Bulletin N° 269
Subject : ON THE RESULTS OF ELECTORAL
POLITICS, NOVEMBER 2006, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA : FROM THE
CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE.
The Morning After
8 November 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The U.S. election results are still coming in, and two Internet web
sites that I have found for immediate results are :
We wish you a good day of happy
surfing on the surface of American political culture....
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Université Stendhal Grenoble 3
http ://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
____________
From Information
Clearing House :
8 November 2006
Information Clearing House
Election 2006: Been Down So Long
It Looks Like Up To Me
by Chris Floyd
Ordinarily, the elevation
of a gaggle of corporate bagmen, spine-free time-servers and craven
accomplices of tyranny and aggression to the control of Congress would
not be a cause for rejoicing. With a few notable exceptions, the
Democratic Party has displayed nothing but cowardice and cluelessness
over the past five years, betraying the interests of the American
people at every single gut-check point in the long march to the
self-proclaimed "Unitary Executive" dictatorship of George W. Bush.
Whenever it really counted – Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts for
the rich, the class-warfare nuclear bomb of the Bankruptcy Bill, the
appointment of sleazy, third-rate officials such as torture-enabler and
Constitution-gutter Alberto Gonzales to high office, and of course, the
eager goose-stepping into the war crime of Iraq (which was, let us
remember, approved by a Democratic-controlled Senate) – the Democrats
folded, would not even go down fighting.
Is there any greater example of this than the vote, just a few weeks
ago, on the "Military Commissions Act,"
the republic-killing measure that gave the president virtually
unlimited, unchecked, unappealable powers over the life and liberty of
every citizen? The Democratic "leadership" – now suddenly basking in
media lionization – would not even mount a filibuster to defend the
Constitution (not to mention the Magna Carta). Many Democrats actually
voted in favor of ending the American Republic. (Harold Ford Jr. of
Tennessee was one of these – and now he has reaped his reward: defeat.
That's how it goes, Harold; you can make a deal with the devil, but
he'll always cheat you in the end. You sold out the nation for nothing
– and now Bob Corker, yet another feckless, faceless,
money-grubbing tycoon will pollute the Senate chamber.) The MCA debacle
was the last full measure of fear and servility from a group whose
collective record is one long tissue of shame.
And yet, and yet…this is indeed a time – a brief, brief time – for
celebration. For the fact remains that the Republican Congress is – as
Matt Taibbi has detailed so forcefully – the worst in American
history: corrupt, incompetent, dysfunctional, lazy, and ignorant almost
beyond measuring. As often mentioned here, they are the very picture of
the Roman Senate described by Tiberius, after they'd voted him yet
another grovelling set of honors and powers: "Men fit to be slaves."
The damage they have done to the nation, and the world, as the
bootlicking handmaidens of George W. Bush and his militarist mafia is
incalculable, and will go on producing foul repercussions for years,
perhaps generations.
And so it is meet indeed that we praise the parting of these wretched
fools from their dominance of the legislature. And even though
Democratic control of one or both houses of Congress will certainly not
usher in a new Golden Age of enlightened and noble governance, it would
be churlish and wilfully perverse not to acknowledge that genuine
benefits will accrue from the change. Giving subpoena power to Rep.
Henry Waxman – one of the few Democrats who have served in opposition
with honor, vigor and fire – is a mighty boon in itself, no matter how
tepidly the Democratic leadership conducts itself in the months to
come. Even though the Bush Faction has already promised a Nixon-style
stonewall on every single investigation – and although Bush has already
openly declared, in his "signing statements," that he doesn't feel
bound to provide Congress with even routine information required by law
– the probes launched by the new majority (or at least their bulldogs
like Waxman) will doubtless produce many nuggets of truth from the
Regime's mountainous slapheap of lies and secrecy.
And that's really all that we can expect at this point – or perhaps at
any point. The Democratic leadership is a deeply embedded part of the
Establishment; multimillionaires like our soon-to-be Speaker, Nancy
Pelosi (who is probably richer than Bush) aren't going to seriously
challenge the near-total domination of American politics and society by
Big Business and wealthy elites. They may re-arrange the display a
little, but they are not going to upset the golden applecart. So while
we may see a slight goosing of the minimum wage, we will almost
certainly not see a major rollback of the relentless rightwing assault
on the rights, protections and well-being of working people and the
poor. We can hope for some modifications of the bizarre and punitive
prescription drug "reforms" imposed by the Bush Party; but we won't see
anything resembling a national health insurance system, despite the
majority of Americans in favor of one. We won't see a reinstatement of
the safety net that was gutted, pre-Bush, by Democrat Bill Clinton. We
won't see major reductions – or indeed, any reductions – in military
spending from a party that has faithfully approved every cent of every
"special spending bill" that Bush has submitted to finance his
off-the-books wars. We won't see a lessening of international tensions
from a crew that has spent most of the past year bashing the Bush
Administration for not being bellicose enough in threatening Iran, and
for not larding Israel with even more deadly weaponry to carry out its
aggression in Lebanon and its increasingly frenzied decimation in Gaza.
We will not see an immediate withdrawal from Iraq; at best, we will see
a few tentative timetables based on unreal and unrealizable
"benchmarks" produced by some grandly gassy "bipartisan agreement"
based on the face-saving formulas of the "Baker Commission."
There is going to be no impeachment of Bush, even if the Democrats get
hold of the Senate. There is going to be no criminal prosecution for
the principal architects of the war crime in Iraq (and probably none of
small fry either). There will be little or no rollback of the draconian
strictures of the Patriot Act, which was overwhelmingly approved by the
Democrats, or the many other measures – "national security letters,"
warrantless surveillance, etc. – introduced hugger-mugger by the
"Unitary Executive." Indeed, we will be very lucky if the new
Democratic leadership even revisits the Military Commissions Act.
So perhaps the best we can hope for is that Waxman and his fellow
gadflies can use their new powers, for as long as they have them, to
dig up as many fragments as possible of the dark truths behind the Bush
Regime's crimes and incompetencies – so that these facts will at least
be out there, they will be available for anyone who cares to know, just
as the investigations of Iran-Contra, BCCI, and Iraqgate, for example,
laid out the sinister character of the Bush Faction long before they
returned to power in the Court-fixed election of 2000. Of course, the
mainstream media ignored these past revelations during Bush's
campaigns, but at least they were available to individual citizens. And
with the internet, any new nuggets can be even more widely and easily
distributed. (Assuming the corporately inclined Democrats don't
ultimately cave in to the relentless assault on internet freedom by Big
Business, that is.)
Naturally, the mainstream media will continue their years-long
kid-glove treatment of the Bush Regime. Oh, they may be a bit more bold
now; they may, occasionally, muster up the courage to call a lie a lie
(or some more polite euphemism.) But for the most part, it will still
be softly, softly with the Bushists, a reluctance to reveal their
Beltway pals and inside sources as the fools and criminals they are.
There will still the same cringing attempt to assure the greedy
plutocrats, the hard-right haters of democracy, the putrid gasbags of
hate radio and the sex-crazed cranks who call themselves Christians
that the "liberal media" will continue to contort reality in order to
produce a bogus "objectivity" that gives the lunatic fringe equal
weight with reason, facts and common sense. (You can check
out the obsequious wheedlings of ABC political news director Mark
Helperin if you want to see the latter dynamic in action.)
Meanwhile, of course, you can be sure that every minute crumb of
possible malfeasance, every atom of innuendo that can be inflated into
an appearance of scandal, will be seized upon by a press now suddenly
eager to flash its watchdog fangs at the newly powerful Democrats. And
certainly, there will be plenty of corruption oozing from the nodes of
patronage now available to the Democrats, and it should be
remorselessly exposed. But, just as it's been since Ronald Reagan's
presidential campaign, the vastly different levels of scrutiny that the
media give to Republican and Democratic scandals (real or imagined)
will be very marked.
Finally, we all must remember this: even if the Democrats were paragons
of courage and wisdom, they will control only the legislative branch
(or perhaps only part of it). The executive branch will remain firmly
in the hands of the Bush Faction, a gang that has already shown its
contempt for legislative oversight – even from its own sycophants – and
has publicly declared that the president is essentially beyond the
reach of law. In the openly stated view of the Bushists, Congress is a
"quaint" appendage – like Tiberius' Roman Senate – fit only to ratify
the arbitrary will of the Unitary Executive.
Also remember that the worst depredations of the first Bush
Administration, the Reagan Administration and the Nixon Administration
were all carried out with strong Democratic majorities in Congress
(except for a brief period of Republican Senate control in the Reagan
years). Even in "normal" times (if we have ever known such a thing),
even with the opposition party in control of Congress, there is
virtually no end to the mischief that the executive branch can get up
to. Nixon and Reagan waged whole covert wars, killing hundreds of
thousands of people, without the approval or input of Congress.
If anyone thinks the horrors of the Bush Imperium are somehow at an end
– or will even be seriously impaired – by the results of yesterday's
election, they have a harsh and bitter awakening to come.
But still – the political situation we have today is better than what
we had the day before. In a period of such deep crisis in the life of
the Republic, and (to draw on Noam Chomsky) in a system of power so
massive and far-reaching, even a small change can mean very real
benefits to a good many people. (And to many good people.) And in any
case, we should raise a glass to the American people for standing up –
amidst the hailstorm of lies and bullshit thrown at them – and giving
George W. Bush a resounding slap in the face. Long may he stew in this
great and well-deserved humiliation.
_____________
Chris
Floyd is an American journalist. He is the
author of the book, Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush
Regime. He has been a writer and editor for more than 20 years, working
in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers,
magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Visit his website
www.chris-floyd.com.