■ EU: muerte del hombre blanco unipolar

Festejo multirracial en las calles del centro de Chicago, la noche del martes 4 de noviembre, tras anunciarse el triunfo del candidato presidencial demócrata, Barack Obama

Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

La demografía representa uno de los principales constituyentes de la democracia numérica. Si Estados Unidos (EU) no sucumbe a la aventura fascista y/o al apartheid de su minoría plutocrática, su nueva democracia generacional está ya marcada por la recomposición demográfica en los próximos 40 años: el ascenso de la hibridación multicultural.
La elección del mulato hawaiano Barack Obama (Barack proviene del árabe baraca que significa “bendito”) representa el inicio de una revolución democrática pacífica y multirracial, pero sustentada en el cambio demográfico cuando el segmento juvenil de los 18 a los 29 años se volcó por su candidatura, mientras el segmento de la tercera edad, en su mayoría monorracial wasp (blanco-anglosajón-protestante) votó por McCain que significa, en idioma escocés, el “hijo de Caín”.
Se trata de “un nuevo EU” que rompe radicalmente con el “viejo EU” decimonónico (cuando 85 por ciento de la población era wasp), en espera de la principal mayoría étnica que será latina y de preponderancia mexicana.
En las dos anteriores elecciones, el diferencial del voto popular había sido mínimo, mientras el sufragio del colegio electoral había sido apretadamente controvertido, lo cual benefició al Partido Republicano y a su base fundamentalista evangelista, apuntalado tanto por la perversidad electorera de Karl Rove (el íntimo asesor de Baby Bush) como por los neoconservadores straussianos.
Más allá de lo aplastante de los votos electorales en favor del hawaiano mulato Obama, su distribución geográfica es dramática: las dos costas cosmopolitas al Oeste y al Este son demócratas, con la mínima excepción en el lado oriental de los estados de Carolina del Sur y Georgia. La región de los Grandes Lagos y la frontera con Canadá (con la exigua excepción de Montana y Dakota del Norte) son también demócratas, mientras el Partido Republicano y su base fundamentalista evangelista queda aislada en el centro y en el sur donde se detectan dos fracturas tectónicas de la nueva demografía en Carolina del Sur y Misuri, considerando que Obama arrancó nueve estados que habían votado en la elección anterior por Baby Bush.
De los cuatro candidatos a la presidencia y a la vicepresidencia cabe resaltar que la más joven era la pistolera petrolera Sarah Palin (44 años), tres años menor que Obama; el mayor de edad fue el blanco panameño e “hijo de Caín” (72 años). El vicepresidente electo Joe Biden, de 66, es el único católico de los cuatro.
No bastaba ser joven (el caso de la pistolera petrolera Palin), para atraer en forma aplastante al segmento juvenil de 18 a 29 años que en su amplio espectro racial (blancos, negros, latinos, asiáticos y judíos) se volcó por el candidato multicultural Obama.
El voto mexicano y, por extensión, el sufragio latino, prácticamente dio casi la tercera parte de los votos del colegio electoral al mulato Obama con el predominio en California (55 votos), Nueva York (31), Florida (27), Colorado (9) y Nuevo México (5).
La frontera de EU con México votó mayoritariamente por Obama, con la notable excepción de Texas (34 votos), donde no todo está perdido, ya que el voto mexicano y latino constituirá la futura mayoría debido al sufragio de los hijos de los migrantes en la próxima generación. Tal vuelco demográfico en Texas aislará aún más al reducto fundamentalista evangelista de los wasp en el centro y sur de EU.
Edward Luce (The Financial Times, 5/11/08) exhibe que “cada generación” posee su propio distintivo en la elección presidencial, como sucedió en 1968, “cuando Richard Nixon explotó en forma exitosa el resentimiento blanco por el apoyo de Lyndon Johnson a la Enmienda de Derechos Civiles que puso fin al dominio de 150 años del Partido Demócrata en el sur”. La “estrategia sureña” es la “invocación racial encubierta a la clase trabajadora alienada de blancos” (los “demócratas de Reagan”, es decir, aquellos demócratas que votaron por el ex presidente republicano) que ayudaron al “éxito del Partido Republicano en siete de las pasadas 10 elecciones presidenciales”. A juicio de Luce, Obama liquidó la “estrategia sureña”.
El giro demográfico ha sido dramático y no es justipreciado por el diferencial de 5 por ciento del voto popular, ya que los grupos de mayor crecimiento etnodemográfico votaron dos a uno en favor del mulato hawaiano Obama. Desde Johnson, en 1964, ningún candidato Demócrata había obtenido 44 por ciento del voto blanco, como sucedió ahora con Obama, cuando tampoco se puede exagerar el voto aplastante de los negros que constituyen 13 por ciento de todo el electorado.
Luce destaca el “significativo surgimiento de los latinos” que se volcaron en favor del Partido Demócrata en la elección presidencial y del Congreso, lo cual se epitomizó en Florida, donde “Obama obtuvo 57 por ciento del voto latino, que incluyó la mayoría de la segunda generación de cubanos” que se alejó del Partido Republicano debido a su xenofobia antinmigrante.
James Carville, encuestador estrella de los demócratas, aduce que “una nueva generación transformó la política en EU”, y recalca que el Partido Republicano no solamente perdió las elecciones de la presidencia y el Congreso, sino, sobre todo, a “una entera generación de votantes”, cuando el “triunvirato Bush-Cheney-Rove alienó una extensa mayoría de jóvenes votantes con sus guerras culturales”. A juicio de Carville, este nuevo bloque demográfico juvenil y multicultural hará prevalecer el dominio del Partido Demócrata en los siguientes 40 años, y que se reflejó en la votación de solamente 32 por ciento de los votantes menores de 30 años en favor del “hijo de Caín”.
Carville afirma que en la política presidencial de EU el dominio partidista es “cíclico”, como se desprende de los periodos de 1896 a 1932, luego de 1932 a 1968 y ahora de 1968 a 2008: “el dominio republicano prevaleció los pasados 40 años” (con la excepción de cuatro años para Jimmy Carter y ocho para Bill Clinton, curiosamente, ambos ex gobernadores del sur), cuando expresó la reacción al dominio de los demócratas en la década de los sesenta, y que “estaba arraigado en el poder del voto masculino blanco”.
Ahora el voto masculino blanco ha disminuido, mientras el voto de los otros grupos etnodemográficos se ha incrementado en forma asombrosa.
Concluye que pocas elecciones como las recientes tienen “resonante y duradero impacto en el paisaje político”, cuando el “Partido Republicano, en su más bajo nivel de popularidad, perdió una generación de votantes”, mientras “una nueva mayoría de demócratas ha emergido con los votantes jóvenes a su cabeza” que representan la “mayoría que continuará a gobernar 40 años más”.
Murió el hombre blanco unipolar. ¡Viva el nuevo hombre multicultural!

Bajo la Lupa
Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com.

AlterNet

Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance.

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?
Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.
There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter -- stumbling a little, using long words -- carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.
It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic -- men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton -- were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?
On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many U.S. citizens become so dumb and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of U.S. politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.
One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion -- in particular fundamentalist religion -- makes you stupid. The United States is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.
Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy -- now known as Social Darwinism -- of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.
Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.
But there were other, more powerful reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South," Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."
The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that 1 in 4 of the state's public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on Earth at the same time.
This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishization of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary; all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.
Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day, men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.
The specter of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the elections of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite -- like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush -- has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an overeducated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the right-wing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.
Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the U.S. education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

Michael Moore: No More Socialism for the Rich!

CNN. AlterNet

"McCain is going to make sure the wealthy get another incredible tax break while everybody else suffers."

The following is an excerpted transcript from Michael Moore's appearance on CNN's Larry King Live
Larry King: He is many things, but dull isn't one of them. Michael Moore, the academy winning documentary filmmaker. The latest film is "Slacker Uprising: A Look at the Youth Vote." His latest book is "Mike's Election Guide '08". He is a supporter, as you might imagine, of Barack Obama.
He comes to us from Traverse City, Michigan. And I understand you have some friends with you tonight calling themselves Plumbers for Obama.
You want to explain this? Where are you?
Michael Moore: I'm in a senior citizens house here in Northern Michigan. These guys behind me, they don't just call themselves Plumbers for Obama, they actually are Plumbers for Obama. And they they're licensed plumbers and they're going around helping out people who are in need of plumbing help, who maybe are of modest income, modest means. And so they want to show that real plumbers are for Obama. The average, you know, plumber makes maybe $40,000 to $60,000 a year, if he's lucky. And they're all going to benefit greatly from the Obama tax break that they're going to get if Obama is elected.
King: What do you make of the "Joe the Plumber" thing with McCain?
Moore: Well, I think it's part of the same illusion that the Republicans have been presenting for the last eight years. They say one thing, but the reality is, you know, something else, whether it's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or whether it's now playing up "Joe the Plumber."
The Republicans, their whole tax plan is to punish the plumbers and everybody else who has a job like this in this country. And yet they somehow have taken this guy -- I feel kind of sorry for this guy, too. He probably didn't expect to be in the limelight like this. And but it's not really about him as an individual. And I don't think people should be getting down on him just because he isn't a licensed plumber or his name isn't Joe or anything else that's come out. I just think that that's kind of irrelevant.
The only relevant thing is that McCain is going to make sure that the wealthy get another incredible tax break while everybody else suffers. And Obama is going to make sure that the guys like this who are working behind me tonight here in Northern Michigan, they're going to get a tax break. They're going to get relief. They're going to get help.
King: What do you make of this, Michael?
Moore: It's one of the tenets of John McCainism and George Bushism. I mean that's exactly what they've done in the last month. I mean the complete irony of this, that they have spread the wealth around to more wealthy people. They have bailed out wealthy people who were playing a high stakes game of risk and failed. They were using money that didn't exist, that wasn't theirs, to try to make more money.
Actually, when these guys behind me here if they were to ever write a check for money that they didn't have in the bank and actually use that check to buy something with it, they'd be arrested. It's called check kiting.
But that isn't what happens to Wall Street. That's not what happens to the CEOs and the hedge fund people. They get away with this. It's these people, McCain, his campaign, they stand for socialism for the rich. Obama and the Democrats stand for giving these guys and other people like them a break.
King: Let's say Obama promises tax cuts for 95 percent of the people. How do you do that and solve health care and all the other problems that need to be paid for?
Moore: Are you asking me if I were drawing up the next budget?
OK. Here's what you do. You end the war in Iraq. That's $10 billion a month that we're spending that could be spent on repairing our roads, building bridges, building schools, increasing our workforce of nurses -- all the things that we really need in this country. We could start by taking the money away from this war and the money away from crazy Pentagon ideas that haven't done us any good and have only hurt us. That's one really good place to begin to find the money that needs to happen.

To read more HERE.

Justice Department Pressed by Bush to Contest 200,000 Ohio Voters

Bush Undermines Democracy with Attack on 200,000 New Ohio Voters

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet.

AlterNet

How far will an already politicized Justice Department go to assist Republicans win on November 4?

As the 2008 presidential election heads into its final week, the current president threw a political wild card on table late Friday, when he asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the status of 200,000 Ohio voters.
George W. Bush's request, if honored, could be politically explosive. It would remind voters of the Department of Justice's partisan abuses of power in the scandal surrounding the firing of seven U.S. attorneys in 2006 who did not deliver 'voter fraud' convictions.
It could be a big distraction, drawing attention away from issues that call for legitimate DOJ intervention, such as shortages of voting machines in minority precincts in Virginia and Pennsylvania, compared to nearby white precincts. That disparity would violate existing civil rights law.
Or it could interject a complicating dynamic into the already heavily litigated Ohio general election, by adding the Department's weight to GOP legal claims that pre-emptively question the legitimacy of a close vote count in a key battleground state.
Either way, the Department must choose if it will remain silent or get involved in an action that would go well beyond its historic role of quietly monitoring elections and avoiding messages to voters.
"This is taking the politicization of this to a new level, and the last thing we need is for the elections officials and voters of Ohio to be put in a chaotic situation in the last days before the election," Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Washington Post, reacting to the White House request.
The White House, according to the same Post report, described its actions as a routine referral to a federal agency as requested by a member of Congress, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). Boehner had written to Mukasey early last week but received no response.
The Obama campaign reaction was to send the fourth letter this month to Mukasey urging he ensure the Department does not interfere "to satisfy desperate partisan political demands."
"For the Department now, in response to the intense politics of the moment, to abruptly intercede in the current work of state and local officials would inflict incalculable damage -- further and irreparable damage -- to your office and to the reputation of senior federal law enforcement," said Robert Bauer, Obama campaign counsel.

Bauer's "further" damage was a reference to media leaks by FBI officials confirming it was investigating ACORN, a low-income advocacy group, for voter registration issues. That disclosure violated Department rules and Bauer asked Mukasey to instruct a special prosecutor in the U.S. attorney firing scandal to investigate the leak. Like Beohner's request, Mukasey also did not respond to Bauer's request.
The Real Issue
At issue in the White House pressure tactics is how the GOP may be able to contest the vote count if the results are close.
Republicans in several battleground states have sought to challenge the validity of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations using a gray area of federal election law and error-prone databases.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) instructs states to use Social Security and driver's license databases to verify voter registrations, but leaves it up to states how to specifically do that. In Ohio, for example, the Secretary of State, Democrat Jennifer Brunner, has issued for local officials to follow.
The absence of specific federal guidelines on using the Social Security and state motor vehicle databases to verify registrations is compounded by another factor: the fact that these records, especially Social Security data, have error rates as high as 28.5 percent when used for verifying voter registrations.
These factors are behind the GOP's assertions that key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania are facing major ballot security crises that threaten the legitimacy of the vote.
In various lawsuits, the GOP has argued that registrations that did not match these databases be segregated and treated as a separate class of voters. The GOP said these voters should receive provisional ballots, which would have to be verified before being counted.
But, so far, most state and federal courts have rejected the GOP's legal arguments. Late last week, a Wisconsin court told that state's attorney general, a McCain campaign co-chair, that he did not have the authority to sue on this issue. Moreover, in Ohio, the GOP's lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it sided with Brunner. The Ohio secretary of state, a former judge, said her office had met HAVA's requirements by promulgating its own procedures to verify voter registrations.
Soon after the Supreme Court ruling, several Republican House members started lobbying the Justice Department to intervene. At the same time, Brunner issued new directives -- which have the force of law -- telling Ohio's 88 county election boards they count not bar anyone from voting because of 'no-match' voter registration issues.
The White House then asked the Justice Department to intervene after Brunner's latest directives.

USA: black future

Racism on November 4th?

Posted by Thers, Whiskey Fire

Alternet

Like many people this election season, I am curious to see if race is a barrier that can be cleared as Catholicism was in the 1960 election.

Molly was kind enough recently to share a heartwarming story with me relayed to her by two dedicated volunteers going door to door to get out the vote. The lady of the house answered the door and was cordial to the campaign workers. When they asked her who she thought she would vote for in the upcoming presidential elections she yelled back in to her husband to inquire who they were voting for. This piece alone intrigues me as I cannot imagine my spouse ever deferring to me in this manner, nor do I think she should just for the record. At any rate, the reply came immediately from within, "We're voting for the n-----". The woman unfazed by this answer repeated it to the campaign workers "We're voting for the n-----". (I pause here for dramatic effect...where to begin parsing this oddity.)
To begin with, I am shocked that the woman used the same language as her husband, apparently without any sort of embarrassment. My spouse, a much more cultivated person than myself, spends a large portion of her life covering my lack of social graces and attempting to refine the few I have. It also strikes one as odd that folks who would choose this particular descriptor of our fellow African-American citizens would also think it prudent to vote for Obama for president. The two behaviors seem at odds and represent to me the reason I find joy in going to work every day with people. They can always suprise you. The possibilities are never less than infinite. I am heartened by the prospect of individuals with enough insight to recognize that despite their own feelings about race, Obama could serve their interests. This is progress in some fashion. As opposed to the working/middle class folks voting republican, because of issues such as abortion, while many republican policies are decimating them economically.

Like many people this election season, I am curious to see if race is a barrier that can be cleared as Catholicism was in the 1960 election. Racism is as American as apple-pie. When I teach social work classes and we talk about race I begin the class by telling students that they must accept as fact that they are racists. This is not to imply that I think they are members of the Klu Klux Klan, skinheads or the like, but rather that racism is in the air and the water. We are all racist, it is merely a matter of degree. If you are a member of this culture you are a racist, because it could not be otherwise. I include myself in this indictment and believe that willingly acknowledging this is the only way to be conscious of our shared beliefs and begin questioning them. This piece by Kristof in the Times discusses the sort of subtle racism that I fear may have an impact in this election. Many people will give in to a gut level discomfort they feel about Obama as a candidate that they may not even be able to explain to themselves. How can we know in these circumstances if we are responding to the color of a man's skin or if we are really voting against him because we believe he wants to take our rifles away? We don't ...which is why I suppose the whole question intrigues me.
It is both sad and amusing to watch the right contort itself to both deny that it is racist all the while searching for racial proxies to fling at Obama i.e. he is muslim, he hates his white grandmother, he hangs out with black revolutionaries. I will be voting for Obama in part, because he wants to dialogue with african-american revolutionaries, white working class men and leaders of countries with a different world view. The 8 long years of ignoring those who thought differently has not worked well. As the country and the world grow closer together and more interdependent we need someone as our leader whose default setting for problem solving doesn't involve the military. Virtually no one wants to waste the resources and the lives those endeavors cost anymore. We need someone whose experience extends beyond prep schools and the sheltered world of old money.
This understanding of others is not an intellectual exercise, it involves a dialogue and some discomfort. I reflect upon the places in my own life where I really learned something about those who were different from myself and it was never in a classroom. It was sharing a room in the military with an african-american man from New Jersey and a Samoan man. It was clients early in my career who were brave and kind enough to let me know where my approach was condescending and operating on faulty assumptions. It is the continuing feedback from my coworkers about how we can make our agency more diverse and inclusive.We can only come together as a country and a world by having these discussions and questioning whether the things we hold as true really are.
If you have an interest in exploring your own biases as regards the 2008 election cycle go to Project Implicit to take a test that can help reveal some of your own unconscious biases.