Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Fissures Right Of Center QUOTE  OF THE DAY Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. - - Mahatma Gandhi JUNE 10th IN HISTORY: 1975 -- Rockefeller Commission report is released, detailing a secret & criminal CIA-sponsored domestic program called, CHAOS, which included keeping records on 300,000 persons & groups, & the infiltration by agents & provocateurs into black, anti-war & political movements in the US. RHINO HERE: RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE today is a fascinating, informative, historical look at the political  right wing of the world. A Fernand Braudel Center publication, these commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term. I urge you to click the link & read the whole thing. You'll be glad you did. But first a few links to articles watching over the Democratic Presidential race, and a heads up that the documentary on the Florida voter fraud, "Unprecedented: The 2000 Election" arrives on DVD & Video on June 24. You can pre-order it now through www.amazon.com, or call your local video store to request  they order it. If you're a netflix.com member, it's also a good idea to email them requesting "Unprecedented." The filmmakers also have a website at http://www.unprecedented.org . At last weekend's 'Take Back America" conference John Kerry & Howard Dean roused the left wing activists attending but all reports say Dennis Kucinich's shrub roast got the biggest cheers. - - "We don't need a second Republican Party" By Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com, 6/6/03 WASHINGTON -- The organizers of the Take Back America conference took pity on Missouri congressman and presidential candidate Richard Gephardt on Thursday. His videotaped address to an assembly of hundreds of progressive grassroots activists would probably have drawn jeers whenever it had been played, given that the crowd was nearly as angry with milquetoast Democratic centrists as it is with President Bush -- and unlikely to be content with a video when six of nine candidates had taken the time to grace the gathering in person. Yet had the video come as scheduled, after Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, had electrified the audience with an old-fashioned, red-faced, lectern-thumping populist sermon, it would have played like a parody of establishment banality. Cheers met the emcee's announcement that Gephardt was being put on hold, and the crowd streamed out of the auditorium at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel giddy with quixotic excitement and inspiration. Second Republican Party Left wing soft money? Till there's real campaign finance reform, we gotta play the game the way the game's played Liberals Meeting to Set '04 Strategy Labor, Rights Groups Focus on Getting Out the Vote to Help Democrats by Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post, 5/25/03 Major liberal organizations, from labor unions to civil rights groups, have begun to meet privately to develop a coordinated strategy to oppose President Bush's reelection in 2004. Their goal is to buttress the Democratic Party and its nominee by orchestrating voter mobilization and independent media in as many as a dozen battleground states. All of the organizations are free to accept unlimited contributions, or "soft money" from wealthy individuals, unions and corporations. These donations are the kind that the new campaign finance law prohibits political parties and federal candidates from collecting. Together, these organizations have the potential to target $40 million to $50 million in key states including Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The amount could be much higher if organized labor invests heavily and a new, pro-Democratic committee gearing up to run television advertisements is successful. In addition, these organizations are expected to play a crucial role in Election Day get-out-the-vote efforts. .. Liberal Meeting All the Dem candidates, except Kucinich, are proposing new health care systems that "expand coverage by building on the existing system rather than creating a new one." Kucinich, as with most issues, takes the more visionary approach. Universal Health Care Gets Boost - Democratic Rivals Push New Plans By Amy Goldstein and Dan Balz, Washington Post, 5/26/03 Democratic presidential candidates have resurrected universal health care -- an issue that produced one of the low points of Bill Clinton's presidency -- in a calculated gamble that the voters are ready for a new debate over providing access to health care coverage to all Americans. Four Democratic candidates have come forward with proposals to bring most of the 41 million Americans without insurance into the health care system, and others are in the process of refining theirs. Although the plans differ in some significant ways, they have two things in common: All are big and ambitious, and are far costlier than anything that has been proposed since Clinton. The proposals on the table represent an abandonment of the incremental steps favored by Democrats -- and Republicans -- since the Clinton health plan debacle of 1994, but they also demonstrate the lessons learned from that defeat. With one exception, the Democratic plans seek to expand coverage by building on the existing system rather than creating a new one. Universal Health Care 6:40:42 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Lunacy, or Policy? RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE          "Lunacy, or Policy?"          "By Immanuel Wallerstein ( iwaller@binghamton.edu )          "Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, Commentary No. 114, June 1, 2003 When the very Establishment, very responsible Financial Times, the representative newspaper of big capital, runs an editorial whose title is "Tax Lunacy" and whose subtitle is "The US administration throws prudence out of the window," you know that they must be very upset. The editorial concludes on this somber note: "For [the more extreme Republicans], undermining the multilateral international order is not enough, long-held views on income redistribution also require radical revision. In response to this onslaught, there is not much the rational majority can do: reason cuts no ice; economic theory is dismissed; and contrary evidence is ignored. But watching the world's economic superpower slowly destroy perhaps the world's most enviable fiscal position is something to behold." So while Bush and company are crowing about their victories in Iraq and in the U.S. Congress, and much of the world left writes in a tone of desperate dismay about these successes, perhaps we should look at the deep fissures within all those forces that might be termed "right of center" - worldwide, in the United States, and among the capitalist strata.... READ IT ALL AT: http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. 6:07:20 AM    comment

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