marccooper

Red Crossed

In the immediate aftermath of Catastrophe Katrina, I urged my readers to contribute to my favorite relief organization, Operation USA. I am pleased that many of you did.

Now, my old compadre and Op USA chief Richard Walden has been burning up the keyboards in exposing some of the more unseemly aspects of the Red Cross. You might have caught his “The Red Cross Money Pit” op-ed piece in last Sunday’s L.A.Times.

If not, check out his recent bloggings on the same theme on the Huffington Post.

When you boil it all down, the national Red Cross cashes in big-time on Katrina-like disasters while the general public doesn’t realize that the Federal Government pays the Red Cross for its work. Says Walden:

No one seems to read Red Cross ads with any real subtlety: they do not rescue or medicate people; they do shelter them, feed them and help them relocate via motel/hotel vouchers...all of which is reimbursed via pre-existing contracts as long as there is a state or federal disaster declaration.

They can indeed spend the money they have collected for Katrina -- $750 million as of September 19th -- on people and community institutions in need beyond what they will get back from FEMA and the state governments; but there is no history of them doing so to any significant extent. Local chapters, yes; it's their community's disaster. The national Red Cross, unlikely; they were the ones who did not appear in New Orleans and pulled out their local chapter from its own community.

Nevertheless, something like 80% of charitable donations provoked by Katrina go to the Red Cross which also gets the lion’s share of flakking from celebrities and the Feds.

It’s a pity because that money could be so better spent by smaller, more agile, more grass-roots groups like… well… Operation USA!

Meanwhile, a note to my good friend Arianna: Dahling, there’s a Red Cross banner ad (!) on the top of the HuffPo page where Walden’s postings appear. I know, if anybody can, you can make it disappear with a mere snap of your fingers!

ANSWER Is Not The Answer Part II

A few more straggler pieces have popped up analyzing last weekend's anti-war demos and the disproportionate role exercised by delusional fringe groups like ANSWER.

Dennis Perrin, with whom I have had some sharp political differences, offers a biting first-person account.  He quotes his anti-war daughter looking at the ANSWER robots up on the stage and incredulously asking: "Who the hell are these people?" Excellent question!

The Nation magazine has weighed in with a brief dispatch that, quite predictably and unfortunately, glosses over the glaring liabilities of an ANSWER-led protest and ends up being one more thinly-disguised and uncritical event press release. The problems with ANSWER go way beyond a "lack of political nuance and a bullying attitude." It's rather a matter of a massive citizen's movement being hijacked and crippled by a few dozen extremist loonies. 

The debate we've been having on this site for the last few days ought to be taking place in the pages of The Nation.

The Nation is the outlet best positioned to air this controversy. It needs to trust its readers more and not be so timid in confronting the really tough strategic questions. A magazine devoted to the peace movement ought to be thinking twice as hard as anyone else about just who should be leading it.  Maybe my editor will call me up and excitedly ask me to write a piece on "Why ANSWER Isn't The Answer." I'll let you know.

I Have A Dream [UPDATED]

Thanks to C-SPAN, I watched at least some of this weekend’s anti-war demonstrations with a great measure of ambivalence and even wonderment. To be honest, I watched for about 20 minutes until I began to overdose on the shrill rhetoric from a bunch of shouting nobodies on the rostrum. Like it or not, they were the voice given to the sea of people who actually turned out.

Perhaps as many as 200,000 people or more participated in rallies from coast-to-coast with the largest gathering taking place in Washington.

No question that there is a growing frustration and even dread about where the war in Iraq is leading – if anywhere. Or if it has been worth the bloodshed until now. And the demonstrations were a good opportunity to manifest that mounting discomfort.

That said, there are only two ways the anti-war movement can achieve its goals. Either through what the Europeans calls “extra-parliamentary” methods i.e. the disruption of business-as-usual and rendering the country ungovernable. Or through a political strategy by which there is a strategic shift in The Establishment.

Yes, yes, I’ve heard all the facile rhetoric many times before about an “inside/outside” – "suites and the streets” strategy that would combine both approaches. But in the end, it’s really one or the other. Either you overthrow the government, or you force it to change its policies.

Going way out on a limb, I would say the former option– the collapse of the American government via street demonstrations—is rather a long-shot. Which means that the peace movement will achieve its goals primarily and only by building a political coalition broad enough and forceful enough and credible enough to provoke a sea-change in policy.

That, in turn, means that at least a significant, if not a majority, slice of the Democratic Party has to be on board. Unfortunate, but true. That means including not only those who sign on to the 'Out Now' mantra of the current movement, but also those who have a less drastic view -- but still oppose the current course. The war issue could be “nationalized” in next November’s congressional election if that movement were broadened sufficiently. A Democratic upset in the mid-terms could force the Bush administration to change course and/or could lead to a Democratic victory and a change in war policy in ’08.

Yet, not a single top Democratic official publicly associated him or herself with Saturday’s street protests (sorry, Reps. Conyers and McKinney don't qualify as "top" officials). Not just Mister Kerry and Madame Clinton were missing. But equally AWOL were outspoken critics of the war like Howard Dean and Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy – just to mention the better-known.

This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but only a bit. Much can be said about the timidity of the Democrats when it comes to staking out a position – any position—on the war. And I have not flinched from saying so, rather repeatedly.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the peace movement’s organizational logistics remain in the hands of fringe groups like ANSWER, is because they eagerly fill a gaping void left by more moderate forces. Democrats and liberals have not stepped forward – so they get trampled by the few dozen fervent comrades from the glorious Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Fundamentalist-Leninist grouplet that runs ANSWER.

There is another coalition that helps organize the peace rallies – United For Peace and Justice. Somewhat more moderate than ANSWER, UFPJ nevertheless has few and only tenuous links with mainstream political forces. At various times over the last few years UFPJ has threatened to resist getting bullied by the cultish members of ANSWER, but in the end it always capitulates in the name of “unity.” Such was the case with this past weekend activities in which ANSWER once again set the themes and the tone of the protests.

There's an odd and defeating dynamic that pervades these activist groups -- a dynamic that often leads young critical thinkers to abandon them after a short infatuation. The inner circle, the feverish full-timer activists are often members of tiny, Marxist groups, "vanguard parties" or their "mass organizations." These devoted militants dedicate all of their time, all of their energy and all of their lives to "building" these miniscule sects. Some of the more entrepreneurial among them even figure out a way to make a living out of their politics.

Their relentless, round-the-clock energy allows them to easily dominate the tedious, mind-numbing meetings and planning sessions that go into organizing large-scale protests. Who else but a humourless party-builder could survive those marathon "consensus" sessions. But God Forbid anyone should actually criticize any of them or the 'line' they impose on the demos. Anyone who dares to challenge them is immediately called out as a McCarthyite -- as if joining one of these sects offers some implied warranty of immunity from criticism. When confronted with this cheap blackmail of being branded as "red-baiters," the more reasonable liberals and "progressives" almost inevitably fold  and the cycle repeats itself. And then people actually wonder why the peace movement can't attract more mainstream political support?

Who could imagine a nationally-known Democrat pol showing up to one of Saturday's rallies unless motivated by some sort of electoral death-wish?  Show up to be joined on the stage by George Galloway wearing a Palestinian kefiyah? Or by the kefiyah-draped leaders of ANSWER shouting out how they stand for the Cuban Revolution? Indeed, the kefiyah was the de rigueur accessory worn by countless speakers – speakers from little-known and tiny solidarity groups loudly condemning U.S. policy not only in Iraq and Cuba, but also in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Haiti etc. etc. And a plethora of speakers condemning Israel (without finding a way to equaly condemn the suicide-bombers).

I’m not even going to deal with the justice or legitimacy of each of the above causes. But you don’t need as much as an abacus to figure out that with each of the above-named planks you shrink, not widen the anti-war platform.  There ought to be one single issue that admits someone to this movement: you simply oppose Bush policy in Iraq. Period.

Instead, the organizers of the protests imposed a political litmus test that narrows down possible supporters to the smallest, rather than the largest, common denominator. Given that its leadership comes from the political margin, the peace movement needs to be built from the sidelines inward, not the reverse. This works wonderfully for the marginal. Their political isolation only reconfirms their self-righteous purity. Hell, if a Democrat actually showed up on the dais, the organizers would no doubt claim they were being "co-opted." But it sucks for everyone else.

I have no idea if under different circumstances, with a different crew onstage, a few Senators might have been lured into the mix. I do know that the current configuration makes that impossible-- for now and for the immediate, crucial future.

This is a failure not only of the Democrats themselves, but also of the clearer-thinking folks inside the peace movement who ought to know better. I have said it before, so why not again? These more moderate voices need to resist the political blackmail of true-believers of the ANSWER variety and simply push them out of the leadership of the movement. At least they must if they want that movement to be something beyond an impotent theater of self-expression.

I can anticipate some of the reaction to this notion. “Oh, Marc,” I will be told, “Who cares what the idiots on the stage said? You don’t really think that the scores of thousands who came to Washington actually listened to the speeches from the stage, do you?"

My answer: Of course not. There aren’t five hundred people in America, let alone a hundred thousand, who could sit or stand through more than five minutes of that drivel.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there were antiwar speakers on that platform – just two or three instead of 45 or 50—whose words could inspire not only the protestors, but also move other millions into some deeper sort of reflection and action?

Wasn’t that the case in the great 1963 civil rights march on Washington? Have you ever in your life met a single person stupid enough to say that the only important thing that day 42 years ago was merely showing up in D.C. because it really didn’t matter what Martin Luther King actually said? That no one was really listening?

Why do we accept such a miserably lower standard for the anti-war movement?

A related post By Nathan Newman here.

Update: Steve Gilliard has a wonderful post on why A.N.S.W.E.R. is not the answer. He says, among other things:

"I watched an hour or so of the rally and I wanted to smash my screen.

Why can't they have adults who can speak in words, not slogans.

Here's a hint, Palestine is really unpopular in the US, even among liberals. You do not gain support for the Palestinians by having some campus clown talk about the injustices of the Palestinian people. You know, why not have a real Palestinian from Palestine who doesn't speak in slogans. You know, but a human face on it. And leave the support of terrorists like FARC at home, after all, you can't call Israelis terrorists when you're praising drug dealing terrorists."

"...Let's face facts. ANSWER are parasites who use our good intentions to push their agenda. So instead of rejoycing about the massive turnout, a hint that Bush's war is extremely unpopular, we're debating the speaker list and their abuse of their audience.

The reason ANSWER does this shit is because no one stands up to them...People can pretend that the CSPAN coverage didn't matter, but it did. It mattered to millions of liberals who saw that circus and said they would pass on the next protest. It mattered to people who financially support such protests. It mattered to polticians and their staffs. It matters. How you conduct yourself matters and what you represent matters..."

Gilliard also publishes the list of speakers from the protest podium. I reprint it without comment. None is necessary:

* Jessica Lange, actor
* George Galloway, British Member of Parliament
    * Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general
    * Cindy Sheehan*
    * Dolores Huerta, Co-Founder, United Farm Workers of America
    * Malik Rahim, New Orleans community activist who survived Hurricane Katrina
    * Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
    * Ralph Nader
    * Mahdi Bray, Exec. Dir., Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation
    * Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, attorney/co-founder, Partnership for Civil Justice, National Lawyers Guild
    * Elias Rashmawi, National Council of Arab Americans
    * Brian Becker, National Coordinator, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
    * Lynne Stewart, human rights attorney
    * Rev. Al Sharpton*
    * Anita Dennis, mother of Iraq War veteran / resister
    * Clayola Brown, President of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Vice President of UNITE HERE*
    * Ben Dupuy, Former Ambassador At Large for the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
    * Jos Williams, President, President of the Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO
    * Michael Berg, father of Nicholas Berg
    * Christine Araquel, Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines
    * Andy Thayer, Equality Campaign
    * Curtis Muhammed, Community Labor Union of New Orleans
    * Margaret Prescod, Global Women's Strike
    * Hadi Jawad, founder of Crawford Peace House
    * Chris Silvera, Teamsters Black Caucus
    * Musa Al-Hindi, Al-Awda National
    * Michel Shehadeh, L.A-8 defendant, a Palestinian activist framed COINTELPRO-style
    * Nancy Wolforth, Executive Vice President, AFL-CIO
    * Manuel Santos, Socialist Front of Puerto Rico
    * Brenda Stokely, Million Worker March, New York City Labor Against the War
    * Peta Lindsay, Youth and Student A.N.S.W.E.R. Student, Howard University student
    * Mounzer Sleiman, National Council of Arab Americans
    * Macrina Cardenas, Mexicanos Sin Fronteras
    * Jeanette Caceres, Spoken word artist from New York University
    * Gloria La Riva, National Committee to Free the Five
    * Riya Ortiz, Network in Solidarity with the People of the Philippines, Campaign for Justice Not War
    * Larry Holmes, Troops Out Now Coalition
    * Chuck Kaufman, Nicaragua Network
    * Women's Anti-Imperialist League
    * Representative of Bayan USA
    * Eugene Puryear, Youth and Student A.N.S.W.E.R. Student, Howard University student" link

 

A Modest Proposal

NOTE: This is Andrew Gumbel signing off after five days of guest-blogging. It’s been real. Thanks, Marc. See y’all in cyberspace.

Remember how, in the wake of 9/11, Clear Channel radio drew up a list of songs it no longer considered appropriate for airplay because they were unpatriotic, or offensive, or simply in bad taste? Top of their list was John Lennon’s Imagine, which you have to admit is indeed a mawkish, revolting rejection of all the values this country holds dear and could only, in those anxious days, have served to offer aid and comfort to the enemy.

Clear Channel’s unwavering sense of public service went far and deep. Out went Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire, The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian, Jump by Van Halen,Talking Heads’ Burning Down The House and many, many more. Sometimes, this culture just needs to be saved from itself, don’t you think?

Well, the country once again finds itself in times of trouble, and although the danger is now from the forces of nature rather than al-Qa’ida, I think it might be opportune once again to review the songs liable to pop up on the radio dial and purge the ones that are unhelpful – or worse – when a full-force hurricane is wreaking havoc along the Gulf coast for the second time in a month.

I’ve been going through my music collection and can’ t help but be struck how shockingly irresponsible most of the artists are when it comes to disaster preparedness. Any time a singer-songwriter mentions a hurricane, in fact, the impulse is not to clear out but to move toward it. Take this typically blasé piece of sentimental tripe, an old John Hiatt tune (also covered by Aaron Neville) called Feels Like Rain:

Batten down the hatches
But keep your heart out on your sleeve
A little bit of stormy weather, that’s no cause for us to leave
Just stay here baby, in my arms
Let it wash away the pain
And it feels like rain

He actually finds the idea of riding out the hurricane romantic! Quick, run a FEMA tractor over his CDs!!

The Cowboy Junkies, in Southern Rain, even stoop so low as to make fun of people who follow government evacuation orders:

And it will never cease to amaze me
How a little rain can drive folks crazy
When I'd trade all my blue skies gladly
For your blue eyes, crooked smile
And a steady downpour

Well, that’s the last time I listen to them.

The Animals got into trouble after 9/11 for We Gotta Get Out Of This Place. Four years on, I’m altogether more exercised about the one that begins “There is a house in New Orleans…”

Haven’t they heard? No there isn’t!!

There’s so much more: Bruce Springsteen vowing to drive all night “through the wind, through the rain” just so he can buy his baby a pair of shoes (Drive All Night). Tell me about it when he gets tossed off the freeway and comes sobbing to the great teat of Mamma Government for a new truck… Or Neil Young berating himself for not loving his hurricane better and wondering why he keeps “getting blown away”. WHY DO YOU THINK, YOU MORON?

People, we are in a national emergency, and I can’t do this on my own. My resources are limited, and I need you to help me compile an exhaustive list of suspect songs so we can prevail upon the good souls at Clear Channel to do the right thing -- once again. These are dark times, and the numbers of the valiant are few.

You will help me out, won’t you?

Dying like animals... or worse?

NOTE: Still Andrew Gumbel guesting in the hotseat.

With another hurricane blowing in, Human Rights Watch has an absolute horror story about the last one. Just before Katrina struck, the authorities at the New Orleans city jail facility known as Templeman III simply upped and left, abandoning hundreds of prisoners who were locked up without food or water and, as the flood water rose, found themselves without power, fresh air, toilet facilities, or -- most pertinently -- any means of escape. How many died as a result remains unclear, but bodies were seen floating in the floodwaters when relief finally came after four days. Even now, almost three weeks later, 571 prisoners remain unaccounted for.

The most graphic part of HRW's account:

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmate’s last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench. 

“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation. 

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility. 

...

Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows. 

”We started to see people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows,” Brooke Moss, an Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. “They were wavin' em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows . . . Later on, we saw a sign, I think somebody wrote `help' on it.” 

As of yesterday, signs reading “Help Us,” and “One Man Down,” could still be seen hanging from a window in the third floor of Templeman III. 

Several corrections officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the 1990s. 

“It was complete chaos,” said a corrections officer with more than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and said: “Ain't no tellin’ what happened to those people.” 

I'm inclined to say the prisoners were treated like animals, but actually all evidence I gathered during my time in the disaster area suggests no animal would have been knowingly consigned to such a fate. Thousands of dogs and cats and other domestic creatures made homeless by Katrina were lovingly rescued and taken to special shelters (including one on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge where their minders, bizarrely, included numerous Scientologists). Prisoners, though, are apparently unworthy of such attentions.

Turns out, of course, that Katrina may only have been a warm-up act. Will Rita give everyone a chance to get it right this time, so they deploy not only advance aid consignments but also the appropriate dose of basic human consideration? Or does the nightmare of Templeman III suggest we are dealing with a very ugly aspect of human behaviour here, one that has existed for a long time in certain parts of the American South, that even a Category 4 hurricane and a face-to-face encounter with destruction and death cannot mitigate?

Enraptured by Rita (2)

Well the last one may have looked like a six-week-old fetus, but this one looks like... (click for full size)

Whatever will the Christian right have to say about this??? (Via Crooks and Liars)

Enraptured by Rita

NOTE: This is still Andrew Gumbel sitting in for Marc.

It dawned on me, when I was visiting the hurricane-ravaged Mississippi coast last week, that the scene before me was not unlike the Christian fundamentalist vision of the Rapture -- that moment when all righteous believers are transported to Heaven in an instant, and the rest of us are left to grapple with sin, chaos, satanic tyranny and very, very bad weather. Here, on the side of I-35 in Waveland, deep in the American Bible Belt, was row upon row of abandoned cars, their owners nowhere in sight, with other storm-tossed cars piled awkwardly on top along with the occasional sweater or refrigerator door. Homes and businesses were simply abandoned, in some cases with the screen doors left wide open. Waveland City Hall was simply wiped off the planet.

With Hurricane Rita now barreling in across the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Category 5 winds and yet more damage of historic proportions, the fundamentalists themselves are clearly thinking their own apocalyptic thoughts. "People need to pick up that blessed Book and they will see that all of these things are supposed to come to pass," reads one typical post-Katrina, pre-Rita fundamentalist website entry. "The prophesies in the Bible are being fulfilled every day. People, please repent before it is too late."

According to a Mississippi church called These Last Days Ministries, the hurricanes are a harbinger of the Tribulation, the turbulent period immediately preceding the return of Jesus Christ and the Last Judgement. The best thing to do, in fact, if you find yourself in the path of the storm is not to evacuate or rely on FEMA but rather stick a crucifix on your front door and hope for the best. If you purchase "Heaven's Personal Protection Packet" (yours for $5, plus $3 shipping and handling), you will learn how to do this to maximum effect: "Wooden crucifixes adhere better to the doors when the aluminum strap is removed from the back. Put a light coat of cement on the back of the crucifix and then press it to the outside of the door."

Good to know.

There's plenty more babbling along these lines all over fundamentalist cyberspace. We've already had the theory that Katrina was God's punishment for Louisiana abortion clinics, on the basis that a satellite picture of the storm resembled a six-week-old fetus. Now one site suggests the hurricanes are a conspiracy going all the way back to the Middle Ages aimed specifically at the demolition of American civilization. Gotta love this line: "There is far more to the hurricanes than meets the eye, for the agenda of the Prieure de Sion is global revolution and world domination, not weather research."

Will the politicians take advantage of the fears and dreams of their evangelical constituents? (Already I've seen evidence that government relief on the ground is being outsourced to faith-based organizations, but perhaps that is a separate issue.) Or is this one time when all the political blather about loving Jesus hits the hard brick wall of reality -- a reality in which the rush for federal dollars, and the frantic reaching for exposed rear ends, trumps all the usual insincere pieties?

On the subject of insincere pieties, you could all do worse than to watch Kinky Friedman's hilarious new animated commercial to promote his insurgent campaign for Texas governor. Watch it, and tell me if you think his needling of the Jesus-spouting mainstream pols is a) funny and b) will win or lose him votes, especially at a time when the follies of humankind are being humbled so by the awe-inspiring forces of nature.

Election reform? What election reform? (2)

NOTE: Another guest post by Andrew Gumbel

It seems I may have under-estimated the impact of the Carter-Baker commission's recommendation of a voter-verifiable paper audit trail on electronic voting machines. Already, two of the country's toughest hold-outs against a paper trail, Cathy Cox of Georgia and Linda Lamone of Maryland, are caving and, at the very least, using the commission report as a cover for the multiple other pressures they face on this issue.

Cox, Georgia's Secretary of State who has ambitions to run for governor next year, has out-and-out embraced the paper trail, while Lamone, who heads the Maryland State Board of Elections, says she will now give it active consideration. Both women were instrumental in making early statewide buys of Diebold machinery, spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars even though they were both told the touch-screen machines weren't up to snuff, and then expended considerable energy covering up for Diebold's shortcomings and stonewalling on demands for public accountability, including proper paper recounts. (Note to Bush-Diebold conspiracy theorists: they are both Democrats.) Neither are friends of the cause of representative democracy -- for reasons I lay out in detail in my new book Steal This Vote -- so their capitulation is cause to cheer. Loudly.

Shameless plug dept.: For those of you in the LA area, I will doing a book reading tomorrow (Thurs) night at 7pm at Dutton's in Brentwood, and another next Wednesday, Sept 28, at 2000 Plus Bookstore in Long Beach, also at 7pm.

Election reform? What election reform?

NOTE: This is Andrew Gumbel guest-blogging again.

I thought I’d wait a day or so to see if anyone had much good to say about the major report co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker on the dire state of elections in this country and how to fix them. But it seems the work of their Commission on Federal Election Reform, now concluded, has received a near-universal thumbs-down – most notably from dissenting members of the commission itself.

This, unfortunately, is what you get when you take one prominent Republican and one prominent Democrat and try to pretend that the combination will produce enlightenment and fairness and a just representation of the public interest. It ain’t going to happen, especially if you happen to believe (as I do) that the real problem with American politics lies not with one party or the other but with the two-party system itself. Given the long history of contempt for the electorate and for ballot-box integrity displayed by both Democrats and Republicans, hoping for progressive electoral reform from the two of them conjoined is a bit like inviting rival gangs of thieves to join forces to advise you on how best to secure your worldly goods.

I don’t think everything in the Carter-Baker report is bad – not by a long chalk – and they themselves stress the need for nonpartisanship over bipartisanship. In the end, though, the report reflects just too much of the cross-party haggling that went into its make-up. It argues, valiantly, for fitting the new generation of lousily programmed electronic voting machines with an independently verifiable paper audit trail – no small victory, given the contentiousness of the debate over Diebold and the other touch-screen machine manufacturers – but goes nowhere far enough in calling for thorough public oversight of the questionable software put into the machines in the first place. It calls, rightly, for a clean-up of the country’s notoriously unreliable voter registration rolls, but then plunges deep into voter suppression territory by advocating an absurdly over-restrictive voter ID requirement.

What is saddest is the commissioners’ evident powerlessness to change some of the most fundamental things about the system that need changing. It is utterly anomalous that certain US states -- especially in the South -- continue to disenfranchise ex-felons who have fully paid off their debt to society. But the best report can do is ask, pretty please, if those states would be so kind as to change their minds. Ain’t going to happen, certainly not in Republican-controlled states where most ex-felons are poor and/or black and likely to lean Democrat. Likewise, the United States is virtually alone among established democracies in failing to provide its electoral candidates with equal, unpaid access to the broadcast media. But the report merely “encourages” the networks to provide five minutes of serious coverage of the issues every night in the month running up to any given election. Don’t hold your breath.

That said, there is some good stuff, especially on imposing uniform nationwide standards on registration and provisional ballots. (Inconsistent rules and practices from state to state, and from county to county, are one of the major factors behind the dysfunctions of American elections because of the undue political influence they have historically encouraged.) Some people regard the commission appointment of James Baker, the Bush family consigliere who held up the Republican end of the dogfight over Florida in the wake of the 2000 election, as akin to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. But I prefer to see him in more brutally realistic terms as someone with the White House’s ear who might actually be able to get a few things done.

It’s going to be modest at best, though. For more details, I’d urge you to read the provocative analyses of the ever-excellent Rick Hasen of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Dan Tokaji of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and Tova Wang of The Century Foundation. Wang perhaps puts it best when she says the voter ID question seeks to put blame for fraudulent elections on the individual voter when, far more often, it is the politicians and the administrators who are at fault. She goes on:

As I and others have documented repeatedly (see here, here, and here) voter fraud at the polling place is not our major problem, and identification requirements serve to disenfranchise many groups of voters.

Here's what the problems are in American elections today: too few—not too many—people vote; the voter registration system is not working for voters or elections administrators; voters are still systematically disenfranchised, due to such policies as felon disenfranchisement, flawed felon purges, inaccessible polling sites, misallocation of voting machines, and inappropriate challenges at the polls; voters are individually disenfranchised by continued, often race based, voter intimidation and deceptive practices; and there is a general mistrust of the election system by the American people.

Why don't we start there instead.

Re-engineering New Orleans

NOTE: Andrew Gumbel here, sometimes known on this site as modestproposal. Thanks for the introduction, Marc. Welcome, gang. Feeling a little like the kid from the back row suddenly playing teacher. Don't hold back your spitballs on my account. But, please, spit them nicely, wontcha?

The Bush administration could use a really good engineer to help rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf coast. But, as news reports over the past few days have suggested, it seems the engineer they have picked is strictly of the political variety -- old Turd Blossom himself, Karl Rove. And that makes me wonder if the cynicism of the US political system isn't about to sink to unprecedented new depths.

We've already seen the iniquities of redrawing district boundaries for congressional and state legislative races. Fewer and fewer races are even remotely competitive -- last November's elections have been described by Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy as "the least competitive in history" -- which means voters have fewer and fewer reasons to get out of bed on election day.

But New Orleans offers up a whole new twist on this sorry scenario. Since 80 per cent of the city is water-damaged and prone to demolition, and since opinion polls show as many as 40 per cent of the city's former residents may never be coming back, Rove and his team of political engineers have a unique opportunity to refashion a hardcore Democratic city in their own image. In other words, they no longer need to worry about gerrymandering district boundaries; they can just gerrymander the population within those boundaries instead.

How can they do that? In any number of ways: by razing whole swaths of public housing, especially in the Ninth Ward, and by encouraging unfettered real-estate speculation on a scale that would all but exclude lower-income groups (read: poor blacks who either vote Democrat or not at all) from areas where they previously lived, often under severely straitened circumstances. Already, there is talk (from the Heritage Foundation, among others) of private takeovers of public property including school buildings and -- one assumes -- public housing. Inevitably, any exercise in social re-engineering will involve some measure of racial re-engineering: New Orleans before the flood was two-thirds African American, with a disturbingly high correlation between skin color and socio-economic status.

When I was in the disaster region last week, I heard a lot of stories of evacuee families being split up and shipped off -- either by bus or by plane -- to different parts of the country, in some cases without any indication of where they were heading until they were already on their way. Those stories, in turn, have led to rumors that the Bush administration is engaged in a crude exercise in population transfer, breaking up what polity New Orleans could lay claim to and dispersing it to unabashedly red states like Idaho, Utah and Texas.

My own take is that the pattern of dispersal is perhaps less crude and more complicated, but based nonetheless on the straightforward logic of political patronage. The red states in question almost certainly volunteered to take the evacuees, and were almost certainly promised a certain flow of federal money in exchange. The Rovean mindset would have taken a particular interest in Republican state administrations that could use a little boost, and a perfect case in point is Governor Rick Perry, George W.'s successor in Texas, whose anemic job approval ratings were making him vulnerable in next year's re-election battle. Now, thanks to the efforts of FEMA in Houston, Dallas and Austin, among other places (at one stage notably more energetic than those in the disaster area itself), Governor Perry is in the spotlight, looking good and riding high once again in public opinion.

On a rather brutal realpolitik level, one has to admire what Karl Rove is doing, just as, in another era, one might have admired the sheer organizational chutzpah of the Tweed Ring in New York or the Gas Ring in Philadelphia. It's an impressively ruthless way of running a political machine. But it's no way to manage the biggest natural disaster in the country's history.