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Lead Article
News & Letters, January/February 2001
Far Right enters White House with 'President select' Bush
by Terry Moon
No sooner was he sworn in than George W. Bush outlawed funds for family
planning clinics abroad which may offer abortions or counselling, showing
his contempt for freedom of speech and guaranteeing untold more women's
deaths from clandestine and self-induced abortions. This first act of his
presidency bore the mark of the Christian Coalition.
Bush's elevation to the presidency by a reactionary Supreme Court will not
pass without contradiction. Massive, furious, and multi-dimensional
demonstrations greeted his coronation, not only in Washington, D.C. but in
cities and towns across the country, including San Francisco, Los Angeles,
and Tallahassee in Florida where a pattern of theft of Black and Jewish
votes threw the election into contention. (See page 11 for reports.)
Even before the inauguration, demonstrations erupted like the 300 who
rallied in St. Louis at the stone courthouse where 144 years ago the slave,
Dred Scott, sued his owner for his freedom. That demonstration, against the
racist, sexist Missouri ex-Senator John Ashcroft as Bush's choice for
attorney general, was sponsored by a growing coalition of Black and women's
organizations.
The rage of protesters over the usurpation of democracy sharply contrasted
then Vice President Gore's conciliatory gestures. In his last days as
president of the Senate, he attempted to quiet the furious Rep. Maxine
Waters and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and the entire Congressional Black
Caucus which stormed out of the Senate's certification of the electoral
college vote.
Record voter turnout by Blacks and women had turned state after state away
from Bush. And as much as Bush tried to play to Black America with his
"compassionate conservatism," few were fooled, least of all the Black
masses. Nor could pushing forward a handful of Black, Brown, Asian, and
women's faces make people believe that this diversity of color and sex
represented any diversity of THOUGHT.
RIGHT-WING AGENDA IN APPOINTMENTS
Never before has a president with absolutely NO mandate acted in such
contempt of the obvious will of the people, apparent in his choices for his
cabinet. (This arrogance was further driven home by the obscene excesses of
$30 million squandered on inaugural celebrations.)
Of course, Bush's choice of Richard Cheney as vice president during the
campaign represented a bid to return the country to the retrogressive reign
of Reagan. The connection to Reaganism as it was continued in the senior
George Bush's administration is palpable as well, including in some
appointees who had served under George's W.'s father. (See "The Gulf War
and Bush, ten years later," page 12.)
In his selections can be seen Bush's agenda to free capitalism from all
restrictions and crush any and all opposition, most especially workers and
Blacks, but also environmentalists, youth, and feminists-all those forces
who have come together to challenge globalized capitalism.
Capitalism's naked, werewolf hunger for limitless production, however, must
be cloaked in some kind of acceptable ideology. Thus Bush has overlaid
capitalist ambition with a retrogressive fundamentalist, so-called morality
which uses the language of religion and is racist and sexist to its core.
- Bush picked Ann Veneman as secretary of agriculture, a proponent of
global free trade and bio-technology, and Elaine L. Chao as labor
secretary. Chao opposes affirmative action, believes that "self-reliance is
the essential engine of success," and her "labor" experience consists of
serving on the corporate boards of Clorox, Dole Food, and Northwest
Airlines.
- Roderick R. Paige, secretary of education, is for the delusive "freedom"
of school vouchers. As for his pledge that "no child be left behind," poor
and minority children fail the standardized achievement tests that Paige
and Bush advocate in disproportionately higher rates than others, shutting
them out of higher education.
- Under Tommy Thompson, the "Health and Human Services" Department will be
anything but. As governor, Thompson cut welfare rolls in Wisconsin from
100,000 families to 7,700. The average annual income of those thrown off is
40% below the poverty level for a family of three. Forty-seven percent
can't pay their utilities, 37% can't pay for housing, and 32% can't pay for
all the food their families need. It is not only women with the most
problems who are the last on the rolls; the ones with the most
difficulties-poor health, abuse, language problems, mental illness-were
also the first to be thrown off for violating stricter rules. These women
are homeless, living in poverty with relatives or friends, depending on
handouts, in jail, or dead. Thompson, anti-abortion to the extreme,
promises to review RU-486, one of the most tested drugs in history,
supposedly for safety, but in actuality to ban it.
- On the environmental front, Bush's secretary of interior, Gale Norton, is
a registered lobbyist for a company being sued for numerous toxic waste
violations. Her free-market approach as Colorado's attorney general
resulted in the 1992 Summitville mine disaster, killing the Alamosa River.
Bush's pick for the Environmental Protection Agency, New Jersey Gov.
Christine Todd Whitman, was targeted by that state's Legislative Black and
Latino Caucus for environmental racism. The new secretary of energy,
Spencer Abraham, one of the strongest supporters of the dumping of
high-level nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, fronts for an energy
policy based entirely on promoting production of nuclear power, coal,
natural gas and, above all, oil, including the opening of Alaska's fragile
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
- Most ominous of all is Bush's choice of John Ashcroft for attorney
general. The facts of Ashcroft's racist acts are now widely known: He used
the race card to slander Black justice Ronnie White who had been nominated
to a federal judgeship in 1999, tagging him "pro-criminal"; he spoke at and
praised racist and sexist Bob Jones University; he honored the clearly
racist SOUTHERN PARTISAN magazine, stating that those who fought to
maintain slavery were "Southern patriots"; he twice vetoed measures passed
overwhelmingly by the Missouri legislature that would have made it possible
for volunteer deputy registrars from nonpartisan organizations to engage in
voter registration in the 50% Black city of St. Louis-a policy already
allowed in the rest of the mainly white and Republican St. Louis County.
Further, Ashcroft helped scuttle the nomination of James Hormel as
ambassador to Luxembourg strictly because Hormel is openly gay. He
expressed his hostility to women's right to control our own bodies when he
sponsored legislation so draconian that it criminalized abortion even if a
woman was made pregnant by rape or incest, and signed legislation stating
life begins at conception.
MILITARISM'S LINK TO REPRESSION
The triumvirate of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, Condoleezza
Rice as national security advisor, and Colin Powell as secretary of state
reveals Bush's plans to drastically increase funds to the military, develop
the astronomically expensive and completely unrealistic "Star Wars" missile
defense system, and extend the U.S.'s imperial reach at the expense of
social programs in the U.S.
Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut for the rich and his pricey plans for the
military come at the very moment when unemployment is rising and plants and
businesses are failing. Even his treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, has said
that the tax cut would do nothing to reverse the slowing U.S. economy.
Signs of a slowdown-or worse-are omnipresent. From semiconductors to sales
of new single-family homes to retail sales, December showed the worst
growth since 1987. One of the most serious indicators of a slowdown and
coming recession is that of job creation. The growth of private jobs in the
fourth quarter was the slowest since 1992.
The loss of jobs cuts across all businesses from dot-com companies to
service and heavy industries. Even computers aren't selling and Gateway is
eliminating 2,400 jobs. In sales Montgomery Ward eliminated more than
37,800 jobs, Sears laid off an additional 2,400 and smaller retailers are
following suit across the country.
The hardest hit segment of the economy is manufacturing, with 62,000 jobs
lost in December alone, with announced plans for another 134,000 layoffs to
come. Both DaimlerChrysler and General Motors plan to cut car production by
about 25% the first quarter of the year and layoffs and shut-downs in auto
have already started. Those who do find work, find it at significantly
lower pay and little or no benefits.
In boom times, the U.S. economy is able to absorb the $1 billion more a day
it spends abroad than it sells, the largest trade deficit relative to the
overall economy in decades. But now, with recession looming, even
economists like Robert J. Gordon at Northwestern University are saying
"Stagflation. I think it can, and may, come back." He predicts that as soon
as negative returns begin to surface, investors will put their money
someplace other than the U.S. The effects could be enormous, weakening the
dollar and affecting other economies as well. A tax break for the wealthy
will affect this situation not at all.
Bill Clinton's chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers
made one final rosy report, concluding: "We don't think we're going into
recession." Whether or not Clinton can take responsibility for a booming
'90s economy, hinted in the report, it's undeniable that his administration
destroyed welfare and the safety net many need now and a great many more
may well need in the near future. Clinton's administration also gave the
green light to Tommy Thompson to savage poor women and children in
Wisconsin. Furthermore under Clinton's watch the prison population hit two
million-a 74% increase over 1990.
CLINTON'S DAMAGE
Many Blacks were amazed by an editorial by Clinton in THE NEW YORK TIMES on
"Erasing America's Color Line." He called for passing a federal law to ban
racial profiling, rethinking mandatory sentences for non-violent offenders,
reducing "the disparity between crack and powder-cocaine sentences," and
giving back the right to vote to ex-felons.
An angry Jesse Jackson responded, "These gaps existed in 1992. He had eight
years to work on them," and the director of the Washington office of the
ACLU, Laura Murphy, asked the obvious: "Why didn't he do more on these
things during his own administration?"
The gaps that Clinton left and the reactionary doors he opened, or simply
refused to close, make it that much easier for Bush and company to walk
through them and wreak human havoc. Abroad, they include the inhuman
sanctions against Iraq which have caused the deaths of over half a million
children. At home they include the dismantling of welfare leading to
increased hunger and homelessness, as well as his refusal to really end the
discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. Everything that
Bush has done shows him determined to not only walk through those doors,
but turn this country to the extreme Right with a vengeance.
What election 2000 has done is reveal that democracy in the U.S. is a sham
and that Republicans and Democrats alike will trample it if that's what
they think it takes to hold onto their power.
The opposite to all that are those forces and Reason determined to
transform the world into a truly human one-youth, environmentalists, gays
and lesbians, workers, women, and most of all the Black masses in this
country. The leaders fear them so completely that Gore would concede the
election with "good grace," that not one Democratic senator could be found
to sign a complaint contesting the election, and that all of Bush's cabinet
choices were approved without a hitch.
Of course the pusillanimous actions of Democrats will not halt the movement
for a human world, it will only mean that we need to look to ourselves.
Ultimately, it will be the new passions and forces arising from below who
will determine the future of humanity.
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