Don't Vote for Deputy Dawg. posted by Richard Seymour

Oddly enough, the above appeal would be taken by many American liberals as a heretical cry to vote for Bush. Having consulted some acquaintances in the US who are more left-wing than most but nevertheless support Kerry, I came across a number of consistent themes, which I'll now seek to despatch.

Kerry Will Not Cut Taxes for the Rich...

Bush's disgraceful policy of slashing taxes disproportionately for the highest income earners revolted liberal voters. Over the whole four years of his term, the accumulated tax cuts would be distributed as follows: 36.3% to the top 1%, 17% to the next 4% and 26.4% to the next 15%. Kerry has promised to repeal these tax-cuts. Few liberals noticed, however, that Clinton launched a highly regressive tax plan in 1997 which would "give the top one percent more in tax cuts than the bottom 20 percent of the population". Clinton allied himself with the Republicans in 1999 to introduce tax cuts for the wealthy (cuts in capital gains tax, the gradual abolition of inheritance tax, reduction in taxes for higher-earning married couples, extension of tax-relief in private pensions to higher income earners). The proportion of corporate profits paid in taxes shrank from 41 percent in 1989 to 31 percent in 1998.

Kerry himself has himself announced a pro-corporate agenda, boasting that "99 percent of American businesses will get a tax cut under the Kerry-Edwards plan". He has reacted to Republican tax cuts proposals by proffering a Democrat "watered-down" version of the same, a movement redolent of Clinton's "triangulation" strategy. It is a simple matter of record that no matter how right-wing the Democrats are in opposition, they will always beat that record once in office. Kerry offers no reason to hope he will militate against that trend.

Kerry Will Protect Civil Liberties...

Despite the fact that John Kerry voted for the Patriot Act, many liberals hope he will prevent further erosions of civil liberties if he gains a plurality. They take comfort from recent criticisms that Kerry has made of the Act. Those notwithstanding, he still supports "95% of it" as his website says. Newsweek recently noted that "in reality Kerry is not so far from Bush in his views on the Patriot Act. The Massachusetts senator claims he not only stands by his vote for the legislation, but that he authored most of the law’s money-laundering provisions and thinks some aspects of the act actually need strengthening (like improving intelligence information sharing)." Kerry has never been shy of supporting state intrusions into private life. During the 1990s, he and John McCain campaigned together for companies producing encryption devices which allowed citizens to keep their messages private to be forced to include 'clipper chips' for the government to acces those messages. Kerry now promises to "enhance our collective security by creating a new 'North American Security Perimeter' to coordinate customs, immigration and law enforcement policies to better protect the region from terrorist threats."

His record as a drugs war hawk ought to force his liberal supporters to pause. As Johann Hari (amazingly enough) pointed out in The Independent, Kerry

dedicated an entire senatorial inquiry in 1989 to denouncing the Reagan administration's softness on international drug suppliers. His principal advisor on the subject today - and the man tipped by some commentators to become his Secretary of State - is Rand Beers, who defected last year from his role as Bush's counter-terrorism advisor. Throughout the 1990s, Beers was the primary architect of the US policy of "taking the fight to the drug-growers" - launching massive chemical attacks on farmers in foreign countries in an attempt to prevent their crops ever reaching America's shores.

...

Sean Donohue, a US journalist who works with the Colombia Support Network, has documented the human cost. "In January 2001, I visited a government-funded yucca co-operative that was intended to help farmers find an alternative to growing coca," he explains. "The co-operative had been fumigated and the entire yucca crop [which is, of course, totally legal] had been destroyed. One woman explained she had invested everything she had in the co-op and now had no way to feed her children."

A study by Ecuador's Pontificia University discovered that people living near the sprayed areas have shown symptoms of chronic poisoning and temporary blindness since the aerial poisoning began. "There have been cases of babies born with deformities... The impact of glyphosate will be lasting, because not all of its effects are seen one day to the next," it found.

This issue, of course, overlaps with foreign policy, to which I now turn.

John Kerry Won't Fight Preemptive Wars...

John Kerry is for preemption, so that one's dead before its even got off the ground:

Kerry on Friday offered some support for one of the most controversial aspects of President Bush's national security policy, even as he criticized the president for not reforming intelligence agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"Am I prepared as president to go get them before they get us if we locate them and have the sufficient intelligence? You bet I am," he said at a news conference at his Washington headquarters.

...

Kerry said the intelligence needs to be improved so that the word of a U.S. president "is good enough for people across the world again."

But he added, "I will never allow any other country to veto what we need to do and I will never allow any other institution to veto what we need to do to protect our nation."'

Kerry supported Bush's preemptive war on Iraq and has still not quite figured out how to criticise it without opposing it. The net message so far is that Kerry would do it better than Bush, which is hardly a difference of principle. (For comparison, imagine two released murder suspects bragging to each other about how quickly and efficiently they can stick a knife in a passerby without getting into a mess with the police and public etc.) On Israel , Kerry is even more fundamentalist than the Bush administration, as his campaign material affirms:

John Kerry has always voted to maintain critical foreign aid to our ally Israel, resisting any attempts to cut it over his years in the Senate. In the early 1990s, he fought President Bush when his administration restricted aid to Israel through the loan guarantees program ...

John Kerry has always believed the US must stand solidly behind Israel at the UN and other international organizations. He recognizes the UN must establish more credibility on Arab-Israeli matters and would never hesitate to wield a US veto on the Security Council in the face of anti-Israel/anti-Zionist resolutions ...

Kerry co-sponsored the Syria Accountability Act, which includes a ban on the export of military and dual use items to Syria. He believes that “we must ensure that Syria does not acquire and distribute additional weapons thereby exasperating tensions in the Middle East, raising potential threats to Israel, and undermining arms control.” ...

John Kerry understands that a nuclear armed Iran is unacceptable. He believes the failure of the Bush Administration to thwart Iran’s efforts to amass nuclear weapons poses a real threat to the safety and security of Israel, the US and the rest of the free world.

From out their own mouths do they most damn themselves. John Edwards is even more fanatical than Kerry, as Stephen Zunes notes. Edwards was a fervent cheerleader for the war, going out of his way to defend Bush when the sceptical voices were elevating in number and volume. He and Kerry both support Ariel Sharon's annexations of parts of the West Bank, defended Israel when it faced criticism for directing military operations in civilian areas and even criticised President Bush when he called for Israel to desist from some of its operations in the West Bank.

Kerry Will Protect the Supreme Court from the Hard Right...

Astonishingly enough, most liberals - if pushed - will concede that the really pressing issue from them is who sits on the Supreme Court. It really does seem that this is the touchstone issue for terrified liberals (they always mention how 'scary' Bush is). The argument is that a Democrat like Kerry will never put fundamentalists and fruit loops like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. This does not bear a moment's examination.

The Democrats precisely did vote fundies onto the supreme court - in fact, they voted Scalia onto the Supreme Court 98-0. Clarence Thomas was confirmed 52-48, with 11 Democratic senators putting him over the top in a Senate controlled by the Democratic majority. True, these were still Republican appointments, but look again at the record:

* Clinton packed the courts with reactionaries, specifically selecting appointees who would be acceptable to Orrin Hatch. 182 of 187 Clinton judicial nominees that had come to a Senate vote were approved without any Republican opposition.

* Clinton put no well-known liberals on the benches and made no attempt to rectify the imbalance of the Reagan-Bush years.

* From The Progressive , September 1996:

"By and large, however, Clinton simply avoids progressive nominees in the first place. Clinton's appointees are wealthier and more closely tied to the business and prosecutorial wings of the legal profession than the nominees of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

"Clinton's picks are far more conservative than Jimmy Carter's," says Ronald Stidham, an Appalachian State University political-science professor who has analyzed the ideological underpinnings of almost 28,000 federal court decisions made since 1968.

"Clinton's appointees are about as liberal as Gerald Ford's," adds Stidham. "In fact, the Clinton judges aren't all that much more liberal than Nixon's."

On civil-liberties issues, federal district-court judges appointed by Carter have issued liberal rulings 52 percent of the time, according to Stidham's research. Ford appointees have been in the liberal column 39 percent of the time, while Nixon's achieved a 37 percent liberal rating. The Clinton appointees ruled on the liberal side only 35 percent of the time, just two percentage points better than the appointees of Reagan and Bush.

On labor and economic issues, Clinton's appointees to court-of-appeals positions have issued liberal decisions at precisely the same rate--50 percent of the time--as have Ronald Reagan's picks."

Coda...

Q: What do you say to a multi-millionaire, war-mongering, anti-gay marriage, pro-Israel, pro-Plan Colombia, pro-Patriot Act, pro-corporate plutocrat who is running for President?

A: Hello Mr Bush/Kerry.