinful.

Most non-Indians don't understand what the relationship of tribes is to the state government, to local communities or to the federal government. It is admittedly a complex set of relationships, but Arnold is exploiting that lack of understanding. He's lying, but it's a lie that plays to prejudices derived from ignorance. Focus group tested pandering, no doubt.

Behind this ignorance, feeding these prejudices, is the oldest form of racism in California's history. It is racism against American Indians. In the past it resulted in Indian slavery, in massacres both notorious and unheralded, in policies of extermination, in cultural destruction, in the all-American genocide. It continues to result in injustices every day of the week. This racism is exhibited in the habit of turning Indian reservations into toxic waste dumps, as well as in apparently "small" ways such as racist names and logos for sports teams like the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, that would not for a moment be tolerated if they involved any other ethnic group.

So it is this racism that may tip the balance. (Interesting that the media swallows whole the rabid right vocabulary: repeating the "inciting class warfare" line, but calling racism "playing the race card." Why don't they call it "inciting race warfare" and "playing the class card"?)

It makes sense in that unconscious racism is of a piece with the appeal to the undifferentiated anger towards everybody in government for the mess we're in, as if "sending a message" is what voters are actually going to be responsible for doing in the recall election. They are apparently poised to lose their minds and go with their raw rage, and then find themselves with a governor who must lead and make decisions. And nobody has the first clue as to what he will do. Will he gut Medicaid to balance the budget? We have absolutely no idea.

His big appeal is hollow in terms of policy. There is in fact nothing a governor can do to force Indian tribes to cough up more money---that's a fantasy on the order of sending Arnold over to Iraq to clean up the Taliban in ninety-five minutes, while we munch popcorn and cheer.

Arnold seems to think that the governor's job is promotion. Wonder where he got that idea? He's been watching too many old Ronald Reagan G.W. Bush cowboy movies. He's also made it clear that promoting is how you make something "successful" (like bodybuilding) and anything you say can be morally justified if it is done to promote something.

In one of his movies (which he promotes along with his campaign) he recites the famous Hamlet line as he decides whether or not to kill the "bad" guy. To be or not to be? Not to be, he concludes. That's the quality of his solution. It's very satisfying. It isn't real.

Apparently a lot of Californians want to get rid of "the bad guy," or at least the only one they can in this election (polls also show that legislators, Republican as well as Democrat, are as unpopular as Governor Gray Davis). They are currently being aided and abetted by the media that has been promoting Arnold relentlessly, and now seems breathless in anticipation of a star quality governor with media savvy handlers who will provide them with great video and magazine covers.

The problem isn't getting rid of the bad guy. The problem is having a governor who can govern, and electing that governor--even in the sham of a recall election no longer supported by the man who started it---on the basis of policies and political abilities. What are Arnold's policies? Are they based on oversimplified and distorted information as are the few statements he has let slip concerning what he would actually do as governor? What are his political, as distinguished from promotional and "acting" abilities? We don't know that either. The question to be or not to be may hinge on the question of whether enough Californians care about what we know and what we don't know.

There's still a week to go. The election itself may still hinge on turnout. But if the media blitz for Arnold and the accompanying perception that the only choice is Davis or Arnold (though Cruz Bustamante is within eight poll points of Arnold, he has utterly disappeared from media reporting) combine to discourage union and Latino voters and real Democrats from voting, then California will enter its own nightmare. (Another California nightmare would be if Bustamante loses by a vote total equivalent to the Green Party candidate's total.) It will only amplify the national nightmare--let;s face it, the global nightmare---of the Bush administration, and not just for Californians.

A White House divided

At the moment of this musing, there is a furor over the outing of a CIA undercover operative, who happened to be the wife of a turncoat Bush I appointee who represented the U.S. in Iraq during Gulf War I but who recently has criticized Bush II and Gulf War II. Someone described so far only as a "senior Administration official" named the name to columnist Robert Novak and perhaps five or six other journalists, violating federal law. This is high crimes stuff, as well as being the latest hoist by their own petard turnabout for the Bushies, for it seems the motivation of the outing was to intimidate and punish a supposed political traitor, the kind of vicious "hardball" that's become a standard weapon in the arsenal of the self-righteous rabid right.

But what makes this additionally interesting is how it might relate to earlier evidence of a White House cracking and splitting under pressure.


At first the main publicized conflict was State v. Defense, the big rivalry in the Bush administration, though Iraq proved that to be less than a drama hungry press made it out to be. There was something called "The White House" that choose actions and policies from those offered by the moderate internationalist State or the American Empire rabid rightists of Defense and Justice, like items off a mix and match menu.

But in the quagmire phase of the Iraqi occupation, the central control of the White House seems to be unraveling, and the entity itself is showing fractures. It used to be the Bush-Cheney White House, with Bush the on-air personality and marketing guy, and Cheney the invisible string-puller from his undisclosed location behind and above the stage.

The first major sign of a serious divide, though little noted at the time, was the public repudiation by the Bush wing of v.p. Cheney's contention that Saddam and the Iraqis were implicated in 9-11 terrorism. This could indicate that while the Bush people aren't backing off the course previously set in Iraq, they aren't anxious to continue the headlong rush to defeat the axis of evil, the suicidal recklessness of which must be obvious even to them by now. At the very least it was cautioning to the Cheney wing to not get publicly ahead of the Bush line.

This, as well as GW's smug challenge for anyone with information on who told who what concerning the CIA exposure to come forward, suggests that the revenge play originated with the Cheney people, either in the White House or elsewhere in the government.

While we may yet see a sacrificial lamb offer itself up, we may also be looking at the possibility of a Cheney withdrawal from the 04 ticket, for health reasons. But even if it plays out very differently, these signs suggest a White House divided against itself. Meanwhile, the Iraq situation deteriorates, Bush's big UN speech didn't get him any international help, the U.S. armed forces are getting restive over the dithering and wasted by the strain of being overcommitted, American voters are wondering why Iraq schools are getting money and U.S. schools are being bled. Meanwhile, the poverty rate has gone up for the second year in a row, confidence in the economy is down, and the number of Americans without health insurance jumped last year by the highest percentage since the last time the Republicans lost the White House. It's a time for action in the public interest, and this White House, incapable of such so far on ideological grounds, may be too divided to respond even if it wanted to.

The Political Moment

As dangerous as things have been in general, this is perhaps the most dangerous moment. The Bush administration is starting to self-destruct, with public squabbles and distancing (repudiations of vp Cheney’s demagogic insistence that Iraq was behind 9-11). Bush has never been weaker, with a very public perception that he doesn’t have a clue what to do next, about Iraq or the economy. The chickens are coming home, and while that is more or less inevitable, it’s an invitation to desperation on the part of an administration not known for moderation or even good sense.

It’s a good bet for instance that the heat is on the exploited soldiers in Iraq. They are likely under intense pressure to distract the world with a win, like getting Saddam. It’s going to get more Americans killed, and a lot more Iraqis.

It's a moment in which desperate people with no concern greater than their political power (so they can keep their corporate sponsors happy) may do truly desperate things. Suddenly a new military confrontation somewhere. As adversaries smell disarray, they may do something just provocative enough to excuse big violence. The first official use of atomic weapons since World War II is not beyond this Bush bunch. That'll get people back to where they want them: shocked and awed.

Because the chickens are not only coming home, they’re talking, and squawking. The U.S. Conference of Mayors pointedly pointed out that two years after 9-11, fully 90% of American cities have not received federal funds to take effective measures against terrorism. Homeland Security is a fraud.

Speaking of frauds, the most straightforward charge of such concerning the war in Iraq came from Senator Ted Kennedy last week. The response to his unminced statements was especially desperate. Media pundits implied he was drunk. Republican leaders charged him with personal hate filled attacks, noting that he had more bad things to say about Bush than about Saddam. Then their rabid right minions renewed their standard personal attacks on Kennedy, with references both veiled and open to his weight and of course Chapaquidick. So longer ago now its spelling has fled, but the rabid right has long ago enshrined it as one of the articles of faith.

It’s also quite interesting that what he actually said was less reported than the reactions to it. The best a google search could do was the AP report, from a newspaper in Tapei. If you’re interested, that AP report follows.

On the homefront meanwhile, it's been reported that after a two year decline, the wealth of the wealthiest Americans is once again on the rise. It jumped 10% this year. The Bush tax cuts are having their intended effect, it seems. Meanwhile add "jobless recovery" to your vocabulary. What's next--the return of Stagflation?


ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORT

The case for going to war against Iraq was a fraud "made up in Texas" to give Republicans a political boost, Senator Edward Kennedy said on Thursday.
In an interview, Kennedy also said the Bush administration has failed to account for nearly half of the US$4 billion the war is costing each month. He said he believes much of the unaccounted-for money is being used to bribe foreign leaders to send in troops.
He called the Bush administration's current Iraq policy "adrift."
The White House declined to comment on Thursday.
The Massachusetts Democrat also expressed doubts about how serious a threat Saddam Hussein posed to the US in its battle against terrorism. He said administration officials relied on "distortion, misrepresentation, a selection of intelligence" to justify their case for war.
"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office showed that only about US$2.5 billion of the US$4 billion being spent monthly on the war can be accounted for by the Bush administration.
"My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he said.
Of the US$87 billion in new money requested by President George W. Bush for the war, Kennedy said the administration should be required to report back to the Congress to account for the spending.
"We want to support our troops because they didn't make the decision to go there ... but I don't think it should be open-ended. We ought to have a benchmark where the administration has to come back and give us a report," he added.
Kennedy said the focus on Iraq has drawn the nation's attention away from more direct threats, including al-Qaeda, instability in Afghanistan or the nuclear ambitions of North Korea.

Star Trek Episode 34,495: Where No Nation Has Gone Before


"So Spock, where are we?"
"We are on Earth, Captain. But the more interesting question is, when are we?"
"What? We've traveled through time as well as space?"
"Yes, Captain. If we were in fact caught in a Converse Warp superfragment, that would indeed be the effect."
"Here---this looks like an information device. Yes, it displays images. If you can match these images with the historical data base patched through your tricorder--"
"We can ascertain the exact time period."
"Look there! The date is on the screen. September 7, 2003. Early twenty-first century! It appears to be a presidential address. Yes, look--President Al Gore."
"Fascinating."
"But wasn't Al Gore the losing candidate?"
"Indeed, Captain. He won the popular vote but lost the election through a decision of the Supreme Court. At least, in our timeline."
"You mean?"
"Yes. It seems we were caught in an Obverse Warp Superfragment. Therefore we traveled through space and time and into an entirely different timeline."
"In which Al Gore became President!"
"I believe this button controls the sound, Captain."
"Well turn it up, Spock, turn it up!"

"---the extraordinary events of these past few weeks, the revelations of improprieties, the resignations from the Supreme Court, the unprecedented suit brought before the reconstituted court that led to the reversal of the 2000 decision, the elimination of Florida's electoral votes resulting in my election to the presidency. Yet our nation has endured, and our system worked.

But now, my fellow Americans, to the task at hand. My predecessor launched an attack on the nation of Iraq in the mistaken belief that America was in imminent peril from weapons of mass destruction. This turned out not to be the case. I have therefore ordered a full review of our intelligence apparatus.

Our military power did depose a brutal dictator in a region of the world that is, for better and usually for worse, important to our national interests. The United States cannot send its military might to change every brutal regime in the world, and we will not. But what's done is done, and we start from this point, and move forward.

Together with Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Wesley Clark and United Nations Ambassador Mario Cuomo, I have conferred with our NATO allies and members of the UN Security Council. Together we have put forward a plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, the return of self-rule to the Iraqi people and the withdrawal of occupying forces.

The first step will be the withdrawal of half the American and British forces now in Iraq, effective within three months. At the same time, United Nations peacekeepers will more than make up the numbers of withdrawing troops, although their duties will be somewhat different.

Second, a United Nations team will assist in a speedy inventory of the most pressing needs of Iraq, as well as a full inventory of the direct damage to that nation's infrastructure caused by the war. It is important for Americans to know that Iraq is a nation with the expertise, talent and desire to rebuild itself. Iraqi professionals-engineers, managers, scientists, builders, industrialists-will be involved in this inventory. When it is completed, Iraqi professionals will be contacted for estimates of what they need to repair and rebuild their country's bridges, electrical and water systems, and other needed infrastructure. When those estimates are completed, the United States will deposit with the United Nations a sum of money, including long-term loans, sufficient to cover the estimated costs. This reconstruction fund will be a large part of our commitment to Iraq.

Third, the United States will assist the United Nations in reconstituting the basic security and social infrastructure of Iraq-its courts and police, its fire departments, and medical systems, its systems of care for those who most need help and cannot help themselves.

Fourth, the United States will assist the United Nations in developing a process for returning the government of Iraq to its people within two years. We expect this will be a gradual process, but it will have a timetable, and be governed by the general principle of maximum participation by Iraqi citizens at each stage, until Iraq is a self-governing nation.

It is important for the American people to understand from the beginning that we cannot direct or control the political destiny of Iraq. We hope this process can be peaceful, but we cannot guarantee that it will be. There are many factions and many rivalries that the repressive regime of Saddam kept in check by brutal force. We will assist the transitional authority and, if we are asked, the provisional Iraqi government, in maintaining security, but only within that two year time period. We will no longer send our sons and daughters into situations for which they are unprepared, for which they are not trained, and frankly, where they-where we-- do not belong.

As part of our proposal, the United Nations agrees to permit two large military bases in Iraq, one for American forces, one for British forces, during this transitional period. We will pull back most of our remaining troops to our base. We will negotiate for a continuing presence in the region with the provisional government, and if necessary the elected government of Iraq. Britain, by its own choice, will withdraw all its forces from the region by the end of the two-year period.

In view of this plan, and to support certain special needs at home, I am asking Congress to allocate an additional $87 billion. Part of that amount will go to the military, to increase pay and medical and veteran's benefits. Part of it will go to the reconstruction fund for Iraq, part of it to the United Nations effort. A large part of it will be devoted to completely revamping our homeland security. This is where our attention belongs. Our infrastructure remains vulnerable. We must change that. Our cities are without adequate resources to do what needs to be done. We must change that.

As part of our enhanced homeland security, as well as our intelligence review, I will ask Congress to repeal most provisions of the so-called Patriot's Act, which not only abrogate the very rights that define us as Americans, but have given government a set of expensive, misguided and ultimately fruitless tasks. We can't afford this cynical exercise, financially or morally. The days of Big Brother Government are over.

September 11, 2001 showed us that we are vulnerable. Some of that vulnerability goes with the territory, if we are to be a free society. But we can do more to truly protect our infrastructure and our environment from attack. For years we have been slowly starving our public health and public safety systems and resources. We must reverse that process. The public good is best served by public means.

At the same time, there is no reason for Americans to live in fear. We have enemies in the world, but we also have friends. When we give in to unreasoning fear, we do the work of terrorists for them. Each one of us is endangered far more by accident and natural disaster than by terrorists. If we devote most of our efforts to measures that protect us and help us heal from every kind of disaster, we will be safer from the effects of terrorism as well. We can do more to undercut the very reasons that people support terrorism, by understanding them and understanding ourselves. We will still have enemies, and we must defend ourselves against them. But we will earn more friends. To exploit fear is shameful. To protect ourselves from old dangers as well as new dangers is-"
"Logical!"
"Shut up, Spock! And listen!"

"But it would be irresponsible for me as President to propose such a large amount of additional spending without proposing a way to pay for it. This used to be thought of as a Republican principle, although it never really was any more Republican than Democrat. We have a great deal of unfinished business in this country. We have a great many challenges ahead. So we can't spend the government into oblivion. It's just not realistic, nor is it right.

It is also not right to continue to ask the most sacrifice from those among us who are least able to bear it-the sick, the old, the very young, the overworked and underpaid, the most vulnerable in our society, all of whom were hurt terribly by the failure of the federal government to support the states in their efforts to provide the help that the richest nation in the history of the world is fully capable of providing. Nor should we ask more of the middle class, who continue to bear a disproportionate tax burden. I must also note that it is from these families, struggling to maintain their American Dream that most of soldiers have come. These families have made their contribution.

So I will introduce legislation to repeal most of the so-called Bush tax cut as it predominately affects the wealthiest 1%, and the wealthiest 10% of our nation. In addition we will increase taxes on corporations---not to 1970s levels, but closer to a fair share, considering the benefits that corporations have reaped by being able to conduct their business within the social and legal and physical infrastructure that the American people pay for with their hard-earned taxes.

Finally, a portion of that $87 billion will go to the new Apollo Project-a public/private effort to create the new American industrial revolution in new self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable energy technologies. I'll go into much more detail about that project in a few days. But this is a plan to ensure that never again will America spill blood for oil. It is an extremely exciting new start for American industry, to once again lead the world, to boldly go where no nation has gone before."

"Captain!"
"What is it, Spock? Can't you see I'm watching this?"
"But I have just logically deduced how we can reverse the process and return to our own time and place and timeline."
"Very good, Spock. But what's your hurry? Don't you want to see how this turns out?"

United Nations Once Again Hot Dog! I mean, Boudin Blanc!

Crisis was averted today as the U.S. announced it has secured support from France for a UN resolution to become a limited partner in the Bush Administration Iraq venture. President George Bush made the announcement after lunch at the White House with the French Ambassador.

“We are happy to be partners in the fight against terrorism with our oldest ally,” President Bush said.

The French Ambassador presented him with a ceremonial check, which was signed, with that dry Gallic humor for which the French are so famous, “the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys.”

Standing beside a giant Perrier bottle, the President munched on what he described as “the best French Fries I’ve ever tasted. They sure make good French fries over there,” he quipped. “We’ll be sending a whole lot of them to our boys in Iraq, along with a selection of fine French cheese.”

He also touted another menu item, which he called a “French hot dog.” Reporters learned later that he was speaking of boudin blancs, a French white sausage. The President was so enthusiastic about them, his press spokesman said, that he’s requested that major league baseball teams begin offering them at all ball parks, beginning with this year’s World Series.

The President also announced changes to the federal school breakfast school program standard menu, which will now include French toast and croissants. In addition, all standardized tests administered to U.S. school children above grade three will require that the student be able to spell “croissant” or the student will not advance.

The President was joined by vice president Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General and the Secretary of State in a toast to the new international agreement. “With Champagne,” The Attorney General noted. “The Real Thing. From France. If it’s not from France, you can’t call it Champagne. That’s the law,” he warned, speculating that non-compliance could very well fall under the provisions of the Patriot Act.

The President and vice-president then had an informal contest to see who could eat a plateful of French cheeses the fastest, while a good natured debate ensued between Secretary Powell and Secretary Rumsfeld over the relative merits of Pinot Noir and Merlot.

They then prepared for an official state dinner at the White House, where twenty French chefs would be preparing a special delicacy for the Bush team, filet de crow.

Quagmire

It took the Clinton administration six years to substantially undo the damage that twenty years of Republican administrations had done to America. George Bush has not been president for even three years and the damage his administration has done will take a decade if not longer to even approximately correct. Even apart from the destruction and deaths, some can never be undone.


When Clinton took office, the American economy and position in the world was threatened by deficits and debts and the perception that the federal government was helpless if not clueless in dealing with them. Social problems were worsening and the natural environment was being heedlessly destroyed. Clinton maneuvered to win what he most needed to win out of what it was possible to win in Congress. He lost big on health care. He gave in big on welfare. He gambled that the injustices in welfare and in his trade and globalism efforts, and the mistakes in his environmental legislation, would be corrected, because prosperity and peace would give him or the next Democratic president the political muscle to do so.

He tried to reorient a foreign policy distorted by Vietnam, the reactions and subsequent adventurisms of the Reaganites. His record is mixed here as well, but despite a hostile military establishment (which seems remarkably unbothered by George Bush's draft dodging and lack of military experience) he managed to steer the ship of state away from tragically misconceived military interference and quasi-military conquest.

Now in 2003 we face the catastrophe of having Nixon and Reagan in one president. Bush has imposed his Reagan-Redux voodoo economics, presenting future presidents with the most enormous debt in history. Among the many astonishing elements of this black magic act is the lack of outcry, the fact that supply side economics, having proven to be worth less than the napkin the Laffer curve was reputedly first sketched on, is back without debate. It's as if the late 1980s never happened, that a book title of the period did not cry out "America: What Went Wrong?"

Yet forewarned has not proven to be forearmed. The United States had ample warning from knowledgeable analysts as well as governments of many nations and millions of people around the world that its military attack on Iraq would come to grief. How quickly everything has become its opposite. The policies and responses that lived by 9/11 are dying by terrorist bombs and counter-terrorist violence in the Middle East and Iraq. So quickly the quagmire, and we are beset with Reagan deficits and Nixonian warfare simultaneously.

Even the clearest achieved goal of the Iraq war has backfired. No, not deposing Saddam, but turning Iraq into an American military base so the military presence in Saudi Arabia could be ended. Now the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia has been essentially accomplished, and therefore the United States is forced to stay in Iraq or lose its land-based presence in the region. For this reason---which you will never hear officially articulated---there will be no quick end to the quagmire.

American troops, already unpopular among Iraqi people for aggressive and at times what has appeared to be criminally brutal operations, will be forced by recent blatant terrorist violence, to be even more aggressive and violent. The cost of the military presence will go higher, as the administration is compelled to actually accomplish some reconstruction, which will cost even more.

Recent polls and surveys indicate that the American people are not happy about this, and they are no longer enthralled with G.W. Bush, Commander in Chief. There are several Democratic candidates with the potential to be superior presidents. But their work is being made more difficult and more thankless every day, just to get back to where we were, more or less, in November 2000. Perhaps if this president is visionary enough, and can communicate that vision convincingly, and can back it up, such a scale won't be relevant. We will truly move on. But with a better than average, politics as usual president, it will take a very long time to get back to the condition of 2000, if we get there at all. If Bush is re-elected, I doubt we ever will.

For an all too pointed Labor Day message, look for Molly Ivins' August 28 column, which I hope you will find here.

More Like It

Patience, non-California fans. It'll all be over soon.

Another usually reliable poll, the L.A. Times, gave Bustamante a double digit lead over Arnold, and this week the media finally came around. They're a bit befuddled because he's not the typical media candidate. With his formal diction he reminds me of newsreels of 1940s statesmen, though not staid--just good enunciation. He seemed a little nervous on national TV but he held his own and made sure he got his answers in before the anchor went into his act. He could catch on, who knows? The retro candidate.

The news continues to be good for Bustamante, as unions and officeholders continue to endorse him, and even Gray Davis is now publicly supporting a vote for Bustamante as well as a no vote on recall. That's pretty significant, although it may be an act of desperation. But it is a strategy that could work. It's now close to even money whether Davis will be recalled, and Bustamante is pretty likely to be the top vote getter. Things will probably get nasty from here on out, though, because he's the frontrunner. Arnold has tried to make him sound like another Gray. That won't wash. But expect an onslaught backed by those who suddenly realize that if he wins, they--being rich and corporate--will have to pay more taxes, more than Gray Davis could get away with levying on them. How many minutes will go by before we start hearing the inevitable charge of "class warfare"?

If he can survive that, Cruz will cruise.
More and more it looks like Bustamante could very well be the next Governor of CA, if not this year, next time.

The Dashed Election Guide

Cousin Lemuel writes from Ontario(where he had to cope with the Great Blackout out east: we note in passing the counter-intuitive reports that say Toronto had more serious looting problems than did New York City), and where an election is likely to be "called" soon (rather than recalled). He writes of his own election blues dilemmas. His list is as follows:

I'm tired of investing hope and washing out.

I'm not sure about any of "my' candidates. Will they act like I want them to act, on the outside chance they are elected?

Or will they find a "higher calling" a more "strategic analysis"?

My time is more precious to me and I don't feel like wasting it.

What better use of time than a democratic struggle?

Yes, if the candidate is trustworthy and simpatico.

Once I'm there (in the campaign) auto-pilot will take over. I will be campaign-man and do my duty.

I'm not sure I like that any more.

All good points. Then he asks us for advice. We are not used to being asked for advice. Usually we are given it. "Love it or leave it," is a frequent example. However, we will hazard the following Point of View (which is not Advice, mind.)

Radical though we may be according to prevailing standards, such as they are, we tend to adhere to the only and oft-repeated pronouncements of Grandma, which were two:
"You live long enough, you see everything."
"We do the best we can."

We tend to feel that pretty much sums up life, the universe and everything.

Applied to elections, it results in this philosophy: what you're doing basically is hiring somebody. You have to hire somebody, you've got a limited number of probably limited quality job candidates, and you have to choose one.

So you choose the best available for the job. If you're not confident they'll do the job the way you would like---and in politics, that's pretty much a given---then we tend to fall back on the Hippocratic Oath test: which is likely to do the least harm. (Could be we'd also call it the Democratic Oath.) This alone made us staunch supporters of Al Gore in the last U.S. presidential bash. It was in many ways the reason we don't regret voting for Clinton twice: he did some good, he did some unforgivably bad, but basically he did a lot less harm than his immediate predecessor did, and his opponents would.

This by the way is our "general election" philosophy. Not necessarily our nominating or primary election approach. Right now the U.S. is poised to begin primary elections for president, and there's six or eight Democratic candidates vying for the eventual party nomination: to be one of the two major party candidates. We believe this is where a thousand flowers should be blooming, and a vigorous debate should ensue. Many people are choosing sides now, and although we have our eye on a couple of the candidates, we're not choosing yet. We haven't heard the debate. So far the debate has made health care a major issue---one candidate went out on a limb with an ambitious plan, it got a lot of voter interest and response, and so the other candidates had to come up with their own plans. This is how the process should work.

The candidates state their positions. They influence each other. We see who seems to have the goods in terms of smarts, ability to communicate, and smell. Do they smell trustworthy, resourceful, etc.? How electable are they? Some people make their choice on this basis very early. Things change too much and too fast for that, we believe. Of course, if some absolute pig is gaining momentum and emerging as a preemptive front-runner, then strategies change.

Here in the U.S., the issues that we will be looking at in judging presidential candidates will be: health care, campaign finance and global heating. Of course we'll be checking out positions on Iraq, foreign policy in general, other domestic issues, but assuming the candidates in our running are all for quieting the current imperialist warmongering (time for that advice again, eh?) we see these as the most important long-term issues. A comprehensive single-payer health insurance is the most desperately needed economic and social change, cutting across class lines from upper middle to the bottom. Elections are always going to be less than completely meaningful as long as candidates and officeholders can be bought. Global heating is the most important factor for the next generation and the ones following. Already we're seeing effects that may well be charged to global heating, including as many as 10,000 deaths in France from a heat wave and drought. If the number proves out, and the science suggests culpability, it could well be that the climate crisis has already killed more people than 9/11.

The contemporary voter may often be all too easily hoodwinked by image, but there's some sense in the instinct to elect people who can communicate. Only the ability to communicate can leverage enough power to overcome inertia, not to mention the very monied interests. It's chaos theory come to politics, the way a little can go a long way.

So charisma can be a plus, however dangerous it also can be. The point perhaps is to look at it objectively. Not only am I swayed, but are these positions solid, grounded in fact and analysis and good purpose, and are others swayed? Then maybe you've got a candidate.

When a candidate gets elected, they have to go do the job. It is a job like any other: you have to do it every day, but there are still only 24 hours in that day, and you are still only a human being. At this point, a candidate's self-knowledge can be important. How aware are they of their motivations, of their situation? Clinton may not have been completely clear on his motives, but he usually understood his political situation. JFK may not have been particularly astute psychologically, but he had a sense of irony, and that's almost as good. He almost always knew the score.

As voters and citizens, we tend to project a lot on our leaders. We see the flaws in them we'd rather not look at in ourselves. We don't give them the benefit of the doubt that we certainly give ourselves. Few officeholders have much power. Sometimes the ones who seem to be "getting something done" are getting it done because the monied interests want it done, and they're on the payroll already. So a little patience in general, but keep after them on issues. The citizen's responsibility does not end with the vote.

So that's the Voting Guide. Working on a campaign is a more stringent commitment, but if it helps get issues debated, that alone may be worth it. If your candidate gets elected, you might get easier access for your views. And the great thing about hiring somebody for public office is that you can help fire them at the end of their term without getting sued.

Why is the Press Ignoring Bustamante?


It's been all Arnold all the time in the national media, which unfortunately is to be expected. But California media has not been doing much better. Last weekend the Field Poll, which has a consistent record for accurate predictions, showed that Cruz Bustamante led Arnold among likely voters. This was before there was anything that could be described as a Bustamante campaign---no paid media, no endorsements, no speeches or statements after the announcement. You'd think that this would be a wakeup call, that the media should start taking the lieutenant governor seriously. No such luck.

The Sunday SF Chronicle news section was all over Arnold, and featured a photo of the stripper candidate pushing out her chest. But no Bustamante. Nothing. Or as they must be saying across the state, Nada.

It was the same story days later when Arnold had a press conference and then a media-ted meeting with advisers. The media was obsessed with the answers Arnold gave and didn't give. When was he going to give specifics on how he would solve California's problems, and especially balance its budget?

Meanwhile, Bustamante laid out a plan for dealing with the state budget. He gave specifics. He was largely ignored again. He maybe got a paragraph or two in a story on Gray Davis and his "from the heart" speech.

This week Bustamante got endorsements from some labor unions and from the California Democratic congressional delegation. Will this finally earn him some media credibility? Don't bet on it. The media would rather carp on the guy who won't give specifics than report on the guy who does. Gary Coleman has gotten more coverage than Bustamante.

Somewhere we heard or read a reporter saying that the media is re-learning how to cover campaigns. They're trying to figure out how people want them covered. So far their answer is to follow the celebrity. Cover it so that stories on news pages and news channels are indistinguishable from Entertainment Tonight. Forget any civic responsibility in framing the issues that will actually matter to the people of California at a time of crisis, the issues that the governor of California actually has to deal with, and reporting on what the candidates say about them. Talk about your harvest of shame.

If I'm a labor leader or a Latino leader I'm telling my people: Look, they're ignoring you again. They're ignoring what matters to your lives, they're ignoring the candidate who is willing to talk about taxing the rich more fairly and taxing wealthy businesses (and there are plenty of those) to do what government in a democracy is supposed to do. They're ignoring you. Get yours at the polls.

RECALL ARNOLD!
by Theron Dash

Now in our second minute of gathering signatures on petitions to recall Governor Arnold (we still can't spell his last name---reason number one to get rid of the sucker!), the Recall Governor Arnold Movement aka Terminate the Terminator is pioneering the politics of Anticipatory Boredom Remover.

Just thinking about how dull life (i.e. media) will be without a recall campaign is motivation enough. But think as well of all the really hard stuff we'll have to hear about when the circus leaves town. Fortunately California leads the way once again, especially in our cutting edge entertainment-news- industrial complex. Not only have we solved the budget crisis in the default choice of the truly desperate (when too little money is available for too much and there are no good choices, the solution is to throw it all away as fast as possible) but we see the future ordained by the logic of cable TV news: total recall all of the time. Like so totally.

Recall Arnold is the place to be. That he may not win the election is beside the point---who cares about the other nonentities and politicians? Let's get started, and give people something to sign in the Safeway lot.

Total Recall

Okay, so that's not the first Arnold pun you've seen, nor by the level of cleverness adored by major media, will it be the last. Every day changes the California recall election, but unless something major happens in the next 24 hours, the basic situation may be set: Arnold is in, Issa (the rabid reactionary who started this recall mess) is out, Feinstein is not getting in, nor is Riordan. But Democrat Lt. governor Cruz Bustamante is running with the slogan: vote no on the recall, then vote for me. And it looks like the state courts are going to let the recall election proceed in October as scheduled.

So far Bustamante is taking some hits for hypocrisy, but what he's done is just plain good sense. Recent polls showed Gray Davis even weaker than before as the recall became reality. The ballot is in two parts: yes or no on the recall is the first part. Right now sentiment is tracking yes. The second part is where you vote for the replacement governor, should the current one be recalled. Since this is not a "vote of confidence" election, and it makes no sense to recall the current governor in part one and then vote him back into office in part two, Davis cannot be a candidate to replace himself. Davis wants an all the eggs in one basket strategy for the Dems, to totally defeat the recall. But lots of Dems, in and out of office, were getting nervous about this all last week. Then Big Arnold announced, and Bustamante made his move. (Little Arnold-that is, Gary Arnold---also announced, but the only voters who care about that are the ones who are uncertain whether to vote for him or Larry Flynt.)

The media is currently concentrating on Big Arnold, and whether his candidacy might be derailed by "revelations." not from on high but from down low. Of course this is what the media would be concentrating on, especially with a candidate who announced on the Tonight Show. And they'll probably keep their cameras trained on the Arnold show for the next few weeks.

In which case, they'll miss the story. (Hey, they wouldn’t be the media if they didn’t.) Unless Arnold runs a brilliant campaign (his first words hardly suggest he will) and Bustamante runs a terrible one (his announcement was not very well handled, media-wise), then the governorship is likely to remain Democratic. And here's why:

The recall so far has all been about polls, hype, and getting people to register their anger and fear by signing their name outside the supermarket or post office. Californians will sign anything. It's their California-given right. But most of them don't bother voting, even on the propositions their signatures put on the ballot.

Voting is a different dynamic. It all happens the same day, so old-fashioned organizing and organizations are important to getting people to the polls. The Democrats swept the state last time. The patriotic wave for Bush has mostly crested, the surf is no longer up. There may not be a lot of grassroots GOP enthusiasm for Arnold. Rabid conservatives upset with Arnold's views on abortion and gun control may very well go to Bill Simon, their candidate last time, who is on the ballot this time, too.

By the numbers, Cruz Bustamante was the top vote getter in the state just two years ago. It's not because he has startling name recognition. I doubt if he's ever been on the Tonight show. He's not even especially telegenic. But he's a Democrat and he's Latino. Latino voters know him well. No Latino has ever been elected governor. California has no majority population, but the next time it does, it will be Latino. Bustamante is the future, and the future may be now.

So now the Democrats have two decent chances to hold the governorship. Gray Davis will put a lot of money into defeating the recall. That in itself may succeed. Unions will provide organizing, and get their people to the polls. (That Arnold is so aggressively anti-union will help their motivation.) They will be urged to vote no on the recall. But regardless of how they vote on the first question, they can vote on the second, and chances are they'll vote for Bustamante. He is after all the Lt. Governor.

But Davis has indicated he intends to spend the next couple of months governing, "trying to make the lives of Californians better." That's a somewhat better strategy than he started out with, which was Issa-bashing. Bustamante immediately criticized it and told him not to dare going negative. He's running again on "experience," even though this is his greatest weakness---he ran and won on experience, and has gone a long way towards turning it into a dirty word.
People are looking for leadership, and Arnold is sounding that theme. The problems of California are not the fault of Gray Davis, but his leadership has been lacking. But at a time when Davis' best hope is bold leadership and laying out a courageous vision for the future, he seems to be saying he's going to hunker down.

Dissatisfaction with that may be enough to push the recall button to Bye Bye Gray. Then Bustamante should win. If he can articulate a vision and show leadership, he's got the experience to make people more comfortable voting for him in time of crisis.

He may lose some votes on the left to the Green Party candidate and Arianna Huffington, although I wouldn't be surprised if she withdraws in September in favor of Cruz. Peter Camejo is the Green Party candidate, and in some ways has better credentials in advocating for Latinos. But he's running his campaign against Gray Davis. Democrats are not going to vote for him, especially with the memory of Nader and his indirect role in the Bush putsch. Rank and file Democrats are likely to vote against the recall and for Bustamante.

With moderate to conservative Democrats and an energized Latino electorate, Bustamante should have enough to win in a very crowded field. I don't think the Hollywood liberals will vote for Arnold, even if he is pretty liberal on social issues. Not if Cruz looks like he can win. Sometimes liberal guilt actually works out for the best.

A lot will depend on Bustamante. Can he articulate a strong, clear and sensible vision? Can he differentiate himself from Davis without criticizing Davis? He is supporting a "no" on recall, so he's not running against Davis. Then again, he is. It's delicate but doable.

This applecart might be spilled by a higher profile Democrat getting into the race. Leon Panetta is mentioned. Bad idea. Bad for the party, bad for him, now that Bustamante is in the race. I don't know what Panetta's political base is. I do know that he often comes across on TV as softly arrogant, especially when he starts every sentence with "Obviously." Few if any of the Clinton appointees did well at the polls last time. (Come on, you can't count Hillary.)

So pretty soon we may not be talking about Total Recall. We'll be looking at Cruz control.