Dissent and the American mainstream

WhatsonUK, September 2004

For many years it seemed all but invisible. For a few months after 9/11 you’d be forgiven for thinking it had been utterly extinguished. But the other America, the dissident America, was always alive and over the last two years it’s been kicking with increasing force and rising impatience.

On 15th February 2003, 500,000 Americans gathered in New York City to join millions around the world opposing a war against Iraq. Bush and Blair ignored them. Today the war in Iraq continues, the lies are exposed, the casualties mount, the brutality seems endless. The United States is reviled by the rest of the human race as never before in its history. And George W Bush is more loathed by the citizens of the planet than any other US president, and quite possibly any other US citizen, ever.

In the US itself, Bush has polarised the population. US families are paying a blood price for his policies, and doubts about his motives for invading Iraq have spread to every sector of society. These doubts have been informed and echoed by Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 – whose $100 million plus takings at the box office make it by far the most commercially successful documentary in the industry’s history. In an election year, with the contest too close to call, it may also prove to be the most politically influential. A Gallup survey conducted in mid-July showed 8 percent of American adults had already seen the film; another 18 percent planned to see it at a theater and another 30 percent on DVD/video.

Significantly, nearly a third of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of independents told Gallup they either had seen or expected to see the film at theaters or on DVD/video. So Farenheit 9/11 is not merely preaching to the converted. The US corporate media keeps Americans in the dark about their country and its role in the world but that doesn’t make them blind to the truth. Increasing numbers have been seeking out alternative sources of information, as testified not only by the success of the Moore film but also by sales of anti-Bush, anti-war and anti-corporate books and traffic on dissident websites.

Farenheit 9/11 is only the most spectacular manifestation of a new wave of cultural activism. REM, Pearl Jam, Tom Waits, Sean P. Diddy Coombs, Steve Earle, the Dave Matthews Band, the Dixie Chicks are all working to unseat Bush. If Bruce Springsteen’s mooted autumn tour through the electoral swing states materialises, it might well finish off the president.

But the media stars only carry clout because they’re echoing a burgeoning current of opinion. The venerable American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has seen its membership rise from 250,000 to 400,000 since 2001. Trade unions, largely silent during the Vietnam war, have been sharply critical of Bush’s foreign policy. In July, the California Federation of Labor, representing more than two million members, voted overwhelmingly to “demand an immediate end to the US occupation of Iraq”. In June both the 1.4 million member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) called for an end to the occupation. Anti-war and human rights groups are active in small towns as well as big cities. It’s a diverse, decentralised, frequently divided movement – but it’s growing and it spells trouble for Bush.

Sometimes the criticism of Bush is that he is either “dumb” or “dumber”. But the man is as smart as he needs to be. Smart enough to serve unswervingly the interests of those who got him elected. Smart enough to seize 9/11 and use it to implement an agenda nursed for years by sections of the US elite. For the neo-Cons the grief and confusion in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers was the opportunity of a political lifetime, the chance to unleash an aggressive military strategy abroad while plundering the people at home. The Democrats went along for the ride. The ensuing war on terror has inflicted death and destruction on people in Afghanistan and Iraq and has had deadly repercussions from Palestine to Colombia to the Philippines. Inevitably it’s led to the crimes against humanity committed at Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and Guantanamo – crimes for which Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, bears prime responsibility.

The peoples of the world have ample reason to yearn for his removal from office, but so do the majority of Americans. Bush has mounted the fiercest attack on civil liberties since the McCarthy era of the early fifties – the PATRIOT act handed unprecedented powers to government agents to invade privacy and harass dissenters. He’s encouraged the religious right’s crusade against reproductive rights and cultural freedom, assaulted affirmative action and unscrupulously pandered to white racism. He’s opened 58 million acres of public land to road building, logging and drilling, downgraded hundreds of environmental regulations and spurred global warming.

All presidents have served the rich, but in the modern era none has done so as shamelessly as Bush. His tax cuts for the richest 1 percent will cost about as much this year as the combined budgets for Veterans Affairs, Energy, Environmental Protection and Homeland Security. In 2004, the 250,000 households with incomes above $1 million will benefit by an average $123,600 (three times the median household income) – a combined tax break greater than the total given to the 85 million taxpayers who make up the bottom 60 percent of the population.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Tax cuts for the rich plus increased military spending equals cutbacks in public services – education, health care, child care, retirement pensions – and the biggest budget deficit in the country’s history.

The recklessness both at home and abroad scares people and it’s not surprising that ‘Anybody But Bush’ has become a popular and heartfelt battle-cry.

But what kind of alternative is Democratic nominee John Kerry?

Kerry and his running mate Edwards both voted to authorise Bush’s attack on Iraq. Both voted for the PATRIOT Act. Both voted for Bush’s record breaking increases in military spending. Both back Israel’s ‘separation wall’. Like Bush and Cheney, both are millionaires.

Kerry is an avowed believer in “muscular internationalism” – i.e. the use of US military force overseas. He has made it plain he has no intention of withdrawing US troops from Iraq and is prepared to send more. His campaign has been cautious in the extreme – avoiding hard positions on specific issues – and he may yet suffer from that.

There are real differences between Kerry and Bush, notably on abortion and tax cuts, but both are the creations of America’s two-party system and a democracy profoundly undermined by the rule of money. In 2000 Bush raised and spent a record $110 million on his campaign. This year he’s set to double that figure – and one third of that sum come from big business donors. Kerry is not far behind at $180 million – one quarter of which comes from big business donors.

These sums do not include other forms of corporate campaign sponsorship, such as the $100 million raised by the host committees for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Top donors to both Democratic and Republican convention committees included giant financial, pharmaceutical, telecom, defense and tobacco firms. In fact, twenty-one companies were major givers to both parties’ convention committees. What do they expect from their investment? Well, the pharmaceutical industry recently saw the $108 million they’d invested in Washington politicians since 1989 pay back a $139 billion dividend when Congress and Bush approved a new private-sector led drug program for the elderly.

Despite Kerry’s muffled approach, Iraq remains the central issue in the election, the one by which Bush will stand or fall. Here the decisive actors may well turn out to be the insurgents in places like Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and Baghdad’s Sadr City. But a key role has already been played by Americans outside the mainstream, people as famous as Michael Moore or as unknown as the kids who walked out of school when the bombing started. They’re the latest incarnation of a long-standing American tradition. In 1845, when the US invaded and seized a vast chunk of Mexico, writer Henry Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax in protest and spent a night in jail. “When a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law,” he said, “I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionise. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”