James van Luik
Publisher & Editor & Compiler
Index 2 Signature:
http://www.geocities.com/channujames/index2.htm
By clicking on this signature one has access to all articles of the JvL Bi-Weekly.
Also, I can be most easily reached through the following email address:
Please forward the Bi-Weekly to any who might be interested
Saturday, January 15th, 2005
Volume 4, No. 1
6 Articles, 12 Pages
Editors Note
There is 3% rate of poverty in the Netherlands in contrast with the United States where one out of six adult Americans, 17%, isn't earning enough to keep out of poverty.
This administration is trying to push through Congress a national identity card. This card will contain valuable and private information. Our administrations should never be entrusted with such power.
This administration is trying very hard to privatize Social Security—and of course Medicare—by destroying it in order to save it. Keep in mind that Social Security is now an excellent and solvent program, all vested propaganda to the side.
Furthermore, this administration continues to resist the idea that the nation needs a medical plan similar to the plans of Canada or Europe excluding, since Thatcher, Great Britain.
Plainly, we are in the hands of Raving Lunatics who believe that their Ideology is more important than our Lives.
1. Ten Practical Ideas for Legislation
2. Costa Rica Calls for International Solidarity, and The Neo Liberal-Attack
3. Food Supply Vulnerable to Contamination by Drugs and Plastics from Gene-Altered Crops
4. A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities: The Ghost of Vietnam
5. Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse
6. The Crisis of Democracy at Home
1. TEN PRACTICAL IDEAS FOR LEGISLATION
BY
RALPH NADER
make it easier to
band together.1. Enact legislation to reform the electoral
process; mandate publicly financed elections;
2. Enact living
wage laws, repeal Taft Hartley
3. Promote sustainable technologies, environmental protection
4. Prevention medicine; full medical coverage for all
5. Launch a national program to abolish poverty
6. Design a security policy against global disease, waste, wasteful defense budget, wage peace.
7. Renegotiate NAFTA & GATT so that it does not subordinate labor
8. End discrimination laws and injustice, and replace corporate criminal prisons; reject war on drugs and eliminate the corporate system with superior alternatives
9. Defend and strengthen the criminal justice system where wrongful and crack down on crime in the corporate suite, consumer fraud; expand health and economic rights for children exposed to respiratory, and cancer causing fast food. Also, 40% of children suffer from asthma where there are incinerators close by.
10. Strengthen
investors' shareholders rights, labor pension funds: people who
own the corporations don't run them. It's the corporate managers
who do.
BY
ALBINO VARGAS BARRANTES & EDGAR MORALES QUESADA
(OFFICE HOLDING MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR EMPLOYEES IN SAN JOSE', COSTA RICA)
(The Costa Rican people are calling for
International Solidarity to resist the final Neo-Liberal attack
against our society!!!!
This message is addressed to our brothers
and sisters in trade unions, to all social movements and to all
progressive political organizations.
The government of the United States of
America has injected, via the Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB), the sum of $700,000, for the promotion of the Free Trade
Agreement between Costa Rica and the USA)
TLC
of Free Trade Agreement: an overwhelmingly unjust struggle.
01
– Recently, the Costa Rican press has been spreading the
news that the US government, through the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB) and the Costa Rican-American Chamber of
Commerce (AmCHAM), has invested the astronomical sum of $700,000
into our country to promote the Free Trade Agreement (FTA)
between Costa Rica and the US.
02
– The aim of this massive investment is to
"convince" the Costa Ricans of how good the proposals
for the FTA are and finance a massive publicity campaign to drown
out the voices of those of us who oppose this inauspicious
agreement; voices which come not only from the trade union
movement but also from a wide variety of other sectors.
A
struggle which has been maintained through massive popular
struggle
03
– The undeniable high esteem and respect in which the Costa
Rican people hold the public institutions, has allowed us, as
popular social organizations and trade unions, as well as the
pro-Costa Rican political forces, to resist, for some time
successfully, the implementation of this dehumanizing Neo-liberal
model of privatization which Washington is selling us.
04
– The respect ordinary Costa Ricans have for their essential
public services is universal and this has permitted us, those of
us who represent the progressive democratic force in Costa Rica,
to organize massive popular social mobilizations, at a nation
level; marches and social actions which have served to stop,
momentarily, the right wing, neo-liberal groups in Costa Rica in
their plans to privatize our public services. Today these right
wing groups are characterized by the Ex-president of Costa Rica,
Dr. Oscar Arias Sanchez, who would like to return to power in
2006. (Editor's note: Oscar Arias received the Nobel Prize
for Peace because of his work as head of the negotiations with
the Nicaraguan Sandanista government to get that government to
sign an American arranged peace treaty. The American State
Department was shocked when the Nicaraguan government agreed to
do so. It should be noted that the Nobel Peace Prize is not given
by Sweden, but by Norway. It should be also noted that Norway is
a member of NATO. The Peace Prize is and has been a
politicized prize. – Any reader interested in Arias'
unsavory role should contact me and I'll forward a short
bibliography.)
05
– However, these massive popular demonstrations repudiating
Neo-liberal intentions have not contained the drive of these
right wing factions to impose their so called "models of
development".
06
– The Neo-liberal groups at the top the political and
economical interests of the traditional Costa Rica two party
system, a system now totally discredited by scandals which have
reached international level (everyone now knows that we have
ex-presidents detained in prison), have never backed down from
their intention to bury the social development model which the
Costa Rican people have been promoting for the last 40 years and
to impose their own project: the privatization, (through the
FTA), of our public institutions and services
(Telecommunications, Electricity, Water, Fuel, Banks, Ports,
Health and Social Security).
07
– We should note that the social development model which has
been enjoyed by Costa Rican families for the past 60-70 years
have been sustained by the vigour of their national institutions
and public industries, which have formed the backbone of social
development, the distribution of wealth and social investment.
This achievement has brought recognition from around the world,
for our political system of respect for democracy, human
development and peace.
The
Free Trade Agreement with USA: an opportunity for the most
backward/regressive forces in our society.
08
– Now the regressive Neo-liberals, the most recalcitrant
right wingers in our country, have politically regrouped, as
we've already mentioned, behind ex-president of Costa Rica and
former Nobel Peace prize winner, Dr. Oscar Arias Sánchez,
(standard bearer of the Neo-liberal policies) and are using the
signing of the FTA to carry out their political and economic
will: the implementation of the Neo-liberal model in our country
– an implementation that precisely requires the transfer of
institutions and public services into the hands of the private
sector resulting in the death of the social development model
built by the Costa Rican people over the past decades.
09
– It speaks volumes that, two ex-presidents of Costa Rica,
the driving forces of neo-liberal policies, are now in prison,
accused of allegedly receiving "gifts" from
multinational companies who are waiting to take advantage of the
privatization of Costa Rican institutions. Another connoted
ex-president refuses to return to Costa Rica to answer similar
charges.
10
– It's obvious that the right wing needs the approval of the
FTA to give legal credence to businesses which are trying to get
their hands on public property. At the same time, with the FTA
we'll see the collapse of the national system of production,
which will kill off the little that remains of national
agriculture; a key sector in the promotion of a more inclusive
and socially mobile society, as has been borne out by past
experience.
11
– It's clear that we, the Costa Rican people and our
legitimate social organizations, find ourselves in an
overwhelming and unequal struggle against the FTA and all that it
represents, which is effectively the selling off of he rights of
civil society in Costa Rica.
Appeal
for international solidarity
12
– However, with the financial support and solidarity of the
international trade union movement, social and political
movements of the world who resist and are opposed to
dehumanizing globalization which promotes the neo liberal model,
we can defeat this new Goliath.
13
– We urge you to create networks of solidarity and
international communication linking with trade unions and social
organizations here in Costa Rica.
14
– The struggle is overwhelming and unfair; but we have one
advantage, the people, our people, who love and defend their
democratic institutions because it is these very institutions and
services which have served our well being and have given us
peace.
15
– If solidarity and support arrives in time then these
sinister plans can be halted; if not Latin America will have lost
its position as the showcase of social resistance, maintained by
the people of Costa Rica throughout the last 20 years.
Long
live the solidarity of the people. With solidarity the Costa
Rican People can go forward.
3. FOOD SUPPLY VULNERABLE TO CONTAMINATION BY DRUGS AND PLASTICS FROM GENE-ALTERED CROPS
BY
ERIC YOUNG & RICH HAYES
For
more than a decade, corn, soybeans, and other food crops
genetically engineered to produce drugs, vaccines, and industrial
chemicals have been grown on American farms. But a new report by
six agricultural experts now warns that the food supply is
vulnerable to contamination by these "pharmaceutical
crops" unless substantial changes are made in the ways and
places such crops are grown and managed.
Based
on the experts' findings, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)
today called on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to
immediately ban the field production of corn, soybeans, and other
food crops engineered to produce pharmaceutical and industrial
chemicals. UCS recommends that the USDA spearhead a major
campaign to encourage and fund safer alternatives like non-food
crops or growing pharmaceutical food crops indoors.
"Nobody
wants drugs in their cornflakes," said Dr. Margaret Mellon,
Director of the Food and Environment Program at UCS.
"Consumers who discover that they have unwittingly ingested
drugs in their cereal and taco shells are likely to direct their
ire – and their lawsuits – against the companies that
sold them the food.
UCS
convened the panel of experts to determine whether it is possible
to produce pharmaceuticals in familiar food crops like corn or
soybean (the two plants most often used for pharmaceutical
production) without contaminating human food or animal feed. The
panel – acting independently of UCS – analyzed the
current system for growing food and feed-grade corn and soybeans
and identified many points where drugs and plastics could pass to
the food supply if pharmaceutical crops were grown under the same
system. After evaluating various approaches to blocking
contamination at these points, the panel concluded that the
current corn and soybean production system cannot be used for
pharmaceutical corn and soybean in the US while ensuring
virtually no contamination of the food and feed system.
"It
is sobering that drugs and industrial chemicals could have so
many routes to the food supply," said Dr. David Andow,
editor of the technical report and a professor in the Department
of Entomology at the University of Minnesota. "Pollen can be
carried to fields with food crops by the wind or insects, seeds
lodged in the crevices of harvesting equipment could come loose
while harvesting food, and plants can come up as volunteers in
the middle of a food crop To protect the food supply, each
potential route has to be blocked."
The
expert panel said it is theoretically possible for the government
to create a new systems that would allow corn or soybean to be
safely used as pharmaceutical crops. Establishing that system,
however, especially if it permits pharmaceutical crop production
to continue within its traditional food crop regions, would
require new management systems, new oversight, and a new uses of
some equipment and technologies – all built from the ground
up. The expert panel strongly encouraged development of this new
system.
UCS
doubts that USDA could establish, monitor, and ensure the
successful operation of a new system of this magnitude. Over the
past few years, the government has put together a piecemeal
system, which, while moving in the right direction is not enough
to protect the food supply. The better way to reap the benefits
of pharmaceutical crops is to stop the use of food crops now and
begin to explore other production methods like non-food crops or
plant cell cultures.
Consumers
and food companies alike will not accept a system that allows
drugs to seep into the food supply-even at very low levels,"
said Dr. Jane Rissler, deputy Director of UCS's Food and
Environment Program. "But alternatives will not emerge
overnight. That's why the USDA must embark immediately on a major
campaign to encourage and fund alternatives to the outdoor use of
food and feed crops in pharmaceutical and industrial crop
production."
The
technical report was written by scientists at Iowa State
University, University of Central Florida, University of
California at Davis, University of Illinois, and University of
Minnesota, and an agricultural management expert based in Hudson,
Iowa. An introduction to the technical report and UCS conclusions
and recommendations are being released as one document, A
Growing Concern: Protecting the Food Supply in an Era of
Pharmaceutical and Industrial Crops.
4. A MIRE OF DEATH, LIES AND ATROCITIES
THE GHOSTS OF VIETNAM
BY
ROBERT FISK
Who
said this and when?
"The people of
England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it
will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been
tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The
Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things
have been far worse than we have been told, our administration
more bloody and inefficient than the public knows… We
are today not far from a disaster."
Answer:
TE Lawrence (of Arabia fame) in The Sunday Times in August, 1920.
And every word of it is true today. We were lied to about weapons
of mass destruction. We were lied to about the links between
Saddam Hussein and September 11th, 2001. We were lied
to about the insurgents—remember how they were just
"dead-enders" and "remnants"?—and we
were lied to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire
country was steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying
powers or of the government of satraps that they have set up in
their place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections
next month.
Over
the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole
project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies—when
they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and
destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq—are being
vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we
have not seen before in the Middle East. My own calculations—probably
conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are
never told about—suggest that in the past 12 months, at
least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at
the rate of two a day. How does this happen? Is there a
suicide-bomber supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we
done to create this extraordinary industry? Time was, in Lebanon,
when a suicide bombing was a once-a-month event. Or in
Palestine/Israel a once-a-week event. Now, in Iraq, it is daily
or twice daily.
And
American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of
the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the town and
cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-marine
staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in
Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian board—which
had to decide whether to give refugee status to an American
deserter from the 82nd Airborne—that he and his
fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women
and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with
his arms up. "We killed the man, "Massey said. "We
fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle." Massey
assumed that the dead Iraqis didn't understand the hand signal to
stop. On another occasion, according to Massey, marines—in
reaction to a stray bullet—opened fire and killed a group of
unarmed protesters and bystanders. "I was deeply concerned
about the civilian casualties," Massey said. "What they
(the marines) were doing was committing murder." The
defector from the 82nd Airborne, Jeremy Hinzman, told
the court that "we were told to consider all Arabs as
potential terrorists… to foster an attitude of hatred that
gets your blood boiling".
All
this, of course, is part of the "withholding of
information" It took months before the Abu Ghraib torture
and abuses were made public—even though the International
Red Cross had already told the American and British authorities.
It took months, for that matter, for the British government
to respond to the outrageous beatings—and one killing—carried
out on defenseless Iraqis in Basra, first exposed by The
Independent. In the first seven months of last year, the
authorities maintained that they still "controlled"
Iraq, even though—when I drove 70 miles south of Baghdad in
August—I found every checkpoint deserted and the highways
littered with burnt American trucks and police vehicles.
Still
we are not told how many civilians were killed in the American
attack on Fallujah. The Americans claim that they killed more
than 1,000 insurgents—only insurgents, mark you, not a
single civilian among them—is preposterous. Still we are not
free to enter the city. Nor, given the fact that the insurgents
still appear to be there, is it likely that anyone can do so. Why
are American aircraft still bombing Fallujah, weeks after the US
military claimed to have captured it?
It
is difficult, over the past year, to think of anything that has
not gone wrong or grown worse in Iraq. The electrical grid is
collapsing again, the petrol queues are greater than they were in
the days following the illegal invasion in 2003, and security is
non-existent in all but the Kurdish north of the country.
The
proposal to put Saddam's minions on trial looks more and more
like an attempt to justify the invasion and distract attention
from the horrors to come. Even the forthcoming elections are
beginning to look more and more like a diversion. For if the
Sunnis cannot—or will not vote, what will this election be
worth? Donald Rumsfeld gave us the first hint that things might
not be going quite to plan when he spoke before the American
election about a poll in "parts " of Iraq. What does
this mean" Yet, still the invaders go on telling us that
things are getting better, that Iraq is about to enter the
brotherhood of nations. Bush even got re-elected after telling
this lie. The body bags are returning home more frequently than
ever—we are not supposed to ask how many Iraqis are dying—yet
still we are told that the invasion was worthwhile, that Iraqis
are better off, that security will improve or—my favourite,
this one—that they will get worse the nearer we get to
elections. This is the same old story that Bush and Rumsfeld used
to put about last spring: that thing are getting better—which
is why the insurgents are creating so much violence; in other
words , the better things are the worse thing are gong to get.
When you read this nonsense in Washington or London, it might
make sense. In Baghdad, it is madness. I wouldn't want to try it
out on the young American soldiers who were so arrogantly
informed by Rumsfeld that "you go to war with the army you
have".
It
would be pleasant to record some happiness somewhere in the
Middle East. Palestinian elections in the New Year? Well, yes,
but if the colourless and undemocratic Mahmoud Abbas is the best
the Palestinians have to look forward to, after the far too
colourful Yassir Arafat, then their chances of achieving
statehood are about as dismal as they were when Arafat resided in
his Ramallah bunker.
The
Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is not trying to close down
illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza because he want to be nice to
the Palestinians; and his spokesman's dismissive remarks about
the West Bank—that the Gaza withdrawal will put Palestinian
statehood into "formaldehyde"—does not suggest
that the occupied are going to receive statehood from their
occupiers. Which means, one way or another, that the Intifada
will restart. At which point, the Israelis will complain that
Abbas cannot "control his own people", and the Israelis
and the Palestinians will return to their hopeless conflict.
It
is impossible to reflect on the year in Iraq without realizing
just how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian struggle affects the
entire Middle East. Iraqis watch the Palestinian battle with
great earnestness. Saddam Hussein's support for the Palestinians
was one with which many Iraqis could identify—even if they
loathed their own dictator. And I doubt very much if the suicide
bomber would have come of age so quickly in Iraq without the
precedent set by the suicide bombers of Palestine and, before
them, of Lebanon.
It
is this precedent-setting capacity of events in the Middle East—not
the mythical "foreign fighters" of George Bush's
fantasy world—that is costing America so much blood in Iraq.
When Sharon tries to prevent Palestinian statehood, Iraqis
remember that his closest ally is represented in Iraq by an army
which most of them regard as occupiers. When US forces learn
their guerrilla warfare techniques from the Israelis—when
they bomb houses from the air, when they abuse prisoners, when
they even erect razor-wire round recalcitrant villages—is it
surprising that Iraqis treat the Americans as surrogate Israelis?
We
shouldn't need the evidence of ex-marine Massey to show us how
brutal the occupying armies have become—and how irrelevant
Iraq's "interim" government truly is. In Washington or
London, these "ministers" play the role of
international statesmen, but in Baghdad, where they hide behind
the walls of their dangerous little enclave, they have as much
status as rural mayors. Besides they cannot even negotiate with
their enemies.
Which
leads us to the one clear fact about the last year of chaos and
anarchy and brutality in Iraq. We still do not know who our
enemies are. Save for the one name "Zarqawi", the
Americans—with all the billions of dollars they have thrown
into intelligence, their CIA mainframe computers and their huge
payments to informers—simply do not know whom they are
fighting. They "recapture" Samarra—three times—and
then they lose it again. They "recapture" Fallujah and
then they lose it again. They cannot even control the main
streets of Baghdad.
Who
would have believed, in 2003, as US forces drove into Baghdad,
that within two years they would be mired in their biggest
guerrilla war since Vietnam? Those few of us who predicted just
that—and The Independent was among them—were
derided as nay-sayers, doom-mongers, pessimists.
Iraq
is now proving all over again what we should have learned in
Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: that Arabs have lost their fear. It
has been a slow process. But a quarter of a century ago, the
Arabs lived in chains, cowed by occupiers and oppressive regimes.
They were a submissive society and they did as they were told.
The Israelis even used a "Palestinian police force" to
help them in their occupation. Not any more. The biggest
development in the Middle East over the past 30 years has been
this shaking off of fear. Fear—of the occupier, of the
dictator—is something that you cannot re-inject into people.
And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.
Iraqis
are just not prepared to live in fear any more. They know they
must depend on themselves—our betrayal of the 1991 rising
against Saddam proved that—and they refuse to be frightened
by their occupiers. It was we who warned them of the dangers of
civil war, even though there never has been a civil war in Iraq.
As a people, they watched Westerners turn up by the thousand to
make money out of country that had been beaten down by a corrupt
dictatorship and UN sanctions. Is it any surprise that Iraqis are
angry?
The
American columnist Tom Friedman, in one of his less messianic
articles, posed a good question before the 2003 invasion. Who
knows, he asked, what bats will fly out of the box when we get to
Baghdad? Well, now we know. So we should repeat Lawrence's
chilling remark—without the quotation marks and the date
1920. We are today not far from a disaster.
5. DEPLETED URANIUM: THE TROJAN HORSE
BY
LEUREN MORET
"HEAT NOT A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE
SO HOT THAT IT DO SINGE YOURSELF."
(William Shakespeare)
The
use of depleted uranium weaponry by the US, defying all
international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on
earth including the human one, and yet the US continues to do so
with full knowledge of the destructive potential of DU.
Since
1991, the US has staged four wars using depleted uranium
weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions
and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The
continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has
already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and
will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is
indeed a world affair, an international issue. The deeper purpose
is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted
uranium—from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the
northern half of India—to the US geostrategic imperatives.
The
fact is that the US and its military partners have staged four
nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using
dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to
control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate
vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations
living in those regions, where there are resources which the US
must control, in order to establish and maintain American
primacy.
Describe
as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the
weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium 238 is 4.5
billion years the age of the earth. And, as Uranium 238 decays
into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning
into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step.
There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it
up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of
Mass Destruction.
After
forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide
particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and
travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric
dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing,
maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow
and moisture move it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive
contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of
40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and
lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive
pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many
times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released
from atmospheric testing fallout.
A
2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the
European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) reports that based on
Chernobyl studies low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 time
greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection
models estimate which are based on the flawed atomic and Hydrogen
Bomb studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the
extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr.
Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert
authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:
"The concept of
species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately
induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction
and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of
life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."
6. THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY AT HOME
BY
EDWARD S. HERMAN
The
Privatization of Government
Private
power and the incessant demands of capital as the main engine of
the economy have always influenced, and for long periods
completely dominated, the US political system. Modest change
can be effected, however, when things get bad enough and when the
interests of the fragmented majority coalesce, usually briefly.
These circumstances bring moderate reforms that alleviate
pressures from below. But they arouse great anxiety among the
dominant elites, who denounce the extremism of "special
interests" and their spokespersons in these periods of
crisis of democracy" and "democratic excess"
(i.e., approach to actual democracy).
The
processes by which the excesses are contained, although they may
make democracy a formal affair without much democratic substance,
are institutionalized and made to seem natural by the established
institutions. Their seamier features are glossed over or
suppressed. The civics texts in schools and the mainstream media
focus on the nominally democratic forms, the wonderful system of
checks and balances, and the superficial elements of the
electoral horse races. As is the case in demonstration elections
in El Salvador and other client states, the media stress
personalities and the positive, while avoiding a critical look at
whether the fundamental requirements of free elections are met,
such as reasonable equality for funding and access to the mass
media by representatives of all major classes and constituencies.
The possibility that important options which might serve the
interests of large numbers are systematically excluded from the
political arena, because any candidate espousing them would be
defunded by the main sources of money in politics—as well as
vilified as an extremist by the mass media—is itself
excluded from discussion. As only "moderate" positions
can be adequately financed and treated respectfully and as
"serious" by the mainstream media, the severely
circumscribed options are made to seem natural and normal, like
the competition among the "moderate" parties ink El
Salvador and Guatemala.
The
belief by a considerable proportion of the population that
elections in and of themselves represent genuine democracy in
action, and give sovereignty and free choice to the public at
large, is a tremendous achievement of the western system of
governance. It legitimates elite control and weakens the force of
criticism of western governments and institutions. The public is
rendered quiescent because "it" has spoken , and
significant numbers are impressed with the argument that protest
is improper because the government represents the popular will,
validated by a democratic election. In the classic phrase of
'William Penn: "Let the People think they Govern and they
will be Governed."
A
further factor contributing to quiescence is the belief that,
given the freedom and opportunity for personal achievement in the
US failure is a result of individual inadequacies (or bad luck),
not defects in institutions. We need more "moral
fiber," which will only be weakened by coddling the lazy and
ne'er-do-wells.
Of
course the system must produce some minimal payoff for the
underlying population—or at least for a significant fraction
of that population—in order to keep the excesses under
control. In the provinces, where this has been more difficult,
the US establishment has often actively colluded with and even
helped organize National Security States to keep the masses
apathetic and passive by means of state terror (always called,
however, counterinsurgency, pacification, the restoration of
stability, or even counter terrorism). While this has not been
necessary on such a grand scale at home as yet, it is clear from
the support of so many terror states abroad that it remains a
viable option if needed. The record of the state in the Wilson
Palmer raids and Truman-McCarthy and Cointelpro eras demonstrates
how quickly gross violations of civil liberties—from simple
harassment to outright murder—can be instituted when it
serves establishment interests.
The
Crisis of Democracy
The
1960s produced a "crisis of democracy" in the minds of
US elites. Neither before nor after this period did they see a
crisis, despite the decline in voter participation (now below 19th
century levels), the plutocratizing of politics, the diminished
substantive content of electoral campaigns, and the increased
importance of demagoguery and news management. The fact that
nobody can compete seriously for national political office who
poses a serious challenge to the security state and Military
Industrial Complex, or takes a strongly populist position on
tax-expenditure policy, is not seen as a problem. This is the way
things ought to be: the permanent interests in firm control, the
"business" of politics making the two parties into
branches of a single property party, and the "transaction
costs" too high to make organizing the effectively
disenfranchised masses worthwhile. The financial requirements of
plutocratic politics gives the property party an effective
monopoly.
Some
establishment spokespersons make no bones about the fact that the
characteristic of the 1960s that merited the designation
"crisis" was the arousing of the masses and their
organization into groups that could lobby and protest. Some
establishment commentators and analysts were openly nostalgic for
the times when a quiescent public allowed the government to be
run by a small clique of Wall Street lawyers and bankers. In
consonance with this vision of the 1960s as an era of threat and
irrational upheaval, the main stream media in recent years has
portrayed the period as one of violent protest and mindlessness.
In
short, for the dominant elite, democracy means rule by themselves
without challenge from or participation by ordinary citizens.
This parallels usage, and even more, practice, in dealing with
the Third World, where , for example, a crisis in Nicaragua that
arouses the US leadership to action, to see a need for free
elections and "democracy," is the overthrow of the
Somoza dictatorship and the coming into power of a group pursuing
"the logic of the majority." Somoza's mode of
governance was acceptable, not challenged for any electoral or
democratic deficiencies. The US mass media did not actually call
Somoza's rule democratic, but neither did they call attention to
its failing or US support of highly undemocratic rule. Our
alliance with the terror state was rationalized and protected in
many ways—people not ready, "traditional" modes of
rule, Central American human nature, moving toward democracy
under our tutelage, and, of course, eye aversion. Where elections
were held under conditions of massive state terror, as in El
Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s, but with power in the hands
of groups pursuing the logic of the minority, the media
rushed to applaud the "fledgling democracies" with
"elected" leaders.