Public Opinion Series

Election Madness by Howard Zinn

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/18/7261/

Feb 24, 2008

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members. Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they offer no radical change from the status quo. None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Colonel Andrew Bacevich, The Colonel Series

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052502032.html 

May 27, 2007

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

"Good Riddance Attention Whore" by Cindy Sheehan

May 28, 2007

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party.  This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

Byzantiumby John Julius Norwich, 1988 

A major cause for the continuing unrest in Constantinople was the division of the populace into two rival factions, the Blues and the Greens. Their names came originally from the Hippodrome, where they referred to the colors worn by the two principal teams of charioteer; but the factions themselves had long since left the narrow confines of the arena. In all the main cities of the Empire, they existed as two independent semi-political parties which combined on occasion to form a local militia. Their political affiliations varied according to local conditions and the issues of the day.  At this period, the Blues tended to be the party of the big landowners and the old Greco-Roman aristocracy, while the Greens represented trade, industry and the civil service. Many members of the Greens came from the eastern provinces, where heresy was more widespread. The Blues had gradually come to be associated with religious orthodoxy, the Greens with monophysitism. The populace as a whole gave its adherence, indiscriminately though enthusiastically, to one faction or the other.

Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn, Excerpt

The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Both major parties were controlled largely by men of wealth and ambition. Lawyers, newspaper editors, merchants, industrialists, large landowners, and speculators dominated the Democrats as well as the Whigs.

In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbagemen and firemen. These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system fails.

It was the politics of ambiguity - speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control.

The House of Representatives springs from the mass of the people whom the states may see fit to enfranchise. The Senate is elected by the legislatures of the states, which were, in 1787, almost uniformly based on property qualifications. The President is to be chosen by electors selected by the legislatures. The judiciary is to be chosen by the President and the Senate, both removed from direct popular control and holding for longer terms than the House.

The taxing power was afforded the revenues that were to discharge the public debt in full. Provision was made for this discharge in Article VI to the effect that “All debts contracted and engagements entered into before the adoption of this Constitution shall be valid against the United States under this Constitution as under the Confederation.”

Congress was given plenary power to raise and support military and naval force, for the defense of the country against foreign and domestic forces. These forces were to be at the disposal of the President in the execution of national laws; and to guard the states against renewed attempts of “desperate debtors” like Shays. The army and navy are considered by the authors of The Federalist as genuine economic instrumentalities.

These were the great powers conferred on the new government: taxation, war, commercial control, and disposition of western lands. Through them public creditors may be paid in full, domestic peace maintained, advantages obtained in dealing with foreign nations, manufactures protected, and the development of the territories go forward in full swing. Contracts are to be safe, and whoever engages in a financial operation, public or private, may know that state legislatures cannot destroy overnight the rules by which the game is played.

Economic Hit Man Series

Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, 2006

The neoconservative architects of the war – Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, and Cheney – regarded wholesale economic change in Iraq as an integral part of the American mission to remake the country. The plan was detailed in a confidential, 101-page document titled “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth.” USAID was helped in developing the plan by BearingPoint Incorporated, a Virginia-based consulting firm. In September 2004, the agency awarded the company a follow-on contract worth $225 million.

The goal was to lay “the groundwork for a market-oriented private sector economic recovery.” The plan envisioned the sale of state-owned enterprises through a “broad-based mass privatization program,” the establishment of a “world-class exchange” for trading stocks, and “a comprehensive income tax system consistent with current international practice.”

Saddam’s government owned hundreds of factories. It subsidized the cost of gasoline, electricity, and fertilizer. Every family received monthly food rations. If the United States were serious about having democracy flourish in Iraq, it would have to teach Iraqis a whole new way of doing business – the American way.

CPA: Coalition Provisional Authority

Paul Bremer III, Head of CPA: Bremer was a seasoned diplomat with strong ties to the Republican foreign-policy establishment. He had worked closely in government with two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, and had been ambassador to the Netherlands and the State Department’s counter-terrorism czar. After leaving government in the late 1980s, he worked for Kissinger’s consulting firm and an insurance company, but he remained in the Washington orbit. In 2000, he headed a congressionally appointed commission on terrorism that issued a series of prescient recommendations. After the September 11 attacks, he was named to a presidential commission on homeland security. He was sixty-one-year old workaholic who had a reputation as a can-do, take-charge guy – just the sort of person the White House wanted in Iraq.

McPherson, CPA Economic Policy Director: Had directed the U.S. Agency for International Development for seven years under President Ronald Reagan. He had been a senior vice president at Bank of America. He had worked for the Internal Revenue Service. And he had served as a special assistant to President Ford. It was in the Ford White House that he forged a close professional relationship with Dick Cheney, who was then Ford’s chief of staff. A self-described conservative with an unshakable faith in the power of the free market.

Implementation

Author to Bremer: “What’s your top priority?” Economic reform, he said. He had a three-step plan. The first was to restore electricity, water, and other basic services. The second was to put “liquidity in the hands of the people” – reopening banks, offering loans, paying salaries. The third was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises,” and to “wean the people from the idea the state supports everything.”

Instead of using government money to create new jobs in an Iraqi version of the New Deal, McPherson favored a supply-side strategy: reduce the role of government industry through privatization, eliminate subsidies for electricity and fuel, cut tariffs, lower taxes, promote foreign investment, and enact pro-business laws. Those changes would draw multinational firms, and even wealthy Iraqis, to set up businesses in Iraq that would create jobs for the unemployed. The key to economic growth, he believed, was the “development of a robust private sector.”

To McPherson, foreign investment was key to economic recovery. The way to create jobs, he reasoned, was to lure multinational firms into Iraq with the promise of being able to own not just 49 percent, but 100 percent, of the businesses they established. Iraq, like almost all of its neighbors, restricted the degree to which foreigners could participate in the local economy. In most cases, a foreigner could own no more than 49 percent of a business. The rule, designed to protect indigenous firms, was out of sync with the globalizing world economy, but it played to the Iraqi public’s conspiratorial, xenophobic fears that investors from Israel would seek to take over Iraqi companies.

McPherson seized upon the tax code and took an ax to it. He slashed Iraq’s top tax rate for individuals and businesses from 45 percent to a flat 15 percent. It was the sort of tax overhaul that fiscal conservatives long dreamed of implementing in the United States. No matter that most Iraqis never bothered to pay taxes.

Media Control

SAIC had been contracted by the Pentagon to run the Iraqi Media Network [IMN] which would comprise the national television station, a national radio station, and a newspaper printed six times a week. SAIC had no experience running media operations in post-conflict environment; it specialized in designing computer systems for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies.

 Actualization

Before foreign companies would invest, they needed to be certain that their factories would have enough electricity and water. Simply getting back to prewar levels was not enough. Iraq had to produce enough electricity not just to meet the demand of the moment, but also for the power-guzzling factories of its future. The same theory held for security. Far more money was required to train existing police officers and to hire tens of thousands of new ones.

Bremer aide: “We were so busy trying to build a Jeffersonian democracy and a capitalist economy that we neglected the big picture. We squandered an enormous opportunity, and we didn’t realize it until everything blew up in our faces.”

“Our goal should have been to build a free, safe, and prosperous Iraq – with the emphasis on safe. Democratic institutions could be developed over time. Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked the ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn’t be democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk outside their homes at night.”

Defense Department auditors had begun to question the CPA’s spending spree with Iraqi oil funds in the waning days of the occupation, noting that as much as $8.8 billion could not be properly accounted for, including $2.4 billion in one hundred-dollar bills that was flown to Baghdad from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York six days before the handover of sovereignty.