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Saturday, December 21, 2002
The Beast is always with us!
Going Electronic, Denver Reveals Long-Term Surveillance
By Ford Fessenden with Michael Moss
New York Times
Saturday, 21 December, 2002
DENVER, Dec. 14 -- The Denver police have gathered information on unsuspecting local activists since the 1950's, secretly storing what they learned on simple index cards in a huge cabinet at police headquarters.
When the cabinet filled up recently, the police thought they had an easy solution. For $45,000, they bought a powerful computer program from a company called Orion Scientific Systems. Information on 3,400 people and groups was transferred to software that stores, searches and categorizes the data.
Then the trouble began.
After the police decided to share the fruits of their surveillance with another local department, someone leaked a printout to an activist for social justice, who made the documents public. The mayor started an investigation. People lined up to obtain their files. Among those the police spied on were nuns, advocates for American Indians and church organizations.
To make matters worse, the software called many of the groups "criminal extremists."
"I wasn't threatened in any way by them watching," said Dr. Byron Plumley, who teaches religion and social values at Regis University in Denver, and discovered that the police had been keeping information about his activities against war. "But there's something different about having a file. If the police say, `Aha, he belongs to a criminal extremist organization,' who's going to know that it's the American Friends Service Committee, and we won the Nobel Peace Prize?"
The incident has highlighted some pitfalls of police intelligence software, which has been hailed widely as a major tool in the war against terrorism. One of Orion's newest clients, in fact, is the New York City Police Department, where 200 people in the intelligence division are being trained to use the program, according to city records and Orion officials.
The New York police, who paid $744,707 for an updated version known as Investigations III+, would not say just how they planned to use the system. But Eric Zidenberg, an Orion vice president, said, "They have been a sponge, ready to learn as much as they possibly can."
Beyond the issues of technology, though, the episode has prompted a debate in Denver over the merits of such intelligence gathering.
Many other big cities and the federal government imposed restrictions on police snooping after spying scandals decades ago. In some of those places, including New York, the authorities are now trying to remove the restraints. Denver has been in the unique position of debating post-Sept. 11 privacy and security in the heat of a spying scandal, and not everyone thinks the police should be restricted.
"I think it's imperative after 9/11 that the police department and security agencies have an obligation to track suspicious people, in order to keep the citizenry alive," said Councilman Ed Thomas, who argued against restrictions. In a City Council debate, Mr. Thomas waved a list of the dead at the World Trade Center to emphasize his point.
The Council nevertheless passed a resolution imposing restrictions on police intelligence.
"There is a role for intelligence gathering," said Mayor Wellington E. Webb, who has said he did not know that the police were spying on peaceful citizens in his 11 years in office. "There isn't a role for intelligence gathering on Catholic nuns."
The controversy began last March at a gathering place for Denver activists for a variety of causes, the Human Bean coffee shop. Stephen Nash, a local glazier, was attending a meeting of Amnesty International when, he said, the shop owner told him, "There was a salesman here earlier, and he left this for you."
The package contained printouts from the Denver Police Department's Orion software about Mr. Nash and his wife, Vicki. The unusual thing was that the file had come from nearby Golden, where police detectives looking into a vandalism incident during a protest had received information from Denver's intelligence files.
"We realized the police were actually spreading false information about us to other police departments -- that we were members of a `criminal extremist' organization," Mr. Nash said.
He took the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union and sued the Denver police, setting off a series of continuing disclosures about police spying dating back decades. Police officers have admitted in depositions that they made up rules for monitoring organizations, sometimes deciding to create files on people who merely spoke at rallies.
Policy guidelines that would have prevented spying on ordinary citizens not suspected of criminal wrongdoing sat in the desk of the captain who was head of the police intelligence bureau, never implemented, according to a deposition by Deputy Chief David Abrams.
Among those monitored by the police were Dr. Plumley and his wife, Shirley Whiteside, who ran a soup kitchen in Denver. Marge Taniwaki, who was interned with her parents in a Japanese-American camp in World War II, had a police file, as did her former husband, from whom she had long been divorced. His only connection, she said, was that he owned the car that she drove to a protest.
Sister Antonia Anthony, a 74-year-old nun who has taught destitute Indians in this country and Mexico, was monitored for her activities with a nonviolent group advocating for Indians in Chiapas, Mexico.
"In a democracy, people have to speak out against evil," said Sister Antonia. But, she added, discovering that the police had kept a file on her put fear in her mind. "I have to admit," she said, "I'm really cautious on the road now. You're already on a list, you're `known' to police."
Orion officials say they trained the police to use the program, but some officers say they had no training. Working under the direction of the Denver police intelligence bureau secretary, officers classified organizations like the American Friends Service Committee as "criminal extremist" groups, one of the choices offered in a pull-down menu by the software. Orion says the classification is no longer part of the program.
David Pontarelli, a detective in the intelligence bureau, defended the characterization, saying in a deposition, "They have been linked to activities that involved extremist activity, criminal activities." The police said that each officer had used his own judgment in characterizing a group and that it had often been labeled "criminal extremist" because it did not seem to fit any other choices.
In addition to their intelligence files, the police entered in the database the names of troubled, but unprosecuted, students in Denver schools, along with the names of those who obtained permits to carry concealed guns, and, inexplicably, people who had received honorariums from the Police Department.
Orion got its start two decades ago developing an analysis tool for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where a new office run by Adm. John Poindexter is developing controversial plans to gather vast amounts of personal information as a means to hunt terrorists.
With the Pentagon's approval, Orion says, it began selling a revamped version of its tool to law enforcement agencies in the early 1990's, with little success at first.
Then California state officials hired Orion to develop an easy-to-use database for identifying suspected gang members by their tattoos and other telltale signs. Now being used by 14 states, the system, GangNet, remains controversial in California, where youth advocates say the information fed into the database by law enforcement officials is riddled with wrong or outdated information that can lead officials to falsely believe someone belongs to a gang.
Orion's Investigations, now being used by 20 local law enforcement agencies, lets officials enter information about people, groups and incidents. The data can then be searched and linked, with charts that draw lines to illustrate interconnections.
The company's sales model on its Web site has a gripping new pitch: terrorism. The demo charts some of the known whereabouts of Mohamed Atta and other Sept. 11 hijackers, as well as several onetime terrorist suspects.
In Denver, a panel appointed by the mayor concluded that the police had failed to understand both the power and the pitfalls of the software. "I don't think they had a clue what the capacity of this was and what they were doing with it, honestly," said Jean Dubofsky, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice and member of the panel, which concluded that not one of the 3,400 police records could be legitimately retained.
Justice Dubofsky's panel recommended some strict guidelines for intelligence gathering, similar to those that the New York police have told a federal court they want removed. The guidelines have been adopted, but otherwise, the panel could find no real harm done, even in the misuse of the software program.
"This is the kind of program that could have been very helpful before Sept. 11," said Justice Dubofsky. "It's also a very powerful tool that can cause problems for people. If you're going to use it, you use it very carefully."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:13 PM
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MotherJones.com / News / Feature
Chaos and Constitution
With his country teetering on the brink of disaster, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez clings to power -- thanks primarily to the passionate support of the nation's poor.
Barry C. Lynn
January/February 2003 Venezuela, strike, strikes, Chavez, Chávez, unrest, Caracas
You can buy a plastic-bound copy of the Venezuelan Constitution for 60 cents, a leather-clad copy for $3, a coffee-table edition for $5. Not that you really need a copy of your own, since someone standing near you on the subway in Caracas will have one in his pocket. Or you can always listen to one of the ongoing debates at a downtown park. "Look at this article," someone will shout, and a half dozen people will flip through the constitution's 35,000 words and 350 articles to find the pertinent passage. "Yes," someone else will cry out. "But this one here is more to the point."
Leila Escobar, a lab technician in her early 30s, carries a pocket-size copy of the new constitution, bound in blue plastic. I meet her late one morning in Nueva Grenada, a grimy, run-down neighborhood in the Venezuelan capital, and the mid-October day is unseasonably hot. As a passing cloud offers relief, Escobar pauses to wipe the sweat from her face with a red handkerchief. She has walked seven miles already, near the head of a march by hundreds of thousands who have come out in support of President Hugo Chávez. It has been six months since Chávez was ousted briefly in a coup, and now his opponents -- business leaders, a handful of military officers, almost all of the nation's media -- are once again trying to orchestrate his removal. So Escobar and other chavistas have taken to the streets, vowing to protect the president -- with their bodies, if necessary.
The reason for their support has everything to do with the little blue book Escobar carries. In one of his first acts as president, Chávez held a nationwide referendum on the constitution that effectively redrew the political boundaries of Venezuela from the ground up. Over the past four years, through a series of new laws and programs, he has mobilized the poor to participate in what had always been a top-down, two-party political system dominated by the country's upper and middle classes. "The president has brought us hope, and he has brought us democracy," says Escobar. "They will not take him from us."
Like most Venezuelans, Escobar has plenty of reason to be dissatisfied. Since Chávez won election in 1998, even many of his staunchest supporters believe he has mismanaged the economy and picked needless fights with the opposition. Under his leadership, Venezuela has fallen into severe recession: Factories are shuttered, inflation is soaring, and credit has disappeared. The government sits atop the largest reserve of oil in the hemisphere, yet upwards of 40 percent of Venezuelans still live in poverty. But despite the widespread economic misery, what upsets Escobar most is that Venezuela's rich want Chávez out of power, now. Chávez, she says, is the only leader who has ever cared for Venezuela's poor. "The rich have always had so much, and we, nothing," she explains as thousands of marchers -- mostly of mestizo or African descent -- surge past, blowing whistles, singing, waving flags. "Now Chávez wants the rich still to have, but us too, a little."
Since the demonstration in October, tensions in Venezuela have escalated to the brink of civil war. A nationwide general strike, called by Chàvez opponents, has stretched into its third week. Almost every day, it seems, some sort of protest disrupts life in Caracas -- mass demonstrations, street riots, clashes between government supporters and Chàvez critics. In recent weeks, Chàvez has ordered the military to take over oil tankers whose crews refused to deliver their cargo, and the Bush administration has weighed in, calling for early elections. For the United States, the stakes in this struggle are high. Venezuela is America's fourth-largest supplier of oil, providing nearly 15 percent of all U.S. imports. With the Bush administration authorized to wage a war in Iraq that could destabilize oil supplies in the Middle East, Venezuela's importance to the U.S. economy can scarcely be overstated. "We are married to Venezuela, for better or worse," says Stephen Johnson, a Latin America analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Yet Venezuela's government remains in the hands of a man who has become one of the most vocal -- and effective -- opponents of U.S. interests abroad. Chávez, with his red berets and revolutionary rhetoric, does far more than talk and dress the role of a second Castro. In 1999, he banned U.S. aircraft from flying over Venezuela to patrol for drugs in neighboring Colombia. A year later, he undercut efforts to isolate Iraq by becoming the first head of state since the Gulf War to visit Saddam Hussein, whom he called "a brother." He took the lead in rejuvenating OPEC, convincing member nations to slash production and thereby quadruple the price of oil. And he has stalled U.S. efforts to enact the Free Trade Area of the Americas, slowing negotiations that would extend the provisions of NAFTA throughout the hemisphere.
Given Chávez's record, it was scarcely a surprise that the Bush administration was quick to recognize what it demurely called the "change of government" in Caracas last April, when Chávez was temporarily removed from office. After a protest march outside the Miraflores presidential palace erupted in a shoot-out that left 19 dead, the military abruptly placed Chávez under arrest. It soon became clear that high-ranking officials in the Bush administration had been in close contact with those plotting the coup -- including Pedro Carmona, the Venezuelan businessman who briefly replaced Chávez. But international pressure, coupled with massive demonstrations by the poor, returned Chávez to office within two days.
Since then, the Bush administration has forged an uneasy truce with Chávez, issuing a statement that it will not support any "illegal or violent actions" against his government. With the election in October of leftist Lula da Silva as president of Brazil, Chávez is not the only South American leader who worries Bush. But there's little doubt that after Iraq, Venezuela is the oil-rich country where the White House would most welcome "regime change." For now, most of Chávez's opponents have been careful not to advocate more violence, demanding instead an immediate vote to decide whether he should step down. They portray Chávez as a corrupt authoritarian who represses his own people. His government is but a bubble, they believe; touch it again and it will pop.
If Chávez is ousted, however, it will not be because he is a brutal dictator. He may enjoy sparring with the United States -- after the election of Lula, he declared that Brazil would join Cuba and Venezuela in forming "an axis of good" -- but in the four years since he took office, his "revolution" has had more to do with de Tocqueville than Marx. Efforts to redistribute wealth have been few. Opposition political parties, as well as the press, operate freely in Venezuela, and the federal police -- once among the most feared forces in South America -- have not hindered even those advocating outright rebellion. And for the first time in Venezuelan history, ordinary citizens are being encouraged to create and elect local councils, to work with local officials to improve their neighborhoods, to get directly involved in their government. Acting together, these are the people who have become the single most powerful group in Venezuela. These are the people who, in many ways, have made themselves the real sovereigns of Venezuela's oil.
A few days after the chavista rally, I climb a mountainside to Hoyo de la Puerta, one of the shantytowns that ring Caracas. Here, on either side of a highway, raw brick houses with green corrugated roofs cut into high coastal rainforests that are home to foxes and sloths, snakes and hummingbirds. Some residents work in the city, some grow avocados and oranges, many are unemployed.
Rosa de Peña moved her family of eight here in 1972, when the government bulldozed her oceanside house to clear space for an airport runway. Chávez has provided many neighborhoods with government funds to build sewers, open clinics, and teach residents to read, but the residents of Hoyo de la Puerta are long accustomed to making do on their own. As de Peña, now 75, makes her way down an eroded pathway in her three-inch heels, brown flowered dress, and tinkling steel necklace, she eagerly points out the many small works of her neighbors. Here, a family poured concrete on a steep stretch of path. Here, people strung electric lines through the trees to their homes. Here, a man built a house entirely of stone gathered in the valley below. But at a tiny creek, where seven-year-old Raquel Josefina Pérez bathes, de Peña's pride fails her. After years of promises by local officials, the neighborhood still has no fresh water, and its 500 children must still make do with sharing 120 desks in a tiny, windowless school. That's why Raquel is here at ten o'clock in the morning on a school day. "She does not fit," de Peña says.
For most Venezuelans, daily life has not improved in the material sense since Chávez took office. Yet when people gather in neighborhoods like Hoyo de la Puerta, the talk seldom centers on the price of food or the lack of health care. Instead, what excites them is the new constitution, drafted by a popularly elected assembly in 1999 and approved by an overwhelming vote in December of that year. A somewhat haphazard amalgam, the document protects minority rights, permits people to claim title to their farms and homes, and expands political participation at the grassroots level. De Peña, for example, is particularly excited by a new law that gives citizens the right to take part in the kind of urban planning that drove her from her home 30 years ago. "Before, the government could come and do whatever they wanted to us," she says, pulling a newsprint copy of the law from her purse and waving it about. "But this paper gives the community a voice. This law forces the authorities to listen."
The issue of land ownership, especially, inspires poor residents to praise Chávez. As is true of about half the people of Caracas, most here do not hold legal title to the houses in which they live, or to the lots underneath. Some say they bought their land years ago. Others admit they simply took the land and built on it. Now, a new law permits them to "regularize" their ownership by registering their claim.
Indelgard Vargas, an unemployed engineer and father of two small children, says land ownership is partly a matter of self-respect. "It is better to own a little plot," he says, "than to trespass on a great expanse." But it also has practical consequences. For the first time, the poor will be able to sell their lots, protect them in court, or mortgage them with a bank. Chávez, the revolutionary, promises to make the poor into property owners -- and, in the process, he has already given them a sense of entitlement as citizens. "How can you demand service from the mayor when you don't pay property taxes?" says Vargas. "And how can you pay any taxes if you don't own any property?"
Hugo Chávez burst into Venezuelan politics in 1992 very much uninvited, as the mastermind of a coup attempt that saw tanks roll right to the gates of Miraflores. Chávez, at the time a 38-year-old colonel, coordinated a nationwide military uprising against then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had implemented an austerity program that seemed to fall hardest on the poor. The government quickly put down the rebellion, which left 70 dead, and Chávez surrendered within hours, asking only that he be granted a chance to speak to his supporters over national television. The time for revolution would come, he promised them: "New possibilities will arise again, and the country will be able to move forward to a better future." On screen for less than a minute, his rough-hewn manner and straight talk captured the public's imagination, and he emerged a hero.
Two years in prison only buffed Chávez's image, as did his efforts to embrace civilian-style politics and to stuff his stout frame into a business suit. His 56 percent showing in the 1998 presidential election set a record, but it was his 80 percent popularity rating that stunned Venezuela's political establishment. There are many reasons why most of the country's elite have come to hate Chávez -- the declining economy, his refusal to compromise with opponents, his grandiloquent gestures that remind some of Mussolini. "Just the way Chávez speaks is so polarizing he makes it impossible for anyone to work with him," says Francisco Toro, an analyst with the economic information firm Veneconomia. Many of Chávez's supporters also fault him for aggravating an already tense situation. "He's an idiot," one chavista tells me flatly. "But he's our idiot."
Yet much of the hatred for Chávez arises from visceral class antipathy. The son of small-town schoolteachers, Chávez is a powerfully built mestizo with a wide, almost meaty face and thick hands. He's the sort of man that upper-class Venezuelans expect to see hauling sacks of concrete at a construction site or driving a bus, not running the country. Many refuse even to sit in the same room as Chávez, let alone debate the details of macroeconomic policy or how to divvy up scarce state funds.
For anyone who knew Venezuela during the years of the oil boom, as I did as a foreign correspondent during the late 1980s, the current level of political polarization is shocking. For three decades after the last dictator fell in 1958, the country was often held up as Latin America's model democracy. There were two powerful political parties, both with a strong base of support among the upper and middle classes, both able to rally large masses of the poor via well-honed patronage systems. It was, everyone liked to say, just like the United States.
This system served the country's elite well, rewarding them with highly lucrative monopolies in everything from beer bottling to food canning to domestic airlines. It also did well by the millions of immigrants who came from Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s and 1950s. These people managed most of Venezuela's industries and service companies, and filled most professional positions. And when the big oil dollars started flowing in the early 1970s, it was a system that organized one of the longest-running fiestas of the 20th century. Awash in a seeming sea of money, Venezuelan elites built themselves wide highways, a sparkling subway, a glittering array of office towers and luxury apartments, a beautiful national theater. They imported great chefs, danced in glamorous clubs, vacationed in Paris, annexed large chunks of Miami. Jeep Wagoneers, bottles of Johnny Walker Black, kilos of French cheese -- all were heavily subsidized with public money.
In February 1989, the era of black gold came to a sudden, violent end. Oil prices had been falling for years, and everyone knew the party had to slow. But when the Pérez government tried to pass much of the bill on to the country's poor through higher bus fares and bread prices, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. At first the mobs burned buses, then they looted and burned stores, then they looted the apartments and houses of anyone who seemed to have more. Scores died in battles among neighbors. And when the army came, many hundreds more were shot down. Yet thousands of people refused to go home, even after soldiers opened fire with automatic rifles. In some neighborhoods, mobs armed only with sticks and rocks repeatedly charged ranks of terrified soldiers trucked in from the countryside. No one knows exactly how many people died, but many estimates put the total at well over 1,000. "The Caracazo," as the riot was called, was the single bloodiest uprising in Latin America in the last half century.
By taking to the streets, however, Venezuela's poor became a force that had to be reckoned with. What Chávez has done, through the new constitution, is to start a process of formalizing and solidifying their political power, channeling their anger through political institutions rather than the streets. "Venezuela is a time bomb that can explode at any moment," Chávez said when the constitution was approved. "It is our task, through the power of the vote, to defuse it now." Chávez threatens Venezuela's elite because he wants to turn the mob of February 1989 into what he likes to call el soberano -- "the sovereign citizen." Which is reason enough, in a country where the poor and working class form a solid majority of the voting population, for the elite to want Chávez out.
It's another hot day in mid-October, and the opposition is mounting a huge march of its own. The occasion is the six-month anniversary of Chávez's two-day fall from power, and a few hundred thousand people are marching from the leafy, affluent neighborhoods of eastern Caracas toward the squalid center of the city. It's a big crowd, and noisy, and mostly white. There are housewives, insurance salesmen, lawyers, factory managers, and bar owners, as well as students and assembly-line workers and clerks. There are kids on skateboards and roller blades and bicycles. People blow whistles and bang pots as they almost dance along the route, giving the event a feel more of carnival parade than political protest.
But the passions are very real. "Chávez has to go -- today," says Jorge Laje, a former mechanic who now drives a taxi. Laje once considered him- self a leftist, and in the 1970s he fled to Venezuela to escape from Argentina's right-wing military government. But now he has a house, two children, and -- until the recent recession -- a comfortable middle-class life. "Chávez has destroyed the economy, he has destroyed the country," Laje says. "The only solution is that he go now."
Democratic Action and COPEI, the two political parties that long dominated Venezuelan politics, have all but collapsed in recent years, and opponents of Chávez now have no real leaders or political platform. What they have is money, and they are voting with their bank accounts and passports. Since Chávez took office, tens of thousands of upper- and middle-class Venezuelans have fled the country, many to the United States. Last year they were on pace to remove an estimated $8 billion from the economy -- a staggering 8 percent of the annual gross domestic product.
They also control the media. All of Venezuela's private television stations and national newspapers are owned by the opposition, and all are employed to deliver an unadulterated flow of anti-Chávez propaganda in the form of news, popular music, even soap operas. The distortions can be dramatic. Today's anti-Chávez march is covered by all four TV channels from five in the morning until midnight. The pro-Chávez march three days later -- though twice as large -- is ignored entirely by three of the channels, and covered only sporadically by the fourth. (The American media also played up the anti-Chávez march, inflating its turnout to a million.) The marchers and the media are demanding that a popular referendum on the president be held immediately. They also call on European courts to indict him for crimes against humanity, as Spain did with Pinochet.
It is this charge of repression that most infuriates Chávez's supporters. Not a single leader of the April coup, they note, is in jail, even though some of them continue to openly advocate his overthrow. Not so long ago, the same could not be said for many of the poor who spoke out against Venezuela's old regime. Even at the height of the good times, the country's democracy was a preserve of the upper and middle classes, and it was protected at gunpoint. Anyone who tried to oppose the government from outside the two-party system ran a risk of being arrested, beaten, or killed by the National Guard or the federal police known as the DISIP. The DISIP sported black leather jackets and tall black boots, and the attire was more than a fashion statement.
Juan Contreras was a college student in the 1980s. He was also a member of a left-wing party considered "subversive" by the government. The DISIP and the National Guard routinely broke into his apartment -- 46 times in all, he says. Often they arrested him; sometimes they beat him. These days, Contreras places his faith in community organizing rather than party politics. A 39-year-old social worker, he travels around Venezuela to help poor farmers claim title to their land. He also leads a left-oriented group in the 23 de Enero housing project, a collection of immense and decrepit apartment blocks that rise on hills just west of the presidential palace. The group polices the projects at night, raises money to make needed repairs, and helps the elderly get medicine. "It has been years since any political party did anything for us," says Contreras. "We have to fight for our community by ourselves, every day."
Contreras doesn't expect much in the way of material help from the government -- but he is grateful to Chávez for calling off the police. The DISIP no longer visit his house, nor do they break up public meetings at the housing project as they did in the past. The president, Contreras says, has created a political environment in which the poor can assemble without fear of reprisals. On this day, a group of neighbors at 23 de Enero has organized a dance to raise money to fix an elevator in the 14-story Apartment Block 28. "For the first time," Contreras says, "we can breathe."
It is one thing, of course, to print a constitution, and another entirely to make it work. If oil prices drop, or if Chávez is overthrown, Venezuela could experience an explosion of violence that would make the Caracazo uprising look tame by comparison. Over the long run, however, the greatest danger is that the government will simply lack the resources and wherewithal to build democratic institutions that allow ordinary citizens to have their say, and that they will lose faith in democracy itself. The constitution raised people's expectations; Chávez now pleads for their patience. "Venezuela is a garden that was destroyed," he says. "You can't expect all of our tomatoes to be beautiful and shiny right away."
At the local level, the new constitution encourages poor communities to create district councils to decide neighborhood affairs. Venezuela has no tradition of electing councils that are open to all parties -- or to people of no party -- so building them means starting at the very bottom. In the neighborhood of Petare, which includes some of the poorest and most violent barrios in Caracas, Alejandrina Reyes is going door to door with a small team of city workers and student volunteers. The goal is to speak with every adult in each district of roughly 3,000 people, to explain how residents can elect a council of 12 representatives. "It takes two months or more of almost full-time attention to get one community ready to vote," Reyes says. "And we've only been working with the easy communities, the ones where people have already set up associations and cooperatives." Then she smiles. "It's slow, but the word is really getting out."
One of the first to heed the call was Gloria Baroso. Only 40, Baroso has six children and four grandchildren, and has been on her own since her husband left home seven years ago. She runs a cooperative bakery in the El Carmen section of Petare, and also helps out as a nurse when people in the community take sick. Now she holds a seat on the new district council.
Baroso knows that before Chávez, it would have been unthinkable for a single mother who bakes bread for a living to hold elected office in Venezuela. In the street in front of the cooperative, she wipes her hands on her apron and sighs. Even before she joined the council, she had too much to do. "But it's worth it," she says. Already, she has seen a profound change. "The Venezuelan people are not the same people they were even a few years ago," she says. "We know our rights. And no matter what the rich do to Chávez, this is something they can never erase."
Barry C. Lynn lived and worked in Venezuela in the late 1980s during the last years of the oil boom as a staff reporter for Agence France-Presse.
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 12:13 PM
Who gets the water? The monkey that has the club. Unarmed creature dies of thirst. This lesson from prehistory opens the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For the Odyssey 2003, President Bush has announced a military budget of one billion dollars a day. The arms industry is the only investment worthy of confidence.
The ruling powers of the planet reason with bombs. They are power itself, a genetically modified power, a gigantic Frankenpower that humiliates nature: It exercises its freedom to convert air into filth and its right to leave humanity without a home; it calls these horrors errors, flattens whoever gets in its way, is deaf to all warnings, and breaks whatever it touches.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 10:35 AM
White House know a lot about gaining power, but not much about what to do with it.
December 20, 2002
Quo Vadis, Karl?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
he day after the Republican triumph in the midterm elections, a jubilant Trent Lott held a celebratory press conference. "Let's roll!" he exulted. (Good taste is not one of Mr. Lott's strong points.)
Six weeks later, we have to ask: Roll where (aside from Baghdad)? The storm that has broken over Mr. Lott's head is justified. But it may also reflect buyers' remorse: post-election polls suggest broad public unease about where Mr. Lott's party is taking us.
It's not even clear what the Bush administration wants to accomplish now that it has full control. Until now the administration has been all politics and no policy; John J. DiIulio tells us that there is a "complete lack of a policy apparatus," that all decisions are made by the political arm. For the past two years domestic policy has consisted of little more than checking off the boxes on a wish list drawn up circa 1999.
Meanwhile, as problems that weren't anticipated in 1999 have arisen, the administration has done as little as possible, as late as possible.
This has been true even in the areas where George W. Bush gets highest marks from voters. Remember that the administration repeatedly rejected calls for a homeland security agency, changing its mind only when Coleen Rowley went public with tales of intelligence failures. And a growing chorus of critics say that hardly anything real has been done to make the country safer.
Similarly, the administration tried to prevent any independent inquiry into what went wrong on Sept. 11, and how to avoid future attacks. Then, when he could no longer avoid an inquiry, Mr. Bush did his best to undermine that inquiry's credibility by choosing Henry Kissinger, of all people, to head it.
And then there's corporate reform. At first the administration opposed doing anything. Then, after WorldCom blew up, it agreed to a modest reform bill — only to undermine the bill's credibility both by trying to renege on promises to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission with adequate funds, and by pressuring Harvey Pitt not to choose a real reformer to head a crucial new panel.
Finally, there's economic policy. Fears that the economy would suffer a "jobless recovery" similar to that of the first Bush administration are no longer hypothetical: over the past year G.D.P. has grown, but employment has continued to shrink, and the risk that the U.S. will slide into a Japanese-style pattern of slow growth and deflation no longer seems remote.
Again, the response has been to do as little as possible. As Congress failed to agree on an extension of unemployment benefits — which means that 800,000 families will be cut off on Dec. 28 — the administration simply stood on the sidelines. Last weekend, too late to help those families, Mr. Bush finally spoke up in favor of an extension, but failed to say whether he favored the merely cosmetic House plan or the more serious Senate plan; those who follow the issue know that this makes all the difference.
Will things improve now that there's a new economic team? John Snow seems to be Paul O'Neill without the charm. Stephen Friedman will probably be more vigorous than his predecessor; The Washington Post reports that one of Mr. Bush's frequent complaints about Larry Lindsey was that he didn't get enough physical exercise. But Mr. Friedman will have plenty of time to work out; it has been made clear that his duties as economic adviser don't include actually giving any economic advice.
Meanwhile, if the trial balloons floated by the administration are any guide to the forthcoming "stimulus" package, it will consist of more items from the checklist: making the tax cut permanent, reducing taxes on dividends. Nice stuff if you make more than $300,000 a year and have a net worth in the millions, but pretty much irrelevant to the actual problems of the economy — except the long-run deficit, which will get even worse. It seems that Karl Rove and his merry band of Mayberry Machiavellis are still calling the shots.
It may be that the bad few weeks the administration has just had were the result of random events. But I think the public is finally waking up to the fact that the people in the White House know a lot about gaining power, but not much about what to do with it.
Copyright The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:28 AM
No "Rich" child shall be left behind
Larry Elliott and Charlotte Denny
Saturday December 21, 2002
The Guardian
Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, last night blocked a global deal to provide cheap drugs to poor countries, following intense lobbying of the White House by America's pharmaceutical giants.
Faced with furious opposition from all the other 140 members of the World Trade Organisation, the US refused to relax global patent laws which keep the price of drugs beyond reach of most developing countries.
Talks at the WTO's Geneva headquarters collapsed last night after the White House ruled out a deal which would have permitted a full range of life-saving drugs to be imported into Africa, Asia and Latin America at cut-price costs.
"The United States has announced it cannot join the consensus," the Brazilian negotiator, Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, said.
Sources in Geneva said last night that the negotiating strategy had come straight from the White House, with Mr Cheney seizing the reins from America's trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick.
Mr Zoellick helped broker a deal on affordable drugs at the WTO's meeting last year in Doha under which developing countries were promised they would be able to override patent laws in the interest of public health.
However, America's drug industry has fought tooth and nail to impose the narrowest possible interpretation of the Doha declaration, and wants to restrict the deal to drugs to combat HIV/Aids, malaria, TB and a shortlist of other diseases unique to Africa.
Trade envoys said that the negotiations were likely to resume next month, but last night's failure could push the entire Doha agreement, which covers everything from cutting farm subsidies to introducing more competition into services, to the brink of collapse.
Earlier in the day America's drug industry had expressed confidence that its lobbying of the Bush administration would pay off.
"I don't have any indication that the US is changing its position on that at all," Shannon Herzfeld of PhRMA, the organisation representing leading US pharmaceutical companies, told Inside US Trade, the specialist trade magazine.
The industry argues that it spends billions a year on drug research and that if copycat companies can override their patents and manufacture drugs at bargain prices, research will dry up.
However, aid agencies lobbying on behalf of poor countries pointed out that the cut-price drugs will only be sold in countries which cannot afford to buy them at first-world prices. They accused the White House of being in the pocket of big US drug corporations.
"The joke in Geneva this morning is that they couldn't make a decision because the CEOs of Merck and Pfizer were still in bed," said Jamie Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a US lobby group. "George Bush is arguing that diseases his own children receive treatment for are off limits to poor children in poor countries."
Aside from HIV/Aids, drug companies do almost no research into the diseases on the US shortlist. It excludes diseases like cancer, asthma and pneumonia which are killers in the developing as well as the developed world.
"The drug industry is saying that any disease that is profitable [to big pharmaceutical companies] won't be included," said Mr Love.
A deal on cheap drugs is seen as essential to keep developing countries engaged in the trade round, which was started at the behest of the US and the EU just over a year ago.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:17 AM
Democrats are afraid to take up this issue, since they have their own racists.
December 21, 2002
Bonfire of the Vanities
By FRANK RICH
here's only one thing left for Trent Lott to do now. He will have to become a Democrat.
In his doomed but endlessly inventive effort to grovel his way back to political favor by taking positions way to the left of his own party, the senator came out for "across the board" affirmative action and pledged to proclaim the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation some kind of quasi-Kwanzaa holiday. If the Lott panderthon had lasted into the weekend, he might yet have endorsed Al Sharpton's theory of the Tawana Brawley case or popped up on Comedy Central to host a holiday festival of "Sanford and Son" reruns. Tom Wolfe couldn't make this stuff up.
But of course he already did. The hypocrisy and cynicism we saw in the Lott affair from nearly all parties — political and otherwise — was "Bonfire of the Vanities" all over again. The supposed cause of our new racial uproar, the senator's remarks at Strom Thurmond's centennial birthday party, rapidly became irrelevant to the big picture (as did the clueless majority leader himself). Is Mr. Lott a racist? According to Jim Jeffords, former Senator Paul Simon and nearly everyone else who knows him, he's not. But after awhile that no longer mattered. Mr. Lott had become, in the words of a widely quoted (but unidentified) White House hand, a "walking piñata." And a most convenient one. Republicans, Democrats and the press alike could all prove our moral superiority, cost-free, by stringing up a certifiable fool.
But we shouldn't congratulate ourselves quite so fast. The Lott story didn't break this month — it broke four years ago. Where was the press then? Where were the Democrats? From December 1998 until the following spring, a black columnist at New York's Daily News, the politically nonpartisan Stanley Crouch, repeatedly laid out goods on Mr. Lott more damaging than the senator's latest transgression: his long and intimate association with the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization whose initials are not a phonic echo of K.K.K. for nothing. A few newspaper reporters and columnists recounted the same history, but Mr. Crouch, instead of winning a Pulitzer, was largely ignored by big guns in the media as well as by political leaders of both parties.
Mr. Lott's new offense almost fell through the journalistic cracks as well. Though his embrace of Mr. Thurmond's past took place in a room full of Washington reporters and politicos and was broadcast on C-Span, it was not at first reported in any paper (or on any evening TV news broadcast), even those that did cover the Thurmond party. Why? It may be because the spectacle of a leading Republican backslapping with unreconstructed Dixiecrats did not initially strike anyone as big news.
When Jeb Bush succinctly condemned Mr. Lott for the crime of being "damaging to the Republican Party" — as opposed to, say, being damaging to black people — he was telling the truth. Mr. Lott would not have hurt his party were he an anomaly within it. What made him toxic to the Republican fraternity was his careless revelation of its darkest predilections.
Among the Lott transgressions that resurfaced during his trial-by-media was an occasion in the 1990's, cited by Robert George in The New York Post, when he summoned black staffers abruptly into his personal office "to provide `color' for photos in a media profile." Such a media strategy is no different from that of the 2000 Republican convention, where the party filled the stage with a "Soul Train" jamboree of break dancers and gospel singers to provide "color" for its own image. The goal of that minstrel show — as well as of the strategic planting of black faces in likely TV shots on the floor — was to belie the fact that black delegates at that convention made up 4 percent, a historic low for the party (even lower than at the Pat Buchanan-Pat Robertson convention in Houston in 1996).
Mr. Lott's public display of nostalgia for the South's racist past is hardly unique either. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, gave an interview to a neo-Confederate magazine, Southern Partisan, in 1999 in which he vowed "to do more" to defend the legacy of Jefferson Davis, a Lott hero as well, from anyone who would smear him for having "some perverted agenda." (Slavery, perhaps?) Some of Mr. Ashcroft's actions in public life have matched his words. When he was Missouri attorney general in the 1980's, a federal judge threatened to hold him and his state in contempt for their "continual delay and failure to comply" with a landmark voluntary desegregation plan in St. Louis, according to a Washington Post report in January 2001. When running for governor, Mr. Ashcroft even boasted of having done "everything in my power legally" to fight that plan. This was 35 years after Mr. Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy.
In its effort to portray Mr. Lott as a one-of-a-kind bad apple, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page said on Thursday: "Republicans may once have used race to polarize the electorate, especially in the South. But that strategy long ago stopped being useful." Tell that to George W. Bush, who beat John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary after what Newsweek called "a smear campaign" of leaflets, e-mails and telephone calls calling attention to the McCains' "black child" (an adopted daughter from Bangladesh). Or to Sonny Perdue, the new Republican governor of Georgia, elected in part by demagoguing the sanctity of the Confederate flag.
Long ago stopped being useful? Tell that to Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Bush, who appeared at Bob Jones University in 1999 and 2000. "Of all universities in America," asked the commentator Fareed Zakaria on ABC last weekend, "why is it that Republicans have felt the need to make a pilgrimage to the one university that bans interracial dating?" Now that Mr. Lott is no longer the issue, will any of the conservatives who called for his decapitation answer that question?
The point here is not that these Republican leaders are racists, or that all (or most) Republicans are racist, or that all racists are Republicans. "These are not normal Republican ideas," wrote the conservative author David Brooks, in a characteristically thoughtful piece about Mr. Lott in this week's Newsweek. And he's right. But there are still too many Republican politicians who believe they can pander to whatever racist voters are out there without being called on it. When they are, they cringe — not so much because they care about losing their few black votes but because they care about losing soccer moms who are offended by race-baiting. "Elections are settled in the suburbs nowadays, 43 percent of the vote," said George Will in condemning Mr. Lott. It's that political reality, not any moral imperative, that mandated the majority leader's death sentence.
President Bush is no bigot, and as he likes to remind us, some of his best employees are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. He is in favor of something called "affirmative access" — which has led to a grand total of zero black Republican Congressmen in the next Congress. "Compassionate conservatism" seems less a program than a p.r. strategy to provide cover for the likes of a Lott or an Ashcroft.
Asked this week what the administration has done for black Americans, Ari Fleischer used the kind of examples we heard from Mr. Lott. He said that "the president looks forward to going to Africa" (how patronizing can you be?) and wants "to double funding for historically black colleges and universities" (weren't the Republicans for color-blind policies rather than a politically correct form of de facto segregation?). Mr. Fleischer also said that the president sees education as "the next civil rights movement." If so, Mr. Bush is not that movement's courageous leader; in his education bill, he dumped the tiny school voucher provision that Republican polls say many black families want.
Black voters are not fooled by such empty theatrics. For all the "diversity" at his convention and his rhetorical "compassion," Mr. Bush drew a third less of the black vote than his father and Bob Dole did. The White House's main concern now is that white voters be fooled. So Republicans are trying to create a moral equivalence between Democratic racial lapses and their own, hoping that Robert Byrd's long-renounced K.K.K. past and use of the word "nigger" will somehow blur their own recent record. Bill Frist is the ideal new Senate majority leader, because his own genuinely good works in Africa and "compassionate conservative" geniality will camouflage a voting pattern that, on any issue touching black Americans, is virtually the same as Mr. Lott's.
I almost feel sorry for Trent Lott. Despite all the hyperbole that preceded his demise, he is no Bull Connor or David Duke or even Jesse Helms. He's just the guy who had to die before anyone looked too closely at other, even more powerful politicians' sins.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:56 AM
Thursday, December 19, 2002
* * * *
True to form, British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter did not waste words when he picked up an honorary degree from Italy's University of Turin.
Joining international literary figures such as novelist-essayist Gore Vidal, (The Observer) novelist Kurt Vonnegut and critic-historian Edward Said, whose scathing critiques of U.S. foreign policy since Sept. 11 have been widely published in the international press, Pinter said he had felt "very glad to be alive" after recovering from cancer earlier this year. But he remembered emerging "from a personal nightmare," only to step into "an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare -- the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence -- the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world."
Pinter's acceptance speech was published in its entirety in the United Kingdom's Daily Telegraph.
Recalling that George W. Bush had said, "If you are not with us, you are against us" and "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders," Pinter observed, "Quite right. Look in the mirror, chum. That's you.
"America believes that the 3,000 deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter," the writer said. "They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence."
He pointed out numerous cases of U.S.-aided destruction that are "never referred to," including the American military's use of depleted uranium in the Persian Gulf War, whose resulting radiation levels, he said, led to Iraqi babies being born without brains, eyes or genitals.
He cited hundreds of thousands of deaths that have occurred over the years in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti in Washington-supported actions. And he mentioned "the desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest," as well as 3,000 more recent deaths in Afghanistan and "the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through American and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines."
Pinter reminded listeners that "people do not forget" the deaths of their fellow citizens, torture and mutilation, injustice, oppression or "the terrorism of mighty powers."
"They not only don't forget; they also strike back," he said. "The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of America over many years, in all parts of the world."
* * * *
For George "Poppy" Bush, it was "the wimp factor." For George W., it's the image of an intellectual lightweight.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:37 PM
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56922,00.html
02:00 AM Dec. 19, 2002 PT
Fearing that the Patriot Act will curtail Americans' civil rights, municipalities across the country are passing resolutions to repudiate the legislation and protect their residents from a perceived abuse of authority by the federal government.
On Tuesday, Oakland became the 20th municipality to pass a resolution barring its employees -- from police officer to librarian -- from collaborating with federal officials who may try to use their new power to investigate city residents.
Rushed through Congress a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Patriot Act fundamentally changes Americans' legal rights. Among other things, the act allows the government to secretly monitor political groups, seize library records and tap phone and Internet connections.
The federal government says the expanded powers are needed to prevent terrorist attacks; but critics say the legislation erodes freedoms protected by the Constitution. The Justice Department did not return calls for comment on this article.
A rallying point behind the recent groundswell has been the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, run by Massachusetts activist Nancy Talanian.
Her site includes a blueprint for communities that want to pass anti-Patriot Act resolutions, based on her successful lobbying efforts for such legislation in Northhampton, Massachusetts. The site has gotten over a million hits in the last six months, Talanian said.
Another group to vehemently oppose the act has been librarians. They are now required to divulge patrons' book-borrowing and Internet-surfing habits to federal investigators and are prohibited from making such requests public.
In retaliation, some librarians have called special meetings to educate their communities about the Patriot Act's implications. Others now routinely purge borrowing records and Internet caches. One former librarian devised a series of technically-legal signs to warn patrons of FBI snooping.
"We're Sorry!" states one. "Due to National Security concerns, we are unable to tell you if your Internet surfing habits, passwords and e-mail content are being monitored by federal agents; please act appropriately."
Jessamyn West said she doesn't necessarily expect libraries to use her signs, but she hopes that they'll get people talking.
"Hopefully, they'll make people more aware of what's going on," she said.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:16 PM
Dec. 18, 2002
by Gloria R. Lalumia
Media around the world
1//The Independent, UK--UK TASK FORCE TO HEAD FOR IRAQ IN FOUR WEEKS (A massive British task force will be heading for Iraq within four weeks even if there is no proof that Saddam Hussein's government is in material breach of the UN resolution on weapons of mass destruction. More than 40,000 Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel, as well as about 100 tanks, will contribute to a US-led coalition army of more than 250,000, which could go into action as early as the end of next month.)
2//TurkishPress.com, USA-(PRESS SCAN) U.S. SOLDIERS DO NOT COME (The United States would like to send soldiers to Turkey for a possible operation against Iraq. According to some sources, Turkish soldiers are positive for the coordination and cooperation with U.S. soldiers but negative for their taking position in Turkey.)
- EYES ON IRAQ (U.S. started its military concentration in Northern Iraq for a possible operation against Iraq. A total of 50 TIRs carrying military equipment brought to Incirlik base, entered Northern Iraq from Habur border gate. The government in Turkey this week is on the brink of giving an important decision regarding a possible U.S. operation against Iraq.)
3//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--KURDS VOW: '10,000 MEN IN BAGHDAD' (For the most part, Kurdish leadership has remained tight-lipped about their ultimate ambitions. But occasionally, they have gone on record with candor, and the vision they disclose predicts a potentially chaotic scramble for power once an invasion gets under way.)
4//The Times of India, India--US AID ENCOURAGING PAK TO PURSUE TERRORISM: ADVANI (Asking the international community not to help those nations which practiced terrorism as an instrument of state policy, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani on Tuesday said US economic aid was encouraging Pakistan to pursue it...He said the US economic aid to Pakistan "encouraged it to pursue that policy".)
5//The Moscow Times, Russia--PRESS WATCHDOG SEES KREMLIN CRACKDOWN (Adding its voice to the simmering debate about the role of the media in the theater siege, the Russian Union of Journalists' press freedom watchdog said Tuesday that an assessment of media actions and government response shows the Kremlin is still on a drive to control journalists... Panfilov said the main problem for the media is the overall passiveness of the journalism community. "Unlike journalists in Eastern Europe, Russian journalists never fought for their freedom," Panfilov said. "The freedom was granted to them, and it is being taken away from them. And they are indifferent.")
* * *
1//The Independent 17 December 2002 22:41 GMT
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=362590
UK TASK FORCE TO HEAD FOR IRAQ IN FOUR WEEKS
By Kim Sengupta
18 December 2002
A massive British task force will be heading for Iraq within four weeks even if there is no proof that Saddam Hussein's government is in material breach of the UN resolution on weapons of mass destruction.
More than 40,000 Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel, as well as about 100 tanks, will contribute to a US-led coalition army of more than 250,000, which could go into action as early as the end of next month.
Senior defence officials disclosed yesterday that the deployment was unlikely to wait for evidence that the Iraqis were trying to use subterfuge in their weapons programmes.
A large force parked on Iraq's borders would have a "coercive and persuasive" effect on Baghdad, officials said. And since Iraq had already made its "full declaration" to the UN, the troops were likely to be used for a military strike.
The Ministry of Defence said preparations for a conflict had reached their final stages and contracts for charter ships to carry troops and equipment had already been awarded.
(MORE)
2//TurkishPress.com Anadolu Agency: Monday, December 16, 2002
ANKARA - These are some of the major headlines and their brief stories in Turkey's press on December 16, 2002. The Anadolu Agency does not verify these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
PRESS SCAN
MILLIYET (LIBERAL)
------------------
U.S. SOLDIERS DO NOT COME
The United States would like to send soldiers to Turkey for a possible operation against Iraq. According to some sources, Turkish soldiers are positive for the coordination and cooperation with U.S. soldiers but negative for their taking position in Turkey.
(SNIP)
REFERENDUM SHOULD BE INCLUDED IN CONSTITUTION
Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said that public voting about important subjects and about war should be included in Constitution. However, Deputy Prime Minister Ertugrul Yalcinbayir said that a referendum cannot be done about war. Cicek said, ''Referendum exists in Constitution. It is for a few limited subjects which are given to President.'' adding that taking the view of public about some certain important subjects helps politicians in giving their decisions easier.
TURKIYE (RIGHT)
---------------
EYES ON IRAQ
U.S. started its military concentration in Northern Iraq for a possible operation against Iraq. A total of 50 TIRs carrying military equipment brought to Incirlik base, entered Northern Iraq from Habur border gate. The government in Turkey this week is on the brink of giving an important decision regarding a possible U.S. operation against Iraq. The government has to give an official decision regarding the visit of the American technical delegation which will visit Incirlik, Diyarbakir, Batman, Mus and Malatya Erhac airports which the U.S. wants to use during such an operation.
3//Asia Times Online December 16, 2002
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DL17Ak01.html
KURDS VOW: '10,000 MEN IN BAGHDAD'
By Ian Urbina
This weekend saw the close of an important conference in London of more than 300 delegates from the various groups of the Iraqi opposition forces. The point of the meeting was to present a new image of unity for the fractious and ever-bickering collection of anti-Saddam Hussein organizations. But ironically one of the few things that everyone at the US-sponsored meeting could agree on was that they did not want the US running Baghdad after Saddam. Far less clear was what sort of government they did want.
It was an accomplishment in and of itself that a wide array of organizations attended the two-day meeting. The main Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - who fought each other for years - sat alongside the Iranian-backed Shi'ite group Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI). Also in attendance were the Constitutional Monarchy Movement and the National Accord Movement. One of the main organizers of the event was the Iraqi National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who draws strong backing from Washington.
(SNIP)
There was, however, one important and contentious matter resolved, officially at least. The conference organizers ruled against forming a government-in-waiting. Despite the lobbying of the INC, which contended that forming a transitional government ahead of time would help limit US control of Baghdad post-Saddam, most other parties were skeptical, instead arguing that Chalabi intended to have the US parachute him into leadership. Some groups believe that Chalabi is still plotting behind the scenes, and while the INC strongly denies such accusations, it is also quick to point out the need for a "political authority" to be in place to avoid a "sovereignty vacuum" in Iraq.
The US strongly opposes the formation of a government-in-exile, arguing that it will alienate serving Iraqi generals who might mutiny once a war starts. Surely, the US also does not want to tie its own hands in advance concerning Iraq's political fate, and more importantly the economic status of its oil reserves.
Nevertheless, there are reasons other than the potential US occupation of Iraq for Chalabi and the INC to favor an early settling of the terms of any post-Saddam government. For all of his stated concern over the possibility of a power vacuum, Chalabi is more specifically worried that the Kurds will be the ones to fill it.
For the most part, Kurdish leadership has remained tight-lipped about their ultimate ambitions. But occasionally, they have gone on record with candor, and the vision they disclose predicts a potentially chaotic scramble for power once an invasion gets under way. While touring Iraqi Kurdistan, Chris Kutschera of Middle East Report magazine interviewed a number of high-level Kurdish military personnel and most admitted that it is not just the oil-rich city of Kirkuk - the so-called Kurdish Jerusalem - that the Kurds seek.
(MORE)
4//The Times of India PTI [ TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2002 08:48:58 PM ]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=31587617
US AID ENCOURAGING PAK TO PURSUE TERRORISM: ADVANI
NEW DELHI: Asking the international community not to help those nations which practiced terrorism as an instrument of state policy, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani on Tuesday said US economic aid was encouraging Pakistan to pursue it.
"If the international community does not support us, we expect that they should not help those who are encouraging terrorism," Advani said in reply to a debate on the internal security situation in the Lok Sabha.
"Terrorist organisations are dangerous, but countries encouraging terrorism or pursuing terrorism as their state policy are even more dangerous," he said.
He said the US economic aid to Pakistan "encouraged it to pursue that policy".
(MORE)
5//The Moscow Times Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2002. Page 3
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/12/18/011.html
PRESS WATCHDOG SEES KREMLIN CRACKDOWN
By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
Staff Writer
Adding its voice to the simmering debate about the role of the media in the theater siege, the Russian Union of Journalists' press freedom watchdog said Tuesday that an assessment of media actions and government response shows the Kremlin is still on a drive to control journalists.
"I would like to warn that the position of the Russian media remains alarming," Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations head Oleg Panfilov said at a presentation of the watchdog's report into the October hostage crisis. "The authorities have not given up on their attempts to create new constraints for the work of journalists."
The report -- which for the first time lists all journalists who were taken hostage in the Dubrovka theater and names two who died, former Stavropolskaya Pravda editor Tamara Voinova and Kaliningrad Public Radio director Mikhail Maximov -- concedes that the media bear responsibility for some mistakes made during the crisis. It spells out the initial confusion over crisis policies, cases when hostage-takers were allowed or nearly allowed to speak on the air, when derogatory comments that could have ignited violence in the theater were aired or when journalists allowed themselves to be used as a mouthpiece for the government.
However, the report is highly critical of the government backlash that followed the crisis. The government lambasted the media for their coverage, while parliament swiftly adopted amendments to the media law that, if interpreted broadly, would have crippled the media's ability to criticize the government's actions in crises and coverage of the Chechnya war. After a plea from a wide group of national media managers and rival journalists' associations, President Vladimir Putin vetoed the amendments last month -- but still castigated journalists, saying they had put a priority on ratings rather than human lives.
(MORE)
Panfilov said he was concerned about the Media Industry Committee, a lobby group that is dominated by state-controlled media managers and does not include any representatives of the regional media. The committee, which is developing crisis guidelines for journalists, met last week with top security officials and they agreed to work on the guidelines together. The committee is also drafting a new version of the media law.
Panfilov said the main problem for the media is the overall passiveness of the journalism community. "Unlike journalists in Eastern Europe, Russian journalists never fought for their freedom," Panfilov said. "The freedom was granted to them, and it is being taken away from them. And they are indifferent."
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:14 PM
To the victor go the spoils-rewarding cronies with our tax money
Lawmaker Wants Details On Appointees’ Cash Bonuses
By TIM KAUFFMAN
A leading House Democrat launched an inquiry into the potential impact of the Bush administration’s decision to reinstate bonuses for political appointees who do not require congressional confirmation.
House Minority Whip-elect Steny Hoyer of Maryland sent a letter Dec. 6 to Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James requesting details on how the bonuses will be distributed this year.
He asked for the number of appointees eligible to receive a bonus, the number who receive a bonus or a within-grade pay increase, and the total dollar amount of the bonuses awarded. Hoyer requested the information be broken out by agency.
“We need to take a much closer look at the potential effects of the president’s decision,” Hoyer said in a statement.
The administration’s decision to approve bonuses for political appointees was relayed to department heads in March but only disclosed publicly Dec. 4. The Clinton administration prohibited the practice out of concern that dispensing cash awards to top political advisers and senior agency leaders could appear unethical.
“It was the contention of the last administration that in order to prevent abuse and political patronage, awards given to political appointees should be in a non-monetary form,” Hoyer said in the letter to James.
The change in policy, made public just days after Bush set a lower pay increase for civilian employees than the one favored by Congress, sparked a firestorm of complaints from congressional Democrats. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle of South Dakota and House Minority Leader-elect Nancy Pelosi of California called on Bush to rescind the new bonus policy, while 89 House Democrats sent a letter to Bush expressing their alarm.
Hoyer said he intends to raise the bonus issue with OPM again during the hearing on the agency’s fiscal 2004 budget request.
In a Dec. 4 news briefing, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said about 2,000 political appointees would be eligible for the bonuses, which can top $15,000 a year. White House employees and Senate-confirmed appointees are ineligible.
OPM did not respond to a request for comment on Hoyer’s letter by press time
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:02 PM
Hundreds Are Held After Visits to INS
Mideast boys and men living in the Southland were complying with an order to register.
By Megan Garvey, Martha Groves and Henry Weinstein
Times Staff Writers
December 19 2002
Hundreds of men and boys from Middle Eastern countries were arrested by federal immigration officials in Southern California this week when they complied with orders to appear at INS offices for a special registration program.
The arrests drew thousands of people to demonstrate Wednesday in Los Angeles.
Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesmen refused Wednesday to say how many people the agency had detained, what the specific charges were or how many were still being held. But officials speaking anonymously said they would not dispute estimates by lawyers for detainees that the number across Southern California was 500 to 700. In Los Angeles, up to one-fourth of those who showed up to register were jailed, lawyers said.
The number of people arrested in this region appears to have been considerably larger than elsewhere in the country, perhaps because of the size of the Southland's Iranian population. Monday's registration deadline applied to males 16 and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Men from 13 other nations, mostly in the Mideast and North Africa, are required to register next month.
Many of those arrested, according to their lawyers, had already applied for green cards and, in some instances, had interviews scheduled in the near future. Although they had overstayed their visas, attorneys argue, their clients had already taken steps to remedy the situation and were following the regulations closely.
"These are the people who've voluntarily gone" to the INS, said Mike S. Manesh of the Iranian American Lawyers Assn. "If they had anything to do with terrorism, they wouldn't have gone."
Immigration officials acknowledged Wednesday that many of those taken into custody this week have status-adjustment applications pending that have not yet been acted on.
"The vast majority of people who are coming forward to register are currently in legal immigration status," said local INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice. "The people we have taken into custody ... are people whose non-immigrant visas have expired."
The large number of Iranians among the detainees has angered many in the area's Iranian communities, who organized a demonstration Wednesday at the federal building in Westwood.
At the rally, which police officials estimated drew about 3,000 protesters at its peak, signs bore such sentiments as "What Next? Concentration Camps?" and "Detain Terrorists Not Innocent Immigrants."
The arrests have generated widespread publicity, mostly unfavorable, in the Middle East, said Khaled Dawoud, a correspondent for Al Ahram, one of Egypt's largest dailies. He questioned State Department official Charlotte Beers about the detentions Wednesday after a presentation she made at the National Press Club in Washington. Egyptians are not included in the registration requirement.
Beers, undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, was presenting examples of a U.S. outreach campaign for the Middle East, which includes images of Muslims leading happy lives here. Dawoud asked how that image squared with the "humiliating" arrests in recent days.
"I don't think there is any question that the change in visa policy is going to be seen by some as difficult and, indeed — what was the word you used? — humiliating," Beers said. But, she added, President Bush has said repeatedly that he considers "his No. 1 ... job to be the protection of the American people."
Relatives and lawyers of those arrested locally challenge that rationale for the latest round of detentions.
One attorney, who said he saw a 16-year-old pulled from the arms of his crying mother, called it madness to believe that the registration requirements would catch terrorists.
"His mother is 6 1/2 months pregnant. They told the mother he is never going to come home — she is losing her mind," said attorney Soheila Jonoubi, who spent Wednesday amid the chaos of the downtown INS office attempting to determine the status of her clients.
Jonoubi said that the mother has permanent residence status and that her husband, the boy's stepfather, is a U.S. citizen. The teenager came to the country in July on a student visa and was on track to gain permanent residence, the lawyer said.
Many objected to the treatment of those who showed up for the registration. INS ads on local Persian radio stations and in other ethnic media led many to expect a routine procedure. Instead, the registration quickly became the subject of fear as word spread that large numbers of men were being arrested.
Lawyers reported crowded cells with some clients forced to rest standing up, some shackled and moved to other locations in the night, frigid conditions in jail cells — all for men with no known criminal histories.
Shawn Sedaghat, a Sherman Oaks attorney, said he and his partner, Michelle Taheripour, represent more than 40 people who voluntarily went to register and were detained.
Some, he said, were hosed down with cold water before finding places to sleep on the concrete floors of cells.
Lucas Guttentag, who heads the West Coast office of the American Civil Liberties Union's immigrant rights project, fears the wave of arrests is "a prelude to much more widespread arrests and deportations."
"The secrecy gives rise to obvious concerns about what the INS is doing and whether people's rights are being respected and whether the problems that arose in the aftermath of 9/11 are being repeated now," he said.
Many at Wednesday's protest said they took the day off work to join the rally, because they were shocked by the treatment.
"I came to this country over 40 years ago and got drafted in the Army, and I thought if I die it's for a good cause, defending freedom, democracy and the Constitution," said George Hassan, 65, from the San Fernando Valley.
"Oppressed people come here because of that democracy, that freedom, that Constitution. Now our president has apparently allowed the INS vigilantes to step outside the Constitution."
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, called the detentions doubly disturbing because "a lot of the Iranians are Jews who fled Iran because of persecution, and now they are undergoing similar persecution here.... This is just terrible."
Attorney Ban Al-Wardi, who saw 14 of her 20 clients arrested when she went with them to the registration, said that although everyone understands the need to protect the nation against terrorist attacks, the government's recent action went too far.
"All of our fundamental civil rights have been violated by these actions," she said. "I don't know how far this is going to go before people start speaking up. This is a very dangerous precedent we are setting. What's to stop Americans from being treated like this when they travel overseas?"
Times staff writers Greg Krikorian and Teresa Watanabe in Los Angeles and Johanna Neuman and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 10:06 AM
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
The Evil of Access-History is like waves lapping at a cliff," wrote French historian Henry See. "For centuries nothing happens. Then the cliff collapses
by MARK GREEN
[from the December 30, 2002 issue]
Among the least-discussed numbers from November 5 is $184 million--the amount by which Republican national committees out-spent their Democratic equivalents. And with President Bush loudly beating his war drums, who heard any discussion about the escalating cost of campaigns? Spending in the New York and Pennsylvania gubernatorial elections, for example, tripled within one election cycle.
The evidence that money shouts is mountainous: Ninety-four percent of the time, the bigger-spending Congressional candidate wins--and 98 percent of House incumbents win. The average price of a House seat rose from $87,000 in 1976 to $840,000 in 2000. It cost Ken Livingstone 80 cents a vote to win the London mayoralty last year, compared with Michael Bloomberg's $100 a vote in New York City.
As money metastasizes throughout our political process, the erosion of our democracy should be evident to left and right alike:
§ Special Interests Get Special Access and Treatment. While members publicly and indignantly deny that big contributions often come with strings attached, all privately concede the obvious mutual shakedown--or as one Western senator told me, "Senators are human calculators who can weigh how much money every vote will cost them." Two who violated the usual senatorial omertà gave dispositions in the federal district court arguments on the McCain-Feingold law earlier this month. "Who, after all, can seriously contend," said former Senator Alan Simpson, "that a $100,000 donation does not alter the way one thinks about--and quite possibly votes on--an issue?" Senator Zell Miller bluntly described the daily conversations from fundraising cubicles: "I'd remind the agribusinessman I was on the Agriculture Committee; I'd remind the banker I was on the Banking Committee.... Most large contributors understand only two things: what you can do for them and what you can do to them. I always left that room feeling like a cheap prostitute who'd had a busy day." The access that money buys, of course, doesn't guarantee legislative success, but the lack of it probably guarantees failure.
After 9/11, for example, many legislators thought the argument for energy conservation and reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil was obvious. So Senators John Kerry and John McCain were stunned when their effort to increase fuel-efficiency standards failed 62 to 38--with the average no vote getting $18,000 in donations from auto companies and the average yes vote only $6,000. One senator insisting on anonymity said: "That vote was one of the most politically cowardly things I ever saw in the Senate. We know how to be energy-efficient, and it starts with cars."
§ Fundraising Is a Time Thief. Imagine if someone kidnapped all candidates for state and federal office for half of each day. The story would be bigger than Gary Condit, and would surely lead to calls for tougher penalties against political kidnapping.
Well, there is such a culprit. It's the current system of financing political campaigns, which pits each candidate in a spiraling "arms race," not merely to raise enough money but to raise far more than any rival. One Midwestern senator complained, "Senators used to be here Monday through Friday; now we're lucky to be in mid-Tuesday to Thursday, because Mondays and Fridays are for fundraisers. Also, members loathe voting on controversial issues, because it'll be used against you when you're raising money."
Candidates start to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, trapped in a daily, stultifying repetition they can't escape. As a mayoral candidate I made 30,000 phone calls (that is not a misprint) over two years to lists of potential donors and spoke at 205 of my own fundraising events. It's hard to overstate the physical and psychological stamina required in such an effort, and how little time and energy it leaves for all else.
§ The "Money Primary" Weeds Out Good Candidates. Potential candidates know they have to succeed in not one but two elections: The first, in which contributors "vote" with their dollars, comes long before constituents have their say. And if you don't win round one financially, you might as well not bother with round two; after all, because incumbency attracts money and money entrenches incumbency, no challenger spending under $850,000 won a House seat in 2000. With odds like those, many talented women and men flinch.
§ The "Pay to Play" System Especially Hurts Democratic Candidates and Values. Most Republicans oppose new regulations and taxes out of authentic belief. So they regard the special-interest funding of public elections as a brilliant system: For them, principles and payments go hand in hand. Robert Reich, a former Labor Secretary and recent Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, believes his party is losing its identity as the champion of the average family "because Democrats became dependent on the rich to finance their campaigns. It is difficult to represent the little fellow when the big fellow pays the tab."
Ever wonder why polls show that so many Americans strongly favor higher minimum wages, prescription drug benefits for Medicare, quality daycare, publicly financed Congressional campaigns and stronger environmental protection, even at the cost of higher taxes--yet the political system can't produce any of these? The pay-to-play system is a circuit breaker between popular will and public policy.
Put yourself in an honest Democrat's shoes: What do you do when a big-business donor privately asks you, "So where do you stand on X?" X being something that hugely helps or hurts his economic interests? You realize not only that your answer could immediately affect a large contribution but that the cost of paying for X will fall on taxpayers who are not listening on the phone.
Or suppose you're in government. Once, as the New York City consumer affairs commissioner, I was considering filing a legal action that could cost a Democratic businessman I knew well millions of dollars. I successfully sued, and he did lose millions, and he wouldn't speak to me for a decade. But this outcome did cross my mind as I weighed my decision to prosecute--given the current political money process, how could it not?
§ Wealth Buys Office. As more and more multimillionaires run and win--the percentage of them in the Senate has risen to more than one-third, about the same proportion as it was before senators began being elected by popular vote in 1913--more and more experience-rich candidates are grilled by party leaders about how they can possibly run against experience-poor but wealthy candidates. And when a very wealthy candidate inundates TV, radio and mailboxes with ads portraying him as a young Abe Lincoln and you as the Manchurian Candidate, the pressure to hustle special-interest money becomes even more intense.
Also, as campaign reformer Ellen Miller describes it, "the problem [with] more and more wealthy people running and winning is that then tax policy, healthcare policy and education policy are seen through the lenses of multimillionaires, people who don't need government services. They are a different class of people and from a different world than most Americans, who sit around the kitchen table calculating their finances."
So although issues like terrorism, healthcare and pollution absorb far more public attention and concern, the scandal of strings-attached money corrupting politics and government is the most urgent domestic problem in America today--because it makes it harder to solve nearly all our other problems. How can we produce smart defense, environmental and health policies if arms contractors, oil firms and HMOs have such a hammerlock on the committees charged with considering reforms? The culprit is not corrupt candidates but a corrupt system that coerces good people to take tainted money.
The old and much-discussed saga of political money may reach a climax between now and 2004 as a result of three epic developments:
First, the corporate scandals of 2001-2 started with questions about corrupt financing practices and then moved to questions about corrupt political practices. Joan Claybrook, head of Public Citizen and a veteran of the campaign finance wars, says, "Political money from the Enrons and others bought loopholes, exemptions, lax law enforcement, underfunded regulatory agencies and the presumption that corporate officials could buy anything they wanted with the shareholders' money." Once the current war fever abates electorally, will the Enron/Adelphia/Global Crossing/Tyco/WorldCom scandals lead to a shift in our political zeitgeist, as corruption a century ago led to the Progressive Era?
Second, the McCain-Feingold fight re-educated the public about money in politics. Given all the problems of our current system, the McCain-Feingold law is like throwing a ten-foot rope to a drowning swimmer forty feet offshore. But it's necessary to stop huge soft-money federal gifts that enable big interests to make an end run around federal bans on corporate and labor donations.
Third, the Supreme Court will likely rule next spring on the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold's two major provisions: banning soft-money fundraising by the national parties and restricting soft money for sham "issue" ads. This will be the Court's first major consideration of campaign finance since 1976's disastrous Buckley v. Valeo ruling, which held that legislatively enacted "expenditure limits" were an unconstitutional infringement on speech. If the Court had reached a different conclusion then, there would be no $2 million House candidates today, no $15 million Senate candidates, no $74 million mayoral candidates.
Moreover, the State of Vermont last year enacted a spending ceiling. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit initially upheld the law in August, arguing that evidence of legislators routinely selling access showed the law was a constitutionally permissible way of stopping such corruption. If this case goes to the Supreme Court with McCain-Feingold--and swing Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy agree with the Second Circuit majority--we'll be close to taking the for-sale sign off our democracy.
Meanwhile, can the political process significantly reform not just the soft-money but also the hard-money system?
Most senators and representatives I interviewed thought Congress had exhausted itself in the McCain-Feingold fight and that this Republican Congress had no interest in going further. However, Fred Wertheimer of the campaign-reform group Democracy 21, citing the revolution of rising expectations, believes that "winning McCain-Feingold will open the door to another round," if not in this Republican Congress then in a future one. "And we have put together the best coalition I've ever seen on an issue--from the AARP to the Sierra Club to labor and some businesses."
But 535 campaign finance experts in Congress don't want to change the rules that got them there and have kept them there; and there are hundreds of large interests who invest thousands and reap billions, a rate of return unrivaled since IBM and Microsoft went public--and who like things as they are.
So systemic reform may turn on the 2004 presidential election. If Gore, Kerry, Gephardt or Daschle runs against the current money game as ardently as McCain did--and wins--our slow-motion decline from democracy to plutocracy could end. Democrats searching for a popular and important message should embrace three fundamental reforms based on the slogan "Don't Let Enron Run Your Democracy."
1. Public Financing. The rationale is simple: If, say, twenty special interests give a senator $100,000 each, they own him or her; if instead a million taxpayers give $2 each in public funds, we own him or her. Isn't it preferable for elected officials to be responsive to all voters rather than to relatively few donors? "Democratically funded elections" could follow either the New York City or the Arizona model. Under the first, 4-to-1 matching grants are made for all gifts up to $250 from people who can vote for the candidate (so a $25 gift becomes $125); under the second, after a gubernatorial candidate crosses a certain threshold--raising 4,000 contributions of at least $5--he or she receives all subsequent funding up to a specified ceiling from the public treasury, which could be raised by a "democracy surtax" imposed on registered lobbyists, political consultants and TV advertisers.
Public financing has worked in presidential campaigns and in New York City, Arizona and Maine elections. It avoids First Amendment arguments, since it increases speech instead of limiting it, and majorities of 70 percent regularly support it.
Two strategies can help win over even more voters and some legislators to democratically funded elections: Because the current private system of financing costs tens of billions in corporate welfare, pollution and lost productivity, any public financing system would be inexpensive by comparison. Also, bad policies--for example, privatization of Social Security and weaker fuel-efficiency standards--should be publicly linked to big contributions so voters understand the impact on their health and wallets.
2. Spending Limits. Because the financial "alms" race steals time and buys access, Congress and the Supreme Court should approve Vermont-like spending limits, which existed in the 1971 and 1974 federal campaign-finance laws until Buckley threw them out. But isn't money protected First Amendment speech, as Senators McConnell, Lott et al. claim? No, money is property, as Justice John Paul Stevens concluded in a recent case, which is why the 1907 Tillman Act has banned corporate contributions for nearly a century. How does it advance First Amendment values to allow a few wealthy interests to spend millions of dollars more and drown out the voices and contributions of millions of average citizens?
3. Free or Discounted TV. Because the airwaves belong to the public, we provide broadcasters with federal licenses--for free--on the condition that they agree to serve "the public interest, convenience, and necessity." But they have not lived up to their end of the bargain, perhaps because broadcasters pulled down $1 billion in revenue from political commercials in the 2000 elections. Reducing that revenue would mean cutting into profit margins that average between 30 and 50 percent.
Paul Taylor, executive director of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, a nonpartisan group that advocates free airtime, sums up the scam: "Our government gives broadcasters free licenses to operate on the public airwaves.... During the campaign season, broadcasters turn around and sell access to these airwaves to candidates at inflated prices." He proposes that candidates who win their parties' nominations receive vouchers for electronic advertising in their general election campaigns. Candidates, particularly from urban areas, who don't find it cost-effective to advertise on television or radio could trade their vouchers to their party in exchange for funds to pay for direct mail or other forms of communication. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. writes, "America is almost alone among the Atlantic democracies in declining to provide political parties free prime time on television during elections." If it did so, it would "do much both to bring inordinate campaign costs under control and revitalize the political parties."
For those who universalize the political moment and doubt we'll ever have public financing, a spending ceiling or free TV, please remember that you're right if reformers don't try.
The history of America shows a "capacity for self-correction." Even the Supreme Court, given enough time, has reversed itself on such issues as affirmative action, right to counsel, poll taxes and health and safety regulations.
Only such apologists for the status quo as George Will could believe it's OK for a powerful 0.1 percent of the population to make $1,000 contributions to dictate policy to the other 99.9 percent; for only the rich or the kept to win office; for candidates to spend three-quarters of their time raising money so that the toll-takers known as broadcasters will allow public candidates to speak to the public over our publicly owned airwaves. "History is like waves lapping at a cliff," wrote French historian Henry See. "For centuries nothing happens. Then the cliff collapses."
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 12:08 PM
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