(DV) Zingh: Cracks in the Coalition of the Crackpots

Silvio Berlusconi, one of George Bush's most strident supporters, has lost a watershed election, just like Spain's Bush-man José Maria Aznar did in 2004. New center-left Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi will likely pull Italy's troops out of Iraq and orient his economic policy more closely with Europe than with America.

In France, Jacques Chirac, though not a formal member of GW's Iraqi invasion coalition, is still a conservative sympathizer. An energetic alliance of French high school and college students, resurgent labor unions and the politically savvy French middle class successfully shut down the country with a powerful mix of national strikes and street demonstrations. The French people literally rose up and forced President Chirac to withdraw proposed legislation that would have begun “Americanizing” France's work force by making young workers more globally “competitive” (read: exploitable and disposable).

In Thailand, pro-business billionaire and Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra could not muster enough voters to validate his snap elections, thus jeopardizing his political career and his plans for more trade pacts with the United States.

The U.S.-favored PLO lost control of the Palestinian Authority to Hamas while in Israel, with Ariel Sharon in a permanent coma, the Kadima party barely won enough seats in the Knesset to create a ruling coalition.

On Air Strip One, even Tony Blair's government has distanced itself from George's belligerency toward Iran, warning that it will not join with Oceana in yet another preemptive military adventure against the Disputed Territories.

Even in America's 51st State, Iraq, the Crackpot Coalition's plan to foment civil war has gone awry. The apparent plan was to increase Iraqi oil production, stoke fratricidal conflict and draw down American troops from the volatile cities into massively defended fortresses. These hardened American enclaves, like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, would be relatively secure from violent Shi'a retaliation when Mr. Bush attacks Iran. Instead, oil production has dropped, and as the hitherto compliant Shi'a leadership have sensed the West's inevitable pulling out of the rug from underneath their feet, they have become increasingly less compliant. Thus do Iraq's disputatious factions force the occupiers to patrol the land, thereby turning the tables on Bush and holding 130,000 American soldiers hostage for his good behavior toward Iran.

In the Caribbean and in South America, American hegemony has shivered to splinters. Chile has sworn in its first socialist president since Salvador Allende. Chavez protégé Ollanta Humala won first place in Peru's run-off elections. Evo Morales, an indigenous cocoa farmer and anti-globalization candidate, was elected President of Bolivia by a clear majority. Buoyed by burgeoning oil prices -- thanks, in part, to Mr. Bush's misadventures in the Middle East -- Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is more popular than ever. Even in America's colony of Haiti, the citizens elected Aristide's compatriot, Rene Preval, who, as President-elect, soon visited Castro to reestablish long-severed Cuba-Haiti relations.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., retired generals, like kung fu martial arts masters, are throwing stars at Donald Rumsfeld and backing away from the debacle in Iraq. Espionage trials are warming up that could implicate special interest groups and Pentagon insiders. Super lobbyist Jack Abramoff cops a plea, indicted and former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay resigns in disgrace, and George Bush asserts that he never really knew either one of them, any more than he ever knew Kenneth Lay of Enron. As Bush strives to wipe off his own fingerprints, he proves that unswerving loyalty to the King can be risky. As Scooter Libby and ex-ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame found out, King George is quick to throw others to the wolves in order to save his own skin. The King's knights, ministers and squires must be nervously watching the Crackpot in Chief, for while he sacrifices others to save himself, Bush is dissolving the glue of loyalty that binds him and his henchmen together.

The Coalition of the Crackpots is cracking.

The biggest fissure in Bush's domestic Crackpot Coalition opened up when House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried to ram through an immigration bill that would have criminalized millions of undocumented workers in the U.S. and constructed an Israeli style Berlin Wall along the Mexican-US border. In one fell swoop, Hastert and Frist totally unwound Karl Rove's long-term scheme to draw Latinos and Latinas into the Republican Party.

Moreover, the hugely successful, quickly mobilized street actions against the immigration bill drove a wedge between certain Evangelical Republicans who want to toss every undocumented worker into prison and otherwise socially conservative Catholic leaders who want to prevent Evangelicals from poaching from the “true faith.” The immigration bill also divided socially conservative law-and-order types from the Republican industrial, agribusiness and services sectors that profit from the exploitation of undocumented laborers.

Worst of all for the Crackpot Coalition, the success of the immigration-rights movement in the United States demonstrated three proofs: 1) that political parties are not monoliths -- they are plasmas of disparate interests that can separate as easily as they can coalesce 2) that, like in France, a mass and sustained popular action is possible and can be powerful, and 3) that to succeed, the mass and sustained popular action must inflict, or threaten to inflict, massive and sustained economic pain. Like kids in grade school, all the other “movements” in the United States should have learned this lesson by watching their Latin brothers and sisters show them how it's done.

Lest Democrats feel too smug about all the fracture lines appearing in the conservative edifice, we cannot forget that they, too, have been willing participants in Bush's Coalition of the Crackpots. The crackpot Democratic leadership, including several who would be president, have backed Bush on every post-9.11 gambit from the War Powers Resolution to the Patriot Act to the pending consolidation of the Internet in the hands of the gluttonous telecommunications industry.

Thus, similar fault lines are opening up in the Democratic Party. The labor unions, timidly yoked to the fortunes of Big Business, do the dirty work for their masters, urging upon their depleted membership strike-free work, reduced wages and diminished benefits for the sake of preserving corporate profits. Labor, meanwhile, is as cautious about creating a guest worker program for non-residents who might further reduce union pay-scales as Big Business, for the same reason, is keen to bring the guest workers on. The mainstream Democratic Party schizophrenically wants to be both the party of Labor and of Big Business... and to take campaign money from both.

Within the sclerotic Democratic party, candidates finally are rising to challenge the worst of the inner circle. Ned Lamont, a peace activist, is making a hard run at Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman, flying his true flag as a closet Republican, has threatened to run for the Senate as an “independent”, thus throwing the senate seat to the Republicans, should Mr. Lamont successfully overthrow Lieberman in the primary.

Three thousand miles away on the left coast, anti-war candidate Mark Wilson will challenge from within the Democratic Party the Washington State senatorial birthright of Maria Cantwell, a pro-business, elitist politician who generally loves the environment but dislikes people. Equally interesting, and much more dangerous to the same-old hackneyed politics of the Democratic mainstream is the Green Party challenge to Senator Cantwell mounted by former Black Panther Aaron Dixon. Dixon's rousing kick-off campaign rally drew a large crowd of Black, White and Brown highly disaffected left-leaning voters who share disdain for both the Republican and the Democratic Parties. This was not a placid Green Party convention of polite counter-culturists, but a convocation of angry energy from many strata of society that could, finally, one day, seed a real alternative politics.

Thus, while the Coalition of the Crackpots has not yet crumbled, some deep cracks are showing.

Cracks tend to become bigger over time. Cracks beget other cracks. Things grow in the cracks, take root and push them wide open over time.

Sometimes temples collapse, mountaintops slide down, and even cracked pots fall apart and turn to dust.

Zbignew Zingh can be reached at: Zbig@ersarts.com. This article is CopyLeft, and free to distribute, reprint, repost, sing at a recital, spray paint, scribble in a toilet stall, etc. to your heart’s content, with proper author citation. Find out more about Copyleft and read other great articles at: www.ersarts.com. copyleft 2006