Much has been lamented about the neoconservative's capture of U.S. foreign
policy but little attention has been paid to the capture of U.S. domestic
policy by the neoconfederates.  In both cases the man at the top, George W
Bush, shares the outlook and goals of these political movements that shape
his policies but, he avoids being branded or labeled as a member of the club
or cult as some would see it.

There is a memorable scene in the movie "Cold Mountain", where a wounded
Confederate soldier (Jude Law) is recuperating in hospital and a doctor is
doing the rounds with a gaggle of Scarlett O'Hara-type volunteers.  The
doctor remarks that he can't grasp why these maimed and wounded boys,
farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters, are all fighting for the plantation
owner's right to replace them with slaves.

Welcome to the new south, they have not so much risen, they have captured
the Republican party and are setting the nation's agenda.  When LBJ signed
the Civil Rights Act in 1964 he knew the Democrats would lose the Dixiecrats
and, as Nixon's southern strategy proved him right, we now find the GOP
today firmly in the grip of neoconfederates.

Occasionally, like Trent Lott, the neoconfederates whistfully tip their
hand, but most are mislabeled as conservatives, like Tom DeLay, who appears
as a hand-charging, take-no-prisoners Christian soldier fighting against
taxes, terrorists and the godless liberals polluting the culture and
desecrating family values.

What is overlooked in the fog of the culture wars is the neoconfederate's
economic agenda shrouded in euphemisms like "right-to-work", which means no
unions, labor standards or job security and "guest worker" programs which
means pretending to plug the leaking southern border with a figleaf of
legitimacy while making sure agribusiness, construction, maintenance and
service industries are quaranteed a steady supply of slave labor without
benefit costs and pension obligations.  The fact that the state and local
governments in the south-west are going broke picking up the slack with
healthcare costs and unfunded mandates is conveniently overlooked by the
laissez-faire right and the politically correct left, ensuring that the
melting pot will meltdown.

As our old industrial base is hollowed out by out-sourcing and our new
technology companies migrate to China and India where engineers can be
rented on the cheap, what will happen to the American middle-class?  Will we
all be toiling in the lower forty while the plantation owner sips mint
julips on the verandah?  No, we'll all be selling off the trappings of the
American dream on E-Bay while the only people working will be the "guest
workers" remodeling the billionaire's antebellum mansion.

Reflecting on the State of the Union, the civil war was about saving the
Union from the secession of a rival economic system that was both unfair and
immoral.  Despite all the romantic blather about Southern gentility,
chivalry and honor, the right side won that horrible war.  As the blue and
the grey fight it out today in nostalgic mock battles, the red and the blue
are becoming a stark reality.  It would be a pity that reactionaries cloaked
as conservatives could reverse history and divide the nation again.

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Ian Masters is the host of "Background Briefing" and "Live From The Left
Coast" on KPFK 90.7FM Los Angeles and at ianmasters.org

The Iraq elections

After Florida 2000 the other democracies snickered that America was like a
Banana Republic and we couldn't run a clean, fair election.  Well we proved
them wrong in Iraq where the electorate defied terrorist's threats to run
the gauntlet of suicide bombers then line up for hours undergoing repeated
body searches to cast a preliminary vote in an election that will lead to
more elections before they elect representatives.  In some provinces up to
90% voted in contrast to the usual 25% of American citizens who vote in
general elections and the paltry 5% who vote in some local elections.

Of course there is a lot of premature elation going on at the White House
and it's true that Iraqis had to register to vote to get their food rations
and they didn't know who they were voting for except for slickly packaged TV
blandishments from faceless candidates, but we're used to that.  If you
haven't been to COSTCO lately, let me tell you we don't have rationing, but
you can register to vote outside most supermarkets and our candidates raise
billions from special interests to pay media moguls for television buys and
you don't need Dan Rather to tell you that the race comes down to the cut of
your swift boat versus bursting the bubble of his champagne squadron.

After decades of lethal repression and only one candidate, the Iraqis
clearly have little experience with voter suppression, which is probably why
the Sunnis shot themselves in the foot.  If they followed our example they
would have suppressed the Shia and Kurdish vote not their own, but they're
just coming up with lists and it's too early for them to learn how George W
scrubbed lists, not to mention how JFK got dead people to vote.

Ironically, while Bush got elected because his preachers got the extra 4
million American fundamentalists who didn't vote last time to show up, the
Sunni clerics told their faithful to stay at home while the Shi'ite mullahs
got their flock out to do their religious duty.

Again we can show them that nothing is written in stone.  It was after all
the Democrats who perfected Jim Crow dirty tricks to keep minorities from
voting, but now that the Dixiecrats have taken over the Republican party,
it's the minorities who vote Democrat who hang with the chads and come out
on the short end of the Republican-manufactured voting machines.

While cynics in the Middle East say you can't trust American democracy
because a few oil-men run our country behind the scenes, we can now say we
didn't come for your oil, there's plenty of it in Alaska, we just want you
to give up the bullet and trust in the ballot.  While this may sound like
heresy to the NRA we hardly practice what we preach.  No matter how many bad
hair days Barbara Boxer has there is no getting around the fact that trust
in our voting machines, exit polls and election results is at an all-time
low, especially amongst the losers.

Let's face it, electorally speaking we are limp, flaccid and desperately in
need of a democratic dose of Viagra.  It might also help to bring the troops
home from Iraq and have our military run the next election, because the
American people trust them more than the two parties who only want their
faithful to vote while doing everything they can to get the other sect to
stay home.

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Ian Masters is the host of "Background Briefing" and "Live From The Left
Coast" on KPFK 90.7FM and at ianmasters.org

The inauguration of George W Bush

In a country almost evenly divided between the triumphant and the surly, the
winner-take-all reality of our one party government was made disturbingly
clear to Bill Clinton and John Kerry as they took their places at the recent
inauguration of George W Bush.  The loyal opposition was booed by the
celebrants, faith-based and sore winners who apparently feel they alone have
secured the blessings of liberty and prosperity.

Having allowed patriotism and Jesus to be expropriated, lost market share to
the Republicans as the political brand of winners, and downsized the
American dream, the losers seem trapped in a nightmare of impotent
opposition and irrelevant protest.  The Democrat's slings and arrows of
outrage haven't even scratched the President's obediant cabinet nominees,
all impregnable to criticism because according to Bush, his narrow election
victory was the "accountability moment".  So it's too late for carping and
criticism, the Administration has been absolved of past mistakes and now it
has a clean slate with the electorate's blessing.

The Democrats must be asking, how do they get away with it?  A government
far to the right of mainstream America that promises more wars and less
taxes?  A government elected by a core support of theocrats who want to undo
the constitutional separation of Church and State, not to mention bring
about the end of the world?  Sure you can blame Corporate interests, the
Murdoch Press and Karl Rove's shameless sleaze, but whose job is it to tell
America how bad it is and how to make it better?  Without an idea or a
message that resonates with truth and conviction, slickly packaged lies and
feel-good fantasies will always sell better.   If you have something to say,
eventually it will be heard, particularly if truth and reality are on your
side.

The best that Bush is offering to secure his place in history, that he is
prepared to spend his political capital on, is his vision thing, Social
Security reform.  If our political debate wasn't so vacuous and pathetic
he'd be laughed off the dais.  As if the way to "an ownership society" is to
protect pensions by giving everyone a casino chip to play on Wall Street? 
Apart from being a dumb way to address a phony crisis, it does nothing to
deal with the real economic problems facing the country up to its ears in
personal and public debt.

Who is telling the heartland that we depend on our trading rivals to finance
our standard of living?  Do the red state voters know that as long as we
don't pay our way we have to borrow to buy more of what they make cheaper
while exporting our jobs?  Let's talk about the real ownership society, an
ownership society in which we own more debt from borrowing cheap money, and
now as interest rates go up so that we can keep selling our debt, the
looming housing bubble is about to burst.

If, as the new foreign policy evangelism promises, liberty is our best
security, then the Bush/Cheney team have brought neither.  According to them
we invaded Iraq to remove Weapons of Mass Destruction, take the pressure off
Israel, secure Saudi oil and bring democracy to the Middle East.  But we
appear to have achieved the opposite results.  If eliminating the terrorists
who attacked us and destroying their havens was our number one priority,
then again we have achieved the opposite.  Bin Laden mocks us as his ranks
swell while we short-change our "victory" in Afghanistan for our "mission
accomplished" in Iraq which teeters on the brink of collapsing into a much
more dangerous failed state with 150,000 American targets imported into a
new war zone we created.

In spite of the hopeful election every day that passes more of our soldiers
lose life and limb and almost two years in it's already cost about half of
what Viet-nam ground up and we've still got at least five more years of
stabilization to go.  Who is responsible for the strategic hubris that got
us in this no-win situation and the tactical blindless that led us to resort
to torture and lose more than this futile war?

It is a sorry story, to lie your way into a war, have a swift victory,
squander the chance for peace then be sucked into a guerrilla war by the
same despicable thugs we went to liberate the people from.  But for all of
his manifest failures Bush is only held responsible for what we know and we
desperately need an opposition to tell us how bad it is.  Meanwhile as the
victors savor the spoils and Cheney and Rumsfeld hunker down with Bush and
Rove basking in the glow of the ratings they engineered, the world looks on
aghast.  Obviously it is a great comfort to the mediocre to be always at
their best, but there is a skunk at this White House picnic and it's name is
reality.  So Democrats, bring it on!

With 52% of the vote a mandate from heaven, the "moral values" victory of George W Bush is now expected to become holy writ, and the vanquished heathens, who by definition are immoral and lack values, will have hell to pay until the rapture comes when they get to burn in the apocalyptic hell.  Until then, the left-behind, the reality-based constituency, will be at the mercy of the faith-based moral majority, and if prophesy has any say, you can bet that the fifty nine million who voted for Bush are the same folks as the sixty million who made the end-of-time "Left Behind" books best-sellers.

Now that Armageddon is on the fast track, God knows why John Kerry didn't challenge the Commander-in-Chief, the custodian of the environment, the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger, to disclose whether or not he shares the core beliefs of his ardent supporters who appear to have a messianic investment in the end of the world.  If so, George W Bush has a conflict of interest and he should be impeached, let alone given a second term.

Unfortunately the American social taboo of not discussing religion or politics prevailed, and we still don't know whether the de-facto head of the evangelical movement in the White House is a true believer or a real cynic who is using Christians soldiers to fight for Corporate interests.

What we don't know about Bush we do know about the people who voted for him, and it's even more disturbing.  A recent poll found that 72% of them thought there were still Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, that Bush is popular throughout the world and so is his war in Iraq.  If ignorance is bliss the Republicans must be happy that our schools are turning out dolts and delirious that their press outlets like Fox News are keeping the public misinformed.

The Democrats should not bother appealing to the converted because they can't be reached until reality bites them.  In the real world we have already lost in Iraq and Bush will eventually be held responsible for his war, not to mention his economy, his energy prices, his healthcare meltdown, his crushing of the middle class and betrayal of pensions.  Four more years of Bush will break hearts in the heartland and even the TV preachers will find it hard to shake down the faithful if they are all broke.

When a leading Republican theocrat Tom DeLay tried to ease IRS tax-exempt restrictions so that evangelical churches could advocate as well as "educate" the writing was on the wall.  Somehow parishioner lists became political lists and Karl Rove, who is not so much Bush's brain as Bush's cover, apparently found the extra four million evangelicals who didn't vote last time.

Without the armies of God where will the "immoral minority" find their votes to get back into the game?   A good place to start is the last census that found less than 25% of Americans living in the traditional "Ozzie and Harriet" nuclear family while the vast majority of single mothers, divorced and mixed families, gays and lesbians are doing the best they can while being told they lack family values.  Why don't the Democrats inspire those already doing the heavy lifting in the real world instead of giving right wing romantics a free pass while they look for that shining city on the hill.

Bush's impetuous and immature use of power has undermined our strength and instead of fear, the glue that binds this President to his constituency, the Democrats should look for courage and find strength in the unappreciated love that holds most American families together. They should find and reclaim the real Jesus who the evangelicals have hijacked as a front for right wing politics.  The bible makes clear that the Prince of Peace did not start wars, did not tote an assault rifle, hate gays, celebrate capital punishment or go on TV and con poor people out of their savings.

As Tom Paine once decried, "belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man" and nothing is more cruel than wanting the world to end and a belief that eternity is reserved for evangelicals only.  No wonder George W Bush is finding it hard to fight suicidal religious fanatics abroad, he's in bed with them at home.

Media Monopolies Have Muzzled Dissent

By Ian Masters

Ian Masters is the host of "Background Briefing" on KPFK-FM (90.7) in Los Angeles.

  If information is the oxygen of democracy, the United States has just been gassed, not by weapons of mass destruction but by a weapon of mass distraction.
With George W. Bush basking in glorious ratings and Fox News climbing in the ratings, we may be moving toward a coronation instead of a reelection in 2004. It was, after all, Rupert Murdoch's unilateral anointment of Bush as the winner in the early hours of the morning after the undecided 2000 election that led Al Gore to foolishly concede, because he and the other networks believed what they saw on Fox Television.
  Now the marriage between a government and its volunteer information ministry has been consecrated by the blessed victory of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the geopolitical equivalent of an O.J. meets "Joe Millionaire" wrapped in the flag.
Totalitarian regimes don't tolerate any distinction between journalism and propaganda, but in most democracies it is unprecedented for the free press to abandon Joseph Pulitzer for the methods of Joseph Goebbels.
  How did a born-again, family-values administration get in bed with a purveyor of misogyny and mayhem, trash and titillation? The common thread, for all the public piety, has to be the late Lee Atwater, who was friend, mentor and role model to George W., Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, the head hound in the Fox pound of junkyard attack-dog journalism.
  This undemocratic confluence of politics and propaganda has long been in the making as corporate media have been incrementally empowered while public influence, input and "interest" have been eliminated.
  The transformation of active citizens into passive consumers was enabled by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan's Mark Fowler, who declared "the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants."
Welcome to America, Mr. Murdoch: You can buy the airwaves and, who knows, some day the presidency.
  TV's Fox could not get away with its shameless shilling for the White House if the Fairness Doctrine were still in place, and radio's Clear Channel monopoly would not be able to impose wall-to-wall Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage, etc., on the public if broadcasters were accountable to public opinion rather than the dictates of plutocrats.
  How could it be that in the land of the free and the home of the brave Americans are afraid of opinions? Where are the Tom Paines, the Mark Twains, the Menckens, the Ida Tarbells?
  Dissent has not gone away; it has just been marginalized by monopolies and relegated to the interstices of the Internet.
  But the hammer is about to drop on the Internet too. The head of the FCC, Michael Powell, wants to give away what's left of the store to the broadband cable and satellite providers and make them gatekeepers or tollbooths on the information highway.
  It used to be that the Internet was accessed via a common carrier, the phone company, but as technology has moved forward, these new unregulated media monopolies have increasing control over the information pipeline. Without regulation, they have the ability to choose what content they provide.
  Two FCC commissioners want to delay this hand-over and encourage public debate, but the public is largely unaware of what is at stake.
Obviously you can't expect the Limbaughs, O'Reillys and their bosses or their president in the White House to give them talking points on preserving diversity of opinion while there is a tax cut to sell.
  So speak up, America: It's your country, they're your airwaves. Maybe you can pursue the American dream while you are asleep, but it will be too late to reclaim your country's freedom when you wake up.

THEIR PLACE IN THE SUN

By Ian Masters
 
On May Day President Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and spoke to the nation in a spectacularly posed photo opportunity that rivaled the best of Leni Riefenstahl. Two days later the nine Democrats running for President tried to score points off each other in a debate that looked like a televised job interview for a position already filled. Benefiting from the low expectations that helped him win the debates against Al Gore, George W. Bush has so demonstratively improved on the job that Americans have forgotten the incoherent bumbler who was more comfortable reading to preschoolers than facing the nation. Back before September 11 when the first guest in the White House and the Presidentís biggest donor turned out to be a criminal who stole four hundred billion dollars, the Democrats failed to make a dent in the Teflon, so what can they do now that Bush is standing tall, riding high and back in Ronald Reaganís saddle with a vengeance?
 
Who could have predicted that a cave-dwelling religious fanatic would dispatch martyrs wielding box-cutters to goad America into a holy war?  But overnight Bush became the Commander-in-Chief and Bin Laden got his war,and so did Saddam, and even if we donít catch the bad guys, the White House is on a winning streak and who can blame them for cashing in?  In the meantime as the baby-boomers who got laid in the sixties look for someone to vote for, Bush and his button-down Christian soldiers are making war, not love, and the poll numbers are rising to the heavens.   For the Democratic bearers of bad news, the question is, how long can Americans feel better while not being better off?  The answer whistles past the political graveyard of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Telling the truth makes you a pessimist and a loser, whereas accentuating the positive makes you an optimist and a winner. Truth should trump fiction, but itís all in the packaging. Obviously it would be better if America took care of its own and Bush put our money where his mouth is, instead of giving it all to the military and his rich donors. But thatís class warfare, and while the vast majority of taxpayers may be prisoners of war on the losing side, they donít want to surrender their dreams for a cold shower from a Chicken Little politician.
 
So how do the Democrats reclaim and reinvigorate their majority that lost the last Presidential election?  Do they find a peace-loving patriot, a champion of truth, justice and the American way? Or do they settle for Bush lite and a side of butter with the guns.  Meanwhile, as the professionals target the sliver of swing votes and the loyal opposition waits for the recession to turn into another depression, someone in the Democratic Party should look at the 75% silent majority of Americans who donít live in the traditional family values home and the 70% of eligible voters who donít bother to vote. What would they have to say if someone asked them?
 
Ian Masters is the host of ìBackground Briefingî on KPFK FM. Los Angeles.  

Contact Ian at: ianmasters@mail.com