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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2004Lead ArticleBush lies and scapegoats to save his presidencyby Jim Mills and Andy Phillips What do you do if you get caught lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to invade the country at a cost of over 29,000 dead and wounded? What if you promised that giant tax cuts for the rich and a hopeless half trillion dollar budget deficit would lead to prosperity, but employment and a decent standard of living remain out of reach for most? What do you do if your likely challenger in the upcoming presidential election is garnering strength in polls while your approval ratings keep falling? If you’re George W. Bush, you point at gay and lesbian America and shout, “There’s the problem!" In launching his official campaign on Feb. 24, Bush moved the agenda of the Christian Right to the top of his platform with an initiative to rewrite the U.S. Constitution to ban gay and lesbian marriages. The formula of a scoundrel, scapegoating gays and lesbians should be seen for what it is, a gambit to save his presidency while destroying the lives of millions. If the amendment clears Congress and the states, no one will be safe from religion-based social and economic policies. Whether the frontrunner John Kerry speaks up for gays and lesbians and against the politics of superstition and prejudice remains to be seen. In reaction to Bush’s announcement, both he and runner-up John Edwards stated a personal disdain for gay marriage while opposing a constitutional ban, hardly a hopeful sign for posing a real alternative to Bush’s fundamentalist politics. Already the inchoate Democratic message of opposing the invasion of Iraq was changed into a pitiful effort to offer a better military leadership. Whatever may unfold in the next eight months, an opportunist and reactionary administration is looking all the more unsavory to more and more people, especially youth. LIES, LIES, LIES Within weeks of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, an outlet for propaganda about Iraq as a terrorist threat was set up in the Department of Defense. The administration seized upon legitimate fear of more machinations by Osama bin Laden to paint Saddam Hussein as an imminent national threat, even alleging a connection between the two. The fact is, however, that the first meeting of the Bush administration’s national security team in January 2001 hatched the invasion of Iraq. Confident of his ruse during the buildup to the invasion, Bush told the country that “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that would come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Three days before hostilities on March 20 of last year, he asserted that “intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Even the elitist Bush can’t expect the public to forget these declarations--so they were reinterpreted. Bad intelligence was supposedly behind those words. The truth is, according to one former CIA analyst, the decision to invade Iraq did not rest on information from the CIA because no reliable information was available to justify a claim about weapons of mass destruction. In the service of counterrevolution, an agency like the CIA can render whatever “truth” its master wants. So when, in August 2002, Vice President Cheney referred to intelligence from the spring, intelligence that did not exist, his lap dog at the agency George Tenet produced the evidence needed, postdated back to the spring of that year. Now that weapons of mass destruction have not materialized during a year of occupation, Bush has resorted to broad statements about “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” These were debunked by David Kay. Upon resigning as Bush’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq at the end of January, he expressed his conviction that “there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction” nor “the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on” (NEW YORK TIMES, 1/26/04). The administration chose not to slander Kay, but to blame the CIA. Secretary Powell, again in a fit of naiveté, said, after Kay’s report, that he would probably not have supported the war had he known the facts. The uproar that followed forced Powell the next day to say that he still believed the war to be justified. Bush, above all else, does not want Iraq to be an election issue, which is why there is dogged determination to stick to the impossible and to turn over the government to Iraqis by the end of June. (See “Our Life and Times,” page 12.) It is also why the commission appointed by Bush to investigate intelligence failures (itself a distortion since his people suppressed the unsupportive intelligence) is not to report until next year, after the election. ECONOMICS OF FEAR Amidst the lying, a poll by CNN-Time revealed that only 44% of the people said that Bush could be trusted. Other polls showed that John Kerry would overwhelmingly defeat Bush if the election were held today. But Bush has an election war chest of $150 million that is just beginning to be tapped to dissemble and obscure. There’s a lot to obscure besides the lies about Iraq, for instance about the economy. Bush's $2.4 trillion budget has a record $521 billion in deficits--and this does not include another $60 billion projected to cover costs of the Iraq war. The trade deficit last year totaled $490 billion, so huge that the International Monetary Fund warned it could destabilize the entire world economy. Runaway jobs and automation have led, since Bush took office, to over three million jobs lost, the longest sustained job loss since the Great Depression. His tax plan, which redistributed more wealth to the rich, and low interest rates were, according to Bush, going to add 510,000 new jobs, plus one million more expected during the economic recovery. Instead a paltry 221,000 jobs have been created since June. Both the job outsourcing and speed-up of the remaining work force raised productivity. The huge and constant layoffs in the last three years, which are still continuing, created such fear in workers that they drove themselves to do the work required, often working 16-hour days. The results are now showing up in medical records with a skyrocketing epidemic of stress and depression cases. Looking beyond the term of one Republican president, the deep, intractable problems in capitalism are apparent, and those problems show up most harshly in the lives of Black workers and their families. Black family income compared to white fell between 1968 and 2002, from 60% to 58%. And Black unemployment is twice that of white, a wider gap than in 1972. One in nine African Americans cannot find work. Where the gaps are narrowing, the pace of improvement is so slow that parity lies a generation or more away. Furthermore the working poor (or one in four workers) are staffing the low-wage jobs abounding in the new economy, and they are motivated mostly by fear of getting fired for being late, staying in the bathroom too long, or missing work to stay home with a sick child. In sum, capitalism is failing to meet people’s needs. A great hue and cry went up when N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, stated that in the long run the outsourcing of jobs, and the misery accompanying it, was a good thing for the economy. But the fact is that it is good for CAPITALIST economics because it serves capital. What must be understood is that capital has but one function--to reproduce itself. It does not care one whit for human beings. It lives for the bottom line, and the bottom line only. WHO SPEAKS FOR US? So who speaks for those being ground up by moribund, globalized capitalism? And who is willing to take on Bush’s lies? Both Kerry, the likely nominee, and Edwards voted to go to war a year ago, and unfortunately a few weeks into the primary season the field of debate has been narrowed to a question of who holds the best militarist credentials. Kerry the combat Naval officer in Vietnam has blocked out Kerry the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1970s. But the enthusiasm for the Dean anti-war stance among youth as well as the mammoth global anti-war mobilization, also of a year ago, are helping to maintain focus on Bush’s lies. Against the public’s unwillingness to forget the lies, channeling the debate has been the responsibility of corporate media, the same press that had a hard time finding the five or six million around the world who marched against the war a year ago. The press’s pursuit of Bush’s Air National Guard records, to verify whether he was a Good Ole Boy or a privileged draft dodger, has served as a crafty detour away from a debate on the perils of militarism as a national policy. The handling of the Dean campaign is another example of a prejudicial capitalist press. Following a poor showing in Iowa, the networks repeated ad nauseam the scenes of Dean exhorting his campaign staff rock concert-style. Attached were inferences and commentary alleging instability in the strongest anti-war candidate. If the media seems right-wing friendly, it shouldn’t be surprising. Through media consolidation, out of dozens of outlets, there are now only six, and a simple listing of them will show the unceasing monopolistic trend. They are Viacom-CBS-MTV; Murdoch-Fox TV-Harper Collins-Weekly Standard-New York Post-London Times-Direct TV; GE-NBC-Universal-Vivendi; Time-Warner-CNN-AOL; Disney-ABC-ESPN and the largest, Comcast, which in Philadelphia also owns a baseball team, a stadium and the cable sports channel. A lock on the press should be troubling. In recent years, national election campaigns have exposed totalitarian impulses. Ominous signs have appeared again. The USA PATRIOT Act paints dissent with the brush of terrorism, and the Attorney General hopes to use it to stifle resistance to Bush’s policy of permanent war. Government surveillance and repression of social justice activists has been on the rise. Federal authorities sought testimonies and records, including names, from an anti-war conference in November put on by students at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Twelve people were arrested the next day in an associated, non-violent protest to “Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!” at Camp Dodge. The campus chapter of the National Lawyers Guild which hosted the event was targeted as well. A gag order prevented university employees from discussing the investigation. A storm of protest compelled withdrawal of the grand jury subpoenas on Feb. 10. “Once again, protesters throughout America are being watched, often by police who are supposed to be investigating terrorism,” writes Michelle Goldberg in Salon.com. “Civil disobedience... is being treated as terrorism’s cousin and the government claims to be justified in infiltrating any meeting where it’s even discussed.” Joint Terrorism Task Forces have been deployed nationwide to involve local police in spying on citizens (2/11/04, “Outlawing Dissent”). Despite the intimidation, the movement to dump Bush may actually grow into a majority of votes going to Kerry on Nov. 2. But given the history of Republicans from Nixon to Bush, don’t count on victory for the Democrats. Missed in the angst of the 2000 Florida election recount was the disenfranchisement of 90,000 registered voters well before election day, under the presumption they were ineligible former felons. In fact, few were, but most were African American or Democrat (6/20/03, Sandeep S. Stwal, http://www.Infernalpress.com). Less well known is a Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project report that some 1.5 million presidential votes were not recorded in 2000 because of problems with voting machines. Worst of all, the computers and programs of the same high-tech firm with a right-wing management that selectively purged the rolls in Florida will manage lists of registered voters and count their votes in states across the country this November. CRACKS Hiding the truth is a kind of lie. Ever since the 1991 Gulf War, the arrival of soldiers killed in combat has been blocked to the media. Protecting grieving families is the excuse, but more and more their pain is turning against the administration. One grieving mother, Sue Niederer, wrote an open letter to Bush after the death of her son, Seth Dvorin, in Iraq in February. She complained, "Seth died for President Bush's personal vendetta... Bush put us where we should never have been. We're not even in a declared war." She also condemned the Army for recklessly assigning Dvorin to disarm the bomb which killed him (2/12/04, HOPEWELL VALLEY NEWS). Military Families Speak Out, with mothers’ voices prominent, publishes criticism of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, coordinates activities and trades information on its website (http://www.mfso.org), as does Veterans Against The Iraq War (http://www.vaiw.org). Such sentiments of military family members are of deep concern to Bush, especially since they became public on the eve of the first anniversary of the start of the war. They also pose a challenge to activists involved in the upcoming day of protest on the anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, March 20. What kind of a movement can be a unifying force between veterans and their families against the war, the unemployed and working poor, and gay and lesbians? Scapegoating gays and lesbians by banning marriage means taking away more than 1,000 federal rights, benefits and responsibilities under law, along with hundreds of state-level rights and protections. The government uses the legal recognition of civil marriage to grant these rights, which include Social Security survivor benefits, hospital visitation rights and the ability to inherit a spouse's property without being taxed. It isn’t that gay and lesbian unions are only now becoming visible with the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriages and the surge of marriages in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere. There are gay and lesbian families in every county of the U.S. and a million children are being raised by gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered--and loving--adults. Indeed being “out” means that a newer concept of freedom was fought for and is in full view. Seeing everydayness in different sexual orientations removes a lever of power from the religious fundamentalists as well. “The more discussion there is and visibility there is for gay people, the better for all the legal injustices that we’ve experienced,” explained a lesbian activist. “As people know us better, there’s less discomfort.” The decrepit stage of capitalism is coming into better view by the day. September 11, 2001 undermined the momentum of the movement against anti-globalized capitalism, for decent jobs, and for new human relationships; they have not gone away because the conditions that summons them have only worsened. What’s left for the bourgeois leaders is to artfully propagate a social ideology to disarm revolutionary impulses which otherwise are ready fight for new, human relations. |
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