|
Ilive on both sides of the Atlantic--part of the year in the U.S.A. and the other part in Spain, where I was born. I had to leave Spain because of my active participation in the anti-fascist underground against the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. I lived for a while in Sweden and Great Britain, and finally settled in the U.S.A., teaching (as I still do) at the Johns Hopkins University. I have been active in U.S. academic and political life for more than 35 years. I was senior advisor to Jesse Jackson Sr. during the Democratic Party primaries of 1984 and 1988. In 1993 I worked in the White House with the Task Force on Health Care Reform, chaired by Hillary Clinton. The Rainbow Coalition and the trade unions of the health care sector (1199 locals) asked Mrs. Clinton to include me on her task force to make sure that "single payer" (the progressive proposal for health care reform) got a hearing. (See my article "Why HillaryCare Failed: Getting the Facts Right" in Counterpunch, November 2007.)
On the European side of the Atlantic, I started spending time in Spain after Franco's death and the establishment of democracy, becoming active in academic and political life. I have been advisor to several socialist governments in Spain and to the President of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell.
As a result of these experiences, I believe I know the U.S.A. and the E.U. well, and I am particularly worried by the European press's poor coverage of what is happening in the U.S. presidential primaries--partly through their manipulation of the facts, but often through simple incompetence. I include among these news sources El Pais, Le Monde, and the Financial Times. In their defense, it must be said that the U.S.A. is not an easy country to understand from a European perspective. The political cultures of the two continents are very different, and sometimes even opposite in their terminology or symbols. For example, red has always been the color of the left in Europe. "Reds" are people who hold left-wing views. "Red cities" are cities like Bologna in Italy or Barcelona in Spain that have always been governed by left-wing parties. Blue is the right-wing color. In U.S.A., it's precisely the opposite: "red states" are states won by the Republican Party (defined as the right-wing party) in presidential elections, and "blue states" are those won by the Democratic Party (considered, erroneously, to be the center-left party).
But the differences in political culture are much larger than a matter of the colors assigned to the two major parties. They include the terminology of political discourse. For example, U.S. politicians--such as Jesse Jackson--who call for larger public social expenditures, higher and more progressive taxation, and a greater role for the federal government in expanding social and labor rights, and who favor federal redistributive policies, are called "liberals." On the contrary, in Europe, a liberal is a politician who calls for precisely the opposite: reduced public social expenditures, lower taxes, and elimination of redistributive policies. Liberal parties are very small parties in Europe, indicating people's limited support for those policies. Yet the European press (including the newspapers noted above) constantly mistranslate the term "liberal" as used in the U.S.A.--writing, for example, that liberals favor higher taxes for the rich, more redistributive policies, and expansions in public social expenditures. Sometimes this misreporting occurs through incompetence, but sometimes intentionally. The right-wing liberal (in the European sense) Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, writes in an article in El Pais (January 10, 2008) that the most progressive sectors of the U.S. population are liberals (without clarifying that, in European terms, these liberals should be called social democrats). He is fully aware of the distinction, but he does not feel the urge to clarify it.
This type of reporting creates enormous confusion in Europe. It's no wonder that many of my European friends are mystified and tell me they never quite understand the U.S.A. They beg the U.S.A. to join the community of nations and, besides adopting the metric system, to talk like everyone else in the world, where red is red, blue is blue, and a liberal is a right-winger.
[...]
It was President Clinton (not Prime Minister Blair) who, in 1994, instituted the Third Way--a "middle" way between the New Deal and the Gingrich conservatism that had gained control of Congress. Since then, the leaders of the Democratic Party have been on the center-right on domestic policies, and clearly on the right on foreign policies--sensitive to the economic and financial interests that supported and financed their campaigns for office. The foreign policy of recent Democratic administrations has been more interventionist than that of Republican administrations. And on domestic policies, Europeans are not fully aware of how far to the right the entire political spectrum is in the U.S.A compared with Europe. For example, not one of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates (except Kucinich, who has left the primary race) has called for a publicly funded national health program (such as exists in all E.U. countries). The proposals for "universal" heath care programs, espoused by most Democratic candidates (except Obama) and some Republicans, are basically a call to make health insurance compulsory for everyone. Just as everyone who drives a car must have car insurance, so everyone would have to buy health insurance. These programs would rely on giving people tax incentives and subsidies (that will primarily benefit the insurance companies), without resolving the major problem of health coverage: the high costs and limited benefits of available health insurance coverage. Health benefits undercoverage is the largest problem in U.S. medical care; not until they actually need it do most people realize that their insurance does not cover the costs of their medical care. In the E.U., no party would dare challenge public funding as the major source of health care funding--not even the liberal parties. This should give an idea of how far to the right the entire U.S. political system has moved.
A primary reason for this state of affairs is the privatization of the electoral process, a characteristic unique to the U.S. electoral system. Candidates must raise a lot of money to buy access to the media, especially television. The TV industry sells time (completely unregulated) to the highest bidders. Most of the money that finances the campaigns comes from corporate America and the top one-third (by income) of the U.S. population. This would be illegal in all E.U. countries. As a matter of fact, many ministers in European governments have had to resign when it became apparent that they received private funds for electoral purposes. Not so in the U.S.A. A major reason why not a single viable presidential candidate is calling for publicly funded, universal health care (which is favored by most Americans) is the enormous power and influence of health insurance companies in the electoral process. Both Clinton and Obama have received considerable funds from these financial interests. Again, in the E.U., such open financial support of candidates would be illegal and considered corrupt. In the U.S.A., it is both legal and untainted by hints of corruption. According to Common Cause, 94% of candidates who won reelection in the Congressional elections of 2006 were the best-funded candidates. Money is the milk of politics in the U.S.A. And people know it: in polls, 68 per cent of respondents do not consider themselves well-represented in Congress. In no country of the E.U. does the population feel such a high degree of alienation from its government. This explains the high voter absenteeism in the U.S. electoral process.
| |
