Political Affairs contributing editor Norman Markowitz corresponds with the New York Times, the major ruling class newspaper in the country and, even though they advertise that the publish 'all the news that’s fit to print' they never see fit to print his letters. These are some recent letters on topics that PA readers may find interesting.



The 'Southern Strategy' along with voter suppression put Bush back in office. If Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt, with strong AFL-CIO connections and a Missouri background, would the Kerry-Gephardt ticket pulled out Ohio and possible Missouri. Had Bill Richardson, an articulate liberal Democrat of New Mexico Latino background been the Vice Presidential Nominee, would the election have gone differently? The following letter, sent Oct 20, 2004 address some of these questions.

To the Editor of New York Times Magazine: [October 20, 2004]

In 'Black and Bruised,' Joann Wipijewski suggests that the Democrats abandoning the South would mean abandoning African Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. The twin 'Southern strategies' that have influenced both parties since the 1970s, the policies of pretending that the U.S. is a society of small towns and isolated people interested only in lowering their taxes and living in the modern world while not being part of it, have pushed American politics further and further to the right.

This pandering to the worst of post segregation Southern politics, making the South the standard for the nation instead of vice versa, has especially hurt African Americans both North and South, other minorities, organized labor and low income people generally.

The Southern States are 'right to Work' states in which the labor movement is very weak, wages are comparatively low, and political conservatives of various kinds are dominant. The 'solid South ' of today remains the political stronghold for rightwing religious fundamentalism, coded racist politics, and uncritical support for runaway military budgets – a series of political 'rotten boroughs' for the Republican Party and conservative political forces in national elections.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Republicans abandoned the South and fashioned a national majority based on the industrializing Northeast, Middle West, and the Agricultural Middle West and Far West. That did mean abandoning Southern Blacks to segregation. Today, a Democratic policy of concentrating on winning all of the major industrial states of the North East, Middle West, and Far West, fighting for states like Missouri and Ohio and much of the mountain West, where liberal and progressive traditions and politics exist that can be built upon, offers the best chance for the party to not only win elections, but make those victories the foundation for a new electoral majority, not an exercise in political pandering that will set the stage in the near future for rightwing Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Such a majority could then act to repeal Taft-Hartley, increase massively union membership in the region and the nation, revitalize public social services and raise sharply the living standards, level of education, health care, and housing, of the people of the South, both white and African-American, eliminating the sharp inequalities between the region and the nation which have for so long helped to drag down both.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz



The election is over, but is it really. In New Mexico there was widespread voter suppression of low-income Latino voters in overwhelmingly Democratic districts. In Ohio and Florida, there was voter suppression against low income African-Americans, the group most likely to vote against Bush. What is the ruling class media saying though? The Black and especially the Latino vote for Bush increased. Who is doing the math here? Karl Rove? The following letter, sent October 31, 2004, criticizes an article that takes a ho-hum attitude the political crisis in the U.S. and is blind to the direct danger to free elections inherent in present Republican policies. While the author blamed other parties, the Democrats have not exactly been disenfranchising wealthy suburbanites, members of fundamentalist churches or stock-brokers with felony records, three groups of likely Republican voters.

Dear Editor: [October 31, 2004]

Matt Bai’s article ('Another Contested Contest,' Oct 31, 2004) says nothing in the once over lightly way that passes for analysis in Reagan+2 Bush American politics. The Republicans have been engaging in the sort of voter suppression sans terrorist violence that the KKK, the paramilitary arm of the White supremacy Democrats, did in the late 19th century South. They also stole the 2000 election in ways that would have produced violent demonstrations and the seating of Al Gore as the duly elected president of the country in much of the world. The emergence of the modern Republican party as a party of authoritarian conservatism, something in between the old GOP and the mass European fascist parties of the interwar period, is the source of our political problem and danger, not any 'equal blame' for the two parties that Bai contends.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz



In a Bush league world where there are weapons of mass destruction anywhere you want them to be, why not have red as the color of rightwing Republicans. Then the faithful won’t have to worry about 'reds under every bed.' Perhaps our readers are angry about the Republicans stealing what has been our and our ancestors political color, but they have stolen so much else from the working class for so long that, until we have a powerful mass left, and a mass CPUSA, we may have to live with it. The following letter was sent in a lighthearted vein to Arts and Leisure Section on Nov 15 in response to Frank Rich’s fine article. Rich by the way is one of the few writers for the Times who richly (no pun intended) deserves to be considered what we would call a progressive and what right-wingers call a liberal.

To the Editor of the Arts and Leisure Section: [November 14, 2004]

Frank Rich ('On Moral Values: It’s Blue by a Landslide,' Nov. 14) makes some excellent points about what might be called the politics of institutionalized hypocrisy, but I have one caveat. Why are rightwing Republican states called 'Red States?' Red has been the color of revolution and the left through the world since the French Revolution and the official color in the flags of the former Soviet Union and the present Peoples Republic of China. Are the rightwing Republicans now to be considered 'the Reds'? Is Arlen Specter to be considered a 'Pinko'? What will the FCC do with old cold war propaganda films like 'The Red Menace,' 'Red Nightmare,' and the Reagan era classic, 'Red Dawn'? Will the old IWW song, 'Jesus Got His Red Card,' be given a new meaning? What about our 'heroic British allies,' for whom the color 'blue' has long been connected to the Conservative or Tory party. It is obvious that there will have to be a special committee of Congress established to investigate such 'un-American and un-coaliton activities.'

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz



With Bush purging the CIA and proclaiming the 'march of freedom,' no government or political leader to the left of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz can feel completely safe. This letter, written initially on March 5, 2003, was in response to a typical Times propaganda piece trying to whip up support for the overthrow of Chávez. With the support of the Venezuelan people Chávez has so far survived all attempts by the Venezuelan elites and the Bush administration to destroy his government. However, reactionaries, as the old saying goes, learn nothing and forget nothing and all of us must be ready to defend Venezuela from new attacks.

To the editor of the New York Times: [March 5, 2003]

Moises Naum’s crude trashing of Venezuela’s President ('Chávez and the Limits of Democracy,' March 5) assumes that 'democracy' is limited to electing to office politicians who are acceptable to the IMF-World Bank-WTO investment and trade system, now completely in the hands of rightwing conservatives. Like most of Latin America, Venezuela was influenced by and sought to follow the American presidential rather than European Parliamentary model in government. Chávez was elected by a large majority for a definable term and the attempt to force him out of office or call new elections was in violation of the Venezuelan constitution. Such actions carried out against an American president, a political strike of vital industries for the purpose of ousting the government, would lead to the arrest of the leaders of the strike under existing federal labor law.

'New elections,' for example, were not seriously contemplated as a solution to the Bush-Gore stalemate in the 2000 election, when they would have made more sense than in Venezuela.

While Mr. Naum’s hurling of sticks and stones at Fidel Castro will win him some support in the boardrooms and supper clubs of the United States, Americans who oppose gunboat diplomacy should remember that it was practiced by U.S. governments over and over again, beginning before the Russian Revolution, much less the Cuban Revolution. Too many brutal tyrants were installed by U.S. marines under the principle enunciated humorously in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt about a Central America dictator, 'He’s an SOB but he’s our SOB,' for anyone in Latin America to take any U.S. government or business initiative to 'defend democracy' in Venezuela or anywhere else in the hemisphere seriously.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz



The Bush administration continues to use both terrorism and terrorist to stimulate fear and submission to their policies at home. Terror is a policy, not an ism, and a policy that both states, including the U.S., and various groups, have used to slaughter innocent civilians to advance their policies. The answer to the Bush administration, given its identification with revealed religion, might be to have Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al practice the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, although they might call that liberalism.



To the Editor of the Week in Review: [July 11, 2004]

Geoffrey Nunberg’s excellent brief article on the origins and uses of the words terror and terrorism omits a few important points. The 'Terror' of the French Revolution was never an ism but a state policy to destroy enemies and achieve the 'Republic of Virtue' envisioned by Robespierre. The British called a variety of groups opposed to their rule 'terrorists,' from Bengali guerrilla fighters at the end of the 19th century to Zionists in Palestine and Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya after WWII as the French did most famously in Algeria. Nunberg also fails to mention a very significant and sinister recent development. The old distinction between military/police and civilian targets used to distinguish insurgents and counter-insurgents from 'terrorists' has largely been destroyed, as civilians are routinely targeted by planes and people with bombs.



Sincerely, Norman Markowitz



The Bush administration continues to talk about the 'March of Freedom' and the testing of its resolve in Iraq as the body count mounts. 'Freedom' was a very positive slogan used in the Civil War, but even then, the 'war to free the slaves' was in reality a war to free industrial capitalists, and the end of slavery, while a profoundly positive development, did not lead to citizenship for the former slaves.

The victorious Northern capitalists ultimately had more to gain by supporting conservatives and treating the South as an internal colony rather than supporting abolitionist 'Radical Republicans' who wanted to redistribute the estates of the great slaveholders to the former slaves. In Iraq, eleven months after this letter was written Bush continues to pursue a policy based on military force and intimidation aimed at a domestic U.S. audience, regardless of its effects on the Iraqi people and the whole region.

Dear Editor: [December 16, 2003]

Jay Winick’s article on guerilla wars describes rather than analyzes complicated events. There was a guerilla war, for example, fought in the South after the Civil War. The KKK, led by confederate officers to fight the military occupation terrorized former slaves and white Southerners seen as collaborators with the occupiers. The failure during Reconstruction to carry out land reform for the former slaves and poor whites eventually enabled the guerillas to win elections and establish segregation along with a semi-feudal sharecrop system that restored much wealth and power to the old plantation owners. Whether the occupation of Iraq will succeed will depend ultimately on whether or there will be a social and economic reconstruction of the country that raises substantially peoples’ living standards and establishes an effective system of civil rights and civil liberties. Given the general negative view of the Bush administration about non-military government intervention, it is doubtful that such reforms will even be contemplated, much less implemented, as long as the administration remains in power.



Sincerely Yours, Norman Markowitz



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