Empire Notes

The Democratic Party is having its national convention this week. You may have seen stories that the plan is to keep things at the convention positive and upbeat, instead of upsetting people with a lot of negativity.

Makes a lot of sense. After all, the past year has only seen us launch the first colonial war since Vietnam, degrade ourselves past all recognition with the kind of acts that always are attendant on colonial wars – take your pick, the systematic torture of innocents, up to and including sodomizing children of women who were taken hostage to make their husbands give themselves up, or the killing of roughly 1000 people, mostly civilians, in order to punish an entire town for the killing of four mercenaries or, after much chest-beating about our vaunted system of democratic accountability, to cover up the torture with the release of an Army report saying that it was just 94 unrelated acts of passion. And along with our seemingly limitless capacity for evil, our capacity to do good seems to have been eroded completely – not only can we not fix Iraq’s electricity nearly as well as Saddam Hussein’s government did in 1991, it turns out that, after all the rhetoric about American generosity, that as of one month ago of the so-called $18.4 billion we had allocated for Iraq’s reconstruction, only $366 million, 2%, had been spent. We’ve been failing to reconstruct Iraq and using Iraq’s money to do it, through the odd mechanism of giving it to the shareholders and executives of Bechtel and Halliburton with no strings attached. We bomb the country, then we rob it.

Or perhaps we should be positive because the United States has now gotten universal international execration for its obstructionist efforts to use bilateral trade deals to keep other countries from using their own resources and ingenuity to deal with the scourge of AIDS.

Or because of our efforts to sabotage the one, small, pitiful step, the Kyoto protocol, to deal with the other paramount international problem, global warming?

But surely, you say, in its own upbeat positive way, the Democratic Party will address all of these issues. Well, with regard to the convention, I can’t predict the future with more than 99.8% certainty, but I’ve read the Party's proposed platform and here’s what it says, in a nutshell:

We will do the war on terrorism better, by being more aggressive.

We will do the occupation of Iraq better, by bringing in more foreign troops.

We will do job creation better, by supporting private corporations more.

We think international anti-AIDS efforts should be better.

We think “global climate change” is a problem and we’ll do better.

This in support of a candidate whose main plank is that he will do American imperialism better because, unlike his opponent, he has personally gone overseas to kill America’s enemies.

You may think that, even if the Democrats are no better on Iraq that they will be on AIDS and global warming. They have, however, said not one word about how. There is no condemnation of the use of American economic clout to force other countries to strengthen intellectual property protections to the point that it becomes impossible to deal with AIDS affordably. Not only is there no commitment to restore the bandaid of the Kyoto protocol, there is no use of the phrase “global warming.”

Dennis Kucinich kept campaigning until the eleventh hour, because, he said, he would bring so many candidates to the convention that the party would have to listen to him. Instead, his delegates were forced to fold on the question of putting an anti-war, anti-occupation plank into the platform. What was obvious in 2000 is obvious now: the Democratic Party will not be changed from within.

It’s common to decry the Democrats’ lack of vision, but the problem is worse than that. At a time when our country has dragged itself through the mud and earned the condemnation of the world in the clearest terms since the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party can’t even take off its rose-colored glasses.