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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2003
Editorial
Bush declares state of war as the state of the union
The massive protests that marked the Martin Luther King
Jr. holiday weekend provided an undeniable picture of the forces contending for
the minds of humanity against the drive for war that has consumed George Bush
ever since he announced his intentions to wage permanent war in his "axis
of evil" State of the Union message a year ago. What is unprecedented is that the rapidly growing and
diverse anti-war movement is taking place BEFORE Bush has dropped the first
bomb. This movement will have to face its own contradictions to see where we
will go from here. At the same time, this critical moment demands that we look
at three other battlefields, in particular, where the forces for freedom are
contending for our minds and reveal the true state of the union in 2003. VICTORY FOR PRISONERS Nothing more dramatically reveals the depth of the
uprooting needed to achieve a new human world today than the storm released by
the historic act George Ryan performed in his last days as governor of Illinois
when he commuted the sentences of 164 men and 3 women on Death Row. The
day before he had granted full pardons to four other men, who thereby joined 13
others who had been found innocent of the crimes they were charged with. Among those 13 was Anthony Porter who was only 48 hours
before he was to be executed, thanks to evidence discovered by journalism
students at Northwestern University. While it is important to see that Gov.
Ryan's act did not come out of the blue but out of the hard and persistent
efforts of a growing prisoner support movement nationwide, it is equally
important to make sure that it opens wide a national debate on the entire
criminal injustice system. None are more determined to see that this takes place
than those who have been freed. As one of the four, Madison Hobley, put it at a
meeting to celebrate their freedom, "Now I'm on a mission." REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ROLLED BACK The mission George Bush has been carrying out is the
very opposite: fighting against the most basic of our freedoms. As we mark the
30th anniversary of the momentous Supreme Court ruling that established a
woman's right to make her own decisions about bearing a child, we can see that
Bush's mission from the beginning of his presidency, in tandem with the
Christian Coalition, has been to scuttle that right. He has pursued his goal through two years of
anti-choice, anti-woman executive orders and legal briefs that have made
increasingly inaccessible not only obtaining an abortion but even information
about contraceptives, including "disappearing" such information from
federal government websites. We saw the extremes to which Bush would go on his very
first day in office when he imposed a "gag" rule that barred health
providers anywhere in the world who receive American funds from providing
abortion services or even talking to a woman about abortion. It has succeeded in
disastrously crippling international family planning and other programs that
could advance reproductive health and combat HIV and AIDS. RACIST TO THE CORE As for the question of race, nothing better captures the
state of the union than the way Trent Lott felt so comfortable as majority
leader of the Senate with his racist longing for a return to the good old days
when Strom Thurmond ruled and segregation was the law of the land that his
nostalgia strangled him. How little Bush's critique of Lott meant was clear from
the speed with which he nominated Charles Pickering, whose record is every bit
as racist, to the Court of Appeals. Yet all that pales in the face of the
decision Bush announced, a few weeks after the Lott incident, to join in the
attack on the University of Michigan's affirmative action program in the Supreme
Court--daring to present his racist brief as a "defense of diversity"
and choosing Jan. 15, Martin Luther King's birthday to make his announcement. While Bush's brief stops short of claiming affirmative
action is unconstitutional, its direction, if he wins, would force colleges and
universities across the nation to abandon their current policies and adopt a
so-called "race-neutral" position. WIDENING WAR ON THE POOR Not content with all these wars against the American
people, Bush has rushed to define the opposition he sees arising to his plans
for us as nothing less than "class war." That was the charge
hurled when the first voices of protest were raised against the so-called
"economic stimulus" package he presented in Chicago when he tried to
make his proposal to eliminate taxes on corporate dividends--which will benefit
the top 1%--sound as though it was an anti-poverty program for the elderly.
Given that tax relief for the wealthy is the centerpiece
of his proposed solution to the dismal economic situation confronting us--with
the unemployment rate at an eight year high; all the states of the union facing
their deepest deficits in 50 years and 11 of them considering such drastic cuts
in Medicaid for the poor that no less than a million more face losing their
health insurance--it seems clear that deepening and widening his war on the poor
is exactly the "class war" Bush has in mind. The past two years have revealed that the permanent war he declared when he moved into the White House on a stolen election is a war he has been waging both at home and abroad. It demands from us the kind of total uprooting that will be inseparable from the creation of a world based on totally new human foundations. |
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