Politics

To write that Bush's brain is about to retire would be an anachronism: surely it did that a long time ago. Today we read that Karl Rove is about to retire and write a book on the Bush presidency. This is not something that I either welcome or disdain; like other uber-strategists, Dick Morris or James Carville, Rove embodied the amoral ethos that one should win at any cost. Constituencies are simply there to be activated and wielded for the benefit of this or that campaign.

Several election cycles ago, there was a Washington flap over whether or not China was a "strategic partner" of the United States. Echoing old racist language, National Review labelled the Clinton administration's self-characterization of its China policy, "inscrutable." By the time of 2000 US presidential election campaign, candidate George W. Bush rejected the idea of a partnership, framing China instead as a competitor. In a matter of months, with Bush now at the helm of the American government, China and the US were taken to the brink of confrontation over the downing of a US airplane allegedly in Chinese airspace. That was then!

Neither smart nor filled with answers, I humble myself here by thinking aloud about antiwar strategy. I also want to clearly state some of starting points. My first departure point may reduce my readership by half!  It is that masses of people—self-organizing networks and communities—mostly acting independently of the parties remain among the most decisive forces for ending and preventing wars. Yes, masses of people, not well-positioned elites, not savvy strategists, not self-sacrificing organizers, but ordinary folks reacting to their sense of what's right and wrong remain the bellwether.

Writing as someone who has helped organize events that featured Cindy Sheehan, I want to support her declaration concerning the Democratic Party’s relationship to the antiwar project. I also want to extend my sympathy to and express my solidarity with Cindy Sheehan and the tens of thousands of grassroots organizers who are the fabric of the antiwar movement. In reviewing the first wave of responses to the “Resignation Statement” (RS), I have come to ask more questions about the state of our movement.

On the same day that Mass Global Action joined with nearly 50 other protestors, from the Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, to protest Henry Kissinger and his troupe of war criminals at the Kennedy Library in Boston, we learnt of the death of Slobodon Milosovic. While the death of the Balkan Butcher leaves us cold, we can't help notice the curious symmetry by which the powerful cheat justice. If death was Milosovic's escape, it is the hipocrisy and indifference to international law of the US political establishment that allows Kissinger, Haig, and Clark to go untried for their crimes.

Amidst the indicments, failed nominations, body counts and tropical depressions, there is little reason from optimism, let alone gloating on the part of the progressive movement. Even in moral defeat, in the normally harsh glare of negative public opinion, the right-wing flaps on... Witness the suspension of Davis Bacon in NOLA, the issuing of vouchers for use at private schools, new initiatives to undermine foreign governments (Iran & Syria), etc. Even with the Bush Administration's failure to provide the necessary resources to strengthening international public health systems, it seems poised to revive the politics of fear with the Avian Flu threat. The surest index of right-wing success and resilience in the face of moral failure, though, is the corporate bottom line.

Here are excerpts from articles on the growing tragedy in the Gulf and New Orleans, LA (NOLA), in particular. At some later date, the American people may do a proper accounting. At that time the delayed responses and aid, the prior and continuing diversion of resources for war, and the context pressures of global warming will have to take their place alongside another matter: the calculated destruction of the public sector. For now however, please see the following selections with links that cover some of the immediate issues.

This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful; it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers; it was aimed at ordinary working class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christians, Hindu and Jew, young and old, indiscriminate attempt at slaughter irrespective of any considerations, of age, of class, of religion, whatever, that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it's just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder…

London Mayor Ken Livingston, 7/7/05