Obama's Realignment and People of Color

Obama, Race
and the Future
of U.S. Politics

By Bob Wing
ZNet

Feb 12, 2009 - Barack Obama's victory is indeed an historic breakthrough for U.S. politics. In a country that enforced a system of legalized racism until just 40 years ago, and that was founded on white supremacy, black slavery and Native genocide, the election of the first black president is cause for jubilation.

The significance of Obama's victory is accentuated by the fact that not only is he an outstanding individual with liberal politics and a community organizer's instincts, but he is also leading a potentially historic realignment of U.S. politics.

Such realignment could not come at a better time. Beset by a deep economic crisis, now is the time for progressive structural changes to the international and national socio-economic landscape. But such changes will be impossible without enormous political strength.

Whether President Obama can help orchestrate a turnaround of the economic crisis now facing the country, indeed the world, will be revealed in the coming years. But he has already made a major contribution to changing the pattern of U.S. politics, a pattern that was set by slavery and enabled conservative Republicans to dominate the presidency for the last forty years.

However, the development of a mass progressive movement with its own agenda will be critical to consolidating that realignment, and to winning systemic change in the years to come.

The Color of Election 2008

The magnitude of Obama's victory has led to much hyperbole about the end of racism and the advent of a colorblind society. This notion deserves closer examination lest Obama's victory become an obstacle, rather than an opening, to future racial progress.

Much of the press has focused on celebrating the willingness of many whites to elect a black president. But just how colorblind is the U.S. electorate?

Despite the fact that the Republicans had failed miserably, even on their own terms, and run the country virtually into the ground, whites still voted for McCain by 55 to 43. In stark contrast, blacks voted for Obama by 95 to 4, Latinos went for Obama by 66 to 32 and Asians backed Obama by 61 to 35. (1)

In 2008, the white vote was virtually identical to election 2000 and continued to exert a strong conservative pull on the electorate while the votes of peoples of color and young people of all races headed powerfully in a more progressive direction.

The color lines, in life and politics, are alive and well.

Indeed, peoples of color made the biggest shifts in their voting between 2004 and 2008. It was they who proved decisive in Obama's victory. Left to white voters, John McCain would have won a landslide twelve-point victory.

African Americans voted for Obama by an astonishing 95 to 4, a fourteen-point swing for the Democrats compared to 2004. (2) Many a pundit has dismissed this result as a knee-jerk racial solidarity vote for Obama. How soon they forget that the majority of black voters favored Hillary Clinton for the many months leading up to the Iowa primary.

Much of the mainstream media declared that Latinos were too racist to vote for Obama. They pointed to the large Latino primary vote for Clinton as proof.

Latinos resoundingly put the lie to these cynics by voting for Obama by 66 to 32, a huge sixteen-point swing to the Democrats compared to 2004. Even a 58 percent majority of Cubans in Florida, traditionally solidly Republican, went for Obama.

Latinas led the way toward Obama, casting 68 percent of their votes for him and only 30 percent for McCain. Latino voters under 30 went for Obama by 76 to 24, perhaps indicating the direction of future Latino voting patterns.

Asians swung Democratic by fourteen points over 2004, voting for Obama 61 to 35. The political trajectory of Asian voters has been striking. In 1992, Bill Clinton received only 31 percent of the Asian vote. Since then Asians have steadily moved Democratic, reaching a highpoint this year.

So much for the pundits who believed that Latinos and Asians would never unite behind black leadership. These results amount to a massive progressive motion by peoples of color.

Meanwhile the white vote swung toward Obama and the Democrats by five points compared to 2004. White voters under 30 were the only age group among whites to favor Obama. They voted for him by 54 to 44. All other whites voted for McCain by about 57 to 41.

The most anemic swing was made by white women, who voted for McCain by 53 to 46, moving a mere four points toward the Democrats, This was particularly disappointing in light of their ten point swing to Bush from 2000 to 2004, a change that accounted for Bush‚s victory in that year.

White men favored McCain by a bigger margin, 57 to 41, but this represented a sizable nine-point swing to the Democrats compared to 2004 when they voted for Bush overwhelmingly, 62 to 37.

Overall, Obama carried the white vote in only 18 states, mostly in the Northeast and the West Coast.

The Changing Color of the Electorate

From a long-range point of view, the change in the racial composition of the electorate as a whole is perhaps even more important than the recent shifts towards the Democrats. In 1976 whites constituted 90 percent of the vote; in 2000 they still accounted for 81 percent. This year the white share of the vote fell to 74 percent, quite a dramatic change in a short time.

Just as surprising, the main group increasing its share of the electorate is not Latinos, but African Americans. Blacks constituted thirty percent of all new voters in 2004, and an even greater mobilization this year brought them to 13 percent of the overall vote, a thirty percent increase over 2000.

The sheer numbers of Latino and Asian voters have risen significantly over the same period, but their percentage share of the overall vote is virtually unchanged since 2000: nine percent for Latinos and two percent for Asians. (3)

Surprisingly, the percentage of the electorate that is under thirty years of age, regardless of color, also remained stable, at 17-18 percent. However, these voters increased their Democratic vote by 12 points compared to 2004, voting for Obama by 66 to 32. Young voters were also the main corps of Obama field organizers and their energy gave the campaign much of its movement-like quality.

Historic Realignment?

The true maverick in the 2008 campaign was not McCain who pursued the same old reactionary Republican Southern Strategy, but Obama whose bold strategy of fighting for the South and the Southwest, indeed all fifty states, ran counter to all previous electoral common sense.

His success was both astonishing and history making. He won the southwestern states of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, and the former Confederate slave states of Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, as well as former slave states Maryland and Delaware. The Latino vote was decisive for Obama in Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado.

In all, nine states switched from red to blue from 2004 to 2008: Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire and Iowa. Obama lost Missouri by the narrowest of margins.

The historic nature of these victories is brought into sharp relief by the accompanying maps.

The first is the map of slave versus free states and territories just prior to the Civil War. The other is the electoral map of the 2004 election. Depressingly, they are almost identical: the former slave areas are almost universally Republican and the former free areas, with a couple of exceptions, are Democratic.





Almost 150 years after the abolition of slavery, the political patterns wrought by the peculiar institution‰ still shape U.S. politics. Barack Obama‚s campaign may mark the beginning of the end of this historic pattern, with tremendous implications for the future of U.S. politics. The main window into this change is the Electoral College.

Electoral College: a Pillar of Racism

It is not so surprising that slavery set the pattern of U.S. politics if one knows that the Electoral College itself was a product of slavery.

The Founding Fathers, led by slaveholders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, invented the Electoral College out of thin air to serve their interests.

They codified the notorious idea that slaves were non-humans, and thus deserving of no constitutional or human rights. The one exception to this rule was the stipulation that slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person, solely for the purpose of determining how many congressional representatives each state would be allotted. The three-fifths rule vastly increased the slave power in the House of Representatives and therefore the Congress.

The Electoral College, in which each state receives a number of Electors equal to their congressional delegation, was invented as the institutional means to transfer that same pro-slavery congressional allocation to determining the presidency. Slaveholders held the presidency for 50 of the 72 years before Abraham Lincoln, who was elected in 1860, became the first U.S. president to oppose the expansion of slavery. The South, used to wielding political power through the selective enumeration of slaves, promptly seceded.

Since the end of slavery the Electoral College has remained a racist and conservative instrument. It has given the Republicans a running head start to win the presidency ever since reactionary Southerners switched en masse from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in protest of the 1960s civil rights legislation.

As then-Republican strategist Kevin Phillips put it in 1970, "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are."

Based on that switch, the Republicans adopted the notorious Southern Strategy that has enabled them to dominate the presidency for the last forty years. The Republicans learned to skillfully fashion a winning combination of the solidly Republican white southern voters with conservative and moderate whites in the Midwest and Southwest, through barely coded racist appeals.

The Southern Strategy has been the glue with which the Republican Party has united powerful corporate capitalists to conservative white workers, farmers, gun aficionados, small business owners and suburban homeowners.

Negating the Southern Black Vote

The racial bias embedded in the Electoral College system is the structural basis of the Republican's Southern Strategy. The winner-take-all Electoral College system ensures, even requires, that about half of all voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored. (4)

About 53 percent of all blacks live in the southern states, and in 2000 and 2004 they voted about 90 percent Democratic. However, in those elections white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state and every border state except Maryland.

As a result, every single southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While whites voted 54-42 for Bush nationally in 2000, southern whites gave him over 70 percent of their votes in both 2000 and 2004. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black vote for the Democrats in that region.

The Electoral College result was the same as if blacks, and other Democrats, in the South had not voted at all.

Similarly negated were the votes of millions of Native American and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana and Texas. Further, the peoples of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam, territories ruled by the U.S., get no Electoral College votes at all. The tyranny of the white, conservative majority prevailed.

Compounding the reactionary and pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College, the system gives as much as three times as much weight to the mainly conservative and white Republicans in the rural states compared to states with large, racially diverse and majority Democratic populations.

For example, Wyoming has a little more than 240,000 voters and has three Electoral College votes: one for every 80,000 or so voters. By comparison large population states like California have about one Electoral College vote for every 220,000 voters.

Thus, the Electoral College system violates the principle of one person, one vote, drastically undermines the impact of the black vote and gives the Republicans a major advantage in presidential contests. Its abolition should be a key part of the progressive agenda.

Final Thoughts

Although the political dynamics of each of the nine states that turned from red to blue in 2008 need to be examined closely in their own right, it is likely that a minimum of three or four will move decisively into the Democratic column. A number of others that swung Democratic in 2008 have moved from being solidly red states to battleground states.

The solid Republican South and Southwest may be a thing of the past. In the wake of Obama's hard-won victories, the Democrats have no excuse for essentially conceding these regions, as they have done for decades.

This will qualitatively shift the Electoral College math. Since 1968 the Electoral College has clearly favored the Republicans and the Democrats had to pull off an upset to win. Indeed, Bill Clinton won only because of the third party candidacy of Ross Perot. In the future, it may be that the Electoral College math will favor the Democrats, and that the Republicans can only win by staging an upset.

Just as important, for the first time in U.S. history the two political parties clearly represent the two broad wings of U.S. politics. At the national level, the southern reactionaries no longer hold the Democratic Party hostage.

This augurs well for the possibility that an Obama presidency may be able to gather the political strength to undertake a major restructuring of the economy in favor of working people and peoples of color in general, and to reorganize our foreign policy in a positive direction.

However, there is still a major political element missing from the political equation: a powerful independent peoples‚ movement. In the 1930s the union movement, and especially the newly formed, radical CIO, was key to the New Deal. In the 1960s the civil rights movement was the driving force of the War on Poverty.

Herein lies the principal task of progressives in the coming period: to forge powerful independent, mass movements and organizations that can help shape the Obama coalition in a positive way. Our relative success or failure at this task may determine the future of the U.S. and the world every bit as much as President Obama himself.



Bob Wing is a writer and organizer in South Los Angeles, and former editor of ColorLines magazine and War Times newspaper.




-----------------------------------------------------
Footnotes

1. Unless otherwise noted all voting figures are drawn from the National Exit Polls for 2000, 2004 and 2008, as reported by CNN.

2. I calculate the "swing" or "change" in the vote in the traditional but rather confusing manner as the change in the vote differential. For example, in 2004 blacks voted Democratic by 88 to 11, a 77 point differential. In 2008, they voted Democratic by 95 to 4, a 91 point differential. The vote differential thus changed from 77 points to 91 points, so I report a 14-point "swing" or "change."

3. No national exit poll numbers are available about Arab or Native American voters for any year.

4. Only Nebraska and Maine allocate their electoral votes more or less proportionate to the vote rather than on a statewide winner-take-all basis.
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20545

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Is Afghanistan Obama's Vietnam?

Photo: Soviet Afghan Poster with Dubious Soldier

Note to Obama:
Foreign-Policy
Advice from
John F. Kennedy

By JAMES G. BLIGHT
Chronicle Review

"Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast [including] two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely."

— Barack Obama, January 17, 2009, in a speech in Philadelphia

"All war is stupid."

— John F. Kennedy, in a letter written aboard his PT boat in the South Pacific, 1943

Feb. 27, 2009 - In a book published last month, David Sanger, a correspondent for The New York Times, paints a bleak picture of President Obama's foreign-policy challenges. Among the nightmares Sanger mentions, several are potentially disastrous. They involve continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and possible wars-in-waiting with Iran and Pakistan.

The world's tinderbox, stretching through the Middle East to South Asia, is more dangerous as Obama takes office than at any time in recent memory. The United States is bogged down in a disastrous war and occupation in Iraq. The expanding war in Afghanistan is being lost, and lost badly, to the resurgent Taliban. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is coming apart at the seams and is increasingly at risk of both civil war and a war with its neighbor India, with whom it has already fought three wars, and which also possesses a nuclear arsenal. Finally, some American and Israeli officials have spoken publicly about the possibility of bombing Iran's nuclear sites. As Sanger reports, the Israelis in fact wanted to bomb Iran last summer and requested permission from Washington to fly over Iraqi airspace en route — a request that was refused, causing the Israelis to scuttle the plan.

Has any president ever come to office with such a withering array of potential foreign-policy disasters facing him? Does history have anything to tell us about whether who we elect as president makes a difference in matters of war and peace? Does it provide clues as to the difference President Obama might make, having just ascended to the presidency?

It does. Research in recently declassified documents and formerly secret presidential audiotapes — detailed in my book and documentary film, Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK — demonstrates that John F. Kennedy would very likely not have taken the United States to war in Vietnam. Six deep crises (two each over Cuba and Vietnam, and one each over Laos and Berlin) were his inheritance from his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. His inaugural year, 1961, was in fact the presidential year from hell, as JFK would discover. By March, his advisers were requesting nuclear weapons to counter Soviet-backed rebels in Laos. He suffered humiliation over the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April and outraged his senior advisers, many of whom recommended that he send in the U.S. Marines to salvage the operation and overthrow the Castro government. Between August and October, his advisers recommended military action in Berlin, including the use of nuclear weapons if necessary, and the removal by force of the wall just then going up. And in November, he faced down all of his national-security advisers, who were recommending the Americanization of the conflict in Vietnam.

Kennedy said no to war each time. We now know, after extensive research over more than two decades, Kennedy was right to say no. We are now virtually certain that if Kennedy had chosen to escalate one or more of these crises to an American war, disaster would have followed. In each case, we now know, the adversaries of the United States and its allies were far more numerous, more heavily armed, and more committed to their causes than Kennedy's advisers believed at the time. The same is true for the epochal Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. If Kennedy had agreed to the attack and invasion of Cuba favored by most of his advisers, a nuclear catastrophe would almost certainly have followed. It is highly probable that an American invasion would have been met with devastating Soviet nuclear fire, with almost unthinkable consequences to follow.

The Vietnam case is particularly instructive on the issue of Kennedy's personal significance in America's avoidance of war during his administration. We now have the data to make a relatively objective comparison between JFK's decisions on Vietnam and those of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. It's as close to a perfect experiment as exists in the history of U.S. foreign policy. That is because, for various reasons relating to his own personal insecurities and lack of foreign-policy experience, LBJ retained all of JFK's top foreign-affairs officials. We now know that within hours of assuming office on November 22, 1963, LBJ was pressured by these advisers to take the nation to war in Vietnam. Their argument was the same one they had put to JFK: You cannot let our South Vietnamese ally fall to the communists. If you do, a U.S. pledge guaranteeing the security of an ally will be worthless, another "domino" will fall to communism, and your presidency will be judged a failure. In response to these arguments, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalled, LBJ responded, "OK, win the war." Same advisers. Same conflict. Different president. The Vietnam War was Johnson's war, not Kennedy's. Presidential leadership was decisive in keeping the nation out of war, and leading the nation into war.

Fast forward from 1961 to 2009. Replace Cuba, Laos, Berlin, and Vietnam with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Insofar as the November 4 election was a referendum on foreign policy, the electorate voted yes to Sen. Barack Obama's opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and yes to Obama's stated intention to withdraw U.S. personnel from Iraq as soon as possible in an orderly and dignified way. They also voted yes to Obama's promise to talk to enemies, rather than bully them or bomb them or invade them. And Obama's special adviser on Pakistan and India (Richard Holbrooke) and rumored adviser on Iran (Dennis Ross) are both high-profile advocates of diplomacy as an alternative to military force. All told, Barack Obama's stated foreign-policy objectives recall JFK's remark in his Inaugural Address: "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." Obama's stated approach to foreign policy is, in fact, uncannily JFK-like.

But proclivities and stated objectives aside, does Barack Obama have the right stuff necessary to avoid disastrous wars like those in Vietnam under LBJ and in Iraq under George W. Bush? While voters going to the polls on November 4 could hope, they could not know for sure. The key question is this: Will President Obama display steely, JFK-like resistance to the urge toward war he will inevitably have to face when things go badly, as they almost certainly will, with respect to his inherited crises involving Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan and (no doubt) other dangerous crises which will appear unexpectedly and unbidden on his horizon? The simple answer is: We don't know, but we are about to find out.

We should pay particular attention to Obama's decisions on the war in Afghanistan. On January 17, Obama said in a speech given in Philadelphia (on his whistle-stop tour en route to his inaugural) that Afghanistan is a war "that needs to be waged wisely." Time will tell what sort of "wisdom" Obama was referring to in the speech. If by "wisdom" he means what it came to mean in the Johnson administration, he (and we) are likely to fail. LBJ and his lieutenants tried to carefully, rationally calculate the proper balance between sticks (U.S. troops and bombing) and carrots (the promise of peace negotiations) needed to subdue the Vietnamese communists. They failed utterly. If this is the sort of "wisdom" that the Obama administration will seek to apply in its support of the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul, it is unlikely to prevail against a ruthless, resourceful insurgency whose fighters know the territory as U.S. and allied forces never will. The Johnson administration, which sought in vain to bomb the Vietnamese communists to the conference table, ultimately found itself both humiliated and reviled.

The Obama administration may find itself mired in a similar quagmire of its own making in Afghanistan. To those who believe that such an outcome is unthinkable with a liberal, progressive president in the Oval Office, it should be recalled that LBJ and his advisers were mainly liberals. The escalation of the war in Vietnam was approved and effected by liberal Democrats. Their putative "wisdom" was actually hubris sustained by arrogance and ignorance of the history, culture, language, and determination of their adversary.

Rewind, briefly, back to 1961, to John F. Kennedy. It's worth asking: What were the sources of the fear of escalation to disaster in this young, well-educated, but inexperienced president? Where did his skepticism and caution come from? And how did he muster the determination to act on his inclination to avoid war, even in the face of optimistic advice to the contrary, and also in the face of tremendous political heat from hawks in both political parties?

Two experiences seem above all others to have shaped Kennedy's cautious path through 1961 and thereafter. First, his experience in the South Pacific was fundamental. In the spring of 1943, on the eve of the now famous encounter between his PT boat and a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy wrote home, "all war is stupid." Two of his own men died in the famous collision, and their deaths weighed heavily on the young commander. But by "stupid," Kennedy meant something more comprehensibly negative, along the lines of Robert McNamara's definition of "the fog of war," made in the 2004 documentary film of the same name. In that film, McNamara says that "war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all of the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily." It is worth remembering that when Kennedy wrote "all war is stupid," he was referring to conclusions he drew from what is now often called "the good war." The young PT commander was himself a member of "the greatest generation" that fought the war. Regardless, "all war is stupid," according to JFK. That was the wisdom he took from his experience in war, an experience far beyond Johnson's. In Kennedy's view, war is never good. War is irrational and destructive and plain horrible. Period.

Second, Kennedy's humiliation over the failed invasion of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 was, in one sense, highly fortunate. It was humiliating, of course. More than a hundred Cuban exiles were killed; the rest were rounded up and herded into a baseball stadium in Havana for a mass show trial reminiscent of Stalin's show trials of the 1930s. Yet the Bay of Pigs debacle was not a national disaster on the scale that the war in Vietnam later became under Johnson, nor anything remotely close to it. Kennedy asked himself after allowing a scaled-back version of the exile-invasion plan to go forward, "How could I have been so stupid?" He never again believed the rosy estimates of the CIA with regard to military interventions, nor did he ever again trust his military advisers' optimistic predictions about what could be accomplished in military interventions at acceptable cost and risk to the United States. His advisers hammered away at him to go to war all through 1961 with a ferocity and relentlessness that has only come to light in recent declassified documents and oral testimony. Kennedy stonewalled them, diverted them, but always refused their fundamental advice, which was to go to war. Thus, by the end of 1961, his inaugural year from hell, the United States had not invaded Cuba, was not involved in the war in Laos, and did not go to the nuclear brink in Berlin, and although JFK had increased the number of military advisers to the Saigon government, he had repeatedly refused to send any combat troops to Vietnam.

Fast forward a final time from 1961 to 2009, and what may well become President Obama's own inaugural year from hell. Obama has no personal experience of war. He may or may not be fortunate enough to experience an early, sobering, but not disastrous foreign-policy failure, along the lines of Kennedy's Bay of Pigs. Will Obama have the wisdom and conviction to resist the slide to war when the pressure mounts? Already, many have urged him to lengthen the timeline for getting out of Iraq, which is still a horribly violent, chaotic environment. Already, the groundwork has been laid to increase the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, a country that has been a graveyard for foreign military adventures for hundreds of years. Already it appears that Iran will not cease and desist in its quest for nuclear weapons, no matter how much diplomacy is employed. And already some of Obama's own senior advisers are recommending significant military action inside Pakistan, including bombing and use of Special Forces, in an effort to prevent Al Qaeda from expanding its threat to the West.

President Obama has made a point of meeting with the living ex-presidents and asking for their advice. With all due respect to ex-Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and now George W. Bush, President Obama would be wise to consult the predecessor whose foreign-policy inheritance upon entering office most closely approximates his own in difficulty, number, and potential danger to U.S. interests around the world.

That president is John F. Kennedy, that other bright, young, Ivy League-educated, inexperienced senator who, upon taking office, was catapulted into a maelstrom of difficulty not of his making, but for which he was suddenly responsible. Lesson No. 1 from Kennedy is: "All war is stupid." This is not an invitation to pacifism. It is not a moral exhortation. It does not mean that the least bad option will be never going to war. It is rather a statement of fact, former president to current president: "If you choose to take the United States to war, you should assume that the results will be more complicated, more difficult to control, more damaging politically, and altogether more horrible than you or your advisers can imagine. Keep this in mind, Mr. President, and you might just make it through 2009 intact, as I made it, barely, through 1961."n

[James G. Blight is author (with janet M. Lang and David A. Welch) of Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK, published last month by Rowman & Littlefield, and a producer of the new film, Virtual JFK, directed by Koji Masutani.]

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Lincoln's 'Just and Lasting Peace'

Photo: Multi-billion dollar military junkyard

Cut the Military Budget
(Or Make Levees, Not War)

By Steve Cobble
Huffington Post

An Open Letter to Our Congressional
Leaders on Military Budget Cuts:

On the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, I'd like to call attention to the closing line from his Second Inaugural Address:

"...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Given that the U.S. still accounts for nearly half the world's spending on war, and preparations for war; given that we lead the world in arms sales; given that we have far and away the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons; and given that the Federal government still spends half its discretionary budget on war, and preparations for war--can we honestly say that we are living up to Honest Abe's charge?


And if not, shouldn't we be discussing what we might do differently?

During this week's crucial stimulus battle, the newspapers have been filled with discussion of the "high cost" of the Democratic leadership's recovery package(s), with the usual pundit fear-mongering over the deficit, with editorial applause for last-minute cuts in weatherization/school reconstruction/health care, and with comments on the supposed need to find equivalent "savings" in other domestic programs, perhaps even Social Security and Medicare.

Yet there is one budget topic that is rarely discussed inside the D.C. Beltway--our massive, unstable, and unsustainable war economy. This seems like a huge oversight, since this is one of the few places remaining where real money can be found to fund the programs that President Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership promised during the 2008 campaign, including a new "green jobs" economy, health care for everyone, and union jobs with good wages and benefits.
We know the military budget--plus the war spending--skyrocketed during the Bush/Cheney years.

So why don't we look across the Potomac River to the Department of Defense, which has enjoyed those massive Bush/Cheney funding increases? After all, it's been two decades since the Berlin Wall and the Cold War collapsed, and six years since everyone but Dick Cheney admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--so do we really still need all the entire, expensive DOD wish list?

We just cannot afford the many costly weapons systems our war economy now desires--first, because we need the money for domestic programs; and second, because military spending does not create nearly as many new jobs as does spending on weatherization, mass transit construction, education, or health care.
So, for example, if we need to find hundreds of billions of dollars to put America back to work, provide health care for those left out, and build a sustainable new "green economy" that makes Mideast oil obsolete, why would we ever continue down the F-35 runway, spending massive amounts on one of the most expensive weapons system ever? We should cancel the delayed, not-very-stealthy, way-over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, with its estimated hundreds and hundreds of billions--perhaps even one trillion--dollars cost!
Think about the F-35's cost for a minute. Over its life cycle, the Joint Strike Fighter is now expected to cost just about as much as the stimulus package deal announced yesterday. Does that make any sense, in a time of economic--not military--crisis?

Can we afford the next allotment of F22 Raptors, which still have no mission? Would Honest Abe Lincoln approve of the V-22 Osprey, which even Dick Cheney once tried to kill? Can anyone tell me the strategic purpose of either the DDG-1000 destroyer or the Virginia class submarine?

No, I didn't think so.

If we want to turn the page on the recent past, and show the world the new face of America, we must end the occupation of Iraq, as the President and the leadership in the Congress have promised. We should remember the tragedy of LBJ & Vietnam, and refuse to fall into the trap of a larger war in Afghanistan. We should release all documents from the Bush/Cheney secret files and let the legal chips fall where they may, in keeping with our new President's commitment to the U.S. Constitution and to transparency. We should shut off dangerous and costly efforts to militarize space. And we should not only close down the torture camp at Guantanamo, we should shut down several hundred other overseas bases. After all, America was founded in opposition to Empire, not to become one.

Since President Obama has made it clear that he is serious about keeping his promise to reverse the nuclear arms race, the Congress should help him negotiate big cuts in our nuclear stockpiles--it would make the world a much safer place.
And since we know the future depends on developing a sustainable green economy, why not convert our national weapons labs completely to anti-nuclear-proliferation work and to alternative energy R&D? Aren't "loose nukes" and climate change two of our true security threats?

Lincoln's message to us, near the end of a bloody civil war, was that America's leaders should do all that they could to "...achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace."

If Abe Lincoln took a look at our spending habits today, wouldn't he have to conclude that America has not heard his message? Wouldn't he be forced to conclude that our hearts and minds are not committed to a just and lasting peace, but instead to a growing and incendiary arms race?

I do not believe that the current Federal budget really reflects where most Americans' hearts are. Our people are not comfortable with spending half our treasure on a military/industrial/petroleum complex while millions of Americans suffer without health care, pensions, good schools, affordable housing, even bridges and levees...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an open admirer of Abraham Lincoln, and gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. So perhaps it's appropriate to end with a reminder that Dr. King also warned us about an immoral war and the growing nightmare of a permanent war economy.
He called for a "true revolution of values," and worried aloud whether the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

America's greatest prophet taught us: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

America's greatest President called on us to "...achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace."

So I ask you, the Honorable Majority Leader, Madame Speaker, and all the elected Members of the Senate & House--don't you agree that it's time to pay them some mind?

Thank you, Steve Cobble

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Steelworkers Message to GOP Footdraggers:

Steelworkers Jobs March Draws
Thousands in Granite City, IL

By Scott Cousins
St Louis Suburban Journals

Feb. 10, 2009 - A line of more than 5,500 laid-off steelworkers from Granite City, auto workers from Decatur and Fenton, Mo., and their supporters stretched out for more than eight blocks along a mile-long route as part of a “Put America Back To Work” march Tuesday morning in Granite City.

The march, sponsored by local and state labor unions and several community groups, was held to support passage of a federal stimulus bill, including a “buy American” provision.

Both city and union officials said slightly more than 5,500 people participated.

The march went from a parking lot at U.S. Steel-Granite City Works to Amsted Rail, a distance of about one mile.

At a press conference before the march, labor leaders and local politicians said that passage of the bill — now working its way through Congress — would help jump-start the nation’s economy.

“We are living in unprecedented economic times,” said U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello (D-Belleville). “Families here in Granite City are hurting.”

More than 2,500 area steelworkers are currently laid off or will be soon — almost 2,000 now at U.S. Steel-Granite City Works, which has been idled, and almost 700 at Amsted Rail, which produces railcar parts.

Costello said he is hoping that differing versions of the bill can be reconciled by Congress and passed, and be on President Obama’s desk for signature by the end of the week.

“Every member of Congress can find a reason or something in this stimulus package they do not like,” he said. “If you are looking for an excuse to vote no, you can find an excuse. The fact of the matter is ... it’s time to support this president and his economic plan so we can give him the tools to turn this economy around.”

Much of the focus of the press conference was on “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and schools that could begin within 90-120 days.

Costello said each billion dollars spent on infrastructure generates $6 billion in economic activity, and provides 34,000 “good-paying” jobs.

Union officials said that starting the infrastructure projects would be especially good for plants like Granite City Works. Approximately 30 to 35 percent of Granite City Works’ output is construction-grade steel.

Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes was among those attending the press conference, although he did not speak.

Later, he said passage of the bill was important for the state, which is facing a $9 billion deficit.

“The Congress has to put aside their differences and realize that people are desperate right now,” Hynes said. “They’re bickering over minute details while people are spiraling downward and losing their economic security.”

He said the state would benefit both from infrastructure programs and money it might receive for health care, education and other programs.

The march itself began just after 11 a.m., and was led by a tractor-trailer, followed by Joe Stephens, of Alton, and Marvin Tucker, of Granite City, both laid-off members of United Steelworkers of America Local 1899, carrying a large American Flag.

Most of the local’s 1,300 workers are laid off right now because Granite City Works was idled in December.

“There are so many people off work right now, the country is in bad shape,” Stephens said.

Behind them were several elected officials, including Madison County Board Chairman Alan Dunstan, Granite City Mayor Ed Hagnauer, Pontoon Beach Mayor Jim Denham, and Madison Mayor John Hamm.

“We have a lot of people in Granite City laid off at this time,” Dunstan said. “I think it’s important for us to be here and show our support.”

Hagnauer agreed, saying officials had a duty to support both the steel mills and their workers.

“Our community is not decimated by this, but it’s affected us greatly and we’ve got guys we want to put back to work,” he said.

Behind them, other marchers stretched out over approximately eight city blocks.

Louis Norton, of Centreville, was one of them.

Norton was an employee of Stein Steel Mill Services, which provides support services for Granite City Works, but is currently laid off.

“We need to go to work. We’d just like to get to work and get back to like it was,” said Norton.

The march worked its way along 20th Street to Niedringhaus Avenue, then past the main entrance to Amsted Rail, where about 40 workers were watching.

The march ended in an Amsted Rail parking lot, where some steelworkers performed a few skits, and people mingled, ate donuts or waited for shuttle rides back to their cars.

Dennis Barker, political action coordinator for USWA Local 1899, was one of those performing a skit about the demise of the American middle class.

“This is the first time we’re actually in the street — not in protest but in support of government action,” he said. “We want the government to take action, we want the government to pass the stimulus bill. The government is the last entity that can turn this country around.”

As the end of the parade was working its way toward the parking lot, others were walking back or waiting for friends.

Jack Guelzow of Worden, a laid-off member of Local 1899, had been at the front of the march, but he and some friends had already finished and were waiting near Amsted Rail for others who had been in the middle.

“Hopefully we can do some good here today, we’ll see what happens,” Guelzow said of the march. “It’s a pretty good crowd.”

Granite City Alderman Don Thompson was nearby, said, “I think it’s a very good turnout. I was really surprised. I think the weather was with us, and I think that’s what brought a lot of people out here today. I’ve been here 40-some years, and I’ve never ever seen this magnitude of people.”

“It was a great day for working people here in Granite City,” said Russ Saltsgaver, president of USWA Local 1899.

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Arizona Watch: Lou Dobb's Bull Conner

Photo: Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Detainees

The Face
of the New
American Bigot

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
New American Media

Feb 11, 2009 - On the issue of immigration, there is little difference between conservatives and extremists. Both camps have come to greatly admire Sheriff Joe Arpaio – America's toughest sheriff. To this Arizona lawman, there is nothing wrong with racially profiling red-brown peoples and communities And of course, his supporters applaud his every antic, including the recent public spectacle of humiliating some 220 migrants in Phoenix by parading them in public.

This is arguably why the GOP is dying. Arpaio has become the Bull Conner of our times. For conservative Republicans to embrace him – akin to how extremists embrace him – gives the nation a clear message: the GOP is more interested in preserving its outdated ideology and (racial) heritage, than in expanding its base.


Type rest of the post hereAs the economy continues its uncontrolled convulsions, the nation also continues to convulse with an increasing number of ugly cases of racial bigotry and acts of violence against immigrants.

Indeed, this era is now marked by the rise of the New American Bigot. The old one has undergone an extreme makeover; save for lawman Arpaio, the New American bigot is no longer the Aryan extremist or unrepentant segregationist. George Wallace is out and CNN's jolly Lou Dobbs is in.

Don't misunderstand: Racial supremacists and ultra-nationalists are up in arms because of President Obama's historic election. Many are on a gun-buying shopping spree. Others are prophesizing doomsday.

However, among the nation's mainstream body politic, outward displays of racial bigotry are generally now frowned upon. The GOP has a new face, which is but a mask. Witness the election of Michael Steele to head the Republican Party, or what has now become America's far-right, anti-immigrant party. Steele's mission is to convince people generally not attracted to his party that they are now welcome under the GOP's shrinking white tent. With Obama in office, the chance of siphoning off black voters is nil.

Theoretically, sizeable inroads could be made from the expanding Latino/Latina electorate. Yet with racially tinged xenophobia rampant within the GOP, the chances of making inroads there don't look good. Unquestionably, xenophobia is also present within Democratic circles; it's just not trumpeted as loud.

The GOP's inability to attract new voters has little to do with an image or perception problem. As long as their views come wrapped in patriotism, legalese and law-and-order, they believe that their views are appealing to all. Outward displays of racial bigotry are out, but one exception is allowed: "illegal aliens."

Purportedly, the objection to them is not directed at any one racial or ethnic group. It is strictly directed at those who have broken the law; at the brown hordes that have crossed the Mexican border illegally (the Canadian border is okay); at those who refuse to assimilate into the American way of life; and at those who refuse to learn good English (never mind former president Bush).

In their fervor, they forget that almost half of "illegal aliens" do not enter the country from Mexico. The other half enter legally, but overstay their visas. They also forget that refusing to assimilate or to speak English is not an indicator of legality or illegality. Besides, they are seemingly unaware that there are no laws that compel anyone to assimilate (particularly their conservative or extreme right-wing values.)

The "illegal alien"-obsessed Lou Dobbs does not take a backseat to brazen xenophobes such as Arpaio. Dobb's daily rants have made it respectable for Republicans to clamor for a gated, checkpoint society. Dobbs and most of his talking head counter-parts are anything but jolly, speaking with the same venomous tongue. On the airwaves and on the Internet, racial extremism, xenophobia, scapegoating and dehumanization are part of the daily soup. Both extremists and conservatives hold the views that the fewer red-brown peoples in this country, the better… the less Spanish spoken, the better.

The New American Bigot has a new face, and it, too, is but a mask – a Janus-faced mask.

Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com

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GOP Right Gutting Stimulus to Wreck Obama

Conservative
Plan Isn't
About 'Recovery'

By Isaiah J. Poole
Campaign for America's Future

The missive [1] that House conservatives issued early Friday may be called an "economic recovery plan," but it is as threadbare as the big discount goods store that went belly-up in my neighborhood a few weeks ago and is now in the final days of bankruptcy liquidation.

They claim they are responding to President Obama's challenge to come forward with the best ideas for economic recovery. But they can't seem to break their tax-cut mantra, even though the evidence is clear that a stimulus plan that relies primarily on tax cuts is no stimulus plan at all in today's economy.

The proposals House Republican leaders have put on the table range from the arguably meritorious—exempting unemployment benefits from federal taxes—to the politically and economically unacceptable—their demand that "any stimulus package include a provision precluding any tax increases now or in the future to pay for this new spending," but instead requiring future spending cuts to offset any new spending.

In the middle is the usual melange of business and personal tax cuts. We've pointed out before [2] that whatever you think of various tax-cut proposals, you can't call them cost-effective stimulus.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reinforced this view in a paper Friday [3], concluding, "There is a serious debate to be had about whether cutting corporate rates, especially if done in tandem with measures to close corporate tax loopholes, would strengthen the economy over the long run. But corporate rate cuts simply are not credible as short-term economic stimulus in a recession."

That's because the core problem businesses face in a recession is not a shortage of cash, but a shortage of demand. It stands to reason, then, that businesses will simply pocket a tax cut, or pass some of the proceeds on to shareholders, until an increase in demand entices them to make the investments needed to meet that demand. (Think about how consumers handled the rebate checks issued last year. Because the lion's share of the checks were used to pay off past debts or to squirrel away something in their savings accounts, "the rebates in 2008 provided little 'bang for the buck' as economic stimulus," according to a new study by University of Michigan economists Matthew D. Shapiro and Joel Slemrod.)

So it makes absolute sense for government to be a demand driver, creating jobs and priming the economic pump by finally addressing the long-neglected public maintenance and rebuilding tasks essential to the country's future.

There is nothing in the plan offered up by House conservative leaders that speaks to how the repair and rebuilding of our public assets will be done in the context of a shrinking government; that task is not even addressed. Instead, they want to head off any thought that the nation would make a permanent commitment to not falling again into the hole of disinvestment in our commons that began to open in the Reagan era and widened under the era of Bush II.

"What seems to be the real message being put forward by House Republicans is that government should hand out additional tax cuts to businesses and then sit on the sidelines," Center for American Progress senior fellow Scott Lilly writes in a column [4] published Friday. "It is time for the loyal opposition to recognize their responsibility for the mess in which we now find ourselves and begin to find ways to be part of the solution rather than prolonging the agony in which millions of jobless Americans and at-risk families are now suffering."

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Exorcising Demons of the 'War on Terror'

Photo: Obama in Afghanistan

Obama Notes #1

By Tom Hayden
Progressives for Obama
January 26, 2009

Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, I boarded a red-eye flight to Washington to make a morning workshop on a juvenile justice bill. I hadn't bothered to take a red-eye for eight years, but now it seemed to matter. Something progressive actually might happen in public policy and, if so, it was worth the jet-lag and back pain.

For the first time in years, activists will need an inside strategy to complement the familiar tactics of fighting from the margins. The new president will have to reach out to progressives as well, with the same energy he invests in the religious and Republican right.

At the very least, success in the Obama era can be imagined as something more than slowing down the rate at which things get worse. Hope and heartbreak will rhyme. Wins and defeats can be expected, not simply the monotony of loss.

In that spirit I am beginning a new blog, Obama Notes, a regular analysis from the perspective of a progressive who strongly supported Obama in 2008. Where possible I will be suggesting steps to take.

#1. Torture

Obama's executive order was a tremendous breakthrough after eight years of Bush-Cheney. It will require close monitoring, of course, but it was hugely significant that it came so rapidly, with the stroke of a pen. The immediate question for the peace movement and human rights advocates is whether the Order applies to thousands of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan who are being held in violation of human rights norms and, if not, why not. Congress should send letters of inquiry and follow up with hearings on the horrors for those detainees rounded up in preventive detention.

#2. The Predator Attack

The night after Obama's torture order, I was at dinner with a human rights lawyer who worried that the right-wing would launch political attacks on Obama for "letting our guard down." With that in mind, I became certain that the following day's Predator attack in Pakistan, which killed at least 10-18 people, was as much political as military, a message that the Pentagon will keep on launching strikes against a sovereign country in keeping with "war on terrorism" objectives. The cold truth may be that those people died in Pakistan to make closing Guantanamo more politically palatable. Many more will die as America tries to exorcise and replace the war on terror mentality.

Obama has good reason to worry about counter-pressures from the right and the intelligence community. One day after the executive order banning torture was signed, an odd article appeared on the New York Times' front page about a former detainee who has joined al Qaeda in Yemen. There was no apparent reason for the article's timing except the Obama announcement. The detainee in question was released by President Bush, and is suspected of involvement in car bombings in September 2007.

# 3. Afghanistan-Pakistan

The outlook in Afghanistan-Pakistan is cloudy and grim. The president's latest goal of a "hard-won peace" is a realistic retreat from rhetorical belligerence. But one gets the feeling that no one knows what to do. The appointment of Richard Holbrooke suggests a Dayton-like accord but without the ingredients of Dayton. Where the Balkans consisted of ethnic blocs and competing nation states, Afghanistan resembles the Stone Age without stable tribal structures.

Another 20,000 American troops shortly will become twenty thousand new targets, one of whom certainly will be the last to die for a mistake. And every Afghan the Americans kill will give birth to more insurgents.

The traditional anti-war liberal bloc in Congress has no current plans for opposition to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unwilling to oppose the new president, afraid of being accused of losing, unable to conceive an exit strategy, they are presently without direction or leverage.

But this is not 2002-2003. There is a rank-and-file peace movement and a significant skepticism in public opinion that will not go away. There are few US resources for escalation in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Impatience will grow. "Obama's War" has an an unpleasant sound. The urgency of a diplomatic solution will grow by the day. The content of that solution is far from agreed upon.

Demands for Congressional hearings on an Afghanistan-Pakistan exit strategy in both House and Senate should be the point of departure.
The hearings should occur, and be widely broadcast, no later than the spring, when the Washington weather will be more favorable to protests. In the run-up, teach-ins and other activist forums might begin studying books like Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos, for a preview of the nightmare scenario. Also contact Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films office where a campaign is planned to "get Afghanistan right."

#4. Iraq

Look for Obama to order his promised combat troop withdrawals but with all sorts of escape and delay clauses. The fog of diplomacy can be as bad as the fog of war in this case. Does the 16-month timetable still leave a reserve force in the tens of thousands and, if so, under what guidelines? Or does the recent US-Iraq pact mean in plain words that all US troops will be out by 2011? Again, questions from Congress will be imperative in clarifying the situation ahead. In the meantime, the public base of the peace movement will decline as peace appears to be "on the horizon."

#5. Gaza and the Middle East.

As I argued in the Huffington Post, the timing of Israel's assault was entirely political. First, it was a "consolation prize" after the US refused any assistance in launching a war against Iran. Second, the attack began on the day Obama was elected, and ended by the inauguration. Obama, who in 2007 said words to the effect that "no one has suffered like the Palestinians", observed a subsequent silent through the campaign and all during the Gaza battle. Once ended, Obama twice indicated a concern for Palestinian suffering two times, once in the words of Bono at the Lincoln Memorial, and later in the president's own formulation. More importantly, he appointed George Mitchell as a peace envoy, the best possible choice for those concerned about a just and reasonable settlement. Look for input from civil society, including delegations from Northern Ireland and South Africa, in the conflict resolution process ahead.

#6. Venezuela, Cuba, Latin America.
Obama's statements on Latin America during the campaign reflected a Cold War approach to the region rather than a positive embrace of progressive democratic elections. On the eve of the inauguration, in a Univision interview, he criticized Venezuela for being a "negative" factor in development and an ally of FARC terrorists in Colombia. Both statements were false and inflammatory, and some Administration sources now admit they were mistaken. The time for a new Obama platform on Latin America, in the tradition of FDR's good neighbor policies, will be in April at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The president will have to decide whether to shake hands with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales [the Cubans are excluded] and, more important, offer a more positive vision than continuing the war on drugs and "armoring NAFTA" [ in the words of the State Department's Thomas Shannon].

Once again, Congressional hearings on new directions in Latin America are sorely needed. And Obama needs a Latino emissary with a deeper empathy and more progressive policy mandate than the failed ones of the Bush era.

#7. The Economic Crisis.
ever in my lifetime have so many businessmen been pleading with the government to save them from capitalism. Never has there been such a demand for economic reform. Never has the left been weaker and more left out. Obama has invited many of the Mad Men [or, if you will, the Best and Brightest] who ruined the system to take charge of restoring it, not a good sign. These are people who generally believe that unemployment is a good and necessary thing, as well as the shedding of regulations, on the road to greater profits and growth. If Ralph Nader hadn't run so often for president, we might have a progressive voice in this debate, but...Obama's promise to deliver is threatened both by Republicans with faith-based illusions about tax credits, and traditional Democratic liberals who focus mainly on how much money the government gets to spend. Lost in the debate so far is whether financial and corporate institutions will be re-regulated, how, and by whom? Also at risk are the promises made for major public investments in the green economy.

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Obama Inaugural: Breaking with NeoCon Dogma

Obama's Summons

By Robert Borosage
OurFuture.org

Jan 22, 2009 - Obama's inaugural speech was a pointed critique of the "failed dogmas" of the last 30 years of conservative misrule and a summons to a new and bold, progressive era of activist government; regulated markets and shared prosperity at home; and a foreign policy that reflects our values.

"A man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

It was not the words, but this transcendent reality that evoked the tears at Barack Obama's inauguration Tuesday. The somber eloquence of the new president, the presence of over a million people celebrating what they had done, the grace of Michele and Barack together, the infectious delight of their daughters, the relief felt in the long overdue departure of Bush and Cheney—all were overshadowed by the historic reality of Americans electing the first African-American president to lead them in this time of trouble. We see one another and the world sees America with new eyes as a result.


But Obama's speech should not be lost in that moment. Major presidential addresses are signposts, markers of an administration's priorities and perspectives. Each phrase is contested; what is said and unsaid have meaning. Political allies, aides and adversaries parse the text to claim mandates or define battles. This will be particularly true for Obama, a gifted writer who takes words seriously.

Most analysis focused on the president's somber warnings of "gathering clouds and raging storms," two wars and a weakened economy. Conservatives took solace in his embrace of moral virtues, and martial rhetoric that "our nation is at war," and promise to "defeat" our enemies. Others noted his call to service, a stark contrast to President Bush's summons to the nation to "go shopping" after September 11.

But this distorts Obama's message. The core of the speech was structured around a pointed critique of the "failed dogmas" of the last 30 years of conservative misrule, a sharp rebuke of the policies of his predecessor sitting nearby on the stage, and a summons to a new and bold era of progressive activism.

At home and abroad, the new president claimed a mandate for a dramatic change of course. Domestically, he dismissed the centerpiece of modern conservatism: its scorn for government and worship of markets. "The question... is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works..." We know that the market has "the power to generate wealth," but surely we have learned once more that "without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control."

But he did not stop there. The test for a government that works is "whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." This comes as close to the Franklin Roosevelt's call for an Economic Bill of Rights that we've heard since FDR issued that promise in 1944.

And the measure of markets is not simply a larger GDP or growth, but benefits that are widely shared. "The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy" depends on "the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart, not out of charity, but because it is surest route to our common good."

From these principles, Obama outlined his priorities. His recovery plan will be grounded on public investment in areas vital to our future—from bridges to electric grids. He'll return science to its proper place, a slap at Bush's ideological assault on science. He'll launch a concerted drive for new energy—to "harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories" so we can reduce a dependence on oil that serves only to "strengthen our enemies and threaten our planet." And finally, he pledges a transformation of "our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of the new age."

As to national security, Obama begins by rejecting the "false choice between our safety and our ideals," dismissing Bush's use of September 11 to trample our constitution. He discards the bellicose unilateralism of the Bush neoconservatives, evoking earlier generations that knew "our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. ... Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, and tempering qualities of humility and restraint." He paints an America "ready to lead again" by rejoining the world, with a new respect for "sturdy alliances and enduring convictions."

From these principles, he lays out his priorities. First, he will "responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan," somewhat reassuring phrasing for those of us worried that the dispatch of more troops to Afghanistan could trap us in a costly occupation. He places priority on reducing the nuclear threat, and rolling back "the specter of a warming planet."

Then after pledging the defeat of those who seek to terrorize us, he moves once more to seeking a "new era of peace," beginning with offering the Muslim world a new way forward, based on "mutual interest and mutual respect," watchwords for the Iranian leaders, among others. Rather than Bush's pledge to spread democracy at the end of a smart bomb, Obama offers to extend a hand to those "who cling to power through corruption and dissent and the silencing of dissent" if "you are willing to unclench your fist."

Also significant is what was left on the cutting room floor. There was no mention of raising the military budget, or reforming the military to expand its expeditionary forces. There was nothing about cutting back Social Security, Medicare or other parts of our social contract, the "grand bargain" that conservatives in both parties have been pushing for. Progressives looked in vain for words on reforming our unsustainable global economic posture, and the need to move from creating global markets for investors and multinationals to regulating them for the rest of us. Items marked urgent in his inbox—restructuring a banking system once more on the verge of collapse, and providing mortgage relief to millions facing foreclosure—received only the most oblique reference.

Events transform intention, as George Bush discovered when the collapse of Bear Sterns threatened to bring down the global economy. Movements force change that might otherwise never take place. No one speech defines the future. The fight over priorities and presidential attention has only begun.

But Obama used this speech [1] to raise the bar. While the president understands how far we have come with the fact of his election, this journey is only beginning. He calls Americans to a new age of responsibility, a new commitment to service, to put aside petty and partisan politics to address the stark challenges we face.

But his "post-partisan politics" is not about moving to the center, finding the least common denominator, and splitting the difference. In his inaugural address, the new president boldly summoned us to construct a new era of reform on the ashes of the failed conservative policies of the last three decades, with its foundations grounded on a progressive belief in activist government, regulated markets and shared prosperity at home, and a foreign policy that reflects our values. Each of us is called to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America." It is a challenge that we cannot afford to ignore.

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Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/obamas-summons_b_159816.html

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Day One: Organize For What Needs To Be Done

Photo: Team Obama, with David Axelrod, left.

Obama's Team
And The Return
of Triangulation

By Norman Solomon
CommonDreams.org

Jan 18, 2009 - The mosaic of Barack Obama’s cabinet picks and top White House staff gives us an overview of what the new president sees as political symmetry for his administration. While it’s too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, it’s not too soon to understand that “triangulation” is back.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was adept at placing himself midway between the base of his own party and Republican leaders. As he triangulated from the Oval Office -- often polarizing with liberal Democrats on such issues as “free trade,” deregulation, “welfare reform” and military spending -- Clinton did well for himself. But not for his party.


During Clinton’s presidency, with his repeated accommodations to corporate agendas, a progressive base became frustrated and demobilized. Democrats lost majorities in the House and Senate after just two years and didn’t get them back. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, numerous left-leaning causes fell by the wayside -- victims of a Democratic president’s too-clever-by-half triangulation.

Now, looking at Obama’s choices for key posts, many progressive activists who went all-out for months to get him elected are disappointed. The foreign-policy team, dominated by strong backers of the Iraq invasion, hardly seems oriented toward implementing Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to “end the mindset that got us into war.” On the domestic side, big-business ties and Wall Street sensibilities are most of the baseline. Overall, it’s hard to argue that the glass is half full when so much is missing.

The progressives who remain eager to project their worldviews onto Obama are at high risk for hazy credulity. Such projection is a chronic hazard of Obamania. Biographer David Mendell aptly describes Obama as “an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.”

But in the long run, an unduly lofty pedestal sets the stage for a fall from grace. Illusions make disillusionment possible.

There’s little point in progressives’ faulting Obama because so much of their vital work remains undone at the grassroots. A longtime Chicago-based activist on the left, Carl Davidson, made the point well when he wrote after the November election that “one is not likely to win at the top what one has not consolidated and won at the base.”

By the same token, we should recognize that Obama’s campaign victories (beginning with the Iowa caucuses) were possible only because of the painstaking work by antiwar activists and other progressive advocates in prior years. To make further progress possible, in electoral arenas and in national policies, the country must be moved anew -- from the bottom up.

As his administration gets underway, disappointed progressives shouldn’t blame Barack Obama for their own projection or naivete. He is a highly pragmatic leader who seeks and occupies the center of political gravity. Those who don’t like where he’s standing will need to move the center in their direction.

Obama has often said that his presidential quest isn’t about him nearly as much as it is about us -- the people yearning for real change and willing to work for it. If there’s ever a time to take Obama up on his word, this is it.

Crucial issues must be reframed. The national healthcare reform debate, for instance, still lacks the clarity to distinguish between guaranteeing healthcare for all and mandating loophole-ridden insurance coverage for all. With the exception of Rep. John Conyers’ single-payer bill to provide “enhanced Medicare” for everyone in the United States, each major congressional proposal keeps the for-profit insurance industry at the core of the country’s medical-care system.

As for foreign policy, the paradigm of a “war on terror,” more than seven years on, remains nearly sacrosanct. Among its most stultifying effects is the widely held assumption that many more U.S. troops should go to Afghanistan. Rhetoric to the contrary, Obama’s policy focus appears to be fixated on finding a military solution for an Afghan conflict that cannot be resolved by military means. The escalation is set for a centrist disaster.

During his race for the White House, ironically, Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about “the fierce urgency of now.” But King uttered the phrase in the same speech (on April 4, 1967) that spoke of “a society gone mad on war,” condemned “my own government” as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and declared: “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now.”

Barack Obama never promised progressives a rose garden. His campaign inspired tens of millions of Americans, raised the level of public discourse and ousted the right wing from the White House. And he has pledged to encourage civic engagement and respectful debate. The rest is up to us.

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MLK: Militarism Feeds Spiritual Death

Photo: Dr King at Riverside church giving antiwar speech, left, alongside an anti-militarism ad targeting Haliburton.

One of Dr. King's Nightmares

By Steve Cobble
Huffington Post

As we approach what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 80th birthday, we should remember not just his dream, but his nightmares--his fear that without a "true revolution of values," the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

On April 4, 1967, in New York City's Riverside Church, Dr. King spoke truth to power, making a powerful case against an earlier immoral war. But Dr. King was not just against the Vietnam War; he understood that the world cried out for both justice and peace. And the words our greatest prophet spoke that day still call to us: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Spiritual death.


Yet more than four decades later, the U.S. still accounts for nearly half the world's spending on war, and preparations for war. More than four decades later, we still spend half our own discretionary budget on war, and preparations for war.

The newspapers this week are filled with discussion of our massive deficit, and the usual pundit fear-mongering over the need to cut Social Security and pension funds and Medicare. "Blue Dog Democrats" are quoted saying that they may have to oppose the stimulus plan, or any new health care plan, unless President Obama shows them where he will find the equivalent cuts in other programs (so-called "pay-go" cuts).

Well, I've got a suggestion on where to find a big chunk of that money--look across the Potomac River at that five-sided building which has enjoyed massive funding increases during the entire Bush/Cheney Administration. Heck, it's almost two decades since the Cold War collapsed, a quarter century since Ronald Reagan brought Grenada, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to their knees (snark), and almost six years since everyone but Dick Cheney admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--so do we really still need all the costly programs on the DOD's drawing board?

Congressman Barney Frank recently suggested a 25% cut in the military budget. He has a point, and it's not really that hard to see how to get there.

If we want to turn the page on the Bush/Cheney foreign policy, and show the world the new face of America, we should not only end the occupation of Iraq and close down the detention/torture camp at Guantanamo, but also shut down several hundred other overseas bases. America was founded in opposition to Empire, not to become one.

If we need to find hundreds of billions of dollars to fund a real stimulus program and build a new "green economy" that makes Mideast oil obsolete, why not cancel the "non-stealth", over-budget F35 Joint Strike Fighter, with its estimated one trillion dollars cost? And the next allotment of F22 Raptors, which have no mission? And the V-22 Osprey, which even Dick Cheney once tried to kill? And the DDG-1000 Virginia class submarine, another weapon without a purpose? And dangerous and costly efforts to militarize space?

Let's convert our national weapons labs completely to anti-nuclear-proliferation work and to alternative energy R&D. Aren't "loose nukes" and climate change two of our true security threats? The Bible says that "...where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Is this really where America's heart is, spending half its treasure on a military/petroleum complex while its own people go without health care, pensions, good schools, affordable housing, even bridges and levees?

This week, the inauguration of President Barack Obama shows that we have come a long way towards Dr. King's dream of measuring people not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." This is a very good change, well worth celebrating.

But while we are enjoying the wonderful view as our new President strolls down Pennsylvania Avenue, we should remember that Dr. King also fought for jobs & justice; that he called for an end to poverty & racism; and that he warned us about an immoral war & warned against the growing nightmare of a permanent war economy.

Dr. King prophesied that militarism would bring us economic and spiritual disaster. Maybe it's time we paid him some mind.

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No Cure: The Squeeze Is What Got Us Here

Nouveau Poor:
Numbers Now Too
Large to Ignore

By Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbaraehrenreich.com

Jan. 13, 2009 - Ever on the lookout for the bright side of hard times, I am tempted to delete 'class inequality' from my worry list. Less than a year ago, it was the one of the biggest economic threats on the horizon, with even hard line conservative pundits grousing that wealth was flowing uphill at an alarming rate, leaving the middle class stuck with stagnating incomes while the new super-rich ascended to the heavens in their personal jets.

Then the whole top-heavy structure of American capitalism began to totter, and –poof!—inequality all but vanished from the public discourse. A financial columnist in the Chicago Sun Times has just announced that the recession is a 'great leveler,' serving to 'democratize[d] the agony,' as we all tumble into 'the Nouveau Poor...'

The media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the neo-suffering of the Nouveau Poor, or at least the Formerly Super-rich among them:
Foreclosures in Greenwich CT! A collapsing market for cosmetic surgery! Sales of Gulfstream jets declining! Niemen Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue on the ropes! We read of desperate measures, like having to cut back the personal trainer to two hours a week. Parties have been canceled; dinner guests have been offered, gasp, baked potatoes and chili. The New York Times relates the story of a New Jersey teenager whose parents were forced to cut her $100 a week allowance and private Pilates classes. In one of the most pathetic tales of all, New Yorker Alexandra Penney relates how she lost her life savings to Bernie Madoff and is now faced with having to lay off her three-day- a-week maid, Yolanda. 'I wear a classic clean white shirt every day of the week. I have about 40 white shirts. They make me feel fresh and ready to face whatever battles I may be fighting …' she wrote, but without Yolanda, 'How am I going to iron those shirts so I can still feel like a poor civilized person?'

But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than Obama’s inauguration is likely to eradicate racism. No one actually knows yet whether inequality has increased or decreased during the last year of recession, but the historical precedents are not promising. The economists I’ve talked to -- like Biden’s top economic advisor, Jared Bernstein -- insist that recessions are particularly unkind to the poor and the middle class. Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan says, 'Income polarization always gets worse during recessions.' It makes sense. If the stock market has shrunk your assets of $500 million to a mere $250 million, you may have to pass on a third or fourth vacation home. But if you’ve just lost an $8 an hour job, you’re looking at no home at all.

Alright, I’m a journalist and I understand how the media work. When a millionaire cuts back on his crème fraiche and caviar consumption, you have a touching human interest story. But pitch a story about a laid-off roofer who loses his trailer home and you’re likely to get a big editorial yawn. 'Poor Get Poorer' is just not an eye-grabbing headline, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Food stamp applications, for example, are rising toward a historic record; calls to one DC-area hunger hotline have jumped 248 percent in the last six months, most of them from people who have never needed food aid before. And for the first time since 1996, there’s been a marked upswing in the number of people seeking cash assistance from TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), the exsanguinated version of welfare left by welfare 'reform.' Too bad for them that TANF is essentially a wage-supplement program based on the assumption that the poor would always be able to find jobs, and that it pays, at most, less than half the federal poverty level.

Why do the sufferings of the poor and the downwardly- mobile class matter more than the tiny deprivations of the rich? Leaving aside all the soft-hearted socialist, Christian-type, arguments, it’s because poverty and the squeeze on the middle class are a big part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Only one thing kept the sub-rich spending in the 00’s, and hence kept the economy going, and that was debt: credit card debt, home equity loans, car loans, college loans and of course the now famously 'toxic' subprime mortgages, which were bundled and sliced into 'securities' and marketed to the rich as high-interest investments throughout the world. The gross inequality of American society wasn’t just unfair or aesthetically displeasing; it created a perilously unstable situation.

Which is why any serious government attempt to get the economy going again -- and I leave aside the unserious attempts like bank bailouts and other corporate welfare projects -- has to start at the bottom. Obama is promising to generate three million new jobs in 'shovel ready' projects, and let’s hope they’re not all jobs for young men with strong backs. Until those jobs kick in, and in case they leave out the elderly, the single moms and the downsized desk-workers, we’re going to need an economic policy centered on the poor: more money for food stamps, for Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and, yes, cash assistance along the lines of what welfare once was, so that when people come tumbling down they don’t end up six feet under. For those who think 'welfare' sounds too radical, we could just call it a 'right to life' program, only one in which the objects of concern have already been born.

If that sounds politically unfeasible, consider this: When Clinton was cutting welfare and food stamps in the 90s, the poor were still an easily marginalized group, subjected to the nastiest sorts of racial and gender stereotyping. They were lazy, promiscuous, addicted, deadbeats, as whole choruses of conservative experts announced. Thanks to the recession, however -- and I knew there had to be a bright side -- the ranks of the poor are swelling every day with failed business owners, office workers, salespeople, and long-time homeowners. Stereotype that! As the poor and the formerly middle class Nouveau Poor become the American majority, they will finally have the clout to get their needs met.

[Barbara Ehrenreich, an initiator of 'Progressives for Obama', is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.]

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Paradox of Israel: Imprisoned by 'The Other'

Photo: Wall between Israel and Gaza

The Paradox of Israel:
Regional Super Power
and the Largest Jewish
Ghetto Ever Created

By Ira Chernus
AlterNet.org

Jan. 2, 2009 - Trying to understand the psychology of a people at war is a lot like trying to find the bodies buried under a bombed-out building.

For more than 40 years, I've been watching my own Jewish people in wartime, repeating the same self-defeating pattern over and over. Most Jews say that they want Israel to be more secure, and they really mean it. Yet they support and vote for leaders who perpetuate the conflicts that make Israel less secure.

I've been digging for decades through the endless pieces of that paradox, trying to get to the bottom of it. Here's what I see now as the bottom layer (though there may be layers further down that I haven't reached yet): The root of the problem lies in the Jews' relationship to the non-Jewish world and, even more, in the way Jews understand that relationship.

Jews have a long, checkered history of relations with their gentile neighbors. Sometimes, in centuries past, they got along very well; Jews felt fully a part of a larger multi-ethnic community. But most of the Jews who came to Palestine to populate a Jewish state never had that connected feeling. They experienced the human world the way minority groups so often do: There's us, and then there's everybody else; there's a wall separating us from everybody else. So they could never see themselves as part of a larger Middle Eastern community, a web of interactions where each group influenced all the others.

All they could feel was a great disconnect. Before 1948, they saw themselves as a community separated by all sorts of invisible walls from the Arabs around them. After 1948, they had geographical borders that functioned as visible separators, much like the ghetto walls of old. Although Zionism began as an effort to make the Jews a "normal nation," it ended up creating the world's largest Jewish ghetto.

For many Jews, the sense of disconnection was rooted in real history. Some had ancestors who had been separated from gentiles physically by a ghetto wall. Many had ancestors who felt separated by invisible walls of law and social custom, which seemed just as thick and high.

Still others, though, came from relatively well-assimilated communities. They learned to feel separated from the non-Jewish world, for reasons of all sorts. And since the Six-Day War of 1967, many Jews in the United States and around the world, who grew up in very well-assimilated settings, have learned a similar attitude. For them, Israel is the symbol of a gulf that they imagine has always existed, and must always exist, between Jews and gentiles.

That's why many Israeli Jews, and Jews everywhere who sympathize with them, have a hard time recognizing what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us: Whoever we are, whomever we live with, all the members of a community are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. That's not a moral platitude. It's a poetic way of stating a commonsense observation of fact: Whatever we do is bound to affect others in our community, just as what they do affects us; we are all responding to each other all the time.

No matter how isolated one group may feel, it is always interacting with the groups around it. A minority group knows that it's responding to the majority. It has a harder time seeing how the majority is responding to it. But in fact, the relationship is always mutual. And when anyone on either sides commits violence, the violence is actually a product of the ongoing pattern of relationship, although the majority typically holds the upper hand when it comes to force.

Since so many Jews in Palestine could not recognize that network of mutuality, they could not see how much the Arabs were responding to them. They saw themselves simply living their ordinary lives, minding their own business, on their side of the invisible wall. When the first Arab rocks were thrown at Jews, they seemed like bolts out of the blue. Most Jews could not imagine that their own behavior and their own choices were triggering the attacks. They assumed that the Arabs' had some other motivation -- anti-Semitism, many assumed -- to single them out as innocent victims.

Today, the Palestinian Arabs' rocks still fly. Bullets and bombs and rockets fly, too. And the same great disconnect remains among far too many Jews, both in Israel and around the world. They assume that there is no network of mutuality, no web of give and take. There is simply the Jewish state, trying its best to live peacefully and mind its own business, constantly victimized by attacks for reasons known only to the attackers. All the trouble, it seems, begins on the other side of the border.

This view is at the root of all Israel's military and diplomatic policies and the support they engender throughout the Jewish world. When you see the world through the lens of the great disconnect, everything that the Israeli government does makes sense, including the recent massive attack on Gaza. It's all based on the premise that no changes in Israel's policies can ever affect the basic antagonism of its neighbors.

The famous historian Benny Morris, in a recent New York Times op-ed, described just how things look from inside this great disconnect: "Many Israelis feel that the walls -- and history -- are closing in on their 60-year-old state. … The Arab and wider Islamic worlds … have never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel's creation and continue to oppose its existence. … The West … is gradually reducing its support for Israel."

In other words: Nobody likes us, and we can't understand why. We are, as always, passive victims of unprovoked antagonism, and there ain't a thing we can do about it.

Then comes the inevitable conclusion: Though we can't change our opponents' feelings, we can change their behavior. Conciliation and compromise may produce marginal improvements. But the only way to change their behavior substantially is through the fear that comes from overwhelming force. So the best thing we can do is fight back. When the targets of our force try (quite naturally) to resist, we say: See, they really do hate us! It's a self-confirming illusion that is hard to escape.

That's the greatest danger of the great disconnect: If you don't acknowledge your own role in creating a conflict, you are working with an unrealistic view of what's happening. So you can't craft realistic policies that will actually make your nation more secure. When you start out from an illusion, you are bound to end up in self-contradiction -- which is just what has happened to Israel. With its political culture rooted in memories of oppression (and the eras of cooperation largely forgotten), it continues to assume that the Jews are a beleaguered minority. Its policies all stem from that premise.

But it's an illusion. Any realistic assessment of the Middle East must begin with the obvious fact that Israel has a preponderance of power over everyone else -- and a massive preponderance over the Palestinians. Imagine the United States basing its policies toward Mexico on the belief that we are seriously threatened by Mexico's power. That's pretty much how Israel deals with the Palestinians.

It isn't just absurd; it's lethal. It creates policies that get people killed -- mostly in the Occupied Territories, but far too many on Israel's side as well. Yet Israelis keep saying they only want security, while they go on electing leaders whose policies make them less secure, repeating the same excuse: "Those [fill in the blank] understand only one thing!"

It's a common refrain, a reminder that the great disconnect is hardly unique to Israel and the Jews. It shapes relations between many groups all over the world, including relations between the United States and the many groups it defines as enemies. Many Palestinians may view their conflict with Israel through the eyes of the great disconnect, too.

In fact, when I offer this analysis of the Jewish community, I'm often met with the objection: Why just criticize Israel? What about the other side, with its rockets and suicide bombers? That question, too, emerges from the viewpoint of the great disconnect. It's a way of saying, "Why focus so much on our side? Isn't the real trouble coming from the other side?" -- as if the trouble could come from only one side.

Of course the trouble comes from the relationship, to which both sides contribute. But I don't live among Palestinians. I'm not in any position to understand them. So I speak to my own people. I point out that we have no control over the choices others make. We can control only our own choices. And it's only by making new choices in our own community that we can hope to affect the choices of others.

Fortunately, there are plenty of Jews who understand this. Their numbers are growing. And they hold the key to peace and security for Israel. People who are trapped in the great disconnect are not likely to listen to anyone on the other side of the wall. Only when voices within their own community offer a new, more realistic view can they have a chance to hear it.

But the message has to speak directly to the heart of the problem at its deepest level. It has to name the great disconnect, acknowledge the real and imagined history behind it, but insist that now it is too dangerous -- for ourselves and for others -- to cling to a past memory as if it were present reality.

To explain the great disconnect is not (as some fear) to absolve Jews of their moral responsibility. In fact, it's the only way to bring the Jewish community back to its moral responsibility. The great Zionist thinker Martin Buber said that responsibility is really "response-ability:" the ability to tear down the imagined walls separating people and communities from one another, so that all can respond to the reality of the situation.

The first step toward responsibility is recognizing the reality that no one ever lives shut up behind a wall. We are always in mutual relationship with the people around us, whether we know it and like it or not. Once people tear down the imaginary walls that they think surround them, they can realize that their borders are not walls but bridges, connecting them to the people on the other side. Only then can they begin to reach across those borders and make peace.

Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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Palestine: Defeat Is Not an Option

Photo: Gaza: You can destroy homes, but the people endure

What You Don’t
Know About Gaza

By Rashid Khalidi
NYT Op-Ed

Jan. 8, 2009 - NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.


THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

THE BLOCKADE Israel’s blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.

The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment — with the tacit support of the United States — of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.

THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.

WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

[Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."]

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