The Christian Science Monitor | August 15, 2006

Democrats don't need a new plan or more big ideas

By James Norton

MINNEAPOLIS — The scent of political change is in the air. There appears to be a grinding political shift afoot in America, fueled by dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and the exploding budget deficit. It's been made more tangible by last week's Democratic primary defeat of Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman by Ned Lamont.

But amid the sense that November will bring a fresh start, there's been a great deal of clamor — coming from pundits on the right, left, and what remains of the center — about the need for Democrats to come up with "a plan."

Just ask Rep. Rahm Emanuel, (D) of Illinois, and head of the Democratic Leadership Council Bruce Reed. They've titled their new book "The Plan: Big Ideas for America," and suggest, in their introduction, that it contains "a new social contract for the 21st century and a new patriotism and responsibility to make it happen."

The underlying assumption: Democrats really need a new social contract for the 21st century.

The secondary underlying assumption: Something was wrong with the old one.

But the problem isn't that mainstream Democratic ideas — such as maintaining a system of progressive taxation; federal regulation of food, drugs, and the environment; nationalized Social Security; a multilateral, pragmatic foreign policy — have been discredited. It's that Democrats, lacking control of the White House and Congress, therefore lack a national leader. And without a national leader, it's far more difficult for Democrats to whip their own members into shape with political carrots and sticks, and to speak with a unified national voice.

The result is that every individual member is free to zig or zag on almost any issue, presenting the appearance of a party in disarray. For example: Colorado's Democratic senator, Ken Salazar, is supporting Senator Lieberman's independent bid for reelection at the expense of his own party's official nominee. His Republican equivalent would be (rightfully) drummed out of the GOP overnight.

Democratic "weakness" isn't a lack of strong ideas; it's a pure lack of political discipline, a weakness magnified by the efficient internal discipline of the Bush-Cheney-Rove machine.

Voters don't need a fancy new plan to be convinced to move back toward the Democratic status quo, despite what right-wing pundits have said about a hunger for some grand vision. It was, after all, a grand vision for democracy in the Middle East that popped the top off Pandora's box. And a grand vision for "reforming" Social Security turned out to be the least popular thing since New Coke.

The Democratic plan, therefore, doesn't need to be discovered, or forged by a team of visionaries. It's already out there. It's the return of good — or at the very least, harmlessly gridlocked — government. That means regulatory agencies headed by experts (not former lobbyists) and old-fashioned checking and balancing.

It's the return of taxes being pushed in a progressive direction — with the megawealthy, who have gained the most from America's infrastructure and its well-educated, healthy workforce, contributing the most per dollar earned to maintain the public good.

It's a restoration of the separation of church and state, which history has shown is supremely healthy for both.

It's coming back to the idea that America respects the idea of national self- determination, which means that American troops don't belong anywhere they are unwelcome occupiers — such as the Shiite and Sunni areas of Iraq.

It's also a return to the idea of a common American natural heritage, which demands a restoration of the protection of land and species made vulnerable to developers by the GOP.

It's a return to the idea that human rights and civil rights trump convenience - if you need to torture, hold someone for years without trial, or restrict basic freedoms in order to get something done, you just have to find another way to do it.

And finally — and here's something traditional conservatives can rally behind, as well — it's a move back toward a government that governs less and governs better. That may mean the end of exhaustive government spying programs, but so be it.

That's the revolution Democrats should be promising voters in November — a return to an era where problems were manageable, and an accountable government was working to solve them. Once we've gotten back to those halcyon days, Democrats and Republicans can both sit down and come up with a new plan to figure out where to go next.

James Norton is a former editor at the Monitor and the author of "Saving General Washington: The Right Wing Assault on America's Founding Principles."

The Christian Science Monitor | July 28, 2006

Don't divert small-business aid to big business

By James Norton

MINNEAPOLIS — On paper, 2005 was a very good year for Americans with small businesses. A "record breaking" $79.6 billion worth of federal contracts were given to small businesses, according to a press release issued by the Small Business Administration.

This is exciting news; small business, we're told (at least 10 times a week during election cycles) is the engine of innovation and hard work that drives the American economy.

So who are some of these little dynamos scooping up federal dollars? See if any of these names ring a bell: Northrop Grumman. Boeing. Bechtel. General Dynamics.

Since 2000, federal contracting has exploded in terms of annual volume, growing 55 percent to $377 billion in 2005. By law, at least 23 percent of that money should be awarded to small businesses — in order to nurture new ideas, the nimble exploitation of new economic opportunities, and the revitalization of neighborhoods that are down on their luck but trying to make a new start.

But nearly $5 billion of contracts — coded as "small business" — went to 13 of the largest government contractors, according to a recent review by The New York Times of data provided by Eagle Eye, a research firm based in Virginia. The same firm found that the percentage of federal contracts given to small businesses decreased last year from 20 percent to 17 percent.

Moreover, an unknown percentage of that 17 percent went to big businesses due to error, fraud, or loopholes. Some of the confusion surrounding these figures has been created by the Small Business Administration itself; newly appointed SBA administrator Steven Preston is refusing to release to the American public a list of firms coded as small businesses in fiscal year 2005.

A preference for massive, politically connected firms has been this administration's stock-in-trade. From Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force to the former industry lobbyists who weakened or destroyed federal environmental protections to the military contracts awarded to cronies of elected officials, a tone has been set: Big firms with Republican officers have prospered at the expense of transparency and the public good.

But small business has been central to this administration's economic policy. On issues ranging from fighting the estate tax to its aggressive campaign for tax cuts to its resistance to raising the minimum wage, the administration's war of words has been distinguished by its intense public devotion to the American small-business owner.

Putting its money where its mouth is — and was — wouldn't just help the Bush administration match its deeds to its rhetoric; it would be a politically shrewd way to court the votes of the millions of Americans who depend upon small businesses for their livelihoods.

From that perspective, using the SBA to rob small business on behalf of big business is a foolish long-term strategy.

But beyond that, it's also downright un-American. To the people of Western Europe, inventor and entrepreneur Ben Franklin represented the spirit and promise of America more than anyone else — including George Washington. Franklin turned new ideas into useful goods — everything from the lightning rod to an odometer to the revolutionary Franklin stove. And over the next couple of centuries, Franklin's spirit of industry — which he relentlessly flogged in a brand-building campaign that would turn Coca-Cola marketing executives green with envy — matured into a shorthand for the independent entrepreneurial spirit that remains one of America's most attractive features to the world as a whole.

Small businesses bring the small-scale but big-impact innovation of Ben Franklin into the modern era; as Republican leaders have said time and again on public occasions, small businesses are the front line of capitalism, and often the vehicles for helping outsiders and new immigrants get ahead.

Cozying up to big business is a proven way to maintain political power, but if the Bush administration wants to bet on the future, it needs to put its money on the little guy. A good start would be to follow the directives of the SBA's own inspector general — and make sure small business contracts go to small businesses.

James Norton is a former Middle East editor of The Christian Science Monitor and the author of "Saving General Washington: The Right Wing Assault on America's Founding Principles."

The Christian Science Monitor | June 14, 2006

Roots of US war prisoners' rights run deep

The lack of human decency at Guantánamo Bay undermines a legacy of just treatment.

By James Norton

MINNEAPOLIS — At Guantánamo Bay this past weekend, three internees — or prisoners, or detainees, or whatever you want to call human beings jailed indefinitely without conviction and with no hope of legal recourse — committed suicide.

Navy Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, the base commander, described the suicides as "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

Details on what led these men to commit their act of war are a little hard to come by thanks to the extraordinarily un-American veil of secrecy that surrounds the camp. But despite that effort, information about Gitmo has trickled out slowly - from sources in the FBI and CIA, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, from a released British prisoner, and from investigative journalists such as The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh.

The American Civil Liberties Union has compiled thousands of documents relating to torture of prisoners in US custody, including FBI memos complaining about military abuses at Guantánamo Bay. Details include prisoners being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads, and "military guards ... slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia."

At its root, the very idea of Guantánamo Bay runs headfirst into what it means to be an American.

The US has (or had) a worldwide reputation for promoting human rights. That reputation was earned by its struggle — often against itself, as was the case during the fight against slavery, and the civil rights movement — to protect individuals against systems that would otherwise mistreat them.

The roots of that reputation run deep, reaching back to the Enlightenment ideals that gave birth to the essential protections of the Constitution. But a lot of countries merely talked the talk at the time of their birth — there's a mile-wide gap between the high-flying rhetoric of the French Revolution and the blood bath that followed.

But George Washington and his compatriots took their founding principles quite seriously. On Aug. 11, 1775, Washington sent a blistering letter to a British counterpart, Thomas Gage. He complained about gravely wounded and untreated American soldiers being thrown into a jail with common criminals.

Eight days later, despite threatening to treat British soldiers with equal cruelty, Washington admitted that he could not and would not retaliate in kind, writing: "Not only your Officers, and Soldiers have been treated with a Tenderness due to Fellow Citizens, & Brethren; but even those execrable Parricides [traitors] whose Counsels & Aid have deluged their Country with Blood, have been protected from the Fury of a justly enraged People."

Imagine that; a government on the run fighting a desperate war against a hated enemy and treating captured prisoners with compassion and decency. No doubt many of the captured British troops had intelligence that might have been useful to the Revolutionary cause — still, decent treatment was the norm. In the current war on terror, that would be described as being "soft."

Alexander Hamilton, while commanding soldiers against the British, prevented what could have been a massacre. After the siege of Yorktown, one of Hamilton's captains, eager for revenge against the British, was about to run a prisoner through with his bayonet.

Hamilton stepped in personally to stop the man, and later reported proudly: "Incapable of imitating examples of barbarity and forgetting recent provocations, the soldiers spared every man who ceased to resist."

The Founding Fathers didn't treat prisoners decently solely because they were decent people. Although their writings and ideals reveal a constant and passionate interest in essential human rights, it's important to remember that they were also pragmatists. They understood that the Revolutionary cause had to take and hold the moral high ground in order to rally popular support and exhaust the British giant. And they knew that their necks were very literally on the line were they to be captured by the British. Mistreatment of British soldiers would come back on their heads a thousandfold.

Times have changed, of course, and now it's the US that holds the upper hand from a military perspective. There is no longer any fear among US leaders that they personally will suffer the effects of cruel treatment of prisoners, and so they feel far more comfortable ordering the sort of "extraordinary" measures of interrogation and detainment that led to the Gitmo suicides.

What they overlook, of course, is that the moral high ground is still there to be taken — or lost. And as long as "Abu Ghraib" and "Guantánamo Bay" remain in the international lexicon, tyrants around the world can laugh off criticism of their actions coming from American leaders — after all, America understands that desperate times call for inhumane measures, right?

It can be argued, of course, that captured British soldiers are hardly equivalent to the type of men held at Guantánamo Bay. The soldiers fought in uniform; the detainees at Gitmo were terrorists, working undercover. Washington would have had them hanged. True enough - except that we don't actually know how many of them were terrorists working undercover. Most were detained on evidence too flimsy to hold up under trial, according to declassified documents from the Department of Defense and reporting in the staunchly nonpartisan National Journal. The evidence suggests that many — perhaps most — of the detainees are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You don't have to be a historian or political scientist to realize that it's high time the US government took a step back toward its founding principles and shut down Guantánamo Bay. Accountability for those who loosened the restraints of human decency, and a bit of reparations for everyone unjustly imprisoned also might be the civilized thing to do. In fact, it would be downright American.

James Norton is a former Middle East editor of The Christian Science Monitor and the author of "Saving General Washington: The Right Wing Assault on America's Founding Principles."