News & Views You Can Use
Jan 7, 2004
City Pages
News and Views You Can Use
Restoring Community
Howard Dean's American Strategy
The following remarks as prepared were delivered Dec. 7 by Dr. Howard Dean in Columbia, SC.
In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way – by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people.
They called it the "Southern Strategy," and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like "racial quotas" and "welfare queens" to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems.
The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few.
To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us.
But these politics do worse than that – they fracture the very soul of who we are as a country.
It was a different Republican president, who 150 years ago warned, "A house divided cannot stand," and it is now a different Republican party that has won elections for the past 30 years by turning us into a divided nation.
In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one paycheck to the next.
Hunger does not care what color we are.
In America, a conversation between parents about taking on more debt might be in English or it might be in Spanish; worrying about making ends meet knows no racial identity.
Black children and white children all get the flu and need the doctor. In both the inner city and in small rural towns, our schools need good teachers.
When I was in medical school in the Bronx, one of my first ER patients was a 13-year-old African-American girl who had an unwanted pregnancy. When I moved to Vermont to practice medicine, one of my first ER patients was a 13-year-old white girl who had an unwanted pregnancy.
They were bound by their common human experience.
There are no black concerns or white concerns or Hispanic concerns in America. There are only human concerns.
Every time a politician uses the word "quota," it's because he'd rather not talk about the real reasons that we've lost almost three million jobs.
Every time a politician complains about affirmative action in our universities, it's because he'd rather not talk about the real problems with education in America – like the fact that here in South Carolina, only 15 percent of African Americans have a post-high school degree.
When education is suffering in lower-income areas, it means that we will all pay for more prisons and face more crime in the future.
When families lack health insurance and are forced to go to the emergency room when they need a doctor, medical care becomes more expensive for each of us.
When wealth is concentrated at the very top, when the middle class is shrinking and the gap between rich and poor grows as wide as it has been since the Gilded Age of the 19th century, our economy cannot sustain itself.
When wages become stagnant for the majority of Americans, as they have been for the past two decades, we will never feel as though we are getting ahead.
When we have the highest level of personal debt in American history, we are selling off our future, in order to barely keep our heads above water today.
Today, Americans are working harder, for less money, with more debt, and less time to spend with our families and communities.
In the year 2003, in the United States, over 12 million children live in poverty. Nearly 8 million of them are white. And no matter what race they are, too many of them will live in poverty all their lives.
And yesterday, there were 3,000 more children without health care - children of all races. By the end of today, there will 3,000 more. And by the end of tomorrow, there will be 3,000 more on top of that.
America can do better than this.
It's time we had a new politics in America – a politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices.
Because when white people and black people and brown people vote together, that's when we make true progress in this country.
Jobs, health care, education, democracy and opportunity. These are the issues that can unite America.
The politics of the 21st century is going to begin with our common interests.
If the President tries to divide us by race, we're going to talk about health care for every American.
If Karl Rove tries to divide us by gender, we're going to talk about better schools for all of our children.
If large corporate interests try to divide us by income, we're going to talk about better jobs and higher wages for every American.
If any politician tries to win an election by turning America into a battle of us versus them, we're going to respond with a politics that says that we're all in this together - that we want to raise our children in a world in which they are not taught to hate one another, because our children are not born to hate one another.
We're going to talk about justice again in this country, and what an America based on justice should look like – an America with justice in our tax code, justice in our health care system, and justice in our hearts as well as our laws.
We're going to talk about making higher education available to every young person in every neighborhood and community in America, because over 95 percent of people with a four-year degree in this country escape poverty.
We're going to talk about rebuilding rural communities and making sure that rural America can share in the promise and prosperity of the rest of America.
We're going to talk about investing in more small businesses instead of subsidizing huge corporations, because small businesses create seven out of every 10 jobs in this country and they don't move their jobs overseas – and they can help revitalize troubled communities. We're going to make it easier for everyone to get a small business loan wherever they live and whatever the color of their skin.
We're going to talk about rebuilding our schools and our roads and our public spaces, empowering people to take pride in their neighborhood and their community again.
We're going to talk about building prosperity that's based on more than spending beyond our means, a prosperity that doesn't force us to choose between working long hours and raising our children, a prosperity that doesn't require a mountain of debt to sustain it, a prosperity that lifts up every one of us and not just those at the very top.
The politics of race and the politics of fear will be answered with the promise of community and a message of hope.
And that's how we're going to win in 2004.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1976, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan asked, "Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit sharing in a common endeavor or will we become a divided nation?"
We are determined to find a way to reach out to Americans of every background, every race, every gender and sexual orientation, and bring them – as Dr. King said – to the same table of brotherhood.
We have great work to do in America. It will take years. But it will last for generations. And it begins today, with every one of us here.
Abraham Lincoln said that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth. But this President has forgotten ordinary people.
That is why it is time for us to join together. Because it is only a movement of citizens of every color, every income level, and every background that can change this country and once again make it live up to the promise of America.
So, today I ask you to not just join this campaign but make it your own. This new era of the United States begins not with me but with you. United together, you can take back your country.
Howard Dean
Dr. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, is a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States.
Animal Control
Pre-Christmas Scorecard
Athens-Clarke County animal Control responded to 38 calls.
2 complaints of animal cruelty
2 bite cases
3 complaints of barking dogs
2 ordinance violations
21 animals impounded
20 dogs
1 raccoon
25 dogs placed
16 adopted
4 reclaimed
5 turned over to other agencies
ACC Animal Control press release for the week of Dec. 16 to Dec. 22.
Restoring Ownership
But Who Will Own You?
Somebody at Homeland Security must have slipped the manuscript of my next book to Karl Rove. Among other things, my upcoming political manifesto posits that the Republicans won't be able to surf the 9/11-generated shock-and-awe wave forever. It's still the economy, stupid; it always will be. All the foreign policy successes in the world - catching Saddam, terrorizing Libya into unilateral disarmament, dragging Osama's bloated carcass down K Street - won't make three million people forget that they've lost their jobs or that Bush, whose estimated net worth runs between $9,634,088 and $26,593,000, refused to extend their unemployment checks.
Unless there's another dramatic attack in '04, domestic issues will determine what happens in November.
Word has it that Bush will kick off his "re"election campaign with a package of domestic economic proposals to be announced during next month's State of the Union address. What the GOP calls "The Ownership Society," writes conservative New York Times pundit David Brooks, will "embrace the more productive and fluid economy, but make sure government aggressively moves to give workers the tools they need to cope."
"The Ownership Society," which acknowledges that most people change employers and careers throughout their working lives, shows that conservatives have been doing some creative thinking about their domestic agenda. Among the highlights:
Portable Health Insurance Tax credits would subsidize medical premiums, the number of people who qualify for existing government programs like Medicare would be expanded, and small businesses would be allowed to form pools so their employees would qualify for group plans.
Reemployment Accounts: Unemployment stipends would be replaced by lump-sum personal "accounts" that layoff victims could spend, says Brooks, "on training, child care, a car, a move to a place with more jobs, or whatever else they think would benefit them."
Privatizing Social Security: This idea has been around for years. You would decide where to invest the money in your Social Security "account," like employees do now with their 401(k)s. As with a 401(k), you would reap big rewards during stock market booms but risk getting wiped out in a crash.
Except for Social Security privatization, which would excessively endanger retirement funds to line the pockets of politically-connected Wall Street brokerage houses, these are interesting ideas - in theory. If you take a closer look, however, reality asks a lot of tough questions.
Bush says he wants Americans to adopt a "responsibility culture." But his Ownership Society concept requires more responsibility than most folks should be asked to bear. The health insurance tax credit, for example, would come in the form of a big refund check after taxpayers file their 1040s. Many workers, hit hard by stagnating wages and unexpected expenses, will spend the government windfall on other bills. The same thing goes for re-employment accounts. If a guy blows his lump-sum unemployment payment on a casino riverboat or Internet gaming-site bender, he and his family could end up out on the street. You and me, we might spend the money on computer classes. But for too many people, it's too big a temptation.
Worse still, the GOP's track record suggests that Bush's Ownership Society would merely replace the antiquated liberal safety net - which assumes that a person works for the same employer his or her entire life - with a privatized system that's so poorly underfinanced as to be worthless. The much-ballyhooed No Child Left Behind Act has been, well, left behind - it hasn't received a penny. Bush welched on his promise to spend $15 billion on African AIDS prevention. The average dollar value of the school vouchers issued by Cleveland, whose program Republicans say should be copied nationally, is so low that parents can't afford to move their kids to private schools. And the average taxpayer will receive just $800 from Bush's tax cuts - enough to bankrupt the treasury but not to stimulate the economy.
"Congress and the administration are looking at proposals that cost $50 billion to $80 billion over 10 years," The Times says. But that's chump change next to the size of the problems they claim to address. $8 billion per year would provide health care to just three percent of America's 44 million uninsured. And it wouldn't leave anything for reemployment accounts.
The only way to fund this election-year vote grab would be to cancel the $1.8 trillion tax cuts and the $100 million-per-year occupation of Iraq - but Republicans aren't that serious.
"The public is not expecting perfection, but is looking for progress," says GOP pollster David Winston. Perhaps he's right - maybe the American people will view three percent as "progress." But where I come from, three percent ain't even a tip.
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists.
Howard Dean's American Strategy
The following remarks as prepared were delivered Dec. 7 by Dr. Howard Dean in Columbia, SC.
In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way – by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people.
They called it the "Southern Strategy," and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like "racial quotas" and "welfare queens" to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems.
| |
The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few.
To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us.
But these politics do worse than that – they fracture the very soul of who we are as a country.
It was a different Republican president, who 150 years ago warned, "A house divided cannot stand," and it is now a different Republican party that has won elections for the past 30 years by turning us into a divided nation.
In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one paycheck to the next.
Hunger does not care what color we are.
In America, a conversation between parents about taking on more debt might be in English or it might be in Spanish; worrying about making ends meet knows no racial identity.
Black children and white children all get the flu and need the doctor. In both the inner city and in small rural towns, our schools need good teachers.
When I was in medical school in the Bronx, one of my first ER patients was a 13-year-old African-American girl who had an unwanted pregnancy. When I moved to Vermont to practice medicine, one of my first ER patients was a 13-year-old white girl who had an unwanted pregnancy.
They were bound by their common human experience.
There are no black concerns or white concerns or Hispanic concerns in America. There are only human concerns.
Every time a politician uses the word "quota," it's because he'd rather not talk about the real reasons that we've lost almost three million jobs.
Every time a politician complains about affirmative action in our universities, it's because he'd rather not talk about the real problems with education in America – like the fact that here in South Carolina, only 15 percent of African Americans have a post-high school degree.
When education is suffering in lower-income areas, it means that we will all pay for more prisons and face more crime in the future.
When families lack health insurance and are forced to go to the emergency room when they need a doctor, medical care becomes more expensive for each of us.
When wealth is concentrated at the very top, when the middle class is shrinking and the gap between rich and poor grows as wide as it has been since the Gilded Age of the 19th century, our economy cannot sustain itself.
When wages become stagnant for the majority of Americans, as they have been for the past two decades, we will never feel as though we are getting ahead.
When we have the highest level of personal debt in American history, we are selling off our future, in order to barely keep our heads above water today.
Today, Americans are working harder, for less money, with more debt, and less time to spend with our families and communities.
In the year 2003, in the United States, over 12 million children live in poverty. Nearly 8 million of them are white. And no matter what race they are, too many of them will live in poverty all their lives.
And yesterday, there were 3,000 more children without health care - children of all races. By the end of today, there will 3,000 more. And by the end of tomorrow, there will be 3,000 more on top of that.
America can do better than this.
It's time we had a new politics in America – a politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices.
Because when white people and black people and brown people vote together, that's when we make true progress in this country.
Jobs, health care, education, democracy and opportunity. These are the issues that can unite America.
The politics of the 21st century is going to begin with our common interests.
If the President tries to divide us by race, we're going to talk about health care for every American.
If Karl Rove tries to divide us by gender, we're going to talk about better schools for all of our children.
If large corporate interests try to divide us by income, we're going to talk about better jobs and higher wages for every American.
If any politician tries to win an election by turning America into a battle of us versus them, we're going to respond with a politics that says that we're all in this together - that we want to raise our children in a world in which they are not taught to hate one another, because our children are not born to hate one another.
We're going to talk about justice again in this country, and what an America based on justice should look like – an America with justice in our tax code, justice in our health care system, and justice in our hearts as well as our laws.
We're going to talk about making higher education available to every young person in every neighborhood and community in America, because over 95 percent of people with a four-year degree in this country escape poverty.
We're going to talk about rebuilding rural communities and making sure that rural America can share in the promise and prosperity of the rest of America.
We're going to talk about investing in more small businesses instead of subsidizing huge corporations, because small businesses create seven out of every 10 jobs in this country and they don't move their jobs overseas – and they can help revitalize troubled communities. We're going to make it easier for everyone to get a small business loan wherever they live and whatever the color of their skin.
We're going to talk about rebuilding our schools and our roads and our public spaces, empowering people to take pride in their neighborhood and their community again.
We're going to talk about building prosperity that's based on more than spending beyond our means, a prosperity that doesn't force us to choose between working long hours and raising our children, a prosperity that doesn't require a mountain of debt to sustain it, a prosperity that lifts up every one of us and not just those at the very top.
The politics of race and the politics of fear will be answered with the promise of community and a message of hope.
And that's how we're going to win in 2004.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1976, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan asked, "Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit sharing in a common endeavor or will we become a divided nation?"
We are determined to find a way to reach out to Americans of every background, every race, every gender and sexual orientation, and bring them – as Dr. King said – to the same table of brotherhood.
We have great work to do in America. It will take years. But it will last for generations. And it begins today, with every one of us here.
Abraham Lincoln said that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth. But this President has forgotten ordinary people.
That is why it is time for us to join together. Because it is only a movement of citizens of every color, every income level, and every background that can change this country and once again make it live up to the promise of America.
So, today I ask you to not just join this campaign but make it your own. This new era of the United States begins not with me but with you. United together, you can take back your country.
Howard Dean
Dr. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, is a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States.
Animal Control
Pre-Christmas Scorecard
Athens-Clarke County animal Control responded to 38 calls.
2 complaints of animal cruelty
2 bite cases
3 complaints of barking dogs
2 ordinance violations
21 animals impounded
20 dogs
1 raccoon
25 dogs placed
16 adopted
4 reclaimed
5 turned over to other agencies
ACC Animal Control press release for the week of Dec. 16 to Dec. 22.
Restoring Ownership
But Who Will Own You?
Somebody at Homeland Security must have slipped the manuscript of my next book to Karl Rove. Among other things, my upcoming political manifesto posits that the Republicans won't be able to surf the 9/11-generated shock-and-awe wave forever. It's still the economy, stupid; it always will be. All the foreign policy successes in the world - catching Saddam, terrorizing Libya into unilateral disarmament, dragging Osama's bloated carcass down K Street - won't make three million people forget that they've lost their jobs or that Bush, whose estimated net worth runs between $9,634,088 and $26,593,000, refused to extend their unemployment checks.
Unless there's another dramatic attack in '04, domestic issues will determine what happens in November.
Word has it that Bush will kick off his "re"election campaign with a package of domestic economic proposals to be announced during next month's State of the Union address. What the GOP calls "The Ownership Society," writes conservative New York Times pundit David Brooks, will "embrace the more productive and fluid economy, but make sure government aggressively moves to give workers the tools they need to cope."
"The Ownership Society," which acknowledges that most people change employers and careers throughout their working lives, shows that conservatives have been doing some creative thinking about their domestic agenda. Among the highlights:
Portable Health Insurance Tax credits would subsidize medical premiums, the number of people who qualify for existing government programs like Medicare would be expanded, and small businesses would be allowed to form pools so their employees would qualify for group plans.
Reemployment Accounts: Unemployment stipends would be replaced by lump-sum personal "accounts" that layoff victims could spend, says Brooks, "on training, child care, a car, a move to a place with more jobs, or whatever else they think would benefit them."
Privatizing Social Security: This idea has been around for years. You would decide where to invest the money in your Social Security "account," like employees do now with their 401(k)s. As with a 401(k), you would reap big rewards during stock market booms but risk getting wiped out in a crash.
Except for Social Security privatization, which would excessively endanger retirement funds to line the pockets of politically-connected Wall Street brokerage houses, these are interesting ideas - in theory. If you take a closer look, however, reality asks a lot of tough questions.
Bush says he wants Americans to adopt a "responsibility culture." But his Ownership Society concept requires more responsibility than most folks should be asked to bear. The health insurance tax credit, for example, would come in the form of a big refund check after taxpayers file their 1040s. Many workers, hit hard by stagnating wages and unexpected expenses, will spend the government windfall on other bills. The same thing goes for re-employment accounts. If a guy blows his lump-sum unemployment payment on a casino riverboat or Internet gaming-site bender, he and his family could end up out on the street. You and me, we might spend the money on computer classes. But for too many people, it's too big a temptation.
Worse still, the GOP's track record suggests that Bush's Ownership Society would merely replace the antiquated liberal safety net - which assumes that a person works for the same employer his or her entire life - with a privatized system that's so poorly underfinanced as to be worthless. The much-ballyhooed No Child Left Behind Act has been, well, left behind - it hasn't received a penny. Bush welched on his promise to spend $15 billion on African AIDS prevention. The average dollar value of the school vouchers issued by Cleveland, whose program Republicans say should be copied nationally, is so low that parents can't afford to move their kids to private schools. And the average taxpayer will receive just $800 from Bush's tax cuts - enough to bankrupt the treasury but not to stimulate the economy.
"Congress and the administration are looking at proposals that cost $50 billion to $80 billion over 10 years," The Times says. But that's chump change next to the size of the problems they claim to address. $8 billion per year would provide health care to just three percent of America's 44 million uninsured. And it wouldn't leave anything for reemployment accounts.
The only way to fund this election-year vote grab would be to cancel the $1.8 trillion tax cuts and the $100 million-per-year occupation of Iraq - but Republicans aren't that serious.
"The public is not expecting perfection, but is looking for progress," says GOP pollster David Winston. Perhaps he's right - maybe the American people will view three percent as "progress." But where I come from, three percent ain't even a tip.
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists.
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