| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"ClassWarz" |
| Date: |
28 May 2004 11:50:03 PM |
| Object: |
BANANA REPUBLICANS!!! |
From the book Banana Republicans:
http://www.bananarepublicans.org/excerpt.html
<begin quote from the book
The following excerpt is from the introduction to Banana Republicans.
The War at Home
"I'm a uniter, not a divider," said candidate George W. Bush during his 2000
campaign for president. "I refuse to play the politics of putting people
into groups and pitting one group against another." This promise to be a
"uniter, not a divider" was a recurrent theme throughout Bush's campaign,
repeated verbatim in media interviews, fund-raising letters, campaign stump
speeches and debates.
As Bush neared the end of his first term, however, evidence suggested that
he had been just the opposite. The Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press conducts periodic opinion polls that compare the attitudes of
Republican and Democratic voters. "National unity was the initial response
to the calamitous events of Sept. 11, 2001," noted its November 2003 update,
"but that spirit has dissolved amid rising political polarization and anger.
In fact, a year before the presidential election, American voters are once
again seeing things largely through a partisan prism. ... The Pew Research
Center's longitudinal measures of basic political, economic and social
values, which date back to 1987, show that political polarization is now as
great as it was prior to the 1994 midterm elections that ended four decades
of Democratic control in Congress."
The reasons for these deepening divisions are not hard to find. The voting
system that brought Bush into office was seriously flawed, and he presided
over an unsteady economy, soaring budget deficits, tax cuts that primarily
benefit the wealthy, some of the worst business scandals in U.S. history and
a devastating terrorist attack. As Bush prepared to run for re-election,
fears of future terrorism continued to grip the nation, which had become
embroiled in two overseas guerrilla wars with no end in sight. Outside its
own borders, moreover, the administration's aggressive foreign policy made
the United States hated and feared as never before. These conditions might
seem to have presented an opportune moment for serious reconsideration of
America's course and future direction in the early 21st century, and yet
during the first three years of the Bush presidency, little serious public
debate could be heard.
These conditions reflected the highly effective political organizing
strategy of the conservative coalition that brought the Bush administration
to power. The Republican party's hard right - "movement conservatives," as
they like to call themselves - hold views and long-term objectives that are
considerably to the right of mainstream public opinion, but they had managed
to maneuver themselves into a position of control over nearly every branch
of the American government. As we will explore, politics for them is not a
debate. It is, quite literally, a "war by other means."
Intellectual Ammunition
During the 2000 presidential and congressional elections, every Republican
member of the U.S. Congress received a free pamphlet, compliments of
Congressman Tom DeLay, the party's majority whip. Written by conservative
activist David Horowitz, the pamphlet was called The Art of Political War:
How Republicans Can Fight to Win. It came with an endorsement on the cover
by Karl Rove, the senior advisor to then-candidate George W. Bush. According
to Rove, The Art of Political War was "a perfect pocket guide to winning on
the political battlefield from an experienced warrior." In addition to
DeLay's gift to members of Congress, the Heritage Foundation, one of the
leading conservative think tanks in Washington, found Horowitz's advice so
impressive that it sent another 2,300 copies to conservative activists
around the country.
True to its title, The Art of Political War argues that "Politics is war
conducted by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to
prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. ... In
political wars, the aggressor usually prevails." Moreover, "Politics is a
war of position. In war there are two sides: friends and enemies. Your task
is to define yourself as the friend of as large a constituency as possible
compatible with your principles, while defining your opponent as the enemy
whenever you can. The act of defining combatants is analogous to the
military concept of choosing the terrain of battle. Choose the terrain that
makes the fight as easy for you as possible."
This concept of politics as warfare is intimately connected to Horowitz's
personal political roots. In the 1960s, he was a militant Marxist and editor
of Ramparts, one of the most radical leftist magazines in the United States.
He also lent his vocal support to the Black Panther Party, which advocated
and practiced armed "self-defense" against what it viewed as the "foreign
occupying force" of racist white police. After becoming disillusioned with
the Panthers, Horowitz took a hard swing to the right, thereby winning the
admiration of the conservatives he used to denounce. His memoir of the
1960s, Destructive Generation, was one of three books that Karl Rove
recommended to George W. Bush in 1993 as Rove began grooming Bush for the
presidency. Horowitz has visited Bush personally on several occasions to
offer advice, beginning with Bush's days as governor of Texas and continuing
during his presidency.
Of course, Horowitz is not the only disillusioned leftist from the sixties.
What makes him significant is that his militancy has remained constant, even
as his worldview has changed. In a strange way, he remains a Leninist, right
down to his appearance (balding, with a Lenin-like goatee). He even
continues to offer Lenin's words as advice. "You cannot cripple an opponent
by outwitting him in a political debate," he explains in The Art of
Political War. "You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction: 'In
political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but
to wipe him from the face of the earth.'"
Field Marshall Norquist
Grover Norquist is another prominent leader in the conservative movement's
political war. "I would call him our field marshal," said Horace Cooper, a
former aide to House Majority Leader ***** Armey. Norquist helped the
Heritage Foundation write Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." His most
important contribution, however, has been coalition building. Since 1992, he
has hosted Wednesday morning meetings in the Washington, DC office of his
organization, Americans for Tax Reform. The Wednesday meeting pulls together
the heads of leading conservative organizations to coordinate activities and
strategy. "The meeting functions as the weekly checklist so that everybody
knows what's up, what to do," says Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, a conservative
pollster and regular attendee.
George W. Bush began sending a representative to the Wednesday meeting even
before he formally announced his candidacy for president. "Now a White House
aide attends each week," reported USA Today in June 2001. "Vice President
Cheney sends his own representative. So do GOP congressional leaders,
right-leaning think tanks, conservative advocacy groups and some like-minded
K Street lobbyists. The meeting has been valuable to the White House because
it is the political equivalent of one-stop shopping. By making a single
pitch, the administration can generate pressure on members of Congress,
calls to radio talk shows and political buzz from dozens of grassroots
organizations."
Norquist's coalition advocates abolishing taxes, especially estate taxes and
capital-gains taxes. Regulations they want abolished include minimum-wage
laws, affirmative action, health and safety regulations for workers,
environmental laws and gun controls. They also support cutting or
eliminating a variety of government programs including student loans, state
pension funds, welfare, Americorps, the National Endowment for the Arts,
farm subsidies, and research and policy initiatives on global warming. Even
well entrenched and popular programs such as Medicare, Social Security and
education are targeted for rollbacks, beginning with privatization. Most
members of the coalition are anti-gay and anti-abortion, although Norquist
has made an effort to recruit gay and pro-choice Republicans.
Norquist's political leanings were cemented in his youth by reading
anti-communist tracts such as Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover and
Witness by Whittaker Chambers. During the 1980s, he visited battlegrounds in
the Third World to support anti-Soviet guerrilla armies. In Africa, he
assisted guerrilla movements backed by South Africa's apartheid regime -
Mozambique's RENAMO and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola, for which he worked
as a lobbyist in the 1990s. Among the memorabilia in his Washington office,
a prominent photograph shows Norquist holding an AK-47 in Afghanistan - a
memento, not of the recent war, but of the 1980s when he and other Reagan
conservatives backed the mujahideen in their guerrilla war against the
occupying Soviet army. If it troubles him that the mujahideen went on to
become the organizing base for Al Qaeda, he has never said so publicly.
The connecting thread between these foreign adventures and the conservative
movement's domestic issues is the idea, also born in the Cold War, that all
government is somehow like the Soviet bureaucracy and that government
programs aimed at promoting the general welfare are therefore "creeping
socialism" that must be fought with the same ferocity with which the cold
warriors countered revolution in countries like Angola or Mozambique.
Norquist has declared that his goal is "to cut government in half in
twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the
bathtub."
This is also the logic behind the name of Norquist's group, Americans for
Tax Reform. "It's not just because taxes are irritating and unpopular and
all that," says journalist Elizabeth Drew, who profiled Norquist extensively
in her book, Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in
America. "He has a long-term view, which is the lower the revenues that the
government takes in, the less spending it will be able to do, the less money
will go to the groups that he sees as the base of the Democratic party and
its power - the teachers' unions, welfare workers, municipal workers and so
on. This is a big, long-term war. It's total. It's Armageddon. And I have to
say that the people on the right, I think, have thought this through much
more than their opponents on the other side who really don't much know what
they do and how the opposition thinks and are just waking up to it."
The Debate Club
Whereas Republicans see politics as a war, strategists for the Democratic
Party tend to see politics as a debate. And at that level, they think they
have been doing pretty well. According to Stanley Greenberg, who was Bill
Clinton's pollster, the Democratic and Republican parties have been trapped
in "the politics of parity" ever since Eisenhower's election in 1952 ended
Democratic dominance and began "a half century that no party would
dominate." As an example of this parity, Greenberg points to the 2000
presidential election, in which voters split almost evenly between George W.
Bush and Al Gore, with Gore actually winning a narrow majority in the
popular vote. "The loyalties of American voters," Greenberg concludes, "are
now almost perfectly divided between the Democrats and Republicans. ... The
two parties are so evenly matched that the slightest shift in the political
winds could blow the balance."
Other Democratic strategists, notably John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, see
bright prospects for the party's political future. Their 2002 book, The
Emerging Democratic Majority, looked at the growing influence of
Democratic-leaning voter blocs - minority voters, women and educated
professionals - and predicted that "Democrats are likely to become the
majority party of the early twenty-first century."
Some of this analysis is valid. Over a period of decades, for example, polls
have regularly shown that a majority of the American people support the U.S.
Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which left the choice on whether
to have an abortion up to a woman and her doctor. On the environment, more
than 70 percent of the American people believe that the burning of coal, oil
and other fuels is responsible for global warming, and roughly the same
majority supports the Kyoto Protocol and other international agreements to
limit greenhouse gas emissions. In a 2002 Gallup poll, more than half of
respondents said they were concerned about water, soil and air pollution,
damage to the earth's ozone layer and the loss of tropical rain forests.
Majorities of 70 to 80 percent support higher emissions and pollutions
standards for industry, spending more government money on developing solar
and wind power, and stronger enforcement of environmental regulations.
Although terrorism and the war in Iraq have recently become significant
public concerns, by far the most enduring concerns expressed in opinion
polls are the economy and jobs, followed usually by health care, education
and national defense. On the issue of health in particular, Democrats enjoy
a clear advantage over Republicans. Surveys consistently show that most
Americans want an expandedgovernment, in the form of a tax-financed
universal health-care program - an idea that Republicans consistently oppose
and that liberal Democrats have supported. If politics were simply a matter
of debate over policies, therefore, Democrats would appear well-positioned
to defeat their Republican rivals.
The Fight Club
Whatever advantages the Democrats might enjoy in theory, Republicans have
achieved victory upon victory in practice. The 2000 elections gave the
Republican Party the White House, a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives and a 50-50 split in the U.S. Senate. By 2002, the GOP was
able to consolidate its control of the House and achieve a majority in the
Senate. It already controlled the Supreme Court, with Republican appointees
comprising seven of the nine justices who sit on the court. This gave the
Republican Party majority control of every branch of the federal government
for the first time since 1932.
The situation for Democrats didn't look any better at the state level. The
2002 elections, noted Denver Post reporter James Aloysius Farrell, "marked a
tectonic and largely unheralded shift in the American political landscape.
For the past half-century, Democrats dominated the state legislatures - in
the mid-1970s by 2-to-1 ratios in the number of overall legislative seats.
But when the dust settled after the 2002 elections, Republicans had emerged
on top." Norquist celebrated this victory by telling Farrell, "We are trying
to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter
nastiness and partisanship." He added, "Bipartisanship is another name for
date rape" (an axiom that he attributed to one his mentors, former U.S.
House speaker Newt Gingrich).
At the end of 2003, Republicans held a 28-22 majority of state
governorships. They also controlled more state legislatures than Democrats.
In 22 states, Republicans controlled both the state senate and state house
of representatives. Democrats enjoyed similar control in only 16 states,
with control split between the two parties in 12 others - the first time
that Republicans have had a significant advantage in state legislatures
since 1952. According to conservative writer Bruce Walker, the shift of
power at the state level reflected a long-term "disintegration of Democrat
power in state legislatures. Twenty or thirty years ago, 'Republican state
legislative strength' was an oxymoron. While Republicans won national
elections and even controlled the Senate for six years under Reagan,
Democrats totally dominated state legislatures."
Republican domination of all these political institutions has created
secondary synergistic effects that further strengthen the party's hold on
power. Its dominance in the U.S. Supreme Court and its control of the
Florida governor's mansion helped give George W. Bush the White House in
2000, even though Al Gore received a majority of the popular vote and
irregularities dogged the Florida recount. Increased power at the state
level has also enabled Republicans to push through electoral redistricting
in several states, further solidifying the party's power at the national
level. "In crafting its agenda for economic reform," Norquist wrote in June
2003, "the Bush administration has the luxury of being able to think and
plan over a full eight years. ... This guarantee of united Republican
government has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term."
Republicans, he predicted, "are looking at decades of dominance in the House
and Senate, and having the presidency with some regularity."
The shift to Republican control has also extended the party's fund-raising
advantage, and as former California State Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh once
observed, "money is the mother's milk of politics." To give just one example
of how funding trends have shifted, tobacco industry contributions to
politicians prior to 1990 were split evenly between Democrats and
Republicans. As Republicans have increasingly dominated traditionally
tobacco-friendly states in the South, industry funding has swung
accordingly. From 1991 to 1994, Republicans received 62 percent of the
industry's political contributions; from 1995 to 2000, they received 82
percent. Similar trends have occurred in other business sectors. In 1990,
agribusiness gave 56 percent of its contributions to Republicans. By 2002,
that figure had climbed to 72 percent. During the same period, contributions
to Republicans from the defense industry went from 60 to 69 percent; from
construction, 53 to 65 percent; energy and natural resource extraction, 53
to 65 percent; finance, insurance and real estate, 48 to 58 percent;
healthcare, 48 to 65 percent; transportation, 53 to 71 percent; other
businesses, 59 to 65 percent. The only business sector to buck the trend was
communications and electronics, which increased its giving to Democrats
slightly, from 58 to 61 percent.
One-party dominance has also muted political debates that would have
otherwise greeted many of the actions of President George W. Bush. The
presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan, the first George Bush and
Bill Clinton all had to contend with opposition from at least one other
branch of government, and the resulting hearings in the House of
Representatives or the Senate fueled controversy and media coverage. With
the same party controlling all branches of government, there has been
minimal public debate over the policies of the current Bush administration,
even as it has launched two wars, reversed long-standing policies on worker
safety and the environment, and cut taxes for the rich while 2.7 million
private-sector jobs have been lost and the number of unemployed Americans
has increased by more than 45 percent under its watch.
Although Republicans frequently complain about the "liberal bias" of the
news media - the so-called "fourth branch of government" - the reality is
that conservatives have become increasingly influential within the media,
with overwhelming domination of talk radio and a preponderant advantage on
cable television, if not on the broadcast networks. In November 2003,
conservatives demonstrated their power to influence the media agenda when
they mounted an organized outcry that succeeded in killing the CBS network's
broadcast of a docudrama about the presidency of Ronald Reagan. CBS yielded,
according to conservative U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo,
because "the conservative media world is now good at gang tackling. From
Matt Drudge's Drudge Report(which framed the issue of the miniseries) to
Fox, the bloggers, talk-radio hosts, and the columnists, everybody piled
on." A couple of weeks later, by contrast, there was no comparable outcry
when the History Channel marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of
John F. Kennedy by airing a documentary which speculated that Lyndon B.
Johnson had helped plot the assassination. The documentary drew angry
condemnation from Johnson's family and former staff members, but otherwise
there were virtually no public objections to its broadcast.
The Permanent Warfare State
The Republican Party's successes have not come quickly or easily. For more
than four decades, conservatives have worked to build a network of
grassroots organizations and think tanks that formulate and promote
conservative ideas - a process that we describe in Chapter One, "The
Marketplace of Ideas." Conservatives are now enjoying the fruits of this
long-term investment. Unhappy with what they regard as the "liberal bias" of
the news media, they have attacked from both the outside and the inside,
building their own, unabashedly conservative media such as talk radio and
Fox News at the same time that they have systematically set about promoting
the careers of conservatives within the mainstream media - a strategy that
we explore in Chapter Two, "The Echo Chamber." They have built ideological
alliances between industry, government and regulatory agencies, further
blurring the lines between each, with consequences that we examine in
Chapter Three, "The One-Party State." And although the entertainment
industry may be more liberal than, say, the tobacco or construction
industries, Republicans have been more effective than Democrats at
capitalizing on the ways entertainment has transformed politics - the 2003
election of Arnold Schwarzenegger being a recent case in point, as we shall
see in Chapter Four, "Pumping Irony." But they have also understood that
politics involves more than dominating the news cycle or influencing public
opinion, and they have not hesitated to use hardball tactics in pursuit of
power. Blacks and other minorities consistently vote Democrat, so in
response - as we show in Chapter Five, "Block the Vote" - Republicans have
developed techniques for suppressing voter turnout in minority communities
or have used old-fashioned gerrymandering to effectively marginalize
minority votes. Notwithstanding their stated aversion to "big government,"
now that they have become the government they have not hesitated to expand
its powers in precisely those areas that are most threatening to individual
freedoms, through the USA Patriot Act and other measures that authorize
spying on citizens and detentions without trial. The likelihood that those
powers will be abused has increased, moreover, as the conservative movement
accuses its ideological adversaries of "treason," "terrorism" and
"un-Americanism," threatening long-standing traditions of tolerance and
diversity. We discuss these trends in Chapter Six, "Traitor Baiters." In
sum, the direction in which forces in the GOP are moving looks - at times
absurdly, at times ominously - similar to the "banana republics" of Latin
America: nations dominated by narrow corporate elites, which use the pretext
of national security to violate the rights of their citizens.
David Horowitz's notion that politics is "war conducted by other means"
inverts a statement originally made in 1832 by the German military theorist,
Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz stated that "war is merely the continuation
of politics by other means." In this original formulation, war was one among
multiple methods by which competing nations might resolve their differences.
Clausewitz's original statement allowed for the possibility that differences
could also be resolved peaceably, which of course he preferred. Without a
political purpose, moreover, war becomes "pointless and devoid of sense."
Accordingly, Clausewitz wrote, "No one starts a war - or rather, no one in
his senses ought to do so - without first being clear in his mind what he
intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it."
Standing Clausewitz on his head, as the Republican right has done, leads to
radically different and dangerous conclusions. If politics is merely the
continuation of war, then war becomes the norm, and peaceful politicking
becomes simply a temporary maneuver aimed at gaining battlefield advantage.
The political arts of compromise, negotiation, dialogue and debate - even
culture itself - become mere weapons with which to destroy your enemies. And
since war is the norm, there is no need to worry about whether to start one.
War already exists, and the point is simply to win or at least keep
fighting. (Understanding this mentality may help explain why the Bush
administration showed so much enthusiasm for initiating war in Iraq as part
of a broader "war on terrorism," while displaying little interest in exit
strategies or clarity about what it intended to achieve.)
When one party is able to impose its will without consulting others, the
temptation is to run roughshod over the opposition - especially when it sees
politics as a form of warfare. During late 2003, for example, the GOP
developed a proposal for Medicare reform, which included the most sweeping
changes since the program's establishment in 1965. Drug companies and
private health-care plans - strong financial backers of the party - stood to
benefit financially from the reform proposal, and the Republican leadership
simply ignored opposing viewpoints. House Democrats were excluded from the
conference committee reconciling the House and Senate versions of the
Medicare bill. When the House vote on the bill began on November 22, 2003,
it faced defeat by a two-vote margin, as a number of the Republican Party's
own congressmen refused to support its $400 billion price tag. Desperate to
win, the GOP leaders held open the vote (normally a 15-minute procedure) for
nearly three hours, the longest House roll call ever. In what has been
called "the most efficient party whip operation in congressional history,"
GOP Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker Dennis Hastert, Health and Human
Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and even President Bush used the prolonged
roll call - from 3:00 a.m. to almost 6:00 a.m. - to persuade dissenting
Republicans to change their votes. According to outgoing Michigan
congressman Nick Smith, the "persuasion" included offers of assistance (by
some accounts, including $100,000 in contributions) for his son's upcoming
campaign. When Smith refused to change his vote, fellow Republicans taunted
him, saying his son was "dead meat."
The metaphors that guide politics have consequences that affect us all. The
notion that politics is a process by which a community governs itself leads
to radically different consequences than the notion that politics is a form
of war. One assumption leads to civil debate, negotiation and compromise,
while the other leads to incivility and a no-holds-barred approach that
shreds moral restraints and institutional safeguards. Treating politics as
war may be an effective way to win power, but it has rarely succeeded as a
philosophy for wise governance.
end quote>
America is the largest Banana Republic thanks to the Banana Republicans!
STOP THE REPUBLICAN ENEMIES OF WORKING CLASS AMERICANS!!!!
CLASSWARZ
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| User: "Proprclr" |
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| Title: Re: BANANA REPUBLICANS!!! |
13 Jun 2004 02:32:35 PM |
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"ClassWarz" <Outsourced@AmercanWorker.Com> wrote in message news:<10bg5jrhrnoj7d6@corp.supernews.com>...
From the book Banana Republicans:
http://www.bananarepublicans.org/excerpt.html
<begin quote from the book
The following excerpt is from the introduction to Banana Republicans.
The War at Home
"I'm a uniter, not a divider," said candidate George W. Bush during his 2000
campaign for president. "I refuse to play the politics of putting people
into groups and pitting one group against another."
Tell that to gays and transgendered people who had to put up with
more hate crimes ever scince his tookas was planted in the Oval Office.
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| User: "Scott Hedrick" |
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| Title: Re: BANANA REPUBLICANS!!! |
13 Jun 2004 06:05:17 PM |
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"Proprclr" <balanco01@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:cb8bd93a.0406131132.26730fcb@posting.google.com...
Tell that to gays and transgendered people who had to put up with
more hate crimes
under their supposed "friend", Bill Clinton. There's a fellow who bought the
homosexual vote with his promises to fix the military, and the best he could
come up with was "don't ask, don't tell." *There* is a real betrayal.
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