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CounterPunch
November
25, 2002
Shining Our
Light on the Shadow Forces:
Open Letter to the Fledgling "Movement"
By BERNARD WEINER
Co-editor The Crisis Papers
It's tempting to get totally disheartened by the
recent midterm elections. I certainly did. But don't despair:
Things are going to get much worse before they get worse. Then
they'll get even worse, and then things will start to get better.
I'm not just making a joke. We really
are in store for a hellacious next several years. Those of us
in the overt Opposition -- Resistance or Movement or call-it-what-you-will
-- are going to take it in the neck, and face dangers rarely
experienced in traditional American politics. Better buckle up,
friends, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Bush&Co. are claiming a mandate,
behaving -- as they did after the 2000 election -- as if they
engendered a huge groundswell of public clamor for their policies;
they are not about to back off and behave moderately, in accord
with their razor-thin victory at the polls. (Only 40% of the
eligible electorate voted on Nov. 5th; the GOP won with just
over a half of that vote. A shift of 49,000 votes in Minnesota,
Missouri and New Hampshire would have kept the Senate in Democratic
control, and a switch of 42,500 votes in House races would have
put Democrats in control there.)
[ This makes two elections, the one in
2000 and now in 2002, where the results are suspicious; in the
first case, the Supreme Court summarily ended the re-counting
of citizens' ballots, in effect installing Bush into the White
House. (And, as we now know, had the Florida recount proceeded,
Gore, who won the national popular vote by more than a half-million
ballots, would have been President.) In the 2002 midterm election,
touchscreen computer-voting in key states -- where, just days
prior to the balloting, Dems were either leading in the polls
or neck-and-neck against their GOP opponents -- may have, could
have, been tweaked in enough close elections to tip the scales
to the GOP; there were no ways of re-counting ballots, since
there were no ballots to double-check against, and, at the last-minute,
there was no exit polling, so again nothing to check the computer
results against how people said they voted. He who controls the
computer-software in the voting machines has potential control
over the numerical results, and only three companies control
that technology.)
So it's now clear for all to see: Bush&Co.
are moving toward total consolidation of political power -- the
very thing our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid; recognizing
the tendency for power to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt
absolutely, they made sure to parcel out political authority
to the various branches, with the free press as a further brake
on runaway rulers.
In order to achieve absolute control,
the Bush Administration has to crack down on all possible avenues
of dissent, nationally and internationally.
Filling the Vacuum
Internationally, the collapse of Soviet-style
communism left a vacuum in world politics, and the HardRightists
saw the chance for the U.S. to move in and take it all. The result
is a bullying, threatening, arrogant, in-your-face move toward
"benevolent hegemony" across the globe. Or, to express
it less euphemistically, the U.S. is behaving like a modern version
of the Roman Empire, sending our armies abroad to take what can
be taken, to grab what can be grabbed -- get out of our way or
face destruction.
(Now, this is not to deny that there
are bad guys out there, VERY bad guys, who wish the U.S ill and
need to be dealt with, but the Bush&Co. approach seems to
lean domestically toward police-state tactics, and internationally
toward wielding the bludgeon first and using diplomacy afterwards,
as a fig-leaf cover.)
Domestically, Bush&Co. already have
the three branches of government pretty well in hand, and the
minority Democrat party, dazed and confused, remains in shambles;
the conglomerate-owned mainstream media doesn't give Bush&Co.
many problems; the university campuses, at least the professors,
have been cowed into near-silence. That leaves the anti-war movement
and the progressive sites on the internet as the locus of dissent;
since neither is very large, or reaching at this point much beyond
its relatively small core-constituency, they can be taken care
of in due time.
If, however, they start to grow in power
and influence, if a genuine Movement begins to take shape --
similar to what developed so successfully in the civil rights/antiwar
'60s and '70s -- then get ready, all stops will be pulled and
it's going to get very ugly.
If millions start to show up at anti-war
and anti-government rallies, you can anticipate that planted
agents provocateurs inside the Movement will create violent incidents
that will destroy the credibility of those causes. If the progressive
internet websites begin to attract significantly more visitors,
inciting more and more protests and Resistance actions, there
will be major hack-attacks on a few key websites, as examples
for the others, or, in the name of "homeland defense,"
offending websites simply will be shut down as being dangerous
to "national security" in "wartime," unpatriotic,
treasonous.
Goodbye to Privacy
If you think I'm exaggerating out of
paranoid hysteria or simple anti-Bush venom, just examine the
recently passed Homeland Security Act and the USA PATRIOT Act
(the latter of which was rushed through Congress a few days after
9/11 without most legislators having had a chance to read it).
As a result of these acts and other executive fiats, as of this
moment there no longer is a guaranteed right to privacy for any
citizen.
Your home, your business, your computer
files, your emails, your library visits, your credit-card purchases,
your phone calls, your communications to your friends and colleagues
-- in short, just about every aspect of your life now belongs
to the federal government. (Where, oh where, were all the anti-big-government
conservatives? Oh, I forgot: They now have the power and can
drop their principles off at the moral cleaners. It's OK to have
a Big Brother government snooping on all its citizens -- except,
of course, when it comes to who might own assault rifles and
other heavy-duty weaponry, which Ashcroft has ruled the feds
can't go near -- as long as you're the Brother in charge. If
Gore had won and tried to carry on these police-state tactics,
there would be a rousing GOP outcry for impeachment. It all depends,
I guess, on whose Gore is being oxed.)
But, you say, none of this affects me.
I've never done or thought anything traitorous, and I don't have
a Middle Eastern name, so I don't have to worry. Doesn't matter.
A ticked-off neighbor or colleague at work denounces you to the
authorities as insufficiently patriotic or as engaging in "suspicious
behavior" -- even though you've done or said nothing wrong
-- and you've got a file opened on you. The security police begin
nosing around, and suddenly you don't have a job anymore. Or
you are classified as a suspected "enemy combatant"
and are locked away on a military base, with no contact permitted,
no lawyer permitted, no judicial oversight permitted.
(Though Bush and Ashcroft promised, prior
to the passage of the USA Patriot Act, that the bill referred
only to non-citizens and that nothing like that would ever happen
to Americans, it already has. In the future, there may well be
more citizens "disappeared" into the American gulag;
all it takes is a piece of paper signed by Ashcroft, with no
appeal process permitted. Welcome to the brave new world of permanent
war, permanent insecurity, permanent martial-type law.)
Friends, as some of us have been warning
for more than a year now, we no longer are inching toward a kind
of fascism in this country. We're just about there. Using legitimate
post-9/11 fear in the citizenry, Bush&Co. have been able
to shred Constitutional guarantees of due process and rush these
draconian acts through Congress; aside from a few courageous
leaders on the conservative right and those of us on the civil
libertarian left, few have objected. Americans, it seems, are
quite willing to trade their several-hundred-years-old rights
for the illusion of "security."
Worse and Worser
Manipulating that fear for their own
ends has been the number one focus of Bush&Co. since 9/11.
But the origins of their grab for power go back much further.
These goals and tactics were in the planning stages and worked-out
theorhetically for years before. The events of 9/11 -- which
many of us argue were known in broad outline by Bush's inner
circle and permitted to happen (now we know why Bush&Co.
have fought like crazy to prevent meaningful investigations of
pre-9/11) -- became the convenient hook on which to hang the
total power-grab that we're witnessing now.
So, yes, things are going to get much
worse, and then worse still. The worst kind of ideologically-driven
judges will be appointed, thus controlling the judiciary for
decades to come. Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Laws regulating
polluters will be relaxed. Bush's huge tax-giveaways to the wealthy
will be made permanent, thus ensuring there is not enough money
for social programs to aid the poorer and middle-class elements
in society. Corporations will be turned free to pillage the economy
even more; greed will be enshrined as the new deity. What public
programs can be privatized will be privatized. Many union protections
will disappear. Key aspects of Medicare and Social Security will
be diluted. Etc. Etc.
I'm not making this stuff up. These are
on the agenda, openly talked about in GOP circles. These will
be the effects of Bush&Co. policies for the next two years
-- the Administration began acting in this reprehensible manner
mere weeks after Nov. 5th, relaxing anti-pollution regulations
in the Clean Air Act, re-nominating already-rejected HardRight
judges, etc. -- and, if nothing changes, for the next four years
after that, and so on into the foreseeable future unless a true
Opposition can educate the American populace and turn things
around.
Miracles and Work
Now I suppose it's possible that a miracle
could occur. 1) Moderate GOP Senators Snowe and Specter and Chafee
could see how extreme the Bush program is becoming and "do
a Jeffords," deserting the Republican party and moving over
to the Independent side, which would put the Democrats back in
control of the Senate. But don't hold your breath; there are
too many perqs that go with being part of the winning team.
2) Or, conceivably, some of the sleazy
financial scandals and energy scandals could pop up to bite Bush
and Cheney and White and the rest of the crew. But don't count
on it. Many of the investigators used to work for Kenneth Lay
at Enron.
3) Or, as in so many other cases when
one faction thinks it has total control of the situation, Bush&Co.
in their arrogance and feeling of invulnerability could go way
over the top and have to face a backlash of alarmed, angry middle-class
Americans, bent on impeachment. Conceivably, it could happen
if and when the full truth emerges about Bush&Co.'s pre-knowledge
of the 9/11 attacks and doing nothing to prevent them. Again,
don't hold your breath.
So, it kinda looks like there isn't going
to be a deus ex machina resolution to this political drama. This
being the case, how do we get to that political turnaround?
Well, friends, I suggest that two roads
are diverging in the yellow woods, and we're going to have to
choose whether to keep walking on the bushpath and get swallowed
up in a society that breeds further chaos and despair in its
relentless move toward profits and power and imperial domination.
Or whether to take the road less traveled, which requires action
and courage in our attempt to move this country back toward the
light, back toward hope and concern for our fellow citizens and
for peace and diplomacy rather than imperial wars.
Which way we choose will make all the
difference, not just to the future direction of the government,
but how we feel about ourselves, as individuals and as a people.
The shadow forces are in the ascendancy
and have begun to wreak havoc on the world, on our country. Unless
we can devise intelligent, creative ways of stopping them, or
at least slowing them down and moving our society back toward
the light, we are in for a longer, colder, darker winter than
needs to happen. That is our call, our mission, our destiny --
if we are willing to join in that struggle.
In the coming days, we will, we all will,
be speaking more about practical ways to turn this greed-and-power-and-war
machine around. But for now, it is most important that we take
some time to think deeply about where we want to go, as individuals
and as a country, and start to position ourselves for right,
and effective, action.
Bernard Weiner,
Ph.D. -- co-editor of the new progressive website The Crisis
Papers (http://www.crisispapers.org)
-- has taught American government and international relations
at various universities, and was with the San Francisco Chronicle
for nearly 20 years.
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