February 4, 2005

Heart of Democracy
When the War Comes Home
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

     I doubt that I’m the only one that finds the “election” in Iraq disingenuous and the American media’s coverage so propagandistic that it renders the 27 utterances of the word freedom in President Dubya’s inauguration speech meaningless. What goes almost unnoticed in this “war on terrorism” in Iraq is the similarities to that once ignoble disaster known as Vietnam. In that war too, in the year 1967, an election was held amidst the violence and carnage. The Americans heralded this as a great step forward for democracy in that war torn country with some 83 percent of the eligible residents voting. What a success this was to stem the tide of global communism, except for the fact that the US military by force of arms could not and did not win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. Just months later the Viet Cong launched the New Years Tet Offensive, which brought the war directly into the heart of Saigon nearly toppling our puppet democracy. [See article on page 7 this edition]
     Sadly our collective amnesia of our own history and the lack of historical education for our younger generations allows this Bush regime to repeat this mistake with ironic ignorance. The lesson is that you cannot impose democracy at the point of a gun from the outside, it can only be won from the inside by those who are willing to, as the state motto for New Hampshire says, “Live Free or Die.” You can’t artificially inseminate a people with this type of value for freedom. Unfortunately freedom and liberty are not the values that our returning troops in Iraq will be bringing home anytime soon.
     If the past is any precursor for the future, what we will once again discover is that the psychologically wounded, physically maimed and scarred veterans of this illegal war will eventually be heading home only to have their own personal traumas played out on the streets and in the homes of America. This will bring a sudden unexpected and inexplicable rise to both street crime and homelessness in our cities as these once proud-warriors-for-freedom are jettisoned back into the “peace time economy.” There will be no peace, only endless wars. Wars on drugs, wars on terrorism, wars for oil and wars to enforce global free trade. The money to pay for all of these current and future wars will come from the short-changing of the American taxpayer on education, healthcare and Social Security. The children of this short-changed system will be increasingly ignorant of their history and the media propaganda machine will support more general senility.
     The heart of our democracy will not be found in Baghdad, nor Columbus, Ohio but in places like Los Angeles where the future of our nation is played out on a daily, even hourly, basis to the tune of some 42 percent of the trans-Pacific container trade entering our ports. It is not a mistake of fate or chance that the only contenders for the office of mayor of this “island upon the land” are all center to left-progressive Democrats. Seeing as how LA and the San Pedro Harbor Area voted overwhelmingly, by some 70 percent, to cancel Bush’s next four years of deception. This next election here stands as a complete shutout to the neocons vision for America.
     The success of Los Angeles and indeed most of California as the world’s fourth largest economy can in many ways be traced back to early 20th Century progressive reforms that ended the privatization of water and electric utilities and regulated those that weren’t publicly owned. The challenge for the next mayor of Los Angeles, who I believe should be James Hahn, is to expand both the freedoms of it’s citizens while protecting the municipally owned enterprises from corporate plundering and making them and the city bureaucracies more accountable. No small order for any mayor, but Hahn needs to return to his populist-progressive roots to be the man-of-the-people he intended to be when he started. Clearly Bernard Parks can’t do this and Hertzberg, Villaraigosa and Alarcon should be running to kick Schwarzenegger’s “girly-man” ass out of Sacramento. They probably are.
     What I find baffling is how any of these Democratic candidates can support the regressive half-cent sales tax to hire more police officers—a regressive taxation strategy that plays into the thinking of those who would return this city to an era of conservatism. There are clearly better options—both for raising money from the property-owners whom the police disproportionately protect, and for spending it on programs—such as Toberman’s Gang Unit—that are more capable in fighting crime in ways that traditional policing is not. The ultimate protection against crime is not to lock up the bad guys, but to rehabilitate them and stop producing them in the first place.
     This is the sort of progressive solution we should be working on developing for the 21st Century for a democratic LA, the city that should be leading the nation in rethinking its role in democratization on every issue it faces, from crime to education to labor relations, environmental justice and all the rest.