April 2008

TAKE BACK AMERICA

On March 17-19, the Campaign for America’s Future held its fourth Take Back America conference. Last year’s conference was dominated by the full parade of Democratic Party candidates making their case with their best speeches (and all were good). This year, the 2,000 or so delegates appeared to have taken some collective vow to ignore the primary battle still underway between Clinton and Obama. Instead there is a candidate out there named “Clinton/Obama.” In addition to this mysterious compact (broken a bit by Roy Wilkins and Rep. John Conyers) the theme of Take Back America seemed to be “everything is linked,” starting with stopping the war and solving the economic crisis.

GREEN JOBS

Several sessions linked the environment and the economy. Good jobs can be created through Green Jobs. Van Jones, the electrifying chief of Ella Baker Center and Green for All, told the opening plenary that we must create a green economy that is strong enough to make jobs. “Connect people that most need work with jobs that most need to be done.” Jone’s equally electrifying colleague, Majora Carter, described for a rapt luncheon crowd her project in the Bronx that not only created a park along the Bronx River but also used green technology to tackle a wide range of social problems.

Majora may have taken the conference theme of linkage to an extreme, matching up pruning trees and crime fighting. In her Bronx neighborhood, where neighbors said drug dealers gathered because of thick dark shade trees, her organization trimmed off limbs to let through a streetlight. Joel Rogers of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy said it would not be easy to scale up green jobs from Majora’s Bronx model to provide significant employment as well as significant effect on global warming. The best bet was in the area of environmentally friendly housing. Apollo Alliance head Phil Angelides said that the private sector was getting on board with green technology. Even Rupert Murdock plans to make Fox TV carbon neutral!

IRAQ

Democratic Party candidate Darcy Burner (Washington) and nine fellow Democratic Party candidates launched a “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq.” The plan is available on the website of a new action coalition initiative, ResponsiblePlan.com.

As a new approach - and more linkage - it incorporates plans for “Preventing Future Iraqs.” These include restoring transparency, accountability, eliminating Presidential “signing statements” (see WNDC statement, www.democraticwoman.org, and warrantless spying, restoring habeas corpus, stopping abuse in the U.S. contracting process, ending detainee torture and rendition, and creating a clean energy economy.

One of the 10 candidates, the dynamic Tom Perriella of Virginia’s 5th District, made the overarching point that achieving desirable international goals – getting rid of Saddam Hussein for example – doesn’t require the use of military power. “We figured out a strategy to get rid of a great human rights abuser, Charles Taylor, in Liberia.” Burner recruited two retired generals, Major General Paul Eaton and Brigadier General John Johns, to work with them on the plan (note: Johns spoke to the WNDC in February). Another one of the 10 candidates was Maryland’s big primary winner and sure shot for the Congress, Donna Edwards. She expressed outrage that the media had declared Iraq off the front pages. As we approach 4,000 casualties, the press should step up to its job and put casualty figures back on the front page. Congress should step up to its job and take back oversight.

AND MCCAIN

With all the upbeat and often moving sessions, Mike Podhorzer from the AFL-CIO brought the conference down to earth with polls showing McCain winning the general election handily in Ohio and, overall, in a dead heat with Obama/Clinton. As of now, the Electoral College math had McCain ahead 246 to 203. Maybe, he said, the problem is the failure of conservatives to play in the real world. Only 38 percent of Republicans think we are in a recession. Even worse, polls show they believe McCain is an agent of change. Podhorzer’s parting shot was “Define McCain before he defines us.”

Even more urgently, Brad Woodhouse of Americans United for Change told the conference, “we have to define the Bush era or they will be back in power.”

Reagan came back from Iran-Contra and left office with a 67 percent favorable polling. The “Reagan Rebound” meant his term could be and was defined as a success. Hard as it is to imagine, the Republicans are working on a “Bush Rebound” so that his era will be defined as a success (the surge! the surge!). We have to keep his ratings low -- otherwise Republicans will say the conservative ideology didn’t fail, there was just incompetent execution. Americans United for Change has a Bush “Legacy Bus” which will visit 200 sites, plastered with the right messages: “Economy in Recession! Endless War! Healthcare in Crisis!.” Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post told the same audience that the way to define McCain was to shout “SAME AS BUSH!”

AT THE WNDC

WNDC’s Lincoln and Alice Day’s documentary Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: the Environmental Footprint of War had a way oversold premiere at the DC Environmental Film Festival March 11. In their words: “In all its stages, from the production of weapons through combat to cleanup and restoration, war entails actions that pollute land, air, and water, destroy biodiversity, and drain natural resources. Yet the environmental damage occasioned by war and preparation for war is routinely underestimated, underreported, even ignored. The environment remains war’s silent casualty.” The Days are taking up the challenge of the Take Back America conference to make the linkages that will bind together a Democratic Party’s bold agenda for the future.

“How many filing states before we have a failing global civilization?”

Lester Brown spoke at the WNDC March 13 on his latest book Plan B 3.0. Brown laid out new obstacles to combating the crisis of global warming. Chief among these new threats was the phenomenon of “failed states.” These are states that cannot provide basic security, food and health care to their citizens and may in fact have no functioning government at all. Failing states thus pose a direct threat to global warming, through deforestation, soil erosion, collapsing fisheries and many other incapacities. Brown included Pakistan (see below) in his list of the “usual suspects,” such as Somalia and Haiti.

Brown says the overall goal must be to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2020. Meeting the goal is “doable” Brown says, pointing to the extraordinary plans in Texas to produce 40 percent of electricity needs from wind turbines. Grassroots efforts are key. Of 151 planned new coal-fired power plants, 59 have been defeated through grassroots opposition, and 48 are under current challenge.

AT THE THINK TANKS

Washington Post Book Club. February 12 WNDC Members Lucia Hatch and John Marshall heard top authors Steve Coll, George Packard, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Thomas Ricks in a panel discussion at the Washington Post on the war on terror. Thomas Ricks ventured an answer to the question “How Will the War in Iraq Turn Out?” He said, “I keep thinking of a smart official I was talking to late one night last summer in Baghdad…. She was sitting on a balcony looking out over the city, and she said: ‘You know, Americans still don’t recognize that they are not going to like how this thing ends.’ That’s as close as I can come to telling you how it’s going to end. We are not going to like it.”

New America Foundation Panel on Rethinking Social Security and Medicare. February 19 WNDC member Gil Brown heard Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation and Maya MacGuiness of the New America Foundation tell their audience that despite their ideological differences they both expected the rising costs of existing Social Security and Medicare programs would probably force federal taxes to rise to 30 percent of GDP by 2030, compared with about 18 percent at present.

Among their recommendations: entitlement spending should be made “discretionary,” and thus voted on (perhaps every five years) by Congress; that legislated “triggers” might automatically keep spending within budgeted levels; and that a permanent “standing commission” of respected persons oversee these programs, and report on their financial soundness every five years.

They believe everyone should be required to save for an adequate retirement and to insure themselves for the cost of basic health care. Government would make this practical through: (1) providing financial help to those who would need it to meet these obligations; (2) help spread risks so that health insurance would be affordable and available to all, regardless of their health status; and (3) provide a strong and adequate income-related safety net against unpredictable or catastrophic emergencies. In addition, benefits to middle class and especially upper-income Americans would be reduced or eliminated.

(To read their paper, go to their web page at www.newamerica,net; click on 1. programs, 2. fiscal policy programs, 3.policy papers, and 4. rethinking Social Insurance.)

AND THE GOOD NEWS IS…. Pakistan

Lester Brown may be on to something when he says that “failed states” is the new environmental threat to look at, but Pakistan isn’t one of them. The recent elections in Pakistan were in the words of William Dalrymple (NY Review of Books 4/3) “an unequivocal vote for moderate secular democracy.” In fact, Pakistan may have become an instant case study on why buying into an unpopular autocrat is not the best strategy if stability and partnership on an anti-terrorist agenda is your top goal, as it is for the Bush Administration. It turns out, and not only in Pakistan, that legitimacy is the key to stability and that legitimacy comes through the central institution of democracy, elections. Pakistan’s February 18 parliamentary elections brought to power two parties that overwhelmingly won the popular vote, the Pakistan Peoples Party, led by the late Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zadari, and the Moslem League of Nawaz Sharif. They are working together to form a new government and successfully circumscribing the repudiated President Pervez Musharraf’s power. In more good news, the new Parliament has elected its first female Speaker, Fehmida Mirza. The troublesome tribal areas in the north may go democratic too; electing regional governments and rejecting radical Islamists.

The EU election monitor for the disastrous Kenyan elections told a Washington audience that he got a call from a colleague monitoring elections in Pakistan: “What happened? We were supposed to be the ones in trouble!” It was maybe predictable that something different would happen in Pakistan. Think for a moment of what kind of “failed state” it is where the riots in the streets were led by lawyers in white shirts and ties and the chief popular outrage was over the firing of the Supreme Court Chief Justice. Nor is Pakistan’s economy a basket case. Take these statistics: Pakistan’s economy between 2002 and 2006 grew almost as strongly as India’s. From 3 million cell phones in 2003 they have 50 million now. Car ownership has been increasing at roughly 40 percent a year since 2001. In Pakistan, you do not have a failed state where government institutions do not function, you have a state where the usurpation of power is (finally) successfully contested.

Pakistan, however, does represent another failure of the Bush Administration to get it right. The Bush strategy is to preach democracy but actually support autocrats that they assume (wrongly) are both effective and in their pocket.

— Betsy Clark

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The Political Dispatch is a publication of the Public Policy Committee.
Woman’s National Democratic Club, 1526 New Hampshire Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202/232-7363 Fax 202/986-2791 www.democraticwoman.org
Comments to the Editor: info@democraticwoman.org Betsy Spiro Clark, Editor