Background: "Fahrenheit 9/11"

I saw "Fahrenheit 9/11" at the Metreon in San Francisco on opening night. The screening itself had the feeling of a political rally, with a line hundreds of people long stretching from the second floor (where the movie was being screened) down a long flight of stairs to the first floor, a buzz of excited voices in the air, activists walking the line handing out literature as we waited eagerly. 

The tension continued to build when we got inside the theater, as we were subjected to a ton of ads, then a succession of trailers for cookie-cutter big-budget movies that never seemed to end, to the point where big boos went through the room when each new trailer started and we knew we had to wait longer for the movie we'd paid for to start. 

The Metreon, the multiplex to beat all multiplexes, was and is a hub of vulgar hyper-commercialization and lowest common denominator fare, so it was an odd fit for a somewhat radical political flick. The fact that Moore's movie was at the Metreon showed just how much money the owners expected to make from it, a hunch that would turn out to prove correct. "Fahrenheit" would go on to become the biggest-grossing documentary of all time, a distinction it still holds. 

The timing couldn't have been better for Michael Moore. He was a hot commodity as a filmmaker, as his previous movie ("Bowling for Columbine") had won an Oscar for best documentary and the subject matter of "Fahrenheit 9/11" (the awful and staggeringly corrupt presidency of George W. Bush) was very relevant in the U.S.--where a presidential election was scheduled in less than five months--and the rest of the civilized world, which couldn't wrap their collective heads around the stumblebum cowboy personality or unilateralist policies of W. The French, who had a particular disdain for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, awarded Moore with the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. 

My feature article was as much a fact check of the movie as a review. I generally liked Michael Moore, and felt like his heart was in the right place, but I found him to be sloppy at times in his thinking and presentation, favoring stunts and plays to audiences' emotions over sharp, objective political analysis of the kind other documentarians engaged in. For better or worse, "Fahrenheit" exhibited Moore's usual characteristics and techniques, but ultimately I had to give him credit for bringing vitally important topics--the theft of the 2000 election, Bush's failure to heed pre-9/11 intelligence warnings, Bush's protection of the Saudis, the lies that took us into Iraq--to a mainstream audience who had been shielded from this information by a gutless mainstream media. GOP shenanigans in Ohio and irrational fears of terrorism helped Bush gain a second term, but never have I seen a film director put forth such a monumental effort to sway a presidential election toward the side of right.  

Fahrenheit 911: Is it all just an illusion?

This piece was originally published 8/29/04 at getunderground.com. For background information, click here.

"Fahrenheit 911" has revived the conspiracy theory accusation fad. Since Moore's movie effectively strips George W. Bush of any shred of legitimacy, it's easy to laugh off the right's criticisms of "Fahrenheit" as politically motivated, but such reflexive dismissiveness is little better than the angry denunciations of Republicans who routinely jerk from the right knee without having seen the movie. 

How does Moore's case stand up to cross-examination?

Deep Down in Florida

"Fahrenheit 911" begins with the 2000 presidential election. Before a legitimate count had been done in Florida on election night, Bush's cousin John Ellis gave the go-ahead for Fox News to call the election for Bush. The major networks followed suit minutes later, creating the premature impression in most voters' minds that Bush had won the election, and thus that Gore was trying to steal it in the weeks to follow.

As investigative journalist Greg Palast (who covered Florida for the London Guardian and the BBC) has pointed out, the Bush family shenanigans in Florida were front-page news--in Great Britain, and all the countries that saw a prime time BBC segment covering the same. Back in the United States, the major American media simply cleaned up after their extended hit on Al Gore by maintaining a stoic silence as they shoveled the dirt on Gore's political casket following Bush's 5-4 Supreme Court victory.

Moore pointedly mentions that African-Americans were disenfranchised, but leaves out much of the backstory that gives weight to his case. According to Greg Palast: 1) in 1998, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and governor Jeb Bush revived a law from the Reconstruction period that denied felons--mostly minority and 90% Democrat--the right to vote; 2) Republican Secretary of State (and eventual co-chairperson of the Bush-Cheney Florida operation) Katherine Harris then awarded a no-bid contract to Choicepoint, a private firm with Republican ties, to draw up a list of felons for use by the state of Florida; 3) when Choicepoint discovered that there were numerous errors on the list (people who had committed felonies in other states whose voting rights had been restored, non-felons who had the same name as felons, people who were accused of committing felonies in the future), the firm sent a letter to Katherine Harris offering to verify the legitimacy of the names on the list before passing it along, but Katherine Harris said her department would handle the task; 4) Harris failed to verify the names, and tens of thousands of people on the list were unable to vote, other than the small number who went through the rigorous appeals process to have their rights restored before the election. Ninety percent of the names on the list were erroneous in a BBC sample. Considering that the list was composed of 55% Gore-leaning minorities, it's a fair bet that had the law been correctly implemented, with full verification, Gore would have bested Bush's 537-vote margin many times over.

Another thing Moore didn't explore in much detail was the number of people who did vote, but had their votes disqualified. In Palm Beach County alone, Gore lost 6,600 votes because of a flawed ballot design. The outdated punchcard voting systems that served minority districts across the state helped invalidate 95,000 black votes statewide, at ten times the rate of white votes, according to the US Commission on Civil Rights. The ACLU sued after the election to make voting systems uniform.

When the invalidated overvotes (ex: voters who punched Gore's name and wrote his name on the write-in section of the ballot) were tallied after the election, Gore's victory margin swelled to a minimum of 15,000 votes, which is why election night exit polls showed a clear Gore victory. Florida law states that votes are to be counted based on the "clear intention of the voter." Moore is not stretching the truth to say that the clear intention of the voter was not honored in Florida.

Bush's War on Terror, pre-9/11

Faced with the worst job growth since Herbert Hoover and record deficits, and unpopular--although not highly publicized--stances on most major issues, Bush has made national security the touchstone of his re-election campaign. Moore contends that Bush did little to stop terror in the months prior to 9/11.

The charge of pre-9/11 national security inadequacy on Bush's part has engendered howls of derision on the right, but is backed up by mountains of evidence too vast to bear full inclusion in Moore's movie. At the end of the Clinton Administration, counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke had weekly meetings with the heads of the Justice Department and the FBI to sift through intelligence and coordinate responses; these meetings were discontinued under Bush. Clarke, based on his long and competent experience, was head of the Clinton counter-terror effort, but under Bush, Clarke was demoted and forced to go through Bush National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with his many urgent and specific proposals. Clarke repeatedly asked for meetings with the principals (i.e. key decision-makers) in the Bush Administration, but was not able to get a meeting until one week before the attack, on September 4, 2001. In fact, prior to 9/11, Al-Qaeda was the central topic of only two of the roughly 100 Bush team national security meetings. The morning of September 11, Rice was set to give a national security speech--on the imminent need for missile defense.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, the top law enforcement official in the U.S., had numerous oversights: switching the Justice Department focus from counter-terrorism to drugs and pornography; downsizing a program designed to monitor Al-Qaeda suspects in the US; and denying an FBI request on September 10, 2001 for more anti-terror agents. Ashcroft did not mention Al-Qaeda as one of his department's top priorities in a list drawn up in the months prior to 9/11, though he was concerned enough for his own safety to stop flying commercial airliners in the summer of 2001. Rice and other Bush officials have claimed that they were re-creating the counter-terror response from the ground up, but one must question sacrificing day-to-day vigilance in favor of a comprehensive overhaul on an issue of such immediacy.

It's possible that Bush could not have stopped 9/11, even if he had paid closer attention to the growing Al-Qaeda threat about which he was repeatedly warned, but his strong opposition to formation of both the congressional and independent investigations of 9/11, his penny-pinching on the funding of the investigations once he gave in to their existence, his opposition to extending the independent commission in the final months of its investigation, his stonewalling on producing documents, and his unwillingness to testify publicly (or alone, in private) leave him pretty defenseless. Had the Bush Administration had little culpability, one would think they would have briskly authorized an investigation, as FDR did immediately after Pearl Harbor.

Bush/Saudi connections

The events of 9/11 gave Bush the political capital he needed to push the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moore asks why Iraq was targeted--when it had no ties to 9/11--instead of Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers. What follows is a lengthy accounting of long-standing business ties between Bush family and friends and the Saudis, including an account of the Saudi nationals (among them two dozen members of the bin Laden family) who were swiftly cleared to fly out of the U.S. in the days immediately after 9/11, when American commercial airspace was in lock down. We learn, among many other things, that Saudi money helped bail W. Bush out of a bad business venture, that Bush's good friend in the National Guard (whose name was blacked out of the military records released by the White House) had been a financial manager for Osama bin Laden's parents, and that Bush recount spokesman James Baker's law firm is representing the Saudis in a trillion-dollar lawsuit filed against them by families of 9/11 victims. With these and many more connections drawn, is it any wonder that Bush redacted 28 pages of the 9/11 congressional investigation report that dealt with alleged Saudi connections to 9/11?

At the same time, the U.S. has had close relations with the Saudis for decades because America's profligate auto-based lifestyle depends on Saudi Arabia's largest-in-the world oil reserves. The Saudis play a key role in the oil market, pumping up the volume when prices increase to subsidize low prices and stabilize the U.S. market. Undoubtedly Bush has especially-close relations with the Saudis, but that in itself is not so crucial as whether Bush's intimacy with the Saudis compromised national security.

Greg Palast, author of the indispensable The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, asserts that suspicions of Saudi ties to Al-Qaeda existed in the Clinton Administration, but the investigative approach was "go slow," not least because the Saudi royals refused to cooperate. When Bush came into office, investigations died entirely. 

Part of the difficulty in assessing the importance of the alleged Saudi-Al-Qaeda ties is that the Saudi royal family is several thousand large. If there was a connection, how many Saudi royal family members were in on it, and how high up the ladder were they? Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept, claims, based on two unnamed government sources, that four Saudi princes (including the long-time head of Saudi intelligence, Turki Aziz) and the former head of Pakistan's air force had ties to two Saudis in the U.S. who were linked to two of the San Diego-based 9/11 hijackers, and that, strangely enough, all but the untouchable Aziz died within months after the Saudi royal family heard through the grapevine that these connections were under investigation. If connections did exist, would a more aggressive posture by the Bush Administration have stopped 9/11? By presenting a gaggle of facts Moore sets up this vital question, without giving a clear answer. Many "Fahrenheit" detractors have criticized Moore for not nailing his case shut on the Saudis, but no one can know for certain without Saudi cooperation, and it's possible that Moore set out to do no more than stir up a dialogue over a potentially vital (and very under-discussed)  piece of the 9/11 puzzle.

The War President

In Osama bin Laden, Bush inherited a vicious and low target to go to war with. Moore doesn't spend much time on Afghanistan, other than to drop some intriguing tidbits into the mix: the Taliban had visited Texas in 1998 when Bush was a governor, to try to cut a deal with Texas-based Unocal, a company wishing to build pipelines across northern Afghanistan; and former Unocal representative Hamad Karzai became the U.S. hand-picked leader of Afghanistan, a not-so-enviable position after Bush siphoned military resources from Afghanistan and redirected them to Iraq.

What Moore didn't go into much detail about was that the Taliban, in addition to being brutal and uniquely backward, were harboring Al-Qaeda training camps and refused to give up Osama bin Laden, and that the Afghanistan operation, unlike the invasion of Iraq, had broad international support. As proposed placement of U.S. military bases has since shown, building and securing the pipeline was likely one of the incentives, but not the only one, or necessarily even the most important one.

Next Moore gives an account of Peace Fresno, a group of California peace activists who have meetings and occasional demonstrations. There don't appear to be any terrorists, or potential terrorists, or even violent or disruptive "elements" in Peace Fresno, but for some reason the local sheriff's office infiltrated their group with a mole who posed as an activist. This sketch serves to illuminate how long the arm of the law has grown since the passing of the Patriot Act, a topic alone worthy of a documentary, or a series of documentaries. Moore's footing on the civil liberties angle is firm but brief in "Fahrenheit," perhaps because he has so much to cover. 

The Patriot Act, since opposed by over 200 local governments in 37 states across the country, seems to have directed a fair amount of valuable resources where they don't belong, which is funny, because, as we find out next, the Oregon coastline isn't even secure from attack. Peaceful and unpopulated as the Oregon coastline is, I don't find this vignette to be an effective example of the shortchanging of security resources. Moore's instinct is correct, however, for despite a fondness for talking tough and busting the piggy bank open for top-heavy tax cuts and military hardware (which has starved struggling state and local governments of badly-needed revenue), Bush has often shortchanged homeland security by diverting funds to sparsely-populated red states and away from the cities where attacks are most likely.  This effectively dries up funding for first responders/firemen and policemen, port security, border security, airline security, and chemical plant security.

Iraq

After showing that the real enemies of the U.S. lie elsewhere (not mentioned: Pakistan), Moore shifts to Iraq. One big criticism of "Fahrenheit" has been that Moore began this sequence by showing a buoyant wedding party, happy shoppers, and a kid running with a kite on the day of the invasion. These shots can be seen as a ground-level view of the horror of war's disruption, or a whitewashing of the generally grim life in Iraq. One can be against the war and acknowledge that it was done in the name of oil and diversion without writing off Saddam Hussein's inhumanity and the terrible toll it had on the people of Iraq.

Following is now-infamous footage of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, interviews with GIs, and a shift into a more personal place as Moore features a series of interviews with Lila Lipscomb, a super-patriotic Flint, Michigan mother of a soldier over in Iraq. Rather than focus on the parade of administration lies and media complicity that led to the war, as many others have done so vividly, Moore shows the evolution of Lila from a gung-ho military booster to a fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq, with the death of her son. These scenes, as they gather in sadness and intensity, can be seen as compelling or manipulative, depending on the viewer's sensibility, but they cut to the central questions of war, pre-emptive war in particular: assuming such a thing exists, what determines a just war? Who has the human authority to make such a decision? If the decision is made, will anyone be held accountable? And why is it that the poor--those getting the least from the status quo--always seem to put their lives on the line defending the status quo for the comfortable?

On this last question, Michael Moore returns toward the end of "Fahrenheit" to the thing he is best known for: on-camera confrontations with unaccountable elites who mount center stage in our current sociopolitical dysfunction. To many people this may have been old hat: he's done it so many times before, it's staged, etc. Yet the fact remains that while congressional support for the Iraq invasion was overwhelming, only one member of Congress sent a child into harm's way. Can Moore be faulted for pointing out such an obvious disconnect?

Moore concluded with a quote from George Orwell to the effect that the central goal of warmakers is to consolidate power, to disarm opposition by keeping voters paralyzed by fear. Strong stuff, but not exactly a big leap in the face of a court-appointed administration hiding record deficits, unpopular policies on most major issues, and the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover behind two wars, while a confrontation with Iran starts to flame.

In conclusion

Many of the overpaid major media stenographers have predictably pigeonholed "Fahrenheit 911" as a mere partisan grenade, one of the hubs of political polarization in the U.S. Judging Moore strictly by his sometimes heavy-handed tactics and/or his obvious political motivations lets talking heads off the hook by relieving them of the duty of having to weigh in on the matters broached in the movie.

Moore's gift is not as a professional journalist, but as a filmmaker, communicating contemporary history through an intuitive visual medium to millions of people who don't spend all their time glued to the Internet. Based on the voluminous research at hand, it appears that Moore's instincts are mostly right. Whatever his flaws, Moore has performed a vital public service by putting these life-and-death issues front and center, where they deserve to be. Had it been left up to the U.S. mainstream media, many voters would be driving blind into the 2004 fork in the road.

Background: "Roasting the Pigs of War"

During the two decades I lived in the Bay Area, the Mission District was the hippest neighborhood in San Francisco. It had a wealth of restaurants, including more than a dozen taquerias. It had beautiful Victorian architecture. It had ethnic diversity, with a large Latino influence. It had live music venues, edgy bars, a lot of young explorers, artists, and activists, art studios, used bookstores, independent coffee shops, and hundreds of murals. 

Tech money and the runaway greed of real estate parasites have diminished the Mission's cultural cachet somewhat since that time, but one outpost of the old, bohemian Mission continues on:  Artists' Television Access (ATA). ATA is a small, social justice-oriented movie theater/performance space which shows independent films and shorts, generally around a specific theme.

On the Saturday night recounted in "Roasting the Pigs of War," ATA served up a whole host of videos about the Iraq War. While much/most of the rest of the country continued to sleep walk through that time, buying Bush Administration lies about WMD's, Saddam Hussein's purported ties to Al-Qaeda, or the fairy tale that the invasion was done for the good of the Iraqi people, we were exposed to one harsh truth after another about the lies we had been fed, the true motivations for the invasion (o-i-l), the horrible human wreckage Bush had unleashed. Walking away from the event, I had the feeling I often had throughout the Bush administration:  shock at the ignorance and gullibility of red state Americans and gratitude that I lived in a city where critical thinking skills and concern for the long-term public interest generally held sway.

Roasting the Pigs of War

This piece was originally published 4/6/04 at getunderground.com. For background information, click here.

On March 20, several thousand concerned citizens took to the streets of San Francisco to protest the one-year anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq. That evening, dovetailing with the march, the Mission District's ATA (Artists' Television Access) presented a marathon session of video shorts and documentaries about the war.

Though not predominately a political entity, ATA's focus on experimental film made it a perfect showcase for the series of shorts, all independently produced and rarely if ever shown in the country where the invasion was hatched.

ATA typically does thematically-based shows. A central theme throughout the March 20th evening production was the role the mainstream/corporate American media played (and continues to play) in producing a disconnect between perception and reality, a disconnect which is much smaller in this bluest gemstone of the blue region, where alternative media flourishes and constructive criticism is seen as the highest act of patriotism.

As the crowd filtered in past a donation table with several piles of free literature, a military promotional film by Keith Sanborn appeared on the screen. Throughout "Operation Double Trouble," shots of aircraft carriers, men in submarines, and fighter jets hovering high above the clouds filled the screen as motivational music played in the background. Intermixed with patriotic military shots were testimonials from a private who said she could do nothing more honorable than defend her country, and from a general serving in the Iraq operation who said "I worry about the youth of America," until he interacted with dutiful young soldiers who renewed his faith in America's future. Cutting against the red, white, and blue tenor was a freeze-frame effect in which propagandistic statements were stopped, rewound, and showed again, forcing the viewer to actually think about what they were seeing and hearing.

Next up was "Hollywood Victory," courtesy of Paper Tiger TV, a "neoconservative project," "directed" by Dick Cheney, "produced" by Jerry Bruckheimer, a well-known maker of shallow, splashy, big-budget movies. "Victory" was a farce that zeroed in on the power of images. Over footage of George W's (in)famous GI Joe landing on a carrier in a flight suit was a voiceover of a stern military man saying "Son, your ego's writing checks your body can't cash" and a throwaway 80's theme song complete with power chords and cheesewiz synth. From the landing, "Victory" cut to a shot of Robert Novak, a Republican talking head, saying how good Bush looked in the jumpsuit, laughing that he himself wouldn't look that good, and David Broder, long-time reporter for The Washington Post, saying how much "authority" Bush's image makers had instilled (in a man of such distinctly un-presidential timber?). After blips of whitewashed patriotic mainstream news coverage was Michael Moore's speech accepting the best documentary Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine," in which he spoke of "fictitious presidents" and "fictitious wars," only to be booed by some of the suits in the crowd and cut off by the academy orchestra. Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" closed the short on a powerful note.

***

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

-A.J. Liebling, journalist




The meat of the marathon presentation began with "Independent Media in Time of War," a mini-documentary featuring Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, produced by IndyMedia, an organization dedicated to a vibrant alternative press. Standing at a podium, Amy Goodman laid out one example after another of the complicity of U.S. major media in the invasion of Iraq. 

In the first striking example, Goodman related the distinction between CNN (shown in America only) and CNN International (shown abroad): on the day that the U.S. military took Baghdad and Saddam's statue was toppled, American CNN viewers saw the statue and only the statue falling all day, whereas international CNN viewers--who expect a semblance of balance in the news--saw a split-screen, with Saddam's statue on the left, and casualties of war on the right. Made plain was why many Americans have a good feeling about the invasion, relative to people abroad who got a fuller picture from CNN International, plus the much more critical mainstream news sources in their own countries. 

When asked why CNN America did not show casualties, a CNN exec said (of the casualties) "some of them are tasteless." Spoonfeeding an audience that knew no better, the U.S. media bombarded their viewers with romanticized shots of soldiers walking in slow-mo across a tarmac and fighter planes gleaming in a morning sunset. The American coverage repeatedly referred to the precision of the U.S. operation; after all, as Tom Brokaw of General Electric/NBC nightly news said when the bombing began, "We don't want to destroy the infrastructure, because we'll own it in a few days."

The American television media interviewed generals and administration officials who supported the invasion. According to FAIR, in the week before and the week after the invasion the major networks and PBS had 393 interviews, only three of which were with people opposed to the war. Goodman pointed out that in a true democracy, where a diversity of opinions would be presented, every interview with a general talking about the specs of their war machinery would be matched by a doctor explaining in the driest, most objective terms exactly what bombs do to the human body. Alongside reporters embedded in the military would be reporters embedded in the peace movement and among Iraqi families. Goodman culminated this segment by asking: "If this was state media how would it be any different?"

Next Goodman talked about the human costs of the invasion, including the fact that the majority of deaths occurred among Iraqi civilians, and told the story of an errant bomb on the first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom that hit an apartment complex, killing a four year-old girl, her mother, and her mother's sister, and injuring many more. Another casualty of imprecision was the Hotel Palestine, a hotel in Baghdad that at the time housed over 100 journalists, a fact universally well-known among world media. Coincidentally, the hotel (which was shelled by American tanks) contained the offices of Al Jazeera, a major Middle Eastern media organ critical of the invasion. Many journalists were injured, and a Spanish journalist and a Palestinian journalist were killed. Not long after, members of the Spanish press stood in front of the U.S. embassy chanting "murderer, murderer." One wondered if the tragedy could have been averted had Al Jazeera not given their precise coordinates to the Pentagon.

Back home, the incident was written off as a mistake by Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clark, who acquired her job by orchestrating (what was later to be proven false) public testimony from a young Kuwaiti girl of babies being pulled out of incubators by Iraqi soldiers in the run up to Gulf War I. Meanwhile Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the U.S., told its 1,400 stations to black out music critical of the war, and hip hop artist Michael Franti--a spiritual social critic--discovered that members of his band had gotten a knock on the door from the FBI, who had taken pictures of them at a recent Franti concert. Goodman closed with a statement on the need for more independent media in the U.S., to restore this country to its once proud tradition of true freedom of expression.

All proceeds from the door (contributions were voluntary) and from the concession table (where beer and hotdogs were sold) went to Moveon.org, who produced the next mini-documentary, "Uncovered:  The Whole Truth about the Iraq War." Though more slickly produced than the other shorts, "Uncovered" was no less effective, because most of the people interviewed--former members of the military, CIA, State Department, foreign service, and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter--had all been part of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Tackling the sheer number of administration misstatements about the invasion could take a lifetime, so this documentary cut to the chase, focusing on the administration's coordinated televised statements in the months before the invasion. 

While weapons inspector Hans Blix saw no harm in giving the inspections (of Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction) another 3-4 months, footage showed Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and administration press secretary Ari Fleischer warning of the "imminent threat" of Saddam's weaponry in a barrage of quickly edited cuts that cleverly showed the drumbeat effect of the media offensive. When asked how he knew these weapons existed, Cheney referred to "the quality of our intelligence," though CIA findings were quite vague, what Nation columnist David Corn called "circumstantial, inferential...with caveats and qualifiers." In fact, Hussein Kamel, an Iraqi defector who had been head of Saddam's weapons program, said he had destroyed all biological and chemical weapons on Saddam Hussein's command many years back. Kamel's inconvenient information was ignored.

The other major justification for the Iraq invasion was the contention that Iraq had ties to Al-Qaeda, and thus represented a front in the war on terrorism. But as former administration diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV pointed out, Saddam was actually a secular leader with no proven ties to Al-Qaeda. In fact, Osama bin Laden called Saddam a "Socialist infidel." By contrast, administration allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are well-known breeding grounds for Al-Qaeda.

Bush's 2003 State of the Union address continued the march to war, with references to "mobile production facilities," Sarin Mustard VX gas, "38,000 liters" of Botulin toxin, and "advanced nuclear weapons sites." Despite his long record of lies, Bush's credibility went virtually unquestioned by the major U.S. media in the months leading up to the invasion.

The keynote speech in the administration's drive to war was delivered by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN Security Council one month before the invasion. Seen as a lone administration moderate, and having publicly claimed to be against an invasion a year earlier, Powell was perceived--nationally and internationally--as harder to disbelieve, making him the perfect Trojan Horse. Charge by charge the documentary showed that few of Powell's claims have panned out: the ties to Al-Qaeda have still been unproven, the mobile production facilities turned out to be hydrogen generation facilities, the "100 - 500 tons" of chemical weapons agent were never found, and the fabled "weapons of mass destruction" are still at large. (Powell didn't reprise the uranium in Africa story Bush had used in his State of the Union because he felt the evidence was lacking.) Powell's stress on the urgency of pre-emption has proven to be completely unfounded.

The documentary then jumped ahead to the post-invasion situation in Iraq, as day after day passed and no weapons of mass destruction were found, forcing fall girl Condoleeza Rice to go on TV and say "We made a mistake." Weapons inspector Hans Blix said (the administration was) "100 percent sure they had weapons, 0% sure of where they are."

As this segment of the documentary closed, President Bush sat with a foreign leader before members of the press, one of whom asked him if he thought the U.S. inability to find WMDs would hurt America's credibility around the world. The artless dodger took on his trademark deer-in-the headlights look for a few seconds, then said "I'm not exactly sure what that means," to big audience laughs. As grim as much of the subject matter was, the sheer, at times clumsy mendacity of the Bush administration succeeded in providing many such moments of absurdist humor throughout the night of anti-war videos.

Moving along, "Uncovered" explored the Wilson affair. About a year before the invasion, and long before Bush and Cheney's repeated references to Saddam's nuclear program, Dick Cheney sent Joseph Wilson IV to Iraq to find WMDs. Joseph Wilson was a career diplomat who had worked for Bill Clinton and Bush Sr., and was a good friend of the latter. Wilson was sent over on the basis of a memorandum that allegedly showed the sale of yellowcake uranium (for use in nuclear weapons) from Niger to Iraq. 

When Wilson didn't find even remote evidence of the transaction having taken place, he returned to the U.S. and reported his (lack of) findings to the State Department. After the invasion, in July 2003, Wilson recounted his trip in a now-famous op-ed for the New York Times; Wilson concluded by saying that we may have been taken to war on false pretenses. As a reward for speaking the truth as he had found it, Wilson's wife Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA officer was outed in a column by right-wing scribbler Robert Novak, who had received the information from a source inside the Bush administration. Much speculation points to Cheney's office as the source of the leak; if anyone is tried and convicted, they could face a felony for potentially endangering the safety of a member of American intelligence. The memorandum on which Wilson's search was predicated was later found to be a forgery, with several words wrong in French, days of the week that didn't match dates given, names of officials who weren't officials, and names of officials who had been out of government for years.

At its close, "Uncovered" included statements from various foreign policy careerists who said that the invasion of Iraq was a diversion from the war on terrorism that could make our relations with the people of the Middle East more tense and more violent. The film ended to loud applause.

During the intermissions, scenes from a homemade movie shot at the protest earlier in the day came on, showing a drum circle of 20-30 people in the background, while in the foreground directly in front of the camera people danced. Occasionally the camera broke away to the edges of the drum circle to catch some of the assembled messages--a stop sign that said "Stop Bush," a sign that said "He Lied, Thousands Died."    While the cinema verite rolled, the emcee again reminded people of the concession stand and the dartboard at the back, with a picture of Bush made up like a pig on it. There was also a public service announcement from a legal group supporting unencumbered freedom of assembly; a protester named Noah had been beaten up by the police, and a friend or relative was sought.

The intermission movie flicked off and on came a group of video shorts: three videos that did not place in the Moveon.org Bush in 30 Seconds contest, including a riotously funny send up of Bush (Lionel Richie) and Blair (Diana Ross) "singing" back and forth to each other in slow motion, mouthing the words to "Endless Love" while the song played over the top.

Next was a short by Eli Elliott, "Radical Teen Cheer," a short about a group of Mission high school Latinas called Radical Teen Cheer who travel around doing progressive cheers, and a short by Jeff Taylor/James Ficklin called "War Pigs" about Bechtel, the San Francisco-based corporation that plans to make a killing by commodifying Iraq's water supply. Tying into the theme of the night--Roasting the Pigs of War--a protest was shown in front of Bechtel's San Francisco office. As a man with a pig mask spoke into a microphone, a makeshift trough was set out filled with fake dollars. Eventually the sound cut out, and grunting noises came on over footage of suits walking along concerned (or oblivious), only to return to a baby innocently playing with the money, saying "hi" to the camera. Bechtel was posited as a symbol of Bush's "leave no defense contractor behind" modus vivendi, wherein highly profitable corporations get their mitts on Iraq's oil and water while 70% of Iraq is unemployed and the hospitals overflow.

"Gringothon," a homemade movie from Greg Berger, was up next. Filmed in Nueva Guerra, "Gringothon" followed a spirited and naive Che Guavara t-shirt-wearing Caucasian-American in Mexico as he tried to raise money to help take Bush out of office and put him in front of an international tribunal. The ambitious gringo solicited people on buses, on the street, on the sidewalk. This was followed by a short called "A Mountain Has Been Taken" by Caroline Koebel that showed a claymation plant which sprouted green as sunny 60's advertisement music came on, then withered as live testimony of the horrors on the ground in Iraq appeared.

Next up were two Lord of the Rings spoofs ("The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Twin Tower Military Industrial Complex"). Over scenes from Lord of the Rings movies were English subtitles scripting out Gandof/Noam Chomsky's battle with two of the most burgeoning, rarely discussed forces in the American and world landscape. Underlying message throughout: never give up, Frodo, no matter how bad things look.

Last in this series of shorts was a movie called "Homeland" (Jacob Bricca) that began in the suburbs, showing big gas-guzzling cars driving by an obese man riding his lawnmower across a big green lawn past a house with a seven-digit address. Drawing attention to the modern-day consumer culture, the short moved on past endless construction sights into a supermarket and long rows of every kind and color of needless consumer good into ads for the war, all of which morphed into a video game on a kid's TV screen, then back into empty car lots and empty supermarkets.

The second intermission came on, with more protest footage and more mostly ignored reminders that the concession stand had not been emptied.

When the show started up again, independent journalist Mark Brecke presented a series of slides that put a human face on the invasion. Brecke, who had been to Iraq and other countries in the region, began his presentation with an entry from Encyclopedia Britannica that pointed out that the people of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) used tools and grew crops while Europeans hunted in the woods for game and gathered berries and roots.

Brecke was embedded in the U.S. military, who knew he was working on a book project. Many of the slides were of children; "the face of war is always different for children," said Brecke. Though Brecke couldn't go anywhere alone, curious children gravitated toward U.S. military members as they walked through the streets on patrol or crawled along in their convoys of Humvees.

Along with the photographs were stories--of how Nazarea (a hotbed of resistance) was ransacked and looted by Saddam's policemen, of the time photographs showing Saddam's predilection for torture were found, of other evidence of evildoing by Saddam being bulldozed, of the ongoing repair of schools, hospitals, orphanages, and of the U.S. military interpreter Mohammad, who was paid $30/month, the average wage in Iraq.

The soldiers on patrol thought Brecke, as a journalist, was making "$1,000/day and drove a sedan" and often borrowed his cellphone to call home. Many of the soldiers, from small towns across America, said they would never see the world the same way again. The cover of the book Brecke contributed to showed a picture of a young Iraqi girl in a hospital with shell shock, staring ahead fixedly. This picture "was the average Iraqi's response--no bandages, no blood."

The final intermission was just five minutes. Again we saw footage of the day's protest. A line of police officers fell into formation and ordered protesters out of the street and onto the sidewalk. The emcee made another pitch for the remaining hotdogs (regular hotdogs only, tofu hotdogs long since gone), and the dartboard at the back.

The last formal piece was "Weapons of Mass Deception," a work in progress by Mike Kavanagh. This 20-minute production (culled from 200 hours of raw material) was a collage of media snippets and overdubbed music, starting with a flashy MSNBC Countdown to Iraq TV graphic shown to the sultry machismo of James Bond-like music. Intermixed with music were well-timed news segments, including one in which a newscaster explained that (oh, by the way) Iraq had the second biggest oil reserves on the planet, which were easily and cheaply extractable. 90% of the reserves were unexplored, making the seizure of such reserves a boon that could help to stabilize oil prices, theoretically saving Bush the fate of Jimmy Carter, who paid the price for rising prices at the pump. 

Following was an SUV ad done to punk industrial music to emphasize destructive power, and a concise seminar called "To Market a War," which listed three prerequisites for a successful media operation in war: 1) the iconic image; 2) a war theme song; and 3) a war hero. The iconic image was the statue of Saddam tumbling, and later the shot of a child running gleefully through the streets of Baghdad with the head of the statue on a leash. The war theme song was "Iraq and I Roll" by country singer Clint Black, a Clear Channel-friendly song that was instantly picked up and played repeatedly on right-wing radio. The war hero was Jessica Lynch, whose story was shown in its initial dramatic reportage, as we now know falsely, by Dan Rather and others. Throughout "Weapons," scenes from the movie "Wag the Dog" (in which a presidential candidate contrives a war in Albania to divert attention from a sex scandal) were mixed with footage of casualties and deaths in Iraq. "Weapons of Mass Destruction" closed with a Twilight Zone monologue that was numbingly prescient.

What remained of the audience filed outside, where they gathered for smokes and conversation. Satisfied to exhaustion by independent films of infinitely more creativity and depth than the effects-heavy beached whales that pass for entertainment in modern day America, we were reminded once again that raw capital and gimmicks are no match for the power of ideas.

Background: "Total Recall"

The California gubernatorial recall election of 2003 represented one of the most remarkable political victories of right-wing corporatism masquerading as populism in U.S. political history. 

Helped along by ally George W. Bush, who allowed Bill Clinton's price controls to expire soon after taking control of the presidency, Enron shorted California residents of electricity, leading to blackouts and exorbitant rates. Having few options, Democratic governor Gray Davis signed expensive long-term contracts, which were essentially ransom payments, rather than ride the storm out.

Seeing an opportunity in the disaster Enron had created with Bush's help, Republicans expertly prayed on public ignorance, blaming Davis for the electricity shortage. Implicit in the scapegoating of Davis was the falsehood that one of California's most experienced public servants, who was racking up an impressive legislative record as governor, was incompetent.

To run against Davis, Republicans recruited Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man with no political experience and next to no knowledge of public policy who hadn't even bothered to vote in half of the elections in his adult lifetime. Multi-millionaire Arnold was presented as a man of the people, an immigrant who had made it (who, ironically, was campaigning on getting rid of occupational driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants). 

Thanks to a stalling national and state economy, the blandness of Gray Davis, the effectiveness of the GOP's false narratives, and a staggering level of ignorance and misdirected rage, Schwarzenegger became governor, setting the template for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump thirteen years later.

Total Recall

This piece was originally published 11/15/03 at getunderground.com. For background information, click here.

One night what seems like an eternity ago I saw on the local news that the California Republican Party had named a new chairman, Duf Sundheim. Sundheim announced a list of goals for the party, including the recall of Democratic Governor Gray Davis, who had won re-election by five points just a few months prior. 

I laughed to myself. The Republicans had narrowly solidified their national hold on government in the 2002 elections with WMD lies, but in California Democrats had won every statewide office for the first time since 1882. Attempting a recall of Davis seemed like a desperate tactic that was bound to fail. The recall was passed into law by Progressive governor Hiram Johnson, who enshrined direct democracy as a way of counteracting corporate parasites (mining companies, timber companies, ranch interests, and Southern Pacific Railroad) that had a habit of killing necessary government reforms and elemental legitimacy. Davis's actions were far more timid, and generally benign in intent. Davis hadn't authorized secret bombings of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians, or gone around the public, the press, and Congress to sell arms to terrorists and divert the profits to right-wing counterrevolutionaries in Latin America. Davis hadn't repeatedly lied to the press, the public, and the world about the absolute necessity of sending other people's sons and daughters off to die in foreign lands to win the Senate for the Republicans. Hell, Gray--a squeaky clean, straight and narrow Vietnam vet--was too square to have accepted the advances of an eager young admirer named Cybill Shepherd.

Must be just a way for Sundheim to suck up to the Republican powers that be, I thought. A pat on the back from the boys up top for thinking big.

Deregulation of California's electricity market

This story really begins with the California energy crisis of 2000.

As more and more hucksters jump up on our TV screens singing hosannas to deregulation and privatization, it's good to think back to another era of anything goes economic policy--the 1920's. The invisible hand of the 20's clenched up and delivered a knockout punch that produced the Great Depression, which elected Democrat Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt, whose first order of business was cleaning up the mess left by three consecutive Republican presidents in thrall to laissez-faire.

FDR signed a raft of laws to break up monopolies, halt gouging of consumers, spread public resources widely, and hold business accountable. This flurry of legislation produced the Public Utilities Holding Company Act and the Federal Power Act, which, in league with open accounting standards and bans on campaign contributions from utilities, provided Americans with cheap and steady electricity.

These laws held up more or less in tact until 1996, when California's then-governor, Republican Pete Wilson, facing heavy pressure from energy company lobbyists and steep donations from their bosses, pushed and signed into law a measure deregulating the California energy market. Consumers were told that deregulation would allow greater competition, which would inevitably lead to lower prices (20% reductions, according to the power company pitch) for abundant supplies of energy.

Not everyone bought this one-size-fits all free market model. In 1998 Ralph Nader helped put a proposition on the California ballot that would have re-regulated the energy market. 53 million dollars from the state's energy companies helped defeat the measure and keep deregulation in place. In the same election, California Democrats regained the governor's mansion for the first time in 16 years when Gray Davis walloped Republican opponent Dan Lungren by 20 points.

Governor Davis, meet Enron

For a little over a year Davis cruised in the radical center of California politics. He signed some legislation sent to him by the liberal Democratic state legislature, vetoed some, and consistently maintained Clintonian approval ratings of around 60 percent.

Beginning in the spring of 2000, energy prices soared in California, increasing by as much 7000% by the end of the year. Blackouts swept up and down the coast.

Before departing for private life Bill Clinton put a temporary cap on electricity prices, but incoming President George W. Bush removed the cap within his first week in office, at about the same time that Vice President Dick Cheney met with energy company heads to devise the administration's Energy Bill (Cheney has yet to release the notes of these meetings to the courts or the public).

Gray Davis and other California officials cried foul, but the energy companies said that California was falling victim to overuse and undercapacity. When asked on television about the skyrocketing prices that were hemorrhaging California, Bush administration officials echoed the energy company line, blaming the crisis on California's environmental regulations and unwillingness to build more power plants (decisions made by the power companies, not the governor). Trying to turn grits to gravy, the Bush administration claimed the chaos in California was an endorsement of Bush's Energy Bill, which would not have regulated electricity prices, though it would have increased dirty coal production, exhumed and subsidized nuclear energy, and allowed private interests to drill more, log more, and pollute more, often on publicly-owned lands.

Faced with continually rising rates, extreme volatility, including threats of future blackouts, and little help from the feds, Davis made possibly his most controversial decision, buying long-term energy contracts at high prices to stabilize the market.

What really happened in the energy crisis

In the 2000 presidential election California went for Al Gore 54-42. Having spent $10,000,000 in California, $10,000,000 more than Democrat Al Gore, Bush was a little sore, so he and his cabal decided to give up on California, and moreover, to punish California for stepping out of line, in the tradition of Bush's brutally brilliant strategist, Karl Rove. During the energy crisis, Gray Davis publicly accused the energy suppliers--who included Bush's number one contributor, Enron, as well as many other major Bush supporters, including Reliant and Dynegy--of rigging the system and gouging California consumers. Most Californians at the time supported this hunch, only to be ridiculed as "goofy" by Vice President Dick Cheney.

But the fall of Enron in 2001--and the return of Democratic control of the Senate with the defection of Republican Jim Jeffords--lifted the lid on the whole episode, bringing much new information to light. The rapaciousness of the energy suppliers was found to be so blatant that even Bush's serf-like Republican appointees on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission admitted that energy companies had in fact gouged California consumers with a complex series of scams: buying capped energy in California, then selling it back to California at a higher price from a different state; overloading energy lines, so that operators would be forced to make highly expensive emergency purchases; and shutting down plants during peak hours, under the guise of doing repairs, again to raise rates. The accusations of increased use and overcapacity were shown to have been fictitious: California had plenty of power plant capacity to meet their increased usage of 5% from the year previous, which still left California with one of the lowest levels of per capita energy consumption in the nation. 

The profits earned at California's expense were so excessive (Enron's profits in the last quarter of 2000 rose 34% from their profits in the last quarter of 1999) that many energy company executives socked away big portions of their windfall in hidden reserves to avoid scrutiny and to pull out later if the bottom line began to sag, as a way of fooling shareholders. At the same time, executives at many of the same companies aggressively exercised their stock options, buying shares at low insider prices, selling high, and pocketing millions in capital gains. During the period under focus, Ken Lay, chairman of Enron and good personal friend of George W. Bush (who has bestowed on Lay the affectionate name "Kenny Boy") racked up 27 million dollars, while Peter Cartwright, chief executive of Calpine in San Jose, waggled almost ten million dollars over just a six-day span.

When all was said and done, California had been fleeced for tens of billions of dollars and voters had found a scapegoat in Governor Gray Davis.

2002 gubernatorial election

The dynamic of the 2002 California gubernatorial campaign was very similar to the 2000 presidential election. Democrats chose Davis, a competent, boring, highly knowledgeable candidate with policies supported by the majority of his constituency, while Republicans picked Bill Simon, a wholesome-appearing intellectual lightweight with no government experience and views to the right of the majority of Californians. Richard Riordan, a centrist Republican and the former mayor of Los Angeles, had lost handily to Simon in the primaries after Davis ran ten million dollars of negative ads against Riordan, who was considered the most electable Republican.

Into and through the 2002 campaign season, most Californians blamed the energy crisis on Gray Davis, taking his approval ratings down into the low forties, from which they never recovered. However, Simon was such an uninspiring and conservative candidate that Davis won by five points--but not without a price. Faced with an opponent with higher qualifications and far more popular--and populist--positions, the Republicans did what they could to make the 2002 election a referendum on Davis's perceived character by constantly blaming him for the power crisis and criticizing him for raising huge amounts of campaign cash (unacceptable behavior in a Democrat) and thus "lacking vision." The focus on Davis's perceived public persona took hold with many California voters, even among many Democrats who pulled clothespins off their noses as they emerged from voting booths.

Petitions are circulated

In early 2003, when petitions first went out supporting the recall, the signatures did not come. This lack of momentum, and the knowledge that only one governor had been recalled in American history, left many commentators predicting that the recall would never get the signatures required in the allotted time.

Enter Darryl Issa. Backed by a small clique of right-wing fundraisers and tacticians with notorious reputations in California, Issa stepped up to revive the recall, naming his effort "Rescue California." A perfect example of California's possibilities for self-reinvention, Issa had left behind a youth in which he was arrested for weapons charges and grand theft auto to become a wildly successful car alarm magnate and conservative congressman representing a district in Southern California. Thinking that a recall vote--where a candidate could win with as little as 15 percent of the vote--would be his one shot at the governor's mansion, or at least a great opportunity for notoriety within the party, Issa poured more than a million dollars of his own money into the recall, hiring signature gatherers and paying them a dollar for each signature. Davis took Issa's campaign to court, claiming that Rescue California had hired people from outside the state who did not have the right to vote in California, but the charges didn't stick. The signatures (3/4ths of which were collected in the gated community-heavy region of Orange County) came in on time and the recall was on for October 7. The first part of the recall ballot would be an up or down vote on whether to keep Davis as governor. The second part of the ballot listed all the replacement candidates; if Davis's removal were approved by more than 50% of voters, the candidate with the most votes on the second part of the ballot would become the new governor. 



(California voters) "are unfamiliar with the recall process ... this uncertainty means voters can be easily swayed in either direction"

-Recall strategist Frank Luntz, in a memo to his clients


Details, schmetails

The recall presented financial and logistical nightmares for California counties, who were already deep in the red because of the recession and the starving off of money from the federal and thus state governments. Many counties faced an uphill battle just getting already-scheduled local elections ready for November.

The Republican strategy was to downplay these concerns, and concerns about removing a democratically-elected governor less than a year into his second term--concerns voiced much more vocally in the San Francisco Bay area than anywhere else in the state--by hammering on the purported risks of leaving Gray Davis in office.

The game plan for Issa's "Rescue California" campaign was shaped in a memo by the nationally known Frank Luntz, a high-caliber Republican strategist and former pollster for Enron and Newt Gingrich. Echoing the GOP strategy in the impeachment battle and 2000 presidential election, the memo said that the recall campaign should avoid discussion of the global, life-shaping decisions public executives make in favor of a withering focus on the perceived weakness of Davis's character. As Luntz put it in the memo: "Issues are less important than attributes and character traits in your recall effort."

Policy specifics were to be avoided, because Davis had signed and was in the process of signing a stunning amount of popular, forward-thinking legislation:

-the nation's first paid family leave law

-domestic partner benefits for gays and lesbians

-a host of environmental protection measures, including the strengthening of wetland protections, the banning of the flame retardant perchlorate, Co2 emissions reduction laws (challenged in court by the Bush administration and the auto companies), and a bill requiring 20% renewable energy by 2017

-the strongest pro-choice protections in the country

-a revolutionary stem cell research bill

-measures on behalf of the working class such as a bill that will bring healthcare to a million uninsured workers, reinstatement of overtime pay for more than 8 hours worked in a day, a raise in the minimum wage, increases in funding for affordable housing, and a groundbreaking law forcing agriculture companies to arbitrate stalemates with underpaid migrant workers

-a bill cracking down on predatory lending

-the appointment of qualified judges from all genders, races, and backgrounds (including 9 openly gay and lesbian judges, 9 more than Davis's two Republican predecessors appointed in 16 years)

-the strongest HMO reform and gun control laws in the country

-the establishment of solid nursing home staffing mandates

-legislation strengthening tenants' rights

-the toughest anti-spam and financial privacy bills in the country

-a law protecting 1,500 American Indian religious sites from development




"A riot of millionaires masquerading as a 'revolt of the people'"

-bedrock conservative columnist George Will, on the recall


Let the games begin

Anyone with $1,500 to blow and 350 signatures could jump in the fray, so the process degraded quickly, growing to a field of over 200 candidates, among them a well-known and artificially well-endowed Los Angeles porn star, adult entertainment magnate Larry Flynt, and so-early-eighties actor Gary Coleman.

Meanwhile, the state legislature was engaged in the serious business of passing a state budget, an insufferable task ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Proposition 13 was so radical that it was opposed by former California governor and future president Ronald Reagan, the embodiment of Republican conservatism. Proposition 13 capped property taxes at 2%, which choked the revenue windpipe of 25% of its air. Within less than two decades California's roads, schools, and healthcare went from among the best in the country to among the worst.

The law also dictated that no state budget or tax increase could pass with less than a 2/3rds vote of the legislature. Eight California Republicans used the 2/3rds law to hold the 2003 budget hostage, and while doing so blamed Davis for the delay, feeding the notion that Davis's incompetence was getting in the way of a budget deal. The California Eight offered few alternatives and refused to deal until the Democrats agreed to cuts in healthcare for the poor, 10% hikes on college student fees, as well as a tripling of the vehicle registration fee (to the same rate it had been before it was lowered during the Dot.com boom).

The great California deficit

When the budget was inked, California had an $8 billion deficit. Even while protecting to what extent he could popular public priorities (healthcare and education), Davis became the scapegoat for painful budget cuts, which were being felt nationwide in states and localities who had seen federal dollars shrink while W poured tens of billions of dollars into the war in Iraq and the pockets of his biggest contributors. 

When appearing on television, Republicans hit their mark and referred to a "$38 billion deficit," which no longer existed, due to the budget deal. Often Democrats present would correct the error, only to see the same Republican official repeat the $38 billion figure the next night on TV. The charge was so nifty that it was picked up and frequently repeated by the media, including the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and Chris Matthews of Hardball, who kept mentioning the number after clearly being told that it was inaccurate. 

Inevitably, this familiar hijacking of the dialogue convinced many voters that Davis was guilty of gross negligence, though 47 states were in the red, and California's per capita deficit is significantly lower than the $500 billion dollar-whopper Bush will drop on us next year.

"I know Arnold personally. He is in no way qualified to govern anybody or anything."

-Howard Koch, executive producer of Schwarzenegger's latest movie, Terminator 3, in an e-mail to friends and associates


The Terminator: "Man of the People"

Unable to find any statewide candidates who were attractive, media-savvy, and not right-wing Neanderthals, California's Republicans turned to the land of make believe, Hollywood. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his campaign for governor of California on the Tonight Show, and revealed the strategy he would rigidly adhere to for the next three months: visit good friends with major media outlets, chat amiably while tossing weightless pseudo-populist darts at Davis's character, juke and jive when asked how he would specifically do better or wave his hand in the air and laugh it off as an irrelevant question (pressed at one point about his lack of specificity, Arnold said "the public doesn't care about the details.")

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in 2001 spent $383,000 on nannies for his kids, ran as the latest sunny-faced multi millionaire Republican Everyman doing his political internship as governor of a state with the 5th largest economy in the world. He had not even bothered to vote in five of the past 11 elections, including the presidential elections of 1996 and 2000, but he would better steer a state through tough times than the most experienced public official in the state.

Convenient myths, continued

While Arnold did his thing, his surrogates fed a handful of messages over and over to the media, all in a chorus. Two of the biggest interrelated lines were that the California economy was in a major slump, and that a big part of the reason for the slump was California's--and thus, by extension, Gray Davis's--hostile attitude toward business. Helped along by the stock market crash, low revenues, 9/11, Bush's unfunded mandates on education, welfare, and homeland security, and the 82 cents California gets for every dollar it gives the federal government, California was and is in tough times, but its dive was no bigger than average in the United States: housing prices continue to rise, the jobless rate is right around the national average, personal income has remained level, and start ups continue to balance out businesses that leave for lower taxes. 

Not unlike other high tech areas of the country, there was a huge exodus of jobs overseas after the Dot.com bust, but the business environment had little to do with this; Texas, a state with very little regulation and low taxes, had even bigger tech job losses than California. Healthcare, electricity, and real estate/land prices make California the 13th most expensive place to do business in the United States, but considered against the comically lax regulation and tax burdens in much of the United States, this is hardly extraordinary. To many business owners, the climate, landscape, and physical beauty compensate in quality of life, which is why California still leads the world in innovation and entrepreneurship. Complaints of government strangulation of the private sector were also big in the early '90s recession, just a couple years before California had its biggest boom ever. Nonetheless, after zombie-like repetition, the charges that Davis was strangling business stuck, just like the purported link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

Arnold's silver bullet(s)

While blaming the electricity crisis and the state of the California economy on Davis's lack of character, Republicans pulled out their silver bullet, the "car tax." In the early '90s California recession, Republican Governor Pete Wilson signed a bill that tripled the vehicle registration fee. In 1997, when the economy soared, Wilson lowered the fee back down to its original rate. In 2003, after Republicans refused a minimal tax increase on the very richest Californians, the California legislature was forced to raise the registration fee back to its pre-boom cost. To the majority of Southern Californians, the vehicle tax was a major assault on their sense of entitlement to drive cheaply, global warming ozone depletion and the fate of the rest of the world be damned. As So Cal suburbanites got stuck in regular traffic jams in the most overdeveloped artificial environment on earth, right-wing shock jocks wailed on about the vehicle registration fee.

And, as if raising the cost of driving weren't bad enough, the shock jocks hit the jackpot of white nativism when Gray Davis signed a bill to allow illegal aliens to legally drive back and forth from jobs that no one else wanted. While much of the world likes to see California as a sunny paradise, nothing raises the hackles on the backs of So Cal's vanilla suburbs than "special treatment" for foreigners.

Cruise control

Arnold's shady, handsomely-compensated handlers used donations from real estate developers and Silicon Valley to run populist-tinged ads wherein Arnold said he would stop special interests ("it's time to return government to the people") while motivational music trailed in the background. And as the other major gubernatorial candidates held several diplomatic, informative debates, Arnold's handlers made sure to keep him at least a mile away from any potentially unscripted moment, gliding him through the co-ed softball circuit--Oprah, Howard Stern, right-dial talk radio--where he would be certain to get pitches slow and perfectly deflectable with spoonfed one-liners from his movies, like "Hasta la vista, baby." Arnold only stepped outside the bubble twice: once for a press conference, and once to do a debate, which he agreed to only after he was told he would get the questions in advance. 

One of Arnold's central messages was his embodiment of the American dream. Many times he told enthusiastic audiences how he had come to the country with little English and 50 cents in his pocket. The reality was that Arnold (at the time Mr. Europe and Mr. Universe) first entered the United States on an elite visa exclusively extended to athletes, entertainers, and religious figures, under the sponsorship of Joe Wieder, a world famous bodybuilding magnate who set Arnold up with a car, an apartment, a stipend, and later, contacts who would help make Arnold rich in Hollywood and California real estate. 

In the fictional world of Southern California, where myths refuse to die, Arnold's tall tale added moral ballast to his vehement opposition to driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, supposedly reflecting a strict sense of fair play. Oddly enough, Arnold was alleged to have broken his visa agreement before he became a citizen by making money off of a bricklaying business. Arnold's spokesman swore his client hadn't done anything illegal, but refused to release Arnold's immigration records.

Down the stretch

As the race neared the finish line Davis's popularity remained dismally low, weighed down by lies, half-truths, and Davis's unique breed of boring, while Arnold solidified his lead, refusing Davis's debate offers and attending heated rallies where Arnold yelled the famous line from "Network" ("We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore") to huge crowds of Southern Californians who'd roughed years of federally subsidized water, roads, and defense jobs. Arnold looked on approvingly as big wrecking balls showed what Arnold had in mind for the vehicle registration fee.

In the last week of the election a lot of dirt came Arnold's way, including the revelation that Arnold had admired Hitler (for his ability to control large numbers of people, among other things). This was unsurprising to those who knew that Arnold's dad was a German stormtrooper during World War II, or those who knew that Arnold was a good friend of Austrian war criminal Kurt Waldheim, to whom Arnold raised a toast when he married Maria Shriver. It was alleged that outtakes from Arnold's first major movie, "Pumping Iron," revealed many other unsavory ruminations, but the media could not investigate because Arnold had bought rights to the movie stills for $1.25 million dollars. Later the director's partners sued, claiming they had not been privy to the sale. Arnold eventually settled for $400,000 and sealed the evidence forever.

A much larger irritant for Arnold was a blockbuster story the Thursday morning before the election in the Los Angeles Times that included allegations of sexual harassment against Arnold from more than a dozen different women. In 1993 Wendy Leigh had written a book called "Arnold, an Unauthorized Biography" which told much the same story (in addition to alleged incidences of racism and anti-Semitism), but Arnold's full court press helped slam the lid on Leigh's book.

Faced with the Times's story, Arnold's campaign coordinator Sean Walsh forwarded a URL to carefully-chosen media that linked to a woman with the same name as the 16th harassment accuser, Rhonda Miller. According to the site, Rhonda had been charged with prostitution, narcotics, and forgery. Surely this woman couldn't have any credibility, could she? Quickly this piece of news made it to Fox, the Drudge Report ("ARNOLD ACCUSER'S STORY FALLS APART"), Rush Limbaugh, and other talk radio barkers, where it circled and swelled among the cannibals in the right-wing media echo chamber.

After the election it came out that Rhonda Miller the alleged prostitute was not Rhonda Miller the 16th Schwarzenegger accuser, but Arnold had already won comfortably, 55-45, despite getting less than 50% of the vote in Los Angeles and a weak showing in the Bay Area.

The hangover

In the days after the recall, articles popped up in the press about California's improving economy, and a report came out that showed that test scores had improved for the fifth year in a row and 90% of the state's public schools were improving under Gray Davis's laser-like focus on education.

As the drama from the recall had barely subsided, arsonists set off what has become the largest fire in California in possibly a century. Virtually overnight many of the areas who had voiced the strongest antipathy for Gray Davis's "big government spending habits" were sending Arnold with hat in hand to Washington to get hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal aid for people who had typically built or bought homes in unsustainable, fire-prone ecosystems, in canyons, mountains, on hillsides.

After four years of drought, in April of 2003, Gray Davis wrote FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Association) asking for $430 million dollars to help thin underbrush and cut down dead, highly flammable trees to avoid a major catastrophe in three counties--San Diego, San Bernardino and Riverside--which turned out to be the backbone of Arnold's electoral map. The situation was so dire that within a couple weeks, a bipartisan group of eight California federal officials wrote a follow-up letter reminding FEMA of the importance of aid. 

Though the amount sought was less than 1% of what Bush recently asked for in the latest installment of his colonial venture in Iraq, Bush's friends at FEMA kept W's record of screwing California perfect, waiting six months to issue a rejection, which was received less than 24 hours before the fires began. Instinctively, some on the right blamed the fires on Gray Davis, but even Republican Mary Bono, whose district was victimized by the fire, told reporters "FEMA's decision was wrong" and "the timing couldn't be worse...we knew this disaster was going to happen with certainty."

San Diego could have helped itself, but it didn't have its own fire department. Every time bond measures came up to increase money for firefighting, the anti-tax majority rose up in opposition. Mike Davis, author of two of the most definitive books on California's runaway development and its attendant battle with nature (City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear) told LA Weekly of the free lunch libertarianism in his place of residence, San Diego: "It's a form of parasitism, really...this is a culture that wants to live in a known fire ecology but not pay for fire protection."

To ransom California for aid, the Republican Congress is now trying to push their irony-doused Healthy Forests Bill. Republicans claim that unloosing restrictions on Big Timber's felling of thousands of stands of old growth timber is a fair exchange for thinning limited amounts of underbrush on public lands, which will do little to stop fires in California, two-thirds of which have been on private land.

While refusing to designate more than half the funds in the bill for thinning forests around residences (the stated aim of the legislation), Republican plans to limit judicial and public oversight of logging of old growth timber on federally-owned lands could very well lead to the type of clear cutting followed by uniformly planted stands that cause more fires by leaving open spaces that let the sun in to dry out the forest floor. California is so desperate to get the aid that Senate Democrats might just fold and go along with a bad bill.

Arnold's agenda

After being defiantly vague through the whole of the three-month election, Arnold's grand vision has begun to take hold. Not a week after Arnold had won the recall, it came out that Arnold was planning on settling Davis's lawsuits against the power companies (now that they'd done their job of getting him into office). Arnold's press spokesman said that making any connection between this slap on the wrist and Arnold's meeting in May 2001 with Enron head Kenneth Lay was preposterous; Arnold said he couldn't even remember meeting Lay. For good measure, Arnold will be floating another electricity deregulation proposal to get California moving again.

Education is considered the most important issue to California voters. Arnold has chosen former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, someone who had a thorny relationship with those in the trenches, California's teachers, as his education secretary. The situation is further exacerbated by Riordan's support for diverting public money to religious schools ("vouchers" in common parlance.)

Arnold also will play to his base in Southern California by massaging them with federal dollars, trying to end the "car tax" (which funds firefighters, police, and libraries), and asking for a vote--or ballot measure, if necessary--to repeal the driver's license for illegal immigrants. 

Pulling the drawbridge up behind you has long precedence in American politics. In California politics, it's an unwritten rule that Southern California must bash immigrants and/or people of color at least every couple election seasons, as if they need to get it out of their system. In just the last decade California has had divisive ballot measures on medical care and education for children of illegal immigrants, Affirmative Action, and bilingual education. Following the generally effective national Republican strategy of hiding the likes of Cheney, Tom Delay, Dick Armey, and other nasty white men behind Bush's plastic Colgate smile, Arnold preached inclusion to the ends of the earth only to make his staff a virtual ideological carbon copy of former Republican governor Pete Wilson's. Though invisible during the campaign (because his name is mud among the growing, emerging ranks of Hispanic voters in California), Pete Wilson has contributed a vast swath of Arnold's administration, including chief of staff Patricia Clarey, deputy to Wilson's chief of staff, and Jessie Knight, a Wilson appointee to the Public Utilities Commission who was a big booster of energy deregulation. Along with the Wilson graduates Arnold has brought aboard many Reagan, Bush, and Bush II folks, such as Viet Dinh, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, as well as several economic advisers from the Hoover Institution, the only economic institution in the country named after a president who had a worse job growth record than George W. Bush.

W's brother, Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, is loaning California Donna Arduin, who has served as Florida's budget director. Arduin is often referred to as Jeb Bush's "hatchet woman" for her full steam ahead tight-lipped approach to enacting cravenly elitist economic policies under the guise of "trimming the fat." To keep the budget balanced she has raided trust funds, fought lower class sizes, pushed huge cuts on underfunded universities, and allowed waiting lists for health insurance for poor children and eldercare to balloon. She has also trimmed the fat by lopping Medicaid-funded dental work from 26,000 adults and dropping coverage of eyeglasses and hearing aids. Arduin's tactics are so extreme that even some Florida Republicans are concerned. The president of Florida's Republican Senate, Tom Lee, said "We've created a game of hot potato for future elected officials with our budget...The music is going to stop soon, and someone is going to be left with a big problem." Ken Pruitt, the Republican head of the Florida Senate Appropriations Committee, has traveled has traveled around the state in a yellow bus in protest of what he says is Jeb Bush's lack of commitment to education. The School Boards Association agrees, giving Florida a D- for school funding. Fortunately for California's children, there is a liberal Democratic majority in the state legislature that has no plans of Floridating California. 



(Americans) "like violence, power, revenge, riches, success and fame, and they don't know the difference between real life and fantasy, between real people and characters in an action movie."

-Larry Derfner, writing in The Jerusalem Post


Arnold's amendment

For those who believed this movie within reality couldn't get any more surreal, there is one last, lingering twist: currently the U.S. Constitution does not allow foreign-born citizens to run for president. Taking a sudden interest in immigrant rights, Senator Orrin Hatch (the Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican from the pure vanilla state of Utah) recently conducted a hearing proposing a 28th amendment to the Constitution, which would allow American immigrants with twenty years of citizenship status to run for the presidency. Schwarzenegger, coincidentally, has been a U.S. citizen for twenty years.

So don't be completely surprised if at some time in the future (after all, California is about the future, right?) American voters pick an action hero to save the country from big spenders, business killers, and if we're real lucky, terrorists.