Subject: NLNS 3.3 .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT New Liberation News Service Table of Contents Volume 3, Number 3 October 10, 1992 ISSN# 1060-4227 Investigative Articles 1. Aftermath of York U. Student Takeover, *Excalibur* 2. What is Fascism?, Chip Berlet 3. Peace and Freedom Party Nominates Ron Daniels, *News International* 4. Waste Merchants Intentionally Poison Natives, *Groundwork* 5. Indigenous People Fight Geo-Thermal Project, World Perspectives NEWS 6. Kicking Enemy Ass, NLNS 7. Test Score Discrimination, *FairTest* 8. Congress Cuts Military Aid to East Timor, ETAN 9. Nicaraguan Invasion? *Nicaragua News Update* 10. Inkatha Withdraws from Democracy Negotiations, *The Thistle* Perspectives 11. An Appeal for the People of Iraq, AFSC 12. There Are Windmills and I Must Tilt at Them, NLNS 13. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, *Lancaster Independent Press* 14. Why the Left Should Oppose Clinton, NLNS 15. Perot's Post-Modern Pastoralism, NLNS 16. How We Rock, NLNS >From the Vault... 17. What is the Sound of One Faction Clapping? LNS *How to use this packet*: Member publications are free to reprint everything in this packet, free of restrictions, unless otherwise indicated. The only stipulation for use is that you reprint the credits and credit the news service by printing "(NLNS)." *Submissions to NLNS* PLEASE submit news, opinions, letters, graphics, photos and anything else that is on your mind to NLNS. We prefer items sent to us on 3.5' or 5 1/4' disks in either Mac or IBM format, or even better, over email. *NLNS cooperates with*: Nicaragua News Update, misc.activism.progressive (UseNet/ACTIV-L), Canadian University Press, Peacenet, Asian Student Association News, and many others. NLNS IS... Susan Conrad, Jason Pramas, and Phillip B. Zerbo. Call or write us at: NLNS, P.O. Box 325 Kendall Square Branch Cambridge,MA 02142 (617) 492-8316 Electronic Mail: Internet: nlns@igc.org Peacenet: nlns (c) 1992 Initiative for Grassroots Media * All writers and artists retain full rights to all their work appearing in this packet. * The copyright applies only to the form of this publication and any work produced in-house by the NLNS Staff, and does not in any way effect the reprint policy stated above. Statement of Purpose The New Liberation News Service was founded as a non-profit educational project with one goal in mind--to offer small underground and community media outlets a radical alternative to existing international wire services. We strive to provide as much information to such grassroots media as often and as cheaply as possible. We also work as an activist organization to spread the idea of a people's media to every corner of the globe. NLNS is biased in favor of all democratic movements for social change. We do not believe in the so-called "objectivity" touted as the journalistic standard by the mainstream capitalist press. To us, the only honest journalism is one with an admitted bias. Fairness in reportage is the single value NLNS holds above all others. Fairness to all of the people all of the time--not just to multinational corporations and their government lackeys. As long as the day-to-day struggles of everyday people continue to get buried under the endless deluge of "infotainment", NLNS will be here "uncensored and free" for all those who believe that the power of the press should be available to everyone. Not just to those who own one. Peace. --- 30 -- - .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT AFTERMATH *York's (University, Toronto, Ontario) executive offices were stormed by 300 students last March. The students were furious after witnessing a series of racist incidents directed against black students by York's guards. Six months later, their demands are being met. But has York really changed?* Excalibur Staff (NLNS)--It was seven months ago--on March 12--when hundreds of angry students boarded elevators in York's Ross Building and took control of the university's highest offices for three hours. They came looking for President Harry Arthurs, wanting him to approve an eight-point plan to prevent further incidents of racist treatment and harassment by members of York's security force and bouncers at The Underground pub. "We want Harry!" students chanted in the ninth-floor presidential offices--some banging on walls or furniture--until they were told that Arthurs was "out of the country" (*Excalibur* later confirmed that he was less than 100 metres away). The crowd told startled staff in the office to produce the university's vice president instead. They were asked how many they wanted to see. "All of them," several students shot back. List of Reforms Four of York's top bureaucrats arrived two hours later and listened to students while Metro Police cruisers waited below. The protesters gave the vice presidents a shortlist of reforms which included: * A full-scale investigation of York Security by an external body approved by the students leading the protest. * Immediate dismissal of any security officer convicted of "discriminatory behavior" by a new review committee of students, professors, and community members. Committee members would be chosed by the University's Office of Race and Ethnic Relations and by the protest leaders. The group would act on specific incidents of alleged discrimination, and review the entire security force each year * The immediate dismissal of all non-student bouncers at The Underground nightclub in the Student Centre. * Mandatory race relations training for security officers and officials. * One additional full-time officer in the Race and Ethnic Relations office. Leaders of the protest said they wanted a meeting to work out the details and told the administrators they would not be given a choice. Changed Atmosphere "We're giving you 15 minutes to give us a yes, or we're going to stay here," former *Excalibur* editor Jeannine Amber, standing on a desk above the vice presidents and holding a megaphone, said after she read the demands. Just as their time was about to run out, the vice presidents gave in. Four days later they met with 300 students in the York senate chambers. They were joined by Student Centre manager Rob Castle and York Security's executive director Pam MacDonald. The protest changed the atmosphere on the campus for black students, according to Heather Dryden, a York Federation of Students vice president and an organizer of the occupation. Security officers now know their actions are being watched and students are more likely to approach her or the Office of Race and Ethnic Relations with complaints, she said in an interview last week. "It's made students talk more. Students are getting to the point where they are not keeping things to themselves," said Dryden, who guides the federation's approach to social and equality issues. But Dryden said she objected to remarks about the occupation by incoming York president Susan Mann, who told *Excalibur* last month that student protesters chose the move because it was part of a "tradition" for the university and had "an aspect of fun." Dryden argued that all of the protesters were serious enough to risk their academic careers right before final exams. She also said Mann should have met the students herself. In the same interview, Mann had called the move "an action of last resort" and said it suggests "some people are unwilling to use [the] existing structure" of the university to resolve their complaints. "These students went through every single process they could think of and had doors slammed in their face the entire time," Dryden said. John & Jane Doe In the weeks before the protest, students--especially black students--tried to draw attention to several reported examples of racist behavior by security officers and alleged assault by a pub bouncer. A parking lot attendant had repotedly told a black student "This is not the jungle." In another incident witnessed by a large crowd, two students, also black, were asked for identification by security guards while standing in the crowded student centre. An officer had singled the students out and told them they looked "too young." Security staff are not supposed to ask for identification unless they see an offense being committed. Black students reacted by wearing "John Doe" and "Jane Doe" name tags for the rest of the week. Security officials hesitated before choosing Al Mossman--a York security employee--to investigate the incident. Hearing about this, students started planning the occupation in secret. "It was just an acccumulation of things and then it was 'This is it!' and then everybody decided unanimously that they were going to take action," said Althea Morgan, a fourth year English student who was the object of the "This is not the jungle" comment. Seven months later, most of what students demanded during the occupation has been accomplished. One security officer implicated by students during the protests was fired; another was suspended without pay and is now back at work. An additional full-time race and ethnic relations officer, Teferi Adem, was hired this summer. Chet Singh, the centre's other officer, provided anti-racism training for security officers this summer. Similar training will be required every year. "The point of the whole matter was for them [the security officers] to understand how racism works and how they play a role," Singh explained last week. The Black Secretariat, an umbrella group of organizations in Toronto and Ontario, plans to start its external review of the department this fall. Review committee members will likely not be chosen until the secretariat begins its work, said Singh. A Healthier System All professional bouncers at the Underground were fired immediately after the occupation and a code of conduct for security in the student centre would likely be finished by press time, manager Bob Castle said last week. He also said a student centre committee dealing with security in the Underground has been expanded and contains a majority of student members, another of the occcupations demands. Castle said a standard complaints procedure for security incidents at the pub has also been drafted. Complaints would go to a supervisor first, who has an opportunity to discipline the staff member and inform students who launched the complaint. Students can then appeal to Castle or the security committe itself, but Castle said management will follow recomendations from a special university office (like Race and Ethnic Relations, or the Sexual Harassment office at any time, even if that recomendation is harsher than managements'. "If the office of race and ethnic relations says they [the bouncers] should be terminated, we would terminate them," Castle said. Castle said the new system will be "healthier" than a system that has to be improvised each time. Singh also said York's campus-wide security advisory committee will be changed so that it is more open to participation and includes more students and ccommunity members. Wait-and-see Attitude Most of the protesters are assuming a 'wait-and-see' attitude before commenting on the cchanges that resulted from the protest. "People feel this is just being done on the surface level to show the students they are doing something. As far as the administration is concerned, some people wonder if the same attitudes still exist," Morgan said this week. "We want to know how much power the [steering committee] is going to have. Will it effectively be able to effect the students? I myself am just waiting to see what is going to happen from this." In the wake of the rally, conflicts within the steering committee led to division among protesters. Morgan says such disputes are an inevitable part of organizing large groups of people behind a common cause. "Everybdy has a different idea about how to handle the situation. Everybody has their own solution, and everybody believes their solution is correct. [After the incident] a group of people had to sit down and decide which route they were going to take and that is very hard," she said. "I'm hoping positive things will come out of this. I hope it'll really do something for York." *Excalibur* can be reached at 420 Student Centre, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT What is Fascism? Chip Berlet This article is adapted from the author's preface to Russ Bellant's book *Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party*, co- published by South End Press and Political Research Associates. * "Fascism, which was not afraid to call itself reactionary... does not hesitate to call itself illiberal and anti-liberal."* --Benito Mussolini (NLNS)--We have all heard of the Nazis--but our image is usually a caricature of a brutal goose-stepping soldier wearing a uniform emblazoned with a swastika. Most people in the U.S. are aware that the U.S. and its allies fought a war against the Nazis, but there is much more to know if one is to learn the important lessons of our recent history. Technically, the word NAZI was the acronym for the National Socialist German Worker's Party. It was a fascist movement that had its roots in the European nationalist and socialist movements, and that developed a grotesque biologically-determinant view of so- called "Aryan" supremacy. (Here we use "national socialism" to refer to the early Nazi movement before Hitler came to power, sometimes termed the "Brownshirt" phase, and the term "Nazi" to refer to the movement after it had consolidated around ideological fascism.) The seeds of fascism, however, were planted in Italy. "Fascism is reaction," said Mussolini, but reaction to what? The reactionary movement following World War I was based on a rejection of the social theories that formed the basis of the 1789 French Revolution, and whose early formulations in this country had a major influence on our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. It was Rousseau who is best known for crystallizing these modern social theories in *The Social Contract*. The progeny of these theories are sometimes called Modernism or Modernity because they challenged social theories generally accepted since the days of Machiavelli. The response to the French Revolution and Rousseau, by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and others, poured into an intellectual stew which served up Marxism, socialism, national socialism, fascism, modern liberalism, modern conservatism, communism, and a variety of forms of capitalist participatory democracy. Fascists particularly loathed the social theories of the French Revolution and its slogan: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." * Liberty from oppressive government intervention in the daily lives of its citizens, from illicit searches and seizures, from enforced religious values, from intimidation and arrest for dissenters; and liberty to cast a vote in a system in which the majority ruled but the minority retained certain inalienable rights. * Equality in the sense of civic equality, egalitarianism, the notion that while people differ, they all should stand equal in the eyes of the law. * Fraternity in the sense of the brotherhood of mankind. That all women and men, the old and the young, the infirm and the healthy, the rich and the poor, share a spark of humanity that must be cherished on a level above that of the law, and that binds us all together in a manner that continuously re-affirms and celebrates life. This is what fascism as an ideology was reacting against-- and its support came primarily from desperate people anxious and angry over their perception that their social and economic position was sinking and frustrated with the constant risk of chaos, uncertainty and inefficiency implicit in a modern democracy based on these principles. Fascism is the antithesis of democracy. We fought a war against it not half a century ago; millions perished as victims of fascism and champions of liberty. * "One of the great lies of this century is that in the 1930's Generalissimo Franco in Spain was primarily a nationalist engaged in stopping the Reds. Franco was, of course, a fascist who was aided by Mussolini and Hitler." "The history of this period is a press forgery. Falsified news manipulates public opinion. Democracy needs facts.* --George Seldes Hartland Four Corners, Vermont, March 5, 1988 Fascism was forged in the crucible of post-World War I nationalism in Europe. The national aspirations of many European peoples--nations without states, peoples arbitrarily assigned to political entities with little regard for custom or culture--had been crushed after World War I. The humiliation imposed by the victors in the Great War, coupled with the hardship of the economic Depression, created bitterness and anger. That anger frequently found its outlet in an ideology that asserted not just the importance of the nation, but its unquestionable primacy and central predestined role in history. In identifying "goodness" and "superiority" with "us," there was a tendency to identify "evil" with "them." This process involves scapegoating and dehumanization. It was then an easy step to blame all societal problems on "them," and presuppose a conspiracy of these evildoers which had emasculated and humiliated the idealized core group of the nation. To solve society's problems one need only unmask the conspirators and eliminate them. In Europe, Jews were the handy group to scapegoat as "them." Anti- Jewish conspiracy theories and discrimination against Jews were not a new phenomenon, but most academic studies of the period note an increased anti-Jewish fervor in Europe, especially in the late 1800's. In France this anti-Jewish bias was most publicly expressed in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer of Jewish background, who in 1894 was falsely accused of treason, convicted (through the use of forged papers as evidence) and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Emile Zola led a noble struggle which freed Dreyfus and exposed the role of anti-Jewish bigotry in shaping French society and betraying the principles on which France was building its democracy. Not all European nationalist movements were necessarily fascist, although many were. In some countries much of the Catholic hierarchy embraced fascist nationalism as a way to counter the encroachment of secular influences on societies where previously the church had sole control over societal values and mores. This was especially true in Slovakia and Croatia, where the Clerical Fascist movements were strong, and to a lesser extent in Poland and Hungary. Yet even in these countries individual Catholic leaders and laity spoke out against bigotry as the shadow of fascism crept across Europe. And in every country of Europe there were ordinary citizens who took extraordinary risks to shelter the victims of the Holocaust. So religion and nationality cannot be valid indicators of fascist sentiment. And the Nazis not only came for the Jews, as the famous quote reminds us, but for the communists and the trade union leaders, and indeed the Gypsies, the dissidents and the homosexuals. Nazism and fascism are more complex than popular belief. What, then, is the nature of fascism? * "If fascism came to America, it would be on a program of Americanism."* --Huey P. Long Italy was the birthplace of fascist ideology. Mussolini, a former socialist journalist, organized the first fascist movement in 1919 at Milan. In 1922 Mussolini led a march on Rome, was given a government post by the king, and began transforming the Italian political system into a fascist state. In 1938 he forced the last vestige of democracy, the Council of Deputies, to vote themselves out of existence, leaving Mussolini dictator of fascist Italy. Yet there were Italian fascists who resisted scapegoating and dehumanization even during World War II. Not far from the area where Austrian Prime Minister Kurt Waldheim is accused of assisting in the transport of Jews to the death camps, one Italian General, Mario Roatta, who had pledged equality of treatment to civilians, refused to obey the German military order to round up Jews. Roatta said such an activity was "incompatible with the honor of the Italian Army." Franco's fascist movement in Spain claimed state power in 1936, although it took three years, the assistance of the Italian fascists and help from the secretly reconstituted German Air Force finally to crush those who fought for democracy. Picasso's famous painting *Guernica* depicts the carnage wrought in a Spanish village by the bombs dropped by the forerunner of the *Luftwaffe* which all too soon would be working on an even larger canvas. Yet Franco's fascist Spain never adopted the obsession with race and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that were hallmarks of Hitler's Nazi movement in Germany. Other fascist movements in Europe were more explicitly racialist, promoting the slogan still used today by some neo-Nazi movements: "Nation is Race." The Nazi racialist version of fascism was developed by Adolph Hitler who with six others formed the Nazi party during 1919 and 1920. Imprisoned after the unsuccessful 1923 Beer Hall putsch in Munich, Hitler dictated his opus, *Mein Kamp*f to his secretary, Rudolph Hess. *Mein Kampf*(My Battle) sets out a plan for creating in Germany through national socialism a racially pure *Volkis* state. To succeed, said Hitler, "Aryan" Germany had to resist two forces: the external threat posed by the French with their bloodlines "negrified" through "contamination by Negro blood," and the internal threat posed by "the Marxist shock troops of international Jewish stock exchange capital." Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany by Hindenburg in January 1933 and by year's end had consolidated his power as a fascist dictator and begun a campaign for racialist nationalism that eventually led to the Holocaust. This obsession with a racialism not only afflicted the German Nazis, but also several eastern European nationalist and fascist movements including those in Croatia, Slovakia, Serbia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine. Anti-Jewish bigotry was rampant in all of these racialist movements, as was the idea of a link between Jewish financiers and Marxists. Even today the tiny Anti- Communist Confederation of Polish Freedom Fighters in the U.S.A. uses the slogan "Communism is Jewish." * "Reactionary concepts plus revolutionary emotion result in Fascist mentality."* --Wilhelm Reich One element shared by all fascist movements, racialist or not, is the apparent lack of consistent political principle behind the ideology--political opportunism in the most basic sense. One virtually unique aspect of fascism is its ruthless drive to attain and hold state power. On that road to power, fascists are willing to abandon any principle to adopt an issue more in vogue and more likely to gain converts. Hitler, for his part, committed his act of abandonment bloodily and dramatically. When the industrialist power brokers offered control of Germany to Hitler, they knew he was supported by national socialist ideologues who held views incompatible with their idea of profitable enterprise. Hitler solved the problem in the "Night of the Long Knives," during which he had the leadership of the national socialist wing of his constituency murdered in their sleep. What distinguishes Nazism from generic fascism is its obsession with racial theories of superiority, and some would say, its roots in the socialist theory of proletarian revolution. Fascism and Nazism as ideologies involve, to varying degrees, some of the following hallmarks: * Nationalism and super-patriotism with a sense of historic mission. * Aggressive militarism even to the extent of glorifying war as good for the national or individual spirit. * Use of violence or threats of violence to impose views on others (fascism and Nazism both employed street violence and state violence at different moments in their development). * Authoritarian reliance on a leader or elite not constitutionally responsible to an electorate. * Cult of personality around a charismatic leader. * Reaction against the values of Modernism, usually with emotional attacks against both liberalism and communism. * Exhortations for the homogeneous masses of common folk (Volkish in German, Populist in the U.S.) to join voluntarily in a heroic mission--often metaphysical and romanticized in character. * Dehumanization and scapegoating of the enemy--seeing the enemy as an inferior or subhuman force, perhaps involved in a conspiracy that justifies eradicating them. * The self image of being a superior form of social organization beyond socialism, capitalism and democracy. * Elements of national socialist ideological roots, for example, ostensible support for the industrial working class or farmers; but ultimately, the forging of an alliance with an elite sector of society. * Abandonment of any consistent ideology in a drive for state power. It is vitally important to understand that fascism and Nazism are not biologically or culturally determinant. Fascism does not attach to the gene structure of any specific group or nationality. Nazism was not the ultimate expression of the German people. Fascism did not end with World War II. After Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, the geopolitical landscape of Europe was once again drastically altered. In a few short months, some of our former fascist enemies became our allies in the fight to stop the spread of communism. The record of this transformation has been laid out in a series of books. U.S. recruitment of the Nazi spy apparatus has been chronicled in books ranging from *The General was a Spy* by Hohne & Zolling, to the recent * Blowback* by Simpson. The laundering of Nazi scientists into our space program is chronicled in *The Paperclip Conspiracy* by Bowers. The global activities of, and ongoing fascist role within, the World Anti-Communist League were described in *Inside the League* by Anderson and Anderson. Bellant's bibliography cites many other examples of detailed and accurate reporting of these disturbing realities. But if so much is already known of this period, why does journalist and historian George Seldes call the history of Europe between roughly 1920 and 1950 a "press forgery"? Because most people are completely unfamiliar with this material, and because so much of the popular historical record either ignores or contradicts the facts of European nationalism, Nazi collaborationism, and our government's reliance on these enemies of democracy to further our Cold War foreign policy objectives. This widely-accepted, albeit misleading, historical record has been shaped by filtered media reports and self-serving academic revisionism rooted in an ideological preference for those European nationalist forces which opposed socialism and communism. Since sectors of those nationalist anti-communist forces allied themselves with political fascism, but later became our allies against communism, apologia for collaborationists became the rule, not the exception. Soon, as war memories dimmed and newspaper accounts of collaboration faded, the fascists and their allies re-emerged cloaked in a new mantle of respectability. Portrayed as anti-communist freedom fighters, their backgrounds blurred by time and artful circumlocution, they stepped forward to continue their political organizing with goals unchanged and slogans slightly repackaged to suit domestic sensibilities. To fight communism after World War II, our government forged a tactical alliance with what was perceived to be the lesser of two evils--and as with many such bargains, there has been a high price to pay. * "The great masses of people. . .will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."* --Adolph Hitler Chip Berlet can be reached at Political Research Associates, 678 Mass. Ave., #702, Cambridge, MA 02139. --- 30 -- - .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Peace and Freedom Party Nominates Ron Daniels for President Husayn Al-Kurdi, * News International* (NLNS)--The California Peace and Freedom Party, meeting at its State convention in San Diego on the weekend of August 15-16, has chosen Ron Daniels as its 1992 Presidential Candidate. Daniels defeated Dr. Lenora Fulani by 120 to 91 in the voting among delegates. Daniels, a long-time Black nationalist organizer, pledged to "reach out and organize the unorganized, to knit together the various communities" in an effort to "destroy the slave system" which features "racism and capitalism as the foundations." The smooth-spoken Daniels, a Youngstown, Ohio resident, had served as a leading advisor to Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, but was let down by Jackson's unwillingness to break with the Democratic Party, which he characterized as "openly Big Business and pro-capitalist." He vowed to "meet the system in the streets and make this country ungovernable," calling for a "domestic Marshall Plan" which would use $170 Billion from the U.S. military budget to serve a wide range of human needs. His Vice-Presidential running mate is Asiba Tupahache, a Matinecoc Indian from Great Neck, New York. Daniels came to the convention with impressive credentials-- he was a leader at the National Black Political Conference in Gary, Indiana 20 years ago and a founder of African Liberation Day, as well as chairperson of the founding convention of the National Black Independent Political Party (1980) and is convener of the African American Progressive Action Network, which sponsors the National Malcolm X Initiative. His weekly column, Vantage Point, apprears in over 100 newspapers. Heading up the Campaign for a New Tomorrow, the energetic, personable Daniels has been preparing his presidential run for over two years. He is slated to appear on the ballot in some 17 states, with write-in campaigns in at least ten others. His opponent for the nomination, Dr. Lenora Fulani, has generated controversy on the Left with her affiliation to the New Alliance Party, a New York-based operation run by Dr. Fred Newman. Peace and Freedom delegate Casey Peters (Los Angeles) referred to Newman as "an L. Ron Hubbard in drag, a political L. Ron Hubbard." NAP has been compared to Scientology, the Unification Church and Lyndon LaRouche in terms of its cult-like practices. When questioned about the mounting allegations against her organization, Fulani dismissed them as "Just not true, all lies." The 42-year-old psychotherapist from New York City called on delegates to vote for her because of her tie to NAP, which she described as the 4th largest political party in the USA. Her punch-line in her effort to garner support was "I have a national following. I am an African-American woman. This is the Year of the Woman." The NAP has used intensive fundraising techniques to collect over $1.5 million for Fulani's 1992 Presidential bid, with guru Newman receiving a $6000 per month stipend from the campaign coffers, according to Federal Election Commission records. Newman was actually aligned with the eccentric right-wing cult leader Lyndon LaRouche for a brief period in 1974. Since then he has founded a variety of interlocking organizations, some using his brand of "psychotherapy" to attract recruits. Steve Karp, a floor manager of the Daniels campaign at the Peace and Freedom convention, was elated at the results of the Daniels-Fulani race. "It was good to see the Peace and Freedom Party send a clear message to the NAP that they are not going to be allowed to take over this party. That message was sent not just by electing Ron Daniels and Asiba Tupahache, but also an entire slate of state officers who were all Ron Daniels suppporters." Over 400 people packed the Craftsmen's Hall in the Hillcrest district of San Diego to decide the Daniels-Fulani contest, to elect new state officers and to work out a platform for 1992. Peace and Freedom, founded in 1967 as a Left electoral front, has over 60,000 California members. Gerald Horne, Chair of Black Studies at UCal- Santa Barbara, was elected as state chairperson. Berkeley's Marsha Feinland, active in a broad range of struggles over the past 20 years, got the call as Northern California Chair. San Diego residents were elected to the Southern California Chair and Corresponding Secretary positions. C.T. Weber won the Southern Cal Chair post, urging a higher level of activist engagement, saying "It's almost the 21st century. If we don't get our act together pretty soon, we're going to be sliding back to the 19th century." Monty Kroopkin, the IWW ("Wobbly") anarchist activist and journalist, is the new corresponding secretary. In what was characterized as a "media whiteout," only some ten media representatives out of 150 invited were present. There was virtually no coverage in any US media. Sweeping and comprehensive resolutions were passed relating to HIV and "Lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans-gender rights," along with planks opposing the North American Free Trade Act, support for the Cuban government and people and a resolution "celebrating 500 years of indigenous resistance since the Columbus arrival." A statewide solidarity campaign with the Drywallers' strike and a mass demonstrations October 4th at the Bush-Clinton debate in San Diego are among the upcoming activities being planned. Resolutions were passed calling for the release of longtime Black Panther political prisoner Geronimo Pratt and condemning the Boy Scouts of America for their anti-gay discriminatory practices. "Ethnic cleansing" taking place in Yugoslavia was denounced, but opposition to US military intervention in the region, as elsewhere, was condemned. The Peace and Freedom Party proclaims that "In the class struggle between the workers and the bosses, we stand squarely with the working class. . .The bosses use their governmental power to subjugate the workers, poor and oppressed. We seek to dismantle the organs of the bosses' power and to build organs of workers' power. . .The working class and its natural allies far outnumber the bosses and their allies. It is in the bosses' interests to divide the workers through state, social and economic means. It is in the workers' interest to unite in common struggle against the bosses and in defense of each other's rights. National and ethnic minorities, women, and gays and lesbians are under increasing attack, and all workers must mobilize to beat back those attacks." As to the Ecology, Peace and Freedom calls for the development of technology which would "restore and enhance the workers and the earth." In international relations, the Party stands with "the workers and oppressed of the world in their struggle for freedom from their bosses and from the US empire which props up those bosses." The ultimate aim of Peace and Freedom is the establishment of a socialist system, in which the working class controls the planning and management of the economy, with production geared to human needs. Socialism is seen as the massive extension of democracy, with the widest levels of society taking part in the decision-making process. In his nomination acceptance speech at the convention, Daniels urged progressives in the US to move beyond the "betrayals and 'bankruptcy' of the US Democratic and Republican Parties, who have become mere competing factions of a single Big Business Party. He called for the building of a "Movement Party" to engage in ongoing action "in the streets" and not just during an election year. Daniels proposed a General Strike for April 1993, on the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Citing the American Declaration of Independence, he reminded conventioneers that it is a duty to abolish an oppressive government. If justice and democracy cannot be won peacefully through electoral means because of Big Business control of the election process which shuts out any serious alternative candidate, then Daniels said "We should make the country ungovernable!" * News International Press Service* can be reached at 6161 El Cajon Blvd. #4, San Diego, CA 92115; (619) 696-9531 --- 30 -- - .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Waste Merchants Intentionally Poison Natives Valerie Taliman, *Groundwork* (NLNS)--There are thousands who have suffered the consequences of highly dangerous industries operating in and near Indian communities. Angry tribal leaders accuse industry and the military of economic and environmental racism for devestating their land and their people. They say that calculated decisions were made that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Native people--people that corporate and government officials deemed expendable. The intentional poisoning of Native people has been going on for a long time. It can be traced back to the small-pox infected blankets that the U.S. Cavalry distributed to Indian prisoners of war. It continued through the decades in the form of military and industrial development that polluted Indian lands and water supplies. Today the poisonous deals come in slick packages from friendly waste merchants or from David LeRoy, who heads the Bush Administration's Office of US Nuclear Waste Negotiations. LeRoy has been trying to sell tribal leaders a deal to set aside 450-acre parcels of Native lands for federal storage of radioactive waste from the nation's 110 nuclear plants. In return for poison, LeRoy holds out prospects of more federal money for health care, education and other economic benefits that financially strapped tribes critically need. It is a strategy that some tribal leaders call "economic blackmail." LeRoy mailed letters to more than 65 tribal leaders nationally and has lobbied at major Indian gatherings such as the National Congress of American Indians attended by 1500 delegates. So far, only the Mascalero Apache tribe in New Mexico has received $100,000 of grant money to study the prospect of a nuclear waste facility on the reservation. It is a prospect that has caused much controversy among tribal members, many of whom oppose it. Waste deals disguised as "economic development." This recent round of waste proposals comes on the heels of scores of proposals from waste disposal operators who have deliberately targeted Indian lands for waste incinerators and landfills. In the last two years alone, more than 50 tribes from Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska, California, New York, Nevada, Utah, South Dakota, Washington, Wyoming and Florida have been approached by waste merchants seeking deals on Native lands where state regulations do not apply and there is less red tape governing toxic waste incinerators and landfills. Toxic waste deals are often disguised as "economic development" projects. Waste companies promise million-dollar deals to people who often live in economically depressed communities that seldom attract offers of this magnitude. In exchange for millions, waste companies propose to build high-level waste incinerators and massive dumps to store tons of toxic waste shipped in from all over the nation. Waste merchants also recognize the political and economic vulnerability of Native nations. Becuase affluent communities have the money and political power to ban waste sites from their neighborhoods, most landfills, incinerators and toxic dumps are built near low-income communities of color, many near Indian lands. Unless a tribe has existing environmental regulations, toxic waste falls under the jurisdiction of federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) laws that are often less stringent than those of states. Native leaders say the lax and distant enforcement exercised by the EPA is not enough to protect tribes from companies that are trying to take advantage of the sovereign status of Native people. "Environmental laws do not protect our people," said Gail Small, a North Cheyenne attorney and activist. "With less than four percent of our original land base left, we refuse to accept the deliberate targeting of our land for white America's trash and poison's." Encroaching on the Western Shoshone That feeling is shared by the Western Shoshone Nation whose land in Nevada was taken by the government to build the Nevada Test Site. The military has exploded more than 700 nuclear bombs since 1951 including 100 above-ground blasts that were allowed until 1963. Although the Treaty of Ruby Valley never ceded lands to the U.S., providing only permission for settlers to pass through Shoshone land, the federal government ignored the treaty and took more than 800,000 acres for weapons testing. The department of defense (DOD) now uses that land to conduct both underground nuclear tests and ariel bombing at adjacent Nellis Air Force Gunnery Range and the Tonopah Test Range. These tests expose millions of citizens in a five-state surrounding area to radiation. "We are the most bombed nation in the world." William Rosse, Sr. proclaims at the many environmental gatherings he attends. "We've had more than our share of radiation," says Rosse. "Now they want to put the Yucca Mountain repository on our lands." The proposed high-level nuclear waste repository would create cavities and tunnels spreading over 1500 acres inside the Yucca Mountain to store 70,000 metric tons of deadly nuclear waste. An additional 150 surface acres would be used to house administrative and warehouse facilities. The estimated price tag to taxpayers so far is $15 billion. The repository is intended to keep nuclear waste "safe" for 10,000 years by placing steel canisters filled with the most deadly substances on the planet in tunnels up to 115 miles long. If approved, the repository would operate from 2003 to 2053, taking in nuclear waste from nuclear waste sites throughout the nation. Only five states would not be impacted by the transportation of high-level radioactive waste, causing many state and local emergency response teams to worry about the prospect of accidents. With up to 4000 shipments of radioactive waste crossing the nation annually, trucking industry statistics reveal that up to 50 accidents per year could occur during the 30-year period that nuclear waste would stream to Yucca Mountain. Fearing the dangers posed, some tribal leaders have called for a ban on the transportation of hazerdous waste through their reservations and a handful of tribes have outlawed hazerdous waste operations. * Groundwork* (formerly *Greenletter*) can be reached at PO Box 14141, San Francisco CA 94114. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Philippines Indigenous People Fight Geo-Thermal Project * World Perspectives* (NLNS)--In past weeks, more than 30 people have been arrested in Mindanao, including a staff member of the indigenous organization Lumad Mindanao. President Ramos has deployed 500 paramilitary, 150 elite Philippine Marines, and more than 2,000 soldiers to the site of a proposed geo-thermal project, opposed by the indigenous population. Says the Secretary-General of Lumad Mindanao: "Since Ramos was the former Secretary of National Defense, I don't believe he is the protector [of the indigenous people]. The total war policy will be strengthened against the people. We are always the victims of war because the military believe that we harbor the New People's Army or the communist guerrillas, so the military operates under the assumption that any indigenous person who is not cooperating with the government is either guerrilla or supporter of the guerrilla movement, therefore an appropriate target for the military. Our people don't understand what is leftist or what is communist." Standing just under 3,000 meters, the dormant volcano Mount Apo is the highest mountain in the Philippines. It was declared a national park in 1936 and has been put on the UN list of national parks and equivalent reserves. To the indigenous people of Mindanao and the indigenous people who live on Mount Apo's slopes, it is sacred: "The mountain is the last sacred grounds among the indigenous peoples of Mindanao. It is sacred to all the people in Mindanao because it is the highest peak in the Philippines. When we say Apo it means our ancestor. We believe that this mountain is the abode of our dead ancestors." "Mount Apo has the last remaining important forest in Mindanao because of the unscrupulous logging that has been operating here since the 1950's. Mindanao mountains are almost denuded. That is the only remaining forest whereby, according to some scientists, it is where the rare flora and fauna could be found that is native to Mount Apo." The indigenous people have sworn to resist with their lives the geo-thermal project on Mount Apo. Economic development is seen as imperative by the Philippines government, with a national debt now topping $30 billion. It is clear that the 500 megawatt geo-thermal field at Mount Apo would aid industrialization of Mindanao. But would it dent the national debt? Local politicians and the local Bishop have called for a halt to the project, which might affect hundreds of thousands of people. Says the Secretary-General: "The destruction of Mount Apo is not only the destruction of indigenous people, but it is the beginning of irreversible destruction of the people around Mount Apo. Because Mount Apo is the fountainhead of 28 rivers and streams, which supply the rice fields of the low-landers, particularly in central Mindanao. For the project, it is necessary to cut trees and bulldoze areas, it is destroying the very foundation of the life of the people in Mindanao." The Philippines government has approached the Japan Export- Import Bank for funding. But the Lumad tribal elders warn that if development continues, the spirit of Mount Apo will get angry. * World Perspectives* monitors shortwave radio around the world. They can be reached at PO Box 3074, Madison, WI 53704; worlpnews@igc.apc.org --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT "Kicking Enemy Ass" Compiled by Linda Greene, NLNS Corporate Culinary Artistry (NLNS)--Thanks to corporate chemistry, scientists will soon finish developing chemical compounds that will enable microwaved food to smell and look as though it just finished roasting or baking in a conventional oven. One researcher, Varoujan Vaylayan of McGill University, is working on a mixture of sugars and amino acids that will produce familiar home-cooked aromas and looks. In one experiment Vaylayan microwaved two chicken legs, one treated with his chemical compound and the other untreated. Both cooked equally well, but the chemically treated leg, according to Vaylayan, was "golden brown and had the aroma of freshly roasted chicken." In contrast, the untreated leg "was gray in color and had no aroma." The first such chemically treated microwave morsel to hit the supermarket shelves will be French bread dough. (*Electric Consumer*) Oral Contraceptives and Liver Cancer (NLNS)--Your doctor might not tell you, but the findings of new study from Toronto General Hospital indicate a serious link between oral contraceptives and liver cancer. Women using oral contraceptives have a "small but definite" risk of developing a benign liver tumor after using the Pill continuously for over five years, according to the study. Any woman who's used birth control pills for more than five years should see a physician for an abdominal exam to determine if she has a liver mass. Women on the Pill for more than eight years have a slight risk of developing a premalignant liver lesion or liver cancer and should see a doctor for periodic exams for a liver mass. The senior author of the study, Lian-Che Tao, M.D., cautions, "The likelihood of oral contraceptives' responsibility for hepatocarcinogenesis [causing liver cancer] must be taken seriously. It is hoped that early detection of malignancy in women at risk may lead to better results from surgical treatment for a tumor that, at present, has an almost hopeless prognosis." (*Acta Cytologica*) More Advances in Corporate Cuisine (NLNS)--Monsanto, long known as a manufacturer of PCBs and other hazardous synthetic organic compounds, recently turned some of its attention to the humble potato. On August 25 the chemical company announced that its scientists genetically engineered a potato that will absorb less oil, and therefore fewer calories, when cooked. Designed to also benefit farmers and the fast food industry, according to a Monsanto biologist, the typical genetically engineered potato will yield a chip holding 6% less oil than does an old-fashioned potato chip. (*Herald-Times*, Bloomington, IN) Quote of the Week (NLNS)--"[The Equal Rights Amendment] is about a socialist, anti- family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." --Rev. Pat Robertson, discussing a proposed ERA amendment to the Iowa state constitution, August 24, 1992 (National Abortion Rights Action League) Voting (NLNS)--"In Australia," writes Helen Caldicott, "voting is compulsory- -if people do not vote, they are fined $50. . . . In order to remove the power and privileges of the wealthy and corporate elite, America needs compulsory registration and compulsory voting so that the political will and needs of all the people will be represented. . . . Since the address of every citizen is known by the U.S. Postal Service, registration could be effected by governmental decree." Sounds good, but when the "motor-voter" bill--requiring states to register people to vote when they applied for drivers' and marriage licenses, hunting and fishing permits, and unemployment, disability and welfare benefits--reached George Bush on September 22, he vetoed it. Its supporters say the bill would have given the vote to 90% of the estimated 65 million in this country who are eligible to vote but can't do so because they haven't registered . MORE KICKING CLINTON'S ASS! (NLNS)--According to the U.S. Census, in '89 Arkansas had the fourthhighest poverty rate in the U.S. In '90 Renew America ranked the state 42nd in the delivery of health care. That same year the Center for the Study of Social Policy ranked Arkansas 44th from the top in children's overall well-being. *** In 1990 *Financial World* ranked Arkansas one of the nine worst- managed states. *** In 1990 the Green Index placed Arkansas 48th from the top in environmental health and 50th in environmental policy initiatives. *** In '91 Public Citizen named unit 1 of Arkansas's Nuclear One nuclear power plant the nation's 2nd second worst reactor and its unit 2 the 10th worst out of 111 in the country. From '88 to '90 Nuclear One had ranked 6th among 45 similar nuclear power plants, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in exposing the public to radiation. *** In 1990 Waste Management, Inc., the world's largest waste- treatment company, which has paid over $28 million in fines or settlements for price-fixing, bid-rigging and other antitrust violations since 1980, gave Clinton $2,000 in PAC contributions. *** El Dorado, AR, population 27,000, has five chemical plants, a petroleum refinery and one of the nation's largest hazardous waste incinerators. El Dorado has four times the average national rate of Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive neuromuscular disease that attacks nerve cells and pathways in the brain and spinal cord and that scientists have linked to industrial pollution. El Dorado's incinerator, run by Ensco, receives hazardous waste from every state except Hawaii. From January to November 1989, 45,000 tons of hazerdous waste arrived at the Ensco incinerator by truck or train. *** The El Dorado incinerator burns half the nation's PCBs. In June 1986, 2,000 people attended public hearings to protest increases in the rate at which the Ensco incinerator was burning PCBs. Then, a month later, more than 1,000 people marched to protest the rate increase. In 1989, without holding a public hearing, the state of Arkanses granted Ensco a 60% increase in the volume of hazardous waste it could incinerate in El Dorado. *** Bill Clinton is a good friend of Ensco's developer, Melvyn Bell. Ensco is a client of the law firm that Hillary Clinton works for. At one time an antique desk on loan from Bell's Architectural Antiques rested in Governor Clinton's office. *** Jacksonville, AR, 15 minutes from the governor's office in Little Rock, has a rate of childhood cancer seven times the national average. Population 29,000, Jacksonville contains three Superfund sites, one of which is the site of the former Vertac chemical plant, where the dioxin-contaminated Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange was manufactured. In 1986 a company that had never built or operated an incinerator before arranged to burn, on site, the 30,000 barrels of toxic waste stored at Vertac, which is located in a residential neighborhood. Jacksonville residents presented Governor Clinton with 4,000 signatures against the plan and voted against it 2 to 1. The test burn of 2,800 barrels of dioxin took place anyway--the first time dioxin has been incinerated anywhere. During his 1990 gubernatorial campaign Clinton said about the Vertac neighborhood, "Why should we ignore the facts? I've looked at health studies, and there are no serious problems." *** In 1987 Governor Clinton signed a bill exempting industry, the state and politicians from any liability from the dangers of incineration. *** In 1991 Clinton signed a tax exemption for a steel company despite its numerous air permit violations and named September National Chicken Month not long after the state decided to pay the Arkansas Poultry Federation $90,000 to run a state lab, thus letting the organization regulate the industry it promotes. *** In 1989, under Clinton's administration, Arkansas changed the state slogan from the "Land of Opportunity" to the "Natural State." Written up by Linda Greene, this information was compiled by People Against a Chemically Contaminated Environment, Jacksonville, AR, from Arkansas newspapers. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Supreme Court Links Test Score Cut-Offs to College Segregation* FairTest Examiner* (NLNS)--In a landmark decision declaring Mississippi's segregated system of higher education "constitutionally suspect," the U.S. Supreme Court specifically cited the role of minimum ACT requirements as a central factor in denying Black residents access to the state's major universities. The justices found that state policies requiring all entrants to Mississppi's flagship universities to post a composite score of 15 on the American College Testing Program exam (ACT) "are not only traceable to the de jure system [of racially segregated colleges] and were originally adopted for a discriminatory purpose, but they also have present discriminatory effects." In 1985, according to the Court, 72 percent of Mississippi white seniors who took the ACT scored 15 or higher. Less than 30 percent of Blacks made the cut-off score. Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White noted, "It is not surprising that the Mississippi universities remain predominantly identifiable by race." The Court also pointed out that "the disparity between Black and white students' high school grade averages was much narrower than the gap between their average SAT scores, therby suggesting that an admissions formula which included grades would increase the number of Black students eligible for automatic admission to all Mississippi's public universities." It concluded that "the State has so far failed to show that the 'ACT-only' admission standard is not susceptible to elimination without eroding sound educational policy." The Supreme Court decision may have profound implications for other public college systems which use test score cut-offs since the court strongly states that "even though such policies may be race neutral on their face, they substantially restrict a person's choice of which institution to enter and they contribute to the racial identifiability of the eight public universities." Similar arguments may also be applied to other instutions which rely on minimum test scores such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and several state financial aid programs. Lower courts will now review Mississippi's cut-off standard as well as other factors cited in the decision "that perpetuate the racially segregated higher education system."* FairTest* can be reached at 342 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139- 1802; (617) 864-4810. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Congress Cuts Military Aid to East Timor! East Timor Action Network (NLNS)--There will no U.S. military aid to Indonesia in Fiscal Year 1993! At 6:30 pm on Friday, October 2, a House-Senate Conference Committee deleted $2.3 million in International Military Education and Training (IMET) funding for Indonesia from the Foreign Aid appropriations bill. They also agreed to restrictions and approval requirements on economic aid to Indonesia. This is the final decision on IMET for this year, as the bill will be passed by both Houses and signed by the President within the next few days. The consensus decision came after a hard-fought battle, in which Indonesia enlisted members of the U.S. military, State and Defense Departments, and major corporations (including General Electric, AT&T, Freeport-MacMoRan, and McDonnell-Douglas) to lobby for the program, which has trained about 150 Indonesian military officers in the US every year for decades. In June, the House of Representatives adopted the Machtley- Hall amendment to cut off IMET by a unanimous voice vote. The issue was raised and decided within three days, and pro-Indonesia forces did not make a serious effort to influence the vote. In the Senate, however, they had three months to lobby, and chose to make this a major issue. Business representatives expressed fears that the IMET cut could lead to further restrictions on economic aid and trade with Indonesia. The debate garnered network television coverage, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and widespread discussion. Senators were visited and called by corporate lobbyists, cabinet officials and admirals. They also received calls and faxes from many constituents, as human rights, peace, and East Timor solidarity groups mounted an intense campaign. Although the grassroots groups couldn't match Jakarta's money and high-level contacts, they mobilized many people who had previously been inactive on East Timor. On September 23, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 15-12 to disallow IMET unless the State Department certified that certain conditions, proposed by Senator Inouye, were met. This was a defeat for East Timor, as the conditions were weak and did not require anything concrete from Jakarta. The Committee voted down a proposal by Senator Leahy that would have required Indonesia to account for people killed and jailed, and to permit human rights observers into East Timor. When the House-Senate conference committee met this afternoon, Representative David Obey led other House members in advocating a total suspension of IMET. Senator Leahy proposed conditions stronger than those narrowly rejected by the Appropriations Committee. When Inouye and his supporters saw that meaningful conditions would probably be approved, they agreed to the cutoff, expecting that Suharto would reject conditional aid as an insult to national pride. By fighting so hard, Indonesia's supporters increased the importance of the final decision. By resisting such pressure, Congress sends a strong signal that the ground rules have changed. As Indonesia begins negotiations with Portugal over East Timor, this will encourage them to come to a just resolution. This is the first time in 17 years that Congress has cut aid to Indonesia over East Timor. It will not be the last. East Timor Action Network - U.S.; PO Box 1182, White Plains, NY 10602 USA. (914)428-7299 fax:(914)428-7383. --- 30 -- - .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Jesse Helms' Aide Suggests US Invasion of Nicaragua (NLNS)--During a Sept. 15 celebration of Central American Independence Day in Miami, Deborah De Moss, aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, told Nicaraguan exiles that a US military intervention might be required to solve Nicaragua's problems. According to the Nicaragua Network in Washington, Nicaraguan daily Barricada reported De Moss' comments in Miami as calling for a US invasion of Nicaragua to arrest Sandinista leaders in the tradition of the 1989 US invasion of Panama. Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Ernesto Leal responded by filing a "verbal protest" with the US State Dept., saying that his government felt compelled to respond since De Moss had fallen into a pattern of "systematically using arrogant language" in her criticisms of the Chamorro administration. --*Nicaragua News Update* - -- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Inkatha Withdraws from Democracy Negotiations Tim Hinton, *The Thistle* (NLNS)--In a characteristically petulant piece of behavior, Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi announced recently that he was withdrawing his party from the negotiations aimed at ending white minority rule in South Africa. His party "the Inkatha Freedom Party" was founded in the aftermath of the unbanning of the ANC and the release of its imprisoned leaders from jail in 1990. The party's precursor "the Inkatha Cultural Movement" had been in existence for over a decade. Since its inception, Inkatha has been associated with the semi-independent region of Kwa-Zulu. This is an area in the Natal province created by the white regime as the "homeland" for people of Zulu descent. Under the homelands policy the regime created illusory "states" with no international standing. The members of these states were ordinary black South Africans who, as a result of this process, were robbed of their South African citizenship. The leaders of the homelands, who are almost to a man nothing more than petty dictators dancing to Pretoria's tune, are unelected and rule by brute force. The South African Defense Force has intervened to prevent their downfall whenever the threat materializes. In the most recent horror perpetrated by such a regime, troops from the Ciskei homeland massacred ANC protesters. Although Buthelezi never accepted full independence from South Africa, he was quite content to rule over Kwa-Zulu under the Apartheid regime. During the 1980's, he was a major player in a discussion forum called the Kwa-Natal Indaba. ("Indaba" is the Zulu word for a decision making body.) The proposals of the Indaba amounted to a form of federalism for South Africa as a whole. Under the envisioned system, the Natal region would have been one federal state incorporating the white parts of Natal as well as Kwa-Zulu. Such a result would inevitably concentrate a large amount of power in Buthelezi's hands. Notably absent from these talks were any of the ANC-supporting organizations in Natal. Participants included white dominated corporations and some white parliamentary parties. One reason for the absence of ANC-supporters was the fact that then, as now, Inkatha's program involved the zealous promotion of Zulu nationalism. Contrary to what is suggested in the mainstream media, there are many Zulu-speaking South Africans who reject Buthelezi's claim to speak on their behalf. Indeed, these people "like most South Africans" are quite opposed to the idea that someone's ethnic identity ought to have any direct political importance. To be sure, it is important to some South Africans that they identify themselves primarily in ethnic terms. But this is far from being true of most. The history of enforced ethnic identification which was the foundation of Apartheid policy is too fresh in people's minds for them to be happy to be identified as, say Xhosa- or German- speakers. In withdrawing from the negotiations, Buthelezi has sought allies among those who are opposed to the creation of a unitary state in South Africa. It is hardly surprising that the first two in Buthelezi's line are the dictators of homelands, one of them being the man whose troops murdered the thirty ANC members recently. It is to be expected that Buthelezi is hoping to push through the sort of federalist solution which was proposed by the Kwa-Natal Indaba. The reason he cited in pulling out was the fact that Mandela and de Klerk had agreed that the carrying of what are called "traditional weapons" is to be banned. These weapons are home- made guns, spears and knives and, although Buthelezi claims they have symbolic value only, they frequently are used by Inkatha- supporters in attacks on ANC people. The important question is the effect of the Inkatha Freedom Party's withdrawal on the process of negotiations for democracy. De Klerk has already expressed the concern that without this party, the negotiations cannot proceed. Ironically, several polls taken in the major urban centers have put Buthelezi's support among black people at around six or seven percent. This means that in a straight democratic election the Inkatha Freedom Party is unlikely to do very well at the national level. However, in the negotiations thus far, the party "like each of the others, the ANC and the government included" has had one vote. This clearly gives Inkatha an inordinate degree of power in the existing forum. In the light of these facts, the strategy behind the withdrawal is not obvious. It would seem more rational for Buthelezi to stay in the talks and enjoy the benefits accruing to him from the unfair spread of voting power there. The deeper background worry has to do with Inkatha's potential for disrupting the transition to democracy. The history of liberation struggles in Africa is replete with cases in which a disgruntled group of people who identify themselves in ethnic terms wage war against the newly democratic state: witness the cases of South Africa's neighbors Angola and Mozambique. In both instances brutal campaigns were fought by rebel armies receiving massive support from the US (which underwrote the costs of UNITA in Angola) or South Africa (which supported both UNITA and the Mozambique rebel force Renamo). Whether Buthelezi's conduct is mere petulance (he is never short of a massive amount of self- importance) or part of a long term strategy for increasing his influence on South Africa's future, he is certain to have delayed the coming of free and fair elections by several months.* The Thistle* can be reached at W20-413, 84 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139; (617) 253-0399; thistle@athena.mit.edu --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Sanctions & Suffering: A Quaker Appeal for the People of Iraq [NLNS Note: This is a slightly edited version of an American Friends Service Committee Brochure. See below on ordering info...] (NLNS)--Thirteen Quaker service agencies around the world, including the American Friends Service Committee, have jointly issued an appeal for the people of Iraq. * "The war hurt us a lot. I have a baby brother and sister, and they used to cry whenever they heard the airplanes and sounds of explosions. One morning a missile exploded in the street in front of our house. I never forget how frightened I was that day. There was no electricity, water or fuel of any kind, and my mother was pregnant at the time and couldn't cope with all the housework even with my help in looking after the children and taking care of them. The price of food is very expensive and sometimes I try not to eat a lot so that my brother and sister have more to eat."* - 15 year old Iraqi woman * "I am against war, since war means destruction, hurt and ruin. Nobody should like war especially when all the great powers of the world gang up against one country in an unequal war and try to destroy all signs of progress and make the country go back to the middle ages. People are starving to death and inflation is murder. Missiles and bombs do not think, they hit and explode--whether you are military or civilian, sick or well, old or young, men or women, you die. Where do you go to hide?"* - Iraqi woman over 50 years old. Dear friends, This is a call for action from Quaker service organizations around the world to people of faith and conscience. We are asking that people with a deep humanitarian concern, whatever their persuasion, urge their governments to advocate that the United Nations lift all non-military sanctions against Iraq. Civilians, especially children, elderly people and other vulnerable groups, are dying in Iraq as a direct result of the Gulf War and the continuing sanctions. Health studies show that disease and malnutrition are widespread, and that infant mortality rates have risen sharply. Iraq is a public health catastrophe. Quaker relief workers were among the first non-military westerners to enter Iraq after the cessation of the fighting in March 1991. Since then our message has remained the same: non-military sanctions should be removed. International voluntary agencies cannot supply sufficient aid. Iraq can afford to supply its own basic humanitarian needs, if it is allowed to trade. Sanctions applied to achieve political aims are forcing innocent people to suffer and die. Members of the United Nations Security Council risk setting a dangerous precedent of denying basic human rights. Even though the Iraqi government's stance is weakened by its own human rights record, the world should not stand by and watch Iraqi children die while waiting for the government in Baghdad to do the right thing. The failure of the Iraqi government and of the members of the United Nations Security Council to reach a compromise has resulted in a political impasse. Human needs have been overridden by political interests. We believe the impasse can be overcome. People of faith can play an important role simply by asserting humanitarian concerns. We appeal to you to take action. THE IRAQ SANCTIONS DILEMMA Quaker service agencies have come to unity: The United Nations Security Council should lift all non-military sanctions against Iraq. It is the most practical moral response to the ongoing public health emergency in Iraq. When the Gulf crisis began, concerned people, including many Friends, supported the use of international sanctions--combined with assertive diplomacy--as a means of putting pressure on Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. After the war ended, Quakers immediately called on the United Nations Security Council to lift non-military sanctions. The war had driven Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, achieving the original objective of the sanctions. It had also destroyed Iraq's civilian infrastructure. The sanctions prohibit oil exports, all imports except for those approved by the United Nations, and foreign investments. The Security Council has proposed a one time $1.6 billion sale of Iraqi oil, but it has attached political conditions unacceptable to the Iraqi government. This impasse has kept the sanctions in force. We believe there remains a humanitarian imperative to allow Iraq to rebuild its shattered civilian economy. As long as sanctions are maintained, this is impossible. THE SUFFERING OF CIVILIANS IN IRAQ The public health emergency in Iraq is taking a higher toll in civilian lives than the coalition bombing did in 1991. The price of food has risen beyond the means of most Iraqis; the inflation rate on basic foodstuffs has reached 2000%. Government rations cover only 30% of a family's nutritional needs. Hospitals lack medicine and basic supplies, and typhoid, hepatitis, meningitis and gastroenteritis are epidemic. Farmers face shortages of seeds, fertilizers and irrigation equipment. Sewage systems, power plants and other facilities destroyed in the Gulf War cannot be repaired for a lack of spare parts. Many of the temporary repairs made to these facilities since the end of the war are now failing. The best efforts of international relief agencies can supply only 5-10% of Iraq's needs for food and medicine. The problems are too big even for the combined efforts of United Nations and private relief agencies, especially as demands on relief agencies are growing worldwide. The realistic solution is to employ Iraq's resources to meet the basic humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people. WHY LIFT SANCTIONS? Without income from international trade, Iraq will not be able to finance the reconstruction of its shattered economy, which United Nations observers have estimated will cost $22 billion. Until it can sell oil--its principal export--on the world market, Iraq will not even be able to complete essential repairs to its infrastructure. The Sadruddin Aga Khan Report to the United Nations estimated that $6.9 billion in repairs were necessary to provide basic humanitarian services to the civilian population. To argue that the continued suffering of the poor and lower middle class of Iraq will trigger a successful revolution is a dubious proposition. After years of war and internal strife the people of Iraq are simply struggling to survive. We believe that military sanctions should be maintained, and that effective international monitoring of civilian trade should be established, to ensure that Iraq's resources are devoted to peaceful purposes. Yet we are convinced that it is morally wrong to seek political or policy changes in a foreign government by depriving its citizens of essential food and medicines. This course of action can only lead to further suffering and perhaps further bloodshed. WHY ARE WE MOVED TO RESPOND? Many people of faith and conscience around the world laboured to prevent the outbreak of war in the Gulf. We reached out to people in the Middle East in a search for common ground. We appealed to our national leaders--and to Iraq's--to find some way to resolve the conflict peacefully. We supported diplomatic efforts at the United Nations and in the capitals of several countries. We petitioned, we marched and we held vigils. And we prayed. Now, we believe that people of faith everywhere should respond to a new danger. The growing interdependence of the world's economies has given a few large and powerful nations a new means of exerting pressure upon smaller and less powerful nations. Economic sanctions may be acceptable in some cases when they do not threaten life, when they are agreed to by the leaders of the potential victims, or when they are a realistic alternative to war. When, however, sanctions are applied to a country such as post-war Iraq, with an economy already devastated by war and dependent on imports for its basic sustenance, it is primarily civilians who suffer and die while the political and military elite remains relatively immune. As effectively as high-tech weapons, sanctions can devastate the lives of millions of children and vulnerable adults. We appeal to you with our concern. The impasse between the United Nations Security Council and the Baghdad government inflicts great suffering on the people of Iraq. This cannot be right. We urge you, as people of faith and conscience, to act, to let the people charged with these decisions hear your voices. THE QUAKERS' PART IN INTERNATIONAL RELIEF WORK When the guns of the Gulf War finally fell silent Quakers contributed to international relief efforts. We have worked to build bridges between Iraqis and citizens of our home countries. We have brought Iraqi children's artwork to Canada and the United States and used it to develop peace education workshops. We have brought Iraqi children to our communities for medical treatments not currently available in Iraq, and we have hosted them in our homes. Quaker study missions to the region have examined the consequences of the war and identified new concerns. A new Quaker office in Baghdad has coordinated Friends efforts for relief and reconstruction. We have delivered food and medicine to hospitals, and have supplied seeds, fertilizers and spare parts for agricultural equipment to farmer cooperatives in the northern and southern regions of Iraq. Our staff have worked, along with other relief organizations, to combat respiratory infections. Yet we have learned first hand that, despite our best efforts, for the people of Iraq the war is not over. The economy must be revived to repair the country's infrastructure and to purchase sufficient quantities of food and medicines. This is why Quakers around the world have joined with others of faith and conscience to call for the lifting of non-military sanctions against Iraq. MODEL LETTER TO THE UNITED NATIONS We are encouraging you to write directly to the chairman of the Sanctions Committee on Iraq. You may wish to use the following as a model for your thoughts. * Date Chairman, Sanctions Committee on Iraq c/o United Nations Security Council United Nations Headquarters New York, New York 10017 U.S.A. Dear Mr. Chairman, I am concerned that vulnerable and disadvantaged groups are being made to pay a heavy price for the pursuit of political objectives against the Iraqi government. In view of the nature of that regime the issue of sanctions against it is complex. While sanctions are maintained, however, it is the majority of the population rather than those holding power who are suffering from shortages of food, medicines, agricultural supplies, clean water and sewage treatment. International humanitarian aid agencies cannot provide enough assistance to meet the needs of Iraqi people. If Iraq is allowed to sell oil on the world market it can generate enough revenue to meet its own humanitarian needs. At present, talks between the Iraqi government and members of the United Nations Security Council are at an impasse. As sanctions against Iraq come up for review it is time to show a greater flexibility in order to move beyond this impasse. While effective monitoring should be maintained to ensure that its resources are not diverted for military purposes, Iraq should be allowed to sell oil in quantities sufficient to alleviate the suffering of its people. Sincerely yours,* WHAT YOU CAN DO While this is an international Quaker appeal, people in the United States have a special responsibility to take action. The US government is intent on maintaining non-military sanctions against Iraq, and US government policies appear to be the main obstacle to lifting them. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) asks you to take these action steps today: -- Appeal to the President and to Congress. Government leaders pay attention to the number of phone calls they receive on an issue. More effective is a personal letter, using some of the facts, figures and arguments in this [brochure]. Most effective is a personal visit. For more information and assistance, contact the Friends Committee for National Legislation Additional copies of this [brochure] can be purchased (20 for $5) from your nearest AFSC office, or from: Middle East Peace Education Program American Friends Service; Committee 1501 Cherry Street Philadelphia PA 19102 tel: (215) 241- 7019 fax: (215) 241-7177; afsc@igc.apc.org. Your tax-deductible contribution will help defray the costs of printing and distributing this brochure, and other work to lift non- military sanctions against Iraq. Make your check payable to "AFSC/Iraq Sanctions" and mail it to the above address. Canadian Friends Service Committee 60 Lowther Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. Canada M5R 1C7 American Friends Service Committee 1501 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 USA Friends Committee on National Legislation 245 2nd St. NE Washington DC 20002 USA Quaker United Nations Office 777 UN Plaza, New York, NY 10017 USA. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT There are Windmills and I Must Tilt at Them Ken Rand, NLNS (NLNS)--Vigilance is the cost of freedom, plus tax. In addition to his own shadow, the Boogieman fears the sound of sabers rattling, the sound of freedom. The immensity of our nation's dedication to freedom's noble cause is reflected in the size of the annual defense budget. Never in the history of civilized man, woman or child has any people paid so much, present or future, to be so armed to defend themselves against the Boogieman. Yet, in our very midst, there are those who say, "War is harmful to children and other living things," "Make love, not war," "All we are saying is give peace a chance," and other slogans designed to snatch from this very nation's very clutch the very torch of liberty. I may not agree with what they say, but I'll defend to their death their right to say it. I know not what course others may take, sacrificewise, but as for me, give me liberty or give me debt. Cut the defense budget of this kinder, gentler country by as much as a single measly gigabuck and the Boogieman will conclude we've turned chicken. We'll be taken over. Thousands, even dozens, of people from Mexico and other Latin American countries, not all with governments sympathetic to American interests, will enter the country without proper credentials. Their aim: destroy our economy. They'll sleep on our streets, highways and byways, rejecting our nuclear family-unit way of life. They'll take advantage of our world renowned kindness to strangers, even foreigners from oil-rich countries, by over-burdening our welfare system. They'll steal our pets and eat them. They'll refuse to talk American. Cultural exchange groups will infiltrate our gymnastic events, drive-in-theaters, video game arcades, discos, roadside attractions, even 7-11, corrupting our artists with subversive ideas--peace, democracy, freedom. The Western movie will have subtitles. Sports commentators will rhapsodize over the swarthy sinew of athelete's whose names contain too many consonants. Our country's adversaries will steal the spotlight on Arsenio, Oprah, Letterman and Larry King. The Boogieman will be *Time's* Man of the Decade. Liberalism, environmentalism, unionism, negativism, pro- choicism, neologism will spread like a cancer across the land from sea to shining sea, a bull running amok in the marketplace of ideas. Our Youth of Today will be even more confused than normal by values the sneakitude of which will be beyond their ken to appreciate--until too late. Until they're Hooked. They'll "Get Down and Boogie, Man" to overly-loud tunes containing anti-authoritarian slogans when played in reverse. They'll drag Main Street, be disrespectful to their elders, pierce their noses, litter, eat too much sugary foodstuff, run away from home, smoke cigarettes and refuse to make their beds. Our politicians will compromise in our town halls of legislature, our courts of justice and our executive branch many of our sacred national trusts on our bargaining table of appeasement. Of course, many of our elected officials, their families and other employees, are patriots. We shouldn't, however, condemn them as scoundrels until after they've had an opportunity to exercise their constitutionally- guaranteed right to speak out on both sides of an issue. Within weeks, given downtown traffic in some of our major cities, it'll all be over. We better not, we cannot, we dare not, we must not, we should not, we will not allow it to happen. No way. Our very national characteristics are at stake. Our forefathers, foremothers and others will turn over in their graves if we surrender lightly, without informed open debate in public assemblies, vigorous exercise of our constitutional right to vote and, yes, through nuclear armed struggle if need be, the sacred heritage of freedom for which they so gallantly fought for. The struggle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way must press forwardly. Trillions for National Defense, but not one yen for appeasment. The nation today stands at a crossroads as never before. One road leads one way, another road leads another way and the other road goes somewhere else. You must choose which road, if any, you'll take, and by what means of conveyance you'll take it. And whatever you do, remember to be vigilant. Because the Boogieman will get you if you don't watch out. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT * Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me* Chuck Leayman, *Lancaster Independent Press* (NLNS)--When David Lynch's *Twin Peaks* television series debuted several seasons ago, it was met with critical adulation and a viewership whose devotion bordered on fanatacism. For months, the question "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was the buzzword of choice at parties and watering-holes all across America. During its first season, * Twin Peaks* could apparently do no wrong, as it whetted the spectator's "desire to know" with an ever more fantastically lurid array of clues, while turning its Pacific Northwest location into an increasingly surreal *Peyton Place* gone rancid. Indeed, the show was like a Pee Wee's Playhouse for jaded adults, a Romper Room of the id where a fragile veil of mystery precariously concealed the most bizarre occurrences. Yet by its second season *Twin Peaks* mania rapidly fizzled and the show was not picked up for renewal. What happened? Judging by my own reaction, which changed from energetic enthusiasm to complete indifference, I think that the series finally became too strenuously weird for its own good (a strain apparent in Lynch's * Wild At Heart*, released in the wake of *Twin Peaks* early success and wheezing with a desperate desire to both shock and play shock for camp). Whereas Lynch and producer Mark Frost initially used the show to stand the classic smalltown American melodrama on its head, shaking out the essential strangeness of what passes for "normal life," by year two it became a National Enquirer orgy of demonic possession, flying saucers, sexual oddity, and curdled irony. * Twin Peaks* left the ground of everyday life (itself fantasitic enough, as directors like Brunel and writers like Pynchon have indelibly demonstrated) and nosedived into terminal geekiness. Of course hardcore addicts who stayed with the series maintain that the over-the-top excessiveness was quite precisely the point, and a nagging part of me in fact regrets having passed the thing up. At any rate I approached *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me*, Lynch's so-called "prequel" to the series, with some trepidation, feeling more or less innoculated against Lynch's garishly paraded fantasies. But as the film gradually unearth's the ill-fated Laura Palmer's sordid background, it regains something of the raw power that *Blue Velvet* once exploded on the audience's collective psyche. Hip but sophmoric irony gives way to something deeper and far more disturbing: namely, a vision of that cauldron of suppressed sexuality, repressed desire, and not-so-latent violence whose benign face the pre-election Zeitgeist has chosen to dub "family values." The film's savage heart is the psychosexual tension between Laura (Sheryl Lee) and her blandly psychotic father, Leland (Ray Wise). (Those familiar with the series will already appreciate just how psychotic the man is.) Flanked by the bleakly despairing Mrs. Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), father and daughter stage dinnertime confrontations that crackle with barely submerged sexual threat. Leland obsesses over Laura's "dirty" hands, pinches her cheek in a way that is anything but playful, and when he accidentally comes upon Laura hugging and consoling her best friend, briefly hallucinates them naked. As the film moves inexorably closer to the moment of Laura's death, the question of her murderer's identity becomes readily apparent, but the build-up remains harrowing, larded with cryptic visions and angry dreams that slip in and out of Laura's "real" surroundings with the lethal agility of Freddy Krueger. Krueger indeed is not too far off the mark as a touchstone for * Twin Peaks'* concerns; in a sense, every Lynch film is a horror movie. Like the predatory Freddy, Lynch's work (especially *Blue Velvet* and * Twin Peaks*) is the displaced embodiment of a culture in which child abuse, sexual molestation, domestic violence, and teenage suicide are epidemic. At the same time, his films owe much to the great movie melodramas of the 1950s such as *Some Came Running*, *Written On The Wind*, and *Peyton Place*, and to directors like Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk who investigated the American family's potential dissolution under the combined weight of ecconomic affluence and nuclear dread. (A sequence in *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me* where Laura and Leland are screamed at by a stranger in a passing truck generates a level of hysteria equal to some of the staggering outbursts in Minnelli's films.) If sociologists had not coined the term "dysfunctional family," Lynch surely would have. Like its predecessors in the Lynch canon, *Fire Walk With Me* can be read in diametrically opposite ways. Viewed from the Right end of the political spectrum, it's just the latest stop on American culture's frenetic ride to hell in a wheel barrow. Laura Palmer's vaguely bisexual erotic excesses and relentless cocaine imbibing are surely the stuff of the Christian Right's most paranoid dreams. Lynch (rather consciously or not) exploits this paranoia: his is an almost Catholic vision in which, when characters stray from the straight and narrow, they find themselves immediately and spectacularly damned. On the other hand, analyzed from a Left perspective whose formative background includes Marx and Freud [uh, Freud, Left?... NLNS ed.], Lynch's work charts the "return of the repressed" in a bleakly naterialistic but sex-negative society which virtually ensures that whatever "returns" will be hopelessly grotesque. In one sense, American movies have always been about energy; energy in all its forms, whether translated into the physical action of the gangster, western, or war movie, or sublimated into the emotional passion of romantic melodramas and so-called "women's pictures." What has always been so singular about the horror and domestic melodrama genres is their vivid investigations of energy dammed, bottled-up, repressed, and the awful consequences of its fitful eruption. Whether it be the creature from the *Black Lagoon* rising from the depths to steal away a not totally unsympathetic Julie Adams, or *The Bad And The Beautiful's* Lana Turner shrieking with loss as her car spins out of control through the rainy night, the vision is one of energy (be it sexual or emotional) unleashed into the normative everyday, whose precarious surface it momentarily explodes. It's deliciously ironic that *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me* should be released on the eve of this year's presidential election, one in which a murkily defined notion of "family values" is wielded like a cudgel against those who refuse to automatically submit to its spell. For Lynch, the family is a a matirx of madness, whether articulated or suppressed, with sex and drugs providing temporary but futile respite from its imploded energies. That the film has miserably failed at the American box office indicates not only that Lynch's cultural moment has indeed "peaked," but that the American mindset is more than ever resistant to such a profoundly unsettling viewpoint. It's as if the burgeoning evidence for the widespread fact of domestic abuse in all its forms really is just the lunatic ravings of a "culturally elite" media, rather than the mirror image of our nation's dark and unacknowledged heart. * Lancaster Independent Press* can be reached at PO Box 275, Lancaster PA 17603. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Beyond the Ballot Box: WHY THE LEFT SHOULD OPPOSE CLINTON Jason W. Moore and David Jarman, NLNS Election Editors * "Laugh about it, shout about it When you've got to choose Every way you look at this you lose,"* -- Paul Simon Half the voting-age population might be fed up with rightwing and unresponsive one party rule in this country, but much of the U.S. Left remains supportive, even enthusiastic, toward Bill Clinton's presidential bid. And while the prospect of a centrist President after a dozen years of Republican rule is undoubtedly appealing, Leftists should critically examine a pro-Democratic Party political strategy which has done little to empower the oppressed, augment Left forces, or stem the Democrats' move to the right. Few would disagree with the observation that the U.S. party system is in crisis. Despite the opportunities for political independence provided by this development, most of the Left, apparently driven by little more than inertia, seems unable to strike forward with much imagination. This lack of imagination was manifest in the Left's reaction to the Perot campaign--part loathing and disdain, part bafflement, part arrogance. But many of Perot's backers readily grasped the reality that the two-party system, in fact mainstream politics in general, can no longer deliver the goods. It is no longer feel-good Leftist posturing to note that millions of Americans want a real alternative to a political system which seems unable to recognize the basic causes of our economic and social crises, let alone solve them. Certainly this represents a legitimation crisis for ruling elites, most obvious in the rightward realignment of the parties and their concomitant social disconnectedness. The problem goes much deeper, however. The emergence of a qualitatively new type of global economy is leading to, inter aly, the collapse of traditional liberalism and social democracy, not to mention most forms of nationally-centered socialism. Despite the immensity of this problem, which can only be sketched out all too briefly here, revolutionary socialism can be reconstructed; reformism cannot. Why? The answer is best summed up with a question-- Just how many social democracies are there in the Third World? How many U.S.-style welfare states? The implications of these and related questions demands close examination as the transnationalization of capital Third World-izes the U.S. working class, and the U.S. state itself. The welfare state, social democracy especially, relies on the existence of nationally-based economies capable of reaping the benefits of a capitalist world system committed to plundering the vast majority of the world's population. In this way Scandinavia, home of the most developed social democracies, can take advantage of imperialism without having to dirty its hands. As long as the capitalists keep making money, few serious problems arise. When the accumulation process begins to slow down, however, we begin to see the reversal of social democratic gains. The Swedish social democrats are now out of power, the British Labor Party is on the skids, the Italian ex-Communists continue to fare poorly, and the French Socialists have long since forsaken socialism, or even social democracy, for what is at best a welfare state technocracy. All this goes to show that as the social base erodes for reformist ideologies and political action--embodied most obviously in the liberal and social democratic traditions, but also in those of the Western Communist Parties--the political spectrum shifts to the right, but only for as long as no revolutionary movement threatens the status quo. The U.S. experience of the past twenty years bears this out--as stagnation began to hamper the accumulation process, the U.S. ruling class sought to recapture much of that social welfare cushion built up since the New Deal. The result was a restructuring of the economy, especially the working class (more temporary workers, more chronically unemployed, weaker and fewer unions, etc.) and an intensification of exploitation--what we know now as the "Reagan Revolution," though the changes went much deeper than the term implies. Liberals have proved unable to halt, much less reverse, this process. Unfortunately, much of the Left continues to argue that the Democrats just need more support, "pressure" as they call it, to live up to their promises. THE LEFT AND THE DEMOCRATS -- Mistakes, Past and Present When Leftists such as Charlene Mitchell, national coordinator of Committees of Correspondence (CoC), tell us that Bill Clinton "offers the only realistic possibility to reverse the continuing slide toward the right in this country," she tells us to forget our history. [Charlene Mitchell, "Worse is not better," *Dialogue and Initiative*, July 1992] She knows better than most of us that the independent social movements, based outside the Democratic Party, have been the catalysts for reversing the gains of the Right--the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s is only the most obvious example. It only makes sense, then, that the best, maybe the only, way to open up political space for historically progressive social transformation is to organize outside, and not inside, the primary institutions of socialization, cooptation, and social control in our society. The inability of the Left to form a viable--which should not translate as "electable"--alternative to the Democrats has led to the emergence of a Democratic Presidential candidate beholden not to any independent political force, but to a gaggle of centrist technocrats and emasculated liberals. We can comfort ourselves with an admiration of Bill Clinton's ability to respond toughly to some of the President's distortions, but a glance at the newly retooled, lean- and-mean Democratic Party gives us little else to cheer about. Clinton personifies the Democrats' utter capitulation to the successes of Reaganism and the New Right. Like Bush, Clinton implies that traditional liberal Democrats are "too left-wing," that the only way to win elections is to woo the so-called "Reagan Democrats." The new Democratic Party strategy is to ape the Republicans' simian ways--for instance, Clinton has jumped vigorously on the welfare- bashing bandwagon, calling for welfare mothers to get off the welfare rolls and get jobs (jobs which do not and will not exist, at least not under Clinton's economic program). This extends to his racially charged attacks on Sister Souljah, and his carefully planned reluctance to be seen with African-American leadership--perhaps the most "special" of the "special interests" from the Right's perspective. But the Democrats' right turn extends beyond issues of race-- their new economic plan is little more than Reaganomics with a human face. Although he favors new expenditures in education, job training, health care, and infrastructure, the basics of Clintonomics exclude the three-quarters of the population unable to "compete" in the global economy. It is a woefully myopic economic vision, focused purely on shoring up the shrinking middle class, though it lacks the mechanisms to do even that, let alone help the poor. Clintonomics' chief failing is its refusal to provide a democratic opening for a progressive reconstruction of the U.S. economy; without serious efforts towards a radical democratization of the economy, Capital will continue its transnational stampede with all the disastrous consequences that entails. Still, dutiful liberals, and many social democrats (both left and right-wing), continue to hope that Clinton will be a good President, maybe as "good" as Jimmy Carter. "Even if I grant you that Clintonomics is not progressive economics, shouldn't I still vote for Clinton because he appoints judges and approves legislation?" Clinton supporters say. "He's pro-choice; he'll protect the environment; he'll cut defense spending; 'pay or play' health care is better than none at all; he'll make sure that everyone puts a 'visualize world peace' bumper sticker on their VolvoI" Even if, and it is a big if, Clinton lived up to such pronouncements, and everything indicates that he will not, this short-sighted pseudo-pragmatism is a dead end for those seeking long-term progressive change. History will verify this. Social and economic justice, even to a limited degree, has been won not through accommodation with the Democratic Party but through aggressive challenges to the two party system. The Populist experience of the 1880s and '90s, the Socialist Party from the turn-of-the-century to World War I, the Communist Party of the 1930s, and the New Left of the 1960s all succeeded, for a time, because they spoke to a public concerned with the inability of the ruling parties to look beyond their corporate patrons. All these challenges took place in a context of some kind of crisis --economic depression, war, social disruption. Yet, as their success grew, so did their ties to the Democratic Party, invariably leading to their demise as an independent political force. For example, the Populists hit their high-water mark in the 1892 election after years of grassroots organizing, as James Weaver received 22 electoral votes. In 1896, however, the Populists nominated the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan -- and (while some blame lies in the Populists' failure to attract urban workers and to bridge racial lines among Southern and Mid-Western farmers) accordingly rendered themselves irrelevant. They were gone by 1900. This experience, and those of progressives and radicals since, demonstrates the danger of trying to "humanize" the Democratic Party and pull them leftwards. Unfortunately, virtually the entire U.S. Left still sees little alternative to supporting Democrats, hoping that Clinton just lacks the right advice and can be pulled leftwards once entrenched in office. Many, such as Jesse Jackson, seem to support Clinton with little vigor, but a disturbing number, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and feminist Gloria Steinem [Gloria Steinem, "Why I'm Not Running For President," *The Nation*, July 20/27, 1992] are all but fawning over the prospects of President Clinton. Others still, like Charlene Mitchell of the Committees of Correspondence, and the Communist Party [Tony Monteiro, "The Winning Ticket: A Campaign for People's Needs," * Peoples Weekly World*, July 11, 1992; and Jarvis Tyner, "Forward to Political Independence," PWW, Aug. 8, 1992], maintain a theoretical distance from Clinton, but call for a "realistic" embrace of the Democrats and insist on attacking anti-Clinton Leftists as "extremely shortsighted" and "not responsible." [Mitchell, op. cit] (1) This type of pro-Democratic posturing reveals what Manning Marable rightly calls "non-Marxist approaches to the question of politics... [approaches which] fail to comprehend the class nature of the U.S. electoral system." [Manning Marable, "Remaking American Marxism," *Monthly Review*, January 1991] As Marable stresses, the Left "must revive the traditions and tactics of non-electoral politics" as a necessary precondition to any real electoral success. If progressives and radicals are strong enough to influence elections, it simply makes no sense to give our influence away to a Democratic Party which has stabbed us in the back more times than we care to recall. If, and again we have a big if, the Left can decide elections, we don't need the Democrats, they need us. On the other hand, if we cannot be influential players in electoral politics, we have nothing to gain from organizing for liberal and, as with Clinton, centrist Democrats. We don't get brownie points for good behavior; rather, the opposite is nearly always true. Raise hell, and then we'll see some results. Too many on Left see Clinton at worst as a "lesser of two evils," at best as a bona fide liberal. Yet, however much Steinem and the DSA/CoC/CP-influenced Left may hope and pray every night that Clinton will be a good liberal President, even an elementary understanding of contemporary political history shows that there's not a chance in hell of that happening. Clinton, having led the center- right Democratic Leadership Council in its assault on traditional Democratic constituencies during the 1980s, is unlikely to reverse course. Worse, it is likely that, like Carter in the late 1970s, Clinton will help prepare the ground for a further move to the right. If history teaches us anything in this regard, it is that centrists like Clinton in times of economic and social crisis are far more likely to give way to the right than the left. The pro-Clinton Left needs to consider two major questions: For one thing, when has an entrenched president listened to anyone other than people of his own mindset? But more importantly, when has a strong liberal movement (which does not presently exist) ever given rise to a strong radical movement, as these progressives seem to hope? If the experiences of the early 1900s or 1930s or the 1960s are any indication, strong liberal movements, on the contrary, arise from strong radical movements. The reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the early 1970s were won by liberal movements which owed their strength and vitality to the disruptive radicalism that preceded and underpinned them. Would Progressive Era "trusting busting" and social reform have been won without a militant working class movement and a still powerful tradition of rebellion among farmers? Would the New Deal reforms have come without the power elite's fear of a strong Communist Party in the U.S.? Would the War on Poverty have been declared without fear of an increasingly militant civil rights movement? Even if many Leftists continue to ignore the alternatives, we do have more than two choices. Ron Daniels, former National Rainbow Coalition executive director, is using his independent presidential bid -- the Campaign for a New Tomorrow (185 Hall Street, Suite 1402, Brooklyn, NY, 11205) -- as an organizing vehicle to build a progressive political movement which can be effective both in elections and at the grassroots level. Daniels understands that if progressives are to win at the ballot box, they must reach "the 91 million non-voters [in the 1988 presidential elections], 70 million of whom are not registered, two-thirds of whom are poor." [Kim O'Donnel and Steven Wishnia, "Can We Have a Party this Year?" *The Guardian*, June 3, 1992] Much more significant, however, is that the Daniels campaign seems to understand that the question is not "If not Clinton, who do you vote for?"; rather, it is "If not Clinton, what do you work for?" Daniels doesn't want the White House, he wants a strong progressive movement which can scare the hell out of the corporate elites and the Republocrat apparatchiks. If the Left wants to reverse, or even slow down, this country's rightward shift, we won't be able to rely on the Democrats, who have never served that purpose. Only an effort such as Daniels' can open up the political space we need to build alternatives to the hard right policies of Bush, or Clinton's neoliberalism with a human face. With this in mind, it is understandable why the Daniels bid is supported by a number of progressive groups seeking a divorce from the Democratic Party -- Labor Party Advocates (based in organized labor rank-and-file), the National Organization for Women's 21st Century Party, the New Party (modeled on Canada's New Democratic Party), the Greens, and the National Committee for Independent Political Action. Daniels picks up on the logic of the New Deal and Rainbow coalitions, going one step further by favoring a whole series of social democratic reforms, embodied in his call for a "socially responsible economy," equality for women and people of color, revitalizing the inner cities with a "domestic Marshall plan," and conversion to a peacetime economy. Whatever the specifics, however, the Daniels campaign's significance lies more in its movement building efforts than in the ingenuity of its policy papers. It is the campaign's "democracy in the streets" component which deserves the Left's active support despite what we see as the basic inadequacies of its social democratic politics. The groups coalesced around the campaign recognize that democracy takes place not in a polling booth but in day-to-day organizing for the rights of citizens and communities to be free from corporate control. The Campaign for a New Tomorrow reverses the traditional liberal and social democratic approach--viewing empowerment, not electoral success, as the primary objective. If, as it threatens to do, the Daniels campaign lays the groundwork for a viable progressive third party, it must avoid the pitfalls of previous progressive movements. The failure of Oregon's eco-liberal Pacific Party is a case in point--the party's single issue focus and inability to reach Oregon's urban poor and rural working class has kept it a small circle of relatively affluent white environmentalists. If a third party takes shape out of the Daniels campaign it must commit itself, above all, to movementbuilding with an emphasis on solidifying its base among the working class and poor. Only through such commitment can they retain the base to resist getting sucked back into the Democratic Party--the surest route to immediate political oblivion. "Okay," says the dutiful liberal. "But still... wouldn't taking away votes from the Democrats, in the end, just serve to elect more Republicans?" Unlikely. A progressive third party constituency would consist of those whom the Clinton Democrats have spurned in their quest for suburban votes. A progressive alternative would just mean more voters overall, since one would assume these voters would remain disgruntled otherwise... and stay home. However, the question is not so much one of winning every race as it is one of shifting the entire political spectrum to the left. Even in the rare case of a progressive party/movement taking enough votes away from the liberals to "hand" the Presidency to a Republican, we would still win by electing hundreds, maybe thousands, of local officeholders and by building powerful social movements able to force force any administration to consider its wishes. The need for a strong independent progressive movement is especially urgent with a rise in the Christian Right's grassroots efforts. As proto-fascist movements capture more and more influence within the Republican party, pulling the political spectrum sharply to the right, they further legitimate increasingly conservative "mainstream" Republicans. The emergence of the proto- fascist, Christian Right Oregon Citizens Alliance has successfully put the "far left" liberal Governor, Barbara Roberts, on the defensive, and forced the Republicans to bend over backwards for the Party's far right wing. An independent force on the left could similarly force the Democrats left, "legitimize" liberal politicians and movements, and build the social base for truly radical political and social transformation. Although electoral politics are important, the times call for a progressive movement which seeks a political strategy that goes beyond humanizing an electoral (and economic) system constructed to preserve the power of the wealthy, to exposing the basic superficiality and unresponsiveness of the present political system. The lesson to be learned from the crisis of what passes for democracy in the U.S. is not that we need to try harder at the same old game. We need to confront, and ultimately defeat, the rule of the rich masquerading as the rule of the people. As the two major parties realign themselves from center- left and center-right to center and right, the need for independent progressive voices is greater than ever. Progressives and radicals cannot afford to sit by and quietly support the lesser of two evils; even less can they afford to sit out this election. Despite the seeming lack of choice, we can participate politically in a way far more meaningful than MTV sloganeering--we can help lay the foundations for progressive struggles which will rebuild democracy and government from the ground up. * * * ENDNOTE -1. Writing in *Monthly Review* in January 1991, Manning Marable--now a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence -observes that on the issue of electoral politics "the late Michael Harrington [founder of the Democratic Socialists of America] and [Communist Party National Chairman] Gus Hall were largely identical. DSA has operated as the extreme left wing of American liberalism, trying to make socialism respectable to Congressional liberal Democrats. Similarly, Communists have consistently supported political liberals, such as Detroit's Mayor Coleman Young, and even post-black candidates like Virginia's Governor Douglas Wilder, whose political agendas are hardly progressive." This thesis is verified by the nearly identical responses to the Clinton campaign among social democrats, Communists, and the assortment ex-Communists and fellow travelers now in the Committees of Correspondence. Communist leader Jarvis Tyner, chairperson of the CP's Legislative and Political Action Commission, writes somewhat defensively in the *People's Weekly World* ["Forward to Political Independence," Aug. 8, 1992] that there will be no "Communist Party endorsement of Clinton. Like most working people, we are anti-Bush rather than pro-Clinton. We see our contribution to this year's election as an all out effort to defeat Bush and to expose his antiworking class, pro-war and racist, anti-people's policies." This effort to defeat Bush, the Communists imply, must take place primarily within the Democratic Party. Tyner argues that Clinton must move left to win the presidency--at best a dubious assertion-- and that such a political move will open "a 'window of opportunity' for the progressive forces in the remaining months of the 1992 election campaign." Explaining away Clinton's history with the Democratic Leadership Council, Tyner argues that, "Despite close ties with the DLC, Clinton, like FDR, *is susceptible to pressure from the people.*" [emphasis added]. While he is correct that bourgeois candidates can be pressured, he fails to explain the Party's continued support of the Democrats. It seems that despite Gus Hall's sectarian blather about "right opportunism" concerning the emergence of the Committees of Correspondence, the Party's own right opportunism continues to run rampant. Feminist and social democrat Gloria Steinem differs little from the Communist position, although her enthusiasm for Clinton is a bit disconcerting. She understands that independent social movements are necessary for pressuring the president, but continues to urge support for Clinton, whose most wonderful quality seems to be that he is "someone who will listen" (never mind that he didn't pause to listen to Sister Souljah before bashing her in a manner that bore an eerie resemblance to Republican demagoguery, past and present). Comments like "Clinton sees himself as a catalyst of change from the bottom up," are bad enough. Worse, she approvingly notes that "he's a 1990s combination of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy." [Steinem, op. cit.] And within the Committees of Correspondence, although there continues to be considerable disagreement on the organization's relationship to the Democrats, National Co-Chair Charlene Mitchell comments that "in the Biblical battle of David and Goliath, David has only his slingshot, certainly not the preferred weapon for giant- killing, but that was what was available. Although Clinton is not our preferred weapon, he is all that is at hand to defeat Bush and Perot." [Mitchell, op. cit.] The faultiness of this analysis is dealt with at length in this essay. * Jason William Moore, Co-Editor of the Student Insurgent, and David Jarman, former managing editor of the Amherst Student, serve as cochair of the Center for Contemporary Activism, a radical youthoriented research, education, and publishing center. The Center can be reached at 206 NW 7th, Corvallis, OR 97330 or 503-346-3716.* --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT Perot's Post-Modern Pastoralism David Jarman and Jason W. Moore, NLNS Election Editors (NLNS)--H. Ross Perot's presidential campaign is not, and never was, about capturing the U.S. Presidency. In line with the tenor of the times--from the epochal developments in the international political economy to the progressive disintegration of U.S. society, with all the intendant political chaos--the Perot campaign, for all its weaknesses, at the very least implicitly recognized that political power in the New World Order is primarily about social, and not state, power. That this particular attempt to change society has met with little success is far less important than the character of the attempt itself. At base, Perot's presidential bid is about tensions both within the ruling class over the future of capitalist development, and of the increasing alienation of the rulers from the ruled--of their ever deepening need to expand and improve upon hegemonic, legitimating processes. These basic trends will remain at work long after Perot sees his last day. The "plot" of the Perot phenomenon--the ins and outs of his business dealings, his authoritarian tendencies, even his recent political pronouncements--tells us very little about the real significance of the campaign. To draw the critical lessons the campaign has to offer, we would do well to look at the "stage," if you will, upon which the campaign took place. Before we dive into such matters, however, a note on the behavior of the media. Virtually all observers, even most of those in progressive media, failed to grasp the character of basic social, political, and economic trends which have underpinned the Perot phenomenon, and transcend the transitory significance of any one political figure. They knew that something was going on -the "plot," if we can extend our analogy, was at least superficially fairly obvious, but few seemed willing to point out and examine the stage and the scenery. Vague rumblings from the pundits, both left and right, about Perot's authoritarian, even "fascist" streak, missed the boat. Perot is no fascist; he does, however, personify a worldwide trend towards a technocratic capitalism wedded to an authoritarian approach to "global competitiveness." Few analysts grappled with the long- standing social and economic crises that laid the foundations for his presidential bid. The Perot movement capitalized on more than mainstream notions of voter discontent and anti-incumbent sentiment; the campaign took advantage of a decades-long rightward shift in U.S. political economy coupled with a systemic inability of power-holders to legitimate the status quo. The Perot campaign, in its infancy, thrived on the illusion of choice; that torch was swiftly picked up by Bill Clinton, who began to "speak Perot" shortly after the Texan's withdrawal from the race. Perot, then and now (sort of), and post-Convention Clinton, both told the "fear of falling" middle class that, at long last, middle class voters could choose a candidate who promised to bring back the American Dream and reestablish a sense of security--short on the specifics but long on hazy notions of a return to the Golden Age of American Capitalism. (One further note--since Perot's withdrawal and re-entry, we believe the character of the campaign to have changed in some basic ways. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, however, we continue to use the present tense for some observations which may presently no longer hold true in the campaign's second phase.) CHOICE -- APPEARANCE OR REALITY? In his heyday, Perot outflanked the Republican- Democratic axis by seizing upon suburban discontent and providing, however superficial in character, an outlet for a new middle class activism that no longer can fit within the two-party paradigm. Cole Kleitsch, a New Jersey small businessman, in many ways personifies this new activism. Perot's message resonates with a growing, though as yet vague, middle class dissatisfaction: "There are people, myself included, who feel their needs are not being met by the political parties. We're being offered Coke and Pepsi again. What we want is Seven-Up." Like many, he claims to have never been a political "agitator" until the Perot candidacy. Kleitsch, and millions of other Americans perceive Perot as an opportunity for real change in a country where more and more people, as conservative analyst Kevin Phillips notes, "are looking atI the unraveling of the American dream." But does Perot represent an opportunity for fundamental change? Or is he, as Kleitsch hints, simply Seven-Up in a nation that needs champagne or water or milk or tequila or something else not yet realized? Perot might have appeared unsullied and crisp at first glance, but when it comes down to it, he provides the same vaguely carbonated, sickly sweet promises which offer nothing new. Lacking viable solutions, Perot nonetheless succeeded by transcending the two-party discourse. Perot, for all his failures, differs from the rhetoric of the ruling parties by delivering a political message that addresses changing expectations on government role in society. He argued persuasively for the need to retool an anachronistic government (although his only suggested tool is an electronic town hall) which, having narrowed its base of support down to Suburbia, has lost the ability to speak for (or even to) those dissatisfied Suburbanites. Perot has directly addressed Americans' growing dissatisfaction with ineffective government, societal dysfunction, and economic decline. Before the Democratic Convention, Clinton only touched on these issues, but Perot was the only one who articulated this discontent in a way that actually appealed to that 83 percent who feel that the country is "on the wrong track"; he spoke not only to the country's growing pessimism but also its hopes for change. Perot is now little more than a nuisance, and Clinton has successfully shifted into populist high gear. Perot recognizes that more and more people in this age of impending crisis are searching for ways to make the system work. Perot's message challenged the message repeated by the media, the President, and the Congress: "It's too complex; you wouldn't understand; we're gridlocked; our hands our tied by special interests..." Rather than reinforce the idea that government is inaccessible, even alien, Perot cultivates the sense that government is a simple affair, not unlike running a business; after all, as he repeatedly declaims, "We own this country." Because he speaks about government in a way that the restive middle class readily grasp, he sets himself apart from the complicated-sounding, technocratic babble over issues and policy which continues to characterize the Bush and Clinton campaigns, despite the latter's quasi-populist posturing. Perot's enthusiasm for the line-item veto demonstrated his "to the point, straight-talkin'" approach to political language--"Give the president the line-item veto to get rid of pork barrel and waste. I say that for three reasons: No. 1, we ought to do it. No. 2, I'd like to see what he does with it. And No. 3, I'd like him to stop whining about it." Why bother with political trivialities like Congress or the law when all we need is an action man, a "leader" (like Perot?), who can get things done? While this seemingly straightforward approach to political talk might actually leave more voters feeling empowered and able to affect the system, Perot's political message obscures far more than it clarifies. His action-ideology reduces problem-solving to executive action, with nary a thought to the debate and negotiation crucial to any even tokenly democratic process. His way of dealing with the problem of, for instance, Congress and taxation, was to "take away [their] right to raise taxes." (ibid) What happens when Congress, understandably, balks at this idea? The answer to that, and sundry other questions, has never materialized. Nor has he told us much about how he would wage the War on (Some) Drugs -- other than a few disturbing ideas about cordoning off black and Latino neighborhoods for house-by-house searches and, in 1989 on the Today show, declaring "civil war [where] the drug dealer is the enemyI [Drug dealers] go to POW camp. You can deal with this problem in straight, military terms." Again, this was Perot at his take-charge best, tilting with symptomatic windmills rather than pushing onward to address the roots of the urban drug problem -- the lack of jobs programs, subsidized day care, community centers and other empowering programs. Perot's candidacy comes at a time when the two-party system has lost much of its luster. Unlike previous "major" independent candidates--George Wallace in 1968 or John Anderson in 1980 -Perot emerged at a point where he could take advantage of the erosion of traditional politics due to decades of widespread social and economic dislocation (his present failure does not lessen the significance of his early success). Many people, on losing their jobs or homes, have turned to whichever party they previously relied on for answersI And found none. While both the Republicans and Democrats are mired in a form of political mobilization with roots in the late 19th century, Perot has always been free of such baggage. Perot's top-down postmodern "movement" -- and we use the term loosely -- breaks with the historical political party system, designed for neighborhood based political education and organizing. Today, political education has been replaced by one national political culture created by our mass media, and traditional organizing tactics, by-and-large, have been rendered obsolete by suburbanization and urban decay. If Perot's massive, multi-screen, multi-state (and Orwellian?) rallies in May and June were any indication, he is the first candidate to instead try canvassing the nation as one electronically-linked virtual village. This high-tech presidential bid-cum-political movement capitalized on the ideological crisis of both liberalism and conservatism. The domestic polarization between Suburbia and the urban and rural poor increasingly mirrors the transnationalized, and ever-more polarized, global economy. Both wings of the Cold War polity, cut loose from the their post-War moorings, seem baffled as to how return a sense of feel-good nationalism, even jouissance to the political discourse. The ruling parties have lost their ability to formulate an agenda which grapples with the realities of the 1990s, or frankly is all that distinguishable from the other party's agenda. Perot, at some level, knows that. With varying degrees of success, he has tapped into the public's frustration resulting from the ruling parties' uniformity and utter lack of imagination. Rather than risk stepping outside the status quo he claims to despise, Perot manages to appear both (or neither?) "liberal" and "conservative." This was probably the real key to his success; how else could a man who is essentially a paleo-conservative win the support--last May--of 38 percent of self-described liberals. Declining to speak in grey-hued tones of "issues" and "policies," he speaks simply of an "unbiased" common sense and a can-do attitude. But no matter how much he might have made the contest appear to be one of the "apolitical outsider" vs. "the stale establishment," he made his billions off shadily-procured government contracts and has known every President since Richard Nixon. By turning solution into folk wisdom, the benevolent, apolitical persona running for office managed to distance himself from the real Perot. Perhaps the man Perot most resembles in this respect is Ronald Reagan. Just as Reagan spoke of his "city on a hill," Perot glosses over toilsome solutions in favor of the quick fix; he set our sights not on the struggle but on turning the clock back to "alabaster cities that gleam undimmed by human tears." He reinscribes the myth of a pastoral, Frank Capra-fantasy America of doors left unlocked and citizens eager to assist elderly neighbors. In his presentation of himself as the classic rags-toriches storybook hero, Perot, like Reagan, ran not on a platform but on the American Dream itself. PEROT'S PUSH-BUTTON DEMOCRACY With his Town Hall proposal, Ross Perot hit upon the ultimate in typically American bad taste--combining the two most mindnumbing things in the world, politics and television. Perot has made it clear that he wants to revitalize America's sense of community, mainly by instituting nation-wide interactive "Town Hall" broadcasts. Hailed by supporters as a way to break out of our country's political malaise, Perot's Town Hall is deceptively fashioned to put a new happy face on the ongoing disintegration of the democratic process. The problem with the Town Hall is that Perot assumes the crisis of American politics is simply a case of the government having lost the people's trust. His analysis is, at best, short-sighted. While paying lip service to two decades of economic decline, he fails to build upon that crisis to create any serious program to deal with the ensuing socio-economic deterioration. Despite Perot's re-creation of status quo politics with a human face, liberal and even conservative pundits have attacked the Town Hall as either technologically impossible, superficial, or in a few cases, Orwellian. There is some truth to their criticisms-- technological problems may hamper the Town Hall's "interactive" nature; the Town Hall would be just as prone to distortion, manipulation, and outright disinformation as, for instance, the TV news; and certainly the technology exists for government to remember how each household votes in Town Hall polls. These moribund pundits, however, miss the point. The real failing of Perot's Town Hall is that it will do nothing to fundamentally democratize American political debate. In fact, it threatens to legitimate further the ability of the power-holders to frame discussion. At the same time as it centralizes the power to originate and control debate, teledemocracy manufactures the illusion of empowerment in an age where political power is stripped from the populace, to be increasingly monopolized by the Fortune 500 and high-level capitalist apparatchiks. In the fabled New England town hall meeting, the citizens formulated the agenda. Perot's Town Hall could not be further from this--quite simply, its massive scope cannot allow any citizen, or even any group of citizens, to actively participate in framing the issues. They can only serve in a reactive, not active, position. When Perot wants a "popular referendum" on, for example, taxes, the various proposals--with accompanying videos--won't come from the "audience," but from competing groups within the power elite. We will hear only those ideas from only those "interest groups" deemed acceptable by the powerfulI Certainly we will hear from liberal groups and conservative groups, but will we hear from anti- systemic representatives of consumers, organized labor, people of color, women, youth and senior citizens, lesbians and gays, and all those other pesky "special interest groups" (read: not, straight, white, upper middle-class and male)? If present media policies are any indicator, at best we will receive a token smattering of ostensibly "alternative" viewpoints. Even if token "alternative" viewpoints were to get fair play on Perot's Town Hall, they would still be limited to explaining their visions within the straitjacket of status quo debate, unable to escape the necessity of boiling issues down to "yes/no," or at the best, "A,B,C or D" choices. Even with one hour to discuss an issue instead of the two minutes on the evening news, could an issue be explained in such detail that viewers would be made aware of linkages with other issues--for instance, the relationship between capital flight and unemployment, or unemployment and urban decayI and above all, the relationship between any of these ills and our very economic structure? So even when we paint the best possible face on Town Hall, its democratizing effects are limited. At best, we would be left with a technocratic approach to problem-solving, with resolutions issue-by- issue instead of attempting to reconcile the big picture. At worst, the voters would be given more toys but still stuck in the same playroom, convincing them of their own efficacy by allowing them more busywork, all the while keeping real solutions out of reach. Just what prevents us from finding genuine solutions? The liberal critique blames "sound bite politics," "negative campaigning," and "forced choice"--a polling practice which demands a "yes or no" response to a given question--as the downfall of American politics in general and especially Perot's Town Hall. The analysis blaming the problems of a defective system on bad politicians or apathetic citizens, however, ignores the roots of the problem. The conspiracy-theory analysis fearing Perot's ability to keep track of the numbers of incoming phone calls (which he currently does at his 800-number) is equally misguided. Does it seem as if Perot would care how voters respond to different propositions which amount to varying opinions among Beltway policy groups? It is unlikely that Perot would dispatch private investigators to round up that 20 percent of the nation who might favor increased taxes or some other "choice." Rather than looking for nasty people at the top, one must instead address Hegemony--the shaping and control of the "marketplace of ideas" by the ruling class, through various mechanisms ranging from the news' reliance on "the bottom line" to the depoliticizing influences of our standardized mass culture. The simplest understanding of hegemony is that the public will not know any more than they have been told--and when the only people who are doing the telling are those who can afford to own a press or a TV station, the whole story is not going to be told. The mass-mediated political culture that the powerful control has one-dimensionalized our politics--in the minds of 99 percent of the people there simply is no alternative to the status quo. Faced with a system that neither justifies itself nor allows alternatives to be heard, people simply turn off, rather than turning away. So many people find Perot's Town Hall, and in fact his campaign, so appealing because he promises both to return government to a position where it does justify itself to the people--in the people's language, the language of "common-sense democracy"--and where it again becomes an integral part of the American sense of "community." Both notions are, however, basically flawed. The problem is that "Town Hall" teledemocracy cannot create community, only the illusion of it. The "Town Hall" may bring voters closer to the Leader, but it certainly will not bring them together as neighbors. We can only achieve some sense of community and citizen empowerment through grass-roots political action which attacks the concentrated economic power of the corporate and bureaucratic elite. The vague and coercively reached consensus that would flow from Perot's Town Hall is no substitute for the diversity of political, social, and cultural views required in any genuine community. And while Perot's vision is long on justification, it is short on democracy; considering the level of dissatisfaction in our society, it is a politically unstable mix. Town Hall might have all the right appearances of a referendum, but when it comes down to it, it is simply the inversion of a poll. The questions are already framed by dominant values and processed into "either/or" propositions; the only change is that the initiative to respond (sort of) now lies with the interviewee. The flaws of polling will only be magnified through the lens of teledemocracy. The over-represented--educated, high-income white males with mainstream politics--will gain even more influence. They are the ones most likely to follow politics with some degree of regularity and to participate in the political system. Worse, however, will be the substitution of polls for what little remains in our nation's capital of debate and decision-making that considers linkages and issues. All in the name of a return to Common Sense Democracy. For over a century, polling has been used as a means of controlling, rather than representing, public opinion. A question reducing the options to "yes/no," or phrased in biased language, can shape dominant values, even ones contrary to the interests of the majority of citizens, into the guise of "conventional wisdom." First used in this manner during the late 19th century in the battle against organized labor and Populism, such polling has been put to good use recently by the European ultra-right. Perot's Town Hall would continue this tradition. As Christopher Hitchens observes in his perceptive essay "Voting in the Passive Voice," (*Harper's*, April 1992), polling enables power-holders to, "in effect, wield the gavel at the town meeting--to frame a question in such a way as to limit, warp, or actually guarantee the answer. Wouldn't a practice of getting the right responses by asking the right questions (and only those) pose a grave threat to the ongoing and freewheeling conversation that is at the heart of democracy?" Perot's vision of a truly interactive Town Hall is integral to his promises of leading us to a sort of post-modern pastoralism. The danger of Perot's ability to capitalize on the crisis of our one- dimensional political culture, combined with the Town Hall's ability to make the appearance of choice seem like the real thing, however, promises to lead us down a much more dangerous road. Perot's knack for inspiring grass-roots activism offers promise, but only if we can demand a detour not deeper into nationalistic technocracy but into a politics which is decentralized, pluralistic, and which above all seeks a radical transformation to a society based on economic justice. As Perot founders, George Bush veers off into self- parody, and Clinton fails to ignite little enthusiasm outside the middle class, we would do well to ask if the American public could have such a profound dissatisfaction with the breakdown of the status quo that it doesn't wash even when a self-styled maverick (Perot or Clinton) promises to roll up his sleeves and tinker with the engine of democracy? Regardless of what needs the mass media might imagine for us, perhaps the American public isn't looking for a swashbuckling snake-oil salesman but for leaders willing to build vibrant social movements capable of bringing fundamental change from outside of the powers that be. AFTER PEROT, BUSH, AND CLINTON -- WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? What are the basic lessons we can draw from the Perot campaign? First, there is a profound crisis of articulation among ruling elites which prevents them from effectively legitimating capitalist rule in this country; hence the no-confidence "vote" of that half of the electorate which declines to visit the voting booth come November, to cite the most obvious example. The ruling class is rapidly moving to expand the discursive arena in order to increase their ideological control over mass political consciousness. At the same time, however, there is a withdrawal of active support for the status quo on the part of the poor and working class--and even many Suburbanites--faced with profound social dislocation and personal crises. For capitalism to sustain both social peace and a profitable structure of accumulation, the ruling class must sharpen its Hegemonic weapons faster than the rate of mass alienation. Considering capitalism's ineluctable tendency toward the economic immiseration and social alienation of the vast majority, the odds, over the long-haul, are not in our rulers' favor. Second, there exist real, and perhaps disruptive, tensions within the U.S. ruling class--the most ideologically developed in world history--that bodes ill for their ability to keep a lid on popular discontent and to sustain capitalism more generally. This tension is manifest in Pat Buchanan's candidacy as well as Perot's bid. To a lesser degree, it is apparent in the two major candidates' different approaches to international integration--Bush's imperialist neoliberalism (a redundant phrase if there ever was one) versus Clinton's imperialist neoliberalism with a human face. If the key to the successful maintenance of rule at home rests upon how well U.S. elites makes the jump from national to international ruling class, and all trends point in this direction, we have only seen the beginning of elite quarrels over the character of this national/global transition. The window of opportunity for the Left lies in our ability to destabilize this process. With this in mind, it should come as little surprise that underlying conflicts, at both mass and elite levels, over matters of economic nationalism and integration will be one of the defining features of the current epoch. Perot clearly represents the nationalist section of the U.S. ruling class, a strata which seeks a return to the Golden Age of U.S. Capitalism, circa 1948. The mere fact that economic globalization is even on the agenda--Clinton's endorsement of North American Free Trade merited a front-page article in the New York Times (Oct. 5)--underscores this issue's importance to elite concerns. If the Left can move beyond what is at times a trite discourse on regulating, and in some way humanizing, trade, we may be able to exploit capital's potential weaknesses, and move forward along global lines to forge a genuinely internationalist working class movement. And finally, the progressive disintegration of U.S. society- -the "family values" pseudo-debate is at least an implicit recognition by the ruling class of this disintegration -must lead to development of new political processes which will integrate, and reconnect emotionally, the middle class into a new socio-cultural, political, and economic order; that is, the new middle class, smaller than before but still critical for the maintenance of ruling class rule, must feel they have a voice in capitalist democracy. For the fortunate few, there must be the appearance, though not the reality, of choice, freedom, and the American Way. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT How We Rock! A review of MTV's Rock The Vote campaign. Jason Pramas, NLNS (NLNS)--Last week, I was sitting around the house watching * Married With Children* reruns. Then, whipped into near-frenzy by the antics of the mercurial Bundy clan, I stayed glued to a couple more Fox network extravaganzas and suddenly it was THAT TIME. I had forgotten, MTV had cut a deal with Fox to show its *Rock The Vote* TV special. And, lucky me, I was just the kind of 18-25 year old that was meant to be caught in its carefully-created demographic web. Albeit one who is already registered to vote--as an independent, thank you very little. For those of you who managed to miss the hype, MTV has been pumping its unique brand of election year hysteria at rock concerts and other hip media events for the last several months now. Called Rock The Vote, this is a campaign with a typically simplistic MTV twist. A summarization: There are lots of young people of voting age. Most of them do not vote. If we register them, most of them will vote for a "CHANGE." What kind of change is rarely touched upon in the various sound-bite video-propaganda sniglets that have been used to advertise the campaign. Over the last year, viewers have been treated to 30-second blurbs on the presidential candidates (and this campaign focuses primarily on the presidential race) which might include things about George Bush like his favorite sport and rather conspicuously omit less savory facts like: "Biggest Mass Murderer Since Ronald Reagan." A couple of months ago Bill Clinton paid a visit to the network to "talk to the youth" which was about as unexciting an event as one might expect. As a sharp *Boston Globe* columnist put it (to paraphrase): "It is ludicrous to talk about Bill Clinton representing the free-wheeling 60s generation. While the rest of us were out doing the wild thing, the Bill Clintons of the world were in student government experimenting with new and exciting ways to wear blue polyester suits." So whether he plays the sax or not, a machine politician is a machine politician, and none of the answers to the questions thrown by the "youth" in the studio audience were much more than the usual campaign circumlocution. Not that the oh-so-hip MTV studio audiences are particularly articulate representatives of my generation. While there might have been a few Harvard- educated "Global Teens" in the audience with their asymmetrical haircuts all aglow mouthing platitudes about the "destruction of the rainforest" or some other half-explained pseudo issue--there was not much in the way of hard-hitting journalistic repartee by anyone present. No barbs about Clinton's possible connections to BCCI. Nothing about his labor record. Or his environmental record. Or which Fortune 500 corporations are backing him. Just a lot of inane balloon questions beginning with phrases such as: "Uh, like. . .Governor Clinton. . ." and ending with ". . .the destruction of the rainforest." But the piece de resistance was upon me at last. *Rock The Vote*. The Movie. The TV Show. Whatever. Now I'm sure my reading audience is on the edge of their proverbial seats waiting for me to savage the tele-despoilers of the reputation of my generation with savage knives of well-turned phrase, but wait. . .it wasn't too bad. Not as bad as I was expecting anyway. Rock The Vote is the kind of show I watch closely for. As a child of the mass culture myself, watching up to 13 hours of TV a day while growing up asthmatic, I KNOW TV like I know few other things. And a political show that is more good than bad is about the best one can expect from the mainstream broadcast media. So when one such comes up, I am of two minds. On the one hand, I have no trouble shooting the messenger (MTV) for being such a corporate tool. On the other hand, for all the problems I have with the spastic, jump-cut use of the medium (an MTV trademark), the basic message of *Rock The Vote* was at its best liberal-to-leftist with populist noisings thrown in for good measure. At worst it was apolitical nonsense, but I take that as par for the course. But none of it could be called right-wing; so the show passes my first litmus test of relative coolness. Let me focus on the positive first. Of the twenty or so "stars" that the show featured, about eight were decent and articulate. They came at the screen in different ways. Danny DeVito was awesome playing a shadowy power-broker speaking candidly of our generation as mindless consumers who could be manipulated at will by the military-industrial complex. Michael Moore (of *Roger and Me* fame) was extremely amusing, though not as cutting as I would have hoped, interviewing the heads of obscure Washington lobbies with the straightest of faces. As he moved from National Cigar Lobby to the National Cookies and Candy Lobby, he got the stodgy executive- types therein to say some pretty silly things. But the best was when he asked the National Funeral Lobby how they thought the dead would vote this year and they said, "Democratic." The most worth it part of the show for me, however, were the three short (very) segments that actually dealt with grassroots political struggles. That ubiquitous middle-class black person, Spike Lee, led the pack with the surprisingly inspiring segment on the struggles of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South of the early 60s. This was the first time outside of "Eyes on the Prize" reruns that I can recall any mention of that most revolutionary of youth organizations. The deeds of SNCC are already legend and should be studied more closely than they are by today's activists, but to see them recounted in a time slot normally relegated to *Beverly Hills 90210* took me off guard. My respect for the whole effort immediately went up a few notches. Of course, the main point of the SNCC segment was to highlight their incredibly hard fight to simply REGISTER large number of poor southern blacks. And to show its outcome with milestones like the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Following straight on its heels was a piece narrated by Laura Dern and Rebecca DeMornay (mark these names down on your lists of Brat Packers to hit up for money) on the Suffragette Movement. I was unhappy that they did not follow it up with a segment on the more-relevant Women's Liberation Movement of the 60s (No, *Ms. Magazine*, the movement did NOT begin with your cooptation of it in the early 70s!). Still, to see file footage of women at the turn of the century carrying feminist banners with slogans that still ring true, sadly and gladly, was powerful and well placed. One can only hope that the young people watching the show take it upon themselves to investigate the leads they were given on Rock The Vote. Someone whose name I neglected to write down, did a skimpy, but o.k. bit about the anti-Vietnam War movement and. . .there it was. The five- minutes that showcased grassroots struggle as the true bastion of democracy were joined by maybe another ten of assorted good things in an hour long show. Priscilla Presley had some nice things to say. Robin William was almost back up-to-par as he was shown fielding volleyballs with political terms written on them and "improv"-ing amusing folk definitions of the words in his hands. As for the rest? Well, there was a five-part "mockumentary" about a 25-year old, pudgy, hulking schmuck named "Steve Wilkins" running for City Council in a fictional town against a fifty year old black man-- which for all its cinema verite aspirations and liberal good-naturedness did little to make the prospects of running for office look very attractive. It also got my goat when the kid actually said a few words about his economic plan if elected, "I'd like to start a non-profit corporation that would encourage Big Business to invest in entrepreneurship in this city." Oh yeah, I've heard that game before. Up in Burlington, Vermont, where the liberal "Progressives" hold sway over the right-wing "Democrats" and a friend of mine named Eugene Resnick (in his late twenties) ran a grassroots campaign for City Council against just that kind of Keynesian economic nonsense. He got 15% his first time out, as did my friend Jon Leavitt who ran as a Green in Lawrence, MA last year. MTV would've done better to talk to people like them, if they really wanted to discuss the whys and wherefores of third party efforts in the US today. But it was not to be. Let me list the rest of the "stars" that appeared in Rock The Vote, for you fame fans who are just dying to know. Since she's so accustomed to the spotlight, I'll start by mentioning Madonna. There I've done it. I think they should loosen her leather corsets occasionally to allow some blood to flow to her brain and maybe then she'd get something approaching a clue. Aside from the two or three I didn't recognize, the following appeared and did NOT distinguish themselves: Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, The Disposable Heroes of Hipopracy (I expected better of them, but they were kind of funny blowing off "Steve Wilkins" in the "mockumentary."), Christian "Pump Up The Volume was just a fluke" Slater, Luke "likes to skeet-shoot with Charleton Heston" Perry, Lisa Bonet, Ted Danson, and of course, U2. The "Top 4 Issues" (for young people) listed repeatedly were: Jobs, Education, AIDS, and The Environment. Why race and sex got omitted from this list probably reflects MTV's white, middle-class male audience, but were unforgiveable. And it was unclear what we were supposed to be thinking about these issues. Are we in favor of more AIDS? Or "curing" it? I'm a little confused. Dopey me. At this juncture, readers are probably thinking: "Jason, this is all well and good, but what's your point? Is this the best we can expect out of the mainstream media? Why should we give a good goddamn about the drivel MTV shovels at us and calls political? We all admit that the Pearl Jam "Evenflow" video is God, but even so, does this make it worth our while to pay attention to the station which makes it more and more difficult for us to pay attention to anything? Or to read? Or think? Jeezum Crowbars, we sure are confused?" Well, you are an unusually prescient audience to recognize the godhood of Pearl Jam's "Evenflow" video. . .but the point is the thing. The point is: Young radical activists must not scoff at voter registration. It does mean something. It means a lot, but it depends why you are doing it and for whom. Frankly, I am tired of the left ceeding the political high- ground to the right-wing and liberal-centrists in this country. I am tired of people forgetting that it takes years and years of hard unglamorous work to build fighting Left political movements that can REALLY take power in this country--and can REALLY do something worthwhile with that power once we get it. I am sick of youth movements in this country that jump to burning police cars without doing any of that funky "middle part"-- the actual grassroots organizing. I am tired of people looking strictly to foreign political movements for inspiration when American history is absolute overflowing with examples of everyday resistance to the powers-that-be. Examples like SNCC that are still less than thirty years old. In short, there is a real failure to think STRATEGICALLY about what we do politically. There is a failure to plan in the long-term. To think beyond the next time you get to say a few words about Chinese dissidents on National Public Radio. To think about actually talking to "The People" the Left is supposed to be interested in "saving." Actually, I think genuine radicals aren't interested in "saving" anyone, and the separation between grassroots activists who have a real stake in a better society that will better their material and spiritual condition, and liberals who use words like "saving" that belie their class background is getting larger every day. One way we can change all this is precisely by building a new socialist, democratic and feminist third party over the next few years. We need it bad. I am sick to death of strictly cultural politics. Of people who think that theater substitutes for revolution. Or for organizing. Organizing means building organizations. Revolutionary organizations of all kinds, including theater, that people can come together in, and fight with, and develop true centers of resistance in. I am tired of people thinking they are organizers without actually organizing. One way to build revolutionary organizations and parties is to engage in voter registration. And then to encourage people to vote for your new party or simply to come to your groups meetings. To talk to them. To listen to them. To question them. To engage them. Involve them. Get to know them. Drink a few beers (or teas) with them. I believe that voting is a right that should be jealously guarded. It may seem irrelevant to most folks on the national level, but even if you don't think it does much good to cast a vote on the presidential ballot (although I think it matters), consider the significance of our franchise on the lower levels of government. It is not insignificant when radical organizations take over cities and municipalities. Look at Brazil if you don't believe me. The Workers Party there controls the huge city/state of Sao Paolo. Even with the army largely out of their control it still has an effect. If good folks controlled the city council or town board in your area, wouldn't it have a positive effect? Wouldn't resources be freed up for new housing projects for the homeless and poor, job programs at union wages to build up public infrastructure, revamping the public schools, changing to ecologically sound power grids? Wouldn't any of this matter. I think it would. An engaged citizenry with their power to vote can help bring these things about. And here we sit with only less than 40% of under-25 year olds voting. In the current situation, I think MTV's *Rock The Vote* is important strategically for two reasons. It encourages young people to register. And it encourages them basically to vote for Clinton/Gore. The second statement will no doubt surprise many of you. Why should we support the anti-communist Dixiecrat fucks? Three reasons. 1) The lack of a viable (and fully realized) third party has backed the Left up against the familiar old wall of political irrelevance. None of the Left Third Party candidates are big enough to win--from Ron Daniels on down. If they can't win, all they can do is educate people at this point. And assuming that they are already doing that, there is no reason to actually vote for them in November. Because, 2) The Left always thrives in periods of liberal ascendancy. If Clinton/Gore are elected, there will be a change in government. Most of it will merely put a happy face on oppression. But remember, 2000 major government positions will switch from Bush leaguers to new faces. There will be some better people in some key positions. In Congress, vital laws that would have been easily vetoed by Bush (who has a 38-1 veto success record-- with a Democratic majority congress) will have a better chance of survival. And the Supreme Court will probably improve, if one of the current codgers buys the big one soon. None of this is insignificant. It buys the Left four years of breathing space. We need breathing space. Things are horrendous right now from both an economic and a civil libertarian perspective. The economic situation will only get worse, but a breather in the critical realm of the political liberties must happen soon or all may be lost. We need room to organize afresh. The best of the old must merge with the best of the new and move forward together. 3) Maybe people will believe that things CAN still change in this country. That we are not doomed to an unstoppable slide into complete fascism. That the CIA doesn't control our every waking move, but is itself fraught with splits and ineptitude for all its money and power. It will help people hope again. Whether or not Clinton/Gore win, our task is clear. Build a third party. Do it. The process has already begun. There are at least five major efforts to build a left third party building steam even as I write this. We need to work with them. We need to register our own voters. Start winning local offices of all kinds like crazy, just like the Christian ultra-right has been doing for the past five years. Build a coordinated power base of interlocking left institutions. And when 1996 rolls around--hit hard. If we can't win the whole shebang, we can parley for real changes in government and advance to the next stage. But that is a debate we'll have to have in 1995. Right now, our job is to get people engaged again. To take the high ground away from MTV--and from the Democratic Party for that matter. I think we can do it. I hope you all do too. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/10/92 .TEXT What is the Sound of One Faction Clapping? (A Response to "I Hear the Sound of Wargasm") Michele Clark, from LIBERATION News Service #206, Occtober 25, 1969 [LNS Editor's note: The marriage between culture and politics has been performed so often that it would seem the question might be outgrown. But this is not so. Every movement of revolt which is genuine and intent upon lasting success cannot afford to confine its critique of what is dying and its sense of what is being born to either category by itself, but must constantly seek to break down the barrier between politics and culture. The compartments themselves are part of what must die. Sanity, an end to the schizophrenic distinctions between politics and culture, between thought and action, between love and struggle, is a powerful revolutionary weapon. And each new movement must find its own sanity or lose its capacity to grow. In 1969 a faction of SDS called Weatherman rose up and declared itself the Revolution. Weatherman formed very tight collectives around the country and submitted to the discipline of a central committee known as the Weatherbureau. The Weatherman placed great emphasis on "smashing" their bourgeois hang-ups and re-making themselves in the image of fearless fighters who sought to evade no sacrifice. They conceived of themselves as a "Red Army fighting on the side of the blacks and Third World people," and the smallness of their numbers and their isolation within the movement made them pull so close together that their actions at times took on an absurd degree of significance to them and communicated nothing to outsiders. Their message, if you want to call it that, seemed to be total alienation from themselves as white Americans and as irrepressible, though often denied, urge for self-destruction. It reached the point where they could make no distinctions between theater and revolution, where they sought desperate cathartic acts to purge the body politic and no longer the deferred gratification of mass struggle. "Alienate some of the people, some satisfaction; alienate more of the people, more satisfaction; alienate all of the people, complete satisfaction," read the liturgy. The emphasis on personal liberation had run amok and the facade of faith in a mass struggle crumbled before our eyes. Weatherman's leanness and grim desire to make the revolution now, not to wait for the "right" day but to act now, sent shudders through the metaphysical fat in our movement. Other on- lookers, by no means ready to join Weatherman on its own terms (i.e. join a collective), felt affection towards Weatherman on the same grounds that they might have felt impressed by the French surrealists of the twenties; because of Weatherman's arrogant indifference to public opinion, its intense efforts to "break on through to the other side," and finally because of its anti-materialistic, anti- historical conception of what makes a person revolutionary. Andrew Kopkind [yes, the same one of *The Nation* fame--NLNS ed.] a fine journalist and a notorious bystander, wrote a favorable review of Weatherman's actions in Chicago this October not because they demonstrated any real capacity to effect political mobilization but because of the "intensity" and "high speed" with which they live their lives. The question arises whether the poignant intensity and the personal liberation that intrigues Kopkind really makes the grade as revolution. A week before the Chicago action, Mark Rudd, national secretary of SDS and a high-ranking member of Weatherman's politbureau, told his people that Weatherman would lead 10,000 fighting youth by the second or third day of the action. In reality, there were few more than 400 people who had shown up six week earlier at the national planning session. It was a bloody, dispirited crew that waited til the Weather Bureau criticized itself before they felt free to ask why. At such points you begin to wonder if the "liberated" people in Weatherman have not really found just one more brand of escapism, a private apocalypse which is sadly insane. There is the spectacle of Weatherman's mass paper which doesn't seem to have reached many of the masses. You might call in Weatherman's lumpen bourgeois Last Will & Testement, a pure carnival of subjectivity. Militarism and machismo (hot air) substitute for military determination, and the newspaper excites no one more than its creators. "I Hear the Sound of Wargasm" was printed in the Weatherman's mass paper, *The Fire Next Time*, and is one statement of the Weatherman view of youth culture and of what the liberated life-style consists. It must be said in all fairness that many Weatherman resented the article, but they haven't ventured to attack it in public, so what they really feel is unclear. The whole article appears between (***s) intercut between parts of Michele Clark's response. Michele Clark, who has written for Liberation News Service in the past, is currently [sic] a member of Bread & Roses, a Cambridge- based Women's Liberation organization.]. First, what is Orgasm? Orgasm is a total feeling experience, both body and mind, an action and a re-action becoming indistinguishable. An explosive, redeeming release from separateness, isolation and tension. We find it in fucking, though not always. When it is lost we spend much time searching for it, remembering the past, sorrowing if it seems to far away. Orgasm is full of pleasure. Pleasure and blending. When it has passed, it is easy to feel that we are one with the person beside us, with the bed, the wall, the lamp, light and air. It is a great release and relief. Orgasm is also unalienated labor, unalienated living. Really, this is true. We are stuck in the lonely genitals as we are stuck in capitalism. Our fight is against the rule of the genitals as well as against the ruling class. We want pleasure all the time! In our work and words and meetings. Orgasm is a metaphor, then, for how we would like to live (after, far after the revolution) as part of everything, experiencing pleasure from the air, walls, books, spoons, typewriters, other people. Pleasure from our sholders, toes, knees, eyes, hair as well as cocks and cunts. What then is Wargasm? A total feeling experience through hitting, kicking, cursing, killing and getting killed. Pleasure, a loss of seperate self, release of tension. A cocked trigger is an erect cock; a pulled trigger is a wargasm. Your fist gets pleasure smashing into a man's face, a face which then crumbles, caves in before your hard-on might. You love the sense of crumpling flesh. It proves your potency. You lose your separate, lonely self in the melee and think: Oh yes, I must be real now! Wargasm. If you're lucky, only part gets lost. A release of frustration through blood. Revelling in spilt blood, dancing in it. Standing up to your thighs in broken bones and dancing on top of limb dead bodies. A great release and relief. ***Culture is the expression of what's real to people. Coming off the energy of our lives, helping us to get our heads together so we can keep moving. Our experience is revolution. Ripping off the fucked up honkey lives we're supposed to live. Understanding that Amerika is built on fucking people over, robbing people of their work, their bread, their human-ness. And we are learning--the hard way--that survival in Amerika means destroying Amerika. To love we must fight. Break on through to the other side.*** Amerika. Pigamerika. The use of the "k" is powerful and scary. Like seeing your own reflection in a cracked mirror; and it's true, the USA is like that--scary, ugly, distorted, like a shattered mirror, trying to shatter us all. We fight the cracks--try to put the mirror together in a new way, give ourselves and everyone a new reflection. But this is the country we live in, that we are part of. The only one we know intimately. So it's ourselves, myself, youself who is this Amerika. To rub in only the ugliness is like punching yourself in the stomach, or stomping on your own head. To repeat: amerika, pigamerika, is partaking in an orgy of powerful self-hatred. I have always thought and still think that you must love what you fight for. The land, it's potential pride and beauty when the pollution has been chased out, your own man- or woman-hood. Or else, why should you fight to retrive it, if there is nothing of value in yourself? Who do you kill? Who do you hate? Amerika pigamerika? Who is that? It's a lot of things. It's the cops and the Kennedys, but it's also yourself, your mother who's a housewife, your father who sells Parker Pens. Yourself. Your place. ***Bourgeois culture is uptightness, isolation, fear. Bourgeois culture wants us to sit like punks and listen to things, watch things, be passive spectators. But we don't know how to hear music without dancing. We are motion. Every time we refuse to sit still, we destroy borgeois culture. Every move we make creates a new form. Borgeois culture wants us to get married, not to fuck, not to experience each other.*** On the contrary. Borgeois culture is only too happy to have us fuck and think about fucking all the time. And fucking in the narrowest sense, orgasm from one pore only. Borgeois culture is ready and willing with a thousand products and ten thousand false self-images to help us think about fucking and nothing else. It says: Don't perceive or feel except to fuck or yearn for it. Don't think about how bad your job is. Don't think about how insignificant you think you are. Think car-fuck, raincoat-debonair-fuck, cigar-fuck, shaving cream-fuck. And what would Weatherman have us think? That we are hard-on, flesh machines which do three things and these only: We fuck, we hate, we fight and all of it to rock music. Weatherman tell us how extrodinarily repulsive we are if we not with them in tone and content, and anyway we're not too worthwhile 'cause we're white Americans. Bougeois culture tells us how repulsive we are if our underarms get wet, and anyway even if they're dry you still need a Camaro to be loved. ***To keep to ourselves, to be competitive. Women should just be wives and mothers, baby machines. Men should need to control women, to feed their own ego trips. But every time we refuse to be isolated, refuse to get into destructive scenes with each other, refuse the tight-assed lives of pigamerika we build forms for survival, forms for revolution.*** Are the hippies right then? Will we be liberated if we move to New Mexico and join a farming commune? ***Revolutionary culture is the celebration of struggle. Drinking wine and making music with spoons and drums. Getting high. Running in groups, building a thing with some people we dig, moving together. Hanging loose, hanging cool.*** We are a pack of dogs, then--German Shepards or Doberman Pinchers--the big ones, the vicious ones. We roam in packs, tongues hanging out, panting and frothing, looking for blood. The sheep are alone by night in the pasture and we tear them apart with our fangs and claws. They're so timid and stupid, anyway. The carcasses lay bleeding in the field. The dogs don't eat the meat. They aren't hungry. They have done it for the love of blood, crazed with its smell and taste. In the countryside this actually happens. What makes this authentic culture? Who makes music with spoons and drums? Do the Ivy League dropouts and graduates in the Weather Bureau? Are they presently taking lessons in this art? How many miles do you run from yourself before you decide: this must be the place where the real people live. ***Rock music is electrified culture. All the heaviest music is tied into what's happening. It comes out of our history, the freakout of growing up in white Amerika. Drugs, anger and now fighting back. Rock comes heavy off a black thing, too. Black blues people like muddy waters and otis redding. Beacuse Black people have been fucked over worse and longer than us, have understood what survival is about. Black people have been fighting for four hundred years and their culture is a culture of revolution. But we have to keep on out toes. There's a lot of pigs who are getting into a heavy bread scene by making plastic culture and trying to pass it off as real, living energy... Groups like Fifth Dimension who do slick cuts of other people's music. Movies like Easy Rider that are about some Hollywood freak's idea about what it is like to be young and moving. Cats who go for the big bucks by selling $7 tickets for us to sit in chairs and watch some music being played... If it doesn't come off the street, out of somebody's gut, it isn't real. Things have got to be a little bit dirty.*** But on page 2 of *The Fire Next Time*, this same issue, they condemned the Rolling Stones and other groups for their chauvinist, false-consciousness lyrics about women? So where do you decide what is from the streets, and what comes from the moneymakers? Don't the Stones also sing about the street-fighting men, and doesn't Dylan's Nashville Skyline have the most revolutionary lyrics of all? Sexism and chauvinism are everywhere and throughout Weatherman politics. You don't smash them in a day or a week; you don't smash them just because you say you have. The point is: making separations, including as many people as possible in a revolutionary effort. Who are people, people in all their diversity (including their present racism and chauvinism) and who are pigs? Mao Tse-Tung uses "running dogs" to describe Lyndon Johnson's cabinet; the Weatherman use it to mean all who disagree with them. After the cops, who do you go after? ***White kids have a choice. We can wimp out, let ourselves be fucked over, and live our lives inside of cages.*** Why don't they just say "limp out" and get it over with? You can either be hard or limp right? Just like a cock, right? We can all grow them if we try? Yeah. ***Or we can fight on the side of the Vietnamese and the blacks to destroy the pigamerikan monster. We can choose to live the culture of death, or we can make our lives a Wargasm.*** There is no choice here. It's only a culture of death the bourgeoisie offer us, versus a culture of death offered by the Weatherman. --- 30 --- [NLNS can be contacted at the following Internet address: nlns@igc.apc.org.]