CURRENT UPDATES: July 31, 2000

In this update:
The Republican Convention: Be there or be . . .
Moderate or Militant: Will the Real Dick Cheney Please Stand Up?
Lockheed Martin and the GOP: Profiteering and Pork Barrel Politics with a Purpose

The media is all abuzz with comparisons of the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions to Chicago 1968-- perhaps with good reason. There is definitely a sense that "the times, they are a changin'" with a new spirit of activism and dissent. The old peace movement lament of "where are the young people" has been drowned out by the beat of marching feet, and chants of "this is what democracy looks like," in the streets of Seattle, Washington and now Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

The Republican and Democratic Conventions will take place amid a cacophony of marches, lectures, training, teach ins, "shadow" conventions, nonviolent direct action and planned mayhem.

The two major players are the UNITY 2000 Coalition and THE PARTY'S OVER direct action coalition.

UNITY 2000 is in charge of the big legal march on Sunday July 30th. Organizers, who hope this will be the largest ever demo at a Convention, say the message is "NO to business and politics as usual and YES to new priorities for our nation and the world." More info at www.unity2000.org

The Direct Action Network, through their www.thepartysover.com website, will oversee the not-so-legal aspects of Convention demonstrations -- with protests to Free Mumia, disrupt the Convention, and "other surprises." They remind us that "Nonviolent direct action has been an essential part of every successful social change movement in U.S. history and is used by people all over the world to take back our power from corporations and governments."

The list of involved organizations includes most of the familiar faces from Seattle and Washington with their anti-globalization, pro-democracy messages. What seems new, or at least more prominent, in this episode is an elucidation of the connections between militarism and globalization, greed and war.

In this spirit, Bill Hartung is kicking off the Convention season a little early with a panel discussion STAR WARS AND THE MEANING OF NATIONAL SECURITY: WHAT'S BEST FOR AMERICA? hosted by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities.

The event will shed light on the real reasons the Republicans are so keen on pursuing National Missile Defense, despite the mountains of evidence to demonstrate that the contractors charged with making it work can't perform a successful test of the system to save their lives. As Hartung observed, "Given their recent performance, it would be risky to buy a used car from these companies, much less trust them to build one of the most technically demanding and costly weapons programs ever undertaken by the Pentagon."

The week of the Convention itself, the Arms Trade Resource Center will release the latest in its series of Issue Briefs on the politics of Missile Defense, entitled REVENGE OF THE NEO-REAGANITES: The Role of Republican True Believers in the Missile Defense Revival. High on the list of True Believers is Philadelphia area Republican Curt Weldon who has used his post as head of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee to throw billions of dollars at Missile Defense programs for his favorite contractors: Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The program, Tuesday July 25th, will also feature Dr. Theodore Postol, MIT professor and author of a technological critique of the NMD program and Lawrence Korb, former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, and will be held at the Friends Center Meetinghouse (151 Cherry St., Philadelphia). The event begins at 5:30 PM and a $10 donation is suggested. Contact Mary Boardman at BLSP 212-988-9808 for more information.

Cheri Honkala, the founder of the KENSINGTON WELFARE RIGHTS UNION (KWRU), has no difficulties making the connections between greed and war. At the Hague Appeal for Peace in 1999 she compared her experiences as a single parent on welfare in the ghetto of Philadelphia to those of a woman enduring NATO bombing in Kosovo. She said, "While military spending is increasing to destroy the lives of those of Kosovo, the dismantling of our safety net to keep people alive is occurring at home. We at the KWRU are absolutely convinced that in order to really talk in terms of abolishing war, we must talk about abolishing poverty."

That's what they'll be doing in Philadelphia. KWRU, a poor people's organization based in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, will erect a TENT CITY just a stone's throw from the Convention to make visible the poor people who have been "disappeared from the debates, the media and discussion about the so- called economic boom" in America.

KWRU's "unpermitted" MARCH FOR ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS will kick off on Monday, July 31st, 11 AM at City Hall and will bring together thousands of poor people, students, social workers, unions, lawyers and religious leaders to protest. For more information about KWRU and the March visit www.libertynet.org/krwu.html

The Peace Movement will be a visible participant in both the UNITY 2000 march and r2K demonstrations during the Convention. The folks that brought 10,000 people to a remote and once anonymous military institution that trains Latin American soldiers and officers, is coming to Philly, and they are bringing their friends. That's right, the School of the Americas Watch, along with other solidarity and peace and justice organizations, will be in "full effect." Their "WAR NO MORE" PEACE CONVERGENCE will "confront the injustices of our government and the corporate power hogs." Their call to action connects the School of the Americas to other issues of War and greed. Their statement reads, "Let us put an end to the training of soldiers at the School of the Americas (SOA) which has caused unimaginable suffering and trauma and has led to the death and disappearance of tens of thousands.... Let us declare shame on a system that allows corporations to not only sell billions of dollars of weapons each year to tyrannical leaders -- at a cost of millions of lives -- but who also "buy out" government leaders by pumping millions of dollars into their pockets through campaign contributions." For more information visit www.soaw-ne.org/WNM.html or email www.warnomore30@aol.com

THE SHADOW KNOWS

Syndicated Columnista and author Arianna Huffington is the driving force behind the SHADOW CONVENTIONS taking place in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The Philadelphia event, kicked off by Senator and one time Presidential hopeful John McCain, will begin Sunday July 30 at The Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania (3680 Walnut Street, Philadelphia). The three days that follow will be chock full of issues and speakers.

Monday, July 31 will focus on CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM, in a series of panels convened by Common Cause director Scott Harshbarger, featuring Doris Haddock (aka "Granny D" the 90-year-old great grandmother who walked across the country for campaign finance reform) and Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN).

Day Two, convened by Ethan Nadelmann, from the Lindesmith Center will focus on THE FAILED DRUG WAR. Day Three, POVERTY AND THE WEALTH GAP will be divided into three conversations between academics, grass-roots workers, elected officials, representatives of faith-based organizations, and other well-known personalities. For more information and a full line up of speakers visit www.shadowconventions.com

THANK GOODNESS THE MOVEMENT STILL HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR

UNITED FOR A FREE ECONOMY has launched THE BILLIONAIRES FOR BUSH (OR GORE) campaign to make sure that the unrecognized needs of the under represented population are met. Their POLITICAL PLATFORM is worth quoting at length:

"Vote for Bush (or Gore): Although they differ on some policies and sometimes wear different colored power ties, we're confident that both candidates are deeply committed to economic inequality. They bring their hard-won personal experience making millions in a business subsidized by taxpayers (Bush: oil & gas, baseball stadiums; Gore: agribusiness) to national economic policy. Both oppose raising the minimum wage to match the cost of living. Both will continue taxpayer subsidies of generous CEO salaries, as well as taxing earnings from the stock market at a lower rate than income from actual work."

They've got great campaign materials, speeches, sermons, and posters. For the complete picture check out www.billionairesforbushorgore.com

Moderate or Militant: Will the Real Dick Cheney Please Stand Up?

An ATRC Commentary
by William D. Hartung

Prior to George W. Bush's decision to choose him to head up his search for a running mate -- a quest which ended on Tuesday, July 25th with the announcement that Cheney himself had landed the job -- for most Americans Dick Cheney was at best a dimly remembered figure from the bygone days of the Gulf war.

Gulf War Myths, Gulf War Realities

If you remember Dick Cheney at all, it is probably from his supporting role in the "Dick and Colin Show" (my title, not theirs), that slick exercise in televised spin control that kept America mesmerized during the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict. The show was so popular that it achieved the ultimate "preemptive strike," displacing the afternoon soap operas on more than one occasion.

While Colin Powell had the star power, Cheney added a certain low-key, matter-of-fact credibility to the Bush administration's effort to sell the Gulf War as an antiseptic, "humane" conflict.

To hear Dick and Colin tell it, every U.S. weapon worked as advertised, "collateral damage" (i.e., deaths of innocent men, women, and children) was limited, and the successful coalition effort to reverse Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait had ushered in a new post-Cold War order in which tyrants and human rights abusers would no longer go unpunished.

Those of us who stayed tuned to the Gulf War story after it dropped out of prime time soon learned that the Cheney/Powell PR machine had badly distorted the fundamental military and political facts of the conflict.

Militarily, it ended up that U.S. "wonder weapons" hadn't been so wonderful after all. MIT weapons scientist Theodore Postol and the Israeli military persuasively demonstrated that the "star" of the air war, Raytheon's Patriot missile, was successful in intercepting Scud missiles just 10 to 40% of the time, not the 90%-plus rate broadcast by Cheney and Powell. (Ironically, just in the past year, Raytheon has been forced to recall as defective hundreds of upgraded Patriot PAC-2 missiles that it had sold to U.S. allies in the wake of the Gulf War).

Iraqi military casualties were much smaller than the Bush administration had originally claimed, in large part because tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers - exhausted from eight years of war with Iran and fed up with Saddam Hussein's empty promises to take care of their basic needs- decided to "vote with their feet" by beating a hasty retreat from the front lines. Meanwhile, deaths of Iraqi non-combatants from disease and hunger spawned by the destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure were much higher than originally acknowledged. More than nine years after the Bush administration's glorious victory in Iraq, the flood of unnecessary civilian deaths in Iraq continues, driven by the Clinton/Gore policy of stiff economic sanctions punctuated by periodic outbursts of massive aerial bombardment.

On the global political front, needless to say, the bombardment of Iraq did nothing to stop mass killing and repression in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, southeastern Turkey, or East Timor. In fact, in many of these places, the United States armed and trained the perpetrators of ethnic slaughter in keeping with the "Cheney Doctrine" of "arms for our friends and arms control for our enemies." This deeply hypocritical stance helped enrich U.S. arms merchants, but only at the unacceptably high cost of undermining the prospects for arms control and enduring peace in the Middle East, East Asia, and southern Africa.

Yellow ribbons and self-congratulatory rhetoric aside, the main military and diplomatic fallout of the 1991 Gulf War have been the perpetuation of the myth of "war without casualties" (U.S. casualties, that is); the emergence of the United States as the world's leading arms merchant; and the weakening of diplomatic and multilateral approaches to peacekeeping and conflict prevention in favor of a series of ad hoc, U.S.-led "posses" that generally enter zones of conflict too late and use the wrong tools once they got there (e.g., bombing from 15,000 feet as an antidote to ethnic repression in Kosovo).

Cashing In on Connections: Cheney Heads Halliburton

So far, none of the U.S. principals of the 1991 Persian Gulf War have been called to account for the lies and manipulation that they engaged in before, during, and after the conflict. On the contrary, they have profited from the war. And more than any other figure in the war, Cheney had to reap his windfall the old-fashioned way, by exploiting conflicts-of-interest to line his own pockets.

Unlike his more charismatic cohorts, Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf, Cheney didn't get a multi-billion dollar book contract after the Gulf War. And no one was hounding him to run for president (or vice president, for that matter) in the wake of the war, was the case with Colin Powell. Instead, Dick Cheney, the man who helped direct a war that was largely aimed at keeping "our oil supplies" out of the hands of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, decided to get into the oil business, just as his longstanding friends in the Bush administration had done. Wall Street analysts make no bones of the fact that Cheney's new employer, the oil industry services firm Halliburton, hired him NOT for his experience in the industry (he had none), but rather for the doors he could open for the firm in key Middle Eastern markets (including, but not limited to, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). Cheney has done a damned good job of opening doors, helping the firm pursue new business opportunities with old friends (like Saudi Arabia) and "states of concern" (like Iraq and Iran) alike. He also engineered Halliburton's purchase of the construction giant Brown and Root, which is involved in everything from providing security at U.S. embassies security to building military bases for the United States and its closest allies. This in turn allowed Cheney to trade on his connections inside the Pentagon to boost the firm's level of military contracts to more than $650 million per year, enough to bring into the ranks of the department's top 20 contractors in FY 1999, up from 42nd in FY 1998.

Not a bad few years work for a guy everyone assumed had vanished into the woodwork after his 15 minutes of fame expired in the spring of 1991.

Punching Up the Ticket: Bush/Quayle II

Besides offering reassurance to the Pentagon and corporate America that "young" George W. (who at 54, is actually only five years younger than Cheney) won't do anything rash or stupid, Cheney brings another key asset to the ticket: after a distinguished (albeit extremely conservative) career that has included stints as President Ford's chief of staff, a well-regarded member of Congress from Wyoming, and Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, Dick Cheney is actually qualified to serve as president of the United States. The same cannot be reliably stated for George W. Bush himself, who has served one term and change as the governor of Texas, a state whose system gives so little power to the governor that pretty much anyone who wants to get anything done goes first to either the legislative leadership, the comptroller, or the lieutenant governor (who presides over the legislature). In fact, Bush/Cheney looks a lot like Bush/Quayle in reverse, with George W. representing the role of the potato-spelling pinhead and Dick Cheney playing the polite but accomplished career politician with a resume longer than your arm.

The Bottom Line: How Conservative Is Cheney

Despite his reputation as a moderate, Dick Cheney is in reality one of the most conservative political figures of the modern era of American politics. During his Congressional career as Wyoming's member of the House of Representatives in the 1980s, he pulled off the conservative equivalent of the "daily double": a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union paired with a 0% rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. That put him in company with such right-wing luminaries as Jack Kemp, Dick Armey, and Dan Burton, and slightly to the left of Newt Gingrich, who got a whopping 5% ADA rating. Cheney's conservative votes include staunch support for aid to the Contras, opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and opposition to common sense gun safety measures such as a ban on "cop killer" bullets and an end to the manufacture of plastic guns that can fool airport security devices (a vote on which he was joined by only 3 House colleagues).

His record as a moderate stems largely from his tenure as George Bush's Secretary of Defense, when he presided over significant cutbacks in U.S. troops and opposed several unnecessary weapons programs such as the Navy's A-12 "stealth" fighter plane and the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey. But as former Reagan administration Pentagon official Lawrence J. Korb of the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, Cheney's image as a "budget cutter" is vastly over-rated. Clearly, the defense industry harbored no grudge, as Cheney's wife has sat on the Board of Directors of defense giant Lockheed Martin for years. During his tenure at the helm of the Pentagon, the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet troops were pulled out of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved into its constituent republics. Yet despite the disappearance of its Cold War adversary, Cheney wanted to cut the U.S. military budget by only 10 percent over a multi-year period, and was only convinced to cut deeper by Colin Powell, who argued that anything less than a phased-in reduction of 25% would be laughed off of Capitol Hill.

A Ray of Hope: Cheney as Internationalist

To his credit, Cheney seems to be more closely allied with respected, internationalist Republicans like former Reagan Defense Secretary George Shultz and former Bush National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, rather than right-wing true believers like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. This difference could be crucial, since it was folks like Shultz and Scowcroft who helped convince the Reagan and Bush administrations to trade off distorted visions of a leak-proof missile defense for real, negotiated reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. If he were to use his inherent caution to put George W.'s harebrained National Missile Defense scheme on the slow track while nuclear arms reductions are resumed in earnest after an eight year hiatus during the Clinton term, he could make a positive mark on U.S. security policy. And if his newfound experience in the oil business makes him more open to normalizing relations with former "rogue states" like Iran and Iraq, all the better. But before we can gauge how Cheney might perform as vice president, we will need a much more vigorous and detailed foreign policy debate than either Al Gore or George Bush have offered thus far. There's no time like the present, on the eve of the Republican convention, to get started on that debate.

Copyright William D. Hartung, July 26, 2000. Feel free to quote from this commentary with appropriate citation. If you are interested in publishing this essay (or a modified version thereof) as an opinion piece, please contact Frida Berrigan at 212-229-5808, ext. 112, or berrigaf@newschool.edu

I. Lott and Lockheed: Partners in Influence Peddling
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott kicked off the Republican National Convention a day early with a massive theme party and fundraiser near the campus of Drexel University. The party, which was attended by 1,500 faithful Lott supporters (plus one of the authors of this issue brief) was a lavish 1950s-style dance party emceed by Dick Clark with music by the Shirelles, Bobby Vee, and the Four Tops. The "Lott Hop," as it was called, was bankrolled almost entirely by major corporations and industry associations, including the American Gas Association, International Paper, and Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest weapons contractor. Lockheed Martin, which has denied that it sponsored the event in an attempt to influence the most powerful man in Congress, donated $60,000 towards the event. The company has also pledged $1 million to the "Trent Lott Leadership Institute" at the University of Mississippi.

What does Lockheed Martin have to celebrate about Trent Lott? Lots! In the past few years, the majority leader has helped bail out multi-billion dollar Lockheed Martin projects like the F-22 fighter, a $70 billion program that was almost stopped in its tracks last year by Representatives Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and Pennsylvania's own Jack Murtha; the C-130 transport plane, which is routinely added to the Pentagon budget in quantities far beyond what the Pentagon requests; and the Theater High Altitude Area Defense project, THAAD, for which the company has just received a $4 billion multi-year contract despite the fact that it has failed in six of its eight tests.

II. Weapons Makers Largesse Favors Republicans
The relationship between Lott and Lockheed Martin is not unique. The top four missile defense contractors -- Lockheed Martin, TRW, Boeing, and Raytheon -- have made $6 million in political contributions in the current election cycle. The four firms also spent $34 million in lobbying in 1997/98 alone, a figure that will no doubt be exceeded when the final numbers of 1999/2000 are tallied. Ever since the Republicans took control of Congress in January 1995, major weapons contractors have favored them over Democratic candidates by a 2 to 1 margin.

The weapons makers have good reason to reward the Republican party for its role in boosting weapons spending -- since the Republicans took the House in 1995, Congress has routinely added $5 to $10 billion per year to the Pentagon budget beyond what the Clinton Administration has requested in its annual budget submissions. As a result, the Pentagon budget will hit $310 billion next year, a Cold War level budget despite the fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists and the so-called "rogue states" that the Pentagon worries about most -- Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and Cuba -- taken together spend just one-eighteenth of what the United States spends on its military.

III. TRW and John Warner: Hail to the Chairman
Lockheed Martin isn't the only weapons contractor looking to solidify its connections with key Republicans this week. TRW -- which is facing charges of fraud for manipulating results of tests related to the National Missile Defense (NMD) program -- is throwing a luncheon for Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner at the Philadelphia Union Club at noon on July 31st. Warner has been a key supporter of the NMD program. He led the Republican charge in defeating an amendment sponsored by Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota that would have required the Pentagon to conduct realistic tests of the NMD system before making a deployment decision. At issue is the fact pointed out by Dr. Ted Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a joint study group of experts from MIT and the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the American Physical Society (the nation's largest professional organization of physicists) that the current NMD system has shown no capability to distinguish between a nuclear warhead and a simple decoy. TRW research scientist Dr. Nira Schwartz has filed a civil suit against the company charging that they forced her to cover up research results documenting that their NMD "kill vehicle" failed to tell a mock warhead from a decoy 80 to 85% of the time.

IV. Bush and Cheney: the Arms Industry's 'Dream Team'
George W. Bush has strong ties to Lockheed Martin from his service as Governor of Texas, where he tried to give the firm a contract to run the Texas welfare system before he had to relent in the face of public protests and an unfavorable regulatory ruling by the Clinton administration. Lockheed Martin VP Bruce Jackson is a finance chair of the Bush for President campaign, and was heard to brag at a conference last year that he would be in a position to "write the Republican platform" on defense if Bush gets the nomination (which he will, later this week). Dick Cheney, the man who presided over the U.S.-led victory over Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War, has spent the past few years running the oil services giant Halliburton, which ranked 18th on the Pentagon's top contractors list in FY 1999. Cheney's wife, Lynne, serves on Lockheed Martin's board, a service for which she receives $120,000 in compensation. That's small change for the Cheney family -- Dick earned $26.7 million in wages, bonuses, and stock options last year -- but it raises serious questions of conflict of interest when the potential "second lady" is on the payroll of the nation's largest weapons maker.

V. The Bottom Line: Both Major Parties Have Been Bought Off
The answer to the weapons industry's hold on the Republican party is NOT to turn to the Democrats. Under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the Democratic Leadership Council, the Democratic Party has been almost as pro-military as the Republicans, maintaining high military spending, throwing billions of dollars at missile defense, and reaping over $1.1 million in soft money from Bernard Schwartz of Loral Space and Communications in the most recent election cycle alone. The answer is to get special interest money out of politics by supporting full public financing of presidential and congressional races on the "clean money" model, where candidates can successfully run for office without taking any corporate contributions.

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