President Gore, President Kerry, and the Great Vacationer

Some guys have all the luck. Or they make their own luck, by hiring the right sort of thieves, knaves and evildoers.

The opinion stated here in this space that voting rights needs to be one of the top campaign issues in the next election cycles got some ammunition from Paul Krugman's new column in the New York Times on how the election of 2000 was definitely stolen, the election of 2004 may have been, and if people don't wake up, you can kiss 06 and 08 goodbye as well.

Krugman writes:

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore…But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy…Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.”

Katharine Harris, who parlayed her service to the Bushcorps into a seat in Congress, is well known for her partisan decisions as Secretary of State in Florida, as well as overseeing the disqualification of thousands of legal voters through the misuse of a computerized felon list, unchecked and full of errors.

Although Gumbel’s book doesn’t question the 2004 outcome, Krugman cites two reports on it, one by the DNC and the other by Congressman John Conyers. Both describe the hours long lines in predominately Democratic districts, caused by too few voting machines, and people forced to cast provisional ballots which were never counted.

Conyers also cites case after case of partisanship by the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio who also ran the Bush campaign there (remember that Ohio was the only state that Bush visited on election day?) – “makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.”

Krugman concludes:

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation. "

Meanwhile, the Daily Pick reveals that President Bush's latest accomplishment is breaking the all-time record for most vacation days by a president of the United States. Ronald Reagan held the old record of 335 days, though Reagan did it over eight years. President Bush surpassed it in nearly half the time!

And despite the presence of Cindy Sheehan and a growing number of Gold Star Mothers and other protestors, not to mention world press, a few miles away, Bush has two more weeks on his current vacation---and three years and change to set a standard in brush-clearing obliviousness that will challenge the next generation of figureheads for election thieves.

It Takes A Mother

Cindy Sheehan began as a news item, was speedily inflamed into a controversy, and is fast become a phenomenon, maybe even a legend.

Before all of that, she was a mother---the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. That seems to be the center of her power over the American imagination at the moment.

The American penchant for the cult of personality can be disquieting, contending forces inflating virtues and flaws with equal vehemence. But even with that caution, that sense of unease, this phenomenon is amazing.

This is not a celebrity. This is not another pretty face. But this achingly real person is becoming the central symbol in a still expanding national drama.

She is the center of a storm of strong feelings on both sides, and despite contending pundits and bloggers, the real difference right now is that the usually anonymous American public is becoming part of this.

Just the past 24 hours illustrate this: a presumably angry opponent of her protest used a pickup truck to destroy a number symbolic grave markers---wooden crosses with the names of Americans killed in Iraq---that was part of the Camp Casey protest site outside Crawford, Texas. And shortly after that, a farmer who owns a larger piece of land nearby offered its use to Cindy Sheehan so Camp Casey could be relocated. He is a veteran and had supported her silently, until the crosses were run down.

Meanwhile the number of protestors in Crawford grows every hour, and George Bush is stuck a few miles away at his ranch, because to leave before the scheduled end of his vacation several weeks from now would be to admit defeat.

Among the expected arrivals is another Gold Star mother, whose son was killed in Iraq. More may follow.

Demonstrations in support of Cindy Sheehan have occurred already in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. Move On is sponsoring candlelight vigils in cities and towns all over the country for tonight (Wednesday). Information can be found here.

This is an unprecedented event, awesome if for only that reason. Nothing like this happened all the years of Vietnam. Whether the Rabid Right sensed this might happen, or their quick barrage of vicious character assassination helped create this phenomenon, the fact is that one American mother has become the symbol for the revolt of the usually voiceless, united with others heartfelt in their opposition to this war.

But as much as the Bushhead apologists would like to shift the focus onto favorite targets, what they must fear about this is the participation and leadership of families who have so far silently given up their young to a war begun by the arrogant and powerful, who sacrifice nothing and expected to reap the spoils.

Blind to the European Future?

Americans as a rule know little about Europe, possibly even less than Europeans knew about America a half century ago, when Europeans seemed to think Al Capone was still running Chicago and cowboys roamed the West. Well...maybe they were onto something.

Today’s American ignorance is less innocent. Along with the smug complacency and disbelief that we Americans could possibly learn anything from foreign lands, our ignorance of today’s Europe consists of holdover imagery carefully nurtured by big business Repubs, neocons who don’t want their delusions of empire spoiled by the hard-earned insights of Europe, and rabid rightists who certainly don’t want Americans to see European economic successes, particularly the vibrant manufacturing coupled with strong labor unions, universal health care and other social support---and workers with greater job security, shorter work week and more vacations!

A few years ago in The Unconquerable World, Jonathan Schell movingly described how the European Union was forging a system for permanent peace in the region that had put itself through hell for several hundred years, and the rest of the world twice in the twentieth century.

Then last year, in The European Dream, Jeremy Rifkin developed a case for Europe’s vision of the future replacing the American dream that has dominated globalism so far.

I just caught up to Thomas Geoghegan’s July 11 piece in the Nation magazine, just after the “no” votes on the EU Constitution in France and Holland surprised U.S. media into paying Europe some attention. Geoghegan begins by saying that the alarmist talk at the time was excessive, and that in most of Europe “things are pretty nice”---in ways that would make a lot of American envious.

He notes that a 2004 Goldman Sachs study shows that a big chunk of Europe has been doing at least as well economically as the U.S., and when you take a closer look behind the numbers, the picture gets even better.

The higher unemployment rate in France, for example, masks the fact that employed French workers are much more secure, and that over time, a higher proportion of American workers are out of work for significant periods than French workers. European standard of living is going up as fast as America’s by the numbers, but if you put a cash value on the extra leisure Europeans have due to shorter work weeks and more vacations, it’s likely it’s going up faster.

Why do American big business elites deride Europe? Possibly because the top execs don’t make as much there, and in France the income gap between top and bottom is decreasing, not increasing at an obscene rate as it is here.

Figuring in the anomalies of American employment figures, “It’s plausible that in the past ten years most of Europe has done better than the United States---even as Europeans keep working fewer hours.” Though he doesn’t mention it, Europeans also don’t have to spend exorbitant amounts on health care or pensions that their companies conveniently disappear when they get in trouble, while golden parachutes remain open; they don’t worry they might die without medical care, or that the retirement they thought was secure suddenly vanishes.

Geoghegan dismisses the euphoria over China’s economic gains---just catch-up, he maintains, as were Japan’s in the 70s. He derides Friedman’s ‘flat world” theory (i.e. globalized on the American model, with Chinese takeout) and drops this little tidbit that puts the lie to its rightist apologists:

“Last year, according to the WTO, German export goods had a value of more than $915 billion. China’s had a value of about $593 billion. In a so-called flat world, it turns out that the country with the world’s highest labor costs is the world’s champion exporter. Add in France, eta al, and the EU is even further ahead…"

A key to this is that while corporations in the US found it necessary to dismantle the nation’s industrial infrastructure and destroy the middle class to enrich the rich and slowly impoverish the rest (Let them eat Wal-Mart!), Europe held on to its factories and its industrial jobs, which have far more protections for workers than even unionized U.S. plants once did.

In the creation of economics and governments that engender prosperity while providing good jobs, security, health care and a better quality of life; in creating a more perfect union that, despite its ups and downs, is a nearly miraculous model of peace among nations, and even in how it is confronting the difficulties of multicultural societies that the US will also have to face in the 21st century, Europe is worth our close attention over here.

Over there, however, the danger (according to Geoghegan) is partly fostered by over here. “The threat to Europe right now,” he concludes, “is the violence of the rhetoric against the model [of Europe in the last decade], the bizarre gloom and doom when it is actually doing well. The nerve-wracking thing about Europe at the moment is the possibility that ordinary Europeans will lose their nerve and just cave in to their American-wannabe elites.”

To the Privatization Elite: Prove It Works, or Get Out of Town!

They’ve gotten away with this for far too long, living off the fantasies of their snake oil slogans, as well as their lies. Now is the time to call them on it all. If privatization of everything—-from prisons and schools to energy and water, and from health care to Social Security---is so great, let’s see you prove it.

There are enough examples out there now, some running for decades. Show us the money you saved. Show us the efficiency of the private sector, the magic of the marketplace in providing better and more affordable health care, cheaper energy, better schools at lower costs. Spare us the platitudes. Prove it. Prove that privatization works.

The time is right to make this demand because privatization has suffered what looks so far like it’s first major defeat. As Paul Krugman says in his column, Bush’ plan to “reform” Social Security was seen for what it was, as privatization of public insurance, turning it into a risky investment benefiting bankers rather than a guaranteed social safety net earned by every American worker for their old age.

Krugman draws some general lessons. For example: “But the campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war. “

The lies continue, he warns, as Bush officials lie shamelessly about the vulnerabilities and design of Social Security. But the “public's visceral rejection of privatization” should embolden Democrats to go after the Bushers for their “pattern of deception” on this and other major matters, Krugman says.

But there’s another opportunity here, which is to bring the debate on the whole mythology of privatization into a sharp focus, and finally demand that if proponents believe that privatization works so well, it’s time to prove it.


The policy of privatization emerged as one of the major mantras and most destructive changes that began in the 1980s and still threatens America’s future today. Privatization is another way that America turned itself inside-out, reversing what had been public with what had been private.

Privatization became policy in the Reagan years, when the relationship between big money (individuals and corporations) and politicians (mostly Repub and ultra-conservative, but not exclusively) stopped being kissing cousins and started on the road to blatant incest.

While big money worked its wonders behind the scenes, buying politicians, media outlets and making media stars (either merely subservient or wholly owned), the campaign succeeded politically through a new rhetoric: disguised as good old boy common sense, it was insidiously effective advertising sloganeering, so slippery and yet so outrageous that it left opponents speechless.

Privatization followed the so-called taxpayer revolt of the 1970s, which cut municipal and state taxes so severely that public schools, public health and public infrastructure gradually but decisively deteriorated. It also followed Reagan’s federal tax cuts and budget cuts, which further reduced public funding to these state and local programs.

Then came the heavy guns of rhetoric. How were all these public services going to be financed with less tax money, opponents wanted to know. Easy—privatize them! They were just wasting the taxpayer’s hard earned money anyway, full of fraud and abuse. That kind of thing would never go on in a private company! Private companies have to be efficient, they have to deliver. Let them compete and free the magic of the marketplace. Replace the pencil-pushers with hard-nosed can-do entrepreneurs, the kind that made America great.

After the junk bond scandals of the 80s, and certainly after Enron, which privatized energy and rippedoff California’s taxpayers for billions to pay for electricity at prices that had no basis in any reality except the deception and greed of corporate criminals and their political supporters, that such arguments would be laughed off the stage. But they are still being made, every day.

The latest arena is water. Municipalities all over North America (as well as in the UK and virtually everywhere globalization reaches) are under pressure to sell their water systems to corporations. Who, they claim, can deliver water more efficiently at a better price to consumers, while relieving taxpayers of the burden.

Water is just about the last major public utility to survive in America. Despite all the bottles of water everyone carries, and all the pollution and chemical poisons that efficient private industries have poured into the rivers and lakes, and leached into the water table (for getting others to pay for your waste is part of being efficient), America’s municipal water systems are still quite good. They deliver reasonably high quality and healthy water to every home reliably and at low cost.

Not in Atlanta, however, when it turned to a private company to supply its water. The company withdrew from the market after several years of disaster, including violation of federal drinking water health standards. Ten regional water systems in the UK were privatized, resulting in 50% price hikes, and soaring disconnection rates, thanks to efficient meters that automatically shut off the water when a customer failed to “pre-pay.”

Most other privatizations have been equally disastrous or worse. Even the war in Iraq has been privatized, with privately contracted torture management and Halliburton’s efficient use of food service funds to provide soldiers with spoiled food while creating sumptuous feasts for company executives and their cronies.

The time is also ripe to use the “prove it” demand to change the health care debate. The US privatized health care system is in effect nothing less than barbarous. The burden of proof should not be for proponents of public funding for universal health care, but for the supporters of the current system to prove that it shouldn’t be dismantled immediately, and the officers of HMOs forced to get all their medical care in emergency rooms.

Tipping---But Which Way?

The “tipping point” terminology has been used significantly for the second time in a week---first in regard to the climate crisis, and Sunday in a column by Frank Rich entitled “Someone Tell the President the War is Over.”

Rich points out that recent polls show the American public disapproves of the war in Iraq and the presidency of GW Bush in almost exactly the same percentages as disapproved of the war in Vietnam and the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, shortly before Johnson announced he wouldn’t run again.

“But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor,” Rich writes:

Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press."

Like LBJ in 1968, the crucial wound is waning support (if not, as in LBJ’s case, growing opposition) within the president’s own party. For GW, it begins with his most rabid supporters:

“The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.) “

But the force that is likely to end the war, Rich says, is the Republican party regulars, particularly in Congress, as they come closer to the 2006 elections. That’s why, Rich writes, the balance towards ending the war “crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio.”

After noting that it was in a speech in Ohio that Bush began to make the case for war in Iraq based on “a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype,” exaggeration and “false premises.” But it was last week in a special election in a solid Republican district Ohio that Democrat Paul Hackett got 48% of the vote---much closer to winning than anyone predicted. Moreover, Hackett is a former Marine reservist who served in Iraq and called GW Bush a “chickenhawk” during the campaign (for the uninitiated, a chickenhawk is a war hawk who doesn’t serve in the armed forces, and certainly doesn’t advise his or her children to do so.) He made the war in Iraq a major issue in his campaign.

Republicans noticed. Rich writes that congressional Republicans will perform the coup de grace on the war if they want to get reelected---and that’s a done deal, because the war isn’t going to go any better. Rich concludes:

“Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.”

Rich’s arguments are pervasive and persuasive, and supported by other numbers he doesn’t cite. Another poll shows that almost exactly the same percentage of Americans believe the U.S. is winning the war on terror---a paltry 38%---as support the war in Iraq. This suggests that Bush has reached to the floor of his most ardent supporters---somewhere around a third of the electorate. And if feuding rabid righters are any indication, even that floor may collapse.

But there are possible problems with Rich’s analysis. His analogy with Lyndon Johnson, apart from it being at two different points in the election cycle, fails to account for the differences in the two men. Though he doggedly pursued it and tried to punish any perceived disloyalty to his leadership, Johnson was conflicted, bedeviled, even fatalistic about the Vietnam war. GW Bush appears to be a true believer. Johnson was a man of reason much of the time, who seemed to care deeply about civil rights and wanted to create a Great Society. He was also a consummate politician. GW Bush is a zealot, with no inclination towards compromise for the good of the country, or even the good of his party. He has shown no inclination to separate himself from the neocon ideologues led by Dick Cheney.

So while US generals talk about troop reductions, Bush talks about America not losing its nerve in Iraq, and refuses to compromise on anything. Plus, this week he specifically said that the US considers the use of force an option in the continuing dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
So we may be at a tipping point, but which way is this ship of state going to tip?

The Bushites clearly feel that they can do anything they want, and are accountable to no one. This may turn out to be the beginning of the end in Iraq, but it also may very well be a time of great danger.