Haiku Politics

A story in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle reports that the California State Assembly unanimously voted for a bill that gave AT&T exactly what it wanted in the way of a telephone and cable deregulation bill. Not a single Democrat voted against this bill.

As the article points out:

How did the phone companies get such royal treatment from legislators? Was it simply that, as Ken McNeely, president of AT&T California, said after the vote, "It's hard to be against competition and choice for consumers." Hardly. As usual, it was about money.

AT&T's wooing of the bill's sponsor, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, included hosting a Pebble Beach golf fundraiser for Núñez's Assembly Democrats, raising $1.7 million for their re-election. Perhaps not coincidentally, Núñez threw out the opening pitch at the Giants' AT&T Park on Monday.

This is, by the way, the same AT&T that now claims that its customers have no right to privacy involving their personal data.

Here we have once again an example cozy relationship between the Democratic Party and its corporate sponsors.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments

According to this Reuters article,

Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005, the second-highest level in the 40 years for which there is data, a nonprofit think-tank said on Wednesday.

In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

The typical worker's compensation averaged just under $42,000 for the year, while the average CEO brought home almost $11 million, EPI said.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments

David Lazarus explains why AT&T customers can expect no right to privacy.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here is a quote from an article that appeared on the San Francisco Bay Guardian's web site:

If you wonder why things never change in Washington, look no further than a report released yesterday by Russ Baker's Real News Project (www.realnews.org).

The report documents 25 corporate Democrats -- corporate consultants with strong ties to the Democratic Party leadership inside the beltway.

"Although establishment Democrats are, by and large, still more skeptical of the corporate agenda than Republicans, they have become strikingly less so," Baker writes. "This has led to the creation of a kind of permanent corporate governance structure that is truly bipartisan. Many of the firms employing Democratic operatives have them working side-by-side with Republicans -- often the same Republicans they go up against in political campaigns. In some cases, a so-called conservative Republican and a so-called liberal Democrat are full partners in the same firm."

I would take issue with the statement that establishment Democrats are "more skeptical of the corporate agenda than Republicans"--I see no evidence of that, and in fact the evidence shows that establishment Democrats are just as much in bed with big business as the Republicans are--but otherwise this article does show that even some of the publications that regularly shill for the Democrats (as the Guardian often does) are starting to show concern about the close relationship between Democrats and corporate interests.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments

The Senate rejected by a vote of 93-6 a call for withdrawing US troops by the end of the year.

In reality, the troops should be withdrawn sooner than that--immediately, in my view; but the Democrats managed to overwhelmingly cast their votes with the Republicans. The AP article reports that "Democrats decried the debate as a sham. They said Republicans promised an open discussion but, instead, stacked the deck in their own favor by limiting debate to 10 hours and barring any amendments." Nevertheless, what kind of amendments would the Democrats offer? In fact, the article points out,

In both the House and Senate, Democrats appear to be divided into three camps. Some want troops to leave Iraq this year. Others object to setting any kind of timetable. A number of them want the United States to start redeploying forces by year's end but don't want to set a date when all troops should be out.

The Democrats don't know what they stand for with respect to the war. Yet, among all those diverse opinions, notice that none of them said anything about an immediate withdrawal from Iraq; the best we can hope from them is a continuation of the occupation and war for another six months.

Contrast that with what third party left wing candidacies are advocating. For example, Todd Chretien, the Green Party candidate running against Diane Feinstein for the US Senate in California, has this to say on his web site: "If elected, my first act will be to introduce a Senate bill to bring all the troops home immediately". (Emphasis added.) Note his use of the word "immediately". Marsha Feinland is running against Feinstein on the Peace & Freedom party ticket; her party's website has this to say: "The Peace and Freedom Party calls for an immediate end to the military occupation of Iraq, the withdrawal and return of all U.S. troops, and the immediate release of all prisoners of war and detained civilians." (Emphasis added.) Note again the use of the word "immediate".

The lesson is clear: if leftists want to vote for peace in Iraq, they should not cast their vote for the Democrats.

Posted by The Haikuist at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a front page story today with the headline, "Gays want more from Dems on marriage: Proposed same-sex bans seen as test".

The article reports that Democrats have responded to the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages by offering technical, legalistic arguments about the Federal government leaving the issue of marriage to the states, instead of opposing the amendment on a principled basis as an infringement of human rights.

For example, the Chronicle reports:

[D]uring last week's debate, most Democratic senators argued only that Congress should be confronting more important issues like the economy and the Iraq war; they did not specifically address same-sex marriage. When asked later for Sen. Dianne Feinstein's position on same-sex marriage, a spokesman said Feinstein's speech was her only statement on the topic.

"Her only statement on the topic"--in other words, she was ducking the question. This is typical of the Democratic Party, and it has been their strategy at least going back to the 2004 election, when the party platform opposed a constitutional amendment on the strictly legalistic grounds that this would be an intrusion on the prerogrative of states to regulate marriages. It has been the party strategy to avoid taking a principled stand on this issue by opposing the amendment so as to satisfy gay activists and liberals, without at the same time coming out strongly for gay rights and thus alienating right wing Christian voters. Of course, by doing this, they managed to satisfy no one.

Gay Activists who hold high hopes for the Democratic Party should have learned their lesson from the 2004 Democratic Party platform. Nothing has changed, and the Democratic Party refuses to take an unequivocable stand for human rights.

Posted by The Haikuist at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here's a lovely little news item:

Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday.

Posted by The Haikuist at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

The decision by the U.S. Treasury a few weeks ago to end the long distance telephone tax signals the end of an era for war tax protestors. I never personally participated war tax resistance. In a way I have always felt that the military budget is paid for out of the general fund anyway, so it isn't like you are really keeping any money from the Pentagon when you don't pay a part of your tax bill, or that you have a choice in where your tax money gets spent. The budget is not a cafeteria, after all. That being said, I sympathize in principle with those who have engaged in war tax resistance, not the least because it holds value as a symbolic gesture and as an act of civil disobedience. Years ago, during the Reagan era, I went to a seminar on the subject of war tax resistance, to learn more about the subject. I learned at the time that the telephone tax was singled out as a target of war tax resistance because it was instituted during the Spanish-American war as a means of financing it, and since that time has served as a convenient and simple way of expressing opposition to war. Thus many protestors withheld the federal tax from their monthly telephone bill payments.

This site provides a history of war tax resistance, and it includes the following bit of information:

A suggestion in 1966 to form a mass movement around the refusal to pay the (at that time) 10 percent telephone tax was given an initial boost by Chicago tax resister Karl Meyer. This was followed by War Resisters League developing a national campaign in the late 1960s to encourage refusal to pay the telephone tax.

Forty years later, the US is fighting yet a new imperialist war overseas. David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year that, this method of protest had once again become popular among some protestors against the Iraq war.

Now this method of protest is no longer available, but it obviously has no effect on US foreign policy; the US government still has plenty of other means at its disposal for funding its military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere. Life goes on, and war goes on as well.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments

At the New York Democratic Party convention, Hillary Clinton won the endorsement of her party faithful for relection to the US Senate. While this should come as no surprise, the details surrounding this non-event serve as an interesting object lesson in the futility of any effort by the left in trying to reform the Democratic Party.

According to the Newsday article on this subject,

Backstage, Clinton's aides and consultants frantically beat back anti-war candidate Jonathan Tasini's attempt to get the 10 delegate signatures needed to place his name on the ballot. A Tasini victory would have forced an embarrassing three-hour roll call vote and tarnished a day that was intended to be a seamless coronation for Clinton.

Tasini eventually dropped his bid after delegates including Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., introduced a resolution denouncing the "error of going to war illegally."

Clinton, whose October 2002 support of the Bush administration's war resolution has prompted a backlash among anti-war groups, had no comment on the resolution, which passed in a voice vote after most delegates had already left.

This passage illustrates the fact that we all know about Democratic Party conventions--they are stage managed events, essentially coronations rather than real conventions. How horrible--the thought of actually having a roll call vote at a convention! We can't have that, now can we? The Quixotic attempt by Tasini to challenge Clinton over the war from within the Democratic Party was an obviously doomed effort. While the Iraq War continues to be the single most pressing issue in national politics, the Democratic establishment simply treats the issue as unimportant--just as it did in the 2004 election, when its platform essentially said that you can take any position you want to on the war.

The article also notes:

Apart from condemning the invasion, the resolution echoed Clinton's recent statements on Iraq, calling for the safe withdrawal of U.S. troops once the country is stabilized.

This is also the typical Democratic Party position on the Iraq War--rather than calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the party squirms its way into a meaningless call for a withdrawal at some future, unspecified date--"once the country is stabilized", which obviously won't be for a very long time, given that the presence of US troops is actually destabilizing it. But Tasini was willing to accept the worthless bone that they threw him, a resolution criticizing the decision of having gone to war, which might be useful for historical discussion but which doesn't solve the problem of what to do about the troops right now. Tasini's efforts at issuing a challenge within the Democratic Party have proved to be a wasted effort, and by accepting that compromise he merely played right into the hands of the political machine that governs the party.

While a third party challenge from the Left is obviously unlikely to have any success against Clinton in the November election, at least such a challenge will not be tainted by participation in a stage managed coronation that is corrupt and undemocratic. Rather than participate in such a process, it is better to challenge it from without and work towards building a new movement that rejects out of hand the coronation of warmongers.

Posted by The Haikuist at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments

"I'd rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith. We don't want those kinds of fans."

-- Martie Maguire of the Dixie Chicks

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments