Dec '00 / Jan 2001
A
Gift Given, A Gift Received: Water
to Iraq
By Edilith Eckart
Election Analysis Progressive
Directions?
By Bill Thomson
Modernizing Our Electoral Rules
&
Practices
By Rob Richie
Democracy 101
By Blair Bobier
Clean Money: Campaign Finance
Reform
By John Moyers
Book Review: The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth
Anderson Reviewed by
Peter Montague
Remembrance: Robert Theobald
By Bob Stilger
Transforming Our Dreaming
By Josˇ Stevens
Democracy and the Airwaves
By Suzi Aufderheide
StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins
The US Is Warned "Wake Up
To Global Warming Threat"
By Environmental News Service
U.S. Position Threatens to
Derail Climate Change Negotiations
By Cat Lazaroff
Martin Luther King, Jr: Global and
Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Sexual Union, Inside and Out
By Peter Moore
A Pagan Speak to Jesus
By John Darling
Cosmic Calendar
By Salina Rain
(continued)
Election Analysis: Progressive Directions?
By Bill Thomson
How to pay for this? That's easy-significantly reduce the military budget. Let me give you just five facts:
- The US is
responsible for 36% of the world's military expenditures, more that the
next 12 countries combined. (www.cdi.org/issues/wme/)
- The US military
budget is 22 times that of the 7 "rogue states" (Cuba, Iran, Iraq,
Libya, N. Korea, Sudan, Syria).
- The combined
military budgets of the 9 potential enemies of the US (rogue states + China
and Russia) are 35% of the US military budget. Many would consider this
as it should be, since there is an impression that the military establishment
is financed out of a bottomless pit of money, but consider ·
- For the cost
of a Stealth bomber (about 1 billion), we could put an additional teacher/social
worker into each middle and high school in the country.
- In Ann Arbor, Michigan, the residents and businesses through income tax payments contribute over $380,000,000 annually to the cost of present and past military-related activities (over $3500 per capita), an amount 25% greater than the annual city and school budgets combined. There are priorities at work here, and I would submit, a powerful political argument to be made. It cannot be the case that Ann Arbor is unique in this respect. This argument must be made, and made at the local level!
Finally, let
me emphasize the importance of work and effort. If the Greens want to have
an impact, they are going to have to put in the time. They are going to need
to be supported financially and otherwise by an army of volunteers. By the
way-a fund raising idea: If each of the 2,703,717 Green voters sent a check
to the Green party (Box 18452, Washington, DC 20036) for $1.85, the party
would reach the magic $5 million in funding. You could also, of course, donate
$3.70 and be twice as helpful, $18.50 and be 10 times as supportive, etc.
Your time is also crucial-if you're unwilling to spend at least 1 hour a week
to put progressive ideas into action (e.g., letters to the editor, food drives,
organizational meetings, etc.), it won't occur in our lifetime. With effort,
anything can happen.
This year the Greens fielded 238 candidates for office. Given that there are
52,770 local governments (county/3,043, municipal/19,372, township/16,629,
school district/13,726), containing some 400,000 seats, clearly the Greens
have a ways to go to achieve recognition. However, if only 1 in 6 Nader voters
ran for office, every seat in the country would be contested. The math is
simple-it only requires effort. I would further suggest that successful political
movements never build from the top (President, House, Senate) down, but rather
from the bottom up. As former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill said, "All
politics is local." The key to a progressive future lies in the number
of school board and council seats they are able to contest/capture. Ralph
Nader and the Greens have made an enormous impact and have set a clear agenda
and direction-now it is up to the rest of us.
Bill Thomson is a clinical psychologist and a faculty member at the University
of Michigan/Dearborn.
*******************
IMAGINE
-Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).
-Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
-Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
-Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
-Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
-Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
-Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
-Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
-Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.
-Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.
None of us would
deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared
winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page
thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre-or anti-democracy peoples
in some strange elsewhere.
From one of the myriads of forwarded emails circulating after November's election
(source unknown).
