In a message dated 00-12-24 12:02:25 EST, you write: << Message: 4 From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "crl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 12:06:24 -0000 charset="iso-8859-1" Subject: [CrashList] Right-wing coup that shames America Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Right-wing coup that shames America Continuing unofficial counts reveal the full extent of Al Gore's lead and the massive abuses that have put George W. Bush into power Will Hutton, The London Observer Sunday December 24, 2000 I never thought I would live to see it. There has been a right-wing coup in the United States. It is now clear beyond any doubt that the winner of the Presidential election was Al Gore. In Florida the votes are being counted unofficially in a way the Supreme Court would not permit: he was already 140 votes ahead when counting stopped for Christmas and his final lead promises to be in the thousands. Nationally he leads by over half a million votes. What has happened is beyond outrage. It is the cynical misuse of power by a conservative ilite nakedly to serve its interests - and all of us should be frightened for the consequences. The issue is not George W. Bush's conservatism, opponent though I am of what Bush plans to do; a democracy only has vitality and political tension if its philosophy and stream of thinking is articulated and pitches to win elections. The incontrovertible abuse is that Bush has won power despite losing, and critically he only pulled off this feat because the Republicans control the Supreme Court. The Right has subverted pivotal US institutions to win power - a campaign of which the discrediting and attempted impeachment of Clinton was part - and in the process disgraced the legitimacy of US democracy at home and abroad, and undermined conceptions of the rule of law. It is a poor augury for the twenty-first century. In Britain the response has been woeful - itself a token of our own lack of hard democratic instincts. The commentary, especially in the right-of-centre press, has been to decry Gore as a poor loser and to insist that he had to accept the rules of the electoral game, respecting the votes in the US electoral college which, when Florida was lost, gave Bush the election. But as the great liberal defenders of freedom, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, both argued when unjust, illegitimate governments win power through subverting the rules it is our responsibility to contest them. The nine-member Supreme Court, apart from the heady decade of the 1960s when it advanced the cause of civil rights in the South, has always been a bastion of a regressive conservatism. In the 1930s it tried to rule that key elements in Roosevelt's New Deal were unconstitutional. Its defence of the sovereignty of states rights has been fundamental in extending capital punishment and allowing bible-belt states to resist implementing federal legislation banning violence against women. Yet its general prohibition in interfering in a state's rights has been overturned in one instance; the highly politicised intervention in Florida. The more you examine it, the more outrageous the now famous judgement was. What the Court had to do to serve its political purpose was to find a way of acknowledging a sovereign state's rights and the continuing legitimacy of hand recounts in closely contested elections - after all George W. Bush had passed a law as Governor in Texas in 1998 endorsing hand recounts - but at the same time give the election to their Republican champion by finding that events in Florida were a special case.This was tricky. In the first place, even the conservative judges shared the unanimous view that it was reasonable for hand recounts to be undertaken because, as the judgment concedes: 'Punch card balloting machines can produce an unfortunate number of ballots which are not punched in a clean, complete way by the voter.' Consequently individual states are obliged, when the winning margin is tight, to mount an effort to find out what the 'clear intent' of each voter was. In other words Gore was completely within his rights to demand the hand recount. The five conservatives had a problem. How could they deliver the coup? The solution was elegant. The process was too subjective, said the Supreme Court, unless the Florida court put in place even more protective measures to ensure impartiality than the Florida legislature had provided for - a position that is constitutionally impossible, as the judges knew, because it meant the Court would have to change rather than interpret Florida law. Hand recounts are thus legal in principle but impossible in practice because of possible partiality. And in a telling aside in its judgment, the Court said that hand recounts would 'cast a cloud' over Bush's 'legitimacy' that would harm 'democratic stability'. It never crossed the five-strong conservative majority's mind that the opposite might be the case; that not counting votes which would give Gore the presidency when nationally he had won half a million more votes than Bush would damage, not democratic stability, but the entire democratic principle. But then right-wing America is not much interested in the democratic principle. It believes that its duty is to sustain America in its unique destiny as a Christian guardian of individual liberty, a place - I joke not - that will deserve Christ's second coming. It sees itself in a holy war against a liberal enemy within, and its uses every tool at its disposal ruthlessly to dispose of its foe. The Right enjoyed 12 years of power under Reagan and Bush, lost the Presidency to Clinton in 1992 when Ross Perot split the conservative vote and pledged to continue their jihad against what they saw as his illegitimate victory from the beginning. Hence the fantasies of Whitewater. Hence the Starr inquiry into the Lewinsky affair, where now we learn key evidence was fabricated. Hence the attempted impeachment. Mud sticks, they reckoned, and even though they knew impeachment would fail, they calculated it would put any Democrat presidential candidate in 2000 in a presentational bind - association with the successful Clinton years would be attacked as an association with immorality. But for all their efforts American public opinion remained stubbornly tolerant, sceptical of tax cuts and moderately centrist. To win Bush had to outspend his rival two to one in the last month and build on the strategic dilemma faced by Gore about the Clinton years. But even then it has taken the Supreme Court to complete the coup. For all the talk of reconciliation Bush is building a tribal conservative administration bent on supporting business at home and asserting US unilateralism abroad. His next Treasury Secretary has been picked not for his capacity to negotiate the US and the world through the minefield of a fragile international financial system, but his interest in feathering the nests of corporate America. And so it goes on, offering the US and the world a policy and perspective not wanted by the majority of Americans. The consensus view is that within months the whole Florida affair will be forgotten, and Bush will be installed as a legitimate US President. I don't agree. The value of democracies is they produce administrations broadly in tune with the times and will of the people, and thus able to marshal both consent and the correct policy responses for the varying crises that hit them. Not so in America. Whether the need to respect international treaties abroad or the desire to universalise medical protection at home, the US has the man in power it did not want and whose instincts are opposite to those of the majority. This will prove a disastrous administration for America and the world, and the coup will become widely understood as a moment of partisan infamy. It is a brutal lesson for us liberals. Never, never forget the treachery and poison on the Right. --__--__-- Message: 5 From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "crl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 12:09:26 -0000 charset="iso-8859-1" Subject: [CrashList] Miami Herald: REVIEW THE VOTES Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.miamiherald.com The presidential election is over, and George W. Bush is the winner. That fact is no longer in dispute. But remaining to be settled are important questions about the roughly 60,000 Florida ballots that became the focus of attention over the past several weeks, the so-called undervotes. And, as Florida contemplates election reform, it is important to get an impartial fix on what Floridians actually did in the last election. Now is the time to review those ballots, one at a time. The Herald, and its parent company, Knight Ridder, have engaged the nationally respected accounting and consulting firm BDO Seidman LLP, to perform that review. That task began yesterday in Broward County using a painstakingly rigorous and objective process. Because of the complexities of repeating that task in each of Florida's 67 counties, the review is apt to take several weeks. The goal is neither to affirm nor to question the official result. It is to report only what those ballots show. The ballots, which are available for inspection under Florida's public-records laws, will speak for themselves. No ballots will be handled by journalists or even by our accounting firm. Under Florida law, only officials designated by county elections supervisors can do that. Those officials will show each ballot to our representatives, as well as to representatives of other interested media and individuals. The assignment will be to record precisely what each ballot shows according to a procedure detailed by Executive Editor Martin Baron on page 14A of this edition. In every case where there is a question, we will use the judgment of the BDO Seidman representative. When the data is published, readers will be able to determine for themselves what the tally would be under the several standards used by canvassing boards across the state to discern voter intent. While the election is over, the search for understanding isn't complete. The history of what became one of the most closely contested presidential races cannot fully be written until this is done. --__--__-- Message: 6 From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "crl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 12:10:56 -0000 charset="iso-8859-1" Subject: [CrashList] NYTimes: oil and China Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fueling China's Growth Oil has not figured prominently in the delicate relationship between the United States and China. But it soon will. China, the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion people, will become one of the world's top oil importers in just a few years. This growing reliance on imported oil will further anchor China in the global economy and help shape its ties to the United States. Both nations should be thinking about how to manage this new reality and its strategic repercussions not only in East Asia, but also in places like the Middle East. Though the issue is not yet much discussed, it is being closely studied by the Central Intelligence Agency, academics and oil industry analysts. As he devises a China policy, President-elect George W. Bush can draw on the research, some of which has been done by the public policy institute at Rice University named after former Secretary of State James Baker. China's need for ever greater quantities of imported oil is driven by its torrid economic growth. In the next 20 years, China's gross domestic product is expected to quadruple, enhancing its people's living standards and partially closing the economic gap with the United States. The underlying force behind China's growth the great migration of its population to the cities and the creation of a middle class is still in its nascent stages. There are, for instance, 10 motor vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in China, compared with 30 in Egypt, 148 in Mexico, 552 in Japan and 770 in the United States. A net exporter of oil until 1993, China now imports 1.2 million of the 4.5 million barrels it consumes a day. It is expected to import roughly 4 million barrels a day in 2010 and close to 7 million in 2020. The United States currently imports about 10 million a day. The Middle East is expected to supply more than three-quarters of China's oil imports by 2010. As this dependence grows, Beijing is likely to become a more active and influential actor in the Middle East. This may well complicate the American role in the region. Beijing has been cultivating ties with oil- producing nations, including Iran and Iraq. China dislikes international economic sanctions, claiming that they represent unwarranted interference in the affairs of sovereign states. In recent years, Beijing has supplied Iran with ballistic missile technology and has taken an indulgent line toward Iraqi defiance of United Nations weapons inspectors. But China's Middle East diplomacy has also grown more sophisticated than it was in the days of Mao Zedong, when Beijing's main allies were radical Palestinian terrorists. Now China maintains full diplomatic relations with Israel and seeks to purchase sophisticated Western military technologies from the Jewish state that it cannot buy directly from the United States or Europe. China's strategic interests, like those of other major oil importers, will increasingly lie in maintaining political and military stability throughout the Middle East. For that reason, Beijing should not want to see Iran and Iraq develop unconventional weapons with which they could threaten Israel and other neighbors. Encouragingly, China recently promised the United States that it would no longer help Iran or any other country develop advanced missiles. In future years, China could even come to rely on American naval power to keep sea lanes open to ensure the uninterrupted flow of its economic life blood. As China takes its place among the world's great powers, and attempts to integrate its economy into global markets, Beijing's need for foreign oil may have a moderating effect on Chinese behavior. That will require constructive thinking about China's future oil requirements by President Jiang Zemin and a willingness by the Chinese leadership to work alongside the United States in maintaining the free flow of oil around the globe. For a nation on the verge of becoming a full member of the World Trade Organization, that kind of attitudinal shift should be possible. Washington, for its part, should continue to encourage China's Communist leaders to see the two nations' growing economic interdependence as a source of stability and prosperity, not vulnerability. --__--__-- Message: 7 From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "crl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 12:23:02 -0000 charset="iso-8859-1" Subject: [CrashList] Now it's unofficial: Gore did win Florida Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The London Observer Ed Vulliamy in New York Sunday December 24, 2000 As George W. Bush handed further key government posts to hardline Republican right-wingers, an unofficial recount of votes in Florida appeared to confirm that Bush lost the US presidential election. Despite the decision by the US Supreme Court to halt the Florida recount in the contested counties, American media organisations, includ ing Knight Ridder - owner of the Miami Herald - have commissioned their own counts, gaining access to the ballots under Freedom of Information legislation. The result so far, with the recounting of so-called 'undervotes' in only one county completed by Friday night, indicates that Al Gore is ahead by 140 votes. Florida's 25 electoral college votes won Bush the presidency by two seats last Monday after the Supreme Court refused to allow the counting of 45,000 discarded votes. But as the media recount was suspended for Christmas, the votes so far tallied in Lake and Broward counties have Gore ahead in the race for the pivotal state, and hence the White House. Gore's lead is expected to soar when counting resumes in the New Year and Miami votes are counted. In a separate exercise, the Miami Herald commissioned a team of political analysts and pollsters to make a statistical calculation based on projections of votes by county, concluding that Gore won the state by 23,000. The media initiative is likely to bedevil Bush in the weeks to come, thickening the pall of illegitimacy that will hang over his inauguration on 20 January. It has already led to a face-off between almost all the news media organisations in the state and Bush's presidential team. In the most extreme example of the Bush camp's desperation to avoid a recount, the new director of the Environment Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, has proposed that the Florida ballots be sealed for 10 years. Bush's spokesman Tucker Eskew dismissed the recount as 'mischief-making' and 'inflaming public passions' while his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, accused the papers of 'trying to rewrite history'. Meanwhile, Bush made his boldest ideological statement yet with the appointment of John Ashcroft as Attorney General. The appointment is especially significant, because as head of the Justice Department Ashcroft would be the man to bring any felony charges against President Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair. During the scandal, Ashcroft was among the loudest and shrillest voices for impeachment. There have been many calls to President-elect Bush to pardon his predecessor as a sign of peace, but he made a point of rejecting them. Ashcroft lost his Missouri Senate seat to the widow of the state's popular Democrat governor, Mel Carnahan. From the family of a Pentacostal minister, he is an outspoken social conservative and an ally of the extremist Pat Robertson. Ashcroft represents a host of militant committees and activist groups, of which the Christian Coalition is most prominent. He is an opponent not only of abortion but even - as he said in one speech - of dancing. >> _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
