Home | About | Search | Archives

Bush the Lesser Evil? For Some Issues, It Is Worth Considering
Press Action
Friday, October 08, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/federation10082004/

By the Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers

Federation Note: The Federation received the following submission from one of our comrades and decided to publish it. The vote to publish sparked the most acrimonious Glorious Revolutionary Decision-making Session in Federation History and passed by only one vote after the Federation Leadership “liquidated” one particular opponent. “How dare you fucking deny people the opportunity to read this radical proposition and decide for themselves, you soft sandbox shit fascist!” screamed one member of the Federation Leadership.

When it comes to the environment, Bush has been nothing short of a weapon of mass destruction. Not only has he gutted numerous environmental laws, including the Clean Air and Water Acts, he has also set a precedent by disregarding the world’s top scientists and the Pentagon, whose concerns about the rate of global warming grow graver by the day. He’s lifted Clinton’s road-less rule and signed into law a forest plan that will have horrific effects on our national lands.

But Bush’s forest plan was re-written with the help of two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Diane Feinstein of California. As veteran forest activist Michael Donnelly wrote in Counterpunch in December 2003, “Perhaps the greatest irony is that the forests have fared far better under Bush than they did under his Democrat predecessor. Under Clinton’s [Salvage Rider] plan, some 1.1 billion board feet of Ancient Forest stumps were authorized annually. Much to industry’s chagrin, under Bush, around 200 million per year has been cut. Already, that means that 2.7 billion board feet LESS has been cut under Bush than would have been under a Gore administration with the Big Greens usual silence regarding Democrat stump-creation.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Clinton’s plan was actually worse for our national forests.

Now we are in 2004. The U.S. electoral system sets all challenges to the power-elite up for a horrifying defeat. Hence the reason so many liberal and progressive voters deem John Kerry our only hope for defeating George W. Bush in 2004.

They say that Kerry is at least marginally better than Bush. After all, who in his or her right mind wouldn’t support the Kerry campaign? Bush, we’re told, is the worst president in history. A Hitler in the making.

Or is he? Bush is bad, no doubt. But he has yet to drop an A-bomb on a civilian population. Only Democrat Harry Truman did that. So maybe Bush is the second worst president. Bush is still a larger threat to our national security.

No progressive in his or her right (or left) mind would defend Dubya’s doings. He lacks any redeeming qualities. But has Bush really been the greater evil during the past four years? Has he done a worse job than Bill Clinton did? Sure, we have eight years by which to judge Clinton, compared to Bush’s four, but let’s give it a quick whirl.

The economy, many believe, was in better shape under Clinton than Bush. On Dubya’s clock the U.S. has lost close to 2 million jobs. Of course, many of these jobs losses were leftovers from the neo-liberal Clinton years. Under Clinton, as economist Robert Pollin has pointed out in his book Contours of Descent, “The distribution of wealth in the U.S. became more skewed than it had at any time in the previous forty years. No question, an increasing number of U.S. jobs began to be outsourced at an unprecedented rate as well.”

Wage gains for average workers during the Clinton boom remained historically weak, especially in relationship to the ascent of productivity, Pollin argues. “This ‘heightened sense of job insecurity,’” he continues, “lies at the very foundation of the Clinton administration’s economic legacy.”

Things were not any better abroad. Under Clinton, the World Trade Organization (WTO) enhanced its strength, piquing the anger of thousands of protesters who took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to demonstrate against the WTO’s power.

Clinton also bolstered the influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the developing world, and passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with few qualms from liberals and many progressives. It’s no coincidence that neo-liberalism is now dictating the free-market economy despite the claims of some who argue that neo-liberalism has declined under Bush.

“Had [the original promises] come true, NAFTA would have been an enormous boom, and we would all be cracking champagne,” says Lori Wallach, director of the consumer rights group Public Citizen. But instead we have got the 10-year record, and it’s pretty damn grim. NAFTA’s 10-year record, Wallach adds, demonstrates that under the NAFTA model, most people in the three countries were losers, while only a few of the largest corporations who helped write NAFTA were the major winners.

For those caught up in a love affair with Kerry’s Democrats, beware: It was under Bush—not Clinton—that the U.S. briefly challenged the WTO’s legitimacy over steel imports. Bush eventually lifted the tariffs, but he held out longer than expected. While it is conceivable that Kerry would have done the same, the presidential-hopeful is no doubt an ardent free-trader, particularly compared to Bush, who, unlike the New Democrats, is somewhat hesitant to embrace such dogma. Although he supports the expansion of NAFTA into CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and the FTAA (Free Trade Areas of the Americas), the Bush administration has not made these free trade pacts a top priority like Clinton and Al Gore did with NAFTA.

This reality stands in stark contrast to the fabulous label we hear whenever Democrats defend Clinton’s economy.

And what about welfare reform—or as the Democrats called it, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act? Could you imagine Bush getting away with signing a piece of legislation into law as horrid as the bill passed under Clinton? In fact under Bush, Democrats have halted the reauthorization of welfare reform. Where was this defense under Clinton? Don’t think so many would have watched silently had it been Bush who signed it into law in 1996. It is the end of welfare as we know it, Clinton declared. How right he was.

“[M]ajor research studies now report that welfare reform harms families. Young children are going hungry, rushing to emergency rooms, being hospitalized and being abandoned at higher rates,” welfare expert Sanford F. Schram wrote in 2002. “A personal responsibility act that simply pushed single mothers into low-wage jobs without making any provision for the care of their children was a contradiction in terms - it was irresponsible. It was immoral. It still is, and now the evidence proves it.”

“It is disturbing that substantial numbers of children and families are sinking more deeply into poverty when we have the strongest economy in decades and when substantial amounts of funds provided to states to assist these families are going unused,” Wendell Primus of the non-partisan nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities stressed in 1999. And things have only gotten worse.

As Ralph Nader supporters responded to Clinton’s first four years in office in 1996, the Clinton/Gore administration was hardly the beacon of environmental action it claimed to be: First there was the WTI hazardous waste incinerator located outside East Liverpool, Ohio, which Al Gore had promised repeatedly to shut down. Within weeks of taking office, operating permits were issued. This was followed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida, dooming vast acreages of the Everglades. Then the administration capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. In April, Clinton convened a Timber summit in Portland, Oregon, dominated by logging interests; the predictable outcome of this session was a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years.

In July of 1995 the administration dealt its heaviest blow to the American environment by signing the so-called Salvage Logging Rider, a bill that suspended the application of all environmental laws governing federal forests. And on the eve of the Democratic convention, President Clinton gave the food and chemical industries a victory they had sought for 40 years when he signed a bill striking down the Delaney clause, a law that prohibited the addition of carcinogens to processed foods.

Bush and Clinton are virtually indistinguishable on many other noteworthy issues as well. Palestine and Israel for starters. Some people argue that Bush has actually been tougher on Israel than Clinton was. Bush has even admitted that Palestine should be its own state, which drew jeers from Ariel Sharon himself. Although Bush’s concession remains a far cry from a unified territory, where Palestinians and Israelis live side by side as envisioned by the late Palestinian professor and activist Edward Said, it’s still a start. Will Bush aid Palestinians or halt funding to the Israelis? Definitely not. But Kerry certainly won’t either. And therein lies the harsh truth.

What about Iraq? That’s the last straw for most, who simply do not want to believe that a Democratic administration could have attacked Iraq under false pretenses. Never mind the fact that the Democrats authorized bombings throughout Clinton’s tenure and passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, giving the U.S. the right to whack the country for the slightest provocation—or no reason at all. It is also worth mentioning that the Democrats overwhelmingly supported Bush’s invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine the Democrats doing things any differently if they won back the White House.

The Patriot Act? This of course, was a bipartisan nightmare based on the assumption that curtailing civil liberties would make the U.S. safe from terror. Given that Clinton had a version of his own following the Oklahoma City bombing called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, there is little reason to believe the Democrats would not have moved forward with a more egregious version following 9-11, with their mass support for John Ashcroft’s version as our conspicuous souvenir.

It is certainly difficult to discern any tangible difference between Bush and Kerry. Affordable health care? Both deride universal health-care as outlandish radicalism, even though Richard Nixon was the last to propose it. And for those suffering from chronic conditions like cancer or HIV/AIDS, don’t expect huge breakthroughs from John Kerry, who remains silent about government giveaways of taxpayer-funded research to these companies. Gay and lesbian rights? Both are homophobes who are against gay marriage, and John Kerry supports the Massachusetts state ban as he triangulates and votes against comparable federal legislation. But surely there must be some distinction? What is it? Certainly not the war, empire, tax breaks, or trade. In fact, if the Clinton years are anything, they are a testament to how the Left reacts to Democratic administrations. They get by with whatever and however. Privatize social security? Could happen under Kerry. Invading Syria or Iran? It’ll be a bipartisan affair if it happens. Barack Obama just entertained the possibility of “surgical strikes” on Iran. The military draft? That is more likely to happen under the Democrats than Bush. After all, it’s Kerry who wants to increase the military by 40,000 troops, though he does not specify where this new strength will come from. It was the Democrats who authored the legislation the first time around. And don’t forget who it was that got us in and out of Vietnam: The Republicans—as a result of mass social movements.

So the questions should now be raised: Is Bush better equipped to rally and unify opposition to U.S. policy than is Kerry? What about on the home front? Will liberals who backed Clinton despite his gaffes be tougher on Bush? Will minorities fare better under Bush than Kerry simply because there will be more pressure on his administration? We can safely assume that Kerry will continue what Clinton began. For he is a staunch proponent and favorite of the Democratic Leadership Council, which he helped found.

For those hoping a national uprising is in the making, who do you think is more likely to bring us to that apex: Bush or Kerry? Although disenfranchisement will continue under either administration, the popular upheaval, we can surmise, will be the greatest under Bush. Sadly, Bush has perhaps proven to be the left’s best organizer. His policies brought record numbers into the streets prior to the Iraq invasion. Even though more Iraqis perished during Clinton’s first four years in office than on Bush’s watch, Clinton didn’t inspire even a fraction of the uproar, global or otherwise. Depressing, yes, but all too true.

As historian Gabriel Kolko argues in Dimes Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, Bush may well be the better man to destroy the reaches of the U.S. Empire. He believes keeping Bush in office could make old alliances such as NATO obsolete, humbling American foreign policy by forcing us to deal with our own arrogance. We cannot pursue a go-it-alone strategy forever. Kerry, as he’s admitted, will do his best to stop this trend of U.S. isolation in foreign hostilities—and reestablish America as the unequivocal global menace. Bush’s go-it-alone policy is unsustainable. Kerry plans to make the war sustainable by leaning on allies.

If Bush is reelected, Kolko explicates, America’s allies and friends will have to confront such stark choices, a process that will redefine and probably shatter existing alliances. Many nations, including the larger, powerful ones, will embark on independent, realistic foreign policies, and the dramatic events in Spain have reinforced this likelihood. This, he says, will force the U.S. to become a more tolerant member of the global community.

But if Kerry gets elected, postulates Kolko, the Senator will do his best to bring back the global alliance that has caused insurmountable problems for so many around the world. A Kerry victory, then, may well stifle our unified anti-capitalist resistance to empire while four more years of Bush could inadvertently strengthen our cause by broadening the anger of resentment towards the U.S.’s global supremacy. This point certainly deserves consideration, particularly for those in swing states who are considering voting for Ralph Nader on November 2. Such a protest vote against the establishment may in fact benefit our movement, not only by giving notice to the Democrats they don’t stand for us, but also by recognizing the long-term benefits of having Bush in office as opposed to Kerry. After all, it is not individuals we must resist – it’s policy. And the more people up in arms, the better.

Of course this rationale goes against virtually all lefty/liberal discussion about the upcoming election. However, for those on the left who are calling for, and indeed willing to support someone other than the Democratic ticket in swing-states, you better have a reason for not supporting Bush’s viable alternative in John Kerry. If we see no difference between the two parties, we at least have to weigh the costs to our movement. We also must answer up for what this would mean for the election in 2008 if indeed we were to been seen as aiding Bush’s win. Would the anger toward radicals be such that we would in turn force progressives and others to support whoever the Democrats threw at us? Would a Bush win demoralize us or invigorate our movement against war and imperialism? Opposers of the Nobody but Kerry logic should answer these questions.

We would do well to recognize the benefit of contesting both Bush and Kerry. If our opposition to Kerry means that Bush wins, so be it. Remember, this is the Democrats own doing. They have given us little reason to pull the lever for their party’s ticket. While many would view a Kerry win as a monumental victory for the left, this would hardly be the case. At best, the Senator’s victory would spell success only for the elite and ensure a stamp of approval for the continued exertion of U.S. power and global hegemony.

Social movements have historically been responsible for radical social change in this country. We are the force behind those principled tides. Not presidents. Not political parties. Perhaps we can use Bush to our advantage and continue our fight against global injustice with him in the Oval Office. It is at least worth discussing the possibility that Bush may in fact be the lesser of two evils not to mention the left’s best recruiter.

The Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers is a Columbia University-based anti-capitalist, anti-racist student insurgent group. To learn more about the group, e-mail ceodeath99@yahoo.com, or visit our site at www.fortune500killers.org.