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REVIVNG THE POLEMICAL TRADITION

"In the Beginning was the Word… and the Word was God." (John 1.1.)

The Social Democratic Tradition in American politics has sometimes been mocked for its fierce and prolix polemics, and what some regard as an occasional intellectual ponderousness. But we prefer the war of words to the current hegemony of the vidiots, who now belabor us on and on about camera angles, grimaces, confident postures and smirks. Give us those old time political polemics! Here are some recent examples of the polemical form by writers that, while we don't endorse all the very different views set out in each, nevertheless provide great verbal enrichment to the season's political debates.

Wittman on Bush

For starters, we offer the reader Marshall Wittman's challenge to the Bush candidacy. Wittman will be remembered by some as the former YPSL Chapter Chairman at New York University, an early way-station on his own personal long march through the landscape of American politics. But unlike some pilgrims, wherever Marshall has gone he has left a solid contribution to the strength of democracy, and the politics of candor and civic vitality. As the Washington Post's Dana Milbank recently described it:

“What a long, strange trip it's been for Marshall Wittmann. The highly quotable pundit, who has boasted he is the only person to have worked for Cesar Chavez and Linda Chavez, has a new job -- with the Democratic Leadership Council.

“Wittmann, late of the conservative Hudson Institute, will be leaving the Senate staff of John McCain (R-AZ), where he has been lately. Wittmann's move to the Democratic side may be awkward, but he's familiar with strange bedfellows; a practicing Jew, he once worked as a top official at the Christian Coalition. Wittmann becomes the second key McCain adviser, after John Weaver, to decamp to the Democratic side. The DLC's Bruce Reed welcomed Wittmann by saying, "the Democratic Party is the only place centrists and independents can call home."

Wittman recently published a powerful critique of the Bush Admininstration, and an effusive endorsement of Senator Kerry. Some readers will strongly disagree. We reprint it here from the Democratic Leadership Council's Blueprint Magazine because it so effectively sharpens some issues:

DLC Blueprint Magazine, October 4, 2004

MOOSE ON THE LOOSE
By Marshall Wittmann

Bush had a chance after 9/11 to create a bold new politics of national purpose that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud. But he blew it. A modern Bull Moose progressive now finds common cause with Kerry and Edwards.

This unreconstructed Bull Moose will run with the donkey in November.

I am an independent McCainiac who hopes to revive the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and I support the Kerry-Edwards agenda. Don't get me wrong -- this Bull Moose is not completely in agreement with the Democratic donkey. But the Bush administration has betrayed the effort to create a new politics of national greatness in the aftermath of 9/11.

If John Kerry wins, it remains to be seen whether his administration will be more willing to break with its ideological base than a Bush team that has been slavishly loyal to its corporate paymasters. But there is no remaining shred of doubt that another four years of a Bush presidency would have a toxic effect on American politics. If George W. Bush is re-elected, unlimited corporate power, cynicism, and division will ride high in the saddle.

In the past few years, there has been an effort by the neoconservative center-right to forge a new politics of national greatness. Although this new political perspective was never spelled out in specifics, its adherents (including me) envisioned an energetic federal government that would implement a foreign policy advancing American interests and human rights, along with a domestic policy that would promote national service, and an economics focused on benefiting the middle class.

Our model was Theodore Roosevelt, the original Bull Moose, who did not flinch from taking on the special interests at home while aggressively promoting American interests abroad.

The modern champion of conservatives for national greatness is Sen. John McCain. In the 2000 campaign, he advocated rogue state rollback, reform of government, an economic plan that focused on middle-class tax relief, and national service. He inspired Americans "to enlist in causes greater than their self-interest."

Of course, the Republican establishment rallied behind Bush, who used "compassionate conservatism" rhetoric to hide a corporate conservatism agenda. In Bush, the GOP moneyed establishment saw a candidate who served its self-interest, comforting the comfortable and catering to fat-cat contributors -- the new Republican base.

When McCain threatened Bush in the 2000 primaries, we got the first real glimpse behind the curtain of Bush World -- with its vicious and ferocious assault on McCain's patriotism and character. What the Bushies used against McCain was an unholy coalition of the two primary wings of the Republican Party -- the Corporate Warriors and the Prayer Warriors. These unlikely allies united against McCain despite the fact that he had a strong pro-life record and a conservative congressional record.

The alliance of Mammon and the religious right was consummated in opposition to McCain's support for campaign finance reform. The embodiment of this coalition was a key operative who implemented the anti-McCain assault in South Carolina -- former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, a Karl Rove crony who was also on the payroll of Enron. Reed had been my boss when I worked as legislative director of the Christian Coalition. Before the primaries, Reed warned me that he would implement an under-the-radar slime assault on McCain if he posed a threat to Bush -- just what happened in South Carolina after Bush's loss to McCain in the New Hampshire primary.

Anyone who was involved in the 2000 McCain campaign, as I was, knows exactly who is responsible for the "Swift boat" slime attack on Senator Kerry -- in Bush World, all low roads lead to Rove.

When I was at the Christian Coalition, I witnessed first-hand the alliance of the deregulation, no-tax crowd with the religious conservatives. Ironically, the rank and file of the religious right are hardly the country club set. They are largely middle-class Americans who don't rely on trust funds or dividend checks for their livelihoods. But the leaders of the religious right have betrayed their constituents by failing to champion such economic issues as family leave or access to health insurance, which would relieve the stresses on many working families. The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment. The religious right has consistently provided the ground troops, while the big-money men have gotten the goodies.

The realization that the religious right had essentially become a front for the money men of the Republican Party was a primary source of my disenchantment with that movement. And without a doubt, the GOP has merely become a vehicle for unbridled corporate power. Such a party cannot provide a home for a movement that strives for national greatness.

In 2000, the Republican Party clearly had the opportunity to recapture the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, by advocating government as an agent of national greatness and insisting on reforming government and corporate influence on it. However, that path was far too threatening to the Republican elites. Then, and now, they have chosen the dollar over the flag by favoring corporate cronies over a politics of national unity.

The first few months of the Bush administration were uneventful and predictable. Despite his narrow victory, President Bush made no effort to reach out to his adversaries. After all, the donors had to be reimbursed. Consequently, the primary focus was on passing a massive giveaway to the wealthy with a few crumbs for the middle class.

A central feature of the tax cuts was what has become the blessed sacrament of the modern Republican Party -- repeal of the estate tax. This boon for billionaires has become an obsession for the Republican Party, even in the face of huge deficits and the mounting costs of war. Perhaps not surprisingly, the estate tax was a product of T.R.-inspired progressivism that sought a more equitable distribution of the tax burden. Welcome to the second Gilded Age!

Everything could have changed in the aftermath of 9/11. For a while it appeared that it had. Bush displayed moral clarity and leadership worthy of national greatness. However, it was short-lived. It turned out that Bush would be more of a Tom DeLay than a Winston Churchill. On the domestic political front, there was a brief interregnum of national unity. Bush rhetorically sought to bring together the nation in the fight against the terrorist enemy. However, it was soon clear that no political imagination would be employed to forge a new politics. Rather than challenging Americans to enlist in national service, the administration told them to "go shopping." Rather than asking more of those who have more, the administration refused to explore a progressive way to finance the war against terror. In fact, before long, the president returned to his mantra of permanent elimination of the "death tax." Yes, Virginia, there is a war going on, but the donors must be reimbursed!

Bush wisely initiated the overthrow of the Taliban and the liberation of Afghanistan. But as Kerry and others have pointed out, the Rumsfeld Pentagon pursued liberation on the cheap and did not aggressively pursue Osama bin Laden and the remnants of the Taliban in the battle of Tora Bora. As a result of the failure to devote sufficient resources to secure the peace in Afghanistan, that country's future is uncertain.

As the 2002 election approached, Bush had a choice. He could have valued national unity over partisan gain. He could have opted for national greatness over political cravenness. Instead, he chose to conduct a cynical and unprincipled campaign that harkened back to the 2000 South Carolina primary and consequently divided the country. After first opposing the Department of Homeland Security, he reversed course by supporting it and brandishing the proposal as a weapon against Democrats who opposed a minor labor provision. Then there is the story of triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, the U.S. senator from Georgia who was portrayed by the Georgia Republicans as soft on terrorism and a veritable Osama lover for his position on this labor provision. Once again, Ralph Reed -- now chairman of the Georgia Republican Party -- was at the scene of a political crime, taking out a war hero so Republican money power could be safe and secure. Praise the Lord, indeed!

The net result of the 2002 campaign was that the GOP was back in control of the Senate, and the united red, white, and blue country had returned to the divided red and blue states.

I had long supported regime change in Iraq. Saddam's threat to regional stability and the prospect that he would obtain weapons of mass destruction, along with his massive human rights violations, argued that he be removed, particularly after 9/11. But what I could not have anticipated was the Bush administration's abysmal incompetence in both the timing of the war and the execution of a post-war plan.

It is unlikely that the administration deliberately lied about the WMD intelligence. But it now appears that there was some hyping of the data in order to go to war sooner rather than later. We now know that al Qaeda had more extensive ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and forces in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia than it did with Iraq. Florida Sen. Bob Graham deserves belated credit for being a prophet on this score. Meanwhile, we did not secure the peace in Afghanistan, and now the Taliban is reconstituting. But more disturbing was the unforgivable failure to prepare for the post-war period.

Instead, what we got was a landing on the aircraft carrier in the "Mission Accomplished" presidential political photo-op. It was abundantly clear that this was an effort by the Rove team to "cash in" politically on the military victory. It was unwarranted triumphing unworthy of an American president.

While bipartisan voices, including McCain and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, advocated more troops in Iraq to secure the country, the administration ignored their pleas, and the chaos deepened. When the prisoner abuse incidents at Abu Ghraib were revealed, the president failed morally to step up to the plate and immediately and forcefully denounce the outrageous behavior.

Incompetence and hubris in the defense of liberty are not virtues.

Despite Bush's pledge to restore a culture of responsibility, no one was held accountable for either the WMD fiasco or the post-war foul-up. Apparently, accountability only applies to low-income welfare mothers and not to high-ranking Pentagon officials.

Now, the effects of the law of unintended consequences are being felt in Iraq. Iran, one of the charter members of the "axis of evil," may emerge as the big winner in this war, as its influence grows in the Shia south. American credibility, which will be needed in the future as we confront threats, has been incalculably damaged. Our military is overstretched, and it will be difficult to find the resources for expansion because of the deficits created by the irresponsible tax cuts.

It will now be far more problematic to employ force in humanitarian situations such as the Sudan or certainly against the other players in the axis of evil -- North Korea and Iran. Paradoxically, a President Kerry may be more able to use military force than a re-elected President Bush, because he will have more credibility with the international community and the American people than the current incumbent.

What exactly have rock-ribbed conservatives gained from this administration? As conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan has observed, "Domestically, moreover, Bush has done a huge amount to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government; and he has been almost criminally reckless in his hubris in the conduct of the war." Of course, if liberals had their way they would expand the welfare state. In contrast, the Bush administration expands the corporate welfare state. Once again, the donors must be reimbursed! Deficits be damned!

So what does the Bull Moose think of the donkey? In the early primaries, I thought Karl Rove had induced a mass brainwashing of the Democrats as they flocked to Howard Dean. If the Deaniacs had seized the party, the Bush-Rovian dream of realignment might have been realized. Dean was their dream opponent -- a socially liberal, anti-war candidate from Vermont. However, the good centrist sense of the Democratic rank and file prevailed.

This Bull Moose is not all the way with Kerry, but part of the way with JFK. I am generally to Kerry's right. However, on the key issues of progressive economics and a muscular and smart foreign policy, John Kerry's ideas are far preferable to George W. Bush's. And, with his gesture this summer in approaching McCain about the vice presidency, Kerry demonstrated that he is committed to a new politics of national unity.

Although I had my differences with Kerry during the Cold War, he has demonstrated by his hawkishness on Kosovo and Afghanistan that he is willing to use force to defend American ideas and interests. He advocates increasing the size of the U.S. military. On domestic issues, Kerry has positioned himself in the New Democrat tradition. Kerry has proposed an ambitious national service program. He would retain the tax cuts for the middle class while rolling them back on the super-rich. And he would reform, rather than eliminate, the estate tax.

If Kerry is victorious, there will no doubt be a battle within the Democratic Party between the left and New Democrat wings. Perhaps, just perhaps, a progressive national greatness wing can emerge that combines a commitment to national service and progressive economics with a dedication to defending America and promoting its ideals. Fortunately, there is a model for progressive national greatness in the presidency -- the previous JFK. President Kennedy combined a muscular foreign policy with a call to service and a domestic progressivism. Kennedy brought Republicans into his administration and governed from the vital center.

A President Kerry also should embrace a reform agenda that will attract the constituencies of McCain and H. Ross Perot. An overhaul of the tax system that would eliminate loopholes should be undertaken. A few years ago, Rep. Dick Gephardt offered a modified flat tax proposal that would both simplify the system and retain progressivity. A left-right coalition to eliminate corporate welfare should be built. A Kerry administration should promote efforts at the state level to depoliticize congressional redistricting.

In the war against terror, it is vital that America be united. We have real enemies who seek to do us harm. Contrary to the conspiracy theories of Michael Moore and the loony left, Bush did not invent our enemies. But, despite all his bravado and swagger, he has made it more difficult to build a domestic and international political coalition to ultimately prevail against our terrorist adversaries. He has bred distrust by driving a cynical partisan agenda that seeks to reward the wealthy, while branding his political adversaries as vaguely unpatriotic.

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have waged an unprecedentedly cynical and divisive campaign. The campaign has proven that there are no guard rails when it comes to a scorched-earth effort to hold on to power. However, Democrats can seize the opportunity to reach out to disaffected moderate Republicans and independents to build a new political coalition of national unity. That is both the hope and the cause of this unreconstructed Bull Moose.

Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R. Ariz.) and creator of The Bull Moose blog, is a senior fellow at DLC/PPI.

Editor's note: This article is taken from the upcoming issue of the DLC's Blueprint Magazine.

OTHER RANTS:

Is Wittman's pro-Kerry tract too much for you? We therefore offer several other zesty rants that incline in the other direction. They may help you acquire deeper prespective on matters that will be debated by the candidates tonight:

Peretz on Kerry

Here, in tonic contrast to Marshall Wittman, is New Republic Editor Martin Peretz and Massachusetts resident from his magazine's on-line edition of October 8, 2004:

“In Iraq, I am with Bush. Yes, I am repelled by how he and his crowd play fast and loose with the facts, by their elevation of their foreign policy reasoning into some kind of catechism. Still, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is like Russia without Josef Stalin: By no means perfect, but a vast improvement. But now Kerry has spoken definitively about Iraq as well, at New York University and elsewhere. His speeches have produced a flurry of hosannas. TNR put a headline on its cover, echoing a phrase in Kerry's address, that proclaimed there was, "finally, a real debate on iraq." But only Ryan Lizza, in last week's issue, termed Kerry's prescriptions what they really are: "fantastic," used in its correct meaning--that is, extravagantly fanciful, capricious, grotesque. So, if Bush is lying about Iraq, so is Kerry. It's not just that he has exaggerated what has gone wrong in Iraq. His entire speech was premised on the assumption that there were European troops and Muslim troops and United Nations gendarmes who would have gone to war with us against Saddam had Bush only waited another few days, weeks, months in the spring of 2003. That is a lie. And now, he holds out the same false promise. It is true, he admits, that there is a Security Council resolution calling on U.N. members to provide soldiers and trainers and a special brigade to protect the U.N. mission in Iraq. "Three months later," he admits, "not a single country has answered that call." Of course, Bush is to blame. And what should Bush do? He should "convene a summit meeting of the world's major powers" and "insist that they make good on that U.N. resolution." 

Christopher Hitchens on Bush, The Left, and the War on Terrorism

One more delicious polemic. This a potent antidote to those on the Democrat's Left who are trying to invent an alternative moral universe in which they can co-habit with Michael Moore. Christopher Hitchens' interview with Johann Hari was thankfully sent us by Ron Radosh. Do read it all.

"The world these [al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society. To stand equidistant between that and a war to remove it is?" He shakes his head. I have never seen Hitch grasping for words before.

Some people on the left tried to understand the origins of al-Quadea as really being about inequalities in wealth, or Israel's brutality towards the Palestinians, or other legitimate grievances. "Look: inequalities in wealth had nothing to do with Beslan or Bali or Madrid," Hitchens says. "The case for redistributing wealth is either good or it isn't - I think it is - but it's a different argument. If you care about wealth distribution, please understand, the Taliban and the al Quaeda murderers have less to say on this than even the most cold-hearted person on Wall Street. These jihadists actually prefer people to live in utter, dire poverty because they say it is purifying. Nor is it anti-imperialist: they explictly want to recreate the lost Caliphate, which was an Empire itself."

BRITISH LABOUR'S TONY BLAIR SETS THE STANDARD

David Kuznet, former chief Clinton speechwriter, sends us this note :"In case you missed this, another great speech by Tony Blair":

Blair says: "Progressive parties, like the Labour Party, rarely fail because of their values. Fairness, justice, solidarity, opportunity for all. These are the impulses of any decent human spirit. No. We almost always fail when we don't foresee the future in which those values must be applied. The values require steadfast conviction."

"I believe democracy there [Iraq] means security here; and that if I don't care and act on this terrorist threat, then the day will come when all our good work on the issues that decide people's lives will be undone because the stability on which our economy, in an era of globalisation depends, will vanish. "I never expected this to happen on that bright dawn of 1 May 1997." I never anticipated spending time on working out how terrorists trained in a remote part of the Hindu Kush could end up present on British streets threatening our way of life. And the irony for me is that I, as a progressive politician, know that despite the opposition of so much of progressive politics to what I've done, the only lasting way to defeat this terrorism is through progressive politics."

MORE WITHDRAWALS FROM THE AFL-CIO?

by Richard Wilson

The leadership of the International Association of Machinists received support from delegates to its recent convention for withdrawal from the AFL-CIO, if that is deemed necessary. The Executive Board was given the power to leave the federation anytime after the Presidential election.

The issues that stimulated this surprising move are several. First, it is a response to the efforts of groups that consider themselves "reformers" who havce come together in something called the New Unity Partnership for a campaign to restructure the AFL-CIO. These self- designated reformers propose to limit the jurisdiction exercised by each AFL-CIO affiliate to one particular industry. Problems arise when unions that have traditionally organized and bargained across industry lines are urged to move out of areas where they have established a presence

The NUP is made up of two unions that are in the AFL-CIO---UNITE-HERE (a recent merger) and the Service Employees International union. The other NUP partner -- the Carpenters -- is now out of the the AFL-CIO. Douglas McCarron, President of the Carpenters, has made it clear he will only come back if the federation is restructured along lines he is proposing.

One of McCarron's demands is to merge several of the smaller building trades together. The Machinists may fear that its locals may be subjected to shotgun mergers at the hands of the NUP reformers. IAM wants nothing to do with such "reforms."

The IAM was also upset over a Federation "ruling" that gave the Teamsters an open period to raid Machinists' members at Auto Truck Transport Corp. facilities throughout the country.

Another ruling by Federation higher-ups prevented a merger between the United Service Workers/International Union of Horseshoers-which would have added 50,000 new members to the IAM.

There has been a substantial drop in IAM membership in trecent years. "An un-mitigated disaster" is what Tom Buffenbarger, IAM President has called it. In the four years since its last convention, the union lost almost 25 percent of its members. Today membership stands at 388,000 as compared to 500,000 at the last convention.The biggest losses were in aerospace and air transportation.

To do more organizing, the machinsts delegates agreed to use some money from the strike fund. Buffenbarger said that the new organizing would "make this a more diverse union." Clearly, that points to becoming a more general union than ever before. a similar strategy of across the board organizing can be seen in UAW and United Steelworkers campaigns that each out to a variety of workers in the service sector. These industrial unions worry that their efforts will be restricted by NUP reform policies which in effect will primarily benefit the NUP unions themselves.

The Hurd Report

The complexities and ambiguities of the New Unity Partnership proposals are documented and discussed in an article by Cornell Professor Richard Hurd entitled: "The Failure of Organizing and the Future of the Labor Movement" that appeared in the Journal of Labor and Society, September 2004. Hurd looks at the NUP's proposals in the context of the difficulties of achieving growth in the labor movement.

The problems are heightened by the fact that the current AFL-CIO leadership, under President John Sweeney, came into office on a pledge of organizing new members and had criticized incumbent President Lane Kirkland for failing to do the job, Hurd goes on to show that the Sweeney forces have been unable to do any better since they came into office.

Hurd also reviews the track records of the NUP unions in organizing, and finds that they haven't done very well either. They have made a few gains here and there, but by using their own criteria of membership density by industry, the results are not impressive. This is the case despite the large commitment of union resources to organizing by the NUP unions in recent times.

Richard Wilson is former Director of Organizing and Field Service for the AFL-CIO

ECONOMIC ISSUES DO MERIT DEBATE

Samuelson Challenges Benefits of Outsourcing:

While the state of the American economy may not, as some Democrats ardently wish, effectively displace iinternational issues in what remains of the campaign debate, there are still some important issues to be raised. One has recently been given new life by Paul Samuelson, Nobel winning economist and guru to generations of American students of economics. According to The New York Times's Steve Lohr

'Samuelson has questioned the benefits of certain forms of international trade to the long-term health of our economy. Samuelson challenges what he calls a "popular polemical untruth": the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs. Sure, Mr. Samuelson writes, the mainstream economists acknowledge that some people will gain and others will suffer in the short term, but they quickly add that "the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate for the losers." That assumption, so widely shared by economists, is "only an innuendo," Mr. Samuelson writes. "For it is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings."

Hong Kong Shows How Capitalism Needs Strong Government

Another division between our reds and blues involves the role of government in regulating the economic marketplace. The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein recently described the way that corrupt, undemocratic and ineffective government under the Chinese Communists prevents other Chinese Cities from developing the vibrant capitalism that brought such success to Hong Kong.

TOM KAHN FEST

Tom Kahn joined the American Social Democratic Movement as a student at Brooklyn College in the first stirrings of ferment that followed the relative quiescence of the McCarthy and Eisenhower years on America's campuses. But Kahn became a trenchant critic of the excesses of the student movement that often followed in the unraveling of the 1960s. Kahn, who died in 1992, could hardly be considered a prototypical young "neo-conservative." He put his considerable intellectual and organizational skills to work in a generations-long collaboration with Bayard Rustin to encourage the civil rights movement on a responsible and effective course, and also as a key aide to AFL-CIO Presidents George Meany, Lane Kirkland and Tom Donahue in strengthening American labor's political and social influence. Perhaps his outstanding contribution came after he became Director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department in 1986, where he soon acquired a central role in mobilizing U.S. labor and other support for Poland's Solidarnosc union movement, and in nurturing other democratic campaigns to overcome the repressive and exploitative powers that communism's false unions were able, with the collaboration of too many on the left, to exert over workers in so many countries.

Throughout Kahn's life he maintained a consistent and clear belief in democracy and freedom of association -- which he defined simply as “. . . the right of ordinary people to create their own institutions independent of the government, institutions which can shelter them from the power of the state, the power of the employer, or the power of other organized social forces.”

Rachelle Horowitz, herself a veteran trade union and civil rights activist who took part in many of the battles and debates that Kahn so influenced, is now finishing an assessment of Kahn's work which began as a thesis to complete a long-delayed Bachelor's Degree at the George Meany Labor Studies Center. We hope Rachelle can publish this for the general reader. If she does, Social Democrats,USA will convene a public discussion in Washington about Tom Kahn's thought and work, and about its possible significance for the interesting times that evidently are ahead for labor and its friends. For time and place, keep watching Notesonline. We welcome tax-deductible contributions to the League for Industrial Democracy to support this "Kahn Fest." Please send them in today.

AN APPEAL FOR NATO TROOPS IN IRAQ

A group of Italian leaders associated with the magazine, Il Foglio, has undertaken an initiative to enlist the government of Italy and public support worldwide for a NATO mission to provide troops in Iraq to establish security for next January's national election. The initiative has attracted widespread support in Europe and in the US. For a text of the statement and a list of the signers which includes our editor Penn Kemble, click here.

PAUL BERMAN ON THE CULT OF CHE

Paul Berman has written a pungent review of the new film on the Life of Che Guevara, "The Motorcycle Diaries," that again demonstrates Berman's courage in the face of misbegotten fashions, and his grasp of the powerful influence that twisted political sub-cultures can have on the daily lives of peoples in vast regions of the world.

Berman's review begins frankly "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

Michael Moore Deconstructed

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2189/pub_detail.asp

IN MEMORIAM: BERTRAND RUSSELL SEIDMAN

Bert Seidman was a long-time member of Social Democrats USA, and a leader in shaping labor and government policies in the fields of retirement, health insurance, and international relations, where he distinguished himself by his resistance to non-democratic influences in the labor field. The following remembrance appeared in the newsletter of the National Academy of social Insurance

Bert Seidman, 84, one of the founding members of the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), died on Thursday, June 24, 2004 at his home in Falls Church, VA. He served on NASI's Board of Directors from its formation until 1997 and was an active member, known for his commentary at NASI's annual conferences. Mr. Seidman was born in 1919 in Brooklyn, NY. He earned a B.A. in 1938 and an M.A. in 1941, both in Economics, from the University of Wisconsin. Faithful to his pacifist beliefs, he was a conscientious objector in World War II and, as alternative service, he helped build the Blue Ridge Parkway and held classes in industrial relations for his fellow workers.

He spent most of his career at the AFL-CIO, which he joined in 1948 as part of the research staff. He became the Director of its Social Security Department in 1966, where he oversaw the labor movement's work on health care, pensions, social welfare and occupational health. In July 1983, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland appointed him as Director of the new Department of Occupational Safety, Health, and Social Security.

Seidman, who spoke French fluently, also worked on labor issues internationally. From 1962 to 1966, he served as AFL-CIO European Economic Representative stationed first in Paris and then in Geneva.

Seidman served as a member of the U.S. Labor Delegation to the annual conferences of the International Labor Organization from 1958 to 1976, and from 1972 to 1975 he was a member of the ILO Governing Body. In 1973 and 1974 he was the U.S. Worker Delegate to the ILO Conference. He returned to the ILO Conference in 1987 and in 1988 when, as a member of the U.S. Labor Delegation, he led the worker delegates of the Conference in achieving adoption of international standards for employment promotion and protection against unemployment.

After his retirement from the AFL-CIO in 1990, he served on a voluntary basis as Policy Consultant of the Alliance for Retired Americans and Washington Representative of the Jewish Labor Committee. He was Chair of the Board of the National Consumers League and a member of the Federal Advisory Council on Employment Security, the Advisory Council on Health Insurance for the Disabled, the Task Force on Medicaid and Related Programs, and the employee representative to the 1967 and 1971 Advisory Councils on Social Security, and on the 1969 Advisory Council on Health Insurance for the Disabled. John Sweeney, member of NASI and President of AFL-CIO, said about Seidman in his obituary in Washington Post: “It was his razor-sharp blend of activism and intellect that defined him, drew people to him and made his adversaries – from proponents of Social Security privatization to anti-worker politicians – absolutely crazy.”

Seidman's wife of 55 years, Annabel Henry Seidman, died in 2003. He is survived by three daughters, two brothers, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

NOTESONLINE

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