THE HISTORICAL LEGACY

OF WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON:

A LETTER

Jack D. Forbes

DEAR PRESIDENT CLINTON:

Newspaper reports have said that you are now concerned about your historical legacy. As a Native American historian, I feel that I am qualified to say a few words on that subject.

My comments will relate to one of the major themes of US history, and that is the long struggle for democracy within our society and the ideal of justice, fairplay, and liberty for all. By and large, this struggle for democracy and justice moved forward unevenly until World War I, led by the efforts of the working-class, small farmers, women, African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants (especially German-Americans during the nineteenth-century and Jews during all periods), and other oppressed or disenfranchised groups. There were many backward steps, such as the terrible decisions of the Supreme Court in Dred Scott, Plessy, and in most cases involving Native Americans, but the Supreme Court has often been the albatross of our democracy with its willingness to rewrite the Constitution to protect the powerful and rich.

World War I, under authoritarian and racist Woodrow Wilson, saw our country teeter towards quasi-fascism and statism, and the 1920's, with its anti-"Red" pogroms, also caused a loss of freedom, but nonetheless, we lurched forward again after the war with the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the Progressive Party, initiatives and referendums, and gains by women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and other groups. More recently, setbacks occurred in World War II for Japanese-Americans, but the postwar period saw great victories by African-Americans and gains by Mexican-Americans, disabled persons, and others.

Nonetheless, the postwar period also saw the USA embark on the "Cold War" with simultaneous internal attacks upon the Communist Party and also upon many other dissident groups, ranging from democratic socialists to pacifists and groups dedicated to non-white empowerment (e.g., the Black Panther Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as groups opposed to the Vietnam War). This period, after 1945-48, marks a decisive shift in the character of our country, it seems to me. Although it is true that non-whites and women continue to make gains, the democratic nature of the society is significantly eroded by: (1) the high-handed operations of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover and successors, involving, as we now know, openly partisan political suppression of groups unpopular with conservative power elites and greatly enhanced power to spy upon the people as well as to concoct phony prosecutions (as in the case of Leonard Peltier and Wen Ho Lee); the creation of tremendously well-funded and secretive agencies such as the CIA, and numerous others operated by the Department of Defense, which are suspected of reading our overseas mail, listening in on our telephone conversations, and otherwise keeping us under surveillance, as well as illegally committing murders outside (and even inside, as with Letelier) of the country and illegally engaging in the drug trade and in meddling in the internal affairs of foreign nations, all of which we, as a people, are seemingly helpless to oversee or control.

A great discontinuity has been introduced into our country, in that most of us know that our country is engaged in overseas (and internal) activities which are anti-democratic and extremely unethical, but we are powerless to do anything about it. In a real sense, our country (the physical terrain) is now one thing, while the "secret" government which seems to run the USA is a completely separate entity, beyond our control.

Unfortunately, this loss of control over our own government, caused in part by the "Cold War" and the subsequent desire of our leaders to exercise a predominant role in world affairs, has been accompanied by several other trends which have also accelerated our loss of democracy and freedom. First, we can mention the war on so-called drugs, which has led to the creation of huge police control agencies coupled with a massive growth in prison populations. There has been a phenomenal growth in the power of federal agencies, concomitant with a loss of voting rights and rights to free speech and political participation on the part of illegal drug-using persons, while the socially-most-destructive drug, alcohol, is allowed to be promoted and freely used. The hypocrisy of all of this can be seen in the failure of the federal government to release all internal CIA and other documents relating to the drug trade and to the role of CIA allies (the Nicaraguan Contras, Afghan groups, and southeast Asian groups, among others) in the stimulation of the international drug trade.

President Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the dangers of the emerging "military-industrial" complex in his farewell address, also telling us of the dangers of universities becoming enmeshed in that complex. Tragically, his predictions have come true, and we now have a powerful group of mega-corporations which, with their Defense Department, state and local government, and public university allies, now determine our defense-spending policies in their own self-interest, without any meaningful democratic control. The fact that the end of the "Cold War" has seen no "peace dividend" is understandable, given the immense governmental power of the giant defense-oriented governments which we still call corporations.

Tragically, the past several decades have also seen several very dangerous and anti-democratic trends including:(1) the abandonment of both the anti-monopoly policies of the reform years before 1950 and of the enforcement of the anti-trust laws, so as to allow constant mergers. These mergers have led to practical monopolies in many crucial fields, including the oil industry, the airline industry, the banking industry, and numerous others. In California, for example, the hundreds of retail marketing companies in the oil business have been replaced, in most towns, with only a handful: Standard of California, Standard of New Jersey-Standard of New York(Mobil), recently merged, Union 76, British-Dutch Shell, Texaco (slated to merge with Standard of Cal), and Arco (scheduled to merge with British Petroleum). Such a small number of giant "governments" (bigger than all but the ten or so greatest economies) can easily set prices and rig markets.

We have also seen the loss of great airlines such as Western, Pacific Southwest, and many others such as Piedmont, Air California, Ozark, Hughes Air West, Republic, Braniff, and on and on, and now we are confronted with a bloated United Airlines which, in my experience, cannot even run a decent airline and yet it wants to take US Air over!! There is no doubt but what prices are set by the industry in a non-competitive manner, playing follow-the-leader or by non-competition in many markets.

But the greatest loss of democracy has been in the arena of speech and media, where we have witnessed the grabbing of control of newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, publishing companies, and other media by a few huge corporations, many of them foreign-owned. Freedom of speech and expression becomes a joke when city after city has only one major daily newspaper (such as Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland, Portland, and numerous others) and where radio is controlled by a few corporations which now own several stations in the same market, and so on. As a writer, I can personally testify to the failure of major dailies to use my articles and to the virtual total suppression of Native American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, and other voices in most major markets.

A free press is the bulwark of democracy, and we no longer have a free press, as is attested to by numerous journalistic studies. The internet has not solved that problem because most working-class persons, among others, do not have the time or the money to sit at a computer looking for information in the midst of all of the adverts and other distractions of the web. Alternative magazines (such as The Progressive, to name one), are prevented from being sold on 99% of all newsstands because of the long-standing distribution policies of periodical distribution corporations, and there are even entire states - such as Nevada and Oklahoma - where such periodicals are virtually never available ).

The financing of our election campaigns is yet another area where we have been moving in an anti-democratic direction, as is well-documented. We have a Supreme Court which, predictably, believes in freedom for dollar bills but not for individual human beings. The Supreme Court is now, once again as it was before 1936, a legislative body and not a court. The justices see fit to make law rather than to stick with the Constitution, and the laws which they invent are virtually always designed to preserve or grant power to the already privileged. This is true in relation to the denial of rights to Native Americans, where Clarence Thomas has become the court's "expert" on how to take constitutional and treaty guarantees away from First Americans.

I could go on, but in summary, what we have witnessed has been a tremendous loss of the gains made in the long struggle for popular control of this country. Thus we face the irony that as African-Americans or others overcome personal discrimination they emerge from segregation and second-class citizenship into a new kind of society which provides all but the rich with a second-class citizenship. Thus they have climbed up several decks within a structure which is slowly sinking, and therefore, have gained no new height. Or to put it another way, we are returning to the days of the eighteenth-century as in Britain, Germany et cetera, when the wealthy classes ran politics and government as a class entitlement, and other people could just sit around after a day's work drinking alcohol to numb the pain.

Now the question is, President Clinton, where do you fit in? What is your relationship to the greatest theme of this country's history, the struggle for democracy?

Let me begin by stating that I have agreed with many of your actions as president, especially when they have involved an effort to place some degree of restraint upon the extremism of the congressional Republican leadership. You have certainly provided a modest help to low-income workers in terms of raising the minimum wage and in relation to some environmental issues. Your opposition to the crass schemes of Republicans to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy has been important, and there is no doubt but what you have helped to mitigate to some degree the transfer of wealth to the rich by means of the tax code. You have often called upon us to be concerned about the over-all welfare of the society and sought to encourage us to strive for a more just social order.

But Mr. President, the reality is that your actions or inactions have led to the rapid deterioration of our right to democratic self-rule, and you have continued the trend of creating a society with a new kind of feudalism, a society ruled by entrenched oligarchies essentially composed of wealthy white men. These oligarchies are very much like feudal baronies wherein immense corporations and other organizations with their visible and invisible networks exercise what can only be called the power of governance. Let us look at some of the major developments, or lack thereof.

After deceiving us about your intentions, you supported NAFTA. But what is especially shocking about this is that the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to ratify a treaty (and NAFTA is clearly a treaty). But you and the other supporters of NAFTA chose to set the Constitution aside, since you did not have the votes and did not receive a two-thirds vote. Thus you pretended that a simple statute could bind the USA to an agreement which has the authority to set aside laws adopted by states and other governments within the USA. Thus you gave away, to global corporations and their lawyers, a significant part of our self-government, a thing which cannot constitutionally be done except by a bonafide treaty. (Only a treaty becomes part of the "supreme law of the land", not a simple "agreement"). Subsequently, you did the same thing with GATT and the creation of the WTO, a super-government with real power to undue our own laws and ordinances. Again, the WTO could only be set up by means of a treaty, but you pretended that a mere statute was sufficient.

All of this is terribly dangerous and destructive, because on all matters relating to trade and international commerce, the power to govern is definitely taken away from our own elected entities and is transferred to a super-government which is totally undemocratic and controlled by the very corporate entities which threaten democracy on every front. And all of this was done by crippling our Constitution, a process which, although not new, has frightening implications for the future.

The establishment of great international organs with undemocratic characters and with immense powers to punish and coerce is the most important reality of the end of the 20th century, in my judgment. That is why people are protesting, as in Seattle and Prague, Washington, and Los Angeles. But instead of telling the truth about the changed structure of governance, you have pretended that people are merely fearful of "globalization" and "free trade." People are afraid of becoming slaves to a new tyranny of huge for-profit empires. It is the fate of democracy which is in the balance. And you have been on the side of the consolidation of power by the huge organizations without actually seeking any mitigation of that power.

Under your watch also the organs of state security, our secret police, and our spy organizations have grown much stronger. You could have caused the CIA, the National Security Council, and the other agencies of control to release all of their secret archives (except for documents relating to an essential military weapon secret and such). You could have expedited the release of all of the material relating to Reagan's mad-dog wars in Central America, all of the murders, atrocities, drug dealings, and assassinations. You could have released all of the data on our drug dealings in Laos, Afghanistan, and southeast Asia, and on all of our support for repressive regimes in South America, and on what our bombing did to Kampuchea. You could have, in short, given us our government back by making us, the rulers in theory, informed about what had been done in our name from the intervention in Guatemala in 1954 to the Contra scandals. (Thank you for what you have released relating to Pinochet, for example).

But, by and large, you have not chosen to fully open up the secret archives! Not only that, but you have sought to strengthen the powers of the FBI and other police agencies, in spite of the long record of abuses against legitimate political activity. And we have seen the manner in which peaceful protest has recently been mightily circumscribed by what is clearly a nationally-orchestrated style of response handled by police who have been highly militarized and certainly resemble Milosevitch's police in Serbia or police in Red China. Now the FBI has even gone to Prague with names of protesters, apparently, to help the Czech government keep them from exercising free speech. Isn't this reminiscent of the Soviet suppression of the Czech's protests in the 1960's? The fight against "terrorism" is often used as an excuse for enacting new draconian control procedures, but so often the FBI has used its powers against legitimate groups simply because of unpopular views. All of us who lived through the '50s and '60s are well aware that a police agency, once it is armed with great secret powers, cannot be prevented from abusing those powers.

You have had no obligation to protect the illegal actions of your predecessors, and yet you have chosen not to prosecute any wrong-doers or even to expose them. Your Department of Justice has demonstrated a startling lack of justice, as in the cases of Leonard Peltier and Wen Ho Lee. Is it not possible that your treatment of Wen Ho Lee will long be remembered in the future, just as President Wilson's treatment of Debs has never been forgotten (or forgiven)? And why hasn't John Deutch been placed in solitary confinement? Is it that he is a white man, or is it because of his CIA connections?

Your acquiescence in the loss of our freedom of speech and of the press is another area of deep significance. Rupert Murdoch, among a few others, now exercises a dominant position in relation to determining our country's future, not only in what is allowed to be said, filmed, performed, and transmitted, but in what kind of a culture we should like to have. If his empire is soft on porn, soft on violence, soft on sleazy materialism, then he and others like him will have an extraordinary voice in what our world will become. And the vast concentration of the media has been accompanied by legislation and policies allowing for a complete ignoring of all educational and public service functions on airways which inherently belong to all of us, but which have actually been given, overwhelmingly, to a few corporations.

How, indeed, can we have a democracy when the people are being dumbed-down by a media which seeks only to sell products and to distract us from the serious business of being voter-rulers? Or when those who report "the news" are working for powerful corporate interests who are themselves "newsmakers?" What has been your role, and that of your appointees, in furthering the process of taking speech away from us?

The concentration of power in the hands of great corporations, through mergers and other forms of consolidation, did not originate with your administration. But certainly, the pace has increased of late and your people have allowed the anti-trust laws to largely fall by the wayside. And I have not heard you utter one word of concern.

In sum, I believe that you are leaving us relatively prosperous for the moment, but without the tools to control our own collective future. You are leaving some of us much richer, but all of us poorer in the public sphere. Our federal republic is gone, really, and whether we can ever find the means to bring it back is the question of the day. Many are trying, but, as you know better than anyone else, the popular democrats (with a small "d") reach only a very small audience because the avenues are closed or, like the internet, are not usable by the majority. Only "sound-bites" get through to many in the midst of a million diversions and pressures.

What I am saying, in essence, is that while you have performed well in terms of offering us an occasional bit of popular reform, or in terms of protecting us from the extremism of right-wing fanaticism, all of that has been modest in relation to the authoritarian restructuring of our society which has been carried out by the great corporations and by powerful government agencies since 1945 and, now, since 1992.

But President Clinton you still have a few days in office. You can do some things which will significantly help democracy, such as:

(1) OPEN UP THE SECRET ARCHIVES! Order the transfer of all pre-1988 documents to the National Archives for processing and allow the NA staff to determine whether any documents should be redacted, excepting only secrets relating to military weaponry. We have a right to know what our people did in Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Vietnam, Laos etc. We need to have every document relating to the drug trade and US agency connections. Also information on mergers should not be kept from us by the Justice Department.

(2) Order all agencies to regularly transfer all documents to the National Archives for processing on a regular basis. The San Francisco branch, for example, is still missing important documents from agencies such as the Office of Economic Opportunity, from the 1970's.

(3) Talk honestly with the people about the ways in which the WTO and NAFTA both compromise US sovereignty and threaten the constitutional powers of state and local government to enact laws democratically. Discuss the two-thirds requirement of the Constitution and the need to resubmit GATT and NAFTA for proper adoption by the Senate.

(4) Convene a conference of legal and lay experts on the question of whether the WTO is subject to all international laws in its decision-making, since the states which set up the WTO are each subject always to those same international laws and clearly cannot escape those laws simply by establishing a new, supra-state entity.

(5) Amend NAFTA and the WTO to incorporate all international law and human rights accords, if they are not now subject to the same.

(6) Authorize an impartial scholarly investigation of the FBI to see why so much abuse has occurred, including study of the cases of Wen Ho Lee, John Deutch, Leonard Peltier, Anna Mae Aquash, terrorism on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970's and unsolved murders, Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, Earth First, et cetera. What changes need to be made in the FBI to make racism and political repression unlikely to occur again?

(7) Convene a conference of legal and judicial scholars to analyze the reasons for the clear discrepencies in the treatment of whites and non-whites in the judicial system, looking especially at cases such as Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and other notorious examples. Mumia's trial was clearly a judicial farce and you must not remain silent on that type of discrimination in our society, even though the case remains a state matter.

(8) Call for a new "Privacy Bill of Rights" for citizens and consumers, to protect our privacy from constant invasion, theft, and sale by private or governmental agencies.

(9) Call for the redefinition of "intellectual property rights" to include all information produced by any individual about themselves; and the right of control of such information without second parties being able to market it without permission.

(10) Call for significant campaign finance reform.

(11). Call for a redefinition of freedom of speech so as to emphasize the speech of persons, not the speech of dollars; and call attention to the concentration of ownership in the media fields. Convene a conference on media and individual freedom of speech.

(12). Call for an end to discrimination against persons simply because they are poor and an end to the criminalization of poverty and homelessness; convene a conference on the rights of human beings to have a space in which to carry on basic biological functions, as well as such rights as to open a savings account without a credit check. Consider the re-establishment of the Postal Savings system as is the case in most European countries.

(13). Take important steps to bring about justice for Native Americans including: (a) freedom for Leonard Peltier; (2) transfer of all federal Indian schools to tribal or inter-tribal control; (3) restoration of lands to small tribes, especially in California and Nevada (e.g., Washo tribe, Battle Mountain Shoshone Colony, et cetera); (4) restoration of eastern Navajo lands to the Navajo Nation; (5) restoration of the sacred Baboquivari Mountains to the Tohono O'odham; (6) recognition of the Western Shoshone treaty rights; and (7) support my "Native American Sovereignty Enhancement Act of 2001" to empower self-determination and self-management and to simplify the federal recognition process.

(14). Convene a conference to chart out ways to grant federal voting rights to US subjects in Guam, Samoa, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico (Borinquen), without compromising their ultimate right to self-determination under international law.

Needless to state, I do not expect you to proceed evenly on all of these issues in little more than two months. But you can do a great deal on at least some of them.

I remember a book called PROFILES IN COURAGE. I believe that you must now display a great deal of courage if the reputation of your presidency is to be enhanced. You must have the courage to take on the FBI and other vested interests which have heretofore apparently caused you to often shy away from the fight for justice. Can you confront "power"? Thus far you have catered to "power" and that is certainly the easy road to take. But such a path will ultimately only earn you a position in the hall of has-been presidents like Pierce, Buchanan, McKinley, Harding, and Coolidge. You can be better than that, but time is short.

sincerely yours,

Jack D. Forbes