In running for election, Laws, who promised to stay til the job was done (he just didn’t say what sort of job he meant; turns out it was a job not for but on Wanganui) ran a divisive campaign modeled after Karl Rove’s tactics in the US. Instead of gays as the community scapegoat, Laws targeted a so-called “elite”, those people who supported the arts. He ridiculed opera. And anointed himself as a populist with tastes that reflected the majority, hip-hop say, or jazz.
Never mind that Wanganui has had a flourishing arts community which as a creative whole contribute a great deal not only to the cultural attractions of the city but periodically to its coffers through various events featuring the arts. An example is the very successful Wanganui Opera School, a on-week master class that has during its ten years existence attracted international attendance and participation to a city of 43,000.
Taking another leaf from the Bush-Rove playbook Laws concocted a claim that the Wanganui Art Gallery extension project, which had been approved by the previous Council and which had government support to the tune of 2.2 million dollars. had a deficit of a million dollars, owing to a pledge of a private donor which remained unfulfilled. The burden of 3 million in construction costs would, Laws claimed, fall on ratepayers. He intended to save them from that indebtedness. He would promise also a nil rates increase, if elected.
Parenthetically, the Bush-Rove-Laws playbook owes much to the groundbreaking work of Jozef Goebbels (and before him Nicolo Machievelli, Rove’s acknowledged bed-time reading) and his famous epigram: “If you repeat a lie often enough and long enough most people will come to believe it.”
The fact is most such pledges remain abstract and are not fulfilled until just before the project breaks ground. The Gallery, known as the jewel of the lower North Island, with great exhibition space for local artists Maori and others, as well as a collection of more traditional art, has been allowed to drift. It’s curator, Bill Milbank, was forced to retire and direction given to the local librarian as an arts czar (sound familiarly Bushevik?) whose chief credential is her cronyism with Laws.
The nil rates increase is a sham as property re-evaluations disproportionately increased the rates for the homes of those in the Castlecliff suburb, a region known for low income and higher crime rate.
Laws and his rubber stamp Council have instituted projects which benefit cronies and have already doubled the city’s debt.
Oh, and the central government funding? Well, when the Gallery project folded and Michael Laws insulted Arts Minister Tizard, calling her an idiot, government took its money and hasn’t brought a dime back to the city.
And Laws liking for the popular taste. Well, after two appearances on tv1's "Dancing with the stars", he was finally kicked off after a bad attempt at the hop. In his first appearance he looked like a vampire. His second could have been the title of a new book "Dead Man Skipping"
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
Iraq War Reflections
In July 2003 when the war was five months old I wrote a letter to a Norwegian friend, Maryanne Heimberg. She was the widow of the Foreign Minister of Norway and both she and her husband had had a large but unheralded role in the Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. At the time of this writing she was working for the Foreign Ministry and teaching diplomacy. Unfortunately for the world, she is now herself, deceased. Here's my letter in its entirety:
It was most delightful to talk with you the other day. I do hope we meet again soon whether here or in some other country.
In the meantime here is something to consider for your foreign policy interests. Most of the world is puzzled by the foreign policy endeavors of the Bush administration.
Rather than acting in concert with the rest of the world as previous administrations of both parties have done, this one favors going it alone. To cite but a few instances there was the Kyoto treaty on global warming. This administration withdrew. The ICBM treaty signed in Salt I with the then Soviet Union proved inconvenient to an ABM program long cherished by our hawks. Bush announced his unilateral decision to withdraw. And of course Gulf War II which confuses most people. Clearly, this administration has been preparing for war against Iraq for over a year and has used faulty intelligence and hyped intelligence to rationalize its pre-emptive strike (a sharp departure from US foreign policy over the last six decades at least). Even the slight nod to the UN and its weapons inspectors was only a delaying of the inevitable. Now there may be some significant price to be paid in lives and treasury for the US eagerness to go it alone, as the post-War war becomes a guerilla conflict and many former allies from NATO are unwilling now to risk their sons and daughters in a conflict neither of their making nor their prior concurrence.
How to understand all this:
I am convinced that Bush and his closest advisors simply do not give one fig about foreign policy. Nor about world opinion unless that opinion like Tony Blair’s is entirely in agreement with their actions. Well, why attack Iraq if it’s not WMD or certainly not "yellowcake" uranium?
Frankly, because it looked easy. The planners believed Iraq was a military push-over (unlike say, North Korea with its million man army and probable nuclear capability). They wanted a quick clean war to demonstrate American might and determination. It’s obvious that there was no plan for the contingencies of the occupation; even in the absence of actual human intelligence, common sense would have dictated that Iraq’s infrastructure would be threadbare and fragile after a 10 year embargo.
The Bush team appears not to have anticipated either the civil strife or the lawlessness inevitable to the toppling of a dictatorial regime despite all the evidence of history. Why go to war with Iraq when the US decided to go in?
To put the fear of (the Christian ) God into all those muslims who might think of repeating 9-11 in some form or other. But more importantly for domestic consumption. To allow Bush that moment of self-congratulation about the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, a cartoon which was intended for repetition ad nauseum on television during next year’s presidential campaign. It’s unfortunate that Bush may not get to use it as long as the guerilla action continues.
George Bush (and abetted by more sophisticated advisers) is not interested in foreign affairs. He is a man who never, on his own, traveled to Europe, say, or Russia or anywhere. He has no curiosity about those places and no passion for them. He is passionately committed to a right wing agenda for the United States of a staggering economic (and eventually) social re-ordering.
Under Bush the country is engaged in the largest transfer of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the wealthy that has been seen before only in the latter three decades of the 19th century. Not only tax policy that favors only the rich but large deficits will force future Congresses to dismantle the social safety net that supports the less fortunate and the middle-class whether through pre-Kindergarten Head Start programs for the children of the poor or College tuition costs for the middle class or the Medicare Health program for all the elderly.
His ultra-right wing supporters will happily help to gut the Constitution of its meaningful protections of the individual rights of its citizens. At the same time Bush will load the judiciary with judges who see things their way.
A number of years ago I was acquainted with a woman then in her sixties. She was the publisher of a group of neighborhood newspapers in Massachusetts. She herself had graduated from an elite Women’s college in the thirties at a time when many of her high-school classmates went to finishing schools or secretarial schools. We met during the middle 70’s just after Nixon’s return from his opening to China and when civil rights marches and Vietnam protests were the stuff of the nightly news. Her dinner table conversation consisted of one recurrent long complaint: you just couldn’t get good servants anymore. Why her own Irish live-in cook/maid wanted more than one day off and $50 a week for salary. Imagine!
Bush would have been very comfortable with that woman and she with him.
His agenda is to create that new servant class in America. And if it takes the side-show of Iraq to keep the voters from seeing where we are headed well so be it.
It was most delightful to talk with you the other day. I do hope we meet again soon whether here or in some other country.
In the meantime here is something to consider for your foreign policy interests. Most of the world is puzzled by the foreign policy endeavors of the Bush administration.
Rather than acting in concert with the rest of the world as previous administrations of both parties have done, this one favors going it alone. To cite but a few instances there was the Kyoto treaty on global warming. This administration withdrew. The ICBM treaty signed in Salt I with the then Soviet Union proved inconvenient to an ABM program long cherished by our hawks. Bush announced his unilateral decision to withdraw. And of course Gulf War II which confuses most people. Clearly, this administration has been preparing for war against Iraq for over a year and has used faulty intelligence and hyped intelligence to rationalize its pre-emptive strike (a sharp departure from US foreign policy over the last six decades at least). Even the slight nod to the UN and its weapons inspectors was only a delaying of the inevitable. Now there may be some significant price to be paid in lives and treasury for the US eagerness to go it alone, as the post-War war becomes a guerilla conflict and many former allies from NATO are unwilling now to risk their sons and daughters in a conflict neither of their making nor their prior concurrence.
How to understand all this:
I am convinced that Bush and his closest advisors simply do not give one fig about foreign policy. Nor about world opinion unless that opinion like Tony Blair’s is entirely in agreement with their actions. Well, why attack Iraq if it’s not WMD or certainly not "yellowcake" uranium?
Frankly, because it looked easy. The planners believed Iraq was a military push-over (unlike say, North Korea with its million man army and probable nuclear capability). They wanted a quick clean war to demonstrate American might and determination. It’s obvious that there was no plan for the contingencies of the occupation; even in the absence of actual human intelligence, common sense would have dictated that Iraq’s infrastructure would be threadbare and fragile after a 10 year embargo.
The Bush team appears not to have anticipated either the civil strife or the lawlessness inevitable to the toppling of a dictatorial regime despite all the evidence of history. Why go to war with Iraq when the US decided to go in?
To put the fear of (the Christian ) God into all those muslims who might think of repeating 9-11 in some form or other. But more importantly for domestic consumption. To allow Bush that moment of self-congratulation about the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, a cartoon which was intended for repetition ad nauseum on television during next year’s presidential campaign. It’s unfortunate that Bush may not get to use it as long as the guerilla action continues.
George Bush (and abetted by more sophisticated advisers) is not interested in foreign affairs. He is a man who never, on his own, traveled to Europe, say, or Russia or anywhere. He has no curiosity about those places and no passion for them. He is passionately committed to a right wing agenda for the United States of a staggering economic (and eventually) social re-ordering.
Under Bush the country is engaged in the largest transfer of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the wealthy that has been seen before only in the latter three decades of the 19th century. Not only tax policy that favors only the rich but large deficits will force future Congresses to dismantle the social safety net that supports the less fortunate and the middle-class whether through pre-Kindergarten Head Start programs for the children of the poor or College tuition costs for the middle class or the Medicare Health program for all the elderly.
His ultra-right wing supporters will happily help to gut the Constitution of its meaningful protections of the individual rights of its citizens. At the same time Bush will load the judiciary with judges who see things their way.
A number of years ago I was acquainted with a woman then in her sixties. She was the publisher of a group of neighborhood newspapers in Massachusetts. She herself had graduated from an elite Women’s college in the thirties at a time when many of her high-school classmates went to finishing schools or secretarial schools. We met during the middle 70’s just after Nixon’s return from his opening to China and when civil rights marches and Vietnam protests were the stuff of the nightly news. Her dinner table conversation consisted of one recurrent long complaint: you just couldn’t get good servants anymore. Why her own Irish live-in cook/maid wanted more than one day off and $50 a week for salary. Imagine!
Bush would have been very comfortable with that woman and she with him.
His agenda is to create that new servant class in America. And if it takes the side-show of Iraq to keep the voters from seeing where we are headed well so be it.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Judicial Restraint
You can fool all the people some of the time--Lincoln. You know, Lincoln had been a lawyer.
I have to admit that I was gullible in connection with my regard for US federal judges. I knew that most judges are political appointees but I thought that at the federal level merit ruled. The one or two I had known personally either before appointment or while on the bench were, to my mind, incredibly smart and seemed like paragons of moral rectitude.
That sort of idealization goeth before a fall. And it happened two years ago when I was invited to view a special reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser sponsored by the Federalist Society, the conservative group that has had a big influence on federal judicial appointments under Bush. The readers were a distinguished group including five federal judges, four members of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University (including its president), two hiring partners of separate white-shoe law firms in Boston and two high priced private lawyers. The goal was to read an abridged version of the play and then discuss the question of whether the current US President had exceeded his constitutional role.
I never expected these worthies to be great actor/readers. And a couple of them were just awful. But it was the discussion afterward which caused me to reevaluate my previous estimates of judicial intelligence. No one had anything remotely brilliant to say. And when an audience member brought up an essential question he was told flatly by one of these great thinkers that he was just a “Bush hater!”
Now I regard that kind of ad hominem dismissal of a serious critic to be the province of flacks like Karl Rove or Tony Snow because it’s so obviously a way of trivializing the critic’s issues and avoiding addressing them substantively. So they lost me when none of them objected or indeed addressed the question. And what was the question? It was whether the administrations actions both in going to war in Iraq and then diminishing the rights of prisoners as at Guantanomo, didn’t retrospectively lend credence to the argument of the Nazi sympathizers that the judgments at Nuremberg were no more that victors’ justice.
It’s an interesting point because two of the charges under which death sentences were carried out at Nuremberg were carrying out preventive war and meting out serious mistreatment of military prisoners. And it lead to revision of the Geneva`Conventions that Attorney General Gonzales has deemed “quaint.”
Now I’m more inclined to smile more inclusively and broadly at the old saw, “What do you call a lawyer who is too incompetent to practice.?” Answer; “Your honor”
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
The dark force gathers
Michael Laws’ antidemocratic sentiments preceeded his election to Mayor of Wanganui, but continued in the manner of his governance and his public statements.
It was not well-known to the local citizenry that he had a reputation to live down. He had been obliged to resign from a position as MP when it was discovered that he had faked a poll giving him favorable results. Essentially, lying to Parliament is a cause for removal.
As a Councillor in Hawkes Bay he soon wore out his welcome. Then he came back to Wanganui, a city where he had lived as a boy growing up. He had a reputation for poor sportsmanship and questionable tactics. He had written a book “Dancing with Beelzebub” which was reliably described as a testament of his dislike of the city.
As a shock-jock and column writer he achieved a certain notoriety status (too often translated into a quasi-celebrity status in this small country which often imitates the United States in a race for media-based tastelessness). He was reprimanded as a racist bigot by the Broadcasting Standards Authority for remarks about a Christian religious sect whom he dubbed a “cult” and said its members practiced “child abuse” and “should be bred out of the gene pool.”
Among his many extreme opinions was his stated support and admiration of Hitler Youth. Especially, he supported their burning books of the Western Canon.
His support for George Bush and the Iraq war was expressed in a perversion of the lyrics of John Lennons most famous peace anthem. “All we saying,” Laws wrote, “is give war a chance.”
Prince of Pretence
This is a work in progress about a work in self-destruct mode. Michael Laws, the present part-time Mayor of Wanganui, New Zealand and a full-time shock jock has been rebuked by the Broadcasting Standards Authority for his bigotry and racism. What I plan to write about is how he conducted himself in his elected office, his failures in governance. As the list is lengthy I will serve up the pieces of the damaged social and physical infrastructure of Wanganui one at a time...stay tuned.. or better, watch this space
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