I would imagine they would not be calling on us for any support.
I also expect that their repayment of foreign aid checks are in the mail.
And, you're welcome.
radman wrote:
-Caveat Lector-Let's Boycott America
US democracy is flawed; its human rights record poor; its greed threatens
the planet. Is it time for the rest of us to act?by David Nicholson-Lord
Monday 25th December 2000Whenever one gets unduly depressed about British politics, it is always
worth glancing across the Atlantic to see how bad things can really get.
Quite what was going through Tony Blair's mind last week when he rang up to
congratulate George W Bush on the latter's much-disputed achievement of the
presidency may not be known until he writes his memoirs. But it is a fair
guess that he had to swallow hard before he picked up the phone. In
Britain, Blair is routinely berated by the right-wing press as a
superficial lightweight, but, by the side of George W, he is a towering
intellectual giant. Sadly, by the side of George W, a frightening number of
people are.
What is to be done about the United States of America? Put another way,
how much of a jackass does a man have to be before he's stopped from being
president?
For a little over a month, from the inconclusive ending on election night
to the Supreme Court's narrow decision in favour of Bush, the rest of us
watched in disbelief as the nuts and bolts of American democracy came apart
before our eyes. One had known that the system was gridlocked - awash with
unreformed campaign finance, in thrall to business lobbies and focus
groups, obsessed with trivia, incapable of generating an intelligent debate
on serious issues: all this is the stuff of conventional wisdom about US
politics.
But what the daily news from Tallahassee revealed was that the world's most
technologically advanced nation can't even get its voting machines to count
accurately. And that counting by hand might be unconstitutional - which is
rather like outlawing running as a sport because nowadays everyone drives.
And that the entire chad fiasco was just one of several ways in which the
votes of many Florida citizens (in particular, those likely to be at odds
with the state's Republican rulers) seemed to have been fixed and fiddled
out of existence.
In a country that regards itself as the exemplar of the free world, this is
strange stuff indeed. Whatever voting system you use, there are certain
basics that a modern democracy cannot do without. First, universal suffrage
must mean what it says; second, everyone with a vote should be entitled to
cast it and have it accurately counted; and third, the person with the most
votes should win. On all these tests, American democracy failed. One might
think it can't get much worse than that, but it can and probably will.
This is because the almost certain conclusion of the whole extraordinary
saga will be - absolutely nothing. George W Bush will proclaim, on
numberless occasions, "God bless America", much nonsense will be spouted
about healing a dividing nation and the US will settle down to a festive
season of low-IQ Hollywood movies, in which Americans in various guises
routinely vanquish the rest of the galaxy, with Floridian gerrymandering
and dimpled chads a rapidly fading memory. It is in the nature of
gridlocked systems that they cannot easily unjam themselves.
What does this mean for the rest of us? One of the less edifying aspects of
the Florida interregnum was the way the British news media, notably the
television bulletins, treated it as comic relief. It was a reaction, one is
tempted to remark, that revealed the media's growing incapacity for
joined-up thinking, because what happened in Florida was absolutely no
joke. It was the political equivalent of exploratory surgery - the opening
up of the body politic to searching internal examination. Inside, disease
was found to be rampant. And if it is fair to call George W Bush the
symptom of that disease - certainly it produced him and he has profited
from it - we are all among the sufferers.
If you consider that alarmist, think back to the damage inflicted on the
planet by another "regular guy" who made it to the presidency recently, on
the strength largely of a telegenic manner and corporate backing. Forget
the forces of globalisation that so-called Reaganomics helped unleash in
the 1980s; remember only the wound Ronald Reagan's views on family planning
inflicted on US funding for UN population policies and, by extension, the
lives of millions of people in the developing world.
Twenty years later, the global dimensions of the US presidency are more
pronounced, the issues more critical. Not only is Bush keen on reinventing
Reagan's Star Wars missile defence system, a move that at its worst could
kick-start a new cold war. It is also said that he discounts global
warming. And here we are on very dangerous territory indeed.
Global warming may now be the single biggest factor shaping the destiny of
the planet. It straddles nations and national political issues. It affects
all of us - for many, it is an issue of survival. This is partly because it
undermines life-support systems, such as food production and the
availability of fresh water, and partly because it is a potent generator of
disasters - flood, drought, fire and therefore famine. In the southern
hemisphere, it promises to extinguish entire, albeit small, island nations.
These facts have been known for many years, but this year they have become
far more widely known. And this knowing, and the emotions and reactions it
will trigger, may have great political significance. Indeed, this is what
happens in revolutions - more and more people come to know and feel in a
particular way until at some point a critical mass or threshold is reached;
some small event then sets off an earthquake.
In the case of global warming, a developing world long fearful of the
effects of climate change made common cause with a Europe newly sensitised
to it by the worst floods in memory. The conjunction occurred at the
climate talks in The Hague last month, where American culpability was
widely proclaimed (4 per cent of the world's population, but 26 per cent of
its oil consumption), yet American corruption proved inescapable. In
effect, American democratic gridlock - the impossibility of selling
emissions cuts to an American public addicted to carbon-rich lifestyles,
American businesses that supply those lifestyles and an American Congress
financed by those businesses - went global. The talks failed: it became
everybody's gridlock.
Under a Gore presidency, we might have hoped for progress on climate
change. Under Bush, we might as well forget it. However, we won't. We will,
almost certainly, get very angry. We will start to scrutinise the US with a
colder eye. And what we see won't please us - not one little bit.
We may have already concluded, for example, that George W Bush is a walking
metaphor for the warping of American democracy. We may see, in his
resistance to the idea of global warming, something of the insularity and
greed of the American public. We may start to wonder what, precisely, the
US stands for. What good comes out of it? How does it benefit the rest of
the planet?
Such questions can yield surprising answers. Critics such as the American
academic Noam Chomsky have been asking them for decades. So have many
people, and nations, in the developing world. For them, Uncle Sam
symbolises colonialism and exploitation. We used to ask these questions
ourselves - Dickens, famously, visited the US and found it an uncouth,
unformed, childlike society where everyone spat a lot, thought about little
other than making money, yet had a remarkably high opinion of themselves.
But since the US, reluctantly and belatedly, came to the aid of European
democracies in two world wars, the myth of the special relationship has
been fashioned. We hear Americans speak a version of English and believe
it signifies a shared experience. Our politicians have found it expedient
to hang on American coat tails - not least because Britain has become a
convenient landing-stage for US industry in its conquest of the world's
richest market, Europe.
The United States, in reality, is an immigrant culture with two of the
defining characteristics of such cultures: an overwhelming desire to make
good, economically; and a coarseness of public debate that makes it easy
prey to the marketing men, and to calculating politicians masquerading as
regular guys. It treats the rest of the world as, variously, playground,
plantation, storehouse and sweatshop. It locks away and executes as many
people as the most unreconstructed autocracy: a disproportionate number of
these victims are black. It is addicted, fatally, to violence. It hasn't
had a decent president since Franklin D Roosevelt, regards "liberal" as a
term of abuse and managed to convert an elderly, indolent and dim-witted
film actor into, first, a state governor, then a president and, finally, a
kind of secular saint. It is an empire, but whereas the Greeks gave us
culture, the Romans law and the British, arguably, a sense of fair play,
history may well come to view the American empire's defining triumph as the
export of junk to the rest of the world - from genetically modified food to
burgers, bad films and worse television. Not for nothing is American
imperialism known as Coca-Colonisation.
There are many good points to American culture. The issue is whether the
good outweighs the bad - and what answer the overwhelmingly non-American
majority of the world's population now gives when they ask themselves this
question.
It doesn't, for example, take much of a shift in perspective to see US
foreign policy, since the war, not as a defence of the "free" world, but as
oppressive and brutal and governed by economic self-interest. Or to see the
US today as an enemy of the planet - an "evil empire", to borrow Ronald
Reagan's phrase for the Soviet Union.
And in that sense, the past two months of the year 2000 may prove a turning
point - the moment when the scales fell from our eyes.
The question is - what can we do? We don't have votes in US elections, even
if they weren't rigged. We cannot, in Britain, expect governments to act -
British politicians, in the manner of client states, have a doglike
attachment to the special relationship. We do, however, have a powerful
economic weapon - our wallets, credit cards, chequebooks, patronage, custom
and compliance.
A consumer boycott of the US wouldn't be easy - its goods and services and
cultural effluvia have wormed their way into our lives. But as the recent
campaign against GM foods and Monsanto demonstrated, it could be enormously
effective; it would also be peculiarly appropriate. If George W Bush is
indeed a corporation disguised as a human being, as the green campaigner
and presidential candidate Ralph Nader put it during the election campaign,
then the US is a corporation disguised as a nation state.
While governments, in between elections, can be hard nuts for citizens to
crack, corporations are easy - they hurt very quickly, in that area
Americans call the bottom line. For those who might jib at such a display
of overt anti-Americanism, there's a further powerful argument in its
favour. By boycotting America and its products, we might start making
Americans think - which at present they are not showing much sign of doing.
We might act as a catalyst to unjam their own domestic gridlock.
We might, in other words, be doing the US a bigger favour than it could
ever imagine.<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
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