© UN Photo Click for caption and to enlarge
Roy Chaderton Matos (born August 17, 1942) was the foreign minister of Venezuela from May 2002 to February 2004 in the government of Hugo Chávez. He then served as Ambassador of Venezuela to France until August 2007, when he was appointed Ambassador to Mexico.
He was nominated as the new Venezuelan ambassador to Washington On April 18th, 2009, following a diplomatic standoff during U.S. President George W. Bush's administration that saw the expulsion of ambassadors between the two countries.[1]
Jeremiah Wright in the Propaganda System
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Beginning in March 2008 and extending through the last Democratic primaries of early June, the United States witnessed the most brazen demonization in its history of a person based on his race, his creed, and his ties to a presidential candidate. One major purpose behind these attacks was to use the demonized figure to discredit the politician. But participation in the attacks also fed the voracious, twenty-four-hour-a-day media appetite, and quickly took on a life of its own. When we look back at the ugly spectacle then taking place, the evidence suggests that, despite much optimism about narrowing racial divides and an emerging “post-racial” consciousness, something much closer to the opposite had gripped America.
Of course, we are referring to the U.S. political class and establishment media’s treatment of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Barack Obama. Contrasted with their handling of the Reverends John Hagee, Rod Parsley, and Pat Robertson and their links to John McCain, this episode provides an outstanding illustration of this country’s racism, chauvinism, and political biases.
Now retired from the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago — the “‘best representation’ of black liberation theology,” as James Cone told the New Yorker1 — where he served as pastor for thirty-six years, Wright had known Obama for close to twenty of those years. Because of Obama’s membership in Wright’s congregation, Obama’s two coming-of-age books and numerous testaments about his relationship with Wright, and Wright’s early role in Obama’s presidential campaign, where until March 14, he was chairperson of its African-American Leadership Committee, both men had long anticipated the day when someone would use the big-city black preacher against the black candidate.2 “They’re going to associate your name with mine, and that could be detrimental,” Wright recounted in a PBS interview shortly after Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007. “[C]onservative bloggers and pundits have begun raising concerns about Wright’s Africentric theology and his liberal, some say radical, politics,” PBS added.3*
ABC’s Good Morning America first triggered the avalanche of Wright coverage on March 13, when it played four short video-clips of “controversial statements,” and framed them with the leading question: “Could the reverend become a liability?”4 The next day, without referring to a single word from Wright, Obama issued a blanket condemnation: “I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy.”5 The following Tuesday (March 18) in Philadelphia, Obama delivered his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.6 “[T]he discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn,” he said, adding that he had “already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements...that have caused such controversy.” Obama even noted that Wright had a “profoundly distorted view of this country,” bending over backwards to repudiate anything that anybody finds offensive, no matter what Wright might have uttered, no matter how incisive. Noting that “This year, at least so far, the newsmaker from nowhere is Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright,” the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) likened Wright’s emergence “from obscurity to become a household word and an integral part of the media narrative” to the cases of Willie Horton (1988), Gennifer Flowers (1992), and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (2004).7 Although the PEJ failed to discuss what might link Wright to these three other cases, the “newsmaker from nowhere” had in fact become front-page news.
In one obvious sense, the transformation of Wright into an object of mass ridicule, and this object’s use, in turn, as an emotional “issue” to try to scare white Democratic primary voters away from Obama, into the arms of his rival, Hillary Clinton, belongs to a recurring strategy in U.S. presidential politics. As Kevin Phillips, a key adviser to Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign, explained the “Southern Strategy,” the more the “national Democratic Party [became] the Negro party throughout most of the South,” the more this fact “push[ed] whites into the alternative major party structure — that of the GOP.” Beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision against “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education, and carried across the South by the civil rights movement, the federal government’s pressures to desegregate southern schools, and culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964–65 under Lyndon Johnson, Republican campaigns seized upon these institutional changes to reap the political backlash among white, traditionally Democratic voters, whose defections to Republican candidates would prove decisive in several elections going forward. The “Democratic identification with the Negro social and economic revolution precipitated [the Republican] party’s best gains,” Phillips explained. “Negro-Democratic mutual identification was a major source of Democratic loss...in many sections of the nation.”8
But the Wright case is also reminiscent of how the media have swarmed around other Democratic hopefuls the past three decades, when the scent of vulnerability hung in the air. These include Jesse Jackson Sr. in early 1984 over his use of the pejorative “Hymietown” for New York City; Gary Hart in May 1987 over an extramarital relation; Michael Dukakis in 1988 over Willie Horton, a black felon in the state of Massachusetts who, during a weekend furlough while Dukakis was governor, escaped to Maryland where he attacked a white couple in their home; Bill Clinton in 1992 (and throughout his entire presidency) over his extramarital relations; Al Gore in 1999–2000 over his alleged claim to have “invented the Internet”; Howard Dean in January 2004 over the fallout from what became labeled the “scream” speech following his third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses forcing him out of the primaries; and, last but not least, the success enjoyed in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group in sowing lies about John Kerry’s Vietnam War service record.9
Yet, the same media that leapt at the chance to repeat these stories paid very little attention to George Bush’s evasion of the Vietnam War draft and his preferential treatment and failure to meet his legal obligations while a member of the Texas Air National Guard.10 Meanwhile, in 2007–08, Obama has placated establishment critics on virtually every policy front imaginable, the candidate of “change we can believe in” has visited interest group after interest group to promise them that they needn’t fear any change in the way they’re familiar with doing business.11 Nevertheless, Obama’s race, his background, his enthusiastic, youthful, and less predictable constituency, and the occasional slivers of populism that creep into his campaign, make the establishment nervous, whereas Hillary Clinton and John McCain clearly posed no such threats. And like George Bush, John McCain is portrayed as an earthy, chummy, straightforward kind of guy — indeed, as a “maverick” whose associations with lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, and some of the genuinely reactionary forces of U.S. society do not elicit the kind of focused attention directed at Obama and most everything he touches or that touches him.12
Constructing the Black Preacher
By now, the sermons, lectures, and commentaries of Jeremiah Wright quoted, reproduced, and discussed by other sources, ranging from broadcast and cable television and radio, to print and, of course, weblogs and the Internet-based audio- and video-hosting platforms such as YouTube, have been so numerous that sheer scale alone makes it impossible to define where his allegedly “controversial” and “offensive” statements begin, and where they end. But the relative intensity of coverage tells part of the story. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, for the first 125 days of 2008 (January 1–May 4), the Wright-Obama relationship was the most frequently reported news item, receiving roughly 3.8-times more attention than did the second most frequently reported item, how the “superdelegates” were aligning in the primary process; it was covered 4.9-times as heavily as John McCain’s ties to lobbyists.13 Wright and his views also towered over the meager attention given to the views of Hagee, Parsley, and Robertson, and to their relationships with McCain. Media Matters for America reports that between February 27 and April 30 — the 27th having been the date on which Hagee endorsed McCain in San Antonio while McCain was campaigning with Parsley in Ohio — the New York Times and Washington Post “published more than 12 times as many articles” mentioning Wright and Obama as they did mentioning Hagee and McCain. In terms of editorials and op-eds, the ratio was even greater — more than 15 to 1.14
Similar patterns were true across the board. For the ninety-six-day period from February 27 through June 1, mentions of Wright’s name in conjunction with Obama’s outnumbered mentions of Hagee’s with McCain’s 10.5 times to 1; they also outnumbered mentions of Parsley’s with McCain’s 40.2 times to 1. (See table 1.) Remarkably, even the Reverend Louis Farrakhan’s name turned up in conjunction with Obama’s more frequently than did McCain’s with Hagee’s or Parsley’s — although Obama has had no connection with Farrakhan whatsoever. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that at the apex of its coverage (April 28–May 4), the Wright-Obama relationship “accounted for 42% of that week’s campaign stories,” while at its apex (May 19–25), the Hagee-McCain relationship “accounted for only 8%.”15 The next week (May 26–June 1), when Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ after a video was circulated of the Catholic priest, Michael Pfleger, mocking Hillary Clinton during a guest sermon at the church, coverage of this “accounted for 13% of all the campaign stories.”16 Indeed, so obsessive and so recurring was the media’s focus on Jeremiah Wright, on Wright’s Trinity United, and on any person or topic that could be squeezed into this frame of reference and used to generate negative reporting and commentary about the black preacher and his ties to the black candidate, that even when the McCain campaign officially rejected the endorsements it had previously sought from Hagee and Parsley, nearly one-half as many more articles mentioned Obama-Wright than mentioned McCain together with Hagee or Parsley. (See table 2.) This reveals a deep bias of remarkable consistency.
*Ninety-six-day period from Wednesday, February 27, through Sunday, June 1. Factiva database searches carried out under the “All Sources” category on June 2. Actual parameters were: [first name w/2 last name] AND [first name w/2 last name].
Another part of the story is the hostility expressed towards, and the derogatory language used in reference to, Wright — language seldom used for Hagee, Parsley, and Robertson (et al.). Wright “rants” and “raves,” and is “crazy” and “divisive” (etc.). “Wright’s ranting is going to hit white Americans with particular force,” Los Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten observed. Wright’s sermons “mix left-wing conspiracy theories, phony Afro-centricism, remnant black power rhetoric and a rag bag of vulgar Third World sympathies in an angry, frequently race-baiting social gospel. Preached in a style that leaves little room for understatement, it’s alarming stuff when you hear it for the first time.”17
*Twelve-week period from Monday, March 10 through Sunday, June 1. Factiva database searches carried out under the “All Sources” category on June 2. Actual parameters were: (A) Barack w/2 Obama AND Jeremiah w/2 Wright; and (B) John w/2 McCain AND [John w/2 Hagee or Rod w/2 Parsley].
†“Ratio” expresses the ratio between the numbers listed in each weekly column for Obama-Wright to Mc-Cain and Hagee or Parsley.
Aside from his quite accurate prediction about how white Americans would respond to Wright, what makes Wright’s sermons qualify as “ranting,” “conspiracy theories,” “phony,” “remnant,” “rag bag,” “vulgar,” “angry,” “alarming,” and the like, Rutten didn’t explain, nor did he feel any need to — he knew his readers would simply “get it.” Yet, in the same article, Rutten referred merely to Hagee’s “inconvenient views” about the Catholic Church being the “Great Whore of Babylon,” and to Clinton campaign adviser Geraldine Ferraro’s statement that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” without any negative qualifier at all. As with close to 100 percent of his colleagues’ work during this period, whenever the media’s attention turned to Wright, the use of dismissive, highly insulting language came automatically to commentators, while an examination of the truth or falsity of what Wright actually said was regarded as unnecessary.
From the jingoistic right the denunciations were unrestrained: “anti-American, racist rantings” (National Review); “venomous and paranoid” (Ron Kessler); “grievance-mongering preacher animated by the voracity of hate” (Michelle Malkin); “hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism” (Shelby Steele); “black hate speech” and “racist rants” (Charles Krauthammer), “anti-American black supremacist” (London Times), “fatuous clerical rantings,” “black chauvinist rhetoric,” “foaming pastor,” “conceited old fanatic” (Christopher Hitchens); “stuck in a late-Sixties time warp” (Stanley Kurtz); among countless others like them.
But these were often matched and sometimes surpassed by the language of liberals: “histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago” (Bob Herbert); “ranting” and “fire-breathing pastor” (Frank Rich); “race-baiting diatribe” (Cynthia Tucker); a “self-centered jerk” who believes “It’s all about me” and whose “self-indulgent antics” belong on the American Idol television show (Rosa Brooks); the “jibberjabber from the crazy ex-minister” (Patricia Williams); “bigoted and paranoid rantings” (New York Times); “weirdness, wrath, insult, blowhardiness, vanity, paranoia, divisiveness and trouble” (Katha Pollitt). Last but not least, Barack Obama himself referred to Wright’s “ridiculous propositions,” “outrageous comments,” “very different vision of America,” as “divisive and destructive,” “something that not only makes me angry but also saddens me.”18
There were no comparable levels of anger and denunciation by the establishment media, or even by the liberals and left, over Parsley, Hagee, or Robertson, despite their prolific records of atrocious statements, their years of right-wing activism on behalf of the Republican Party, and the fact that McCain actively sought Hagee’s endorsement and referred to Parsley while campaigning with him in Ohio as “one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide.”19 (Obama did not seek Wright’s endorsement or declare him a moral compass and guide.) Thus for the same ninety-six-day period beginning February 27, snippets from Wright were characterized negatively as “ranting,” “raving,” or “crazy” (and the like) dozens of times as frequently as statements by Hagee and Robertson, and literally hundreds of times more often than those by Parsley. (See tables 3-A and 3-B.)
*We used the database operator * to include all variations of these words.
†Ninety-six-day period from Wednesday, February 27, through Sunday, June 1. NewsBank database searches carried out under the “All Papers” category on June 2. Actual parameters were: (first name ADJ2 last name) AND (rant* or rav* or craz*) NOT (last name).
†Ninety-six-day period from Wednesday, February 27, through Sunday, June 1. Factiva database searches carried out under the “Newspapers: All” category on June 2. -- Actual parameters were: [rst=TNWP] AND [first name w/2 last name] AND [rant*** or rav*** or crazy] NOT [last name].
Another word used in this set of controversies, but almost exclusively in reference to Wright, Obama, and company is “divisiveness.” To be divisive means not simply to divide and separate, but to act out-of-order, to overstep proper bounds, to engage in unacceptable behavior, and above all to upset the wrong people. When Obama announced on April 29 that his break with Wright was final and complete, he said he found Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club “divisive and destructive,” and added “people are hungry to get out of the old divisive politics of the past.” Similarly, at the end of May, the Obama campaign issued a terse statement rejecting Pfleger’s “divisive, backward-looking rhetoric”; and in the letter sent to Trinity United, informing the new pastor that his family was leaving the church, Obama explained, “Our relations with Trinity have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright.”20 Throughout the period February 27–June 1, the U.S. political class and the establishment media used the words “divisive” and “divisiveness” almost exclusively to characterize preachers associated with Barack Obama and/or Trinity United (but especially Wright and Pfleger), virtually never using these words for preachers associated with McCain (Parsley, Hagee, or Robertson) and Republican politics more generally. (See tables 4-A and 4-B.) Only Jeremiah Wright upsets the people who really matter.
†Ninety-six-day period from Wednesday, February 27, through Sunday, June 1. NewsBank database searches carried out under the “All Papers” category on June 2. Actual parameters were: (divisive*) AND (first name ADJ2 last name) NOT (last name).
†Ninety-six-day period from Wednesday, February 27, through Sunday, June 1. Factiva database searches carried out under the “Newspapers: All” category on June 2. Actual parameters were: [rst=TNWP] AND [first name w/2 last name] AND [divisive****] NOT [last name].
What the Preachers Said
What, then, has Wright said that brought this storm of attention, anger, and ridicule down upon him? What is it about his words that make them uniquely “divisive”? And what have Parsley, Hagee, and Robertson said that could be criticized, but failed to generate comparable outrage or claims of divisiveness?
Wright indeed has made statements that strike us as false and not all of them trivial in their implications. One important case occurred during his interview with Bill Moyers on PBS in late April.21 Wright noted that Iraqi deaths from the U.S. war totaled some “100,000 [or] 200,000, depending on which count” — numbers that likely understate Iraqi deaths by factors anywhere from six to twelve times.22 But as this error minimizes the scale of U.S. government responsibility, and stays safely within a widely promulgated range that even George Bush might be able to swallow, nobody called Wright a “whackadoodle” for making it, nor used it to challenge Wright’s membership within the reality-based community. Despite the gravity of the topic, and what it means to Iraqis, Wright is as free as the rest of his fellow Americans to make mistakes of this kind. In fact, we have not seen evidence that any of his bitterest critics even noticed.
Not so with other kinds of errors, however. One in particular has circulated widely, and been treated with ridicule. This was when Wright asserted that the U.S. government “invented” or was responsible for the origin of HIV “as a means of genocide against people of color.”23 We do not know how long Wright has believed this, or how many times he has expressed something like it. We do know that Wright has long been an outspoken critic of the stigma associated with AIDS, in particular the belief that “AIDS is God’s curse upon the homosexual.”24 We also know that at this stage in the epidemic’s history, HIV/AIDS impacts black Americans more than any other U.S. ethnic or racial group, with blacks accounting for half of the AIDS cases diagnosed in 2006, nine-times the rate for white Americans, and more than half of AIDS-related deaths, even though blacks comprise only 12 percent of the national population.25 And we know that when a question about the origins of AIDS was put to Wright at the National Press Club — “Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?” — he replied (in part): “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”26 Wright thus offers up the HIV claim while cataloging the oppression of black people in this country, including what has been called the “archetype of unethical research and racism in medicine,” the U.S. Public Health Service’s forty-year experiment with 600 black men in Macon County, Alabama (1932–72), 399 of whom suffered from syphilis but were left untreated, the officials following the disease’s progress in these men all the way to their deaths and autopsies.27
Yet, we are confident that Wright’s HIV error is not central to the attacks he has suffered. What is central are Wright’s extensive and effective broadsides against U.S. and Western (or white European) policies and pretensions, including his criticisms of the United States as an imperial superpower that rules the world by force, and robs from lesser powers in order to maintain its great wealth, without concern for the people it damages. Equally important is his view that the United States remains a racist society, its beneficiaries unwilling to surrender the material legacies of slavery, much less to make reparations for them.
Thus in stark contrast with Obama’s “post-racial” rhetoric, all of Wright’s “greatest hits” that have circulated over YouTube and similar platforms in 2008,28 and wound up reiterated ad infinitum, should be seen in light of Wright’s political critique of “500 years of colonialism, racism, and slavery” — themes painfully familiar to untold numbers of people, taken up and contested by liberation movements and by great literature throughout the ages. This encompasses Wright’s sermon in the aftermath of 9/11 that warned of the dangers inherent in seeking vengeance, and argued that 9/11 can only be understood as “America’s chickens coming home to roost”;29 his assertion that the United States is “the No. 1 killer in the world,” and that when Americans kill, “nobody bats an eye”; his “God damn America...for killing innocent people [and] for treating her citizens as less than human”; and his assertions that the U.S. government “lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and “lied about a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein”; that it supports Israel “shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who [speaks] out against it as being anti-Semitic”; that this country “believe[s] in white supremacy and black inferiority”; and that we ought to call this country the “United States of White America.”
Following Wright’s National Press Club performance, Alexander Cockburn noted that “95 percent of it makes total sense and is a breath of fresh air, as Wright ushers the Real America onto the stage, as opposed to the candidates’ flattering fictions.”30 But as these are precisely the fictions that powerful Americans cling to most dearly, Wright’s harsh criticisms of them place him beyond the pale for the establishment U.S. media and politicians vetted in the money primary.
Were the media concerned about prominent religious leaders who are politically active, whose ministries reach a lot of people, and who take outlandish stands on important issues, surely somebody would have connected the dots between the Republican Party’s years of disservice to the AIDS cause, and John Hagee’s assertion that AIDS is an “incurable plague” and “God’s curse against a disobedient nation.” Neither would anyone have forgotten the late Jerry Falwell’s gem, “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” Nor that former Republican presidential candidate — and current McCain supporter — Pat Robertson campaigned in 1988 on a platform that included “some sort of quarantine of AIDS victims similar to those applied in the past in typhoid fever and hepatitis [cases].”31 And if the media were determined to uproot fanaticism wherever it is found, they would have noted that while only 15.2 percent of black Americans told researchers in 2005 that they believed “AIDS is a form of genocide against blacks,” as recently as 2007, 38 percent of white evangelical Protestants — the largest religious affiliation in the United States — affirmed that “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”32 Not content to blame HIV on a bio-weapons lab, this troubling percentage of Americans still saw AIDS as a form of pestilence — Hagee’s “curse of the plagues” — afflicting not just individuals, but whole countries that have fallen away from God.
In short, the charges levied by Wright against the United States are of a kind that nobody is free to express within the circles of American Power. If one wants to move within these circles, and to climb the many ladders to power and privilege they offer, one must remain silent about its flattering fictions or watch these ladders pulled away. A perfectly accurate assessment of 9/11, Wright’s “chickens coming home to roost” is received as an inestimably greater offense than are the “at least 935 false statements” by George Bush and seven of his regime’s top officials “in the two years following September 11, 2001,” as part of their “concerted effort” militarily to seize Iraq, and to replace the former regime with one of their own making — despite the devastating consequences of these lies.33 The same is true of the wild-eyed remarks by two of the GOP’s favorite preachers about the heavenly origins of 9/11:
Jerry Falwell: [T]he Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years…[But] what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact — if, in fact — God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve… The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this...throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.” Pat Robertson: I totally concur. And the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.34
Jerry Falwell: [T]he Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years…[But] what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact — if, in fact — God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve… The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this...throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”
Pat Robertson: I totally concur. And the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.34
Nor did the media highlight the equally wild-eyed statements by other GOP preachers about Hurricane Katrina as the “judgment of God” against New Orleans for a “homosexual parade”; the need for a “military preemptive strike to take out the nuclear capability of Iran for the salvation of Western civilization” (Hagee); the description of Islam as an “anti-Christ religion that intends, through violence, to conquer the world” (Parsley). Still less did it question the related claim that the United States was “founded, in part” — deriving its “divine purpose,” no less — from God’s “intention of seeing this false religion [i.e., Islam] destroyed” (Parsley).35
Because the men who preach these political sermons align closely with the institutions, policies, and party that Wright lambastes, their colossal gaffes and extremist prejudices, and the eventual outing in late May of Hagee and Parsley, proved nothing more than a minor bump along John McCain’s road, while Obama’s “pastor problem” is the kind that keeps on giving his enemies ammunition with which to attack.
Wright’s message being unacceptable in mainstream politics, not only was Wright vilified, but Obama himself was attacked for this association and felt immediate political pressure quickly and thoroughly to dissociate himself from the beyond-the-pale critic. It took a long time for McCain to do the same with his collection of religious extremist supporters, and interestingly his campaign only took this step after the disclosure one week before of an audio-clip in which Hagee preached that “what Hitler did in the Holocaust” was God’s plan to drive Europe’s Jews “back to the land of Israel.”36 Without this awkward disclosure, McCain might have remained silent, his religious team not having done anything truly beyond the pale like assailing U.S. racism, militarism, or empire building.37
We also believe that another reason liberals were harsh on Wright, beyond the fact that quite a few of them can’t stomach powerful criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and domestic inequalities and racism, is their fear that positions and rhetoric like Wright’s could jeopardize Obama’s chances in the 2008 election. Calling Wright a “distraction on the campaign trail,” Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile lauded Obama’s Philadelphia speech, explaining that Obama “had to rebuke and distance himself from those comments.” Wright’s “Malcolm X-ism,” Maureen Dowd warned, has “dragged Obama into the ’60s maelstrom that [Obama] had pledged to be an antidote to.” In an interview with The Guardian titled “Do the right thing and shut up,” filmmaker Spike Lee complained that “The more [Wright] opens his mouth, the more damage he does.” Lee continued: “It makes me question his motives for talking. I’m starting to wonder whether somebody has been contributing to the building funds of his church. Seriously.” Similar expressions of anger were common in liberal quarters. Wright was egocentric, narcissistic, divisive, indeed, crazy — all-for-Jeremiah and nothing-for-Barack. As Arianna Huffington complained to Charlie Rose, “I think Jeremiah Wright obviously has a tremendous responsibility for derailing this campaign.”38
Southern Strategies
On June 11, 1963, George Wallace, Alabama’s newly elected governor, stood in the doorway to Foster Auditorium on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama, where registration for summer classes was being held. A federal court had ordered the desegregation of the university; Wallace swore that he’d never let it happen. Even though Wallace backed down that day, and Vivian Hood and Jimmy Malone became the university’s first black students, the episode “transformed [Wallace] into a major player in American politics,” Dan Carter writes. Within one week, “more than 100,000 congratulatory telegrams and letters flooded the office of the Alabama governor.” Purportedly more than “half came from outside the South, and 95 percent supported” his stand. It was a “moment of epiphany” for Wallace. He “had looked out upon those white Americans north of Alabama and suddenly been awakened by a blinding vision: ‘They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern. The whole United States is Southern.’”39
Forty-five years later, race continues to impact the United States in powerful, though often less overt ways. By early June, the percentage of Americans dissatisfied with the “way things are going” reached 76 percent — a “record high,” Pew reported.40 One Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll found that by a margin of 51 percent to 35 percent, voters preferred the Democrats to win the White House in November rather than the Republicans.41 Gallup reported that 37 percent of voters identified themselves as Democrats, compared to 28 percent Republicans (with 34 percent independents/others).42 Such findings prompted the Journal (and many Republicans) to wonder whether U.S. politics was facing fundamental realignment “toward prolonged Democratic control”?43
And yet, according to Gallup’s daily tracking polls, John McCain and Barack Obama had been neck-and-neck from early March through the last week of July, both scoring in the low-to-mid 40-point range, with a narrow spread moving up and down between them, and the only departures from this pattern tied to specific but fleeting events, such as when Hillary Clinton withdrew from the Democratic primary in early June, and when Obama returned to the States after his grand tour of Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by stops in Israel, Jordan, Germany, France, and Britain.44
McCain’s relatively strong showing thus stood in sharp contrast with his party’s decline in popularity and its looming loss of congressional seats this fall, despite the fact that “On the issues, he is at odds with many voters.” But pollsters understood the reason: “More voters said they could identify with Sen. McCain’s ‘background’ and ‘values’ than with [Obama’s]… It underscores the extent to which his personality and image, rather than issues such as the war and the economy, could shape this presidential election.”45
Emphasizing this “campaign’s unusual dynamic,” a subsequent Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll deepened these findings. When asked whether each candidate “has a background and set of values that you can identify with,” 58 percent of voters said they could identify with McCain, while 47 percent said the same for Obama. Even more revealing, when asked “who do you think would be the riskier choice for president,” 55 percent said Obama, only 35 percent McCain. “One of [the McCain campaign’s] overriding themes is that [Obama’s] election would represent too big a risk for voters to take,” the Journal explained by way of a gloss on its finding.46 As summed-up by the Pew survey mentioned above: While “McCain’s negatives [were] mostly political, Obama’s [were] more personal.”
Managers of the two U.S. political parties are perfectly aware that both parties stand further to the right (i.e., are more elite-oriented) than does the general public on every issue of major import.47 This is why the parties find it necessary to resort to so many phony issues, and why their candidates run instead on the intangibles of character, values, patriotism, and the like: “Issues” such as these are readily fabricated, fuzzy, manageable, even adjustable from day to day, and each party knows well that its candidate would lose, were he to run on the basis of policies that cause serious harm to the majority of voters, but which each party is sure to implement.
For the first five months of 2008, the U.S. media devoted no more than 7 percent of its campaign coverage to “policy,” that is, to real issue-related stories, but a huge 78 percent to stories that focused on “horse race”-related affairs — strategy, who won and who lost, who lost whose temper, and what campaign tactics, ads, and gaffes the candidates may have committed.48 As Sheldon Wolin might say, the 2008 primaries were a “tribute,” not to the “vibrancy” of American democracy, but to “artifacts manufactured by money, organization, and the media,” and to their “utility in supporting a myth that legitimates the very formations of power which have enfeebled [American democracy].”49
During the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign failed to pry enough racially resentful white voters away from Obama to overcome his lead in delegates, which had already assumed what turned out to be its final shape during the middle weeks of February. But this was not because it did not try — much less because the “Southern Strategy” no longer works. Rather, it was because the Clinton campaign waited too long to employ its version of the strategy, as it was only from late February on that it began making the case to uncommitted “superdelegates” in particular that the Black Candidate could not prevail in the general election, so that it would be too risky for the Democratic Party to permit him to become its nominee.50 Although “electability,” the need to win in “swing” or “purple” states such as Florida and Ohio, and to find some way to collect the “magical 270” electoral college minimum was the rhetoric then in use, we cannot help but be struck by the implicit defense of the color line that lurked beneath all of this.
At the same time, by stirring up so many prejudices and fears around the Black Preacher, and by keeping his relationship with the Black Candidate at or near the top of the media’s campaign coverage for the last twelve weeks of the primaries, the Black Candidate’s standing was diminished among Hillary Clinton supporters, independents, and, in terms of presidential elections, that most important demographic of all, given their sheer numbers — white racists and white social reactionaries. Come November, this is bound to cause lingering effects, and threatens to play a self-fulfilling role in the outcome.
Before Barack Obama clinched his party’s nomination in the first half of 2008, a whole series of demands was made of him, quite unlike any other national candidate in memory. Louis Farrakhan had been the recipient of the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Trumpeter Award at Trinity United Church. This became “Obama’s Farrakhan Test,” about which the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote that, “given who the parishioner is, the obligation to speak out is all the greater.” That very day, Obama issued a terse statement “decry[ing] racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn[ing] the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan.”51 Then up popped Obama’s Wright Test — without question, his most arduous through the primaries. “Why did he stay a member of the congregation?” Clinton operative Lanny Davis demanded. “Why didn’t he speak up earlier? And why did he reward Rev. Wright with a campaign position even after knowing of his comments?”52 It took Obama at least four and maybe five acts of public expiation before he purged his old pastor, the last not completed until Obama’s Pfleger Test came at the end of May, when he finally left Trinity United for good.53
Notions of “tests,” of casting out, and of making amends, take us to the heart of socially sanctioned group behavior.
Because Obama had ties to people who, like Wright and Pfleger, are “divisive,” who traffic in dangerous ideas, and who do not know their proper places, Obama was compelled to sever those ties and promise never to associate with their kind again. Through the Democratic primaries, he did this unfailingly.
The fact that Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination is welcome evidence that the United States has traveled some distance since George Wallace’s “epiphany.” But we must not forget that the “racial divide” not only persists in this country, it is also strong and arguably “without peer,” revealing “two utterly dissimilar publics,” as Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders write in a major study of the “differences in opinion between blacks and whites.” “[T]he most arresting feature of public opinion on race,” they believe, “remains how emphatically black and white Americans disagree with each other.” So fundamental is this divide, it expresses a “deep and perhaps deepening racial alienation.” In a careful study of the 1988 presidential campaign by the first George Bush, and the ways in which it used the image of Willie Horton to “blow up” the Michael Dukakis campaign (Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s phrase), they show that the “racial resentments” of white voters proved decisive in the defeat of Dukakis, and in their words “offered near-perfect illustration of the electoral temptations of race.”54
Modern Dixiecrats
A Dixiecrat meeting is the strangest type of political gathering of our time… States Rights is the issue only insofar as it concerns the right of States to solve — or refuse to solve — their race problems. The real issue is one word, and that word is never spoken. It is one thought, and that thought is never expressed… On the platform, Mr. Thurmond and his fellow travelers shout of Americanism, our way of life, the right to choose one’s associates, Communism, Reds. But they mean Nigger. — John Ed Pearce, 1948 55
A Dixiecrat meeting is the strangest type of political gathering of our time…
States Rights is the issue only insofar as it concerns the right of States to solve — or refuse to solve — their race problems. The real issue is one word, and that word is never spoken. It is one thought, and that thought is never expressed…
On the platform, Mr. Thurmond and his fellow travelers shout of Americanism, our way of life, the right to choose one’s associates, Communism, Reds. But they mean Nigger. — John Ed Pearce, 1948 55
Now that the Democratic nomination is set and the general election draws near, it is the Republican attack machine’s turn. That machine, already large and impressively powerful twenty years ago, has grown in size, sophistication, and power, spreading as far as the explosive growth in new media will enable it. Nor can its effectiveness be doubted, as we saw just four years ago in the remarkable success of the Swift Boat Veterans at denigrating the naval record of Vietnam War veteran John Kerry when he ran for the presidency; and has been seen twice (2000 and then again in 2004) in the machine’s ability to help keep George Bush’s record of draft evasion and his going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard out of the public arena.56
As we noted at the outset, a “Southern Strategy” in U.S. presidential politics is any attempt to persuade or entice or frighten racially bigoted, fearful, and resentful white voters — “Negrophobe whites,” in Kevin Phillips’ classic formulation — to flee the Democratic Party by identifying it with black minority causes (public school desegregation, say, and civil rights more generally). For more than forty years, this has meant the conscious marketing of the Republican Party (which still retains the image of the party of Lincoln) as the bastion of white majority interests. Southern strategies can be blatant, as when the “Dixiecrats” rose up in several Southern states in 1948, and defected from the Democratic Party to protest a civil rights program announced early that year by President Harry Truman as a way of countering Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace’s more comprehensive proposal.57 “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race [and] the constitutional right to choose one’s associates,” the Dixiecrats’ own platform countered. “We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, [and] the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.”58 But a Southern Strategy can also be more refined — removed by varying degrees of separation between the rhetoric and imagery that it adopts and its white racist roots. Indeed, since the 1960s, this has been its most familiar form. Even when George Wallace made his stand in the schoolhouse door, the “proclamation” that he read from the podium that day made no mention of upholding the color line; instead, Wallace spoke of the need to protect “states’ rights,” and denounced “this illegal and unwarranted action by the Central Government” in Washington.59
The same was true for Barry Goldwater in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, who, as Dan Carter recalls, “showed that he could use [racially] coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose.”60 Reagan’s first campaign stop after winning the 1980 Republican nomination was the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the city where Freedom Summer activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had been “slain with the complicity of local police officials in 1964,” the press reported at the time. “Just as Goldwater had drawn virtually all-white audiences in the Deep South in 1964, so Reagan was greeted by a ‘crowd almost entirely made up of whites.’ He did not let them down. ‘I believe in states’ rights’, Reagan said… As [the Washington Post’s Lou] Cannon observed, ‘The visual statement of television the next day was a sea of white faces at the Neshoba Fair with Reagan’s words floating about them.’ The Mississippi event powerfully communicated Reagan’s sympathies and electoral targets in the rural Deep South.”61
Whenever candidates, parties, or media draw from the deep well of white racial solidarity and reaction to gains by black Americans, this is the kind of strategy they are executing — whether they are conscious of their true motives (as was Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign, and are the myriad of Swift Boat-like, negative attack Web sites that have sprung-up in 2008, warning against the “dark forces” taking over the Democratic Party, and pledging their support for anybody but the Black Candidate62) or not conscious of them in the least. From preserving racial segregation in the South sixty years ago, to maintaining the Republican hold on the White House in 1988 and 2008, the essential strategy remains constant. Even if it is not the whole United States that is “Southern,” in Wallace’s sense, what once worked so well across the Deep South has long since gone national, following extant racial cleavages and spread by old and new media alike.63
In the words of one cynic, the Black Preacher “has become the honorary chairman of McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts… Wright will loom larger in the general election.”64 Of this we have no doubt. The savage dragging of Jeremiah Wright through the propaganda system in March, April, and May of this year shows how well-primed is a substantial percentage of the U.S. political class and media to carry out racial scapegoating and to pile on a collectively demonized figure. It also points ominously to much uglier tactics scheduled for the rest of the campaign.65
Only this time things are different. The emotionally potent caricatures of undeserving blacks to whom New Deal and Great Society Democrats have doled out big-government largesse at the expense of white, hardworking taxpayers, and the insidious, coded language and imagery behind which this mentality hides its true face when in public, no longer need to be bundled together and turned into “issues” about “state’s rights,” “welfare queens,” “quotas,” “free rides,” “affirmative action,” “special favors,” “grievances,” “pathologies,” “crime,” “drugs,” “gangs,” “public safety,” “personal responsibility,” and dozens of others:66 Barack Obama’s blackness takes care of everything.
Because Barack Obama is running for the presidency of a country built upon black slavery, white supremacy, ubiquitous color lines, and deeply-rooted race prejudices, the Republican attack machine has its easiest target to date. And this remains true no matter how obsequiously Obama’s campaign managers work to portray him. Or how much “unity” the stalwarts of today’s Democratic Party swear up and down behind him.
Anti-black racism was not created in 2008; and though it can be activated from above, it need not be imposed. Instead, its presence is always felt, echoing up and down U.S. history like the residue of the Big Bang that radio astronomers detect wherever they turn their antennae — only much louder. Before November 4 arrives, we still anticipate this election to turn into nothing less than a national referendum on whether the 66 percent of the U.S. population that is white (or the 88 percent that isn’t black) is willing to permit a Black Candidate to enter the White House.
Meanwhile, out of the image-dominated world of the American elite comes the marketing of Barack Obama, the candidate of “change.” But presidential elections afford scant prospects for real change in the United States, and certainly none in the fundamental structure of its society. No matter which party’s candidate wins at the polls, it is the vast majority of the U.S. and indeed global population that will continue to lose.
Notes:
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The Only Road Is Practice Michael A. Lebowitz
I am certain that, like many people these days, the first thing on your mind is the question of the referendum on reform of the Bolivarian Constitution—what the defeat means and where do we go from here. What I want to talk about today is not on that topic specifically, but it is related. Some people have said lately that they don’t know what the word socialism means. That was certainly a question raised about the proposed reforms. There were people who were determined to generate confusion and fear, and they were asking, what is all this talk about socialism in the constitution? Are we talking about Stalinism? Are we talking about an authoritarian society?
June 2008
The Guerrilla in Colombia: An Interview with Rodrigo Granda, Member of the FARC-EP International Commission Rodrigo Granda interviewed by Jean Batou
Rodrigo Granda is a member of and the leading international spokesperson for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC–EP). His name gained global prominence in December 2004 when he was kidnapped in Venezuela and handed over to Colombian authorities by a number of Venezuelan National Guard soldiers seeking a reward placed on his head by the Colombian government. At the time of his capture Granda was attending a meeting of the Bolivarian Peoples Movements in Caracas. Granda’s kidnapping in Venezuela at the instigation of the Colombian government created an international dispute between Venezuela and Colombia. He was released in 2007 in response to pressures exerted on the Colombian government by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
March 2008
Socialist Strategies in Latin America Claudio Katz
The Latin American left is once again discussing the paths to socialism. The correlation of forces has changed through popular action, the crisis of neoliberalism, and U.S. imperialism’s loss of offensive capability. It is no longer relevant to juxtapose a revolutionary political period of the past with a conservative present. The social weakness of the industrial working class does not impede anti-capitalist progress, which depends on the exploited and the oppressed uniting in common struggle.
September 2007
Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution George Ciccariello-Maher
Too often, the Bolivarian Revolution currently underway in Venezuela is dismissed by its critics—on the right and left—as a fundamentally statist enterprise. We are told it is, at best, a continuation of the corrupt, bureaucratic status quo or, at worst, a personalistic consolidation of state power in the hands of a single individual at the expense of those “checks and balances” traditionally associated with western liberal democracies. These perspectives are erroneous, since they cannot account for what have emerged as the central planks of the revolutionary process. I will focus on the most significant of these planks: the explosion of communal power.
Our Summer 2007 Issue
Revolt in Latin America
July-August 2007
New Wings for Socialism Michael A. Lebowitz
Seventeen years ago, in 1990, I began an essay with a poem of Bertolt Brecht. It was a poem about a man in Europe in the Middle Ages who put on "things that looked like wings," climbed to the roof of a church, and tried to fly. He crashed, and the bishop who passed by said, "No one will ever fly."
April 2007
Our February 2007 Issue
Brazil Under Lula: An MR Survey
February 2007
Socialism and the Knowledge Economy: Cuban Biotechnology by Agustín Lage Dávila
As authoritatively stated in an editorial in Nature, vol. 436, issue 7049 (July 2005), “Cuba has developed a considerable [scientific] research capability—perhaps more so than any other developing country outside of Southeast Asia.” Cuba has been especially successful in establishing a biotechnology industry that has effectively introduced drugs and vaccines of its own, along with a nascent pharmaceutical industry that has achieved considerable success in exports. Its agriculture and health sectors have been strong beneficiaries of its scientific research. As Nature observed: “It is worth asking how Cuba did it, and what lessons other countries might draw from it.” Indeed, the Cuban case is all the more surprising since it is not only a poor country, but one that has been confronted for decades by a ruthless embargo imposed by the United States, which has been extended to scientific knowledge. Moreover, much of Cuba’s scientific progress has occurred in the decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union, which previously had aided it economically and technologically.
December 2006
Prevention and Solidarity: Democratizing Health in Venezuela Claudia Jardim
Halfway up the hill, in a semi-finished, rustic house, a sheet divides the consulting room from the treatment room. Rarely is there a need to identify oneself upon arrival. “How are you Mr. Antonio, has your pressure decreased?” says the fifty-three-year-old Venezuelan nurse Carlota Núñez. Antonio goes in and, little by little, the inhabitants of the neighborhood Las Terrazas de Oropeza Castillo, municipality Sucre, Caracas move through the waiting room.
January 2005
After the Referendum: Venezuela Faces New Challenges Marta Harnecker
With President Hugo Chávez’s victory in the August 15 referendum, the Venezuelan opposition suffered the third great defeat in its struggle to end his government. The unprecedented recall referendum ratified Chávez’s presidency by a margin of two million votes and was declared valid unanimously by the hundreds of international observers who scrutinized it.
November 2004
The Greening of Venezuela David Raby
With all the hullabaloo about Chávez’s alleged authoritarianism, opposition strikes and demonstrations, and a possible recall referendum, you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing constructive is being done in Venezuela and that the nation’s energies are entirely absorbed by political mud-slinging. Indeed, that’s just what the corporate media would like you to think.
Haiti Matters! Charles McCollester
Arriving at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince on the eve of the new year, 2004, the bicentennial of Haiti’s independence, tension was thick in the air. Street violence was mounting but still mostly under control. Clashes took place between opposition demonstrators and police or between anti- and pro-Aristide forces. Since the hotel is near the university and its hospital, we witnessed several groups of 100 to 200 anti-Aristide student demonstrators jogging in cadence toward police with signs and banners shouting slogans—A bas Aristide! Down with Aristide! Since my previous trip in June, anti-Aristide slogans had blossomed in some areas of Port-au- Prince, while pro-Aristide graffiti retained its hold in the poorest districts, smaller towns, and rural areas. Our visit to the towns of Fondwa and Jacmel in the south was eventful in the normal Haitian way, but peaceful. Back in the capital, at the end of our five-day trip up-country, cars were being torched, boulders rolled on roads, and gas stations and banks closed in antigovernment actions.
September 2004
Cuba: The Next Forty-Five Years? István Mészáros
This year Cuba will be celebrating the forty-fifth anniversary of its victorious revolution: a great historic achievement. And when we bear in mind that the Cuban revolution—the long sustained action of a nation of just eleven million people—survived for forty-five years against all odds, successfully confronting the declared enmity, the U.S.-dictated international political encirclement and economic blockade, as well as the ever renewed attempts to subvert and overthrow the post-revolutionary order by the world’s most preponderant economic and military power, even this simple fact puts forcefully into relief the magnitude and the lasting significance of the ongoing Cuban intervention in the historical process of our time. We are all contemporaries to an achievement whose reverberations reach well beyond the confines of the tendentiously propagandized “American Hemisphere,” offering its hopeful message to the rest of the world.
January 2004
U.S. Offensive in Latin America: Coups, Retreats, and Radicalization JAMES PETRAS
The worldwide U.S. military-political offensive is manifest in multiple contexts in Latin America. The U.S. offensive aims to prop up decaying client regimes, destabilize independent regimes, pressure the center-left to move to the right, and destroy or isolate the burgeoning popular movements challenging the U.S. empire and its clients. We will discuss the particular forms of the U.S. offensive in each country, and then explore the specific and general reasons for the offensive in contemporary Latin America. In the concluding section we will discuss the political alternatives in the context of the U.S. offensive.
May 2002
The Argentine Crisis JOSEPH HALEVI
Historically, monetary crises have been related to hyperinflation, from which Argentina has often suffered. Hyperinflation is generally viewed as a calamity leading to the destruction of the capitalist monetary system of circulation. In the present Argentine crisis, however, there has been a complete implosion of economic and monetary relations due to hyperdeflation. This is the strangulation of the economy by the requirement to pay an unsustainable debt.
April 2002
Argentina: An Alternative Proposal to Overcome the Crisis LUIS BECERRA, ET AL.
“There is no alternative” has always been wishful thinking at best, at worst a deliberate lie, on the part of the ruling powers. From out of the ruins to which neoliberalism has brought Argentina, its onetime much-heralded model of success, now come the unsilenced voices of radical economists. We present here an English translation of a proposed alternative solution to the Argentine crisis. The proposal was set out on January 24, 2002, by Argentine economists as a starting point for discussion within the emerging popular movement.—The Editors
The Unemployed Workers Movement in Argentina JAMES PETRAS
Latin America has witnessed three waves of overlapping and interrelated social movements over the last twenty-five years. The first wave, roughly from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, was largely composed of what were called “the new social movements.” They included human rights, ecology, feminist, and ethnic movements as well as Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). Their leadership was largely lower middle class professionals, and their policies and strategies revolved around challenging the military and civilian authoritarian regimes of the time.
January 2002
All material © copyright 2009 by Month
March 31, 2009
Dear Fire,
CODEPINK is springing out in action this April! We'll be showing our pink pride at film showings, congressional visits and community gatherings; stepping out with our allies for the Cesar Chavez march; walking for peace on the Golden Gate Bridge on Easter Sunday; and more. CODEPINKer and nurse Sandee Scott will report on her trip to Gaza with our pink delegation in Oakland at Citizen Hearings, and Neda Raheen and Max Dashu will report on Afghanistan in Berkeley. Plus save the date for a Gaza report back with Alice Walker on April 28! Please join us in our rich variety of political and social events in April!
San Francisco Women's Film Festival
Wednesday, April 1, 7PM
Join CODEPINKers at this opening night at the SF Women's Building. One film by Bay Area's Idris Hassan (recipient of 2004 Pink Badge of Courage); another about Patsy Mink, first woman of color in US Congress 1965.
For more info, visit: www.sfwff.com/schedule/index.html
San Francisco: Bay Area Premiere of "Obama's Iraq," A Big Noise Film
Friday, April 3, 7 PM
Screening followed by a public discussion: How Do We End Occupation & Empire Under Obama? With IVAW organizer Carl Davison; analyst/sctivist Antonia Juhasz, author of "Tyranny of Oil"; and Rick Rowley, Big Noise film maker recently returned from Iraq.
ATA Theater, 992 Valencia Street (at 21st), SF. Everyone welcome, $6 donation requested, not required. Possible CODEPINK tabling.
Contact Rae for details and to volunteer.
Hayward: Peace and Pizza Night!
Pierre Labossiere, from the Haitian Lawyers League, will be speaking on Haiti, Historical and Present, and the United Nations' actions in Haiti.
Location: 1533 B St. (at 5th), Hayward.
For more info contact: CODEPINKHayward@aol.com or Oceankayak@aol.com, or phone: 510-537-2789.
HOPE: Concert and Teach in to Stop Violence Against Women
Friday, April 3 5:00 to 8:00 PM
Join CODEPINK at the HOPE: Concert and Teach in to Stop Violence Against Women, College Nine and College Ten at UC Santa Cruz. Don't miss College Nine's annual event featuring live music, DJ, spoken word, booths & food.
For more info contact Rachel Ogata.
San Francisco: Rally in Honor of Cesar Chaves in Dolores Park
Saturday, April 4, 11 AM
Meet at the corner of 18th and Dolores (park corner near tennis courts); march to 24th and Mission. Bring our pink message of peace. Join our allies such as UFW, UFPJ, and more in honoring a man of peace and justice.
For more info, contact Janet.
Your District: Congress is home for Spring Break! Will you make an apointment with your rep? Say NO to troop escalation in Afghanistan and increases in military spending!
April 6 -17
Escalation of war in Adghanistan and Pakistan?! Days of Action! Join or organize a lobbying team (3-5 people) to visit members of Congress during the Days of Action. Let's bring our messages of peace to all 10 Bay Area members of Congress - Eshoo, Honda, Lee, McNerney, Miller, Speier, Stark, soon-to-be EX- Congresswoman Tauscher, Woolsey and yes, Madame Speaker Pelosi, when they are "at home" during the Congressional Recess. To sign up to be part of district visit teams, talking points, and more: email codepinkjanet@gmail.com. San Francisco: New Way Forward ~ banker bailout national protests
Saturday, April 11, TBA
Bring our "Save Main Street" message to our allies. A New Way Forward plans nationwide rallies in front of banks and AIG headquarters with this message: "12 million unemployed. Foreclosures up 81%. Wall Street has taken over. We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy." To find a Bay Area demo near you, click on: http://www.anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/
San Francisco: Monthly CODEPINK Meeting
Wednesday, April 8, 7:00--9:00 PM
Join us at the Crossroads Cafe, 699 Brannan near Embarcadero (N streetcar stop) for our monthly meeting, to hear about the Gaza campaign, Mother's Day, and other actiions.
To add agenday items or get more info, contact Nancy Mancias.
Berkeley: Monthly CODEPINK Meeting & Pizza
Wednesday, April 8, 6:00 PM
Come early to share a pizza at 6 PM, or just come at 7 PM for the meeting. Agenda: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq; Mother's Day DC and here; MRS; and more.
Spuds Pizza (back room), 3290 Adeline Street, Berkeley, about 4 blocks south of the Ashby BART.
Berkeley: CODEPINK Social "No Agenda" Potluck Brunch
Saturday, April 11, 10 AM
Gather to schmooze, share, and spend time together without a meeting agenda, just a social agenda!
Call 510-845-6156 between 9:30 AM and 6:00 PM to RSVP and for location.
San Francisco: Golden Gate Bridge Walk for Peace
Sunday, April 12, 11:45 AM
Focus (again!) on Afghanistan. Gather at south or north end by 11:45; march at noon; meet in the middle for song and solidarity. Bring small signs and friends.
For carpool and other info, contact Toby.
SAVE THE DATE for Tax Day Resistence
Wednesday, April 15, all day and evening
For more info contact info@CODEPINKalert.org.
Earth Day Weekend
April 17th through 19th
Bay Area wide: Green goes great with pink! Sign up at http://www.greenapplemusicfestival.com/ to participate in a local environmental action and bring War is not Green flyers with you!
Berkeley: Back by Popular Demand!
Sunday, April 19, 2:00 PM
We are revising the "Post Inaugural" PINK Follies and performing on Mother's Day, May 10 at La Pena. This is a MANDATORY practice for anyone who wants to be in the Follies!
Call 510-847-7613 for location and other info.
Berkeley: Monthly Monday Meet, Eat, and Greet
Monday, April 20, 6:00--8:00 PM
Report back on Afghanistan. Neda Raheen and Max Dashu are invited back to share their wealth of knowledge and information on Afghanistan-- and we will update ourselves on the latest US military tactics against Afghans.
RSVP to 510-540-7007; Mediterranean Bugget $13, no one turned away.
Oakland: CItizen Hearings on the Impact of US Weapons on Civilians in Gaza
Sunday, April 26, 2:00--5:00 PM
Presented by Interfaith Witness for Middle East Peace. CODEPINK Gaza delegate and nurse Sandee Scott joins other eye-witnesses such as Gaza residents, weapons experts and first hand responders to testify on. Then we will meet in break-out groups, according to Congrssional districts, to plan vistas and next steps.
For more info, contact nkhouri@afsc.org or lgottlieb@afsc.org.
Berkeley: Gaza Report Back with Alice Walker
Tuesday, April 28
CODEPINK Ongoing Actions:
Berkeley: CODEPINK Counter-Recruitment Presence for Peace
Wednesdays, Noon to 1:30 PM at the MRS, Berkeley
Wear hot pink, bring signs, or just be there!
For more info, call 510-540-7007
San Francisco: Vigil for Peace
Wednesdays, 5:30--6:30 PM
Vigil for peace at Market and Montgomery with our new "HOPE" banner.
Hayward: Peace Corner Vigil
Wednesdays, 5:00--6:00 PM
Peace corner vigil at the corner of Redwood Road and Castro Valley Blvd.
For more info contact Oceankayak@aol.com
Hope to see you soon!
Peace,
Janet, Rae, Nancy, Zanne, and Bay Area CODEPINK
April is packed with actions and events to attend! Join us in PINK and take a stand for peace!
Visit your Congressperson during Spring Break April 6-17!
Join CODEPINK at the movies, events, and in the park to spread the PINK
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Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 11:36 am Recovery in Action: CA, VT, GA, TN, MD, MI, MN The news on the economic front is still grim, but already the recovery package is saving and creating those jobs in towns across the country, stemming losses and spurring growth in ways that affect real families and communities. Here are just a few stories plucked from the local news over the past few days.
California [U.S. News and World Report, 3/9/09]: Obama's Stimulus Keeps the Solar Power Dream Alive for Start-ups… When the $787 billion stimulus bill was signed in February, there were more than a few sighs of relief at BrightSource. The bill showered renewable energy with new funds, including $60 billion in loan guarantees for companies building wind and solar plants. BrightSource was among a small group of start-ups that had already been selected for Department of Energy loans, but the stimulus vastly increased the funds available. It also loosened rules governing tax credits, greatly expanding the pool of potential investors. After months of wondering where to turn for funding, BrightSource had been given a reprieve. "Now, all of a sudden," says Jenkins-Stark, "I have a very different worry proposition for half the capital of our project."
Vermont [WCAX TV, 3/9/09]: Governor Jim Douglas hauled out the barricade to officially close the Bridge Street bridge to traffic. Such construction doesn't usually draw this much attention, but it's the first project in the state to put federal stimulus dollars to work… Eleven projects have finished or nearly finished the bidding process. Among them are plans for improving or replacing bridges in Barre, Brownington, and East Montpelier, and paving roads in Colchester, Rockingham and Royalton. Together, the 11 projects use $33.6 million in federal stimulus funding. Another 20 projects are already scheduled to go out to bid.
Georgia [WJBF, 3/5/09]: Virginia Lequeux, lives in Peabody Apartments: "My whole apartment, I mean I’ve been blessed…blessed." Just recently she was upgraded to a newly renovated floor. New security cameras, laundry facility and even a dishwasher in her apartment. Up until about a year ago, that was the plan for the whole building…but then the money ran out. Richard Arfman, Augusta Housing Authority, Director of Planning and Development: "It was first built back in 1967 and there are 250 units in there and it’s designated for seniors. So it was built in ‘67, some of the insides needed some work done, especially the plumbing, mechanical and electrical systems." But things are looking up again for this public housing high rise. $6.1 million was given to Augusta’s Housing Authority…just enough to finish renovations to the remaining 6 floors.
Tennessee [WTVF News Channel 5, 3/9/09]: Tennessee will put nearly 12,000 young adults to work while providing free labor to businesses as part of the economic stimulus package. Unemployment numbers across the nation. According to the numbers, teens and young adults are among the hardest hit… Help is coming soon. The Tennessee Department of Labor has received $25 million to provide summer jobs for thousands of youth across the state. "Basically, employers fill out the time sheets, the department pays the paycheck and kids get the employment. Everybody wins in this situation," says Jeff Hentchel with the Department of Labor. "Whether its sweeping, emptying trash cans, painting tables."
Maryland [Baltimore Sun, 3/10/09]: Maryland is receiving more than $1 billion in federal stimulus money earmarked for education, and Gov. Martin O'Malley said yesterday he would use some of it to increase funding for community colleges and maintain the freeze on undergraduate tuition at state universities. The governor's initial budget for next year did not include an increase for community colleges, which are seeing thousands more students enroll to gain new skills to help them find jobs in the recession. But with the stimulus money, O'Malley is increasing state aid by 5 percent over the next two years.
Michigan [Michigan Messenger, 3/9/09]: Jackson Police Chief Matt Heins said Monday in a phone interview that federal stimulus grants announced last week will help him save four positions in his department. The money, released by the White House, was part of the Justice Assistance Grants (JAG) program administered by the Justice Department. Heins said he had planned on eliminating four posts — one that was currently empty and three that were currently filled. But with the money from JAG, the police chief said he will be able to protect those positions from elimination.
Minnesota [Finance and Commerce, 3/9/09]: A series of federal stimulus projects in Minnesota are about to graduate from concept to signed contract. On Friday, the Minnesota Department of Transportation plans to award contracts for a series of highway projects to be paid for by the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which includes $502 million for Minnesota highways and bridges and $92 million for transit.
WASHINGTON – President Obama's budget chief isn't sugarcoating his message to health insurance executives: the party is over.
White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said Tuesday the government will no longer overpay companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans, the privately run portion of the government health program for seniors.
For more than 10 years, companies like Humana Inc. and UnitedHealth have defended their plans, pointing out they offer lower premiums and extra benefits compared with government-run Medicare. More than 10 million of the 44 million seniors in Medicare receive care through the plans.
But Orszag reiterated what industry executives have long known: the government spends significantly more money on Medicare Advantage than its own plan. When private insurers first entered the Medicare program in the late 1990s, many lawmakers assumed companies would lower costs with their managed-care strategies.
More than a decade later, though, the government spends about $1.30 on Medicare Advantage patients for each dollar it spends on patients in traditional Medicare, Orszag said, speaking at the America's Health Insurance Plans' annual conference.
He added that the cost burden falls on taxpayers as well as patients in regular Medicare, who pay higher premiums.
"I believe in competition. I don't believe in paying $1.30 to get a dollar," Orszag told conference attendees, including representatives from Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and Cigna Corp.
The group's president, Karen Ignagni, said insurers would offer alternative proposals for controlling Medicare costs and hoped the White House would consider them.
Orszag's address came less than a week after President Obama kicked off his health reform effort with a massive summit at the White House. In his remarks to more than 100 health care experts and stakeholders, Obama said he is willing to compromise on details to reach his overall goal of improving care and covering more people. As one of the interest groups that helped derail the Clinton health reform effort in the early '90s, gaining health insurers' cooperation is critical.
But Orszag showed little intention of compromising on the Medicare Advantage issue. In his previous job as director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Orszag frequently warned lawmakers that the ballooning cost of Medicare was among the greatest threats to the nation's long-term economic health.
Under President Obama's recent budget proposal, Medicare Advantage companies would have to compete to offer their services in different parts of the country. The government payment for each region would be based on the average bid submitted by companies, saving $177 billion over 10 years, according to the White House. Under the existing system, payments are calculated annually using a preset formula.
Worries about the plan have sent shares of health insurers nosediving over the past several weeks, as investors were concerned about the effect on the insurers' profitable Medicare Advantage business.
Orszag reiterated Tuesday that the best chance to solve the country's current health care predicament is to eliminate billions of dollars worth of wasteful spending. He pointed out that different regions of the country spend vastly different sums on seniors in Medicare, without showing much difference in health outcomes.
The budget director cited figures from researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy, who for decades have documented unnecessary care in the U.S. Researchers there have estimated that about 30 percent of U.S. health care spending, or $700 billion, could be eliminated without hurting the quality of care.
Orszag assured executives that insurers are not the only group being asked to change how they do business. As part of his economic stimulus package, Obama provided $1.1 billion in funding for research comparing the effectiveness of various medical treatments. By rewarding physicians for using the most efficient practices, the administration hopes to reduce health care costs.
"We are pushing hard on changing incentives for providers so that we are rewarding better care and not more care," Orszag said.(...)"
Do More on the Deficit
Pub Date: Feb 27, 2009
In his address to Congress, President Obama pledged to cut the annual budget deficit in half by the end of his term. The problem is, this goal would keep deficit levels higher than the record deficits we have seen over the last eight years.
The bottom line is we have to do better. The largest budget deficit during the Bush presidency was $454 billion in 2008. At the time, that was a record. Everyone knows that record will be smashed to bits with the deficit estimated (pdf) to exceed $1.7 trillion in 2009. Right on the heels of that is a predicted deficit of $1.2 trillion in 2010.
We understand the argument that the country is in a deep recession, committing unprecedented funds to a bailout of the financial system and to stimulate the economy, so there is a need to carry large deficits in the short term. But, the budget the Administration released predicts the economic recovery starting in 2010, thus deficit reductions should and can be more aggressive before the end of the Presidential term in 2013.
Let’s be clear—the recent go-go spending years put the country in a deep fiscal hole. During President Bush’s two terms the debt nearly doubled, from $5.6 trillion to $10.6 trillion. The idea that there are no problems with running large budget deficits in an economic boom is intellectually bankrupt. We should have been saving for lean times in recent years, but we didn’t.
Unfortunately, the proposed budget doesn’t go far enough in reversing the bad habits of recent years. It’s not just that halving the budget deficit by 2012 is an underwhelming goal, it’s that the Administration is betting on significant deficit spending as the right economic strategy even after they predict strong economic growth after 2009. The predicted annual deficits through 2019 all exceed half a trillion dollars, piling nearly $7 trillion on top of the debt over the next ten years.
Budget documents are largely political statements, and even the most honest budgets will be imprecise, based at least in part on policy wish lists. The good news is that the Administration’s proposed budget does away with some budgetary gimmicks. There is a return to 10 year budget predictions (rather than only five years) and the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are finally being included. We welcome these changes to add more clarity to the budget.
But there are still a lot of smoke and mirrors. Like budgets of past administrations, the underlying projections rely on unspecified and unsubstantiated savings from eliminating waste, and counts on future receipts from uncertain programs like a controversial cap and trade proposal to deal with climate change.
When the budget was released, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag argued that Medicare and health care were ticking time bombs that the country had to deal with or else they would break the budget. We don’t disagree. But budgets are about priorities and we have to fiscally walk and chew gum at the same time – make the tough spending and revenue decisions to deal with the deficit and Medicare at the same time. Otherwise, we are crippling the country’s economic future.
Agriculture Policy Reform in the Federal Budget
Category: Agriculture, Federal Budget, Headlines By TCS
Pub Date: Feb 26, 2009
The President’s budget proposals for the Department of Agriculture include a number of items that TCS would like to see come to fruition. These include proposals (savings estimates in parentheses):
To reduce crop insurance premium subsidies and underwriting gains. TCS has written extensively on this topic, and testified on these excessive subsidies during the recent farm bill debate. ($5.2 billion)
To phase out direct payments over three years to farmers with sales revenue of more than $500,000 annually. This is another area where TCS has long been a proponent of reform. ($9.8 billion)
That reduces program funding for overseas brand promotion and minimizes the benefits that large for-profit entities indirectly gain as members of trade associations who also participate in the Market Access Program. ($358 million)
Would eliminate the requirement for the Government to pay the storage costs of cotton that is put under loan with USDA. ($570 million)
The full details of the President’s budget are expected next month, so we will have to wait to fully endorse any of these proposals. But in at least one other agriculture-related area the budget falls short. In promising to move the country in a new direction using more renewable fuels, TCS would like to see a clear commitment to reducing subsidies for corn-based ethanol. This is a century old product that should long ago have been taken off of the federal dole.
Here is the response I have just received from Senator Feinstein. fib
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Dear "Constituent":
Thank you for contacting me regarding the "United States National Health Care Act or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act" (H.R. 676). I appreciate the time you took to write and welcome the opportunity to respond.
On January 26, 2009, Representative John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) introduced the "United States National Health Care Act or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act." This legislation would establish a government program to provide free health insurance coverage for all United States residents. H.R. 676 has been referred to the House Committees on Energy and Commerce; Ways and Means; and Natural Resources. Currently, no companion legislation has been introduced in the Senate.
I recognize that the large number of people who lack health insurance is a critical problem facing our country. I find it unacceptable that nearly 46 million people in our country are without health insurance. This problem is especially acute in California, where over 6 million people are uninsured. The escalating cost of some premiums continues to make obtaining health insurance difficult, if not impossible, for many Americans. I am working hard to remove existing barriers to health care so that all Americans have access to the services they require. I have noted your concerns and will keep your comments in mind as the Senate considers health care reform proposals.
Again, thank you for writing. If you have any further questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.
Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ENewsletterSignup.Signup.
We each have our own perspective and all of our views are important. There is no way to solve this working only from the top down. We need to hear every voice. The health problems of the poorest among us and on earth are the problem of all of us. Disease is no respecter of wealth and social standing. Untreated mental health problems are as bad; but their consequences lurk beneath the surface. There is no way to calculate or control the harm one seriously ill person who gets no treatment or the wrong treatment will do. So let us think this through together.
SIX.
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Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs looks back at the rise and fall of the neocons, who encouraged George Bush to invade Iraq.
With the Bush Administration about to recede into history, a widely asked question is whether the neoconservative philosophy that underpinned its major foreign policy decisions will likewise vanish from the scene.
But the epitaph of neoconservatism has been written before - prematurely, as it turned out, in the 1980s.
Having been apparently headed for extinction at the end of the Reagan Administration a second generation emerged in the mid-1990s.
This was period of post-Cold War overwhelming US military dominance which the neocons anointed as the "unipolar moment". It acted as the incubator for the ideas of modern neoconservatism.
Bold ambition
The main characteristics of neoconservatism are:
Prominent neocons destined to play a major role in the Bush Administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, David Addington and Richard Perle.
Neocon advocates in the media included Bill Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, while in academia, Bernard Lewis and Victor Davis Hanson were among those who provided intellectual heft.
In Washington DC, the favourite neocon think tank was the American Enterprise Institute.
Here they authored a series of papers arguing for a more forceful US foreign policy, the centre-point of which was a rejection of conventional negotiations on the Palestine/Israel peace process.
Instead, they harboured the much bolder ambition of a US-instigated region-wide democratic transformation.
The first phase was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein - which, they believed, would have a sort of "demonstrator effect" on the region.
At the beginning of the Bush administration, the neocons' prospects looked dim.
True, several - like Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle - obtained senior appointments, but Bush himself had promised a "humble" foreign policy, the diametric opposite of the neocon approach.
Neither Secretary of State Colin Powell nor Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a neocon.
The neocons did, however, find a crucial ally in Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Although not one himself, Mr Cheney was a founding signatory of the Project for the New American Century, which became the preferred forum for neocon thinking.
A critical crossover point with the neocons was Mr Cheney's commitment to the bold deployment of US military power.
His alliance with the neocons proved critical for them.
High-water mark
Their opportunity came with the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
More than anyone else they had a well-prepared strategy which matched the need of the day for a bold, decisive response.
Suddenly, their ideas of democratic transformation looked like a reasonable policy option.
Their proposals to attack Iraq rapidly moved to centre stage.
Clearly, the neocons were not the only - or even the main - actors in bringing about the Iraq war.
But the key fact remains it was their ideas that ensured that the US response to 9/11 would go beyond Afghanistan.
They were, without doubt, the intellectual godfathers of the war.
The first few weeks of the war represented the high-water mark for the neocons.
On the battlefield, everything seemed to be going their way; politically, their protege Ahmed Chalabi seemed on track to accede to power.
But as invasion turned into occupation and the insurgency intensified, the neocon ideas of region-wide democratic transformation were revealed for the fantastical pipedreams they always were.
With the Bush administration ratcheting back its definitions of success in Iraq, the neocons were in full retreat.
They started to leave the administration, as elite and public opinion shifted decisively against the war.
Polar opposite
In many ways, the 2008 election represented a direct repudiation of the neocon style of foreign policy based on military-centred, unilateralist overreaching.
At first sight, the incoming Obama administration appears to be the polar opposite of neoconservatism.
Its instincts are multilateralist, being committed, for example, to adhering to the Kyoto Protocol and to international agreements like the Geneva Convention.
It places a high priority on diplomacy, with President-elect Obama being open to direct talks with long-ignored countries like Iran and Cuba. Defense Secretary Gates, who is remaining in office, has made it clear that he regards military intervention as the genuinely last option.
Furthermore, the financial meltdown and the drains of the Iraq and Afghan wars have chipped away at the pre-eminence of US power. It is difficult to argue today that the US enjoys a unipolar advantage.
The safest bet, therefore, is that we can bid adieu to the neocons and leave their role to be adjudicated by history.
They themselves argue that they form part of the mainstream of American history. It seems more likely that they will come to be seen as an aberration.
Two things may change this. First, the flipside of neoconservatism is what might be called neo-humanitarianism. This is the idea that US military power should be used to intervene on the ground in crises like the Rwandan genocide or in Darfur.
Some Obama officials, for example Susan Rice at the UN, will be making this case. All indications are that the Obama administration will be cautious but, if not, US unilateral military deployment may be back on the global agenda.
Secondly, the Obama administration faces unsettled business on Iran.
The neocons are arguing that Iran is the defining issue for US foreign policy and that, short of an abandonment by Tehran of its apparent nuclear weapons program, the US must use force.
Once again, the early signs are that, for the Obama team, military force is well down the agenda and a new form of engagement is under consideration.
Should this change - possibly on the back of intransigence from Tehran - the neocons will be back in business and will crow that they have survived yet another premature obituary.
Jonathan Clarke is co-author, with Stefan Halper, of America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the World Order
Sign Our Open Letter to President-Elect Obama
We Need a Change in Israel/Palestine Policy
Congratulations on your historic election as the next President of the United States.
Last year, you pledged to “take an active role, and make a personal commitment to do all I can to advance the cause of [Israeli-Palestinian] peace from the start of my Administration.” We are eager to work with you to fulfill this goal.
To do so, your Administration should break with past policies of unconditional support for Israel's illegal military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and change U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine to support human rights, international law, and equality.
We agree with Aaron David Miller, a 25-year State Department Middle East negotiator and adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs, who wrote that “For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations.”
To become an honest and effective broker, your Administration should:
* Insist that Israel ends its siege of the Gaza Strip. Israel has deliberately impoverished the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip and caused a humanitarian catastrophe of dire proportions by prohibiting the delivery of food, medicine, fuel, and electricity. Your Administration should insist on the illegality of collective punishment and support the human rights of Palestinians such as freedom of movement as a first step towards ending Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip.
* Demand a freeze in the construction of settlements and Israel's Wall in the West Bank. Israel's West Bank settlements, including those in East Jerusalem, are all illegal under international law,and the International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that Israel's Wall is illegal and must be torn down. Halting this construction should be a first step toward completely dismantling the infrastructure of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others have labeled “apartheid.”
* Hold Israel accountable for its misuse of U.S. weapons. In 2007, the United States and Israel agreed to increase military aid to Israel by 25% over the next decade, totaling $30 billion. During the Bush Administration, Israel killed more than 2,000 innocent Palestinian civilians who took no part in hostilities, oftentimes with U.S. weapons in violation of the Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts. Your Administration should hold Israel accountable for these violations of U.S. law and cut off military aid as required by law, rather than increase it.
* End the U.S. veto protecting Israel at the United Nations. The United States has used its veto power at the UN more than 40 times since 1972 to shield Israel from the consequences of its violations of human rights, UN resolutions, and international law. Your Administration should work with, not in opposition to, the international community so that human rights, UN resolutions, and international law are applied and enforced uniformly.
* Base a just peace on human rights, international law, and equality. Such a policy is the only way to ensure the legitimate security needs of all peoples and can only be achieved by engaging in dialog with all interested parties. A just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace includes the complete end of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip; a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue consistent with international law and UN resolutions, including the right of return and/or compensation; and full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. A policy denying Palestinians these internationally-guaranteed rights will only lead to yet another failed “peace process”.Signed by,
National Organizations1. African American Islamic Institute 2. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee 3. American Jews for a Just Peace 4. Americans for a Just Peace in the Middle East 5. Black Voices for Peace 6. Code Pink: Women for Peace 7. Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism 8. Council for the National Interest 9. Doctors for Global Health 10. Episcopal Peace Fellowship 11. Fellowship of Reconciliation 12. Friends of Sabeel North America 13. Global Exchange14. Grassroots International 15. Interfaith Peace-Builders 16. Middle East Children’s Alliance 17. Middle East Peace Fellowship 18. Middle East Research and Information Project19. Muslim Student Association West 20. National Hip Hop Political Convention 21. National Lawyers Guild 22. Nonviolence International 23. Peace Action 24. Presbyterian Peace Fellowship 25. Progressive Democrats of America 26. Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East 27. United for Peace and Justice 28. US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation 29. Voters for Peace 30. War Resisters League 31. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—U.S. Section Alabama 1. Birmingham Interfaith Human Rights Committee, Birmingham 2. North Alabama Peace Network, Huntsville Alaska 1. Alaskans for Peace and Justice, Anchorage Arizona 1. Islamic Reform, Tucson 2. Local to Global Justice, Phoenix 3. Peacemaking Committee, Faith Presbyterian Church, Sun City 4. Women in Black—Phoenix, Phoenix 5. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—Tucson Branch, Tucson Arkansas1. The Pagan Temple, Violet Hill
California 1. 14 Friends of Palestine, San Rafael 2. Academic Mentorship Program at UCLA, Los Angeles 3. Addicted to War, Culver City 4. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Diego Chapter, Encinitas 5. Americans for Democratic Action—Southern California Chapter, Studio City 6. Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice, Oakland 7. Bay Area Women in Black, Oakland 8. Beacon Presbyterian Fellowship, Oakland 9. Berkeley Institute of Biblical Archaeology and Literature (BIBAL), Rodeo 10. Coachella Valley Movement for a Democratic Society, Desert Hot Springs 11. Conversation with Connection, Los Angeles 12. Couples Center, Sebastopol 13. Crabgrass, San Francisco14. Deep Hum Productions, Berkeley 15. Ecumenical Peace Institute, Berkeley 16. El Cerrito Green Party, Kensington 17. Friends of Deir Ibzi’a, Berkeley 18. Global Information Services, Greenbrae 19. Greenwood Earth Alliance, San Francisco 20. Holy Cross Melkite-Greek Orthodox Church, Placentia 21. International & Multicultural Education, University of San Francisco, San Francisco 22. International Imaging, Pasadena 23. Jews against Zionism, Sacramento 24. MAIZ -- Movimiento de Acion, Inspirando Servicio, San Jose 25. Middle East Needs Peace, San Jose 26. Middle East Policy Advisory Council, Oakland 27. Muslim Student Union, University of California Irvine, Corona 28. Nick Dibs for Congress, Long Beach 29. Northeast Los Angeles Radical Neighbors for Peace through Justice, Los Angeles 30. Northern California International Solidarity Movement, El Cerrito 31. Office of the Americas, Los Angeles 32. Pacifica Peace People, Pacifica 33. Parrot Software Services, Menlo Park 34. Peace Action of San Mateo County, San Mateo 35. Peace Political/Human Rights for All, Concord 36. Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Palo Alto 37. Resource Center for Nonviolence, Santa Cruz 38. Sacred Music Events, Auburn 39. San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, San Francisco 40. San Jose Peace and Justice Center, San Jose 41. September 11 Action, Danville 42. Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Nonviolence, Berkeley 43. Some of All Parts, Oakland 44. Students for Justice in Palestine-University of California Santa Barbara, Goleta45. Students for Justice in Palestine—University of Southern California, El Monte 46. The Added Edge, Inc., Vineburg 47. Timothy Crofton Real Estate, Fremont 48. Tri-City Peace and Justice, Fremont 49. Venturans for Justice in Palestine, Ventura 50. Vista Medical Group, Colton 51. Western Regional Advocacy Program, San Francisco 52. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—Berkeley/East Bay Branch, Oakland 53. Zionism Explained, Oakland Colorado 1. Christian Peacemakers Teams of Colorado, Longmont 2. Colorado Jews for a Just Peace, Boulder 3. Colorado Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Denver 4. Friends of Sabeel—Colorado, Boulder 5. Longmont Citizens for Justice and Democracy, Longmont 6. Musical Missions of Peace, Longmont 7. Obamans for Change in the Americas, Glenwood Springs 8. Pax Christi Metro Denver, Wheat Ridge 9. Pax Christi of the Pikes Peak Region, Colorado Springs 10. Peace and Justice Task Force, Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, Denver 11. Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Boulder 12. Strength through Peace, Fort Collins 13. Willow Way Wellness, Longmont Connecticut 1. Bridgeport Islamic Community Center, Bridgeport 2. Greater New Haven Peace Council, New Haven3. People of Faith CT, West Hartford4. We Refuse to Be Enemies, New Britain District of Columbia 1. Episcopal Peace Fellowship DC, Washington 2. House of Creative Writing, Washington 3. Malcolm X Day Committee, Washington 4. Sharing Jerusalem, USA, Washington Florida1. AGSPEC Enterprises Inc., Delray Beach 2. Brevard Patriots for Peace, Melbourne 3. Florida Palestine Solidarity Network, Bradenton 4. Florida Peace Action Network, Hudson 5. Hindus for Peace and Justice, West Melbourne 6. Humanists for Peace, West Palm Beach 7. Jiffi Print, Coconut Creek 8. Patriot Rebel, Santa Rosa Beach9. Pax Christi Northeast Florida, St. Augustine 10. Society for a Just Peace in Palestine, Rollins College, Lake Mary 11. Stafford Farms, Ocala 12. Tallahassee Network for Justice and Peace, Tallahassee 13. We Are Wide Awake, Clermont 14. We Can Take It, St. Petersburg Georgia 1. Athens for Justice in Palestine, Duluth 2. Foundation for Global Community, Atlanta 3. Free All with Truth, Decatur 4. Southern Energy Network, Athens Hawaii 1. Center for Nonviolent Education and Action, Kurtistown 2. World Peace Society, Holualoa Idaho 1. Alliance for Community Transformation, College of Idaho, Caldwell 2. Boise Brown Berets, Boise 3. Women in Black Boise, Boise Illinois
New Hampshire
Utah 1. Golden Rule Project, Salt Lake City2. People for Peace and Justice of Utah, Taylorsville 3. Utahns for a Just Peace in the Holy Land, Salt Lake City Vermont1. Editide, Marshfield 2. Educational Praxis, Putney 3. Kids4Peace—Vermont, Bridgport Virginia1. Ad Hoc Committee for Bethlehem, Vienna 2. Committee on Behalf of Palestinians Denied Entry, Chester 3. MY Estimator, Inc., Falls Church 4. Northern Virginians for Peace and Justice, Falls Church 5. The Wisdom Fund, Arlington 6. Write for Justice, Vienna Washington1. Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Tacoma 2. Code Pink, Vancouver 3. GeoSphere, LLC, Edmonds 4. International Trauma Treatment Program, Olympia5. Media Island International, Olympia 6. Olympia Friends Meeting (Quaker), Olympia 7. Olympia-Rafah Mural Project, Olympia8. Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project, Olympia 9. Palestine Solidarity Committee, Seattle 10. Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, Spokane 11. Poets West, Seattle 12. Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, Olympia 13. Voices for Peace in the Middle East, Bellingham 14. Voices of Palestine, Seattle 15. Walters Landscape Architect, Renton Wisconsin 1. Alees International, Franklin 2. Damascus Center for Theoretical and Civil Rights Studies, Appleton 3. Justice for Palestine, University of Wisconsin, Madison4. Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, Madison 5. Peace Action Wisconsin, Milwaukee 6. Racine Coalition for Peace and Justice, Racine 7. Sura for Change, Milwaukee Wyoming1. Mountain Moving, LLC, Laramie Abroad 1. American Expats in Jordan for Obama, Amman, Jordan 2. Americans against the War—France, Paris, France 3. Americans in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt 4. Arab Center for Democracy and Peace Studies, Amman, Jordan 5. Australians for Palestine, Hawthorne, Australia 6. Danish Peace Watch, Copenhagen
Rallying to the Defense of Mt. Tenabo and Western Shoshone rights
Sacred site of the Western Shoshone Credits: Chris Sewall/Western Shoshone Defense Project
November 2008. Thousands of No Dirty Gold members have sent letters to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to oppose Barrick Gold's proposed expansion of its Cortez Hills mine onto Mt. Tenabo, a sacred Western Shoshone site in Nevada. The mine expansion would threaten sacred Shoshone gravesites, disturb ritual grounds, and harm important water sources.
In apparent disregard for Western Shoshone rights, the BLM gave its go-ahead for the mine earlier this month. But No Dirty Gold members let the BLM know that there is strong opposition to the project, and have helped move the campaign to further action. A lawsuit has now been filed in federal court to stop the expansion.
For more information, see:
Learn More About the Current Crisis in Gaza
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http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/cherylrussell
* * Po la`i e - Silent Night * *
oooooooooooooooooooooooo
Po la`i e, po kamaha`o,
Peaceful night, wonderful night,
Maluhia, malamalama
Peace, light
Ka makuahine aloha e
The beloved mother
Me ke keiki hemolele e
With the holy child
Moe me ka maluhia lani
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Oni na kahu hipa e
The shepherds come
I ko ka lani nani no
With the heaven's beauty
Mele na `anela haleluia.
The angels sing hallelujah.
Hanau `ia Kristo ka haku.
Christ the Lord is born
Keiki hiwahiwa aloha e,
Beloved sacred child,
Ka lama la`i mai luna mai
Light of peace from above
Me ka lokomaika`i makamae.
With goodwill and purity.
Iesu i kou hanau `ana.
Jesus for your birth.
Iesu i kou hanau `ana
Jesus for your birth. "
Dear Obama Family, Barack, Michelle, Sasha and Malia!
Have a great vacation in the spirit of Aloha, Merry Christmas to you and the entire extended Family!
Fire Is Born
Well I know, it was from her secretary, and yes it is robotic, kinda, but still they know what I think about the beaches now, and I helped them act on it. Besides, would I see myself doing such a thing a year ago? Joining this campaign in January did teach me something. Still I hate politics. But, then, I love beaches. fib
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Dear [Hanna W.]:
Thank you for writing to express your support for the "Beach Protection Act." I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.
California's coast is among our popular natural attractions. I understand your concern for beach goers' safety as well as the well-being of the coastal economy. On May 24, 2007, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) introduced the "Beach Protection Act" (S. 1506). This bill would amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to modify provisions relating to beach monitoring. S. 1506 has been referred to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, of which I am not a member. I will keep your comments in mind should this legislation come before the full Senate for a vote.
Keeping our oceans and coasts clean is absolutely essential to the long term health of our state's economy and our environment. The ocean-dependent industry is estimated to contribute $17 billion per year to our state's economy. In addition to benefiting the State economically, California's pristine coastline and beaches improve quality of life by providing recreational opportunities and bringing tourists to coastal communities.
Please know that I will keep your concern for notifying the public of unsafe waters in mind when considering future legislature. Again, thank you for your letter. I hope you will continue to write me about issues that are important to you. If you have any additional comments or questions, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE ON THE BLOG AND ALL AMERICANS OUT THERE IN REAL LIFE!
THE CHANGE IS COMING!
love is already here.
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CACTUS PEARS IN SICILY
Focus on APA Appointments in Obama Administration
Nichi Bei Times,
News Report, Kenji G. Taguma,
Posted: Nov 17, 2008
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