US Presidential candidates show how democracy is corrupted by money

Tuesday, 25 March 2008


The US election season is once again in full swing as America begins its search for it's next President. In the coming months America together with the rest of the world will witness either John McCain the Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, the still yet undecided Democratic candidates, succeed the incumbent President George W. Bush in the White House.

The American establishment has long glorified and held out the apparent merits of it's political system to the rest of the world as part of the 'American dream'; that ordinary Americans can choose with complete freedom their next leader, with power transferring in a orderly and peaceful manner. Any American citizen, they proudly say, can stand for election as President.

The reality is that the American political dream is nothing more than a myth; witness the huge amounts of money being spent by just a few elite candidates shows this is completely untrue; millions of dollars are being spent on sophisticated election campaigns. The reality is that in America, just as elsewhere, Democracy has never fulfilled it's promise; the influence of money has ensured that Democracy remains a flawed system of rule in favour of the rich and privileges.

In the US Presidential election campaign of 2004, George Bush received a staggering $292.6 million dollars in private donations, whilst his then Democrat opponent John Kerry received $253.9 million dollars. The third independent candidate, Ralph Nader, had just over $4.5 million dollars to spend. The total cost of the US Presidential and Congressional election campaigns in 2004 reached $3.9 billion dollars. In the 2008 election Barack Obama has raised $193 million dollars, Hillary Clinton $169 million dollars and John McCain $64 million dollars thus far. In theory the criteria to be a Presidential candidate are very simple: The candidate must be a natural born US citizen, must have been resident for 14 years in the US and be at least 35 years of age. Yet given the huge obscene amounts of money being raised and spent on television advertisements, radio campaigns and other forms of election marketing, the chance of an ordinary person being able to stand as a realistic candidate are nil. Money represents a natural 'market barrier' to entry.

This obvious but powerful conclusion explains why voters in the American political system are losing faith in their entire system. Voter turnout in America has been declining in past years and has one of the lowest turnouts in the western world. Effectively a minority of the eligible electorate has chosen it's incumbent legislators and Presidents.

The masses within the West are beginning to understand that their vote is irrelevant and meaningless as things stand in the American political system. This feeling has been compounded by the fact that in recent years the Democratic and Republican parties have very little real policy differences'. Both have practiced a belligerent foreign policy and have had an agenda that has profited big business at the expense of domestic social spending. The reason why the American democratic system has lead to such a situation is again down to the influence of money and key interest groups. American corporations and lobby groups do not donate money to American politicians' because they see themselves as philanthropists'; they give money because they expect favours back as a return. In return corporate business can expect politicians to craft new policies and laws that are favourable to them upon gaining power and public office.

This shows that Democracy is fundamentally flawed; the ability to manufacture man made temporal laws and policies by the executive leaves the fate of the people vulnerable to those who manage to gain the most influence in a Democratic government. President Eisenhower famously warned of such corrupting influences in American politics by issuing the following statement in his farewell speech in January 1961, saying,

"...three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.

We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Today, America's defence related spending is estimated to be an astonishing $1 trillion dollars a year; to put this into context America's total budget passed by Congress in March 2008 was $3 trillion dollars. Social and Health spending in contrast has declined in recent years, with essential services facing cuts. With America spending more and more of its wealth on its military and foreign wars of occupation, the influence of American military contractors has never been stronger. The distribution of new military projects in the states of influential US congressman, more commonly known as 'pork barrel' politics, demonstrates how intertwined money and politics have become. Yet it is not just the defence industry; the rest of corporate America has also sought to gain a foothold by donating money and engaging lobbyists'; Hillary Clinton recently offered a passionate defence of lobbyists' as investment banks and other financial institutions have become one of the leading donators in this election campaign to Presidential candidates from both parties.

Democracy is not just susceptible to such influence and corruption in America; wherever Democracy is being used as a ruling system the results have shown that the rich and powerful succeed in gaining undue and illegitimate influence right around the world. A recent US study showed that corporations that donated money to politicians always had higher profits per year on average than the rest of their peers. It is not surprising then that many jobs have been relocated from America to other parts of the Third world as corporations have aggressively 'outsourced' many jobs under the noses of America's legislators so that they can increase corporate profits.

Democracy is in reality a sophisticated means of control used by the American corporate and political elite to carefully select its leaders from a small pool that will toe its line. As Americans once more go through the motions to choose their leader, the subsequent outcome is all but predictable. Irrespective of whoever wins, campaign promises made to the general public now will definitely be broken, as new policies and legislation will be made to repay the favours' bestowed on the yet unknown new President. The only thing that is certain is that those American corporations, lobbyists' and special interests groups who have donated money in this Presidential campaign will yet again emerge as the real benefactors from a political system that rewards the rich whilst failing millions of ordinary people.

Social inequality leads to gap in US life expectancy

By Jerry White
26 March 2008


A series of recent reports highlights the magnitude of social distress confronting tens of millions of ordinary working people in the United States as the impact of the economic downturn and growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of the population hits home.

Perhaps the sharpest example of the class divide that permeates American society is a report by researchers at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy that coincide with the growth of social inequality over the last two decades.

The New York Times cited a report based on earlier findings by an HHS demographer and a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which found “widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy” at birth and at every age level.

On average, US life expectancy rose by three years (from 73.7 to 76.7) between 1980 and 2000, but the largest gains were made by the most affluent layers of the population, leading to a growing gap in life expectancy between the lower and higher income groups.

Dr. Gopal Singh and Professor Mohammed Siahpush measured social and economic conditions in every US county by examining 2000 census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors.

The report said in 1980-1982, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than those in the poorest (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7), and it continues to grow, Dr. Singh said.

“Life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000,” he said. “If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh added, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 versus 81.3 years).”

The Times said while that while researchers differ over what causes the disparity, many suggest it includes the lack of health insurance among lower-income people, which makes them less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care. It is estimated that some 47 million Americans lack health care coverage.

In addition, higher income and more educated people have greater access to new medical advances to fight cancer and heart disease, while lower-income people continue to smoke at a disproportionately higher level, live in less safe neighborhoods, have less access to healthy foods and are subjected to increased levels of stress. A recent study by the US Department of Veteran Affairs also found that racial discrimination led to “less aggressive medical care” for minorities.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has found that trends in life expectancy have paralleled the decrease or increase in social inequality over the last four decades. Kreiger ,who investigated the rate of premature mortality—dying before the age of 65—and infant death from 1960 to 2002, told the Times that inequities shrank between 1966 and 1980, but then widened over the next 20 years.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.” She said the creation of Medicaid and Medicare—the two major federal programs for the poor and elderly—along with health centers, the social programs under President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had likely contributed to narrowing the earlier inequalities in health.

The dismantling of these programs—by both Republican and Democratic administrations—over the last three decades, and the radical redistribution of wealth to the top that has resulted, has produced a catastrophe for masses of people, including cutting their years of life.

The report on life expectancy coincided with a rash of new data detailing the widespread suffering caused by the loss of jobs, the collapse of the housing market and the combination of inflation and stagnating or declining wages. The reports noted the following:

* By the end of 2007, 36 percent of consumers’ disposable income went to food, energy and medical care, a bigger portion than at any time since records were first kept in 1960, according to Merrill Lynch.

* An analysis of government data by the Washington Post found that prices for basic staples like groceries, gasoline and health care have risen 9.2 percent since 2006. This means a family of four, which made $45,000 a year, is spending an extra $972 annually, assuming it did not cut back on such items because of higher prices. During that same period average earnings for non-managerial workers rose by only 5 percent, translating into a de facto wage cut for tens of millions of Americans.

Middle-income families are being forced to spend $378 more per year on gasoline and an extra $38 on fuel oil. The price for dairy products has risen 15 percent since 2006, fruit and vegetable prices are up 10 percent, and cereals and bakery products are up 8 percent.

* Even though productivity is increasing, inflation-adjusted median family income has fallen 2.6 percent since 2001—chopping nearly $1,000 off a family’s yearly income.

The fall in wages has in part been caused by rising medical costs, which has led employers to offer smaller pay raises. At the same time wages have been eroded by rising medical costs and efforts by corporations to impose greater out-of-pocket expenses on employees. Since 2001, premiums for family health care coverage have increased 78 percent, according to a 2007 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation cited by the Washington Post.

* Food stamp rolls have reached a record high in Ohio, with 1.1 million people—or 10 percent of the state’s population—receiving federal subsidies, according to the state welfare agency. Caseloads have nearly doubled since 2001, when an estimated 628,000 people were in the program, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

“The economy and loss of manufacturing jobs are at the root of what’s going on,” Jack Frech, director of the welfare agency in Athens County in southeast Ohio, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “But lately,” he added, it’s “the rising cost of transportation and food—people who were barely getting by, are not getting by. It has pressed folks to the edge to have to rely on food stamps.”

In most cases families are eligible for $100 a month in food stamps if they make up to 130 percent of the federal poverty level—$22,880 for a family of three—and have assets no greater than $2,000. Poverty experts say another 500,000 residents in the state are eligible for the program but are not enrolled.

All of these reports depict an unfolding social calamity in the US. In the face of this, both candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination—Illinois Senator Barack Obama and New York Senator Hillary Clinton—have proposed less than half-measures to address the collapse of the housing market, the destruction of decent-paying jobs and the health care crisis.

In an address at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, Clinton called on President Bush to appoint “an emergency working group on foreclosures” to recommend new ways to confront housing finance troubles. She said the panel should be led by financial experts such as Robert Rubin, treasury secretary in her husband’s administration, former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan, and Paul Volcker.

All of these figures are implicated in economic policies over the last three decades that channeled trillions of dollars into the hands of the richest segments of the population through the destruction of some 6 million industrial jobs and the permanent lowering of working class living standards.

Obama is just as opposed as Clinton to any radical redistribution of wealth from the top to bottom. While proposing “middle class” tax breaks, which will hardly make a dent in the disaster facing working families, he has rejected any return to the tax rates on the rich that prevailed in the 1960s—a period when social inequality actually lessened somewhat—saying last year he was opposed to “confiscatory taxes that get in the way of economic growth.”

Article Source: World Socialist Web Site

Many Muslims Turn to Home Schooling

Many Muslims Turn to Home Schooling

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

March 26, 2008

LODI, Calif. — Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home.

Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes.

“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes — they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” said Miss Bibi, 17, now studying at the 12th-grade level in this agricultural center some 70 miles east of San Francisco. “You have to be respectable.”

Across the United States, Muslims who find that a public school education clashes with their religious or cultural traditions have turned to home schooling. That choice is intended partly as a way to build a solid Muslim identity away from the prejudices that their children, boys and girls alike, can face in schoolyards. But in some cases, as in Ms. Bibi’s, the intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.

About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled, though broader statistics on the number of Muslim children being home-schooled, and how well they do academically, are elusive. Even estimates on the number of all American children being taught at home swing broadly, from one million to two million.

No matter what the faith, parents who make the choice are often inspired by a belief that public schools are havens for social ills like drugs and that they can do better with their children at home.

“I don’t want the behavior,” said Aya Ismael, a Muslim mother home-schooling four children near San Jose. “Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders. In Islam we believe in respect and dignity and honor.”

Still, the subject of home schooling is a contentious one in various Muslim communities, with opponents arguing that Muslim children are better off staying in the system and, if need be, fighting for their rights.

Robina Asghar, a Muslim who does social work in Stockton, Calif., says the fact that her son was repeatedly branded a “terrorist” in school hallways sharpened his interest in civil rights and inspired a dream to become a lawyer. He now attends a Catholic high school.

“My son had a hard time in school, but every time something happened it was a learning moment for him,” Mrs. Asghar said. “He learned how to cope. A lot of people were discriminated against in this country, but the only thing that brings change is education.”

Many parents, however, would rather their children learn in a less difficult environment, and opt to keep them home.

Hina Khan-Mukhtar decided to tutor her three sons at home and to send them to a small Muslim school cooperative established by some 15 Bay Area families for subjects like Arabic, science and carpentry. She made up her mind after visiting her oldest son’s prospective public school kindergarten, where each pupil had assembled a scrapbook titled “Why I Like Pigs.” Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar read with dismay what the children had written about the delicious taste of pork, barred by Islam. “I remembered at that age how important it was to fit in,” she said.

Many Muslim parents contacted for this article were reluctant to talk, saying Muslim home-schoolers were often portrayed as religious extremists. That view is partly fueled by the fact that Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for Al Qaeda, was home-schooled in rural California.

“There is a tendency to make home-schoolers look like antisocial fanatics who don’t want their kids in the system,” said Nabila Hanson, who argues that most home-schoolers, like herself, make an extra effort to find their children opportunities for sports, music or field trips with other people.

Lodi’s Muslims also attracted unwanted national attention when one local man, Hamid Hayat, was sentenced last year to 24 years in prison on a terrorism conviction that his relatives say was largely due to a fabricated confession. (Had he been more Americanized, they say, he would have known to ask for a lawyer as soon as the F.B.I. appeared.)

Parents who home-school tend to be converts, Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar said. Immigrant parents she has encountered generally oppose the idea, seeing educational opportunities in America as a main reason for coming.

If so, then Fawzia Mai Tung is an exception, a Chinese Muslim immigrant who home-schools three daughters in Phoenix. She spent many sleepless nights worried that her children would not excel on standardized tests, until she discovered how low the scores at the local schools were. Her oldest son, also home-schooled, is now applying to medical school.

In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi.

Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence.

“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hourlong tutorials.

Of more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, just 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled, and usually the reason is that they were falling behind academically.

As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.

The parents “want their girls safe at home and away from evil things like boys, drinking and drugs,” said Kristine Leach, a veteran teacher with the Independent School.

The girls follow the regular high school curriculum, squeezing in study time among housework, cooking, praying and reading the Koran. The teachers at the weekly tutorials occasionally crack jokes of the “what, are your brothers’ arms broken?” variety, but in general they tread lightly, sensing that their students obey family and tradition because they have no alternative.

“I do miss my friends,” Miss Bibi said of fellow students with whom she once attended public school. “We would hang out and do fun things, help each other with our homework.”

But being schooled apart does have its benefit, she added. “We don’t want anyone to point a finger at us,” she said, “to say that we are bad.”

Mrs. Asghar, the Stockton woman who argues against home schooling, takes exception to the idea of removing girls from school to preserve family honor, calling it a barrier to assimilation.

“People who think like this are stuck in a time capsule,” she said. “When kids know more than their parents, the parents lose control. I think that is a fear in all of us.”

Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there.

Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”



Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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