Category: Politics

Comments on recent political activities and developments primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

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Born on Third Base

I was a little flabbergasted to discover that the reason the Government of Canada was finally able to balance their books this year was not because of all the slashing and burning over the last five years that have left Canada’s social and health care programs in a tattered wreckage. No, that’s not it, and the next time you see Prime Minister Jean Chretien beaming with self-satisfaction at a press conference, please throw a pie in his face.

No, the real reason the deficit has come down is simpler than that. It is because interest rates have come down, and because the economy is in the middle of the longest continuous growth spurt since the early 1960’s. Anyone who has renegotiated a mortgage from 10 3/4% down to 7 1/4% knows what effect interest rates have on a large amount of money. All of those budget cuts? They might have accounted for only 1/3 of the necessary savings.

There are some people out there who believe that the entire budget deficit was just a plot by the very rich to create a huge financial crisis to convince the general public that taxes are bad and that the government can’t be trusted with the management of public resources. The way the plot worked was this:

  • the government used taxes to address the massive imbalance of wealth between the rich and the poor
  • the people supported this activity
  • the government raised taxes, primarily on the well-to-do, to subsidize social programs that help everyone or just the poor.
  • the rich realized that if this system prevailed, they would only own five homes, not ten, and eleven Bentleys, not eighteen, and decided something must be done.
  • the rich, who control the stock market, the bond market, and the Federal Reserve, caused interest rates to go up, to “cure” inflation, at the cost of higher unemployment, which, of course, does not affect the rich.
  • Ronald Reagan, the tool of the rich, reduced taxes on the rich, while actually increasing government spending, especially on the military, which, combined with the interest rate hikes, thereby created a massive government deficit. The media, another tool of the rich, hammered home the idea that inflation was evil and must be fought at all costs, even to the extent of increasing unemployment and government debt.
  • the general public, not aware of the real cause of the budget deficit, became appalled at the size of the budget deficit and demand leaders who would reduce it, without raising taxes.

Here the plan goes astray: Bob Dole, Preston Manning, and John Major were supposed to be the beneficiaries of this strategy. In each case, the public, far more rational than the media give them credit for, elected relatively moderate, compassionate leaders.

Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien and now Tony Blair oblige the ill-informed public by slashing social programs, while maintaining the rhetoric of tolerant, compassionate liberals. Largely, this translates into same sex health benefits, a harmless frill, while diverting billions of dollars in wealth back into the hands of the rich.

The net result: a massive shift of wealth from the laborer to the investor. Read the newspaper, watch tv: how does the media interpret the state of health of the economy? In jobs? In pay for the average dude? In health care or social programs? No! In the value of the stock market, and in the returns on investment for the average stock-holder. When Chain-Saw Al Dunlap takes over a company and promises to slash tens of thousands of jobs, the value of the stocks of this company go up. Great news! You’re out of work! Your family can go to hell, we don’t care– as long as the stock market continues to rise! (One interesting irony: so-called pro-family politicians and religious leaders don’t seem to be “pro” your family, when your job is lost: they support the “lean and mean” economy, lower minimum wages, and anti-union measures. As far as they are concerned, you can go work at McDonalds.)

Here again, the plan has gone somewhat astray, in that growing numbers of middle-class wage-earners are investing in mutual funds, causing an unprecedented string of growth years for the markets. I don’t think anybody really knows what this means just yet.

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Nixon vs Clinton

Many Republicans in the U.S. have publicly compared the Monica Lewinsky scandal with the Watergate scandal of the Nixon Administration. Some of these same Republicans used to say that Watergate was nothing more than politics and Nixon should never have been forced to resign. Nixon used to say so himself. So if the Lewinsky scandal is similar to Watergate, then I guess they are saying that Clinton shouldn’t resign either.

Just to set the record straight, I thought I would render a public service by offering a short refresher on Watergate.

In the early planning stages of the 1972 election campaign, a night watchman at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. spotted some masking tape over a lock on a door leading to the National Headquarters of the Democratic Party. He called the police and several men were arrested and charged with burglary. At the hearing before a District Court, one of the men admitted that he had been an employee of the CIA. A reporter for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, got curious about this connection and started investigating the case more thoroughly.

So Watergate began with a criminal act. A criminal act is a violation of the public laws of the land. The Lewinsky affair, of course, began with a case of adultery. And because Lewinsky was a consenting partner to the offense, there was no criminal act involved (though the Republicans made more than a passing attempt to characterize Clinton’s actions as “sexual harassment”, because it involved an employee. Republican House Leader, Newt Gingrich, at precisely the same time, was having an affair with one of his own office employees, while his wife was ill with cancer!)

A few months later, Bob Haldeman, one of Richard Nixon’s top aides, informed the President that the FBI was investigating the burglary. Nixon instructed Haldeman to tell the FBI to stop their investigation, and he agreed to a payment of “hush money” to the burglars. This is called “Obstruction of Justice” in legal terms and is a serious criminal offense, especially when it is committed by a public official entrusted with the authority to enforce the law.

There is no evidence that Clinton attempted to use his office to influence the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Even if you believe the worst case scenario, that Clinton asked Lewinsky to lie to the Special Prosecutor, no sane person would regard such activity as being in any way comparable to authorizing the disbursement of bribes or attempting to interfere with the criminal investigation of a burglary of a political party’s national headquarters. We should add that the burglars were attempting to plant listening devices on the phones in the offices of the Chairman of the Democratic Party. This certainly goes beyond what Nixon liked to characterize as “dirty tricks” when discussing other acts of sabotage conducted by his underlings during the election campaigns. At the core of the Watergate scandal, there were a number of discrete criminal acts, and the cover-up was intended to prevent the men who committed these acts from being caught. As much as the Republicans would like to suggest that Clinton’s attempts to conceal his affair with Monica constituted a similar act of malfeasance, it is absurd to say that because both Nixon and Clinton tried to conceal that they were concealing actions that were substantively similar.

Nixon’s legal advisor, Charles Colson, was instructed to keep a list of “enemies”. This list included political commentators like CBS’s Daniel Schorr, liberal activist performers like Paul Newman, and other public figures and journalists. The Internal Revenue Service was instructed to conduct thorough audits of the tax returns of many of the people on the list. This is a rather serious abuse of authority.

Nixon’s staff hired former CIA employees to break into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in a coordinated attempt to discredit the well-known source of “The Pentagon Papers”. This, of course, again, was a criminal act. We don’t know if Nixon knew about it before it was carried out, but he definitely knew about it afterwards and again authorized a cover-up.

Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia despite legislation which clearly required him to inform Congress promptly of such measures. He ordered his staff to lie about the bombings before a Congressional Committee. As a result of these bombings, the government of Cambodia was destabilized and subsequently over-thrown by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge conducted wholesale massacres afterwards, leading to the deaths of millions of Cambodians. The U.S. was already in a state of undeclared war with North Viet Nam (no official declaration was ever made). The bombing of Cambodia was a very serious violation of the rights of a sovereign nation.

Nixon’s personal choice for Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was charged with influence peddling and extortion and forced to resign. I suppose it’s not a crime to select a criminal to be second-in-line to the office of President of the United States, but it ought to be. Al Gore, on the other hand, is squeaky clean.

Nixon fired the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, after the Supreme Court ruled that the President must accede to his request to turn over the secret tapes of conversations held in the Oval Office shortly after the Watergate break-in. Had he not resigned, this action alone, which was in defiance and contempt of the highest court in the nation, would have been almost certain grounds for impeachment. When Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, refused to fire Cox, Richardson was fired. When Richardson’s deputy refused to do it, he too was fired. FBI agents were then ordered to seize the offices of the Special Prosecutor.

The move backfired, and alienated even some of Nixon’s staunchest supporters. He was forced to back down and appoint a new Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who promptly renewed the demand for the tapes.

Having exhausted his legal options, Nixon finally turned over some of the tapes, after announcing that several were missing and that one of the key tapes had an 18-minute gap. Nixon denied that he had ordered the destruction of evidence, but it stretches credulity to believe that he was unaware of the gaps or missing tapes until the day he finally turned them over to the Special Prosecutor.

The tapes revealed that Nixon had in fact participated in the cover-up, ordered the destruction of evidence, ordered his staff to lie to Congress and the Special Prosecutor, ordered hush money to be paid out to informers out of a secret fund controlled by the White House, and had openly suggested that intimidation and extortion could be used to obstruct the investigation. More significantly, the tapes demonstrated that Richard Nixon believed that he was above and outside of the law. The conversations reveal a petty, insecure, vindictive little man who thought nothing of using the privileges of his office to lash out at political enemies and intimidate those who thwarted his plans. When he tried to use “Executive Privilege” to hide evidence of his wrong-doing, he became a genuine threat to the rule of law and the democratic process and to the institutions of accountable government. His crimes were very serious and, had he not resigned, he deserved to be impeached, and he would certainly have been impeached, and a large number of Republicans, (including present Secretary of Defense, William Cohen), would have joined the Democrats in voting for impeachment.

To compare the Lewinsky affair to Watergate is ludicrous.

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Killers

So Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson wanted clemency for Karla Faye Tucker, the Texas murderess who was executed yesterday evening. It’s hard to imagine why. Won’t the morals of western society collapse in a sodden heap the day we allow compassion to over-rule our sense of biblical justice?

It is hard to imagine how someone who claims to live his entire life according to the precepts of the bible can come to some of the conclusions that Falwell, Robertson and company come to. According to them, the Bible endorses free enterprise, capitalism, and the American way. It’s mind-boggling. Even if you are a literalist– and I’m not–where on earth does someone get the idea that the Hebrews believed in laissez faire economics? In fact, time and time again, God held the Hebrews strictly accountable for how they invested their capital, used their resources, and what they spent their money on. The widows, orphans, and strangers had to be treated well, or God would withdraw his favours from Israel. Nowhere does God say or suggest, “don’t give generously to the poor, for in so doing, thou wilt encourage dependency and sloth. And thou shalt keep the minimum wage low that the Lord may bless your tax-free capital gains”.

Back to capital punishment: contrary to what I just said, there is sound biblical evidence for the application of capital punishment, right next to the sound biblical evidence for mass murder and genocide. Does that sound harsh? Well, if you’re a literalist, you have to find some way to explain, to your heart’s satisfaction, why God occasionally approved of the slaughter of women and children, along with the soldiers of Israel’s enemies.

Personally, I’m happier believing that the Bible is infallible in the sense of spiritual inspiration, but not necessarily in the sense of historic, social, or economic truth. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have found more than a few errors of translation in the gospels. One more error in translation I’d like to suggest is the idea that God approved of Israel’s violent campaigns against their Canaanite neighbors. More likely, Israel’s writers and historians merely did what all modern writers and historians do as well: attribute a divine moral authority to an all too human act of nasty blood-thirstiness.

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The Salaries of Canadian MPs

According to Southam Newspapers, Canadian MP’s rank near the bottom of the world in terms of pay. Here’s some comparisons:

The big surprise here is socialist Sweden, which pays their members of Parliament less than anyone else, though they sit for a respectable 125 days a year. My goodness. What happened to the stereo-type of the free-spending left-lib government hack squandering all the taxpayer’s hard-earned money on useless and wasteful policy-wonking? What’s going on here? How come the most conservative government in the western world, the U.S., pays their legislators nearly the most?

There is a theory that a national health insurance plan similar to Canada’s would never work in the U.S. (where the cost of health care is, proportionately, three times what we pay) because conservative doctors would consider it a moral duty to cheat the plan as much as possible. There is a good deal of evidence that this theory is true. So the conservatives have made themselves a self-fulfilling prophecy: national health insurance will not work in the U.S. because we will abuse the system to death.

Good for them. That’s why they get paid so much.

Canadian MPs are paid too little. Most people in responsible positions that are at all comparable to being a member of parliament earn well over $100,000. But if we do decide to increase their pay, we should demand something in return: genuine democracy. Thanks largely to Trudeau, our government has evolved into an overly centralized system wherein most key decisions are made by top advisors and cabinet and ordinary party members play almost no role in arriving at decisions anymore. If we really only need ten people to run the country, let’s pay ten people to run the country and toss the rest of the bums out. Let’s also abolish the Senate now and get it over with.

Yes, our MPs are paid too little, but one thing does need to be pointed out: they all applied for the job knowing full well what the wages were. No one forced them to run. If they don’t like the pay or working conditions, fine, quit. There is something offensive about these guys campaigning on civic-mindedness, prudence, and responsibility to the taxpayer… and then doing everything they can to line their own pockets once they get in.

The problem is: who decides what the government should be paid? I have a solution. It’s so ingenious I can’t believe no one every thought of it before! And it’s perfectly in tune with the modern spirit of privatization and downsizing. This is the plan: every candidate running for political office must include, as part of the registration process, a “bid” for his own salary. So when Joe Schmo launches his campaign in Kamloops, the first thing voters want to know is, how much is he offering to work for? Preston Manning can offer his services for $34,500 a year. Chretien thinks he’s worth $100,000. Voters can decide.

You may think this will give an unfair advantage to the rich, who can afford to offer to govern for free. I don’t think so. I think most voters will realize pretty quickly that a Paul Martin at $125,000 is worth a lot more than a Sheila Copps at $69,000, or a Conrad Black– should he decide to run– at $5,000. It would make elections a lot more interesting, because really good, popular politicians could set records for highest pay, and would be entitled to influential positions because the voters want them to have influential positions. Politicians would be more accountable, because we could quickly figure out if they were worth the amount of money they asked for, instead of the amount that all MPs, competent or not, receive.

One last rant here: the taxpayer subsidizes education in Canada to an enormous degree. I forget the actual figures, but I saw them once in the Globe and Mail, and believe me, the numbers are huge. Among the most expensively subsidized educational programs is medicine. And those figures do not even include the cost of providing hospitals and clinics in which doctors and nurses are trained.

I propose that every medical student, nurse or doctor, who enrolls in a Canadian college or university, should be required to sign an agreement to repay every last cent of the subsidized portion of their education if they ever decide to move to U.S. and practice there. The amount would probably be well over $100,000 for doctors, and $40,000 for nurses. Perhaps someone will come up with better figures for me. Why should we Canadian taxpayers, in effect, subsidize the U.S. health care system just because they’re too stupid or dishonest to have their own coherent plan?

Country Salary Sitting
Japan $169,759 43
Germany $102,798 66
United States $169,672 144
Canada $64,400 148
Sweden $36,465 125

 


	


	





		

		
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We are Shocked: Clinton vs Nixon
	


	
	

		
Of course we’re all shocked. The President may have had sex with an attractive young intern. He was the President. He was twice her age. He was in a position of power and authority. He shouldn’t have done it.


Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a clear-headed look at what’s going on. The controversy started when a woman known to be hostile to Bill Clinton (she was a holdover from the Bush administration) secretly and apparently illegally taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky about the alleged affair. The Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, accepted this evidence even though it was acquired illegally, but not before Ms. Tripp had given a copy of some of the tapes to her agent, who once spied on George McGovern’s presidential campaign on behalf of the Republicans and is also known as a Clinton-hater. The information on the tapes, like everything else from Kenneth Starr’s office, is leaked all over the place, but not to anybody with the guts, courage, or integrity to go “on-record”. For three days, we have had nothing but hysterical innuendo without any of the normal checks and balances required of professional journalism. For example, CNN reports that the President’s version of events contradicts Ms. Lewinsky’s. That’s a hoot: Ms. Lewinski has not made any official statement other than the one which insisted that there was no affair. The contradiction is with what the anonymous sources say Ms. Lewinsky said on tape to Ms. Tripp, who is the Benedict Arnold of this scandal.


Anyway, the details are already pretty tired. Most Americans, apparently, continue to approve of the Clinton administration (he lost 2 percentage points!).


What we have is one of the ugliest political scenes since the Profumo scandal in Britain in the 1960’s. And the ugliest aspect of it all is the lurid fascination of watching a nation throw itself into paroxysms of righteous indignation over a petty consensual relationship between the President and a young admirer. Even if it is proven that Clinton advised her to lie to the Special Prosecutor, the idea of impeaching the “leader of the free world” because of a sexual indiscretion is bizarre.


Don’t even mention comparisons to Watergate. Nixon conspired with his senior staff, including the Attorney-General, to cover-up numerous serious criminal acts, including misuse of the FBI and the IRS to harass and spy on political opponents. He maintained an illegal “slush” fund. He accepted illegal, under-the-table campaign contributions. He destroyed evidence and fired the Attorney General when the investigation drew too near to the Oval Office. The list of offenses was so long and detailed that the Democrats didn’t even bother to pursue the charge that he cheated on his income taxes. His staff committed real crimes, including burglary and bribery, and tried to obstruct the investigation of those crimes.


Clinton had an affair. He may be a jerk, but he is not a criminal. Whitewater, you say? The Republicans have tried desperately for five years to find evidence of any kind to indicate that Clinton committed a crime. In spite of all their efforts, no such evidence has surfaced.


The Republicans, in what appears to me to be a highly coordinated strategy, are laying low, hoping to downplay the suspicion that all of these charges are politically inspired. Having learned their lesson from the highly negative reaction to the government shut-down last year– a result of their stubborn determination to sabotage the Clinton administration–they are trying very hard to convey the impression that they are taking the “high road”. Don’t be fooled: they know exactly what they’re doing. When the time comes, if the public can be swayed against Clinton, they’ll demand their pound of flesh. It’s been more than 25 years, but they won’t think it’s too late to retaliate for Watergate.


The question any alert observer would have to ask is, do they really want to give Al Gore a two-year head start on the next election? Maybe, maybe not. It might be easier to fight an incumbent who can be blamed for just about anything that happens in the country, than a fresh-face with creditable experience and political savvy. I’m not sure of the read on this one, but I do know one thing: we’re not getting the whole story.


More and more citizens appear to be adopting the view that this is all politics as usual in Washington D.C. Generally, they feel Clinton is doing a good job– the economy is booming–and don’t want to see a change.


I’ll go out on a limb and make a forecast: a reaction will set in shortly. The media will do some self-analysis and conclude that they may have gotten carried away. Clinton will go on the attack. The American public will perceive this attack as being an indictment of the media that splashes stories about semen-stained dresses on the nightly news, and they will quietly approve. Gore will be president… in 2000.

	


	





		

		
Posted on 
The Wrong Issue: Welfare Bums in Ontario
	


	
	

		
A surprising number of my friends and acquaintances absolutely agree with Mike Harris when he says he wants to kick those lazy free-loaders off the welfare roles and put them back to work. Why should the government subsidize able-bodied adults who should be out there working? Why am I working hard just so my tax dollars can pay for you to have a good time?


Maybe I agree, maybe I don’t. The thing is, I don’t think most people realize how much a smoke screen this issue is.


The thing is, when the government writes a check for $450 to Mabel Smith (not a real person) and her two children because she doesn’t have a job and needs to pay for her apartment and food, we cry “hand out”! Welfare bum! Parasite!


But when a corporation receives a tax exemption…. we get confused. The government doesn’t give Molson Breweries, for example, a check, so it isn’t a handout… or is it?


You tell me: what’s the difference? There isn’t any. If Molson owes the government $10 million in taxes on it’s net profits and the government says, hey, tell you what, pay me $5 million instead, what we have is the government giving Molson’s $5 million dollars as surely as if they handed it to them in small denominations in a little black briefcase. If it was true, this would be a massive government “hand-out”. It would be unfair.


Well, the government does this all the time. It does it when it allows corporations to deduct the cost of renting a box at the Skydome as a “business” expense. It does it when it allows corporations to pollute the environment without paying the cost of cleaning it up. It does it when it uses tax money to pay for sports stadiums, or when it defers taxes on a new factory, or subsidizes the cost of electricity for aluminum plants. It does it when it builds highways and bridges for the cars manufactured by Chrysler, GM, Ford, and Toyota. It does it when it helps bail out the banks that made stupid loans to third world despots who used the money to buy weapons from American manufacturers. It does it every time two businessmen go out for lunch and bill their expense accounts.


The most egregious example of this kind of lavish government subsidy of the rich is, of course, professional sports. The Minnesota Twins are, at this moment, demanding that the hardworking taxpayers of the State of Minnesota fork over about $400 million to pay for a new stadium for the Twins. The owner of the Minnesota Twins is a billionaire. But, he weeps, he can’t afford a new stadium. The old stadium, built to last 30 years, is only 15 years old, but it doesn’t have a private entrance for the boxes, you see, so those rich people actually have rub shoulders with ordinary plebes on their way to their exclusive, private, privileged seats.


At the same time, these idiot owners are offering their players contracts for up to $100 million over seven years. Everyone on the face of the earth knows that this is insane, but most people seem to think that it doesn’t directly affect them because they don’t go to many professional sporting events and if the owner wants to squander his money like that, so be it. The truth is though that you and I are paying Joe Carter $6.5 million to hit 25 home runs and bat .240 this year, because we paid for the Skydome with our tax dollars and the money that the Blue Jays didn’t have to pay for a stadium was thereby freed up to pay for their players. Just to add insult to injury, they gave the exclusive food concession rights to McDonald’s so they could charge twice the regular price for a hot dog. You would think that since we paid for the stadium we could at least get decent food at a fair price. And, of course, McDonald’s is thereby getting a government subsidy. Where are all the free market believers when it really matters?


This is madness. This is insane. This is the product of a society that is full of macho sports freaks who get visibly upset when they hear about a welfare mother spending $30 of her money on booze and cigarettes instead of food but stare with envy when see a basketball star show up with his two bodyguards. What that welfare mother should really do is learn how to play baseball.


The solution is simple. The reason Minnesota even considered subsidizing the stadium for the Twins was the threat to move the Twins to another town that would be willing to pay for a stadium. (Minnesota turned them down). It should be illegal for any town or any state or province to subsidize, with tax dollars, a professional sports stadium. All of the other subsidies should also stop, including “hidden” subsidies, like the costs of dealing with environmental damage caused by factories and industries.


Every corporation should be required to clean up after themselves– if they complain that they can’t afford to do this, they shouldn’t be in business. Should car manufacturers pay to build roads? They’ll scream bloody murder. They’ll say that it would make cars too expensive. Well, isn’t that a thought! You mean the real cost of cars is far higher than the sticker price? How about the cost of bodily injuries caused by speeding? Maybe we should have built up the public transit services instead of the highways. Maybe we should have more trains and buses today and less Firebirds and Intrepids. Read the history of the development of our cities: this idea is not as far-fetched as you think.


Finally, no bank– including the IMF– should be allowed to loan money to any government that is not certifiably democratically elected. Why should the people of Brazil or Argentina pay for F-14 fighter jets ordered by the illegal governments that ran those countries in the 1970’s? Do you know what those jets were used for? Nothing. Do you know where the money is coming from to pay back those loans? It’s coming out of the schools and hospitals and development projects that are needed to help the average people of these countries survive.


Either that, or we should learn to shut up about welfare recipients.

	


	





		

		
Posted on 
Seymour Hersh does an Albert Goldman on John F. Kennedy
	


	
	

		
Reporter Seymour Hersh has just published a book on John F. Kennedy in which he attempts to trash the late President’s memory by making allegations of sexual and political misconduct. In recent interviews, Hersh sounds like a victim himself, complaining about the terrible backlash which is making the response to his revelations concerning the My Lai massacre tame by comparison. He also acts as if he has discovered something new and shocking and should be admired for courageously  bringing it to the attention of the public.  One could almost believe him if he weren’t touring around promoting the book, and if the book was about anything other than titillating scandals.


Well, the public can be pretty stupid, and I think Hersh is counting on that. Informed critics have already lambasted the book as a rehash of rumours and rumours of rumours that have circulated for years. But the public will lap it up, the way it lapped up similar books on Elvis, John Lennon, and Princess Diana.


What about Kennedy? Was he a bad president? Those who think he was a lousy president can be divided into two schools of thought. The Hersh school, which might number a few liberal Democrats among them, thinks of Kennedy as a immensely successful fraud because he seemed more interested in sex than legislation. He had lots of personal charisma, but no real agenda. The conservative school thinks of Kennedy as a fraud because he was too interested in legislation, and the legislation he did present was bad because it was sometimes– but not always –liberal.


Both schools of thought miss the point. They don’t even come close to the mysterious allure of Kennedy and why so many people continue to admire him and mourn his death. For the answer to that question, one need only view some of the tapes of Kennedy’s press conferences. JFK remains the only President since FDR who seemed capable of thinking on his feet. He was witty and smart and reasonable, and didn’t sound like a whiney hack the way Nixon and Carter did, or a smug ignoramus like Bush and Reagan. Oddly enough, the only other President in recent times who was anywhere nearly as articulate was Johnson, who has an undeserved reputation as a loser.  Reagan was all folksy and down to earth and if that’s what passes for poetry in your household, so be it.  Nixon could be articulate, but he could not be gracious or reasonable: he was too small-minded and vindictive. And he hated Kennedy with a passion, for he knew, better than anyone else, that Kennedy had all the great attributes that he didn’t have. Above all else, Kennedy was confident and self-secure, and those are good qualities in a leader.


It is quite possible that, had Kennedy lived, he might have turned out to be a failure, but I think it unlikely. Without a doubt, he would have been less popular, because he would have had to make at least some unpopular decisions. There are some strong indications that he would have pulled the U.S. troops out of Viet Nam altogether, which would have saved America a decade of agony. He was leaning towards the right decisions on the immensely important civil rights issue. His brother, Bobby, as Attorney General, attacked the mob and corrupt union officials with a tenacity that has been unmatched before or since (instead, we have the colossal fraud of the “war on drugs”, $50 billion spent in four years on increasing the street value of heroin, thereby increasing the number of dealers). Above all else, Kennedy was modern in a sense that no President since was modern. He understood the passion of youth for change, for reform, for social justice, and he seemed actively engaged in trying to accommodate this passion within the realities of U.S. politics.


The shock that many of us felt after his death was more than grief for a dead leader, for Kennedy seemed to be a fundamentally decent, intelligent man. Our grief was permutated with a sense of realization that politics was back in the control of the filthy, smarmy, corrupt, petty, small-minded wheelers and dealers who had controlled it before Kennedy. Or maybe it had never really left their control, and Kennedy’s bloody murder merely revealed the truth to us. Either way, Kennedy had transgressed this old order and paid dearly for it (unless you still believe in the myth of Oswald as a lone assassin). In some crucial way, it doesn’t matter whether he himself was free of the corruption that surrounded him: the youth of the 1960’s thought there was reason to hope, and, through Kennedy, thought it was possible to effect reforms through the power of government.


Today, there is Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich. Jesse Helms. Bob Dole. Eighty-five percent of congressmen get re-elected because once they are in power they are able to exchange legislative favours for huge amounts of cash from powerful Political Action Committees with which to attack their political opponents.  The average citizen doesn’t stand a chance of being heard, so most don’t even vote. It makes you want to puke.

	


	





		

		
Posted on 
Colin Powell’s Disgrace
	


	
	

		
When it comes to projecting potential Presidential candidates for the Year 2000, no name is mentioned with more awe and reverence than that of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. He seems to have an impeccable war record, having served honorably in Viet Nam. He is a black man who rose through the ranks to the highest position in the military. He bears the glow of military victory (the preposterously one-sided Gulf War). The media– especially Time Magazine–write fawning, adoring pieces about him. If he does run, it will likely be as a Republican, and the Republicans expect that he will garner the largest percentage of black votes in the history of the party.


General Colin Powell is a coward and a moral disgrace.


Firstly, let’s please toss out the Gulf War. Iraq is a tiny little country with a population of about 14 million (20% of which are rebellious Kurds) in a remote part of the world that happens to have a lot of oil. You heard me right: Iraq has–count them–about 14 million people. The United States, at 260 million, is about 18 times as large. So we have a 800 pound gorilla taking on a 45 pound weakling. Time Magazine tries to make you think that Iraq is huge and powerful by using distorted maps that show the country almost encompassing the globe.


Saddam Hussein is a petty, tin-pot dictator who can’t even count on the unabridged support of his own armies. The U.S. victory over Iraq was a masterful exercise in public relations. Militarily, it was the most one-sided battle in modern history: more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died compared to about 50 Americans. I am not exaggerating. This was not a “war”– a war has to have at least one or two battles. Had Schwarzkopf, Powell and company lost, it would have been the most ridiculously unbelievable result in the history of the world. Even Goliath was only three times the size of David. So don’t tell me that Powell was courageous or extraordinarily clever or “ingenious”— please. All he had to do was tell his men to point their nose cones or turrets at Baghdad and count out the medals afterwards (more than one per combatant). One look at the $50 billion in hardware bearing down on them and the Iraqi’s fled. Yet, with overwhelming military, political, and economic superiority the U.S. didn’t even succeed in removing Hussein from power. Nor did they “restore” democracy to Kuwait (the same fat cats rule as before). Considering subsequent events, this was a colossal failure. It was a failure of will, a failure of intelligence, and a failure of diplomacy. Powell deserves credit for looking very nice in his uniform.


Then there was Bosnia.


I can’t, in this space, give you a detailed history of the Bosnian conflict (check the Globe & Mail, or the New York Times Review of Books for some excellent summaries), but this is essentially what happened: Bosnia and Serbia were the two largest components of the former Federation of Yugoslavia. They became separate nations when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the late 1980’s. Bosnia, comprised mostly of Muslims, but with a substantial population of ethnic Serbs, declared itself independent in April 1992, and was quickly recognized by the U.S. and other Western powers. War broke out and in the first six months, Serbia– please don’t call it a “Christian” nation–, with the aid of a rebel force comprised of Bosnian Serbs, and with overwhelming military superiority, seized 3/4 of Bosnia’s territory. Within those same six months, at least 20,000 Bosnian Muslims–men, women, children–were systematically exterminated. This was quickly termed “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs themselves. Their intent was not only to conquer the territories of Bosnia, but to make it impossible for Bosnians to repopulate the area afterwards. The correct term was genocide. It was only the beginning.


It is well-documented (see the New York Times Review of Books , December 18, 1997) that George Bush and Colin “Neville Chamberlain” Powell were fully aware of the nature of this conflict by September 1991. The CIA (right, for a change) reported that Serbs were raping, beating, torturing, incarcerating and starving tens of thousands of Muslims, and that the Muslims, heavily out-gunned, were unable to resist. These reports were corroborated by reporters, U.N. officials, and aid workers. In other words, atrocities on a scale unseen since World War II were taking place in Bosnia while the Western Powers– which the U.S. tirelessly brags of leading– did nothing.


Actually, the U.S. did worse than nothing: they imposed an arms embargo on the entire region. This had the effect of preserving a huge military advantage for the aggressor, Serbia, and preventing a member nation of the U.N. from defending itself against massive, relentless terror. It was as if we had announced that to prevent the Nazi Holocaust, we should have prevented the Jews  and Nazis from getting any more weapons from us. There is good reason to believe that if the Western Powers had allowed Bosnia to arm itself, the conflict would have soon stale-mated and the world would have spared the hideous tragedy that followed instead.


It is important at this point to consider the two ghosts haunting U.S. foreign policy at this stage. They are the Holocaust (World War II) and the Viet Nam War. In the case of the former, the Western Nations waited too long before taking concerted action against Hitler, thereby allowing six million Jews to die in the concentration camps. The Western powers even refused to accept Jewish refugees from Germany in the early stages of the Holocaust, thereby proving, to Hitler’s satisfaction, that nobody wanted the Jews. After the war, the world collectively pledged to never again stand by and do nothing when confronted with such a monstrous evil.


In the case of Viet Nam, the U.S. embroiled itself in a war it could not win, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and paralyzing domestic conflict. After this war, the U.S. promised itself to never again get involved in a “quagmire”. Powell sees this failure as a lack of will on the part of the U.S. More sensible commentators observe that the U.S. intervened militarily on behalf of an unpopular, unelected, undemocratic government.


Colin Powell and George Bush looked at Bosnia and saw the Holocaust but chose to report to the American people that they saw Viet Nam and chose to do nothing to stop the genocide. Bush hoped it would go away by itself before the elections of 1992. When candidate Clinton attacked Bush’s inaction, Colin Powell, in a major speech given during the election campaign (which Generals should stay out of), declared that he would never allow U.S. soldiers to be committed to another Viet Nam-like quagmire. So here we had a General telling elected politicians just what kind of war he might be willing to fight if asked. Just who is running the country here? Powell should have been dismissed immediately, like McArthur, but his personal popularity was such that politically it could not be done. And why was he popular? I don’t know. Would he have been so popular in a business suit instead of a uniform with lots of medals on it? How about a waist coat and top hat?


The point cannot be made forcefully enough: Colin Powell, along with George Bush and Lawrence Eagleburger, and other foreign policy advisors are personally responsible for a policy that resulted in massive genocide. They created this policy in direct opposition to their own staffers who knew what was going on. Several of them resigned in disgust. Some privately cheered Clinton when he spoke out against the inactivity.


You might argue that their policies merely reflected a consensus of the U.S. electorate. However, polls taken during the presidential election in 1992 showed an alarming (to Bush) tendency among voters to favor some kind of decisive action. The average voter wasn’t so stupid as to think that the world should stand by and watch thousands of innocent women and children murdered in cold blood. The average voter didn’t believe that Bosnia was an inexhaustible quagmire that could never be saved. So Bush and Powell were not being merely politically astute when they decided not to intervene: they were also cowards.


We all went to see Schindler’s List and we all tsk-tsked and wrung our hands and then breathed a sigh of relief. The fact that this movie exists and even won a few academy awards proves that our society knows evil when it sees it and is prepared to do the right thing! Well, this movie took no courage to make: in hindsight, we were all in the resistance. If Spielberg had had any guts he would have done a movie on Bosnia because, yes, we did stand by once again, wringing our hands and shaking our heads, and we let it happen when we could have prevented it. And while Christian talk shows and magazine are all abuzz with Paul Marshall’s book on the persecution of Christians around the world, no one weeps for Sarajevo and Srebrenica.


It should be noted that Clinton’s performance on the issue was only marginally better. Once he was elected to office, he did everything he could to evade responsibility for his campaign promise to help the Bosnians. He sent William Christopher to Europe to get consent for military action but the Europeans were afraid of retaliation against the U.N. ground troops. This was convenient for Clinton because he could blame them, for a time, for his inactivity. The U.N. troops should have withdrawn immediately and air strikes should have commenced immediately. In the end, the Bosnian’s themselves rallied and took back some of the territory. By this time, the entire region was a cauldron of seething racial hatred.


Colin Powell’s actions during this crisis are morally indefensible and cowardly. I hope and pray that if he does choose to run for president, voters take a very close look at his performance and quickly relegate him to the dustbin of history where he belongs.