NORTH
COAST
OCTEMBER 2003
EAGLE
7n a dark time the eye begins to see '
50CENTS
VOL25NO3
-THEODORE ROETHKE
WHOSE
DEMOCRACY
IS IT?
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
“The terrible truth emerged that religion, art, scholarship and
politics only disguised conflicts worse than those of animals. "
-PETER VANISTTART
“Democracy might simply be a labyrinth of apparent choice
leading to a dead end."
-JOHN BURDETT
DALE F L 0 W E R S (SEE PAGE 10)
Very few of humanity's billions will ever be remembered
for very long or be recorded for more than village histories, and
the names who momentarily preoccupy our age will as surely
vanish. Of our rapidly fluid era perhaps only Hitler or Gandhi
might remain for the future, perhaps as icons of its darkness
and light.
Only recently have women’s claims to history been
taken seriously and in Western society it is still difficult to
entertain any other than a Caucasian cosmology. The epic
human struggle is usually portrayed as East against West; of
Yellow Peril against White is Right; of Crescent against Cross;
and for half a century of Communism against BankAmeriCard.
The only real significance of the eternal conflicts is the epic flow
of blood, the slaughter of millions at each turn of history's pages
for reasons as brief as their lives. The names of the multitudes
are lost, only their numbers are marked, aggregates of immense
folly and depravity.
History's dark glare shines now upon a struggle for
worldly empire by a single superpower that claims an inherent
right to dominate the planet because it has right on its side. The
current President who piously proclaims other nations, religions
and peoples as evil sees no evil in his own dominion or among
his friends, sermonizing about freedom and human rights to the
exasperation of most of the world.
The Bush administration has in fact been among the
most culturally and politically repressive in the short history of
the American republic. A few white men of wealth have made
an intolerable grab for power and ordination of a country club
apartheid that has severely eroded much of the basic fiber of
democracy. They have looted the public treasury of billions
while increasing poverty, joblessness as well as legal and
political savagery, and their shortsighted avarice has burdened
generations with a crippling debt that will further limit options
and freedoms for millions of yet unborn citizens.
In the meantime the Russian people who were long our
opponents for world supremacy are slowly emerging from under
a long history of oppression toward political freedoms torturously
struggled for in the West for centuries At the very moment the
Russian people start to throw off the heavy yoke of their history
the Western democracies seem in contrast to fritter away their
hardwon freedoms, perhaps because our liberty has so long
been taken for granted that we are unaware of what life is
without it and therefore cannot imagine we could ever lose it,
especially by our own indifference and indolence. Yet within
our society are groups and individuals (and arguably an entire
gender) who have seldom been accorded the freedoms or
opportunities the President boasts about We don't have to look
at Russia to witness oppression nor should we hold the Russian
people in contempt for seeming to wait so long before tasting
the first wines of freedom. Perhaps as they struggle through the
long process toward freedom we will at some point meet them
halfway in our unfortunate trajectory of democratic decline
The current political climate in the United States is one
of incendiary reversion, which is reflected by political parties that
attempt to placate extreme rightwing ideologues who manipulate
the democratic process to ultimately destroy it. The party in
power apes the reactionary agenda so far as to echo its clarion
call for a religious war upon anyone or anything that is different
or opposes a grim and vengeful vision of apocalyptic govern
ance that excludes diversity, intelligence and imagination, and
which blames the nation’s problems on such interesting and
rather progressive people as feminists, gays and lesbians,
blacks, Hispanics and recently arrived third world immigrants —
in particular Muslims — who hope for the future rather than cling
to noxious images of the past.
The proto-fascists (or “neo-cons") who are determined
to wrest power in the United States vent with words (though
violent and extra-legal exceptions are common) and utilize old
leftist/liberal tactics of popular initiatives to promote laws that
deny anyone disagreeable or threatening to them any rights as
citizens, and though common sense briefly prevails over their
vindictive ambitions, they will not quit in their attempts to sub-
vet the remains of our wracked democracy. They intend that
those who have never enjoyed the fruits of democracy shall
never reach its tree, and though it might be argued that these
reactionary ideas are built on fear, the fear they inculcate should
not be dismissed. Terror begets terror.
The United States is perilously close to losing its most
basic fundamental, one which underlies and sustains free
thought and open debate, the public agreement to disagree.
We are losing our civility, replacing it with intolerance,
hysteria and threatened fratricide. It seems that we are more
fractious and divisive than since the beginning of the first
American Civil War. Our argument is still the same; race and
gender, framed now in terms of wealth. Rich against poor, white
male CEOs versus ghetto blacks, working men and women and
single mothers.
CORPORATOCRACY
When corporations in large measure control our
political agenda, and indeed the political process, true
democracy and life affirming issues will rank low on the
national priority list.
A corporate dominated landscape will produce
inequality, injustice, corruption, abuse of the body politic,
abuse of our environment, exploitation of resources and
degradation of life support systems.
An informed observer need not look far to notice
the above claims to be true Reining in corporate influence
upon governance is a daunting, if not impossible task
Creating a true and living democracy is probably an even
larger task If it can be done at all, it will come from public
activism
-RICHARD JOHNSON
Richard Johnson lives in Astona
The real issue is the disparity of wealth, which compli
cates and corrupts every other issue. The religious rightwing
is determined to begin a second civil war, but their obsessive
conservatism is fueled by the wealthy who support from the
shadows every attack against libertarian leftist ideas and
persons.
It is the wealthy, whose affluence is to a large degree
based on public money paid by the poor and middle class they
incessantly impoverish, who are the real revolutionaries because
they are the source of the dissolution of the society that indulges
their insatiable and arrogant avarice.
Politicians who are supposed to be representatives of
the people are just political real estate, for rent or lease, The
plutocrats getting richer on the upward flow of money due to
continual tax breaks and government contracts divert the world's
wealth to offshore bank accounts and like old Romans exploit
the New World Order that rises on the ruins of Soviet commun
ism. They are the world’s real rulers now. They have divided
nations into corporate colonies, buying and selling public
governments for private capital like Wall Street stocks. Their
megacorporations act toward each other as irresponsibly
aggressive and avariciously jealous as nations used to do.
During the Cold War with Russia capitalism was
espoused as indistinguishable from democracy but since the
collapse of communism the ancient antipathy of class has
accelerated until the only real political parties in the country
are the Rich Party and the Poor Party: the New World Order
the nation's plutocrats are currently designing in the name of
democracy is a direct schism between the affluent and the
impoverished domestically and globally
So whose democracy is it?
A week long national radio forum of public stations will
attempt to answer that question in November. A collaboration
between NPR, PRI, Pacifica and local independent stations
such as Astoria’s KMUN-FM and Portland’s KBOO, a variety
of programs will be devoted November 3-6 to addressing this
essential and fundamental liberty vs vassalage quarrel.
Bernard Sanders, Vermont’s lone member of the U.S.
House of Representatives, an independent and a socialist, has
an answer. “If democracy is going to survive in this country, tens
of millions of poor and working people are going to have to see
the connection between their economic condition and the politi
cal process,” he writes “They must vote not for the lesser of two
evils, but for jobs, income, health care and the dignity to which
they, as human beings, are entitled Only when that occurs will
American democracy become revitalized."
The Poor Party must be organized to reenfranchise the
millions who generally are left out of the democratic process
Just getting them to vote would be a real revolution.
In other words, the only way to save democracy is with
more democracy, and by keeping a balance between conflicting
factions to allow none of them to attain such power as to be
capable of suppressing or persecuting the rest.
Stay tuned
For more information about "Whose Democracy Is it7"
call KMUN at 325-0010 or drop by the station at 1445 Exchange
Street. Astona