The Dead End of ABB

September 14, 2004
ZNet Commentary

Regardless of who you plan to vote for in November (if anyone at all), the assumptions behind ABB stand in the way of building movements that can bring about political change.

We need to chart a course that looks beyond the election to long-term efforts that will necessarily have to be independent of -- and oppositional to -- the Democrats, as well as the Republicans.
We can't do that while shilling for the Democrats, and letting them of the hook.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-09/12arnove.cfm
By Anthony Arnove

ABB -- Anybody But Bush -- is one of the most harmful slogans progressives have put forward in decades.

The slogan tells John Kerry and the Democrats that they don't need to do anything to win our vote.

As the satiric Onion newspaper joked, Kerry can safely run on a "one-point program": that he is not George Bush.

But even that one-point program is in question. Kerry said he supports Bush's policies on Israel "100 percent," his tax cuts "98 percent," and the Patriot Act (which his aides boast he helped to write, in addition to having voted for it) "94 percent."

On Iraq, as we now know, Kerry says he would have voted to authorize the invasion even if he knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Kerry's real argument with Bush is over how best to have run the invasion and occupation, not over its logic or morality.

Kerry thinks he can oversee the "war on terror" more effectively, with more international support, and, as Arundhati Roy has noted in a recent speech, with "Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq."

As Ali Abunimah argued on Electronic Iraq web site on April 29, "What Kerry's plan boils down to then is this: he is more charming than Bush."

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The warlords of America

Most of the US's recent wars were launched by Democratic presidents. Why expect better of Kerry? The debate between US liberals and conservatives is a fake; Bush may be the lesser evil. From John Pilger in Washington

On 6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power".

The joining of hands across America's illusory political divide has a long history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with "bipartisan" backing. Wading through the blood, a new breed of popular historian, the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper owners, spun the heroic myths of a supersect called Americanism, which advertising and public relations in the 20th century formalised as an ideology, embracing both conservatism and liberalism.

The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the American "national security state" in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides humanity as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self-respect.

These days, terrorism having replaced the red menace, another fake debate is under way. This is lesser evilism. Although few liberal-minded voters seem to have illusions about John Kerry, their need to get rid of the "rogue" Bush administration is all-consuming. Representing them in Britain, the Guardian says that the coming presidential election is "exceptional". "Mr Kerry's flaws and limitations are evident," says the paper, "but they are put in the shade by the neoconservative agenda and catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush. This is an election in which almost the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief if the incumbent is defeated."

The whole world may well breathe a sigh of relief: the Bush regime is both dangerous and universally loathed; but that is not the point. We have debated lesser evilism so often on both sides of the Atlantic that it is surely time to stop gesturing at the obvious and to examine critically a system that produces the Bushes and their Democratic shadows. For those of us who marvel at our luck in reaching mature years without having been blown to bits by the warlords of Americanism, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, and for the millions all over the world who now reject the American contagion in political life, the true issue is clear.

It is the continuation of a project that began more than 500 years ago. The privileges of "discovery and conquest" granted to Christopher Columbus in 1492, in a world the pope considered "his property to be disposed according to his will"

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MEDIA ALERT: WHERE THE KILLING STARTS - Robert Fisk

Where did all this killing begin? We might think it began with the leaders who issued the orders for the invasion of Iraq, and with the pilots and soldiers who pushed the buttons and pulled the triggers. But in truth the killing always starts with you and us the public.

The killing, actually, starts with the surreal emptiness and manufactured optimism of party conferences and conventions. Have you noticed how desolate you feel when you see John Edwards fake perma-grin, and when you see John Kerrys carefully rehearsed salute as he declares, idiotically, "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty"?

Do you notice how you cringe when you see Kerry pointing into the crowd a gesture associated with confident authority and power? Do you notice there is something nauseating about the empty clichs, about the speeches about nothing, about the cheering about nothing? Isnt it deeply wounding that, after millions of years of history, humanity has arrived at this utterly fraudulent charade as an expression of democracy?

The reason for the desolation, cringing and nausea is that this is where the killing starts. To kill honesty and sincerity, to kill ideas and discussion, to kill meaning, is to kill people.

This is where the killing starts when debate is emptied of reason so that the public is subject to a kind of mass media lobotomy and fundamentally disenfranchised. What is the difference between not being able to vote and not having anything meaningful to vote for? Z Magazine editor, Michael Albert, notes:

Bush and Kerrys battle for swing voters is actually not even a battle over the informed decisions of those individuals. It is a battle for support from donors and media moguls who provide the means to manipulate swing voters. (Albert, Election Hyperbole www.zmag.org, July 28, 2004)

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Tide? Or Ivory Snow?

Public Power in the Age of Empire
by Arundhati Roy; Democracy Now!; August 24, 2004

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=6087&sectionID=40

Ordinary Americans have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's al-Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba. it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.
This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria

It's true that if John Kerry becomes president, some of the oil tycoons and Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change. Few will be sorry to see the back of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or John Ashcroft and their blatant thuggery. But the real concern is that in the new administration their policies will continue. That we will have Bushism without Bush.

Those positions of real power - the bankers, the CEOs - are not vulnerable to the vote (. . . and in any case, they fund both sides).

The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial-corporate power structure will be allowed through the portals of power.
Given this, it's no surprise that in this election you have two Yale University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier, both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who will lead the war on terror more effectively.

Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the expansion of U.S. economic and military penetration into the world. He says he would have voted to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He promises to commit more troops to Iraq. He said recently that he supports Bush's policies toward Israel and Ariel Sharon 100 percent. He says he'll retain 98% of Bush's tax cuts.

if the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the rest of the world will think that it approves of his policies of "sensitive" imperialism. Is U.S. imperialism preferable if it is supported by the United Nations and European countries? Is it preferable if UN asks Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. soldiers? Is the only change that Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian companies will share in the spoils of the occupation of their country?

Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in power or a stupider one? Is that our only choice?

On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital - hot money - into and out of third world countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them.

The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants' quarters, this set up ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalization on its own.

Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders.

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Issue 107 - September 30 2004
http://www.blackcommentator.com/107/107_freedom_rider_nov_3_pf.html

November 2 is Election Day. On November 3, 2004, a new movement must begin, regardless of that elections outcome.

If Bush emerges triumphant the reasons for opposing his regime are obvious. His agenda is so horrific that opposition is a necessity. America must be saved from corporate corruption, a loss of individual rights, and unending war that threatens the entire world.

Of course the painful situation we find ourselves in makes the possibility of a Kerry defeat unthinkable. It would be the worst electoral defeat of a Democrat presidential candidate in modern political history. It would be worse than the Gore defeat of 2000, worse than the landslides that sent George McGovern and Walter Mondale packing. If a president who cheated his way into the White House, presided over the loss of one million jobs, and made war based on lies isnt defeated, the recriminations and blood letting must be immediate, public, and uncompromising.

There should be no talk of being positive and unified when the Democratic party is in shambles. The clumsiness of John Kerry on the campaign trial is not only a reflection of Kerry the man, but of the dysfunction promoted by the hapless Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Leadership Conference. The only outcome worse than a Kerry defeat, would be continued deference to the people who made it happen.

The party leadership, including the deified Bill Clinton, must be exposed by this movement as the architects of a disaster. Democrats who stood up to Bush when their leaders took a dive must liberate themselves from the belief that the people who have run their party into the ground know more than they do or are deserving of any respect.

Hard truths must be discussed if George W. Bush stands on the steps of Congress with his hand on a bible in January. One of the hardest truths is the fact that the corporate media is the enemy of the Democratic party. Never again should a front runner be dethroned because selective television editing makes it appear that he screamed too loudly. The bloodless assassination of Howard Dean came about through an unholy alliance between the corporate media and Democratic big wigs and was the beginning of the Democrats ignominious slide to oblivion.

The biases of the corporate media are obvious and present the biggest obstacle to the election of a Democrat to the presidency. On November 3^rd Democrats must begin saying loudly and unequivocally that the media are biased. The television networks no longer have even a pretense of objectivity. The talking heads of television news made hay out of the Dan Rather document fiasco, but refused to do even minimum reporting on the same story that was first told during the 2000 campaign. It was proven then that George W. Bush was missing from both his Texas and Alabama Air National Guard units for over a year. The young George W. Bush made no bones about his privileged treatment. In fact he bragged to one of his professors at Harvard business school that his fathers connections helped him to party stateside instead of in the Mekong delta. Dan Rather could have saved himself a lot of trouble with some good old fashioned reporting.

Progressives must begin a new movement on November 3rd even if the unlikely but still hoped for Kerry victory becomes a reality. The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Leadership Conference will crow that their dubious strategies were in fact brilliant. Their claims should not go unchallenged.

The listless Democratic National Convention was a waste of precious time. An undecided voter was either still undecided or a Bush supporter after the Democrats used up four days of television time without coherently and pointedly telling viewers why they shouldnt vote for Bush. Even if Kerry manages to overcome this lost opportunity, he should not be allowed to forget that going on endlessly about swift boats was not very swift.

In short, progressive Democrats must remain visible and vocal in a Kerry administration. We cannot fall victim to the argument that our criticism should be muted because Kerry is better than Bush. The expression damning with faint praise comes to mind. How hard is it to be better than a fascist? That dubious distinction forces the painful vote for Kerry, but it shouldnt keep anyone from speaking up if Kerry forgets who put him in office.

President Kerry should face thousands of demonstrators if he continues the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the take over of Haiti. If a Million Worker March must take place under his administration then so be it. If President Kerry doesnt defend affirmative active or the social security system he should realize that there will be a price for him to pay when he needs support from his own party.

Kerry should not think for one moment that he can bring back the days of slick Willie and his triangulations. Democrats have already seen that movie and know the bad ending all too well. As the song says, we wont get fooled again. On November 3rd, no matter how the headline reads, there will be a movement for change. The remaking of the Democratic party will have begun and the change will be for the better.
Margaret Kimberleys Freedom Rider column appears weekly in Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City. She can be reached via e-Mail at margaret.kimberley@blackcommentator.com. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley's writings at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/

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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=cockburn

Beat the Devil
by Alexander Cockburn

He's the (Any)One

Can someone win the presidency entirely on the basis of a negative asset? I wouldn't have thought so, but here's John Kerry, three months shy of election day, promoting himself as a man of presidential caliber entirely on the basis that he's the Anyone in "Anyone But Bush." Come next January the Anyone behind the desk in the Oval Office may be a bit taller. There'll be medals on the bookshelf showing he killed Vietnamese in the service of his country. As for the policy furnishings, most everything else will stay the same. Kerry's been pretty clear about that, letting his core constituencies know that as President Anyone he's not going to cut them any favors.

The nation's hungry, its underemployed, its jobless? In April Kerry announced that his economic strategy will be to wage war on the deficit, which means he'll do nothing to alleviate problem number one in America today--the lack of jobs and the rotten pay for those lucky enough to have some form of work.

Women? Kerry, the man who voted for Bill Clinton's savage assault, labeled "welfare reform," on poor women, said he might well appoint antiabortion judges, adding magnanimously that he wouldn't want such appointments to lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Kerry vows to put more cops on the streets, and there'll be no intermission in the War on Drugs, which has played a large part in producing the memorable statistic issued by the Justice Department in late July, to the effect that the number of people caught in the toils of the criminal justice system grew by 130,700 last year. The grand total is now nearly 6.9 million either in jail, in prison, on probation or on parole, amounting to 3.2 percent of the adult population of the United States. In many cities a young black man faces a far better chance of getting locked up than of getting a job, since the lockup is the definitive bipartisan response of both Democrats and Republicans to the theories of John Maynard Keynes.
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The Dems Do War Better Campaign
John Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate

By Jerremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill is a reporter and producer for the national radio and TV show Democracy Now! E-mail  jeremy@democracynow.org.

What is clear is that disgust and outrage at the Bush administration is so severe that the Democrats could field Mr. Potato Head and he'd get about as much support as Kerry.

This year could have marked a watershed moment in U.S. history. The Democratic Party could have run on a real anti-war platform with a real anti-war candidate who would stand a good chance of winning in November. The message to the world would have been significant. Instead, the hawkish Democratic leadership successfully pushed through a candidate out of step with the vast majority of his supporters who just want to end one of the most violent and repressive administrations in U.S. history. Such is the state of our democracy.

With John Kerry on the ticket, the Democrats have ensured a victory in November for the small but powerful pro-war special interest. Kerry is their sleeper, their private Manchurian candidate. They face a win-win scenario. Even if Kerry wins, the initial euphoria sparked by a Bush-free White House will eventually be replaced by this reality: no matter what Kerry and Edwards may have said from the podium in Boston, for most of the world neither help nor hope is really on the way.

Still, Kerry has won significant backing from many genuine progressives who are part of the "Anybody But Bush" movement. They argue that the work begins Nov. 3, once Bush is out of office and Kerry, who is characterized as someone who will at least listen, is in power.

It's not that a Kerry administration wouldn't implement some significantly different policies from Bush's. But a Kerry victory will not bring significant change to the system.

After the defeat of Bush's father in 1992, Bill Clinton's policies paved the way for many of the international and domestic horror stories we now see unfolding. His devastating welfare-reform policy and his Omnibus Crime Bill were practically pulled from Newt Gingrich's playbook. Clinton's telecommunications policy, like George W. Bush's, supported further media consolidation. His 1996 anti-terror legislation paved the way for the Patriot Act. He presided enthusiastically over the most deadly regime of economic sanctions in history and began the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam in the so-called "No-fly Zones" in Iraq. He scorned the United Nations and bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days.

Clinton attacked Afghanistan and bombed a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. He tightened the blockade against Cuba and pushed through NAFTA, which sacrificed worker and environmental rights in favor of corporate profits. During the demonstrations outside of the Fleet Center in Boston, protesters from the Bl(a)ck Tea Society set fire to a two-faced effigy of Bush and Kerry. Perhaps that message is not ready for most living rooms in the U.S. But in a few years, it could be prophetic.

http://drrant.blogspot.com/