[Crossposted from the Real History Blog]
I’ve never known a time in my life when so much was at stake and the outcome was so uncertain. This country is truly at a crossroads. We can continue down a horrific path, becoming the kind of country most of us would go to war to oppose, or we can try to get this juggernaut to jump the track, decry our actions in Iraq, plan for our withdrawal, and move to impeach the worst president in the history of this nation.
Which way will we go? I’m not placing any bets yet. There are good signs and bad signs all over the news today.
I was so moved when I read this letter over at Truthout, from a commissioned officer and helicopter pilot in the Navy. The officer sent his wings and bars back in protest over Bush’s policies:
Until your administration, I believed it was inconceivable that the United States would ever initiate an aggressive and preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us. Until your administration, I thought it was impossible for our nation to take hundreds of persons into custody without provable charges of any kind, and to “disappear” them into holes like Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. Until your administration, in my wildest legal fantasy I could not imagine a US Attorney General seeking to justify torture or a President first stating his intent to veto an anti-torture law, and then adding a “signing statement” that he intends to ignore such law as he sees fit. I do not want these things done in my name.
As a citizen, a patriot, a parent and grandparent, a lawyer and law teacher I am left with such a feeling of loss and helplessness. I think of myself as a good American and I ask myself what can I do when I see the face of evil? Illegal and immoral war, torture and confinement for life without trial have never been part of our Constitutional tradition. But my vote has become meaningless because I live in a safe district drawn by your political party. My congressman is unresponsive to my concerns because his time is filled with lobbyists’ largess. Protests are limited to your “free speech zones”, out of sight of the parade. Even speaking openly is to risk being labeled un-American, pro-terrorist or anti-troops. And I am a disciplined pacifist, so any violent act is out of the question.
Nevertheless, to remain silent is to let you think I approve or support your actions. I do not. So, I am saddened to give up my wings and bars. They were hard won and my parents and wife were as proud as I was when I earned them over forty years ago. But I hate the torture and death you have caused more than I value their symbolism. Giving them up makes me cry for my beloved country.
Good news:
- The fissure between the President and the GOP is widening.
- One of Bush’s top domestic policy advisors resigned when his criminal shoplifting habit was revealed.
- Doctors around the world are protesting the force-feeding of prisoners conducting a hunger strike at the American prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. Dubai will not be controlling our ports.
Bad news:
- The port contracts may go to Halliburton.
- The new spin on the Valerie Plame outing: CIA people can be identified through Internet searches (of paid services), the Chicago Tribune found. According to Crewdson’s article, Valerie Plame’s status as a CIA operative could easily have been inferred, to those who knew where to look.
Unknown outcomes:
Ether Zone notes that “the Patrick Fitzgerald grand jury has been meeting every Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9:30 AM – ostensibly to do “read-ins” of prior grand jury testimony. The target? Karl Rove – for lying and perjury. Rove knows this and must be worried sick over it.” Meanwhile, Cheney’s office turned over 250 pages of emails from the VP’s office, emails that had not been turned over the first time they were requested. But will anyone be held accountable?
As Ether Zone notes, if the Democrats regain control of the House or the Senate in 2006, the game changes dramatically and impeachment proceedings are sure to begin.
Let’s go there for a second. Let’s imagine, and frankly, this is no stretch, that the President’s dismal 37% approval rating reflects the will of the voters. Will that be enough to change the scene? Not if Diebold, Hart Intercivic, Sequoia and ES&S are counting our votes:
- Diebold machines are easily hacked.
- Hart Intercivic machines just counted some votes as many as six times each.
- Votes cast on Sequoia machines were filmed going to the unchosen candidate.
- ES&S systems had a 30% failure rate in recent Ohio tests.
Americans aren’t the only ones concerned about our vote. In my document “America’s Vote at Risk,” which I prepared well in advance of the 2004 election after a distressing conversation with a dramatically underinformed individual working for the Elections Assistance Commission, I quoted The Independent in the UK from October 14, 2003:
“A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it’s over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large — and pro-Republican — corporations. [We wonder] if democracy in America can survive.”
The 2006 elections are more important than the 2008 presidential election, because whoever controls Congress has more power than the President. The fate of America and the near-term future of the world lies in the hands not of the voters, but of the voting machine manufacturers. But that’s not the end of the potential story. Activists in counties all over America are working to educate their County Registrars and their Secretaries of State to the dangers of these various systems.
Will it be enough? Or will the takeover of America by right-wing forces, begun, I believe, on November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, be complete?
While I’m doubtful about the near-term future of our country, something fascinating is happening in Latin America, something which the global corporate oligarchy is already moving to oppose. Leftist leaders are being elected all over South America:
- Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist, was just elected the first woman president of Chile.
- Evo Morales, was elected president of Bolivia after helping his countrymen defeat a nefarious scheme to privatize the most basic substance on the planet: water. (Btw – check out this scary piece re water being the 21st century’s oil.)
- President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina has led his country from debt to an economic boom by staring down the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
- In Brazil, under leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, seven out of every ten new cars is powered by ethanol.
- In 2004, Uruguay elected its first leftist leader, a cancer specialist named Tabare Vasquez, who promised to help the poor and reestablish relations with Cuba.
- Hugo Chavez fought off a presumably-US-backed coup to remain in power in Venezuela long enough to offer discounted oil to the freezing denizens of Massachusetts.
What will the 22nd Century say about 21st Century America? Will we have succeeded in turning the Titanic around, or will we have sunk after striking an iceberg of our own making?
All our hands are on that pen, writing that story. Let’s make it a good one.
The political crisis you describe is only one aspect of the overall disaster descending upon the US.
Summary in my diary of last Thursday–The Autumnal City IX.
There are horrific scenerios, and merely bad scenerios, but in none does the US survive as a nation. Our national infrastructure will be gone.
Your poll does not allow for the possibilities that might actually happen.
To what degree our notions of freedom, respect, dignity, and democracy will survive in (the various) local politics is a very open question.
I meant to include an option in the poll for that, “America no longer exists.” But that was just too heartbreaking to put up there as an option, even for me.
of heartbreaking, why not focus on how its existence could occur?
Langtston Hughes said it better, “the land that never was but must be…”
(quote may not be exact, and should be used for the prevention of disease only)
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!
From http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609.
America
If an eagle be imprisoned
On the back of a coin
And the coin is tossed into the sky,
That coin will spin,
That coin will flutter,
But the eagle will never fly.
(Henry Dumas, fr. Knees of a Natural Man, Thunder’s MOuth Press, 1989, p. 92)
I think you’ve captured our situation perfectly Lisa. And I’ve been thinking lately that the movements in Latin America might be the one bright spot on our planet right now. I do think I heard somewhere recently that Bushco’s destructive focus on the Middle East has allowed Latin America to develop positively without US meddling. And it comes as no surprise to me that those movements have been led in several instances by indigenous people and women. I think that’s where the power for change lies for all of us.
What’s fascinating to me is that when the business class is distracted elsewhere, the poor always gravitate towards Socialism and Communism because those systems at least offer them some basic protections. Completely unfettered capitalism offers more of the same, i.e., abject poverty. Once in a while someone has the mental, physical, and psychological fitness to pull themselves up from the bottom rung, but it’s a lot harder to climb the bottom rungs than the top ones in a capitalist society.
I’m not advocating one system or another. No system is diginified if it does not put living beings first.
What we are getting with Bushism is the worst of both worlds. We get capitalism, but it is awash in corruption and corporate welfare and favortism, so it is not truly free market system. And the advantages of capitalism are totally wrapped up in freedom and liberty to engage in commerce. It fits in with the principles of limited government laid out by our founding fathers. But now we are getting spied on, and losing more and more of our freedom and privacy in the name of security. That is, of course, the major problem with communism. To sustain a system that stifles commerce and the profit motive, you have to spy on everyone to prevent an uprising.
We are getting none of the social benefits of communism, less and less of the benefits of free markets, and we are losing our liberties.
Bushism is very bad for the poor and the middle class. It still is nowhere near as bad as Communism as practiced in Korea, Russia, China, Cambodia, or Cuba.
To me, Communism and Dictatorship are the same points on the circle. Both are about the elite keeping everything for themselves and giving the rest as little as society lets them get away with. I don’t see “left” and “right” as points on a line but as sides of a circle. The extremes of both meet at the bottom of the circle.
The problem with capitalism is that while money is mobile, laborers are not. They can’t just pick up and move to take advantage of better opportunities. And if you change jobs too often, no one wants you. So that part of the equation always ends up with the short end of the stick. Money can move across borders easily. People cannot.
Totalitarianism can sprout in capitalist societies as well communist ones. Neither need necessarily lead there — it’s easy to see the temptations in both sytems.
And yes, let’s talk about the poor in Cuba. They’re taught to read & write, provided with medical care, and properly evacuated when killer hurricanes approach. The comparison is pretty favorable for Cuba when looking at the poor in America under Bush or Clinton.
Looking at Latin America through a strictly capitalist/socialist lens misses what is happening in the indigenous movements — which can work within both. Venezuela is Exhibit A.
The business class is hardly distracted in Latin America; they’re just losing — in Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, Argentina. Fox is in serious trouble in Mexico. It’s hard for anyone to ignore that those countries who played by the neo-liberal IMF rules all experienced economic catastrophe, whereas those who resisted have experienced some degree of development success. Now they are looking for inter-regional support & co-operation that will make US policy irrelevant. So what do we see? A build-up of US military presence in Latin America, only this time the State Dept is being cut out & DoD is directly involved.
The challenge to the US is can we adapt to these new, emerging realitites? New relations that we don’t totally dominate? The future doesn’t look too bright in that regard.
Good points, Arcturus. (Love that name, btw. What does it mean?)
I should have said the megacorporations are distracted by war in Iraq, or else they’d be busy working with the “jackals” to remove Chavez and the others more forcibly. In the sixties, in a short timeframe, leftist leaders were killed or removed from office in every country in the Americas, including President Kennedy in the United States. In the same timeframe, Lumumba in the mineral-rich Congo was removed, as had been his defender, Dag Hammarskjold.
It’s a given that the policies of neocapitalism will always fail, left unattended. But for years, American business interests attended to and monitored Latin America closely, which is why for years they were brutalized with right-wing dictatorships. They’re just ITCHING to install a true dictatorship here in America too, and will then go after the rest of the hemisphere.
So while I’m encouraged that nature is swinging left, as it is wont to do in such situations, I fear that eventually, the attention will turn to that region, and the gains will be challenged, and probably in some cases, reversed.
I do think the fact that these are indigenous movements might make them longer lasting. But as the world gets increasingly globalized, fifty years from now indigenous may be archived from the dictionary….
I’m not so sure the attention isn’t already there. Though you’re right it’s likely to heat up, as the economic weapons & USAID/NED destabilization programs haven’t worked so well in Haiti, Venezuela or Bolivia.
I view the indigenous movements as leaders in the anti-globalization (or neo-liberal) movement(s). What’s at stake is the nature (& control) of globalized development, & it’s that struggle, rather than the 20C struggle between capitalist/socialist systems that I suspect will be the focus of future battles.
If MercoSur ever really gets off the ground, it could offer the people of Latin America an alternative model to imperial domination by either the US or China.
(Arcturus is the 4th brightest star in the sky — from the Greek Arctos: bear. Follow the ‘arc’ of the Great Dipper’s handle through the sky & you’ll spot it readily. It appears in western poetry from Hesiod to Zukofsky, and was harnessed to power the lights of Chicago’s World Exhibition. I briefly did some letterpress printing/publishing under the imprint of Arcturus Editions — TMI?)
How was it harnessed in conjunction with Chicago’s World Exhibition? Are you talking about the Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair) in 1893, one of my personal obsessions??
Arcturus is located at a distance of 37 light years, and became famous when its light was used to open the 1933 world’s fair in Chicago, as that light had left the star at about the time of the previous Chicago fair in 1893.
Arcturus
Wow – there’s something really cool about that. Great choice.
But as the world gets increasingly globalized, fifty years from now indigenous may be archived from the dictionary….
We are in peak oil now. This means that oil production is right now at maximum: The rate of oil flow will never be higher than it is at present.
Why this is good news: Globalization is already doomed. As demand for oil exceeds supply, globalization falls apart. Good-bye WTO. Good-bye slaves in Asia making plastic consumer crap for fat clowns in North America. The only problems are what shall follow, and how will the transition be accomplished. (These are indeed rather large problems.)
But the US may no longer be able to undo the gains made in South America.
Your poll was at 2 votes third world, 1 vote McDonaldland when I voted respected again. Just couldn’t stand to see that prospect ignored. Like you said, we’re all writing the story, and I refuse to despair, or to give up.
I’m a believer, and I know I’m not the only one.
Thanks for the optimism, Alice!