Barack to the future? More like back to NAFTA-style globalization

In the fall of 2004, Barack Obama made a memorable campaign appearance at sun-dappled Washington Park in Milwaukee, talking movingly about the bleak future of Maytag workers with whom he'd met in Galesburg, Illinois, whose jobs were heading off to Mexico.

In other speeches, he has often spoken of organizing laid-off steelworkers on Chicago's South Side who had seen their futures crumble before their eyes.

But during the current presidential primary, Obama has essentially abandoned those Maytag workers, the Chicago steelworkers, and millions of other vulnerable Americans and latched on to the corporate agenda where investor rights are enshrined and decent wages and environmental conditions sacrificed.
CHANGE=CORPROATE STATUS QUO?
Obama has apparently decided that the central theme of his campaign--"change"--actually translates into more of the status quo on corporate globalization and the outsourcing of US jobs. This status quo means letting corporations re-shape the world into a global plantation through more NAFTA-style trade agreements like the one just adopted with Peru.

The Bush-initiated deal with Peru, which contains no meaningful new protections for worker rights and the environment, was supported by both Obama and Hillary Clinton, although neither were present to case votes. (See David Sirota's comments summarizing Columbia Law Prof. Mark Barenberg's detailed analysis of the spurious claims of solid new worker protections in the Peru agreement at http://www.huffingtonpost.com / david-sirota / fair-traders-whipping-op.).

Pushed from the left by primary opponents like John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich, Obama claims to have a solution for victims of corporate flight to Mexico and China: more "retraining" and educational opportunities. But as long as corporations retain the unilateral power to relocate jobs and thereby devastate entire communities, and as long as the government provides protections and incentives for such corporate behavior, more training and education hold no certainty of employment.

Still, the New York Times heaped praised on Obama in this 12/23/07 editorial: "Barack Obama has offered the most resistance to the easy path of blaming imports from foreign countries for the woes of the American middle class. “Global trade is not going away, technology is not going away, the Internet is not going away,” he said in New Hampshire. “And that means enormous opportunities, but also means more dislocations.”

But in reality, Obama's point in New Hampshire was absurd. No one is upset with the Internet or other technological advances. But millions of Americans, like the 73% who oppose outsourcing of US jobs according to a 2006 Pew Research poll, are alarmed about corporate flight. They recognize that "global trade" is most often a code phrase for US firms "exporting jobs" to Mexico and China and "importing" finished products from their overseas plants.

NAFTA alone has been responsible for more than 879,000 job losses as of 2003, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_archive_12102003ww.epi.org/ ) Yet the remedies favored by both Barack Obama and the Times editorialists--more formal education and enhanced retraining of dislocated workers--are proving to be totally empty consolation prizes for workers with insecure futures.

 In this era of the greatest polarization of wealth that the US has seen since the 1920's, working families deserve a better answer. We cannot continue to watch passively while the richest 1% earn an astonishing 18.1% of all (pre-tax)US income, while the bottom 40% combined makes just 12.5%.

As for piling on more university degrees to add job security, Princeton economist Prof. Alan Blinder argues that even Phds are now vulnerable to watching their jobs being sent overseas. Blinder estimates that up to 42 million professional jobs are "highly off-shorable" to low-pay sites like China, India, and elsewhere. (Wall St. Journal, 3/28/07)

On the retraining front, it is obvious that neither the Times editorialists nor Obama's staff have bothered to read Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle's superb book, The Disposable American. Uchitelle documents that even with retraining, 73 out of every 100 victims of mass layoffs face substantial losses in their earnings or are forced to retire early.

Obama initially appeared to be a voice of fresh thinking in American politics and the personal embodiment of immense changes in America's structures for opportunity. But with his embrace of corporate-designed global trade --like the new Peru agreement-- and his meaningless "solution" of retraining for non-existent family-supporting jobs, Obama has turned his back both on the very displaced workers he formerly organized and on any credible claim that he represents a "change" in the global economic order. ##30##

Sorry, your job's been outsourced! Thousands of manufacturing jobs have moved to countries that skimp on wages and regulations. Now the service sector is also at risk by

by Roger Bybee for Isthmus on Friday 11/02/2007

Greg Diederich, who worked at Rayovac's Madison packing and distribution center for 17 years, vividly recalls a party hosted there in 2002.

Workers were served cake and ice cream, and given flashlights to thank them for improving productivity. Then, "a couple weeks later," the company informed the 240 workers that the facility was closing, says Diederich, who served as president of United Auto Workers Local 1329 at Rayovac.

Rayovac, it seems, had secretly firmed up an agreement with Dixon, Ill., to relocate the packaging center there. Dixon offered a package of incentives, including adjoining rail and truck access to the new facility. But Diederich identifies another reason for the shutdown: Rayovac's increasing reliance on production from overseas sources in China, Indonesia and Mexico.

"The importation of carbon-zinc batteries from China and Mexico first resulted in the end of manufacturing in Madison and eventually the closing of the operation," he says angrily. "They just look for the lowest wage and the largest profit." In addition, these nations — notorious for their repression of worker rights — offer far fewer worker protections or environmental regulations.

Victoria Hofstad, a spokeswoman for Spectrum Brands, Rayovac's parent company, denies it. "Rayovac did not close the Madison plant due to production in China," she says. "The plant was closed because it produced old-technology batteries with a declining market." She adds that while Spectrum does not disclose information on labor costs, it considers Rayovac's remaining Wisconsin plants, in Fennimore and Portage, "cost-competitive for supplying the U.S. market."

Diederich counters that even the U.S. government recognized that outsourcing was a factor: "The Rayovac workers were granted special Trade Readjustment Assistance because the government found the layoffs were the result of foreign competition. It made that determination."

Since 2000, Wisconsin has witnessed the net loss of 100,000 factory jobs — one-sixth of its manufacturing base — with many jobs moving to Mexico, China and other low-wage, high-repression sites.
WHITE COLLAR JOBS 'HIGHLY OFF-SHORABLE'
Moreover, this epidemic of blue-collar jobs shifting overseas may be only the forerunner of a devastating "offshoring" plague affecting highly skilled white-collar jobs, heretofore largely immune. Along with the job transfers overseas comes a profound break with the idea that corporations have a reciprocal obligation to the workers, communities and nation that nurtured their success.

Most dramatically, seemingly secure workers in Wisconsin suddenly find their lives in free fall when their employer announces a shutdown related to a shift to globalized production. "It leaves you back at square one — no seniority, probably a non-union job with lower wages," says Diederich. "The real kicker is that the executives continue to loot the corporation, jacking up the stock price and making millions on their stock options."
Wisconsin's loss
If golden-hued images from TV ads shape your reality, then you may tend to equate "globalization" with a joyous global village wired to link up Wall Street yuppies with grandmas in Italy and peasants in Tibet. But if you look at what's happening in Wisconsin's factories — and, increasingly, its office parks — globalization often seems to mean global pillage and polarization, lower wages for workers and lighter taxes for corporations.

And rather than bringing people together, it is driving an economic wedge between the super-rich and the rest of us. In Wisconsin, countless firms have radically slashed employment while shifting work to low-wage nations. Less than 15 years ago, Briggs & Stratton was the state's largest private employer, with 11,000 production workers. Now, with plants in Mexico, China and the anti-union U.S. South, it has just 2,500 Milwaukee-area union members.

Three other prominent blue-collar Milwaukee employers — Master Lock, Johnson Controls and Tower Automotive (the former AO Smith) — have long employed more workers in Mexico than Milwaukee. And Rockwell Automation (formerly Allen Bradley) has slashed its union workforce in Milwaukee from a peak of about 6,000 to 300, with plants in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, China and non-union sites in rural Wisconsin.

Other state companies have shut down entire operations. Consider these examples: Johnson Controls in Milwaukee. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Fortune 500 company honored workers at its Brew City valve plant with a party to show appreciation for their years of dedication, with special gifts to workers with 15, 20, 25 and 30 years of service.

On Oct. 9, the workers received another token of the corporation's appreciation: the announcement that their plant was closing and the jobs were being moved to Mexico. Wages at the new Mexico plant: about 72 cents an hour.
Mirro Co. in Manitowoc. The Mirro cookware plant in this community north of Sheboygan employed about 1,000 workers and was a major community landmark. A sign on its factory building read: "Proud to be home in Manitowoc for over 100 years." But in 2004, citing pressures from competitors and the demands of Wal-Mart, a major retailer for Mirro products, the firm decided to close its Manitowoc plant. It had already been importing products from China and Brazil, but chose to further lower labor costs by building a new factory in Mexico.
Racine Steel Castings. This massive foundry had been a port of entry for generations of immigrants from Eastern Europe, the South and Mexico, allowing them to escape poverty through hard work among the fiery furnaces. But the foundry, which employed 1,100 workers in 1980, was recently moved to Eastern Europe, where wages are a fraction of what they are in Racine. "We could not compete with companies where workers are paid $2,500 a year and our workers were paid $25,000 a year," one of the plant's new owners explained.

Across the street, the 125-year-old Rainfair clothing plant has been leveled after new owners, La Crosse Shoe, booted the jobs off to China. The plant has since been replaced by a juvenile correction facility.
Fiskars in Wausau. This Finnish-owned firm, whose U.S. headquarters for craft and garden products is in Madison, recently shut down production of its famous orange-handled scissors in Wausau, moving the jobs of about 300 workers to China and Taiwan. The Fiskars manufacturing jobs paid $11 to $14 an hour locally. "We were facing being the last man standing making scissors in the U.S.," explained Bill Nee, vice president for human relations in the firm's Madison office. "We had a very good plant and very good employees, but from a cost perspective, it wasn't as competitive."

As Nee's comment suggests, the pressures of corporate globalization come down on management as well as workers. If a firm like Fiskars fails to keep pace with its competitors in shaving labor costs, it is likely to lose ground and maybe even find itself on the verge of extinction. While critics attack corporations for their greed, they miss the underlying structural forces propelling the shift of work to low-wage sites like Mexico and China.

When there is no global "floor" to enforce decent universal standards for wages, worker rights and environmental conditions, the systemic pressures promote a ruthless "race to the bottom" in which virtually all corporations feel they must participate.

The myth of retraining
Globalization supporters have claimed that education and retraining will allow displaced workers to adapt and find higher-value jobs elsewhere in the U.S. economy. But studies suggest that training programs — while helping individual workers increase their employability — cannot compensate for the loss of family-supporting jobs. For example, a 2005 study by Marc Levine of the Center for Economic Development at UW-Milwaukee found that Milwaukee has 88,524 more unemployed people than available jobs, and that 44% of African American males were unemployed. A sufficient supply of jobs — at any level of pay or benefits — simply doesn't exist.

Thus, when a displaced worker like Greg Diederich is able to land a new job — he now works in Madison at the unionized General Electrics Medical plant (formerly Datex-Ohmeda) — he realizes that he is one of the lucky ones. And still, he feels far from secure. "I don't see any bright spots in manufacturing," Diederich says grimly. "GE Medical is building a new plant in China to supposedly build a lower-cost version of what we're building, but I'm concerned about what they really intend."

Moreover, even when displaced workers successfully complete retraining programs, they are generally unable to find jobs comparable in pay and benefits to the ones they lost. "Out of a hundred laid-off workers," writes New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle in his book The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, "27 are making their old salary again, or more, and 73 are making less, or not working at all."

Finally, the latest news is that displaced workers may find even less help than before. Retraining programs in Wisconsin face a new round of cuts due to Bush administration budgetary priorities, according to memos now circulating in the state Department of Workforce Development. If so, it would be part of a trend:

According to the Madison-based Center on Wisconsin Strategies, federal funding for key programs offered through the Department of Labor dropped 43% between 1985 and 2004.
Eroding support
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), in his book The Myths of Free Trade, has documented that U.S. investment is increasingly shifting toward authoritarian nations, where independent labor unions are crushed, critical journalists imprisoned or "disappeared," and government policy is focused on attracting foreign investors through holding down wages and offering tax subsidies.

Conventional economists have trumpeted the merits of low-priced imports produced under brutal conditions in places like Mexico and China. But many U.S. citizens have reacted with alarm to the decline of living standards for U.S. workers — wages now make up the lowest share of national income since 1947 — and the highly visible decay of industrial communities. P

opular suspicions of global outsourcing were sharpened first by the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was opposed by 65% of U.S. citizens in 1993. That was just before President Bill Clinton, backed by all but three of the nation's 1,300 daily newspapers, eked out a narrow victory for NAFTA with mostly Republican support. NAFTA granted strong legal protections to corporate investors while offering only token protection of worker rights and the environment. P

redictably, NAFTA produced a 50% increase in the number of factories along the Mexican border, where wages typically run 70 cents to $1 an hour. Indeed, a Carnegie Endowment study found that wages along the Mexican border have actually fallen by about 25% since NAFTA. This is due to an oversupply of workers, combined with the crushing of union-organizing drives as Mexican government policy.

NAFTA has fed corporate America's hunger for low-wage labor without producing the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans. The U.S.-owned "maquiladoras" or factories have generally meant subsistence-level wages, pollution, congestion, squalid living conditions (cardboard shacks and open sewers), and runaway crime.

As Gustavo Elizondo, the mayor of Ciudad Juárez, now crammed with U.S.-owned low-wage plants, has said: "Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth." That's one reason that, contrary to promises made early on, NAFTA has utterly failed to stem the tide of illegal immigration. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; eight million more have crossed the border since then.

In 2005 alone, some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the U.S. while crossing parched deserts. NAFTA, by permitting heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other agribusiness products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven many thousands of Mexican farmers off the land. Some 1.5 million to 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those who cross the border to feed their families.

Meanwhile, NAFTA's service-sector rules have allowed firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-size Mexican businesses have been eliminated. The effects of NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, such as the Permanent Normalization of Trade Relations with China and the Central American Trade Agreement, have fostered majority opposition to "free trade" even among affluent Americans.

Overall, 77% of Americans oppose the offshoring of U.S. jobs, according to a 2006 Pew Research poll. The case against 'entitlements' Standing resolutely against any consideration of "human capital" in trade agreements is an extremely influential group of American pundits, led by columnist Thomas Friedman, author of the best-selling book New York TimesThe World Is Flat. Friedman strongly opposes the notion that the workers of the world possess any economic "entitlements," arguing that prosperity will be generated through governmental deregulation, higher levels of education, and the free flow of technological advances in the hands of unrestricted corporations.

Friedman reserves special venom for "The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor." This is the term he uses for labor and environmental activists who claim to seek higher wages and better conditions for Third World workers, but whose real agenda, he divulges, is actually protecting unionized jobs in the U.S. None of Friedman's anger is directed at the corporations responsible for miserable wages and living conditions.
FLAT WORLD OR MOUNTAINOUS DISPARITIES?
Instead of Friedman's "flat world," we are witnessing Himalayan levels of inequality. Internationally, the gap between the world's richest and poorest one-fifths has increased from 30-1 in 1960 to 78-1. The world's three richest individuals possess more wealth than the combined Gross Domestic Product of the poorest 48 nations. In the U.S., inequality is reaching levels not seen since the 1920s. To cite just one striking measure: the richest 1% — about 300,000 people — earn 16.2% of all income, more than the 150 million who make up the bottom 40%, according to various news reports. Those fortunate few earning over $4.5 million — the richest 1/10 of 1% — earn 6.9% of annual income.

Further, the threat of relocating production has helped leverage vast reductions in corporate taxes at both the state and federal levels. A list of Wisconsin firms earning more than $100 million in 2003 that paid no state income tax includes such well-known names as McDonald's, Merck, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Johnson Controls (the largest Wisconsin-based firm), Kohl's, Snap-on Tools, and the S.C. Johnson family of companies. [See Isthmus, "Are Wisconsin Taxes Too High?" 4/6/07.] Wal-Mart is currently fighting a state effort to boost its minimal taxes.

The shift in Wisconsin's tax structure exemplifies the phenomenon described by author David Korten in When Corporations Ruled the World: "Communities and workers competing against each other to absorb even more of the costs of the world's most powerful and profitable corporations." Much more to come?
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the impact of globalization — a.k.a. outsourcing — on the U.S. economy is the prospect that what we've seen so far is only the beginning. Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a self-described "free trader down to his toes," has estimated that up to 42 million highly technical U.S. jobs — ranging from computer programmers to accountants to economists — are "highly off-shorable" (Wall Street Journal, 3/28/07). Blinder bases his projections on a detailed analysis of 817 job classifications.

He predicts this next wave of job shifts will go far beyond relatively low-skill jobs like those in "call centers" used by insurance and credit-card companies, and reach even people with Ph.Ds. Favored sites will likely be low-wage nations with large numbers of well-educated people, like China, India and countries in Eastern Europe. U.S.-based corporations that relocate professional jobs overseas will thus be able to rely on the public expenditures for higher education made by other nations, even as they fight to lower their taxes in the U.S. and thus undermine higher education here. Blinder calls this offshoring of professional jobs "the big issue for the next generation of Americans." I

n remarks to members of Congress, he warned that "tens of millions of additional American workers will start to experience an element of job insecurity that has heretofore been reserved for manufacturing workers." The immunity enjoyed until now by college-educated professionals could change drastically.

"The cheap and easy flow of information around the globe," writes Blinder, "will require vast and unsettling adjustments in the way Americans and residents of other developed countries work, live, and educate their children." Blinder's warning must be taken seriously, especially in communities like Madison, whose employment base includes huge numbers of workers in insurance, information technology and finance who are potentially vulnerable to being offshored. For example, Promega, regarded as Madison's premier biotech firm with 850 workers worldwide, has opened operations in China.

Meanwhile, CUNA Mutual, the insurance firm, has been shifting jobs out of its unionized Madison office to non-union sites in Waverly, Iowa, and Fort Worth, Texas. But advances in technology may make transplanting jobs to, say, India or Ireland more feasible.
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD VIA UNIVERSAL RIGHTS
Leveling the field Doug Drake, the Milwaukee-based organizing coordinator for United Steel Workers, argues for another possible model of globalization, focused on human needs rather than investor rights.

"The fundamental flaw with the current regime of world trade is that the only interests considered are those of investors and private capital," he says. "Workers, community, health and safety and the environment don't matter. So these trade deals like NAFTA are one-sided structures where investors and banks are the only ones protected.... "No one is saying we should return to a one-nation economy," Drake stresses. "We need a much more comprehensive approach that does more than take into account global stockholders."

One approach along these lines has been used by the European Union to integrate poorer nations. The EU's "social charter" calls for democracy, decent wages, health care and extensive retraining in all nations. Before then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal were admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads, health care, clean water and education. The implementation of democracy, including worker rights, was an equally vital precondition for entry into the EU.

Efforts to improve conditions — schools, hospitals, roads, water supply, etc. — in poorer nations would be a central part of human-centered globalization. So too would be the enforcement of universal standards on labor rights and press freedoms, so workers could organize unions and expose unsafe or unsanitary conditions. The elimination of corporate "incentives" to relocate would be another key step.

Such an approach would level the playing field between transnational corporations and lift up conditions across the globe, rather than ratchet them down by pitting nations against each other

Reprinted from FightingBob.com
A four-step plan for making a plan (for getting out of Iraq). Gooey center
By Carolyn Winter and Roger Bybee

For some time, it should have been crystal-clear that the Bush-Cheney regime was utterly and proudly impervious to record-level disapproval ratings, massive outpourings of democratic public outrage, exposures of flagrant violations of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, and revelations about slavishly serving the interests of huge corporations and campaign contributors.

If progressives seek to exert some power in this situation, we need to consider devoting less attention to further documenting the obvious engorging of the rich at home and the bloody pursuit of empire abroad.
FOCUS ON ENABLERS
Instead, we might try focusing some of our efforts on those who unintentionally "enable" the Bush Administration: the Democratic Congress and the mainstream media. While the Democrats envision themselves as safely positioning the party for a massive triumph in November 2008 they need to consider that they have utterly failed to fight tenaciously to end the occupation of Iraq, preserve civil liberties, and improve the living standards of ordinary Americans.

Rather than setting the stage for a major win in 2008, the Democrats may be succeeding only in deflating, disillusioning and demobilizing those who turned out in huge numbers to repudiate Bush in 2006. Recent congressional approval ratings of 18 percent illustrate the danger of alienating the Democratic base.

The Democrats' enabling behavior has taken many forms, especially when it comes to their acceptance of the assumptions behind the supposedly successful "surge" and the war itself. They go blithely instead of pointing out emphatically that the ongoing U.S. occupation will ignite perpetual resistance and heighten Shiite-Sunni tensions until the U.S. finally withdraws.

Each day provides additional examples of Democratic enabling: accepting the Republican expansion of wiretapping; rejecting a clear denunciation of Armenian genocide in order to ensure smooth Turkish cooperation with the Iraq war; failing to raise taxes on hedge-fund billionaires; and openly leaning to confirm a dubious attorney general nominee. The weak Democratic responses to the administration's ever-more unpopular positions on the war and domestic issues (like the S-CHIP veto) have been paralyzing to progressives bearing witness to the spinelessness. At this point, the Democrats seem utterly obsessed with winning the next election not carrying out the public mandate from the last one.
IS THERE A DEMOCRATIC VISION?
It is difficult for the public to clearly discern any clear Democratic vision for America. As venal and vicious as the Republicans are, they forthrightly stand up for their vision. Progressives urgently need to develop a coherent strategy to impact both the Democrats in Congress and those running for President that their base wants decisive change in both foreign and domestic policy. This means moving them beyond narrow departures from the Republican agenda and obvious electioneering to setting a persuasive progressive agenda.

By this time it is clear that most of us have been far too optimistic about the Democrats' commitment to end the war despite 69 percent public support for that position. Part of the Democrats' timidity can be traced to their preoccupation with the media response to their positions and the resulting implications for winning elections. The media feeds this by accusing them of partisanship every time they challenge the administration.

However, by fixating on polls and the media, Democrats often lose sight of the public's fundamental desire for honesty and commitment in meeting the nation’s most critical needs. With ever increasing intensity, the Democrats have allowed discussion of the apparently endless U.S. occupation of Iraq and domination of its resources to be replaced by a largely-empty debate about details rather than principle.

With regard to Iraq, this has led to a focus on timelines or quibbles about tactics rather than seriously questioning the purpose of our presence in Iraq or the impact of our continuing occupation on the Iraqi people, our own armed forces and the well-being of our nation. On a broader level, the challenge facing progressives is to think of a way to influence Democrats and third parties, where appropriate, to develop an agenda that can attract a broad segment of groups that want change in America.

The following are some steps that should be considered in this effort:
1.) Re-focus public discourse on the genuine reality of the situations at home and abroad rather than responding to the surreal framework of elite debate. For example, we need to respond forcefully to the underlying absurdities of the pro-war position (e.g., Bush's supposed "democracy promotion" and supporting a pro-Iranian government in Iraq while menacing Iran) rather than getting fixated on timelines or tactical issues. We need to rise above the debate du jour, and push Democratic candidates to declare their clear intention to withdraw combat troops and shut down U.S. military bases in Iraq. W

We also need to develop intermediate positions on health care, trade, and other complicated issues that don’t provide all the answers but state the goals (e.g. universal healthcare that excludes a central role for insurance companies). The aim of this program is to consolidate the Democratic base behind compelling, deeply-felt principles that will command a response from now-aloof congressional leaders.
2.) Mobilize all existing progressive groups toward a broad, autonomous movement built around progressive themes rather than a laundry-list of issues. This means genuinely representative leadership of coalition building efforts. If we don’t have broad leadership that includes ethnic, gender, age, and geographic diversity, we will never attract the base from these groups.
3.) Consolidate existing progressive groups around a broad, inclusive set of themes. We need to build toward an expansive, sweeping movement, so that we are not all off on our own particular issues.
4.) Develop a short-term strategy to keep pressure on ending the war and moving the candidates toward serious progressive positions.

How do we effectively confront Hillary's hawkishness (eg.,  swallowing the Bush line on Iran and planning to ceaselessly fight the resistance in Iraq that is incited by the very presence of the U.S. military)? How do we encourage liberals to consider why they would want to continue a manipulative and calculating centrist dynasty?

The Clintons had eight years in the White House and the Bushes have had 12 years. Isn’t there anyone else? Given what we have endured over the past two decades, surely we are owed better than someone who has cynically enabled W's crusades.

Carolyn Winter is a writer and activist who lives in Milwaukee. Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and consultant.

Huffington Post Dec. 11, 2007
Derek Shearer, long-time friend of the Clintons, author of the visionary book Economic Democracy published in 1980, and former US Ambassador to Finland, wrote a column about "Hillary Clinton as An Agent of Change " at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/derek-shearer/hillary-as-an-agent-of-ch_b_76156.html. I respond below.

Mr. Shearer asks if, as president, Hillary Clinton would be an agent of change or a protector of the status quo?"

The correct answer is neither: how about "an active agent of the status quo"? Hillary is certainly no FDR for this era or any other; when the chips are down, she stands firmly with what FDR called "the economic royalists" (eg., a health plan centered on retaining health insurers in command of the health system; support for the NAFTA-style Free Trade Agreement with Peru; support for welfare "reform" in 1996 that repealed part of FDR's Social Security Act.)

Nor will Clinton observe what FDR called his "good Neighbor policy" with other nations. Clinton is far too wedded to the corporations and military leaders who maintain the US empire. She not only voted for the Iraq war, but also voted against Sen. Levin's amendment requiring that all diplomatic means be exhausted before launchng war against Iraq.

Her recent bellicose statements on Iran blew up in her face when the National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran had stopped its atomic-weapons program four years ago. I can appreciate Mr. Shearer's longstanding connection to the Clintons, but he doesn't offer a shred of hope that she is prepared to address the appalling economic polarization in the US or put an end to aggressive preventive wars in consolidating the US empire abroad.

In 1980, Mr. Shearer wrote a book advocating "economic democracy" at home and a humane foreign policy. Hillary Clinton clearly stands for neither.

The Gates of Hell: how Gates and Bush
insist on own version of 'reality' on Iran

By Roger Bybee

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''--unnamed White House aide, quoted in Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," New York Times, Oct. 17, 2004.

"Just when you think you're out, they keep pulling you back in," Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, memorably wails with exasperation in Godfather III.

Exactly. Just when you thought the possibility of a US military strike on Iran was conclusively ruled out last week by the long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate determining that Iran had given up its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and George Bush were already busy trying to create their "own reality" on Iran.

On Saturday, Gates was telling a group of Mideast leaders gathered in Bahrain that the Iranian nuclear threat was still imminent and demanded urgent action. Gates ominously claimed that the Estimate "is explicit that Iran is keeping its options open and could restart its nuclear weapons program at any ---I would add, if it has not done so already," the New York Times reported. (12/9/07).

NIE SEEN AS WARNING BY GATES
n essence, Gates--supposedly a "moderating" force in the bellicose Bush administration--was arguing that the National Intelligence Estimate was actually a warning of an ongoing if not increasing nuclear threat. The solution: the consolidation of Gulf nations into a united military front ready to confront the purported threat posed by Iran. This military alliance, assisted by the US, would include "cooperative air and missile defense, and maritime security awareness."

This ratcheting-up of the arms race in the Middle East, on top of $30 billion in military aid provided earlier this year to Saudi Arabia and Israel, is somehow portrayed by Gates as the surest route to insuring peace. The notion that the Mideast suffers from a dire shortage of military hardware like missiles is, to say the least, a unique interpretation of recent history.

But Gates left no ambiguity about the seriousness of US intentions for the region: "The United States remains committed to defending its vital interests and those of its allies in Iraq and in the wide Middle East."

Gates wrapped up his remarks by defending Israel's development of a vast number of nuclear weapons--without Israel acknowledging their possession or signing on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or monitoring by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. He even asserted that Israel "is not trying to destabilize the government of Lebanon," apparently counting on his audience to have exceedingly short memories that would exclude the bloody and destructive war Israel waged in 2006 that harmed so many Lebanese civilians and so much vital infrastructure, capped by illegally sowing huge swaths of southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the hours before a truce went into effect.

'WORLD WAR III' RHETORIC
President Bush had previously escalated the rhetorical war against Iran with talk about "world War III" in recent weeks, even as the National Intelligence Estimate was circulating through his administration. This week, Bush echoed his Administration's selective "own reality" about Iran on Tuesday, asserting that Iran's perfectly legal development of expertise and technology for nuclear power as an energy source poses a grave and continuing threat to its neighbors, especially Israel, and the US. ''Iran is dangerous, and they'll be even more dangerous if they learn how to enrich uranium,'' Bush said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had responded to the National Intellegence Estimate's release by declaring that the report created the basis for a new dialogue with the US aimed at defusing tensions. Bush responded by insisting that "the ball is in their court" and the ball is in their court'' and White House press secretary Dana Perino contemptuously blew off Ahmadinejad's overture as ''fanciful thinking.''

CUT OUT OF THE FRAME
Moreover, Ahmadinejad's effort to seek an accommodation with the US seemed to get buried in the mainstream US media under the Gates-Bush message of an ever-impending nuclear threat. This failing should be no surprise, given the general character of major media coverage of Iran which has given enormous weight to rarely-challenged (until the NIE's release) White House assertions of the Iranian "threat," coupled with undisguised mockery of Ahmadinejad, whose anti-Semitism, denial of the Jewish Holocaust, and his 2005 statement about "wiping Israel off the map," indeed make him a tempting target but lead the media to vastly inflate his power.

A number of vital facts rarely enter the media's portrayal of US-Iranian relations and permit American citizens to fully understand them.

First, as odious and as seemingly dangerous Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic views are, his powers as president are limited, with foreign policy ultimately determined by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Second, the election of Ahmadinejad resulted in part from US rebukes to olive branches extended by moderate President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani , under whom Iran provided intelligence assistance to the US in 2001 in fighting the Taliban after 9/11. More dramatically, Iran issued a set of comprehensive diplomatic proposals to the US in 2003, seeking normalization of relations with the US in return for "a dramatic set of specific policy concessions Tehran was prepared to make in the framework of an overall bargain on its nuclear program, its policy toward Israel, and al-Qaeda," as Gareth Porter summarized the proposal (American Prospect 5/21/06).

But the US quickly spurned the offer out of hand, and the unfortunate US diplomat who merely conveyed the proposal received a severe rebuke from higher US officials. (Other previous Iranian efforts to aid the US included assistance with the release of hostages in Lebanon and providing arms to Bosnian Muslims.) With the US occupation of Iraq proceeding to kill massive numbers of civilians (now estimated at some 1.2 million) and Iranian efforts to ease relations with the US proving futile, coupled with growing poverty, Rafsanjani was overwhelmingly defeated two years later, handing Ahmadinejad both the presidency and a world stage. In a sense, Ahmadinejad's ascent was in part a product of Bush's policy of menacing Iran.

Third, Iran's earlier attempts at nuclear-weapons development were unmistakably illegal and a peril to the entire world. But unfortunately, the primary lesson taught to other nations by a pattern of US aggression in recent years--particularly under George W. Bush-- has been this: unless you arm yourself with nuclear weapons, any show of independence may be greeted with an invasion and occupation. Thus, Iraq got invaded while the US proceeded more cautiously with North Korea. Israeli military historian Martin van Creeveld observed, "The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build military weapons, they would be crazy."

The US hostility toward Iran remains so intense that when European nations and the US developed a package of incentives to steer Iran off its nuclear course, the US "insisted that all language addressing Iran’s security interests be removed," as Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, former National Security Council staffers, wrote in a New York Times op-ed (12/11/07)

Fourth, while oil-rich Iran's development of nuclear power is now portrayed as persuasive proof that its real intent is to build nuclear weapons, leading hawk Henry Kissinger took a different view when Iran was under the US-implanted dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Kissinger defended Iran's development of nuclear energy during the Shah's reign, arguing that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion into petrochemicals."

While this is an ill-advised energy policy given the dangers of nuclear production (eg., Chernobyl and Three Mile Island) and the long-term problem of storing nuclear wastes, Iran in fact possesses the right to build nuclear-power facilities.

Fifth, the notion that Iran is supplying sophisticated improvised explosive devices to Iraqi insurgents remains unproven, regardless of how many times Gates and others may repeat this claim. A senior US officer, in attempting to document Iran's role, was forced to admit that all the non-explosive materials could be purchased "at any Radio Shack."

Sixth and most importantly, the role of the US CIA and British intelligence in destroying democracy in Iran is vital to understanding Iranians' feelings about the US government, yet is hardly mentioned in stories about Iran. The 1953 coup against democratic leader Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, who dared to seek expropriation of British-owned oil in Iran, cast Iran into 26 years of despotic rule by the Shah, followed by 28 years of domination by Islamic fundamentalists.

But without the media weaving this vital background into its current stories on Iran, the incessant repetition of the Bush Administration's "reality" inevitably colors debate and lures empire-minded Democrats like Hillary Clinton to accept underlying assumptions that are demonstrably false.

The media's ongoing failure to provide background, coupled with cowardice by leading Democrats, gives the needed space for Bush, Cheney, Gates and Co. to serve as "history's actors" and "create new realities" in Iran and elsewhere.

The Bush Administration has repeatedly proven itself not only impervious to, but utterly dis-interested in hard evidence like the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The Bush Administration now sees itself as bolstered by the illusory success with the "surge" in Iraq, although only 38% of Americans believe it has improved conditions, according to a CBS/New York Times poll conducted Dec. 5-9.

But based upon the continuing ferocity of post-NIE statements by Bush and Gates, don't be too surprised by a "faith-based" US strike against Iran before George W. Bush leaves office.