During the 1970s, the apartheid government of South Africa sought to bolster its claims to legitimacy by allowing elections in the Bantustans–the equivalent to today’s walled-in Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The thought was that if people elected local officials, even to hold largely ceremonial offices, then the rest of the world would stop whining about how undemocratic and illegal apartheid was.
The unequivocal French rejection of the new European Constitution (50% “No” votes with electoral participation at 70%) anticipates the turbulence ahead in much of Europe. The vote represented a clear class division, with majorities against the Constitution in the working class (in factories and offices) and amongst voters for the Socialist, Communist, ultra-leftist, and Green parties. These voters were protesting unemployment, the removal of entire factories to cheap labor areas in the new European Union members in eastern Europe (or to Asia), and the threat to France’s welfare state entailed by the European Commission’s obsession with deregulation and the sovereignty of the market. These voters were also expressing their antipathy toward proposed Turkish membership of the Union–a symbolic surrogate for the large presence of Muslims in France. In this, they were joined by voters for the far right (often from the working class themselves) and those who regarded supra-nationality as a threat to France’s cultural and political identity. The “No” vote united both xenophobes and those seeking a different kind of internationalism.
As the costs begin to escalate in the Gulf States with Congress authorizing $60 billion for rescue and cleanup operations and as fingers point in the Capital, the costs of another quagmire mount—that of the Iraq War. The death and destruction strewn by hurricane Katrina may equal or even exceed the death toll of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War. But while 6,000 miles separates the two, the links between war overseas and the fate of those in Katrina’s wake are closely interwoven.
The Bush administration has declared war on the world.
“I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.”
I’d like to see President George W. Bush go on live television before a tough crowd. Like a high school class in my hometown that includes Iraqi students and boys who are preparing for boot camp. These Seattle kids are still able to exercise their Constitutional right to freedom of speech. My guess is that they’d have some questions.
Those crazy North Koreans. They’ve promised in principle to give up their nuclear weapons, but they insist on generating nuclear power for peaceful purposes. With Pyongyang and Washington at loggerheads over this point, the Six-Party Talks to resolve the nuclear crisis in Northeast Asia have taken a recess after two weeks of promising discussions.
While the news media have covered every twist and turn in the negotiations over a constitution, it has largely ignored the most important development in Iraq since the January 2005 election – the emergence of a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
Congress is about to enact an energy bill that would severely limit the power of coastal states and municipalities to veto construction of massive — potentially dangerous — liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) terminals in their harbors. If the bill is signed into law by President Bush, federal authorities will gain the power to overrule states and municipalities in choosing locations for these terminals.
(Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram on Monday, August 1, 2005.)