August of 2003 was a horrifying time politically, markedly worse than the present in terms of human consequences.
In just a few years we had gone from a time of peace and record prosperity with an exceptionally eloquent centrist president who had won two landslides to a time of war by choice and recession with an astonishingly inarticulate and ignorant extreme-right president who had stolen office and was laying waste to just about every progressive priority (and democratic principle) in sight, with barely a peep from the mainstream media about this dark turn of events.
Though any honest and informed person now recognizes that Bush was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, he had high approval ratings at the time. Ironically, though he had helped enable 9/11 by ignoring reams of intelligence warnings, the public rallied around Bush after the event because they wanted a father figure and the mainstream media had failed to report on his gross negligence. Iraq hadn't spun out of control yet, Katrina hadn't happened, the crash of 2008 was several years in the future, so Bush's stock was high.
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean was the flavor of the moment because he was the first candidate to forcefully--angrily, even--give voice to the feelings of Democratic activists and politically-literate voters who understood just how destructive Bush's presidency was. Right behind him in the polls were John Kerry and John Edwards, who would end up as the presidential and vice presidential candidates on the Democratic ticket. Ultimately, thanks to all of the GOP's breathtakingly cynical maneuvers to suppress the vote in Ohio, this ended up being the most prescient sentence in the feature:
There is a small (but growing) body of Democrats who calibrate the degree of difficulty in unseating Bush and come to the conclusion that none of the current candidates is up to task.
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Friday, January 4, 2019
The Contenders
And they're just getting warmed up. Bush's top strategist, Karl Rove, models himself on William McKinley's head consultant, and based on the Bush administration's direction so far, we can confidently guess that the ultimate goal of this group is to wind the clock back to the turn of the 20th Century, before pure food laws, child labor laws, trust-busting, protection of public lands, the progressive income tax, the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, Social Security, bank regulation, regulation of the stock market, media ownership laws, the right to strike, worker safety laws, fair housing laws, civil rights laws, voting rights laws, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the Freedom of Information Act, environmental protections, consumer protections, a woman's right to choose, and all the fundamental civil decencies Democrats (and Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon) advocated and passed into law over stiff conservative opposition.
If this history did not make it obvious enough, Bush's bold, ruthless right-wing push over the past two-plus years has rendered the notion that the major parties have the same agenda patently ridiculous. Yet the Green Party has indicated that they will probably run a presidential candidate in 2004, though, with an anemic 1 or 2% of the vote nationally, they pose absolutely no threat to Bush. In fact, if the Green candidate has any discernible effect on the race, it will be to offer Bush a helping hand by forcing Democrats to shift precious resources to states that should be safely Democratic, giving Bush an even bigger advantage in the swing states (see 2000, Florida). Even some top Green Party officials are leery of this surefire loser of a strategy, and Ralph Nader of all people has suddenly become cautious, saying he may not run as a Green if Howard Dean becomes the Democratic nominee.
As ever, and always, it is the Democrats, and the Democrats alone, who can end a scorched earth Republican administration, and it's going to be a heck of a lot tougher prying W. out of the White House than it was keeping him from getting in as an untested candidate with a wafer-thin resume. Faced with a high state of fear and confusion among much of the public, a mainstream media thus far generally compliant (or should we say complicit?) with most of the Bush agenda, and an opponent who will have 200 million quid pro quo-drenched dollars, anyone concerned about the state of the union needs to take a hard look at the small handful of Democratic candidates to find the one with the best combination of clarity and passion, excited activist networks, media savvy, and the most winning personality contrast to Bush.
Against such a well-oiled machine it's vital to pick a candidate soon and convince the rest to drop out, so progressives can come together and mount their resources. Looking at the 9 (or 10, if Wes Clark jumps in) candidates in the current field, it's obviously time to pare down. Carol Moseley-Braun has a respectable public record, but it's hard to imagine the first Democrat to lose a Senate seat in Illinois in twenty years (to a novice conservative Republican in a Democratic state in a Democratic year, 1998) presenting Bush with much of a challenge. Dennis Kucinich, a four-term congressional representative from Cleveland, probably gets a 100% ranking from every liberal interest group, and has a stellar record against untrammeled globalization, the rampant, dangerous corporatization of our culture and society, and the military-industrial complex, but he has little money, little organization, views well to the left of the whole red zone and some of the blue, and would be the first man in the United States to ascend directly from the House of Representatives to the presidency since 1880. Ditto for Dick Gephardt, another honorable man with a history of loyalty to good causes. The last time Gephardt ran for president, in 1988, he was trounced by political flyweight Michael Dukakis, and outside of Iowa he will most likely be trounced again this year, due to his irremediable blandness and his resultant inability to excite many voters. He has the endorsement of the Teamsters for his opposition to anti-labor trade policies, but this could be nothing but an out for the Teamsters: if Gephardt is eliminated in the primaries, the Teamsters could then endorse the Republican in the race, as they did in '72, '80, '84, and '88, if it looks like the Democrat will lose come Labor Day 2004. Also in the race is Al Sharpton, who has contributed the most concise take on the Bush tax cuts yet ("It's like Jim Jones giving you Kool-Aid...it tastes good but it will kill you"), and provides a voice for terminally neglected inner city residents, but is more likely to win the lottery than become president.
Stuck in the middle of the pack--neither shoe-outs nor top-tier candidates--are two senators: Bob Graham of Florida and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. It's not as easy to dismiss either of these candidates' higher aspirations, but it's easy enough. Joe Lieberman plays the role of a serious candidate before his friends in the press, but is relying almost entirely on his appointment as Gore's vice presidential partner to keep his poll numbers afloat among party regulars, even as he has criticized the Gore campaign's populist bent. Lieberman is trying to present his long-time genuflection before the defense industry, and his interrelated support for interventions abroad, as a trump card against other Democratic candidates, particularly Howard Dean, who have more reluctance to make America the world's policeman. Lieberman is also ribbing fellow contenders over their support for social programs and their opposition to unconditional free trade. These messages play well with donation-giving corporations, elite media interests, and some swing voters, but most Democratic primary voters won't respond well to values lectures from such a craven opportunist who happens to be about as exciting as a bowl of Quaker oats.
Beginning with his underdog gubernatorial victory in 1978, Bob Graham has never lost an election in Florida, ground central. For years Bob Graham has been largely in the background, but since deciding to run for president, he has used his post on the Senate Intelligence Committee to attack Bush's huge (some may think self-interested) lapses in security spending, particularly to localities, Bush's carelessness in focusing military attention on an empty threat (Iraq) when there are more dangerous, ever present dangers (al Qaeda, North Korea), and Bush's imperial secrecy, particularly the administration effort, thus far successful, to shield from the public 28 pages of a recent report on 9/11 wherein is outlined Bush's deprecatory treatment of the Saudis and hijacker ties to some members of the Saudi ruling family. Graham's drawbacks are a low-key personality, the fact that he has never walked the media gauntlet, his lack of money or an activist base, and the possibility that he could face major trouble in the early primaries before Super Tuesday in the south. He has a slim sleeper potential at best.
A generous reading of the present field yields just three candidates who have the money, the drive, the support, and the salability to be a potentially competitive Democratic nominee. John Kerry is a long-time (19 years) senator from Massachusetts with a very impressive resume which includes support for universal health coverage, environmental protections (including protection of the Alaskan National Wildlife Preserve) and energy independence, a very progressive voting record, good looks, loads of money, an alpha male physical presence, and a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts for his service in Vietnam to boot (after his valor on the battlefield Kerry became a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War). Despite what Christopher Hitchens, the high priest of the chickenhawk scribblers, and other members of the media say about Kerry's perceived waffling on Iraq (for the intervention, against the unilateral handling of reconstruction), Kerry has an authority on foreign policy and security issues --the biggest Democratic weakness in the eyes of the average voter--that none other in the current field can lay claim to. In 1985, Kerry became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which helped publicize Ollie North's unconstitutional operation in Nicaragua. As part of an investigation into the North shenanigans, Kerry contributed to a famous report that included mention of connections between the CIA and drug-smuggling Contras.
Kerry is a firm believer in the Democratic tradition of multilateral internationalism. Part of Kerry's internationalism includes support for free trade agreements, which may not play well with labor interests. Kerry's biggest weakness is that he's essentially an unreconstructed liberal from Massachusetts, which could be the death knell for his candidacy throughout the South and many other areas in the red zone.
John Edwards is a senator from North Carolina who has decided to run for president during his first term in public office, which is almost unheard of. He possesses a growing, solid command of policy specifics and has drawn up a policy manifesto entitled "Real Solutions for America," which includes his plans to provide a tax credit to first-time home buyers, matching retirement savings accounts for those making under $50,000 a year, and a plan to make health insurance mandatory for those under 21. Edwards is running as an anger-free Southern populist in the Clinton mold, favoring scholarships for people who agree to teach in inner city schools for five years and a repeal of the regressive aspects of the Bush tax cut. He has supported the Iraq War all along, but has criticized the unilateral handling of the reconstruction. He supports commonsense proposals to federalize security of chemical and nuclear facilities that have been bottled up by the Republicans. He has been ambiguous about trade, expressing concern for North Carolina industries adversely affected by globalization while voting to give President Bush authority to negotiate fast-track trade agreements. He has great strengths in the gentility of his manner, which can play all around the country, his struggles on behalf of the little guy as a trial lawyer, his photogenics, and his life story (he is self-made in the Horatio Alger way Republicans love to mythologize).
But Edward's poll numbers are low because he has spent much time of late fundraising, rather than campaigning, and has by far the least experience in the field, including experience dealing with the media--observers are wondering if he has a glass jaw. According to a story that was leaked to the press some months back, Edwards was at one time feared enough by the White House that they had drawn up a plan to tar and feather him with the liberal bogeyman label, but that role has been seized by Howard Dean (drum roll, please).
Simultaneous appearances on the covers of Time and Newsweek have helped Howard Dean solidify his position as the current Democratic front runner. Despite what anyone says (or plants in the media) about Dean, his record as the governor of Vermont from 1992-2002 was mostly centrist. He often opposed the social spending wish lists of the lefty Democratic legislature in order to keep Vermont's budget in balance (Vermont currently is one of the few states in the nation that is not drowning in debt, thanks to Dean's fiscal responsibility, a concept about as familiar to Bush as cuneiform).
In the spirit of responsible public outlays, Dean has called for full repeal of the Bush tax cuts to fund healthcare coverage for the uninsured and other glaring gaps in our infrastructure. Governor Dean extended healthcare to all children in New Hampshire, mandated mammogram coverage in the state health plan, and extended prescription drug benefits to those up to 400% of the poverty level. As a doctor, Dean brings a wealth of ideas and interest to the issue. Dean is also very well known for signing the first civil unions bill in the country, though he has expressed opposition to gay marriage. Dean has laid out a long-term environmental plan that would have the US using 20% renewable fuels by 2020, and Dean has shown strong support for multilateral environmental treaties. Dean backed NAFTA, but has evolved to a position of supporting free trade agreements only on condition that they include labor and environmental protections. Dean is a strong supporter of the right to organize.
Parting with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Dean was a strong supporter of welfare "reform." In another break with the left, Dean has said gun laws ought to be a state issue, a tacit admittance that he would sign no new gun control legislation, though he has expressed support for the Brady Bill, the assault weapons ban, and gun show restrictions. Dean has said he would not reduce the bloated defense budget, but would simply spend the money more effectively. Though the death penalty is a virtual non-issue at the presidential level, Dean also challenges liberal orthodoxy in his support of the death penalty under narrow circumstances (terrorist acts, crimes against children).
Dean's biggest assets, thus far, have been his personality and his trailblazing organization. Beginning with a strong, vocal stand against the invasion of Iraq, Dean quickly shed his dark horse status with a combination of simple, direct messages to disenchanted Democrats, an unprecedented online presidential campaign that has raised easy money and linked Dean supporters all over the country, and a vigorous, expressive presence. In a time when the United States is represented by a laughably inarticulate automaton that never utters an unscripted line or appears in a spontaneous setting, Dean is the real deal, a politician who routinely throws away the script so he can speak his mind. Call it a 180 degree turn toward public accountability.
The most obvious sign of Dean's pre-eminence is the sudden wave of flack he has received in the media. Over the past few weeks Dean has been attacked directly or indirectly by Lieberman, Kerry, the Democratic Leadership Council, and liberal, and conservative members of the media. The White House has jumped on the bandwagon by intimating that it would relish a Dean nomination. As ever, this could be a bluff, part of the eternal White House confidence game (remember Bush strategists saying they were certain he would get more than 300 electoral votes in 2000?), or maybe it's true. Dean has energized a plurality of angry progressives, but to sell nationally (assuming he wins the primary), Dean would have to pull a majority of moderates, something he hasn't done yet. Dean is an adept politician, so it is still possible that he will broaden his appeal.
There are a lot of dynamics in play that could affect Dean more than anything he does or doesn't do as a candidate. If the economy remains in the tank, no new terrorist attacks occur, and the media treats Dean even nominally fairer than they treated Al Gore, Dean could have a shot. However, if the situation in Iraq cools down, and the WMD story stays underground (or WMDs are found), Dean's bedrock anti-war position and clear-spoken populism may not catch on with the undecideds. If the economy recovers, and/or there is another terrorist attack, Bush could pull away.
There is a small (but growing) body of Democrats who calibrate the degree of difficulty in unseating Bush and come to the conclusion that none of the current candidates is up to task. In times of siege, or perceived siege, it's natural for a populace to shift right, out of fear and paranoia. Unless this state of fear abates--or Bush gets caught up in a scandal that the major media don't abandon for a change--the belief is that the only hope of saving the country from four more ghoulish years of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft lies in the person of Wes Clark.
Called "The Ideal Candidate" by the Atlantic Monthly, Wes Clark offers astounding credentials: he graduated first in his class at West Point in 1966 and received a Master's degree in Philosophy, Economics and Politics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Clark's role as supreme allied commander of the NATO forces that stopped genocide in Kosovo is complemented by his Defense Distinguished Service Medal, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and the Medal of Freedom. He hails from Little Rock, which gives him a leg up in the South, the very heart of Bush's base. He is forceful and articulate in his denunciations of Bush's bullying unilateralism, is liberal on social issues, has (so far) established a decent relationship with the press, and is not as vulnerable to caricature from the right, because he's everything they fantasize that their candidates should be, and much more. Most importantly, with his vast military experience and knowledge of world affairs, he has an untouchable credibility that could neutralize Bush on the vital issue of national security. Freed of the fear factor that has been the criminally cynical linchpin of Bush's political success, a majority of the voting public just might repair our international credibility by making the States a freer, fairer, more open country in a safer world.
The question is: could Clark catch on? Clark would have to raise a lot of money, soon, differentiate himself from the rest of the pack, and overtake Dean (or anyone else who catches fire) in the Democratic primaries, where Clark's prime fitness for the general may not have much impact. Esquire magazine has called Clark "The man who can beat Bush (if he wants to)"; will Democratic primary voters give him the opportunity?
There are no thunderbolt-throwers like Bill Clinton in the current pack, but Bush's tumbling numbers have revealed a previously hidden window of vulnerability. Fresh excitement on the Democratic campaign trail, in combination with what we know will be a big effort by all the groups most adversely effected by Bush's right-wing juggernaut (labor unions, environmental activists, pro-choice and civil rights groups), could provide an in. If those of us who care about the future of the United States coalesce around the best candidate and push hard to spread our message, it's possible we may send the Bush family packing, once and for all.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Background: "All Together Now"
"All Together Now" was the first of many ruthlessly factual pre-election essays I've written which have demolished the breathtakingly ignorant talking point that "the (major political) parties are the same."
I had begun following national politics in my teens, with a laser-like focus on social justice and the ways policy and process impact human beings. This focus continued through my 20's and early 30's, when W. Bush ran against Al Gore.
I was acutely aware during the 2000 presidential election of Clinton/Gore's ideological shortcomings on issues of trade, regulation of Wall Street, the Communications Act, and Welfare Reform, but I was also acutely aware (based on Bush's record as governor of Texas) that Gore was worlds better than W on the 90-95% of other policy decisions presidents make and vastly more qualified for office. Through the fall of 2000, I argued repeatedly with supporters of Ralph Nader, most of whom said it "wouldn't really matter" if Bush beat Gore because they were "so similar."
It mattered a great deal, as it turned out. This piece explored in painful detail dozens and dozens of ways in which W reversed Clinton/Gore policy for the worse.
"All Together Now" was posted in the summer of 2003, as Democrats were beginning to think of who should run against Bush in 2004. No candidate had emerged, so I took on the first question for many of getunderground.com's very left-leaning young readers: whether to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate or to "vote ones' conscience" for a third party candidate. The essay is less accessible than features I would write in the future--thousands of words in length, over-reliant on laundry list formatting, chock-full of long paragraphs--but it definitively proved that the only way to vote one's conscience was (and still is) to vote Democratic.
I had begun following national politics in my teens, with a laser-like focus on social justice and the ways policy and process impact human beings. This focus continued through my 20's and early 30's, when W. Bush ran against Al Gore.
I was acutely aware during the 2000 presidential election of Clinton/Gore's ideological shortcomings on issues of trade, regulation of Wall Street, the Communications Act, and Welfare Reform, but I was also acutely aware (based on Bush's record as governor of Texas) that Gore was worlds better than W on the 90-95% of other policy decisions presidents make and vastly more qualified for office. Through the fall of 2000, I argued repeatedly with supporters of Ralph Nader, most of whom said it "wouldn't really matter" if Bush beat Gore because they were "so similar."
It mattered a great deal, as it turned out. This piece explored in painful detail dozens and dozens of ways in which W reversed Clinton/Gore policy for the worse.
"All Together Now" was posted in the summer of 2003, as Democrats were beginning to think of who should run against Bush in 2004. No candidate had emerged, so I took on the first question for many of getunderground.com's very left-leaning young readers: whether to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate or to "vote ones' conscience" for a third party candidate. The essay is less accessible than features I would write in the future--thousands of words in length, over-reliant on laundry list formatting, chock-full of long paragraphs--but it definitively proved that the only way to vote one's conscience was (and still is) to vote Democratic.
All Together Now
[This piece was originally published 7/1/03 at getunderground.com. For background information, click here.]
During the 2000 presidential campaign a small but strident group of journalists, entertainers, and activists supported Green Party candidate Ralph Nader because they claimed that a vote for Nader would somehow launch the Greens, a third party, into the big leagues of American politics.
Government employee unions were not far behind. After Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2002, Bush announced a plan to outsource half of the federal workforce. Alongside this controversial move Bush decided that the 56,000 valuable new federal employees in airports did not deserve job security or the right to collective bargaining; similarly, after Bush embraced the creation of the Homeland Security department (which, not surprisingly, Ashcroft endorsed on the very day Colleen Rowley was unmasking the incompetence of the FBI in the run up to 9/11), he fought congressional Democrats on the issue of unionization, explaining the need for "flexibility," even running smear ads accusing Georgia Democrat Max Cleland (who has been wheelchair bound since getting a Purple Heart in Vietnam) of being unpatriotic. The ads showed Cleland in the middle of the screen, flanked by Saddam Hussein on one side and Osama bin Laden on the other. The administration also tried--unsuccessfully, so far--to privatize air traffic control, an idea so insane in the wake of 9/11 that it has yet to take wing in a Republican congress.
Union employees were hardly the only working people to feel the brunt of Bush. Immediately upon taking office, Bush signed a repeal of Clinton's ergonomic regulations sent to him by a Republican Congress and set about relaxing workplace safety enforcement. Key in the effort to strip 100 million workers of protection from repetitive stress injuries was John Graham, who headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. As a Harvard professor, Graham had birthed "comparative risk analysis," a regulatory model that attempted to scientifically justify lax public safety measures or other harmful corporate practices by placing low valuations on human life. Ergonomic regulations were part of the large task Graham had of deciding which of the raft of Clinton regulations to un-suspend, amend, or kill, as quietly as possible. One of Graham's right-hand women was Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Gall had the distinction of having been the lone commission vote against safety standards for baby walkers, bunk beds, and crib slats. She was quite a contrast with Clinton's head at the CPSC, Ann Brown, who had used investigations and threats to try to force industry to do the right thing.
The administration has also meddled with worker retirement systems, proposing measures that would allow employers to switch from seniority-based to cash-based pension plans, a boon to business and a bust to workers who are middle-aged and older. In yet another reversal of Clinton policy, the Bush administration has proposed a dangerous re-working of overtime laws that allows employers to base overtime on an 80-hour cycle, instead of the current 40, and allow employers to replace overtime with comp time for any employees loosely classified as "management." This one even has some congressional Republicans scared. The administration also repealed a Clinton rule that allowed states to use unemployment money to help people use family leave to have babies or adopt children.
The pitch was that the Greens would offer a progressive haven for voters who thought the Democrats were too compromising. Nader's supporters were unbowed by the fact that third parties have never played a constructive role in U.S. presidential elections, because our winner-take-all system rewards only parties with mass support. When asked about the possibility that Nader could siphon enough votes from Al Gore to hand the presidency to George W Bush, Nader's supporters were unanimous in their scorn for the question, claiming that it wouldn't matter who won because, as Harvard professor Randall Robinson imperiously put it: "the two major parties are virtually indistinguishable." Gore and Bush were referred to as "Tweedledee and Tweedledum," or "two heads of the same beast." The most generous assessment of Gore pegged him as ""the lesser of two evils."
Bushies loved Nader, because his constant repetition of the theme of rough equivalence between the major party candidates helped blur the important distinctions and thereby conceal from fence-sitting voters the hard right-wing agenda W's men had in store for America. And Nader's insistence on going into big cities in tightly-contested states up until the crucial last moments of the campaign forced Gore to spend virtually all of his time and money in areas that should have been safely Democratic. This in turn forced Gore to hand many swing states (e.g. Ohio) over to Bush without a contest, as Bush used his financial advantage to close the deal with ad time that Gore couldn't compete with.
On Election Day most progressives doubted the validity of Nader's equivalence claim, and the Green candidate's vote total shrank to 2.7%. But 22,000 people in New Hampshire and 97,000 people in Florida voted for Nader, giving George W. Bush just enough votes to reinstate the Bush monarchy. Nader's oft-repeated claim that the parties were essentially the same would be put to the test.
The results: appointments
Differences between the Clinton administration and the W. Bush administration came into view as soon as Bush had declared victory. Where Clinton's cabinet appointees were center-left professionals who attached meaning to their agencies' historic missions, most of W's choices were picked because of their ability to undermine the very agencies they were appointed to run. Bush put Larry Thompson--a director of Providian, which had paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars for fraud--as watchdog over corporate crime, and Harvey Pitt (a former corporate lawyer who had specialized in ensuring that his clients would not pay the price for their negligence) as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
While Clinton's attorney general had been Janet Reno, a liberal, independent woman who stated in one of her first press conferences that she would focus on protecting the rights of the accused, Bush appointed John Ashcroft, a right-wing evangelical Christian who had made his name in Missouri politics by invoking the name of the Lord while opposing abortion and integrated busing, and giving an interview to Southern Partisan, a segregationist Southern publication with an undying memory.
After being confirmed on a largely party-line vote, Ashcroft set about reversing many of Reno's policies and/or implementing his own, policies that never would have seen the light of day in a Gore administration. Where the Clinton administration was the first modern administration to do major combat with the powerful gun lobby, Ashcroft reversed course, dropping a Clinton rule that allowed the FBI to hold onto gun purchase records for 90 days to check for fraud and abuse; under Ashcroft's revision, the FBI was allowed to keep the information for just one day. Turning his back on six decades of Justice Department policy, Ashcroft filed a friend of the court brief in which he reinterpreted the 2nd amendment to give individuals--as opposed to "well-regulated militias"--the right to own firearms. The new interpretation is sure to bring a flood of lawsuits aimed at eviscerating what weak gun control measures currently exist. The Bush administration also quietly ended a gun buyback program that had been initiated by the Clinton administration, and is currently working with congressional Republicans to protect the gun industry from lawsuits, another reversal of Clinton policy, which was to work actively with cities to recoup carnage money from gun companies through the courts.
Ashcroft's most flagrant abuse of office has been in the area of civil liberties. One of the first things Ashcroft did after 9/11 (though it had been in the works previous to 9/11) was reverse Clinton policy on the Freedom of Information Act. Where Reno's policy had been to declassify anything that was not considered tangibly harmful to national security, Ashcroft went in the opposite direction, sending Justice department employees (and employees in the Agriculture and other pertinent departments) a message to classify anything for which there was a "sound basis for doing so", in effect shifting the burden of proof to those who sought to obtain documents. Armed with this secrecy, Ashcroft made and proposed a startling array of changes to civil liberties, including giving law enforcement agencies expanded wiretapping authority, allowing law enforcement agencies to enter people's homes, or seize personal and billing information from the Internet, without court orders, and instituting secret military tribunals. Ashcroft also proposed a repeal of the decades-old ban on domestic spying by the CIA, allowing the CIA to spy on individuals or groups, including dissidents, without cause. Ashcroft was stopped by a Democratic Senate from instituting TIPS, wherein bus drivers, mailmen, and meter readers would act as informants, in a system not unlike East Germany during the Cold War. And in the true spirit of Cold War East Germany, when confronted in a congressional hearing for his flagrant disregard for fundamental constitutional rights, Ashcroft accused his interrogators of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Ashcroft's Justice Department has been particularly bad for people of color. Not much concerned about getting their votes, Ashcroft blocked rules that would have required federal agencies to offer bilingual assistance to non-English speaking persons. Ashcroft also replaced Clinton's liberal immigration policies with a strict policy that leaves immigrants' fates in the hands of a single administrative judge--as opposed to the previous norm of three--and offers little chance for appeal. Only extraordinary cases can be appealed to a Board of Immigration Appeals panel, which Ashcroft halved from 23 to 11 members, after getting rid of the most pro-immigrant judges. In line with this policy, Bush limited foreign nationals from pressing cases against despots and multinational corporations for human rights violations under the Alien Tort Claims Act, and the U.S. Justice Department exhumed a 50-year-old law that threatens jail or deportation for any legal non-citizens who fail to report changes of address within 10 days of moving. And on the voting rights front, Ashcroft continued the Republican tradition of disenfranchising minorities--which worked like a charm in Florida, 2000--by intervening in congressional districting battles in Mississippi and Florida.
One of the benefits of being a zealot is being freed from having to question one's own motives. While Republicans claim to be the party of state's rights, Ashcroft has shown a passion for meddling with state laws, by trying to convince state prosecutors in non-death penalty states--such as Michigan, Minnesota, and Massachusetts--to seek the death penalty, and by fighting the right of elderly Oregon residents to die with dignity, a right that has twice been confirmed at the ballot box. The Bush administration has also meddled with many states' medical marijuana policies, diverting precious law enforcement dollars and personnel to break up medical marijuana co-ops in California, running ads and making public statements in opposition to a ballot measure in Nevada that would have decriminalized small amounts of marijuana, and trying to force hard time on Ed Rosenthal, a city-certified distributor of medical marijuana in Oakland, California. As the rest of the world updates their drug laws to meet the realities of the new millennium, the Bush administration tries to drag us back to the 1950's.
Like all dutiful Bush appointees, Ashcroft has reduced the Justice department to an organ of Bush's re-election strategy, politicizing every move. In September 2002, criminal justice experts accused the Justice Department of tainting the integrity of crime statistics by exerting top-down control over previously independent agencies within the Justice Department. Not long after, Ashcroft appointed two members of the right-wing Independent Women's Forum (Margot Hill and Nancy Pfonhauer) to its domestic violence advisory committee, though they had both vehemently opposed the Violence Against Women Act, a bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. Ashcroft also politicized the Attorney General Honors Program, which had been a non-partisan internship program for new law graduates, by implementing ideological litmus tests in the applications process. Recently the Justice Department turned its back on another department tradition when it tried to kill an annual Gay Pride celebration for gay employees, another vestige of Clinton era tolerance.
Government as theology
While Ashcroft is the most visible face of reactionary Republicanism, his policies represent just a fraction of the Bush administration's sops to the religious right. Nowhere has control of our government by a rabid, unrepresentative religious minority been more apparent than in Bush's court choices. Where Clinton appointed centrist and center-left judges who supported a woman's right to choose, Bush's picks have been uniformly hostile to abortion rights and virtually every other tenet of progressive politics. Among Bush's choices have been Charles Pickering (a Mississippi judge who tried to convince a jury to be more lenient in its treatment of bigots who had burned a cross on a black family's lawn), Jay Bybee (who defended employment discrimination against gays in the Department of Defense), Dennis Shedd (a protege of Strom Thurmond), Peter Keisler (a former clerk for the notorious Robert Bork), Terry Boyle (a former staff member of Jesse Helms), Priscilla Owen (the most extreme member of Texas's far right Supreme Court), John Roberts (a former clerk to William Rehnquist), Jeffrey Sutton (who earned his credentials fighting protections for the disabled), Brett Kavanaugh (an author of the salacious Starr Report) and Bill Pryor (an Alabama attorney general who filed a brief in defense of an anti-sodomy law which was later overturned by the Supreme Court). While the number of 5-4 conservative votes on the Supreme Court highlights the importance of Supreme Court picks, these nominations to the appellate courts may prove to have an even bigger impact on American law, as the Supreme Court docket has shrunk to less than a 100 cases per year. If Bush serves through 2008, his eight years of judicial appointments will have a profoundly destructive effect on American justice for decades to come.
The Bush Administration has also proven its unqualified obeisance to the true believers by doing everything it can to destroy the wall between church and state. The Clinton Administration took the Constitution at its word, that the use of taxpayer funds for any one religion was discriminatory against not only all other religions, but against the irreligious as well. Bush, by contrast, hired Kay Cole James, the former dean of the Pat Robertson School of Government, to help vet many administration employees. Where Clinton/Gore had vehemently opposed school vouchers, Bush has been a tireless proponent of vouchers. Where Clinton did everything in his power to unleash science on serious medical problems, Bush has thumbed his nose at people suffering from diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, spinal cord injuries, and heart disease by handcuffing stem cell research and trying to impose a ban on therapeutic cloning (as opposed to human cloning), a position so radical that Bush is even opposed by Orrin Hatch and Nancy Reagan.
Bush has overturned or tried to overturn longstanding church-state precedents in a startling number of ways: by proposing that religious groups receive federal housing aid even if they discriminate against employees on the basis of religion or sexual orientation; by funding the construction and restoration of religious buildings; by threatening to strip federal funding from any school that fails to accommodate prayer; by signing an executive order that eased the way for religious groups to receive federal funds to run social service programs; by altering regulations to allow federally-funded job training programs to use "sacred literature" (such as the Bible); by bringing huge increases in federal funding for abstinence-only education (which had been undercut by Clinton); by replacing his first top adviser on AIDS, Scott Evertz, because conservatives complained about Evertz's support for condoms in AIDS prevention workshops; by initiating a Health and Human Services review of all grants for AIDS prevention/treatment to ensure they are not sexually explicit; by appointing Jerry Thacker, who called AIDS the "gay plague," to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS; by appointing David Hager, an anti-contraception Christian reactionary, to head the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the FDA; by removing information about contraception and sex education from the Health and Human Services website; and by removing information on the National Institute of Health website that pointed to the fact that recent studies had shown that there was no link between abortion and breast cancer.
Reproductive freedom is another area where the differences between Clinton/Gore and Bush II could not be starker. Clinton was the most pro-choice president in U.S. history, a leader who received 100% marks from the National Abortion Rights Action League. Bush, on the other hand, is likely to score a 0, as he has done everything he can to return the States to a time of back alley abortions. In his short time in office, Bush has revoked funding for family planning agencies that performed abortions with their own money, put the morning after contraceptive RU486 back on ice (under the guise of protecting women's health, no less), intervened in a federal appeals court case in Ohio to reverse a lower court ruling that struck down a ban on "partial birth abortion," directed the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections to study protections available to embryos in medical experiments (a backdoor move to establish embryos as human beings), extended eligibility under the Child Health Insurance Program to fetuses (though prenatal care is already available to pregnant women through existing government services), initiated big increases in "crisis pregnancy centers," where anti-abortion activists try to talk women out of having abortions; and he is about to sign into law a ban on "partial birth abortion" (vetoed by Clinton multiple times), considered by people on both sides of the issue to be the first step toward repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Leaving children behind
Despite his unwavering insistence that every child be born, Bush has gone out of his way to ensure that life is nasty, brutish, and short for the growing ranks of children who, quite unlike our blue blood president, are unfortunate enough to grow up poor. After selling his No Child Left Behind Act as his (one) major domestic policy achievement, Bush cut funding for schools that was necessary to help them meet the tough new academic standards.
On Election Day most progressives doubted the validity of Nader's equivalence claim, and the Green candidate's vote total shrank to 2.7%. But 22,000 people in New Hampshire and 97,000 people in Florida voted for Nader, giving George W. Bush just enough votes to reinstate the Bush monarchy. Nader's oft-repeated claim that the parties were essentially the same would be put to the test.
The results: appointments
Differences between the Clinton administration and the W. Bush administration came into view as soon as Bush had declared victory. Where Clinton's cabinet appointees were center-left professionals who attached meaning to their agencies' historic missions, most of W's choices were picked because of their ability to undermine the very agencies they were appointed to run. Bush put Larry Thompson--a director of Providian, which had paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars for fraud--as watchdog over corporate crime, and Harvey Pitt (a former corporate lawyer who had specialized in ensuring that his clients would not pay the price for their negligence) as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
While Clinton's attorney general had been Janet Reno, a liberal, independent woman who stated in one of her first press conferences that she would focus on protecting the rights of the accused, Bush appointed John Ashcroft, a right-wing evangelical Christian who had made his name in Missouri politics by invoking the name of the Lord while opposing abortion and integrated busing, and giving an interview to Southern Partisan, a segregationist Southern publication with an undying memory.
After being confirmed on a largely party-line vote, Ashcroft set about reversing many of Reno's policies and/or implementing his own, policies that never would have seen the light of day in a Gore administration. Where the Clinton administration was the first modern administration to do major combat with the powerful gun lobby, Ashcroft reversed course, dropping a Clinton rule that allowed the FBI to hold onto gun purchase records for 90 days to check for fraud and abuse; under Ashcroft's revision, the FBI was allowed to keep the information for just one day. Turning his back on six decades of Justice Department policy, Ashcroft filed a friend of the court brief in which he reinterpreted the 2nd amendment to give individuals--as opposed to "well-regulated militias"--the right to own firearms. The new interpretation is sure to bring a flood of lawsuits aimed at eviscerating what weak gun control measures currently exist. The Bush administration also quietly ended a gun buyback program that had been initiated by the Clinton administration, and is currently working with congressional Republicans to protect the gun industry from lawsuits, another reversal of Clinton policy, which was to work actively with cities to recoup carnage money from gun companies through the courts.
Ashcroft's most flagrant abuse of office has been in the area of civil liberties. One of the first things Ashcroft did after 9/11 (though it had been in the works previous to 9/11) was reverse Clinton policy on the Freedom of Information Act. Where Reno's policy had been to declassify anything that was not considered tangibly harmful to national security, Ashcroft went in the opposite direction, sending Justice department employees (and employees in the Agriculture and other pertinent departments) a message to classify anything for which there was a "sound basis for doing so", in effect shifting the burden of proof to those who sought to obtain documents. Armed with this secrecy, Ashcroft made and proposed a startling array of changes to civil liberties, including giving law enforcement agencies expanded wiretapping authority, allowing law enforcement agencies to enter people's homes, or seize personal and billing information from the Internet, without court orders, and instituting secret military tribunals. Ashcroft also proposed a repeal of the decades-old ban on domestic spying by the CIA, allowing the CIA to spy on individuals or groups, including dissidents, without cause. Ashcroft was stopped by a Democratic Senate from instituting TIPS, wherein bus drivers, mailmen, and meter readers would act as informants, in a system not unlike East Germany during the Cold War. And in the true spirit of Cold War East Germany, when confronted in a congressional hearing for his flagrant disregard for fundamental constitutional rights, Ashcroft accused his interrogators of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Ashcroft's Justice Department has been particularly bad for people of color. Not much concerned about getting their votes, Ashcroft blocked rules that would have required federal agencies to offer bilingual assistance to non-English speaking persons. Ashcroft also replaced Clinton's liberal immigration policies with a strict policy that leaves immigrants' fates in the hands of a single administrative judge--as opposed to the previous norm of three--and offers little chance for appeal. Only extraordinary cases can be appealed to a Board of Immigration Appeals panel, which Ashcroft halved from 23 to 11 members, after getting rid of the most pro-immigrant judges. In line with this policy, Bush limited foreign nationals from pressing cases against despots and multinational corporations for human rights violations under the Alien Tort Claims Act, and the U.S. Justice Department exhumed a 50-year-old law that threatens jail or deportation for any legal non-citizens who fail to report changes of address within 10 days of moving. And on the voting rights front, Ashcroft continued the Republican tradition of disenfranchising minorities--which worked like a charm in Florida, 2000--by intervening in congressional districting battles in Mississippi and Florida.
One of the benefits of being a zealot is being freed from having to question one's own motives. While Republicans claim to be the party of state's rights, Ashcroft has shown a passion for meddling with state laws, by trying to convince state prosecutors in non-death penalty states--such as Michigan, Minnesota, and Massachusetts--to seek the death penalty, and by fighting the right of elderly Oregon residents to die with dignity, a right that has twice been confirmed at the ballot box. The Bush administration has also meddled with many states' medical marijuana policies, diverting precious law enforcement dollars and personnel to break up medical marijuana co-ops in California, running ads and making public statements in opposition to a ballot measure in Nevada that would have decriminalized small amounts of marijuana, and trying to force hard time on Ed Rosenthal, a city-certified distributor of medical marijuana in Oakland, California. As the rest of the world updates their drug laws to meet the realities of the new millennium, the Bush administration tries to drag us back to the 1950's.
Like all dutiful Bush appointees, Ashcroft has reduced the Justice department to an organ of Bush's re-election strategy, politicizing every move. In September 2002, criminal justice experts accused the Justice Department of tainting the integrity of crime statistics by exerting top-down control over previously independent agencies within the Justice Department. Not long after, Ashcroft appointed two members of the right-wing Independent Women's Forum (Margot Hill and Nancy Pfonhauer) to its domestic violence advisory committee, though they had both vehemently opposed the Violence Against Women Act, a bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. Ashcroft also politicized the Attorney General Honors Program, which had been a non-partisan internship program for new law graduates, by implementing ideological litmus tests in the applications process. Recently the Justice Department turned its back on another department tradition when it tried to kill an annual Gay Pride celebration for gay employees, another vestige of Clinton era tolerance.
Government as theology
While Ashcroft is the most visible face of reactionary Republicanism, his policies represent just a fraction of the Bush administration's sops to the religious right. Nowhere has control of our government by a rabid, unrepresentative religious minority been more apparent than in Bush's court choices. Where Clinton appointed centrist and center-left judges who supported a woman's right to choose, Bush's picks have been uniformly hostile to abortion rights and virtually every other tenet of progressive politics. Among Bush's choices have been Charles Pickering (a Mississippi judge who tried to convince a jury to be more lenient in its treatment of bigots who had burned a cross on a black family's lawn), Jay Bybee (who defended employment discrimination against gays in the Department of Defense), Dennis Shedd (a protege of Strom Thurmond), Peter Keisler (a former clerk for the notorious Robert Bork), Terry Boyle (a former staff member of Jesse Helms), Priscilla Owen (the most extreme member of Texas's far right Supreme Court), John Roberts (a former clerk to William Rehnquist), Jeffrey Sutton (who earned his credentials fighting protections for the disabled), Brett Kavanaugh (an author of the salacious Starr Report) and Bill Pryor (an Alabama attorney general who filed a brief in defense of an anti-sodomy law which was later overturned by the Supreme Court). While the number of 5-4 conservative votes on the Supreme Court highlights the importance of Supreme Court picks, these nominations to the appellate courts may prove to have an even bigger impact on American law, as the Supreme Court docket has shrunk to less than a 100 cases per year. If Bush serves through 2008, his eight years of judicial appointments will have a profoundly destructive effect on American justice for decades to come.
The Bush Administration has also proven its unqualified obeisance to the true believers by doing everything it can to destroy the wall between church and state. The Clinton Administration took the Constitution at its word, that the use of taxpayer funds for any one religion was discriminatory against not only all other religions, but against the irreligious as well. Bush, by contrast, hired Kay Cole James, the former dean of the Pat Robertson School of Government, to help vet many administration employees. Where Clinton/Gore had vehemently opposed school vouchers, Bush has been a tireless proponent of vouchers. Where Clinton did everything in his power to unleash science on serious medical problems, Bush has thumbed his nose at people suffering from diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, spinal cord injuries, and heart disease by handcuffing stem cell research and trying to impose a ban on therapeutic cloning (as opposed to human cloning), a position so radical that Bush is even opposed by Orrin Hatch and Nancy Reagan.
Bush has overturned or tried to overturn longstanding church-state precedents in a startling number of ways: by proposing that religious groups receive federal housing aid even if they discriminate against employees on the basis of religion or sexual orientation; by funding the construction and restoration of religious buildings; by threatening to strip federal funding from any school that fails to accommodate prayer; by signing an executive order that eased the way for religious groups to receive federal funds to run social service programs; by altering regulations to allow federally-funded job training programs to use "sacred literature" (such as the Bible); by bringing huge increases in federal funding for abstinence-only education (which had been undercut by Clinton); by replacing his first top adviser on AIDS, Scott Evertz, because conservatives complained about Evertz's support for condoms in AIDS prevention workshops; by initiating a Health and Human Services review of all grants for AIDS prevention/treatment to ensure they are not sexually explicit; by appointing Jerry Thacker, who called AIDS the "gay plague," to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS; by appointing David Hager, an anti-contraception Christian reactionary, to head the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the FDA; by removing information about contraception and sex education from the Health and Human Services website; and by removing information on the National Institute of Health website that pointed to the fact that recent studies had shown that there was no link between abortion and breast cancer.
Reproductive freedom is another area where the differences between Clinton/Gore and Bush II could not be starker. Clinton was the most pro-choice president in U.S. history, a leader who received 100% marks from the National Abortion Rights Action League. Bush, on the other hand, is likely to score a 0, as he has done everything he can to return the States to a time of back alley abortions. In his short time in office, Bush has revoked funding for family planning agencies that performed abortions with their own money, put the morning after contraceptive RU486 back on ice (under the guise of protecting women's health, no less), intervened in a federal appeals court case in Ohio to reverse a lower court ruling that struck down a ban on "partial birth abortion," directed the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections to study protections available to embryos in medical experiments (a backdoor move to establish embryos as human beings), extended eligibility under the Child Health Insurance Program to fetuses (though prenatal care is already available to pregnant women through existing government services), initiated big increases in "crisis pregnancy centers," where anti-abortion activists try to talk women out of having abortions; and he is about to sign into law a ban on "partial birth abortion" (vetoed by Clinton multiple times), considered by people on both sides of the issue to be the first step toward repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Leaving children behind
Despite his unwavering insistence that every child be born, Bush has gone out of his way to ensure that life is nasty, brutish, and short for the growing ranks of children who, quite unlike our blue blood president, are unfortunate enough to grow up poor. After selling his No Child Left Behind Act as his (one) major domestic policy achievement, Bush cut funding for schools that was necessary to help them meet the tough new academic standards.
Alongside his dubious proposals to block grant or privatize Medicaid, Head Start, and public housing (measures by and large opposed by the people in the trenches who run these programs), Bush has cut Medicaid, Headstart, public housing, school lunches, the Women and Infants Nutrition program, the Community Access Program (a program Clinton created to coordinate care among health providers for those with no insurance), youth opportunity grants for at-risk youth, HUD community development block grants, the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, childcare for women who are forced to work as part of welfare reform, money used to investigate cases of child abuse and neglect, and training schools for teachers at children's hospitals.
To be on the safe side, Bush's minions have conducted head-totoe investigations of every anti-poverty program to ensure that the crumbs we do authorize go only to the deserving indigent.
Leaving no millionaire behind
Poverty-fighting programs haven't been alone on Bush's chopping block. Bush has also starved domestic security, libraries, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Americorps, Medicare, community policing programs, and government payouts for student loans. Fortunately Bush found enough money in the budget to give a hefty increase to White House operations, and extended $8,000 to John Ashcroft so a blue robe could be thrown over the nude statue of lady justice during Ashcroft's press conferences.
While the budget cuts to anti-poverty programs were made in the name of deficit reduction, Bush has put all his political capital into shifting America's tax burden to the middle class. Instead of increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working class, as Clinton did, Bush has increased IRS investigations of the working poor, while at the same time calling the IRS off the big money prevaricators who hustle money offshore. Reversing the 1993 Clinton tax hike on the super-rich, Bush gave 40% of a $2 trillion windfall to the upper 1% in 2001 and served them up the recent dividend tax cut for good measure.
Assiduously avoiding the new spirit of austerity has been the Department of Defense, which--with the federal government under complete Republican control--has received increases in the neighborhood of 10% to its already bloated budget. Strangely enough, this defense spending has not gone to veterans. Opposite huge increases in purchases of the latest and greatest pyrotechnic killing machines were: cuts to payments to people suffering from cancer and other illnesses as a result of Cold War atomic weapons projects; the implementation of a new Veterans Administration policy to stop informing veterans of their eligibility for health benefits; and cuts to veteran's hospitals that have left ever bigger waiting lists of veterans. Currently 300,000 vets are on waiting lists, many of them homeless, waiting up to a year for an entry medical exam. In a further slap at veterans, Bush threatened to veto a defense authorization bill if Congress insisted on including expanded retirement benefits for disabled veterans; Bush complained that we just couldn't afford the $18.5 billion to 58 billion it would cost over the next 10 years. The top official of the American Legion said that Bush let down all men and women who had served the armed forces. Bush also cut school aid for the children of the armed forces, many of whom were in Iraq at the time, and failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 low-income military personnel.
The results of Bush's drunken sailor budgets have been laid plain. Opposite Clinton's surplus-producing fiscal discipline, Bush's combination of profligate defense spending and the taxpayer-funded giveaways to Bush's filthy rich core constituents have produced the biggest deficit in American history this year. Next year Bush promises to really go for the gusto by shattering his own record, which is certain to shrink the small discretionary budget (which pays for everything but entitlements) more and more as interest on the debt increases.
In his endless quest to abandon all things Clintonian, Bush has also shown fierce opposition to Clinton's economic prosperity. During W. Bush's two and one half years the United States has lost two million jobs, giving the Bush family a net total of 500,000 jobs created, next to Clinton's 23,000,000 jobs in eight years. Its as if W stripped the keys to the Rolls Royce from Clinton's firm hands and drove it over a cliff, into an ocean of endless debt.
Government secrecy
Though Bush has demanded full disclosure of penny-ante music downloaders and traders in court, and full exposure of our health records (without our signature), and has foisted a host of sacrifices of personal privacy on the public in the name of the war against terrorism (think of the officially abandoned Total Information Awareness project run by Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter), the Bush administration has felt disclosure of its own inner workings improper during the same never ending war on terrorism.
To be on the safe side, Bush's minions have conducted head-totoe investigations of every anti-poverty program to ensure that the crumbs we do authorize go only to the deserving indigent.
Leaving no millionaire behind
Poverty-fighting programs haven't been alone on Bush's chopping block. Bush has also starved domestic security, libraries, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Americorps, Medicare, community policing programs, and government payouts for student loans. Fortunately Bush found enough money in the budget to give a hefty increase to White House operations, and extended $8,000 to John Ashcroft so a blue robe could be thrown over the nude statue of lady justice during Ashcroft's press conferences.
While the budget cuts to anti-poverty programs were made in the name of deficit reduction, Bush has put all his political capital into shifting America's tax burden to the middle class. Instead of increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working class, as Clinton did, Bush has increased IRS investigations of the working poor, while at the same time calling the IRS off the big money prevaricators who hustle money offshore. Reversing the 1993 Clinton tax hike on the super-rich, Bush gave 40% of a $2 trillion windfall to the upper 1% in 2001 and served them up the recent dividend tax cut for good measure.
Assiduously avoiding the new spirit of austerity has been the Department of Defense, which--with the federal government under complete Republican control--has received increases in the neighborhood of 10% to its already bloated budget. Strangely enough, this defense spending has not gone to veterans. Opposite huge increases in purchases of the latest and greatest pyrotechnic killing machines were: cuts to payments to people suffering from cancer and other illnesses as a result of Cold War atomic weapons projects; the implementation of a new Veterans Administration policy to stop informing veterans of their eligibility for health benefits; and cuts to veteran's hospitals that have left ever bigger waiting lists of veterans. Currently 300,000 vets are on waiting lists, many of them homeless, waiting up to a year for an entry medical exam. In a further slap at veterans, Bush threatened to veto a defense authorization bill if Congress insisted on including expanded retirement benefits for disabled veterans; Bush complained that we just couldn't afford the $18.5 billion to 58 billion it would cost over the next 10 years. The top official of the American Legion said that Bush let down all men and women who had served the armed forces. Bush also cut school aid for the children of the armed forces, many of whom were in Iraq at the time, and failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 low-income military personnel.
The results of Bush's drunken sailor budgets have been laid plain. Opposite Clinton's surplus-producing fiscal discipline, Bush's combination of profligate defense spending and the taxpayer-funded giveaways to Bush's filthy rich core constituents have produced the biggest deficit in American history this year. Next year Bush promises to really go for the gusto by shattering his own record, which is certain to shrink the small discretionary budget (which pays for everything but entitlements) more and more as interest on the debt increases.
In his endless quest to abandon all things Clintonian, Bush has also shown fierce opposition to Clinton's economic prosperity. During W. Bush's two and one half years the United States has lost two million jobs, giving the Bush family a net total of 500,000 jobs created, next to Clinton's 23,000,000 jobs in eight years. Its as if W stripped the keys to the Rolls Royce from Clinton's firm hands and drove it over a cliff, into an ocean of endless debt.
Government secrecy
Though Bush has demanded full disclosure of penny-ante music downloaders and traders in court, and full exposure of our health records (without our signature), and has foisted a host of sacrifices of personal privacy on the public in the name of the war against terrorism (think of the officially abandoned Total Information Awareness project run by Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter), the Bush administration has felt disclosure of its own inner workings improper during the same never ending war on terrorism.
It's fair to say that the Bush administration is the most secretive, least democratic administration since Republican Richard Nixon's iron-fisted reign ended in self-destruction. In addition to John Ashcroft's rollback of the Freedom of Information Act, we have witnessed: Office of Management and Budget head Mitch Daniels' attempt to transfer control over government information from neutral librarians (a system that has been in place since Thomas Jefferson) to the heads of the departments themselves; Bush's request for a Freedom of Information exemption for the Department of Homeland Security; a court order forcing the Bush administration to release sampled data from the 2000 census; the administration's repeated refusals to hand over documents to Senate Environmental Works head Jim Jeffords about the polluter-friendly rewrite of New Source Review; the administration's killing off of a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies; Vice President Cheney's ongoing refusal to release records of the secret meetings behind the administration's extraction-based Energy Bill; Bush's multiple delays of the release of 68,000 pages of presidential records from the Reagan Administration; Bush's reversal of Presidential Records Act signed by Democrat Jimmy Carter (which required presidential papers to be released no more than 12 years after they were drawn up); Bush's executive order requiring members of the public to show a "demonstrated, specific need" for what should be public information; the secret no-bid contract for Iraq reconstruction awarded to Cheney's former employer, Halliburton; to say nothing of the general disdain voiced by Administration officials when the rare member of the normally docile major media calls their bluff.
Nowhere has this modus vivendi of secrecy been more pronounced than in the administration's handling of the 9/11 investigation. Where Democrat Franklin Roosevelt immediately authorized an independent commission to study Pearl Harbor, the Bush Administration has done everything in its power to keep the circumstances of 9/11--the most important historical event in the United States since the end of the Cold War--secret from the public. Compounding the lie that the Bush administration had absolutely no hint of knowledge of the terrorist danger level at the time of 9/11 (uncovered many months later, along with the revelation that Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial airliners in the months leading up to the attack), the Bush administration first tried to limit the investigation to secret congressional investigations. When this became politically untenable, Bush agreed to an independent investigation, and soon after appointed war criminal-cum-cover-up artist Henry Kissinger to head up the committee. After the public outcry that followed this absurd and insulting appointment, Kissinger stepped down, and the Bush administration reverted to its regular tactics: undercutting funding for the investigation (Bush has allocated five times as much money for the comparatively trivial Columbia tragedy) and stonewalling on giving up documents. Currently the Bush administration is trying to keep the committee's 800-page report from becoming public information.
Green death
Nowhere has the practice of cutting the public out of the loop been abused more frequently than in the administration's environmental policies. Since picking an EPA head (Christie Whitman) who slashed enforcement budgets, pushed voluntary regulation, and gutted public right to know laws in her first years as a New Jersey governor, and an Interior Secretary (Gail Norton) who had impressed her new employer in her years of suing the government for enforcing environmental laws, the administration has performed the masterful political feat of committing an unprecedented assault on the environment while most of the public remains completely oblivious. This has been done both by limiting (or eliminating) public feedback on public land decisions (the direct opposite of Clinton administration policy, where public comment sometimes stretched for years, and was accompanied by the best science available), and releasing many odious anti-environmental policies to the press on Friday evenings or holidays so as to minimize public exposure.
Bush environmental policy is another one of those vital areas of government that offers a stark contrast to the policies of the Clinton Administration. The day Bush was sworn in, his chief of staff Andrew Card immediately suspended all of Clinton's consumer-, nature-, and labor-friendly federal rules with the object of weakening some, killing others, and getting the spin straight on all of them.
Nowhere has this modus vivendi of secrecy been more pronounced than in the administration's handling of the 9/11 investigation. Where Democrat Franklin Roosevelt immediately authorized an independent commission to study Pearl Harbor, the Bush Administration has done everything in its power to keep the circumstances of 9/11--the most important historical event in the United States since the end of the Cold War--secret from the public. Compounding the lie that the Bush administration had absolutely no hint of knowledge of the terrorist danger level at the time of 9/11 (uncovered many months later, along with the revelation that Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial airliners in the months leading up to the attack), the Bush administration first tried to limit the investigation to secret congressional investigations. When this became politically untenable, Bush agreed to an independent investigation, and soon after appointed war criminal-cum-cover-up artist Henry Kissinger to head up the committee. After the public outcry that followed this absurd and insulting appointment, Kissinger stepped down, and the Bush administration reverted to its regular tactics: undercutting funding for the investigation (Bush has allocated five times as much money for the comparatively trivial Columbia tragedy) and stonewalling on giving up documents. Currently the Bush administration is trying to keep the committee's 800-page report from becoming public information.
Green death
Nowhere has the practice of cutting the public out of the loop been abused more frequently than in the administration's environmental policies. Since picking an EPA head (Christie Whitman) who slashed enforcement budgets, pushed voluntary regulation, and gutted public right to know laws in her first years as a New Jersey governor, and an Interior Secretary (Gail Norton) who had impressed her new employer in her years of suing the government for enforcing environmental laws, the administration has performed the masterful political feat of committing an unprecedented assault on the environment while most of the public remains completely oblivious. This has been done both by limiting (or eliminating) public feedback on public land decisions (the direct opposite of Clinton administration policy, where public comment sometimes stretched for years, and was accompanied by the best science available), and releasing many odious anti-environmental policies to the press on Friday evenings or holidays so as to minimize public exposure.
Bush environmental policy is another one of those vital areas of government that offers a stark contrast to the policies of the Clinton Administration. The day Bush was sworn in, his chief of staff Andrew Card immediately suspended all of Clinton's consumer-, nature-, and labor-friendly federal rules with the object of weakening some, killing others, and getting the spin straight on all of them.
Once in office, while butchering the EPA budget to weaken the EPA--a tactic guaranteed to make the government look bad--and trying to hand enforcement off to the ill-equipped states, Bush took the scalpel or the pickaxe to a startling number of Clinton policies: Bush supported a technique by West Virginia coal companies called mountaintop removal, whereby mountaintops are sheared open to get to the seams, dumping pollutants and debris into surrounding forests and streams (Gore's opposition to this practice cost him West Virginia's electoral votes in 2000); Bush abandoned the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which had been negotiated by Gore (Bush adviser Harlan Watson said it wouldn't even be considered for another ten years); Bush replaced Clinton's strict New Source Review policy, which forced aging coal-fired plants to upgrade to cleaner burning technologies, with the Clear Skies plan, which relied on the facade of voluntary compliance, and actually increased the net amount of allowable pollutants.
Where the Clinton EPA continued the traditional practice of defending environmental laws in court, the Bush EPA has settled out of court, giving polluters a slap on the wrist; Bush immediately suspended the hallmark of Clinton's environmental legacy, his rule against development in big portions of publicly-owned forests, instead handing forests back to "local management," and, in effect, industry, for commercial exploitation at taxpayer expense; Bush also nullified a Clinton rule on protecting wetlands, and another rule that regulated run off from big industrial farms; Bush weakened energy-saving standards set by Clinton for air conditioners and heat pumps, declared a moratorium on expansions to the National Park system, pushed proposals to eliminate environmental impact statements and public participation when drilling, logging, mining or development was desired on publicly owned lands, abandoned a plan to propose changes to Missouri River flow to avoid the extinction of endangered fish and birds, reversed a Clinton rule banning mining for copper, gold, zinc and lead on public lands, and issued a legal opinion allowing Glamis Gold Ltd, a Nevada company, to dig an open-pit gold mine near El Centro, California, a desert considered sacred by local Quechan Indian tribe (Clinton had opposed the mine).
Bush also withdrew the veto power of the interior secretary on mining permits on sensitive federal lands, instructed the Forest Service to remove protections for undeveloped portions of national forests, offered amnesty to livestock producers from the Clean Water Act, shifted the cost of Superfund cleanups from chemical companies to the taxpayers, and slashed the funds to clean up Superfund sites.
In further reversals of Clinton/Gore policy, Bush allowed snowmobiles back into the Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks in Wyoming, gutted a regulation forcing public notification of sewer spills, overturned regulations against personal watercraft in eight national parks, deleted information from successive EPA Pollution reports about global warming, backed away from a Clinton plan to create a national seashore just north of Santa Barbara, lifted wildlife protections on federal lands, reversed a Clinton policy of not approving construction of a geothermal plant in the Modoc National Forest, a sacred Indian ground, published a rule in the federal register delaying a measure to force oil and gas industries to follow water pollution standards at drilling sites, put off Hudson river dredging until 2006, forced conservation groups to sue in court to protect Clinton's long-negotiated Northwest Forest Plan, ignored Clinton's plan to restore salmon and steelhead habitat in Snake River, gutted Clinton's Sierra Nevada plan and Clinton's sand dune protections in southeastern Cal against dune buggies, weakened Clinton's new arsenic standard (until it became politically unpalatable to do so), ended the environmental fellowship program for students pursuing environmental sciences, and tried to pry the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve--and innumerable other publicly-owned natural treasures - to commercial exploitation.
This onslaught has taken its toll on career employees at the EPA, producing a number of departures, voluntary and otherwise: Forest Service head Michael Dombeck; Eric Schaeffer, head of EPAs Office of Regulatory Enforcement; EPA ombudsman Robert Martin, along with his partner Hugh Kaufman; James Furnish, a self-described evangelical Christian disappointed with what he termed the Bush administrations "strident pro-development policy"; Martha Hahn, state director of Bureau of Land Management in Idaho; Sylvia Lowrance, former acting head of the office of enforcement and compliance; and David Mihalic, superintendent of Yosemite National Park.
For his tireless efforts on behalf of extraction industries and polluters, Bush has just received an "F" on his League of Conservation report card, an undeniably strong contrast to what we would have seen under Al Gore, whom the Sierra Club said would be the most pro-environment president in American history.
Public safety
Ever wedded to corporate theology, the Bush administration has extended its crass negligence of the environment to many areas of public health and safety. Never much for minimizing public risk, Bush proposed cuts to the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the middle of the SARS epidemic. With serious concerns in the air about security at chemical plants and nuclear facilities, Bush and congressional Republicans caved to the chemical lobby and passed over a Democratic plan for strict safety guidelines in favor of voluntary compliance. On Cheney's suggestion, Bush has suggested bringing nuclear energy back from the dead; a Bush official shook off public concern by explaining that "apart from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island" nuclear energy had had a bright track record.
This onslaught has taken its toll on career employees at the EPA, producing a number of departures, voluntary and otherwise: Forest Service head Michael Dombeck; Eric Schaeffer, head of EPAs Office of Regulatory Enforcement; EPA ombudsman Robert Martin, along with his partner Hugh Kaufman; James Furnish, a self-described evangelical Christian disappointed with what he termed the Bush administrations "strident pro-development policy"; Martha Hahn, state director of Bureau of Land Management in Idaho; Sylvia Lowrance, former acting head of the office of enforcement and compliance; and David Mihalic, superintendent of Yosemite National Park.
For his tireless efforts on behalf of extraction industries and polluters, Bush has just received an "F" on his League of Conservation report card, an undeniably strong contrast to what we would have seen under Al Gore, whom the Sierra Club said would be the most pro-environment president in American history.
Public safety
Ever wedded to corporate theology, the Bush administration has extended its crass negligence of the environment to many areas of public health and safety. Never much for minimizing public risk, Bush proposed cuts to the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the middle of the SARS epidemic. With serious concerns in the air about security at chemical plants and nuclear facilities, Bush and congressional Republicans caved to the chemical lobby and passed over a Democratic plan for strict safety guidelines in favor of voluntary compliance. On Cheney's suggestion, Bush has suggested bringing nuclear energy back from the dead; a Bush official shook off public concern by explaining that "apart from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island" nuclear energy had had a bright track record.
The Bush administration also downgraded the safety standards for radioactive leaks so that they could push for a nuclear waste repository in the earthquake zone of Yucca Mountain, not far from one of the fastest growing parts of the country. The Bush administration's lax food safety standards played a starring role in the largest U.S. meat recall ever when Pilgrim's Pride Corp, the number two poultry producer in the States, had to recall over 27 million pounds of poultry. Bush also had his FDA reverse a Clinton requirement that drugmakers test their products to determine whether they are safe and effective for children and stacked the Center for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning with people sympathetic to the lead industry, including two people with direct lead industry ties.
To help his good friends at the Pentagon, Bush put a gag order on a risk health assessment of perchlorate (a rocket fuel component that has been known to cause neurological damage which has seeped into the groundwater in many states).
And, in one of the crassest political acts on record, Bush made steep cuts to mining enforcement not long before nine miners provided Bush with a dynamite photo op by dying down a mineshaft.
Attacks on labor
Union support for Al Gore from the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, and the UAW helped produce a turnout for Gore that defied expectations, giving him the second-highest number of votes ever, after Reagan in 1984. Endorsing Gore was a no-brainer for the unions, who, apart from NAFTA/GATT, strongly supported the Clinton Administration because of their many efforts on behalf of working people, as well as their opposition to dozens of insidious anti-labor measures belched out by Republican congresses.
Naturally Bush, with Rove standing behind the curtain, immediately set about emasculating his biggest opponents with four executive orders that were later overturned by a federal judge. When dockworkers had a strike on the West Coast, President Bush asked a federal court to reopen the ports and impose a cooling-off period that would end a labor lockout and force workers to consider accepting management's terms. At the same time, Labor Department officials proposed tougher reporting and disclosure requirements for the nation's labor unions, forcing unions to itemize all expenditures above a $2,000 to $5,000 threshold spent on organizing and strike services, lobbying or political activities. Bush also initiated cuts to Family and Medical leave mandates, child labor laws (a century-plus-old bogeyman for the corporate right), and money used to investigate corporate violations of minimum wage laws.
Attacks on labor
Union support for Al Gore from the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, and the UAW helped produce a turnout for Gore that defied expectations, giving him the second-highest number of votes ever, after Reagan in 1984. Endorsing Gore was a no-brainer for the unions, who, apart from NAFTA/GATT, strongly supported the Clinton Administration because of their many efforts on behalf of working people, as well as their opposition to dozens of insidious anti-labor measures belched out by Republican congresses.
Naturally Bush, with Rove standing behind the curtain, immediately set about emasculating his biggest opponents with four executive orders that were later overturned by a federal judge. When dockworkers had a strike on the West Coast, President Bush asked a federal court to reopen the ports and impose a cooling-off period that would end a labor lockout and force workers to consider accepting management's terms. At the same time, Labor Department officials proposed tougher reporting and disclosure requirements for the nation's labor unions, forcing unions to itemize all expenditures above a $2,000 to $5,000 threshold spent on organizing and strike services, lobbying or political activities. Bush also initiated cuts to Family and Medical leave mandates, child labor laws (a century-plus-old bogeyman for the corporate right), and money used to investigate corporate violations of minimum wage laws.
Government employee unions were not far behind. After Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2002, Bush announced a plan to outsource half of the federal workforce. Alongside this controversial move Bush decided that the 56,000 valuable new federal employees in airports did not deserve job security or the right to collective bargaining; similarly, after Bush embraced the creation of the Homeland Security department (which, not surprisingly, Ashcroft endorsed on the very day Colleen Rowley was unmasking the incompetence of the FBI in the run up to 9/11), he fought congressional Democrats on the issue of unionization, explaining the need for "flexibility," even running smear ads accusing Georgia Democrat Max Cleland (who has been wheelchair bound since getting a Purple Heart in Vietnam) of being unpatriotic. The ads showed Cleland in the middle of the screen, flanked by Saddam Hussein on one side and Osama bin Laden on the other. The administration also tried--unsuccessfully, so far--to privatize air traffic control, an idea so insane in the wake of 9/11 that it has yet to take wing in a Republican congress.
Union employees were hardly the only working people to feel the brunt of Bush. Immediately upon taking office, Bush signed a repeal of Clinton's ergonomic regulations sent to him by a Republican Congress and set about relaxing workplace safety enforcement. Key in the effort to strip 100 million workers of protection from repetitive stress injuries was John Graham, who headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. As a Harvard professor, Graham had birthed "comparative risk analysis," a regulatory model that attempted to scientifically justify lax public safety measures or other harmful corporate practices by placing low valuations on human life. Ergonomic regulations were part of the large task Graham had of deciding which of the raft of Clinton regulations to un-suspend, amend, or kill, as quietly as possible. One of Graham's right-hand women was Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Gall had the distinction of having been the lone commission vote against safety standards for baby walkers, bunk beds, and crib slats. She was quite a contrast with Clinton's head at the CPSC, Ann Brown, who had used investigations and threats to try to force industry to do the right thing.
Other big shifts in labor policies stemmed from Bush's nomination of Eugene Scalia, Antonin's son, to be the top lawyer at the Labor Department. The Democratic Senate refused to confirm Scalia, so Bush appointed him to a lower post without a vote during the congressional recess, where one of Scalia's specialties has included filing friend of the court briefs against agency whistleblowers.
The administration has also meddled with worker retirement systems, proposing measures that would allow employers to switch from seniority-based to cash-based pension plans, a boon to business and a bust to workers who are middle-aged and older. In yet another reversal of Clinton policy, the Bush administration has proposed a dangerous re-working of overtime laws that allows employers to base overtime on an 80-hour cycle, instead of the current 40, and allow employers to replace overtime with comp time for any employees loosely classified as "management." This one even has some congressional Republicans scared. The administration also repealed a Clinton rule that allowed states to use unemployment money to help people use family leave to have babies or adopt children.
In other administrative actions, a request by the Bush administration to suspend federal rules aimed at making it easier for coal miners with black lung disease to apply for disability benefits was rejected by a federal judge. Along the same lines, the Energy Department kicked the job illness claims of government nuclear employees back to state comp programs, which have stricter burdens of proof and statutes of limitation. As AFL-CIO head John Sweeney said "This is the most anti-labor administration since Hoover"
Unilateral dogma
Not content to make a mess of things at home, the Bush administration has also gone out of its way to destroy amity abroad. According to Al Gore, the Clinton Doctrine was "together when we can, alone if we must." The Bush Administration has turned this multilateralist vision on its head, going it alone as a rule and retaliating against anyone who raises a peep.
Unilateral dogma
Not content to make a mess of things at home, the Bush administration has also gone out of its way to destroy amity abroad. According to Al Gore, the Clinton Doctrine was "together when we can, alone if we must." The Bush Administration has turned this multilateralist vision on its head, going it alone as a rule and retaliating against anyone who raises a peep.
Bush has set a new record in international arrogance by dropping out of, sabotaging, or forcing his heavy hand on a whole host of international agreements: the 1972 ABM Treaty, the world tobacco treaty (which caused the top U.S. official, Thomas Novotney, to step down), an agreement on going after offshore tax havens (probably with a wink to the owners of Bush's favorite media outlets), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (held up by congressional Republicans since 1997), the 1972 treaty on germ warfare, the Biological Weapons treaty, the UN meeting on racism (the U.S. boycotted), a treaty that banned export of diamonds mined and sold illegally, a UN vote on an international torture convention, the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a War Crimes Court, the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Needless to say, the bully on the block has hit new lows of international popularity, a stunning reversal after the high opinions held of the United States during the Clinton administration. It's gotten so bad that many international citizens in a recent survey said they feared Bush more than Osama bin Laden.
What else?
Space and time considerations prohibit a discussion of many other important areas of government for which the Bush administration has devious plans, such as privatizing and in essence destroying Social Security, Medicare, and all other remaining elements of our weakening social contract, a TORT deform bill that would release Bush's contributors from accountability for the harm they cause, a bankruptcy bill (vetoed by Clinton) that hurts the working poor for the benefit of credit card companies, monumentally harmful FCC deregulation, the death of HMO reform, 40,000,000+ people with no health insurance, Bush's opposition to Affirmative Action (other than for rich straight white born again Christian males), ad nauseum.
Where do we go from here?
If things go smoothly for Bush over the next year and some, it may be too late; the tiny window of opportunity created when the Greens splintered the left in 2000 may have given Bush all the space he needed to sell his aw-shucks persona to gullible voters. We could be facing years of Republican dominance, in which the United States spirals back to a time of extreme social Darwinism, the Gilded Age with DSL.
For those who maintain hope that this juggernaut can be stopped, there is only one sober, adult option left: join hands with environmental groups, labor, gun control advocates, NARAL, and civil rights supporters by offering your money, your time, or at least your vote, for whichever Democrat emerges from the primaries.
What else?
Space and time considerations prohibit a discussion of many other important areas of government for which the Bush administration has devious plans, such as privatizing and in essence destroying Social Security, Medicare, and all other remaining elements of our weakening social contract, a TORT deform bill that would release Bush's contributors from accountability for the harm they cause, a bankruptcy bill (vetoed by Clinton) that hurts the working poor for the benefit of credit card companies, monumentally harmful FCC deregulation, the death of HMO reform, 40,000,000+ people with no health insurance, Bush's opposition to Affirmative Action (other than for rich straight white born again Christian males), ad nauseum.
Where do we go from here?
If things go smoothly for Bush over the next year and some, it may be too late; the tiny window of opportunity created when the Greens splintered the left in 2000 may have given Bush all the space he needed to sell his aw-shucks persona to gullible voters. We could be facing years of Republican dominance, in which the United States spirals back to a time of extreme social Darwinism, the Gilded Age with DSL.
For those who maintain hope that this juggernaut can be stopped, there is only one sober, adult option left: join hands with environmental groups, labor, gun control advocates, NARAL, and civil rights supporters by offering your money, your time, or at least your vote, for whichever Democrat emerges from the primaries.
History is made by coalitions, not noble gestures.
Other features exploring the notion that
"the parties are the same"
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism of voting Green
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better than Donald Trump
(even on her worst day)
Romney-Ryan's road to perdition
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Background: "Operation Enduring Democracy"
In early 2003, I responded to an ad to do political writing for getunderground.com.
Up to that moment, I had been an active writer, but I had not done features before; my writing had consisted of extensive journaling, letters to the editor, prose-poems, hundreds of ideas and phrases jotted down on Post-its, early attempts at short story writing, and a budding novel.
My first assignment was to cover an Iraq War protest. Rain kept the audience small, and made note-taking challenging (I had to hold an umbrella up and steady the mini notebook in one hand while I wrote with the other), but the people who showed up were die-hard believers in what they were doing, their moral outrage driven by a stolen presidential election and an invasion built on lies.
The editor I was working with wanted the piece turned around quickly, so I made an outline from my notes when I got home, did a first draft, and fastened down my final submission within a few days.
Looking back, it isn't a feature that stands out, but it was a good experience, a chance to do event reportage and get my foot in the door.
Up to that moment, I had been an active writer, but I had not done features before; my writing had consisted of extensive journaling, letters to the editor, prose-poems, hundreds of ideas and phrases jotted down on Post-its, early attempts at short story writing, and a budding novel.
My first assignment was to cover an Iraq War protest. Rain kept the audience small, and made note-taking challenging (I had to hold an umbrella up and steady the mini notebook in one hand while I wrote with the other), but the people who showed up were die-hard believers in what they were doing, their moral outrage driven by a stolen presidential election and an invasion built on lies.
The editor I was working with wanted the piece turned around quickly, so I made an outline from my notes when I got home, did a first draft, and fastened down my final submission within a few days.
Looking back, it isn't a feature that stands out, but it was a good experience, a chance to do event reportage and get my foot in the door.
Operation Enduring Democracy
[This piece was originally published 4/14/03 at getunderground.com. For background information, click here.]
April 12, the day of the most recent peace rally in San Francisco, began on an ominous note.
For the first time in months, it rained all morning and early afternoon and mid-afternoon. The sky cried thunder and lightning, very rare in these parts. I wondered if the demonstration was still on, and, more peripherally, does the Bush administration control the weather now too?
I stopped at a cafe on the way. Right after I sat down a clutch of protesters walked by in ponchos, signs encased in plastic, held high. Looking on, one of the cafe employees saluted the protesters and related a story of a recent trip to Paris. Parisians, he said, were not anti-American, but anti-Bush, a distinction the right has done their damndest to obscure to middle America. This is a common dialogue in a city where Bush got 15% of the vote.
The rally was at the Civic Center Plaza, across the street from City Hall. It was put on by ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), an international collective of activist groups, in league with the Bay area chapter of NION (Not in our Name), an organization that stresses international peace and cooperation and social justice. I called the Bay area NION on Thursday, to see if the rally would continue as planned, despite the fall of Baghdad. The spokesperson answered with an unqualified yes, explaining that NION's mission stretched beyond opposition to cowboy unilateralism to include opposition to civil liberties infringements and Bush's war on the environment and communities of color. The demonstration in San Francisco was part of an international day of action, with coordinated demonstrations taking place in over thirty countries on five continents.
When I arrived at Civic Center Plaza, I saw at least a thousand protesters toughing the hard rain. Right away I was drawn to the many interesting signs. In the category of Biggest Stories The Liberal Media Quickly Forgot About was a sign reading "Remember Florida?!!' (www.gregpalast.org)." A sign that has caught on for months now appeared several times: "Regime change begins at home: Impeach Bush! (www.votetoimpeach.org)." Signs were by turns moral ("Victory at what cost?"), biblical ("An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"), darkly humorous (a man in a blood-spattered suit and tie holding a sign that said "Everything Is Fine"), and simple, direct ("How many lives per gallon?"). And there were flags. The NION flag is a globe in an ocean blue background expressing that we're all in this together. One woman held a US flag in which the stars were replaced with corporate logos: Nike, Coke, McDonald's, Shell, IBM, ad nauseum.
In the center of Civic Center Plaza, a location for many rallies--including the recent mega-protest of over 50,000--a speaker cracked a joke about the demonstration being "a rally announcing the death of the peace movement," then shortly after gave a reminder of an upcoming non-violent, direct action demo at Chevron to "resist the corporate invasion." Within moments of this statement whistles blew, and the march was off.
Any idea that the march would be a dirge dissolved immediately. As soon as the crowd left Civic Center Plaza and gave onto Grove Street, the protesters were buoyed by the Brass Liberation Orchestra's marching band rendition of Herbie Hancock's classic "Watermelon Man." Looking around one could see people smiling, happy to participate in democracy among others who were not afraid to share their dismay over the state of the union. At the second intersection a man held a sign up to the marchers that asked "Is Syria Next?," reminding us that we might soon be out in the streets again, if the Bush cabal continues its drive to make the Middle East a U.S. protectorate.
The march continued unimpeded through every intersection except Market Street, which did not thrill all the drivers along the route. At one intersection a peace activist had a lively if civil discussion with a stalled and frustrated single-occupancy driver. At another intersection the motorist at the front of the waiting line kept his horn depressed in futility. A few people flashed him the peace sign, feeling few qualms at reminding the driver, however briefly, of the human costs of his lifestyle choice to drive in a transit-first city.
After a short stop at Market, the march went two blocks south on Church Street and turned left onto 16th. 16th had not yet been cordoned off, causing a driver to be caught going against foot traffic. One protester taunted the driver, who looked miffed, surprised. Quickly two other protesters yelled at nearby marchers to get out of the way and let the driver through.
The march route led to Dolores Park, a park on the side of a city block-sized hill on the edge of the Mission District. Not halfway up the block the march fed into the rally and was met by a group of booths recruiting members and copping leftist merchandise: Bushoncrack.com; the San Francisco Green Party; Bay Area United Against War; the World Workers Party; the International Socialist Movement; and Food Not Bombs, which feeds homeless San Franciscans. There looked to be about two thousand people.
It was obvious from the moment we arrived that we weren't in Kansas anymore, as the first speaker made repeated, angry references to "President Moron" and the "imperialist aggression" of his administration. More specifically, the speaker questioned the United States setting up a war crimes court against Iraqis (when the United States itself had ducked out of the International Criminal Court), and the ability--or will--of a country that had supported and installed dozens of dictators to conceive and grow a fledgling democracy.
The ten or so speakers covered a host of leftist causes that have gone virtually unreported in the U.S. major media. Early on, a message was read from the parents of Rachel Corrie, the unarmed 23-year-old American activist from the International Solidarity Movement who was recently run over by an Israeli bulldozer as it destroyed the house of a Palestinian doctor. There was a pair of speeches by veterans from Veterans for Peace.
A Gulf War I veteran and self-described recovering "right-wing hawk" said "blind faith in your leaders will bring your children home in body bags." The other veteran, who was among the survivors when 241 marines were killed in the Lebanon occupation fiasco in 1983, said "I love my country; I fear this government."
William Mendoza, a former Coke plant employee in Columbia, spoke of the Coke corporation's payments to right-wing paramilitaries to intimidate or kill union leaders.
Next was Stephen Funk, a former Marine Corps corporal and the first conscientious objector in Iraq War II, who read a statement of opposition to the US habit of "exploiting other countries for their resources."
There was a speech from one among the many activists who were shot at with rubber bullets at the Oakland Port last week when they "got in the way" of the business being conducted by a defense contractor that was shipping military hardware to Iraq, and there was a performance by the the rap band Red Guard, whose lyrics spoke for many:
Not your flag
Not your government
Not your war
Not your president
Now is not the time to be silent
As the rally wound down and the crowd thinned to a few hundred, the tenor of the demonstration turned from universal to sectarian. One speaker lamented the fact that the people of Yugoslovia, now living in peace after years of horrific bloodshed and forced dislocations, were "still suffering the effects of the NATO bombing."
Despite the flagrant discrediting done over the past two years to the theory that there was "no difference" between the major party candidates in the 2000 presidential election, Mumia Abu Jamal's lawyer brought the remaining crowd to its feet when he lumped the Democrats with the Republicans as co-equal "parties of the ruling classes."
At the extreme end of the ideologically freeze-dried, an ANSWER representative warmed over about the "free peoples" of Cuba and finished with the fist-raising statement "Long live the Cuban revolution."
At the close of the demonstration we were reminded of the Northern California War Tax Resistance booth and the rally 15 minutes later to protest the purported pro-war leanings of San Francisco representative and House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Most people went home relieved to know that they weren't alone in their anger and apprehension at the Bush administration's assault on democracy under cover of security. And many felt a degree of contentment at having engaged in that most truly American of activities, public dissent.
April 12, the day of the most recent peace rally in San Francisco, began on an ominous note.
I stopped at a cafe on the way. Right after I sat down a clutch of protesters walked by in ponchos, signs encased in plastic, held high. Looking on, one of the cafe employees saluted the protesters and related a story of a recent trip to Paris. Parisians, he said, were not anti-American, but anti-Bush, a distinction the right has done their damndest to obscure to middle America. This is a common dialogue in a city where Bush got 15% of the vote.
The rally was at the Civic Center Plaza, across the street from City Hall. It was put on by ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), an international collective of activist groups, in league with the Bay area chapter of NION (Not in our Name), an organization that stresses international peace and cooperation and social justice. I called the Bay area NION on Thursday, to see if the rally would continue as planned, despite the fall of Baghdad. The spokesperson answered with an unqualified yes, explaining that NION's mission stretched beyond opposition to cowboy unilateralism to include opposition to civil liberties infringements and Bush's war on the environment and communities of color. The demonstration in San Francisco was part of an international day of action, with coordinated demonstrations taking place in over thirty countries on five continents.
When I arrived at Civic Center Plaza, I saw at least a thousand protesters toughing the hard rain. Right away I was drawn to the many interesting signs. In the category of Biggest Stories The Liberal Media Quickly Forgot About was a sign reading "Remember Florida?!!' (www.gregpalast.org)." A sign that has caught on for months now appeared several times: "Regime change begins at home: Impeach Bush! (www.votetoimpeach.org)." Signs were by turns moral ("Victory at what cost?"), biblical ("An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"), darkly humorous (a man in a blood-spattered suit and tie holding a sign that said "Everything Is Fine"), and simple, direct ("How many lives per gallon?"). And there were flags. The NION flag is a globe in an ocean blue background expressing that we're all in this together. One woman held a US flag in which the stars were replaced with corporate logos: Nike, Coke, McDonald's, Shell, IBM, ad nauseum.
In the center of Civic Center Plaza, a location for many rallies--including the recent mega-protest of over 50,000--a speaker cracked a joke about the demonstration being "a rally announcing the death of the peace movement," then shortly after gave a reminder of an upcoming non-violent, direct action demo at Chevron to "resist the corporate invasion." Within moments of this statement whistles blew, and the march was off.
Any idea that the march would be a dirge dissolved immediately. As soon as the crowd left Civic Center Plaza and gave onto Grove Street, the protesters were buoyed by the Brass Liberation Orchestra's marching band rendition of Herbie Hancock's classic "Watermelon Man." Looking around one could see people smiling, happy to participate in democracy among others who were not afraid to share their dismay over the state of the union. At the second intersection a man held a sign up to the marchers that asked "Is Syria Next?," reminding us that we might soon be out in the streets again, if the Bush cabal continues its drive to make the Middle East a U.S. protectorate.
The march continued unimpeded through every intersection except Market Street, which did not thrill all the drivers along the route. At one intersection a peace activist had a lively if civil discussion with a stalled and frustrated single-occupancy driver. At another intersection the motorist at the front of the waiting line kept his horn depressed in futility. A few people flashed him the peace sign, feeling few qualms at reminding the driver, however briefly, of the human costs of his lifestyle choice to drive in a transit-first city.
After a short stop at Market, the march went two blocks south on Church Street and turned left onto 16th. 16th had not yet been cordoned off, causing a driver to be caught going against foot traffic. One protester taunted the driver, who looked miffed, surprised. Quickly two other protesters yelled at nearby marchers to get out of the way and let the driver through.
The march route led to Dolores Park, a park on the side of a city block-sized hill on the edge of the Mission District. Not halfway up the block the march fed into the rally and was met by a group of booths recruiting members and copping leftist merchandise: Bushoncrack.com; the San Francisco Green Party; Bay Area United Against War; the World Workers Party; the International Socialist Movement; and Food Not Bombs, which feeds homeless San Franciscans. There looked to be about two thousand people.
It was obvious from the moment we arrived that we weren't in Kansas anymore, as the first speaker made repeated, angry references to "President Moron" and the "imperialist aggression" of his administration. More specifically, the speaker questioned the United States setting up a war crimes court against Iraqis (when the United States itself had ducked out of the International Criminal Court), and the ability--or will--of a country that had supported and installed dozens of dictators to conceive and grow a fledgling democracy.
The ten or so speakers covered a host of leftist causes that have gone virtually unreported in the U.S. major media. Early on, a message was read from the parents of Rachel Corrie, the unarmed 23-year-old American activist from the International Solidarity Movement who was recently run over by an Israeli bulldozer as it destroyed the house of a Palestinian doctor. There was a pair of speeches by veterans from Veterans for Peace.
A Gulf War I veteran and self-described recovering "right-wing hawk" said "blind faith in your leaders will bring your children home in body bags." The other veteran, who was among the survivors when 241 marines were killed in the Lebanon occupation fiasco in 1983, said "I love my country; I fear this government."
William Mendoza, a former Coke plant employee in Columbia, spoke of the Coke corporation's payments to right-wing paramilitaries to intimidate or kill union leaders.
Next was Stephen Funk, a former Marine Corps corporal and the first conscientious objector in Iraq War II, who read a statement of opposition to the US habit of "exploiting other countries for their resources."
There was a speech from one among the many activists who were shot at with rubber bullets at the Oakland Port last week when they "got in the way" of the business being conducted by a defense contractor that was shipping military hardware to Iraq, and there was a performance by the the rap band Red Guard, whose lyrics spoke for many:
Not your flag
Not your government
Not your war
Not your president
Now is not the time to be silent
As the rally wound down and the crowd thinned to a few hundred, the tenor of the demonstration turned from universal to sectarian. One speaker lamented the fact that the people of Yugoslovia, now living in peace after years of horrific bloodshed and forced dislocations, were "still suffering the effects of the NATO bombing."
Despite the flagrant discrediting done over the past two years to the theory that there was "no difference" between the major party candidates in the 2000 presidential election, Mumia Abu Jamal's lawyer brought the remaining crowd to its feet when he lumped the Democrats with the Republicans as co-equal "parties of the ruling classes."
At the extreme end of the ideologically freeze-dried, an ANSWER representative warmed over about the "free peoples" of Cuba and finished with the fist-raising statement "Long live the Cuban revolution."
At the close of the demonstration we were reminded of the Northern California War Tax Resistance booth and the rally 15 minutes later to protest the purported pro-war leanings of San Francisco representative and House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Most people went home relieved to know that they weren't alone in their anger and apprehension at the Bush administration's assault on democracy under cover of security. And many felt a degree of contentment at having engaged in that most truly American of activities, public dissent.
Monday, October 5, 2015
24th and Mission
I followed my ears to the source of the sound, where I discovered a Latino in his 60s sprawled out, prone, parallel to the bottom of the stairs, with his eyes open.
My first thought was that he was drunk but he gave off no stink of liquor and had a dignified appearance: trim and well-preserved, clean shaven, shiny brown dress shoes, a short-sleeve, open-collared linen shirt tucked into cream-colored, creased slacks.
As someone called 911 and notified the BART station employee, a group of riders stood around the man, concerned. An angelic twenty-something woman hunched over him asking questions in English ("Are you ok? Sir? Are you ok?"). Her boyfriend asked the same questions in Spanish during the pauses, all of us hanging on a reply that didn't come as he stared up at us vacantly, as if in shock, blinking every so often. Setting the small crowd at ease, the woman told us he was alright.
Was she a nurse? Pre-med? Something soothing in her manner told us to believe her.
Long minutes passed. To our relief, the man came around a little and offered a few words en Español. We noticed that he had a quarter-sized, blood red circle on the top of his mostly bald head. Had he sustained a concussion? He seemed less than fully present.
As we looked on patiently, the man indicated that he wanted to sit up. Just behind him on the stairs, cheeks to heels, I reached a right hand over to his strong, worn palm, pulling him up while the woman lifted from underneath. Before we got the man all the way up, he let go of my grasp and indicated that he wanted to move himself.
Sliding around on the tile, he propped his head up on the first stair and began a conversation in Spanish with the BART employee. Crisis averted, everyone else moved away to the train platforms on either side with still an eye on the man, just in case. As if the universe was telling me my work was done here, the train roared in a moment later, wind tunnel effect blowing my hair back.
Staring through the window as the train pulled away, I saw two paramedics poised over the man, restoring normalcy.
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