The JvL Bi-Weekly

 

James van Luik

Publisher & Editor

 

Monday, December 15, 2003

Volume 2, No. 22

 

 

7 Articles

 

1. AARP Gone Astray

2. The Assault on Medicare

3. A Terrible Purchase

4. The Rush to Kill Medicare

5. Uncensored Gore Vidal

6. Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court

7. USWA Calls for Congressional Investigation into Police-State Assaults in Miami

 

 

 

1. AARP GONE ASTRAY

BY

PAUL KRUGMAN

 

"This is a good bill that will help every Medicare beneficiary," wrote Tom Scully, the Medicare administrator, in a letter to The New York Times defending the prescription drug bill. That's flatly untrue. (Are you surprised?) As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the bill will force millions of beneficiaries to pay more for drugs, thanks to a provision that cuts off supplemental aid from Medicaid. Poorer recipients may find previously affordable drugs moving out of reach.

 

That's only one of a number of anti-retiree measures tucked away in the bill. It contains several Trojan horse provisions that are clearly intended to undermine Medicare over time – it will allow private insurers to cherry pick healthy clients in selected cities, and it will heavily subsidize private plans competing with traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, the bill prohibits Medicare from using its bargaining power to cut drug prices; drug company stocks have soared since the bill's details became public.

 

Yet the bill has a good chance of passing, thanks to an endorsement from AARP, the retiree advocacy organization, which has already begun an expensive advertising campaign on the bill's behalf. What's going on?

 

Let's step back a minute. This is a bill with huge implications for the future of Medicare. It's also, at best, highly controversial. One might therefore have expected an advocacy group for retired Americans to take its time in responding --   to make sure that major groups of retirees won't actually be hurt, and to poll its members to be sure that they are well informed about what the bill contains and don't object to it.

 

Instead, AARP has thrown its weight behind an effort to ram the bill through before Thanksgiving. And no, it's not urgent to get the bill passed so retirees can get immediate relief. The plan won't kick in until 2006 in any case, so no harm will be done if the nation takes some time to consider.

 

Many of AARP's members feel betrayed. The message boards at the organization's WEB site have filled up with outraged posts. A number of those posts say something like this: "Now you're just an insurance company." Indeed, that may get to the heart of the matter.

 

Over the years AARP has become much more than an advocacy and service organization for older Americans. It receives more than $150 million each year in commissions on insurance, mutual funds and prescription drugs sold to its members.

 

And this Medicare bill is very friendly to insurance and drug companies. Senator John Breaux, one of only two Democrats who participated in negotiations over the bill, takes the controversy as good sign: "No one got everything they wanted." But as Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, drug and insurance companies got exactly what they wanted: no efforts to limit prices, generous subsidies, and lots of additional business. For example, insurance companies that offer an alternative to Medicare will not only be able to pick and choose their customers, but will also get 30 percent more per client than the government spends on the average Medicare recipient.

 

So do AARP executives support this bill because they hope to share in the bounty? Maybe, but it probably runs deeper than that. Once an advocacy group becomes as much a business as a service organization, its executives are likely to start identifying more with industry interests than with the groups they are supposed to serve.

 

Thus it may see odd on the surface that William Novelli, AARP's chief executive, wrote a glowing preface to Newt Gingrich's book on health care reform. After all, Mr. Gingrich has long advocated turning the administration of Medicare over to private companies – an unpopular idea, and also an expensive one (forget the clichés about inefficient government: private companies have much higher overhead than Medicare). But what looks like wasted money to taxpayers and retirees looks like opportunity to private providers. Enough said.

 

Am I being too cynical? How could I be? In case you haven't noticed, we live in a golden age of pork: the other big piece of legislation marching through Congress, the energy bill, makes the Smoot-Hawley tariff look like a classic of good government.

 

So it should come as no surprise that Medicare "reform" appears likely to be another triumph for the coalition of the bought-off – a coalition that, sadly, includes AARP.

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2. THE ASSAULT ON MEDICARE

BY

(Author Unknown)

EDITORIAL

 

No one who has reviewed the changes in Medicare proposed by the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in the Congress has any doubt regarding the motivation behind the legislation. Corporate-tied conservatives made a commitment to begin the process of privatizing Medicare and they are now delivering on that commitment.

 

Under the guise of creating a prescription drug benefit, the proponents of the legislation that stands on the brink of final passage in the Senate today have, in fact, crafted a scheme designed to enrich pharmaceutical companies while saddling seniors with high co-pays and costs that will continue to make needed medicines unaffordable for millions of citizens. Worse yet, the legislation seeks to use billions of taxpayer dollars to break up the Medicare program and hand the pieces over to the same for-profit concerns that have made the US health care system one of the costliest and most inefficient in the world. So corrupt is the legislation that it actually bans initiatives to lower drug prices.

 

The facts are clear. No member of Congress can claim not to have recognized the corrupt and excessively costly nature of this legislation. For that reason, a number of principled Republicans in the House opposed it, as did most Democrats. As a result, the Medicare bill was defeated in the initial House voting. Unfortunately, the House leadership and its Bush administration allies were unwilling to accept that result. So they rigged up an extended voting period – which lasted through Friday night – and used the extra time to twist just enough arms to secure a 220-225 "victory."

 

Many House Republicans, some of them fiscal conservatives, others responsible moderates, refused to buckle. It is embarrassing to report, however, that Wisconsin's Republican representatives were unwilling to stand up for themselves, or for programs that are vital to seniors and the disabled.

 

Wisconsin Democrats Tammy Baldwin, Ron Kind, Gerald Kleczka and David Obey were steadfast foes of the assault on Medicare. But their Republican colleagues chose to follow the dictates of their party's leadership, rather than the dictates of conscience.

 

It is deeply disturbing that Wisconsin Republicans Paul Ryan, Mark Green, Tom Petri and James Sensenbrenner voted against the interest of the seniors and disabled citizens they are supposed to represent. It is even more disturbing that they proved themselves to be in incapable of independent thinking.

 

Ryan, Green, Petri and Sensenbrenner should be ashamed. And, with the 2004 congressional elections approaching, voters who live in their districts should be actively looking for better representation.

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3. A TERRIBLE PURCHASE

BY

TED MARMOR & JACOB S. HACKER

 

Has the 37 million-member AARP become the American Association of Republican Politicians, as it was recently depicted by The New York Times cartoonist Jeff Danziger? Is its CEO, William Novelli—who once penned a book foreword for Newt Gingrich—a closet GOP operative? Has the organization been co-opted by the health insurance industry, on which it relies for a sizable share of its operating funds?

 

All these criticisms and more have followed the AARP's stunning—but for those who have followed the organization's recent evolution, unsurprising—endorsement of the Republican-crafted Medicare bill even before its details had been made public. And all of the complaints carry some weight. The AARP has cozied up to Republicans, who just a few years ago were lambasting the organization they now laud. And it has long had close ties to health insurers: Indeed, the organization's huge membership base was built on the providing of low-cost supplemental insurance for Medicare beneficiaries.

 

Yet the true scandal of the AARP's stance is not that it is making money off insurance or befriending the GOP. It is that it is betraying its members' interests in the name of a wholly wrong-headed pragmatism. The most striking feature of the AARP's embrace of the Medicare "reform" bill is just how unpopular the plan is with the very constituency the AARP ostensibly represents. In a recent poll, less than a fifth of older Americans approved of the legislation, and the best bet is that even fewer will approve of it once it grim effects become clear.

 

In short, the AARP is providing cover for a bill whose underlying realities are starkly at odds with Medicare's bedrock principles—and entirely belied by the reassuring rhetoric of Republican leaders, who insist the bill is designed to bolster Medicare. This is the Big Lie tactic—saying something repeatedly to make it seem true. But every knowledgeable analyst knows that the drug benefit in the bill is weak and convoluted, and that the rest of the monstrosity has little to do with fixing Medicare and everything to do with crippling it.

 

The sad truth is that this Medicare reform legislation is what Republican critics of the New Deal and the Great Society have lusted after for decades: a major step down a road that breaks up the risk pool of Medicare beneficiaries and fragments the common interests that have given Medicare such political stability and protection. All this means less, not more, generous coverage down the line and less risk sharing between the healthy and the sick, and between the rich and the poor.

 

All of which makes the AARP's stance even more puzzling. Why is the AARP supplying political cover for a bad bill that a majority of their constituents will sure hate? And why is it working so hard to disguise what is actually going on through the massive publicity campaign it has already financed?

 

To answer that question requires knowing a bit more about the organization. The AARP was originally a buying cooperative for health and life insurance. (It was also originally the American Association of Retired Persons; now, it is simply an acronym—a telling illustration of its new hollowness.) Though founded well before Medicare's enactment, it had little to do with the program's birth. Yet it gained immensely from the program: In the years after Medicare's passage, it signed up (and made) millions by becoming the broker of choice for health insurance—known as Medigap—that supplemented Medicare's incomplete policy. Today, this means that, unlike many consumer organizations, the AARP has trivial membership dues. It also means that the AARP has always faced tension between its commercial sources of funds and the common interests of its diverse membership.

 

In the recent past, the AARP managed those tensions reasonably well. Yet it also increasingly reflected the limits of Washington's inside-the-beltway mentality. In 1987-1988, the organization supported Medicare reforms that would have provided real protection from catastrophic expenses. But it went along with a financing plan that imposed all the costs of the legislation on the elderly themselves; then failed to explain its position; and then was startled when the legislation was revoked within a year.

 

Still, the Medicare catastrophic debacle reflected bad political judgment, but decent aims. In 2003, we have the apparent reverse: seemingly shrewd political judgment and substantively terrible legislation. And therein lies the true source of the AARP's stance. Desperate to be politically relevant again in a political climate hostile to many of the goals that its members hold most dear, Novelli and the AARP chose to play the inside Washington game rather  than do what most of its members would have regarded as desirable. They presumed that 2003 was the last chance for any substantial drug benefit for Medicare. They took for granted the argument that the Democrats will not have significant margins in Congress in  the foreseeable future, let alone enjoy control of the White House and Congress simultaneously. In Washington, you have to "deal" if want to "play." And that is precisely what Mr. Novelli and his board decided.

 

They should not have, for their own interests and for the interests of the nation. Even judged on the ill-conceived terms that Novelli and his board set out, the predictions they made are hardly foolproof. Had this bill failed, the best guess is that Americans would be debating prescription coverage in the summer of 2004—and if nothing happened in 2004, in 2005. The AARP of all organizations should know the power of this issue.

 

And while the AARP says that it will work to make the bill better once it is implemented, the historical record as well as the convoluted structure of the bill itself suggest this would not be easy. Medicare, after all, was supposed to be a first step toward national health insurance, but once it passed, implementing the legislation and controlling its runaway costs consumed Washington for years. But the current 684- page legislation makes the original Medicare bill look as simple as a children's book. With private insurers and the government scrambling to implement a bill so unworkably complex, constructive steps forward are unlikely to gain a hearing or enjoy a secure foundation. If there were an appropriate effluent tax on legislative messes, our national budget would be back in the black. As it is, AARP's members should turn instead to time-tested methods of democracy and throw out leaders who have so dismissed their constituencies' concerns. Novelli and his board thought any deal was good. They were wrong. No deal is far better than the bad one just passed.

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4. THE RUSH TO KILL MEDICARE

BY

ROBERT KUTTNER

 

The Bush administration's Medicare bill is a calculated first step toward ending universal Medicare in favor of vouchers. President Bush and his congressional allies have deftly baited this hook with meager prescription drug benefits.

 

With legislators wanting to go home for Thanksgiving, the White House hopes to force a vote by this weekend. The haste is understandable: The more this cynical bill is exposed, the less legislators will fear voting against it. Consider:

 

1. Skimpy Drug Benefits. The Administration refused to confront the pricing power of drug companies. So the government would be billed at exorbitant prices, and the new $40 billion a year in benefits would cover only a fraction of consumers' drug expenses.

 

Under the formula, if you incurred $3,600 of annual drug costs, the program would cover only $1,285. (It covers 95 percent after $3,600, but a lot of people would not participate at all because they couldn't afford the upfront costs.)

 

2. Capped Benefits. The administration's real goal is to shift Medicare from a public program to a private one, with the government's contribution capped. For the right, it's a threefer: contain government's costs, shift risks to consumers, and let private industry cash in. Healthier and wealthier people could supplement the voucher with their own resources. Poorer and sicker ones would get diminished coverage.

 

The bill authorizes "experiments" in six metropolitan areas, where private insurers subsidized by the government could lure healthy seniors away from traditional Medicare. However, past experiments with Medicare HMOs demonstrate that they are far less efficient than public Medicare and leave government holding the bag for the sickest patients. Medicare works  because it is a universal insurance pool. Fragmenting  that pool can only raise costs, divert profits, and compromise care.

 

3. Means-testing. The bill subjects poorer seniors to an assets test and raises Medicare premiums for middle-and upper-income seniors. It also effectively bans drug imports from Canada. And it actually reduces drug benefits for people on Medicaid and those with private retiree coverage.

 

It's dismal policy. Viewed as a bill for special interests, however, the Medicare legislation is sheer genius.

 

Pharmaceutical companies get to sell more drugs at prices they set. Hospitals and doctors receive additional payments. Insurers get to run a lucrative new program with government subsidies. And corporations that are paying health benefits to retirees get new tax breaks worth $18 billion.

 

The administration also deftly co-opted the feeble giant AARP. As recently as last July, the AARP's president William Novelli, warned that  "any final conference agreement should not destabilize Medicare nor penalize those beneficiaries who choose to stay in the current Medicare program." But this is exactly what the conference bill does.

 

Sources close to AARP say that Novelli and his lobbyists, often allied with Democrats, wanted to point to a bipartisan accomplishment.

 

When AARP's $7 million advertising program in support of the bill was announced, the organization's switchboard jammed with angry calls. AARP has long been a business conglomerate selling products to the elderly posing as an advocacy group. Novelli is taking a huge gamble. The more his members appreciate what's really in this bill, the more his move could backfire.

 

Last spring the Senate passed a more moderate bill in which liberals led by Senator Ted Kennedy somewhat reluctantly traded expanded drug coverage for sponsorship by private insurers rather than via public Medicare. However, Kennedy's bottom line was: no serious tampering with the rest of Medicare.

 

Democrats gambled that the Republicans, in order to get a bill, would have to meet liberals halfway. But White House officials concluded that by playing interest-group politics they could peel away enough votes for their plan and ignore the liberals.

 

Bush's bet is that the Democrats are damned either way. Either voters don't read the fine print and Democrats get tarred for opposing a drug benefit bill in an election year or they are made to collude in voucherizing Medicare.

 

While two center-right Democrats, John Breaux of Louisiana and Max Baucus of Montana, supported the conference bill, Kennedy as well as the Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and whip Harry Reid of Nevada oppose it, as do most Senate Democrats and seven moderate Republicans.

 

If the Senate's liberals and moderates can withstand the pressure for a quick vote, the bill's deficiencies will come to light. And at least 40 senators – the number needed to filibuster – will realize that it's better election-year politics to resist wrecking a much-loved program than being complicit in its demise.

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5. UNCENSORED GORE VIDAL

INTERVIEWED

BY

MARC COOPER

 

It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn't born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America's Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled form the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.

 

When I last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of causalities mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

 

This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.

 

Vidal undoubtedly had current polls like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display – vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity – their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.

 

The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president.

 

As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.

 

Marc Cooper: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.

 

Gore Vidal: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles – slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. No one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a  hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years , such government.

 

But then Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism – the only form of government suitable for such a  people.

 

MC: But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.

 

GV: Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't working. Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy's jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn't care.

 

Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year.

 

This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn thing.

 

MC: Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America's two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?

 

GV: Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.

 

Enron was an eye-opener to naïve lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

 

Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No one is punished for squandering the people's money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.

 

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with – even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh – how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time – was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.

 

MC: In this context would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldn't. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?

 

GV: Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it's he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.

 

So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can't think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was a highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.

 

MC: But Gore, you have lived though a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security state, to LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

 

GV: No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country – like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

 

MC: So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

 

GV: No. It would have been better and worse. Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans – most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

 

MC: Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

 

GV: I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

 

MC: Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing our, don't you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

 

GV: I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don't care.

 

But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there isn't enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we are generously financing every country on earth, that we are bank rolling welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in Chicago – which of course is ridiculous.

 

And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.

 

MC: Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?

 

GV: No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don't want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn't their job  to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?

 

So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can't lose.

 

MC: But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

 

GV: Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought that Harry Truman's plans to militarize America would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn't have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.

 

But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He's made every error you can. He's wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can't find jobs. Poverty is up. It's a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.

 

MC: You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn't there still a democratic underpinning?

 

GV: No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.

 

MC: Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

 

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

 

MC: How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

 

GV: I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won't be pretty.

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          6. ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE SUPREME COURT

AS QUOTED BY

ERIC FONER & NAT HENTOFF

 

When Lincoln's right to abolish the rights of dissenting American citizens was argued before the Supreme Court—after the Civil War was over, and Lincoln had been assassinated—the lawyer for the government told the court that during wartime, presidential powers "must be without limit."

 

As for those parts of the Bill of Rights that had also been suspended—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth Amendments to the Constitution—Lincoln's lawyer argued that they were "peace provisions," which had to be put aside when, in wartime, "salus populi suprema est lex" (the people's welfare is the supreme law).

 

Writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, Justice David Davis scorned the government's argument that martial law and military tribunals were thoroughly justified to keep the nation safe. Said Justice Davis, according to that point of view, "It could well be said that a country, preserved at the sacrifice of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of preservation."

 

The case, Ex parte Milligan (1866), resulted in a landmark decision that goes to the very essence of American constitutional democracy. It should be read while keeping in mind how John Ashcroft and other members of the Bush administration deal with the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution.

 

Said the Supreme Court: "No graver question was ever considered in this court, nor one which more nearly concerns the rights of the whole people; for it is the birthright of every American citizen when charged with crime, to be tried and punished according to law … The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers, and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. (Emphasis added.)

 

"No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of [the Constitution's] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government." Such a doctrine, said the Court, "leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the Government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence…(Emphasis added.)

 

"This nation, as experience has proved, cannot always remain at peace, and has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution." If, the Court continued, "the calamities of war again befall us," and the Constitution is again bypassed, "the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate.

 

"For this, and other equally weighty reasons, the Framers of the Constitution secured the inheritance they had fought to maintain, by incorporating in a written constitution the safeguards which time had approved were essential to its preservation. Not one of these safeguards can the President, or congress, or the Judiciary disturb…" (Emphasis added.)

 

But habeas corpus could be disturbed, the court went on—only if the civilian courts were not open, and they were open during the Civil War. The are still open now, but the Bush administration is denying American citizens, designated "enemy combatants" solely by the president, the essentials of habeas corpus and other basic American due process rights as they are being held, incommunicado, indefinitely.

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7. USWA CALLS FOR CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION INTO POLICE-STATE ASSAULTS IN MIAMI

(November 24^th  - 2003. The United Steelworkers of America (USWA) is calling for a Congressional Investigation into "a massive police state," created in part with federal funds, to intimidate union members and others critical of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and limit their rights during FTAA meetings in Miami last week.)

 

"Last week, the fundamental rights of thousands of Americans … were blatantly violated, sometimes violently, by the Miami police, who systematically repressed our Constitutional right to free assembly with massive force, riot gear and armaments," said Leo W. Gerard, USWA international president in a letter to Congressional leaders. "It is condemnable enough that a massive police state was created to prevent American citizens from directly petitioning FTAA negotiators for redress of their grievances." Gerard said in the letter.

 

"It is doubly condemnable," he added, "that $9 million of federal funds designated for the reconstruction of Iraq were used toward this despicable purpose. How can we hope to build democracy in Iraq while using massive force to dismantle it here at home?"

 

Citing "countless instances of humiliating repression in which the Miami police force disgraced itself," Gerard said that Miami police chief John Timoney should be fired, all charges against peaceful demonstrators should be dropped, and a Congressional investigation into the Miami police department's systematic repression should immediately be launched. "To do less would be to endorse homeland repression in the guise of homeland security," Gerard's letter concluded.

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