Author: janinsanfran

Cross posted at Happening-Here with pictures.

After nearly a week, I may be ready share some semi-coherent thoughts about the exhilarating immigrant marches last Monday. I do believe we are seeing something that does not fit neatly into our existing political categories. Because it is new, and because it is not mine, I am a little hesitant to attempt analysis — but here goes…

A surprise development
The size, broad scope, and determination shown in the marches clearly took this country by surprise. Where’d all these people come from? Of course, they’ve been with us for a long time (the average undocumented worker has been the country five years.) But we simply don’t look at them. I’m reminded of visiting family in Palm Desert, California. They live in a gated-community, an oasis of manicured green, surrounded by cactus, rock, and brown desert. All day, silent shapes tend and water the luxuriant plantings, unacknowledged by the golf cart driving residents. Bet those workers took a day off on Monday to assert themselves as human beings. We, the comfortable white middle class and certainly the opinion-forming media, are more like my oblivious retired relatives than we usually care to know.

Much more below…
And there are vast numbers of these people. Estimates say 12 million U.S. residents are now undocumented. Fully thirty-three percent of U.S. population growth in 2004 came from immigration according to the National Geographic quiz some of us have been playing with. When such a large group suddenly makes itself visible, it is hard not to take notice.

Real life, not protest theater
The marches felt different from most of our experience in other ways. The folks in them have already demonstrated their grit by simply getting here. It is not easy to leave home and come here to work at menial jobs. We are sucking the adventurous and the enterprising out of the Latin countries to the south, as well as less obviously from much of the rest of the world.

Furthermore undocumented immigrants are truly poor people; when they risk even the little that they have in order to assert their dignity and humanity, their protest carries a moral weight quite different from the set piece acts of “civil disobedience” that have characterized much middle class agitation for the last 30 years. For an undocumented worker, the possible consequences of political protest are literally incalculable; fortunately there have not been many reports of retaliation against participants in the May Day marches.

Undocumented immigrants are workers
Well, duh… But think about it for a minute: how often in most of our lifetimes have people who thought of themselves as workers led a protest movement? We’ve seen movements organized around race, around gender, around aspirations for peace — but seldom by and for workers. Sure, there was lots of ethnic, Latino, Mexicano, pride in the marches, but as well and often more so, these folks see themselves as proud workers. In fact, to a considerable extent, they are the U.S. “working class” as that term once was commonly if imprecisely understood: they are the people whose work gets them dirty, whose work subjects them to daily physical effort.

Their self-understanding as workers was clear in how the day’s events were planned. They called the protests for May Day, celebrated as International Workers Day in most of the world. They urged from the beginning they would walk out for the day and boycott as well; professional immigrant advocates wanted to tone down the protests. However people who see themselves as workers understand that what the society values them for is their labor and so it is by withdrawing their labor that they assert their dignity.

The hand painted signs at the rallies over and over again expressed outrage that Sensenbrenner, Tancredo, the Republican House of Representatives, or anyone would call them “criminals.” They know, proudly, that their labor creates much of the country’s wealth. “Si se puede; yes, we can!”

Undocumented immigrants appeal to ideals
For most of us, this is a time of political cynicism. The politicians are rotten and our system is failing. Immigrants know political cynicism; many of them come from countries that can make even less claim to practicing justice and equity than George W. Bush’s United States. But nonetheless, their movement aims to speak to this country’s ideals. Many signs and speeches demand that the United States demonstrate its best characteristics, not its worst. They insist over and over: “You are a nation of immigrants; don’t you remember your ancestors came here poor and hungry?” “How can you treat us as less than human?” “Don’t you understand we are really just people, like you?” They wave the U.S. flag hopefully.

A bumpy road ahead
If the emergence of the immigrants is indeed the new civil rights movement, like the last one it is not going to make gains without struggle. It is easy to see some obstacles ahead. I’ll list a few:

• Lofty goals: as David Bacon and Nativo Lopez point out in an important article on the marches, “people are ready and willing to fight for the whole enchilada.” Winning it all, amnesty for all the undocumented, may be more than can be achieved in the short term. Can the movement find strategies and tactics to carry through an ongoing political process marked by repeated fights?

• Divisions by country of origin: in some places, immigrants from different countries worked together well on May Day; Chicago seems to have been a successful example of cooperation. But in others, especially where there are huge Spanish speaking, mostly Mexican-origin, populations, Latino nationalism could overwhelm immigrant unity.

• Divisions by immigration status: many of the “reform” schemes now in Congress would create a multiplicity of legal statuses based on time in the country, ability to document work, ability to pay fines, etc. If some version of these passes, will the group on the legalization track abandon the remaining, and still arriving, undocumented population? Experience says no, because in real life the new arrivals will have family ties to the “legals,” but divisive pressures will grow.

• Leaders: anyone who saw these marches has to believe that the leadership exists in the immigrant communities to accomplish huge tasks. They’ve done it. But that functioning leadership is not, mostly, in the professional immigrant advocacy organizations, especially those in DC and especially those in the Democratic Party. Before the immigrants took to the streets, most of those in “respectable leadership” were open to various “reform” compromises coming out of Congress that would create a “guest worker” status that amounts to slave labor and “legalization” for only a minority of the undocumented. The leaders from the streets need to get into the mix with the professionals, if not completely displace them.

• Pulling up the ladder behind them: When does an immigrant stop being an immigrant? Historically, people have come to the United States, suffered as part of an exploited underclass of workers, gradually gained economic stability, won education and assimilation for their children, and then looked down on the next set of immigrants. Or, more succinctly, the objective for most immigrants has been to leave an immigrant identity behind and become “regular Americans.” Can a civil rights movement be based in a population whose individual members are always striving to escape the group? Globalization and the disparities in wealth between north and south suggest that the incoming flow is not likely to decrease regardless of what kind of wall the U.S. builds on its borders. But can a movement be sustained with a changing cast of core participants? I guess we’ll see.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

South Dakota Healthy Families hopes to put the state’s new abortion ban on the ballot in the November election. When I was asked for money for this effort, I wanted to know more both generally and about prospects, strategy and tactics. Neither the proponents of the referendum, nor the national pro-choice outfits had much on their websites, so in the interest of reducing my ignorance about South Dakota, I did some research. Here is what I found out:
Referendums are not new.
 It comes as a small surprise here in initiative-mad California, to learn that South Dakota was the first state (1898) to adopt initiatives and referenda. As in most places, putting measures to direct vote was a populist, vaguely progressive effort to overcome the power of entrenched interests. As in most states, the power was relatively little used until the 1970s but has become common since. The Aberdeen News reports that 42 laws passed by SD legislators have been put to referendum, and 83 percent were rejected by voters. Sounds good for pro-choice campaigners, who must gather 16,728 signatures (5 percent of registered voters) by June 19 to force the vote.

Dueling polls
So I wondered, has anybody done the polling to find out how a vote might go? Of course, yes. In mid- March, Focus: South Dakota, a Democratic group which employed Robinson and Muenster Associates of Sioux Falls, interviewed 630 voters. They reported:

Sixty-two percent said the legislation is too extreme, 33 percent said they support the bill and the rest were undecided.

When people were asked if they thought the abortion ban should be put on the November ballot, 72 percent answered yes. Pollsters found that 79 percent of Democrats, 67 percent of independents, and 65 percent of Republicans favor a statewide vote on the issue.

Fifty-seven percent of those polled said they would then vote to override the proposal, 36 percent would keep the ban and the rest were undecided about the measure.

Anti-abortion leaders scoffed at the results, claiming 64 percent of South Dakotans are “pro-life.”

Probably all results on this highly charged issue depend on how the question is asked. In early March, the reputable, Republican-oriented Rasmussen Reports surveyed South Dakotans and found them absolutely evenly divided on the ban, 45 percent in favor, 45 percent opposed. Interestingly, “the poll also found that most South Dakota voters (55 percent) know someone who has had an abortion. Sixty percent (60 percent) say abortion is morally wrong most of the time.”

Campaign messages
The Focus: South Dakota poll certainly point to the right message for South Dakota Healthy Families: The legislature’s ban goes too far. The lack of exceptions for rape, incest, or the mental health of the potential mother moves this particular law over into wacko-land for most voters. That “goes too far” message is pretty much the universal message in negative initiative and referendum campaigns, playing well everywhere to majorities of citizens who oppose any measure that can be stigmatized as “extreme.”

An interesting potential sub-theme that could play a lot of ways will also be at work. I’m sure that most South Dakotans don’t want their state branded as a wacko place, by either side. This referendum will undoubtedly get huge amounts of national attention and money from all concerned groups. The ban does have national implications so there is nothing wrong with that, but South Dakotans can expect to feel somewhat invaded. A local blog, Moderates from South Dakota predicts what is coming:

We as South Dakotan’s should start preparing for a media blitz from both sides that if taken too far could have far reaching effects on the final outcome of the vote.

Though what happens in our sparsely populated state rarely matters to those living outside of South Dakota, we can expect national attention and outside intervention the likes we haven’t seen since the 2004 Thune/Daschle Senate race with both pro-choice and pro-life groups mobilizing nationwide. …

Nationally, both groups see this as the latest battle ground for their agenda so you can expect a lot of outside interest and money thrown into a media blitz that could get quite ugly. This campaign, if taken too far by either side, could easily turn off the residents of our state and backfire on either group by making the media campaign the focus rather than the issue itself. If you thought Thune vs Daschle was bad, just wait for the images of unborn babies, aborted fetuses, comments from mothers whom have had abortions, and debates over when life begins that will be coming to a TV near you soon.

I’d predict that the side which convinces more residents that it actually gives a damn about South Dakota will win the vote.

So how does this play on the ground?
Some pro-choice South Dakotans didn’t want to take the issue to a referendum. Todd Epp warned on the blog SDWatch that the referendum would take the focus off progressive efforts to replace the right wing governor and legislators. “The problem is Pierre [the capitol.]” He also warned that there is an anti-gay marriage measure on the November ballot, so the abortion ban vote will unavoidably be complicated by the general right wing sexuality panic. That seems darn unpersuasive to me: can we afford to let them veto anything we want to do by hauling out the usual queer bashing? But the presence of the issue on the ballot will certainly increase the already super-heated temperature of the election.

Now that the referendum petition drive is going forward, some reports suggest that South Dakota Democrats have been energized, “contesting far more races than in past years. In fact, the Democratic Party has candidates in nearly 20 more seats than it did two years ago,” though still leaving many Republicans unopposed. Republican Governor Mike Rounds who signed the ban saw his approval plummet from 72 to 58 percent.

One exciting member of the new crop of Democratic State Senate candidates is Charon Asetoyer, the Executive Director of the Native Women’s Health Education Resource Center. Like Sioux tribal president Cecilia Fire Thunder a supporter of a woman’s right to choose. According to the Nation blog, Asetoyer has also long worked to prevent violence against women.

So to donate from afar, or not donate to South Dakota Healthy Families’ referendum campaign? I come down on the YES side and I hope anyone following this long post will as well. We can help South Dakotans find a way to advertise their state as a sensible place, a state that refuses to go out on a limb for a minority’s obsessions.

This morning the blogosphere is buzzing about a Chicago Tribune article that claims that CIA operatives can be identified using simple Google searches. Reactions seem to range from ex-spook Larry Johnson’s scorn to bemused amazement that the apparently universal incompetence of our regime, demonstrated in Iraq and New Orleans, extends to its “covert” operations.

Would you be even more worried if you learned that the government’s famous “no fly list” could be easily circumvented by any moderately computer savvy terrorist?

According to CSO – the magazine for security executives, getting past the TSA and onto a plane would take nothing more than a laser printer and a stolen credit card. The author walks you through what you would need to do — it certainly reads as if it would be within the skills of most of us. Click that link if you want to know.

The anonymous author comments:

As a frequent flyer, I hesitate to write this article, but as an auditor of security and information systems, it’s the right thing to do. If you’ve ever wondered whether airport security has improved since 9/11, let me set you straight: It has not. There is a gaping hole in airport security, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has done nothing despite being alerted to this vulnerability more than 11 months ago.

As a person who had her own brush with the no fly list, I’ve long contended that most of the airport security rigmarole we go through is just a Theater of Fear, designed to accustom us to scared compliance with authority. Certainly if so-called “security” is this easily evaded, they can’t mean it to keep us safe.

Cross posted at Happening-Here.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

The news appeared this morning that Martin Ludlow is stepping down from his post as head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation hoping to avoid jail time in a scandal involving union money that illegally helped his 2003 campaign for the City Council. No one seems to be contesting the prosecutor’s core assertions: SEIU Local 99 put some campaign workers on its payroll and ran some phone banks, giving Ludlow $53,000 worth of help that it didn’t report. That is the crime.

Now there is no doubt this is illegal. Multiple levels of campaign law, local and state, place limits on and require disclosure of sources of election help. And violating those laws frequently leads to stiff fines. There are very few career politicians who haven’t at least been investigated for some reporting irregularity. But what makes Ludlow’s case special is that union political contributions are governed by additional federal law giving the Department of Justice and the FBI authority to step in with criminal sanctions.
The LA Times reports concerns about the federal involvement:

Ludlow has run afoul of a section of the United States Code titled “fiduciary responsibility of officers of labor organizations.” In particular, according to sources, Ludlow was investigated by the federal government for conspiring to embezzle money, property or other assets from a labor organization.

The regulation of unions has long been the domain of the federal government. …Labor unions have complained that they are being singled out and constrained in a way that their natural opponents, the business community, are not. Such protests have only increased under President Bush, some legal scholars say.

I’m sorry, if this had been a corporation, the activity of hiring campaign workers for a friendly candidate wouldn’t have been treated as “embezzlement” from the stockholders — it would have been applauded as a good investment. And I am sure Ludlow’s being Black didn’t help either.

Ludlow’s departure from the LA County Fed is bad news. He’s been a close ally of progressive mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. His accession to the job following the untimely death of Miguel Contreras signaled the strength of the “Black-Brown” alliance that is trying to set LA politics on a new course and model new possibilities for Democrats nationally. That current is so strong that it can likely survive the departure of one leader, but it is hard not to wonder whether we aren’t seeing here that Republicans in power know a real threat when they see it.

The whole ugly mess should also be a warning to progressives enamored of various campaign finance gimmicks they hope will “level the playing field.” Tinkering at the edges of how cash comes into campaigns with donation limits and partial spending caps simply disadvantages candidates and groups that start with less money. These campaign finance reform practices require people who run for office to hire armies of lawyers, accountants and specialist consultants to ensure that they stay legal. For rich candidates, this is just a cost of doing business. For insurgents, compliance with “ethics commissions” and “fair political practices” regulators is a drain on funds that should go to voter contact.

There are forms of “campaign finance reform” that would work better. The right of rich candidates to self-finance without limit (Buckley v. Valeo) must be made subject to regulation or we are further on our way to plutocracy. “Clean Elections” schemes that give state financing under regulated conditions (versions exist in Maine and Arizona) have shown promise.

But progressives need to be very careful about simply jumping on the latest “campaign finance” bandwagon. Elections are about who has power. Money will get into them because money is power. We’d be crazy to hamstring ourselves.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

This week many in the blogosphere were lamenting our inability to instill passion or install spines in Senate Democrats opposing the elevation of Justice Alito. More than once I dropped something like this on a comment thread:

Folks are going to have to get really used to understanding that we are outsiders. That isn’t the end of the world. When the country was founded, a majority were outsiders — not white, male property owners. The outsiders have progressively forced their way inside. The current Right wants to shove a lot of us back out. So we have to organize like outsiders, expecting very little from the Democrats except when we make them behave.

Sure, it is awful. But there really is no choice.

Guy Kawasaki was one of the “evangelists” who sold the creative, antic appeal of the original Macintosh to a world that had believed computers were for geeks or bean counters. He is now a venture capitalist whose blog Let the Good Times Roll serves as an amusing marketing experiment for his current ventures. Recently he put up a post aimed at start-up entrepreneurs about what he calls The Art of Bootstrapping. I find it interesting to think about what Kawasaki’s advice to fledgling businesses might mean to outsider advocacy or candidate campaigns. In the following material, Kawasaki’s advice is in italics.

1) Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. For outsiders this means: don’t plan on raising the money you need from the big guys, at least at first. Don’t make your campaign plan on the assumption that you’ll get the big grant or hit with the big donor. Instead, try to project simply how you can make payroll. As long as you can do that, you can move forward and create the momentum that might lead to bigger money.

2) Forecast from the bottom up. Because big media, especially TV, have big impact, it is easy to get fixated on what you could do if you could buy enough gross rating points to saturate your intended market with your message. But that route to influence is not for outsiders. Instead you need to multiply the number of ways you deliver message rather than trying first to overwhelm your audience. On a city size campaign, this can imply that given the choice of one really glossy, classy brochure or 15 literature tables in popular locations for a weekend with ugly but serviceable paper flyers, go for those tables.

3) Ship, then test. Outsiders get their propaganda out the door, then refine the message based on the feedback. Because we are outsiders, we really don’t know what will work when we try it out. We write letters, set up and frequent blogs, make flyers, put up stickers and hammer at our points. In a political campaign, the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

4) Forget the “proven” team. Proven teams are over-rated — especially when most people define proven teams as people who worked for a billion dollar company for the past ten years. These folks are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it’s not the bootstrapping lifestyle. Hire young, cheap, and hungry people. You don’t need the most experienced political consultant or pollster. In fact, because the ones with reputations have usually gotten to be insiders and organize like insiders, you don’t want them even if you could get them. And you can’t. You need people who care about your issue or candidate, who will work, and learn.

5) Start as a service business. Build a base by giving the people you want to recruit something they want. For a great story about working this way, read Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights by Jennifer Gordon. Advocates offered legal assistance to exploited immigrant workers by training them about their legal rights and eventually won major wage raises and a domestic workers bill of rights from New York State legislators. With imagination, most campaigns can use this advice. For those trying to replace incumbents, think candidate training workshops!

6) Focus on function, not form. Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff. Outsiders don’t need the best of everything, just good enough. Used copiers and borrowed office space is okay. (Don’t apply this advice to databases or accounting though.)

7) Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don’t fight on all fronts because they cannot afford to fight on all fronts. Yes, you have lots of battles. For political outsiders, this means that you have to look around for people who are already in the field who might be your friends. This can be made difficult by the fact that advocacy financing and political office are finite competitive resources, so there will be pressure on you to go it alone, to pretend you have the only solution to the problem you are working on. Try not to do this if you can help it. Work with others as much as you can, even if they resist your presence in the field.

8) Understaff. Self-exploitation is the only way to get started without money. Accept this and recruit others who can live with it.

9) Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. In a campaign, your best and cheapest resource is the candidate’s time. An outsider candidate has to be open to grotesque, non-stop, self-exploitation for the duration — that means being willing to go to every meeting, meet every voter, shake every hand, answer every question, over and over. In an advocacy campaign, this means, though you try to play well with others, being at every possible event with your own materials, never depending on friendly organizations to get the nuts and bolts organizing done, never thinking organizational or celebrity endorsements will carry the day without your shoe leather.

10) Position against the leader. Don’t have the money to explain your story starting from scratch? Then don’t try. Instead position against the leader. This bit of business advice is about how to break into a Microsoft world. Political outsiders are trying to break into a Republicrat world. I don’t mean to imply we need a third party; I’m writing for outsiders who aim to move the Democrats. You need to promise through your actions and propaganda that you recognize how establishment Dems do it — and promise to fill the niche for those who want it done better. You can. Their results are not that good these days.

11) Take the “red pill.” This refers to the choice that Neo made in The Matrix. The red pill led to learning the whole truth. The blue pill meant waking up wondering if you had a bad dream. Bootstrappers don’t have the luxury to take the blue pill. They take the red pill — everyday — to find out how deep the rabbit hole really is. Stay real. The beginning of political wisdom is understanding what forces you have and what you can really do. As you have a few minor successes (and a lot of failures), don’t believe your own endorsement interviews or grant applications. Hang on to your vision — and know what force you really have. Use it. Build it. Win.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

We need some kind of victory today! Today you can celebrate that $200,000 of your tax dollars will be paid to the American Civil Liberties Union to help that organization continue to stand up for our freedoms.

Two federal agencies agreed Tuesday to pay the American Civil Liberties Union $200,000 to settle a lawsuit brought to uncover information about the government’s no-fly list, which bars suspected terrorists from airliners.

The government will compensate the ACLU for attorneys’ fees, settling a lawsuit initiated by two San Francisco peace activists who were detained while checking in for a flight three years ago…. Yahoo News-AP

I’m one of those activists and I’m pretty happy with the outcome of a long process. And no, the two of us who pressed the lawsuit don’t get a penny.

The agencies at first balked at supplying any information to the ACLU. But U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, after privately reviewing secret government data, said the government was making “frivolous claims” about why it could not….

One heavily redacted document says getting on a list is guided by two “primary” principles: Whether various intelligence agencies view an individual as a “potential threat to U.S. civil aviation,” and whether the agency requesting a listing has provided enough information to identify the person to be flagged at check-in.

We weren’t looking for money. We just wanted to know why Big Brother was looking over our shoulders. We are glad that as a consequence of our detention in an airport three years ago, and the subsequent court case, everyone found out a little more about how the government is watching us.

In 2001, the no-fly list named a mere 16 people. Post 9/11 it grew rapidly, reaching 594 people in December 2001. By December 2005, the list included some 30-40,000 names.

There is still a lot we didn’t learn, but we hope more information will gradually seep out. We don’t really know what makes the government choose to single out a mixed bag of folks including babies, commercial pilots, vets who are “mentally defective”, and Teddy Kennedy. The government says they remove names all the time and there is a bureaucratic procedure people can use to try to get delisted. But the TSA will not confirm that any particular individual has been removed. “National security,” you know.

One of the documents released during the lawsuit suggested that names on the list might be transmitted to U.S. government agencies all over the world — a chilling thought, indeed.

We do know the same day the government settled our lawsuit, they also removed a Cape Air pilot from the list. Robert W.G.M. Gray can return to his job after being grounded for months.

From the beginning, we’ve found it hard to believe that airport “security,”– the lists, the ID checks, the perfunctory hand luggage searches — had much to do with actually keeping us safe from terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks showed that the attackers were very smart; they could certainly find a way around scatter-shot precautions and aren’t likely to use the same tactics twice. The exaggerated security we encounter at airports is largely a Theater of Fear designed to keep us scared out of our wits. Only when not fully in possession of our right minds will we give away our rights to a secretive, arrogant, lawless regime.

Los Angeles Times political pundit Ronald Brownstein had the interesting idea of comparing George W. Bush’s presidency to that of little remembered 19th century Democrat James K. Polk. Polk won office in 1844 with a tiny popular vote margin, governed as if he had a huge mandate, and led the nation into an extremely unpopular war against Mexico. Brownstein draws remarkably bland lessons:

It’s worth considering Polk’s record not because Americans will take up arms against each other anytime soon — although you might never know that from listening to talk radio — but because it suggests that a president who slights the need to build national consensus can seed long-term problems that aren’t immediately apparent amid short-term successes. …

Bush, like Polk, launched a war whose initial justification has spawned bitter dispute….

Bush would place the nation’s security on a more stable foundation if he worked harder to find a consensus agenda with those critics whose assessment of the threat in Iraq and at home was closer to his own.

But…
I don’t share Brownstein’s apparent hope that offering mild suggestions to GWB will moderate his behavior because he wants to improve his place in history. But having dropped out of academia so as to interact with history as an activist for justice instead of as professionally cautious scholar, I’m willing to offer some broad, sweeping comparisons.

• Polk governed from the perspective and in the interest of one sector of the national economy to the detriment of another. He was president for the slave-holding South. Bush is governing in the interest the section of the economy that thrives on resource extraction, most obviously of oil, but also including mining, lumbering and agriculture. Bush’s economy runs on unskilled, low wage, non-union labor. The current blue states have lost their manufacturing base and with varying success made a transition to a relatively well-paid, knowledge-based economy. They are out of the extraction business.

• The economy Polk represented was on its last legs, although that was not necessarily clear to contemporaries. Many probably thought that cotton would be king forever. In fact, northern industry was about to eclipse agriculture as the engine of wealth. Resource extraction doesn’t look so promising in the current global economy; even if we have not found most potential oil fields, extraction economies and their attendant exploited populations seem an unsatisfactory model for the future. Will the U.S. really go the way of Peru or the United Arab Emirates? On the other hand, it is not at all clear that the U.S. can win a leading role in an international competition in science-based innovation.

• Southerners hoped Polk’s imperial war would enable their slave system to expand into new territory. Bush’s Iraq adventure seems more like aggressive defensive flailing, aiming prop up an aging system of world dominance that is threatened from numerous directions: insurgent fundamentalisms, new powers, new nationalisms, new technologies.

• Most importantly, Polk won his Mexican war, scared the British into ceding Oregon and Washington State to the U.S., and generally succeeded with his imperial plans. Regardless of how it is spun, there appears to be zero chance that Bush will succeed in his Iraq adventure.

The contradictions that Polk’s presidency revealed between geographical regions with profoundly different cultures and economic interests led to civil war twelve years later. The U.S. was a rising power, energetically colonizing a continent and on the verge of creating vast wealth. Polk governed in the interests of the losers in the civil war, but nonetheless laid a territorial foundation for future prosperity.

The U.S. today is learning that military and economic power has limits. Bush’s presidency is likely to be remembered as a destructive detour by a society forced to adjust to the reality of being one nation among many that share a fragile planet.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

Cross posted at Happening-Here

Good news for California gays today — forces aiming to qualify initiatives to ban gay marriage have backed off for the moment. The “ProtectMarriage.com” set, a Focus on the Family front group, collected only half the signatures it would have needed to get its measure on the June 2006 primary ballot. Another lot, “VoteYesMarriage.com,” this one a front for Lou Sheldon’s “Traditional Values Coalition,” didn’t even get to the signature gathering stage. Both vow to come back and maybe they will, but for the moment, things are going well for the forces of tolerance.
On gay marriage, the longer it takes opponents to get organized, the weaker they will get. The San Francisco marriages celebrated in 2004; the passage of a gay marriage bill by the legislature in 2005 (vetoed by Schwarzenegger); the decision by a state court saying the California constitution forbids discrimination against gay marriage (now on appeal); and the numerous legal gay marriages in Massachusetts and many parts of Europe — all these developments have helped indifferent voters become used to the idea that the sky won’t fall if the queers get married. Current polling is very encouraging:

Since the passage of [the anti-gay marriage statute] Proposition 22, [Mark] Baldassare, [research director of the Public Policy Institute of California] said, Californians appear to have gradually softened their views on same-sex marriage.

In 2000, polls showed that only 38% of likely voters in California supported same-sex marriage. But a poll this August showed 46% supporting it and 46% opposing. Among all California adults, 44% favored same-sex marriage and 48% opposed it, he said.

Time is on the side of gay marriage.

The leaders who have worked to organize Equality California, the gay campaign to defeat the marriage bans, warn that this setback for the reactionaries may be temporary. And the anti-gay folks do vow that they’ll raise the money to get their initiative on the November ballot. But if they do, they’ll be running into some complicating, countervailing California Republican politics.

Governor Arnold certainly does not want a gay marriage vote in November. He is struggling to win back centrist independents and conservative Democrats whose support he frittered away in the last year. At the same time he needs California’s extremely conservative Neanderthal Republicans. Having to declare for or against gay marriage is the last thing he needs in a difficult re-election.

Crucially, Attorney General Bill Lockyer has determined (and his interpretation would be part of the ballot language) that both the proposed initiatives would roll back existing domestic partnership law. Proponents of the measure that is not yet out for signature collection say their law would have no such legal effect. But the AG’s description will give opponents a strong handle against it.

As I’ve explored before, the AG’s role in describing initiative measures makes it crucial that progressive Californians pay attention to who is running for this second tier statewide office. Lockyer is termed out in 2006. There are two declared Democratic candidates for the post: former Governor and Oakland mayor, Jerry Brown and Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. Presumably Brown would be at least somewhat sympathetic to gay civil rights, though his Oakland tenure has not been exactly progressive. Delgadillo’s campaign web site promotes his law enforcement credentials and makes no mention of his civil rights record. The candidate will be determined in a June primary. The Republican candidate is State Sen. Chuck Poochigian of Fresno, almost certainly no friend of inclusive gay rights.

Supporters of marriage rights for gays need to press all the AG candidates to express clear positions on their understanding of how such a reform might be accomplished and generally get them on record in anticipation of battles to come.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

Commenting on the Administration practice of trying to buy favorable news coverage in Iraqi media, Abu Aardvark observes

Any policy which does not take into account the inevitability of early public exposure is by definition a flawed policy.  That applies to extraordinary renditions, torture, domestic spying, and Iraqi payola schemes alike. This should be a key concept for all policy making today…

If true, this is important and perhaps a genuine change from previous eras.
As recently as 60 years ago, it really was possible to keep hidden from Hitler just where and when enormous Allied armies were going to land on the European coast. Fifteen years after that, it was possible (with the connivance of establishment media) to hide the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba from Castro. In 1972, it was possible to hide the activities of Nixon’s rogue operatives for nearly a year, but then the bureaucracy sprung repeated leaks. In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration policy of selling of arms to Iran in trade for U.S. hostages held in Lebanon stayed hidden only a few months before its exposure in a Lebanese newspaper led to the unraveling of the Iran-Contra scandal. Though the nightmare of Bush’s misbegotten global war on an adjective feels as if it had been with us forever, in fact we’ve only been trapped in Iraq for less than 3 years and already a litany of “secrets” have come to light.

It does seem as if the secrets of the powerful are emerging from the shadows at a greater and greater rate. And in the present state of internet communications, anything known to anyone very quickly becomes known to all who care. It still helps to know what to look for and where to look for it — it always has: “covert” wars were no surprise to Laotians in the 70s or Nicaraguans in the 80s, merely to U.S. taxpayers who made them possible.

More and more, Abu Aardvark is probably right that all policy happens in sight. This implies that in the nominally democratic parts of the world, governments can only carry out their policies, good, bad and indifferent, if they can either distract a majority from them, attract a majority to them, or impose their will by force on their populations. Getting by under the radar is no longer a realistic option. That’s new and I don’t think we quite know what it means yet.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

I may be naïve, but I sure hope it matters. Today the Senate, via Senator Lindsay Graham’s legal dodge and good dose of obfuscation seems likely to pass a gutted version of the McCain amendment that will put the U.S. on record as “not doing torture” while in fact preventing persons tortured by the U.S. from going to court to complain about it. There’s a Catch 22.

For weeks we’ve been treated to the Prez and Condi telling all and sundry “we do not torture.” And concurrently we have the drip, drip, drip revelations that the U.S. both turns over unlucky “rendered” prisoners to others to torture and practices “harsh interrogation” tactics that sometimes leave dead bodies lying around. And many of us with longer memories know the U.S. trained thousands of Latin American torturers at the “School of the Americas” in the 80s (that military outfit is still on mission today, renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.”)

We live with a strange, divided consciousness. On the one hand, anyone listening at all knows that our government is violating international norms and laws. Concurrently, the torturing authorities still need to lie about it, volubly, and even go through complicated charades like the current McCain amendment shenanigans to backstop the lies and give legal cover for continuing to torture.

Why bother with the lies? Why not just come out and nakedly assert: “We can and we will. Fuck you.” While I am sure this is closer to GWB’s preferred style (and is the style his U.N. enforcer John Bolton), they apparently can’t quite do that.

I guess they do still need some international cooperation. Other governments may envy the U.S.’s freedom to act lawlessly, but at least the European ones can’t afford to admit that to their own populations.

And they are hampered by a surprisingly strong residue of respect for rights and laws among people who work for the U.S. government. Today’s report that the President, on his say-so, threw out the constitutional requirement for warrants to wiretap U.S. citizens betrays that many high ranking officials had reservations. They talked to each other. They leaked. The new conduct bothered them; they were accustomed to feel governed and sustained by law; they also feared they might someday suffer consequences for trashing the law.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. “My first reaction was, ‘We’re doing what?’ ” he said. … Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

Nobody is talking high principle here, but at least there seems to have been a habit of deference to law.

I think the strength of that deference is part of why they need to torture and imprison lawlessly. It is not just the bodies of the captives that are on the line, but also the whole edifice of moral and legal constraint on the guys with the most war toys. They want that broken, definitively.

Even as the U.S. sinks more and more deeply into the authoritarian pit, I find it hard to believe that lawlessness will completely win out.

One of the mysteries of twentieth century history is that vicious, murdering governments again and again held the bodies of their most effective enemies in their control — and didn’t kill them. Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza was a brutal dictator who responded to popular unrest by bombing his own cities. But though he tortured and imprisoned his enemies, the Sandinistas leadership survived to overthrow him. (And be “destabilized” in turn by the U.S.) The apartheid government of South Africa tortured Steve Biko and many others to death. They imprisoned Nelson Mandela for 27 years, but he lived to negotiate a relatively peaceful transition to democratic rule by the majority. Some vestige of legal constraint limited even these brutes.

Slowly, unevenly, a majority of this dangerous species of ours seems to have learned that some limits on our murderous tendencies are needed for survival. And so, prudentially, we begin to codify limits. International law gets enunciated, even if it is mostly ignored.

After storms of lawlessness, those once all powerful may be surprised to find themselves reviled — think Pinochet. And though it may be hard for people in the U.S. to see, Eurocentrics that we are, even the loathsome Taliban were originally hailed in Afghanistan as the restorers of law; it looks likely the young Sadr may get to play that role in Iraq once the U.S. retreats.

The drive toward some rule of law seems to be universal. (What form of law of course remains to be struggled over.) So our lawless government has to lie about torture and tries to get as many as possible to participate in the falsehood. Though not yet challenged, they know some kind of guilt, some sense of crossing a necessary line. The rest of us are left to build from that weak, but real, foundation.