The Field on the Narcosphere

By Al Giordano

Back in May, Nate Silver offered his usual comprehensive analysis and comparison of public opinion polls, that time on the subject of US public opinion regarding abortion rights. “The remarkable thing about abortion,” he wrote, “is precisely how steady public opinion has been on it for many, many years.”

Suddenly, with the US House’s insertion of the Stupak Amendment into the Health Care bill, abortion has reentered the national debate with a volume not heard in years, if not decades. Lindsay Beyerstein wrote an excellent summation of the political machinations for Newsweek, noting that Stupak’s provision “would bar patients who receive government affordability credits from buying health insurance that covers elective abortions, even if they pay for the abortion component with their own money.”

My own opinion is that decisions as personal as whether to spend nine months pregnant (a responsibility that usually extends for decades to come when it comes to caring for and raising a child) ought to be exclusively the potential mother’s domain. Governments don’t belong in that decision, neither through legal nor economic coercion. The Stupak amendment seeks to threaten them – and their health care providers – both ways. And one of the reasons it was able to get through the House is precisely because the abortion issue has been fairly quiet for years.

When pro-choice Democratic presidents are elected, abortion rights groups typically end up having to lay off staff and do a lot less since their supporters presume that the right will be protected and donations stop coming in. In that sense, there is a silver lining in the emergence of the Stupak amendment: It has energized much greater economic and political support for the organizations that are needed to monitor and defend abortion rights.

My experience reporting (and, previously, managing) political campaigns is that when abortion becomes a hotly contended issue, in most of the country that polarization favors pro-choice candidates. It brings greater voting turnout from women across the board and causes a wide swath of Republican women (as well as Independents) to cross party lines when they perceive that right to be threatened. Many suburban GOP-leaning Congressional seats in particular have historically swung from anti-choice to pro-choice representatives during those election years when there has been a clear contrast and polarization on the issue. On the other hand, in years when there is no perceived threat to the protections preserved by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the relative calm benefits anti-choice politicians and Republicans in particular, because anti-choice voters tend to ramp up their single-issue obsessed turnout every year, while pro-choice voters tend to vote, at those times, based on other issues and concerns, and many just stay home.

After the House version of the Health Care bill passed with the Stupak amendment as part of it, that was yet another Rorschach Test of people’s basic instincts: There were comments here and elsewhere that pronounced, definitively, that it would surely survive the Senate version and then House-Senate conference committee, and then become part of the law. Meanwhile, others got to work, began organizing, volunteering and donating with the leading pro-choice organizations.

Beyerstein reports, some weeks later, that the palpable resurgence of the pro-choice movement in response to Stupak is succeeding in turning the tide:

The Center for Reproductive Rights unveiled an anti-Stupak-amendment TV spot on Tuesday that will run in Washington, D.C., on cable, and on the Web. The same day, People For the American Way and NARAL delivered a petition with more than 97,000 signatures amassed over 72 hours to the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging him to keep the Stupak language out of the Senate bill. So far, that pressure has worked.

The pro-life contingent would need at least 60 votes to add Stupak-type language to the Senate bill when it comes to the floor. Momentum seems to be shifting in favor of the pro-choice faction. Even Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Bob Casey (D-PA), two of the staunchest pro-life Democrats in the Senate, backed off off their original insistence that the senate bill include Stupak-like language.

But what if that doesn’t work, and the eventual Health Care law does include Stupak-like language? That would end up a Pyrrhic victory for the anti-choice forces, because it would place abortion rights front and center during the 2010 midterm Congressional and Senate elections. That polarization would, if past is prologue, cause a significant number of anti-choice members of Congress to lose their seats to pro-choice challengers. It would also flood the campaign coffers of pro-choice candidates with small donations, Obama style. It may actually save the Democratic majorities in Congress in a year that might otherwise be anti-incumbent. I somehow suspect that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is fully aware of this dynamic and may be wielding a longer-term stealth strategy to save her majority in 2010.

The thing about the Health Care battle is that whatever law emerges is not going to be perfect, not at all. It will have unworkable provisions, such as mandates and, if the Stupak amendment were to survive, that, too. And yet once passed, it will become the foot in the door that allows the Health Care system to be improved in the direction of progress for years to come. The hardest part of the struggle for national Health Care – one that has failed during every administration since President Harry Truman proposed it in 1948 – is to get that foot in the door.

You don’t see, for example, many successful politicians arguing to end Medicare or Social Security today. Once these kinds of programs become law, and people begin to depend on them, it becomes an act of political suicide to try and repeal them. In this sense, opponents of Health Care are correct when they dramatize just how big and irreversible a step this would be for the United States. Even a flawed Health Care law would not revert back to no national Health Care at all, especially if it has even the mildest of “public options” as part of it.

It would be after that foot jams in the door that specific issues – like abortion, like mandates, like expansion of public options – can be debated and legislated on their own specific merits, rather than as part of a complicated mathematical equation of getting to 60 votes in the Senate or a majority in the House on Health Care itself. Those subsequent battles would be the grist for Congressional campaigns in 2010 and beyond. And when it comes to abortion rights, on a straight up or down matter, when the issue is polarized, that has usually benefited progress on the pro-choice side.

America may be sharply divided on the issue of abortion, but when push comes to shove it keeps deciding to protect abortion rights. It’s only when people presume a right will always be there that efforts to defend them atrophy and opponents of those rights can then take them away.

In strictly political terms, Stupak has already provided a long overdue shot in the arm to the pro-choice forces in the US. It has energized the pro-choice majority in the country, and been a boon to its organizations. That wasn’t its intent, but that is often how politics works. Which is why it is also a completely defensible position that Health Care should become law with or without Stupak in it. Even if Stupak survives the bill intact, there will surely be a second bite at that apple, and solid political circumstances to repeal it when it will inevitably be reconsidered on its own.

On the other hand, if Health Care doesn’t survive this year’s process, there very well may not be another chance to get it in most of our lifetimes. What everybody has to understand is what’s really at stake. Do we succeed in jamming the foot in the door? Or does the door slam shut for more decades to come? If one doesn't have access to Health Care at all, the question of whether it pays for abortion or not becomes moot.

By Al Giordano

Pictures that will tell more than a thousand words...

Here they are: the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism class of 2010.

Read more about them, where they come from, where they're going, what they do, and what they'll be doing together in February on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, here.

Update: Today we publish the first in a series of letters from these scholarship recipients, through which you can learn a little bit more about them and receive yet another invitation to support their attendance at the School. Today's letter is from Ansel Herz, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (In the photo collage of the students I sometimes affectionately refer to as "X-Men," Ansel is the one, above, that most resembles Cyclops!)

By Al Giordano

A Narco News reader named Darrol sent us the following letter, which we’ll publish in its entirety and gives us the opportunity to answer some questions that are probably on many minds:

Dear Narco News,

In Honduras, are El Libertador, Radio Globo and Canal 36 still closed, or have the glopistas allowed them to reopen?

It is astonishing that this important news has not been covered **anywhere**!!!  Why is nobody covering this?  Re-opened or still closed, either way the state of the news media in Honduras is itself big news.

Even on the web site of El Libertador, which I read almost daily, this que stion has not been covered.  I would send an email to El Libertador, but my Spanish is not that good.  I read it fine, but I have never tried writing it.

If the opposition news media is still shut down, then Washington can't pretend that the conditions exist for free elections.

If I'm not mistaken, Narco News has a focus that includes the state of the news media in Honduras.

More details I - and many others - would like to know are:

* What is the status of the studio equipment and transmitters for Radio Globo & Canal 36?

* What is the status of the printing press for El Libertador?

* What assurances, if any, have been given by anyone that the death threats against people like Jhonny Lagos will not be carried out?  It seems to me that - at a minimum - the US government should have extracted extremely "hard and fast" personal guarantees from the coup leaders, that journalists will not be threatened, as part of the US government's need to put a fig leaf on its decision to recognize the elections.

* Apart from the question of whether the opposition media is back in operation or not, the world wants to know something about the day-to-day details that might make it almost impossible for them to work.

Thanks for all the good work that all of you do at Narco News.

Darrol

Dear Darrol,

Both Channel 36 and Radio Globo are back on the air, although the coup regime has not returned the equipment its troops removed from both their studios on September 28.

El Libertador has been reduced to publishing about one issue a month, and editor Jhonny Lagos and his staff are operating more or less in underground fashion due to the continued violent threats against them. I am not aware that the US government has extracted any pledges from the coup regime regarding press freedom or that it has addressed the matter at all.

As for the November 29 “elections,” Independent presidential candidate Carlos H. Reyes has officially withdrawn his name from the ballot, saying that he won’t participate in a fraudulent process. The National Front Against the Coup d’Etat (the coordinating body for much of the resistance) has called for a boycott of said “elections.”

The Organization of American States will likely meet in general assembly over the next week and the topic of recognizing or not recognizing the “elections” will likely be debated. A majority of OAS nations are not going to go along with any suggestion of recognizing them or sending electoral observers and that would leave the current position – non-recognition – in vigor. That will also put Washington in the position where it would harm its other interests in the hemisphere if it chose to unilaterally recognize the elections while the coup regime has not honored the Tegucigalpa accord.

The topic has come up repeatedly at US State Department press briefings over the past week and spokesmen evade any “yes” or “no” answer as to whether the US will recognize the November 29 “elections” even if President Zelaya is not restored to power. However, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon’s comments last week to CNN Español suggesting that Washington would recognize the “elections” regardless continue to give the coup regime oxygen and undercut all other pressures upon it.

The Honduran Congress has set a deadline of next Tuesday, November 17, for the Supreme Court and other agencies to issue their non-binding advisory opinions as to Zelaya’s possible return to the presidency. The court may issue a statement today or tomorrow: if it does, expect it to come out against that solution with continued threats to have Zelaya arrested if he sets foot outside the Brazilian Embassy.

Yesterday, inside that Embassy, US Ambassador Hugo Llorens sustained a long meeting with President Zelaya and will be returning there today for more discussion. Zelaya says the deal struck by the Tegucigalpa Accord is already dead. At the same time, he has not ruled out returning to the presidency if Congress votes to reinstate him. The key bloc of votes in Congress – 55 members of the National Party, led by its presidential candidate Pepe Lobo – have not publicly pronounced how they will vote if Congress does take up the measure. And other Congressional leaders keep crowing that they won’t convene such a vote until after November 29.

Meanwhile, coup dictator Roberto Micheletti has gone through this farce of declaring himself the head of a “national unity government” (one of the planks of the Tegucigalpa Accord).

In other words, the situation in Honduras is one big clusterfuck.

Is there still a chance that President Zelaya might return to office prior to November 29? It gets less likely through each day of stalling tactics by the regime, but there is still a needle that might be threaded and it would go like this: Congress would have to convene quickly after its November 17 deadline for advisory opinions, and the National Party bloc would have to vote in unison to authorize Zelaya's return together with a couple of dozen anti-coup Liberal Party legislators and some minor party members. What gets forgotten in a lot of the statements back and forth (including the mutually symbiotic gloating by international golpistas on the right and "Obama coup theorists" on the left for whom Honduras, its civil resistance, and its struggles are merely pawns on an imperialist chess board) that it is entirely in Pepe Lobo’s interest to make that happen, since it would be the only way to make the November 29 vote at all respected within and without Honduras, and he is almost certainly going to be the winner of that vote whether it is legitimized or continues to be illegitimate. What makes the most sense for Lobo is to do everything possible to try to salvage the perceived legitimacy, ahead of time, of that "election." Those are the hard political realities on the ground.

Many have accurately referred to this as the “fig leaf” solution, but it is one that, sources tell Narco News, Zelaya would still accept at this late date, despite his having called the Accord “dead.” (There is, of course, a lot of posturing coming from all sides.)

And although the Tegucigalpa Accord would have Zelaya himself refrain from pushing for a Constituent Assembly for a new Constitution, it is not binding on anyone in the national resistance, not even on Xiomara Castro de Zelaya or Pichu Zelaya. That’s the 800-pound gorilla that is not leaving the room no matter how the next weeks play out.

The fact remains that even back in June when Zelaya attempted a non-binding referendum in favor of voting November 29 for or against a new Constitution and Constituent Assembly, not even that timeline had it happening before this presidential term is done next January 27. Even had a November 29 referendum approved such a process, there would still have to be another election scheduled to select delegates to that Constitutional Assembly, the body that would write the new Constitution.

Once the November 29 vote passes – whether its results are recognized or not – the number one item on the national agenda will continue to be the popular demand for that Constituent Assembly and the rebirth of a nation that it could bring. A lot of the rest are just matters of the circus going on up above and the media's obsession with them. The resistance, after 136 days, is not going away. And we will continue – as we have all along - to do our job of looking below, rather than fixating above, and reporting to you the real story, which is what happens on the ground.

By Al Giordano

Congrats to everyone who did the heavy lifting of going door to door, joining phone banks, doing data entry, and organizing your communities to make the people's voice heard.

Tonight history was made - by you.

As readers here know, I never doubted this would happen, and I said so repeatedly. While some spent the summer and fall whipped by the commercial media into Chicken Little frenzies, others went out and got it done. You know who you are.

Nor do I doubt that the US Senate is next to do it.

Not since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has any US government help for the workers and the poor this sweeping been made law.

There are still a few more slips twixt the cup and the lip, there will be more pushing and shoving on the Senate side, but if organizers keep organizing, this will not fail.

Enjoy the video...

Update: And I'd also just say... what Booman said.

Al Giordano

With the agreed-upon November 5 deadline for restitution of Honduras President Manuel Zelaya approaching, the White House has just sent in a big gun. US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis - arguably the most progressive member of the Obama cabinet - was appointed today to be one of four members of the "Verification Commission" that is charged with making sure all sides comply with last Friday's agreement signed in Tegucigalpa to end the coup d'etat.

The agreement's timeline is clear as day:

October 30, 2009

1. Signing and entrance of the Accord into effect.

2. Formal delivery of the Accord to Congress for the effects of Point 5, “Regarding the Executive Power.”

November 2, 2009

1. Formation of the Verification Commission.

After the signing of this Accord and no later than November 5

1. Formation and installation of the National Unity and Reconciliation Government.

Other members of the verification committee are former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, President Zelaya's UN Ambassador Jorge Eduardo Reina Idiaquez and coup regime lackey Arturo Corrales Alvarez, who will no doubt be outnumbered by the other three if he tries to join the anti-democracy extremists of the coup regime in stalling implementation of the agreement.

Lagos is a particularly interesting addition to the Verification Commission. In 1972, Chilean President Salvador Allende nominated him as ambassador to the Soviet Union and Congress refused to vote on his nomination. After the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile he was forced into exile to Argentina and then the United States. He returned to Chile to lead the resistance against the coup regime of General Augusto Pinochet, including the successful "vote no" referendum of 1988 that brought down the then fifteen-year-old coup regime.

That the White House chose Secretary Solis - obviously not from the State Department, but a cabinet member on equal footing with Secretary Hillary Clinton - sends a clear message that it means business (and perhaps that the hemming and hawing that characterized State's mixed-message behavior toward the Honduras crisis all summer long has come to its overdue conclusion). Solis is strongly allied with labor union organizations in the US, which have their own alliances with many of the unions that make the backbone of the Honduran Civil Resistance.

In addition to speaking Spanish, both Solis and Lagos know plenty about how civil resistance works and how to combat the stalling tactics of those in power. Solis already bested the stalling tactics of Republicans in the US Congress earlier this year that attempted to block her nomination. Lagos has already dismantled one coup regime. He now gets the chance to dismantle another.

By Al Giordano

The newsroom now has a new accessory: a whiteboard, just like Dr. House’s.

In a little over 48 hours comes the Sunday night deadline for completed applications to the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism 2010 session to take place next February 3 to 13 on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

And over the next two weeks, the names of 24 scholarship recipients who will attend that ten-day intensive training session on Journalism and Civil Resistance are going up on that whiteboard.

They'll be learning and producing quality news reports, viral videos and a documentary side by side with 48 professors (a good number of whom graduated from or taught at this school in previous years), collectively with hundreds of years experience doing investigative journalism and/or winning civil resistance campaigns.

As of tonight, two days before deadline, completed applications have already come in from communicators in the following lands: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Perú, the United States and Venezuela. And, lo’ and behold, there are some gi ft-wrapped items postmarked Australia, India, Great Britain, Pakistan, Spain, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia… Already, we have promising candidates from every populated continent on this earth. (And the final 48 hours, in past years, has been when the bulk of them come rolling in.)

Of course, I’m not the sort to be content just looking at or shaking the boxes: I’ve opened each and every one of the early applications already and begun studying them. And I get even more excited beholding the talents of conscience to choose from for the class of 2010. Thinking about the works its members will do – with us, and with others, just like those that came before them - for years to come is one of the best parts of this job.

The board still has a lot of white space on it, waiting to be filled with 24 names.

Maybe one of them will be yours.

English language applications are still available for the next 48 hours by sending an email to app@narconews.com. Spanish language applications can be received by emailing sol@narconews.com.

Don’t miss the Sunday night deadline (midnight pacific time). The door to the future of the Authentic Journalism renaissance remains open ‘til then.