Znet Kerry Won't Stop the War But independent action can
by Mark Harris May 06, 2004
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'Anybody But Bush' - You Get What You Pay For
The "Anybody But Bush" vision now has most of the progressive milieu in its trance, but it is not a vision as much as it is a paucity of vision. Faced with a war sparked by the extremist right-wing politics of the Bush Administration, the best so many otherwise articulate and powerful voices for justice can muster is an insistence on supporting whoever happens to win the Democratic nomination. It's a telling sign now of how truly rudderless left-progressive politics is in the United States. It's also revealing just how desperate progressives are that a return to the Clinton-style politics Kerry embraces is now considered almost a god-send.
In fact, the social policy of the Clinton Administration was the most conservative of any administration since the end of World War II, as historian Howard Zinn reminds us in the revised edition to his "A People's History of the United States." The entire tenure of the Clinton Administration was defined by erosion of New Deal social policy, gutting welfare and other safety net programs, deregulating industries, union and environmental protections, and generally cozying up to the interests of silver spoon investors and corporate executives, the principal beneficiaries of the era's market prosperity. The campaign slogan of 1992, "Putting People First," came to mean "putting the bond market" first, as Edward Herman, Wharton School professor of finance, remarked a few years ago in a Z magazine round-up on the Clinton legacy. In this sense, the Clinton Presidency was but a stage-setting prelude to the Republicans Gone Wild nightmare of the current administration.
Is the only choice now one of the speed of the retreat from the promise of a better, more just society? Unfortunately, if the possibilities for political change are viewed only through the lens of Bush versus Kerry in November, then that is the sorry reality. But it's a mistake to view the election as the be-all and end-all of all our hopes. Let's instead get heretical in our thinking and declare that a neo-con Republican in power is not inherently less responsive to pressure from "the street" than a liberal Democrat. Historically, when has progressive social change ever depended more or even mostly on whether a Democrat or Republican is in office, rather than on what happens outside the corridors of power, in the workplaces, campuses, and neighborhoods, among the officially voiceless and disenfranchised or excluded? This is the story of the Civil Rights movement, when sit-ins and marches and a growing, relentless dissent compelled a bipartisan power structure, long comfortable with Jim Crow racism, to finally sit up and take action. This is the story of woman's suffrage, too, the Vietnam peace movement, and labor's long quest for the eight-hour day, benefits, and such civilized ideas like vacations. This is the story of the historical movement of democracy itself.
Think about this: In 1970 labor activists helped secure passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, viewed by many as "the most important pro-worker legislation of the last 50 years," as Steven Greenhouse noted in a 2002 New York Times profile of veteran labor leader Tony Mazzochi. Notably, the OSHA legislation was passed under a Republican administration. Those same Nixon years also saw an end to the military draft, and legal recognition of a woman's right to choose. Again, no thanks to Nixon or even to a "progressive" Supreme Court (it didn't exist), but to the popular, organized activism and mobilization of public opinion of millions of Americans. In this context, the million-plus March for Women's Lives on April 25 did more to secure women's reproductive rights than anything that will happen on November 4.
It might similarly be easy to credit President Clinton for passage of such legislation as the Family Medical Leave Act, but that leaves out the reality that the real impetus came from women's groups and unions, who had pushed for such legislation for years. Likewise, the belief that Clinton's early health care reform initiative failed because it was too liberal or visionary turns reality on its head. The proposal failed because whatever reformer's vision it could claim sank in the bog of endless reassurances by the Administration to sectors of the insurance industry that their profits would remain sacrosanct. But without a mobilized public movement, even that was not enough to ensure passage of the health care reform. This was not the case in Canada, where historically active public support for the independent, union-based New Democratic Party helped to eventually win passage of a single payer health system.
If Ralph Nader, an early endorser of the small Labor Party group founded by the late union organizer Tony Mazzochi, was actually running a campaign advocating Mazzochi's idea of truly independent, working-class campaigns for office, in opposition to the corporate-dominated two parties, it could at the very least set an example of the direction grass-roots organizing needs to go if independent political action is ever going to gain momentum in this country.
Unfortunately, that is not what Nader is doing. The Nader campaign seeks to oppose the Democratic Party while ostensibly trying to boost the party, hoping to pressure Kerry from the grass-roots left to take better positions on a host of issues. Accordingly, Nader thinks he can pull large blocs of disillusioned nonvoters, independents, and even Republicans into voting booths, blocs otherwise beyond Kerry's reach, who, the thinking goes, will then invariably translate part of their presence in the voting booth into backing for various progressive Democrats running for local and state offices. It's a confused, ambiguous strategy and it makes about as much sense as Michael Moore's endorsement of General Wesley Clark, who led NATO in bombing civilian targets in Belgrade in 1998, as a "peace" candidate for the Democratic nomination.
While Nader at least advocates getting out of Iraq (but in six months), the problem now with all the elite debates about the future of Iraq is the thorny problem of the Iraqi insurgency, which in one way or another, is likely to continue growing. Of course, it's possible the U.S. military may perpetrate a repression so thorough and bloody that it effectively puts down the rebellion. For now. But with weapons you can never obliterate the spirit of human resistance. They also cannot kill everyone. The spirit of nationalism is such that the Iraqi people will in the long run never countenance the ongoing occupation of their country, puppet government or not, especially with the current atrocities and killings becoming part of their collective memory. They will one way or another be the final arbiter of the future of Iraq.
More Protest, More Demonstrations
As a labor organizer, Tony Mazzochi understood that the type of progressive social change that endures always originates and grows from the grass roots, from the cellar floor, challenging the existing status quo as well as whatever conventional wisdom tells us about the limits of what is "practical" to achieve. Social change rather happens when the dissent in the air gets organized and visible and takes to the streets as well as the ballot box. And getting organized has never depended upon "lesser-evils" or benevolent elites. Our battle now is not just against a military occupation, but against militarism itself.
Undoubtedly, last year's antiwar protests lost some of their urgency following the quick military victory by U.S and British forces over Saddam Hussein's government. Yet mainstream American politics is as much a creature of paradox as it is mostly an exercise in sound bites and personality contests. It was thus perhaps at the moment of President Bush's most triumphal war posturing, when he paraded macho style in full flight uniform on the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier, celebrating "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, that a sense of the seismic credibility chasm the Administration was about to plunge into began to edge into fuller view.
The chasm has opened. What is unfolding now in Iraq is a political disaster for the United States. As reports surface from Fallujah of Marine snipers who shoot at ambulances, or civilians who step out of their houses, or of American soldiers who sadistically abuse Iraqi prisoners in the very prison Hussein once used for his own tortures, the evidence mounts of the utter moral collapse this war represents for the government of the United States.
What our political leaders have done is criminal. Under the guise of a phantom weapons threat, the United States government started a war that after one year of "liberation" has led not to dancing in the streets but street combat. The beginnings of a classic nationalist rebellion against occupation by a foreign power are now underway. Think Vietnam. Think Algeria. With the infrastructure still in crisis, electricity spotty, hospitals in disrepair, cities under siege, unemployment over 50 percent, union rights denied under the same Hussein-era laws, and world opinion largely in square opposition to U.S. policy, the corporate CEO-think that defines the Bush mind-set has proven its profound inability to lead. At least if political leadership still has anything to do with social justice, peace, and prosperity in the world. The Democratic front-runner John Kerry equally shows no signs of a fundamentally different mind-set.
The antiwar marches before the war and most recently on March 20 sent a vibrant, defiant message that international and domestic opposition to the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq runs deep. They must continue. Now more than ever. Louder than ever. Bigger than ever. No matter who is in office. The killing must stop.
Think Out Now. Bring the troops home now.
full: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5469
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