RAT FWD: Commentary from the Guardian

[Laura Winton <fluffysingler@prodigy.net>]

A forward from a friend.

------Original Message------
From: Mary Jo Maroney <maroneym@hpmidwest.org>
To: "'fluffysingler@prodigy.net'" <fluffysingler@prodigy.net>
Sent: August 23, 2000 12:40:44 PM GMT
Subject: Commentary from the Guardian (British paper)


Laura,

I am going to post this to our Greens listserv and just wait
for the negative comments to come in. We recently had a debate about what
should appear on the platform and the biggest bone of contention was the
idea of a maximum wage (ten times that of the minimum wage.)  While this
essay does not address a maximum wage it does address economic inequality in
the US. Many people felt that to impose a maximum wage would cause people to
be less innovative and one person suggested it was demagoguery. I am
becoming less and less enchanted with the electoral process if it means
dumbing down the ideals of the organization just to attract more people.

MJ

>From the guardian unlimited website
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,357499,00.html


The lesson from America is that Europe is our only hope

The United States has become insufferable as it has grown
all-powerful
Polly Toynbee
Wednesday August 23, 2000

The land of the free now wields an absolute power, free of
responsibility, such as the world has never known. The rest of the globe
watches its elections with renewed anguish as powerless spectators and
demi-subjects. The two conventions displayed all that is most repugnant and
alien in a political system corrupted beyond recognition in the democratic
world.

The $100m campaigns lift off in an obscene haze of sanctimonious, lachrymose
religiosity, oozing family unction and lies. With 77 days to go and
contenders neck and neck in the polls, George W Bush says that Jesus is his
guiding influence, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman share a prayer with reporters
and both campaigns promise instant gratification and no sacrifice for
anything or anyone ever. Dishonest fantasy politics turn
America into an out-of-control, self-absorbed, infantilised monster.

The richer, stronger and more globally unaccountable America
becomes, the more self-centred its politics grows. The end of the cold war
should have brought great psychological dividends. Generous in global
victory, free of paranoia and with wealth beyond imagining, here at last was
its chance to become what it has always believed itself to be - the brave,
the beautiful, the free and so on.

The high-flown rhetoric of the conventions is echoed in
every high school valedictory speech, in every rotary and church, pledging
allegiance to a constitution that has lost any vision of society beyond the
pursuit of happiness. God's chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a
self-image almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old
Soviet Union. The most advanced, knowledgeable, educated, psychoanalysed,
therapised nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to
the world around it.

This is the indictment:

* Global warming: both poles are now melting and the process
can never be stopped or reversed without America. The US federal government
report on climate change itself predicted a 5-10C heat increase this
century, with attendant fires, droughts and floods. A quarter of the world's
population consumes 80% of its energy, most in the US. At Kyoto the US
agreed to a very modest 7% cut in emissions by 2010. Congress refused to
ratify it and since then America's emissions have increased by over 20%.
The Republicans deny the cause of global warming, Democrats
say nothing of cuts. As a result other countries are now sliding out of
Kyoto promises, finding loopholes. Why should politicians in France or
Germany take huge political pain in demanding cuts from their voters when
the monster across the Atlantic goes on guzzling? With global power should
come global responsibility to lead, but it doesn't.

* Defence: Congress's refusal to sign the comprehensive test
ban treaty last October virtually urges others to acquire their own weapons.
The Bush camp talks of tearing up the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty. 
Both parties are committed to the insane national missile defence system,
putting the US under an umbrella protecting it from imaginary threats by
"rogue" states that might lob a missile across, presumably unafraid of
retaliation. It will end the old mutually assured destruction policy by
which the world survived the cold war. Costing $60bn, it works even less
well than the smart bombs of recent wars but still arouses fear and anger in
China and Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski calls it the mentality of the
"internationally gated community".

Such isolationism will make the US role as a good global
police force less likely: already political cowardice at losing any US
soldier's life damaged its moral credibility in a genuinely
unself-interested intervention in Kosovo.

* The third world: the US promised $600m towards the relief
of third-world debt, with 25 countries partly aided by the end of this year.

Not a penny has been paid because Congress refused. The rhetoric was good -a
recent US poll showed half the population thought the problem already solved
- but even Uganda, the exemplary "good" poor country, has still received
nothing.


Following US parsimony, the EU and Japan have been dragging
their heels too. If the world's richest country, whose GNP has risen by a
third in five years, hasn't paid, why should anyone else? Then there are the
world trade negotiations, wrecked instead of saved by US political
selfishness.

* Poverty: a nation that does next to nothing about its own
poor is unlikely to offer much to other countries. While US stock market
values have increased five-fold in a decade, with half of all shares owned
by 1% of the people, welfare has been cut to a five-year lifetime limit.

With 40% of the people not covered by medical insurance, Medicare for the
elderly is being cut by $115bn - and the Republicans promise far worse to
come.

Virtually all the income gains of the last five years have
been enjoyed by the top 20% of the population. The real value of the minimum
wage is still below what it was in John F Kennedy's day, income distribution
as unequal as in the 1920s. (Bill Gates' wealth is equal to that of the
entire bottom 40% of the nation). The poor go to jail in a country that
imprisons more than any dictatorship - 5% of adult males are under
"correction". Some 3,500 people await execution on death row; 580 have been
executed since the Supreme Court lifted its ban.

This is not the portrait of a civilised modern state. We are
deceived by history. We are deceived by the myriad rainbow wonders of
America, this mighty engine of invention and imagination, of creativity and
enthusiasm from sea to shining sea. Europeans visit New York, San Francisco
or Cape Cod, read the great American novelists and intellectuals, revel in
America's popular culture, films and art and admire the super-sophistication
of its academic discourse.

It's rather like visiting St Petersburg before the
revolution, wondering at the brilliance of Tolstoy, Pushkin,
Chekhov,Dostoevsky or maybe Fabergé, while trying to disregard the Tsar. The
US constitution is kept on a mighty altar and lowered into a bomb-proof
shelter at night as if it were indeed the guarantor of freedom: all it
proves is that constitutions, freedoms of speech or information are only a
small part of a good society. (The Soviet constitution was a pretty good
document too.)

In elections there is always a better and worse. Bush is
terrifying - in hock to oil and arms, promising a $1.3 trillion tax cut to
the exclusive benefit of the top few. Gore is better. But whoever wins,
America's dismal failure to address the key questions with any realism must
strengthen European resolution on future unity. The life, views, values,
ideas and politics of any town or village anywhere in the EU feels much more
like home than any small town in middle America these days. The more we look
at alien America, the more European we feel and the stronger we need to
become.

"Those poor kids.  So young.  So nauseous."
--Krusty the Klown Telethon for Motion Sickness


Laura Winton
fluffysingler@prodigy.net
http://pages.prodigy.net/fluffysingler