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From International Socialist Review, Issue 18, June–July 2001.
Downloaded with thanks from the ISR Archive Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
PRESIDENT BUSH took office in January 2001 as the first person in 112 years to win the presidency while losing the popular vote. His “selection” as president depended on two miniscule advantages: a 5–4 Supreme Court vote and an officially certified 537-vote victory in Florida. Meanwhile, he polled 550,000 fewer votes than Democrat Al Gore in the country as a whole. Since his Florida victory depended on well-documented and systematic disenfranchisement of the Black electorate, a majority of Black Americans refuse to accept Bush. For the first time since 1973, thousands protested a presidential inauguration when Bush took the oath of office on January 20.
Yet when the media marked the administration’s “first 100 days,” all of this seemed to be forgotten. With polls showing his approval rating hovering around the average for postwar presidents, media outlets rushed to proclaim Bush’s administration a success. The Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “President Bush marks his 100th day in office ... with good grades from a public largely pleased with his job performance save for one area: his handling of the environment.” The New York Times noted, “Mr. Bush has been widely praised for his administration’s discipline, the speed with which he won consensus for what will likely prove to be one of the biggest tax cuts since the Reagan era, and the largely successful way he faced his first foreign challenge, an unexpected confrontation with China.” [1] The journalistic hot air provided the required lift to Bush’s balloon at the 100-day mark.
In the 2000 election, Bush came within striking distance of Gore for three reasons. First, he marketed himself as a “compassionate conservative” who cares about issues like education and health care. He camouflaged his fundamentally conservative policies in liberalish rhetoric. He would “change the tone” and work for “bipartisanship” in Washington. In this way, Bush and his handlers managed to force a virtual tie vote in a political climate ripe for a Gore rout. Second, Gore helped Bush. Not only did he run an exceedingly inept campaign, but his “New Democrat” politics ceded tremendous ground to Bush. Polls showed that voters had trouble telling Gore and Bush apart. Finally, Ralph Nader’s left-of-center Green Party campaign gave expression to nearly three million voters, the majority of whom would have “held their noses” and voted for Gore if they voted at all.
Bush’s conservative agenda lost last year’s election. After the Florida fiasco, the conventional wisdom in Washington held that Bush would govern “from the center.” He would push for limited goals that had broad appeal across the mainstream political spectrum, we were told. But anyone who seriously believed this nonsense didn’t pay attention to the ruthless and antidemocratic fight that Bush and his surrogates waged in Florida. The Bush administration would have none of this talk about centrism. With amazing speed, they moved to impose a solidly right-wing agenda on Washington and the country. In the earliest days after the election, right-wing ideologue Marshall Wittman of the Hudson Institute lamented that “the left won this election.” But a few weeks into the Bush regime, another right-wing ideologue, the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Feulner, proclaimed Bush’s gang to be “more Reaganite than Reagan.”
The Bush administration’s attacks on working people make a mockery of the “compassion” that was supposed to define his conservatism. Bush’s decisions on a series of last-minute Clinton regulations – from scrapping standards on arsenic levels in drinking water to supporting congressional repeal of workplace safety regulations – received the most attention in his administration’s early days. But his entire agenda seeks to turn back the clock on federal policy across the board.
At the center of Bush’s political and economic strategy has been his call for a $1.6 trillion tax cut that will flow primarily into the pockets of the richest 1 percent of the population. By approving the tax cuts (barely modified), Congress has not only rewarded Bush’s main campaign contributors; the tax cuts serve a longer-term conservative strategy – to wipe out the federal budget surplus and, as a result, to deny resources for liberal priorities like health care or education. To finance these tax cuts, Bush’s proposed 2002 budget pledged to hold federal spending to a 4 percent overall increase, compared to the 8 percent increase Clinton’s last budget financed. Bush proposes accomplishing this with across-the-board cuts in a broad array of federal programs. The Bush tax cut is the signature of his domestic policy. All other budgetary changes are merely window dressing. Even Congress’s slightly scaled-back tax cut will likely be large enough to accomplish Bush’s strategic goals.
The Bush tax cut is only the first step in Bush’s planned advance to a full neoliberal program of widespread privatization of government, including privatization of Social Security and Medicare. This, combined with his support for vouchers to finance private-school education, shows the administration’s ideological devotion to the loopiest of free-market proposals. Another signature proposal, Bush’s plan to contract out government social welfare administration to faith-based organizations, serves two aims at once. First, it bolsters the privatization of the welfare state. Second, it satisfies his core supporters among religious conservatives.
Bush’s social policies also bear the Religious Right’s stamp. From the appointment of Neanderthal John Ashcroft as attorney general to that of John Walters as drug czar, the administration has placed true-believer conservatives in important positions. It further plans to stack the judiciary with clones of Supreme Court reactionaries Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Bush’s first decision – to restore Reagan’s ban on support for overseas family planning agencies that counsel abortion – signaled his plan to turn back the clock. It remains to be seen just how brazenly Bush wants to strike directly at legalized abortion. But there’s no doubt that Bush and his henchman want to shift social policy on drugs, abortion, civil rights, and other social issues decisively to the right.
Finally, Bush’s foreign policy unmistakably aims to increase the willingness and ability of the U.S. to act unilaterally to dominate the world. He advocates his central foreign policy plan – to build and deploy a “national missile defense” – as a defensive measure to counter a “rogue state.” In reality, missile defense implements U.S. domination of space – a frontier where no potential competitor can go. With the old Soviet threat gone, administration hawks clearly view China as the next military competitor. Bush’s early actions – from publicly undermining South Korea’s attempted rapprochement with North Korea to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s leaked plans to reorient U.S. military deployments to the Asia-Pacific region – aim to start a new Cold War with China. Bush’s rhetoric about “skipping a generation” of weapons portends a huge increase in military spending whose aim is to place an insurmountable technological and firepower distance between the U.S. and any other country on earth. The combination of these policies – once thought to be Reagan-era fantasies – serves the goal of “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” [2]
Given the sharp right turn that Bush is trying to execute, it’s amazing how little his policies have managed to shake the Washington status quo. With so little opposition coming from the so-called opposition party, the Democrats, and with the media rolling over for Bush, the administration has managed to convince itself that its policies are popular. Bush’s early travels to barnstorm for his policies before largely pro-Republican crowds (at the 100-day mark, he had managed to visit 26 states – more than any other modern president) seemed based on this assumption. Yet, after all of the well-choreographed hype, Bush had little to show for it. Support for his tax cuts barely broke 50 percent in most opinion polls. And when polls allowed respondents to rank the importance of tax cuts along with other priorities – like increased spending on education or medical care – tax cuts fell to the bottom of the list. [3] Majorities opposed his anti-environmental policies.
Perhaps more worrisome for Bush (despite the administration’s general disdain for public opinion) is the widespread impression that he is what Ralph Nader called him: “a corporation disguised as a human being.” The ABC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in late April found that less than half the public thinks Bush understands their problems. By a 2 to 1 factor, they think he supports corporations over ordinary people. And when pollsters asked them to choose what was more important to them, “holding down the size of government” or “providing needed services,” respondents chose “providing needed services” by a 62 percent to 31 percent margin. When pollsters asked the public to choose Bush’s priorities, they said that he favored “holding down the size of government” (62 percent) over “providing needed services” (31 percent). Meanwhile, the ruling class’s effort to prop up Bush’s legitimacy hasn’t hoodwinked as many Americans as the establishment likes to think. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll showed that only 50 percent believe that Bush won the election “fair and square.” Forty-eight percent divided between those who said he won the election “on a technicality” (29 percent) and those who said he “stole the election.” [4] The same poll showed that two-thirds of Black Americans believe that Bush “stole the election.” Urban residents and trade unionists – two groups who turned out in the largest numbers for Gore last November – expressed the most intense dislike for Bush. [5]
The polls show that Bush’s agenda is far from popular. Questions about his stolen election persist. Yet he continues to advance his policies with little opposition. There’s only one reason for this: the pathetic response from the Democratic “opposition.” This contrasts sharply to the eight-year holy war that Republicans and their media mouthpieces waged against the Clinton-Gore administration, despite its Republican-lite politics. Washington Post political reporter John F. Harris explained:
In Clinton’s first term, Rep. Richard K. Armey (R-Texas) turned to Democrats and said, “Your president is just not that important to us.” This underscores the irony that Bush, whose ascension was clouded by questions over whether he really won, has been accorded more legitimacy by the opposition than Clinton was – or than Gore would have had he become president while losing the popular vote. [6]
Not a single Republican voted for Clinton’s first-year budget in 1993 – despite its emphasis on fiscal austerity and deficit reduction. Yet, in the early Bush administration, congressional Democrats provided the margin of victory for the GOP-sponsored repeal of workplace safety regulations. And two-thirds of Democrats in the party’s last redoubt of institutional power in Washington, the U.S. Senate, voted for bankruptcy reform legislation that will bring real harm on working people. Eight Democrats crossed the aisle to make Ashcroft attorney general. With actions like this, the Democratic Party proved itself “dead ... expired and gone to meet its maker,” according to former labor secretary Robert Reich’s parody of an old Monty Python skit about a dead parrot. [7]
Even though public opinion is skeptical of Bush and opposed to most of his priorities, the Democrats don’t seem to have the partisan gumption to fan this sentiment. All of the “inside baseball” explanations for the Democrats’ passivity in the face of Bus›’s attack (inexperience in acting as an opposition, lack of a single spokesperson, uncertainty about congressional redistricting, etc.) place second to the real reason. As one of the two main governing capitalist parties in the U.S., the Democrats reflect the neoliberal capitalist consensus that all major governing parties – from traditional conservatives to social democrats – adopted in the last decade. For big business, the free-market devotees in the GOP (a party that used to have a “moderate” and even “liberal” wing) are the preferred alternative. But the Democrats are a good second choice. In the 2000 election, the Democrats drew virtually even with Republicans in raising “soft money.” As the editors of Monthly Review put it in a February 2001 editorial:
The transformation of the Democrats was fully accomplished over the past eight years. A turning point came when Clinton selected Gore as his vice-presidential candidate in 1992. Prior to that date, conservative or centrist Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter had “balanced” the ticket with liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. With Clinton’s selection of Gore, it was a formal recognition that the liberal wing of the party was losing serious clout. Any short list of the major legislative accomplishments of the Clinton-Gore administration would include: passage of a Draconian crime law; the approval of NAFTA and GATT and the creation of the WTO; the Telecommunications Act of 1996; the elimination of federal welfare guarantees to poor children and single mothers; and maintenance and expansion of military spending. These are all issues traditionally championed by the right wing of the Republican Party. There are hardly any progressive measures anywhere to be found on the Clinton-Gore report card and not one major issue where they squared off with the needs of the wealthy and put all their influence on the line to go to bat for their voting base. [8]
Despite Gore’s loss and Clinton’s disgrace, they’ve left their stamp on the party. The party of official liberalism – that once promoted itself as the party of the New Deal and the Great Society – is now the party of fiscal responsibility and law and order. ›ven when it would benefit Democrats to promote government action to address the real needs of ordinary people – from health care to child care – the stifling centrist consensus rules it out of bounds. Given that, it’s no surprise that Democrats simply nibble at the edges of Bush’s agenda, rather than taking it on full force. Then-Senate minority leader Tom Daschle (D-So.Dak.) tried to spin the Senate’s April 2001 shift of $300 billion from Bush’s tax cut to education and other spending as a victory for Democratic moderation. In reality, the final product – a $1.3 trillion tax cut tilted to the rich – actually matched the tax cut Bush campaigned for before he upped the price tag to $1.6 trillion after taking office.
“If [the ‘moderates’] go along with the repeal of the inheritance tax and big cuts in the top income tax brackets for the wealthy,” E.J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post, “you’ll know the definition of a moderate: a conservative who lacks [right-wing Republican Representative] Tom DeLay’s guts or candor.” [9]
If the Democratic so-called centrists have rolled over for Bush, the liberals – both inside the party and those who lead Democratic base groups such as unions and feminist organizations – have seemed paralyzed since Bush stole the election. Bush is lining up in his crosshairs everything they supposedly hold dear, yet they seem able to do little more than issue press releases. Some, concluding that nothing can be done with Bush in the White House, have backed off their previous commitments. For instance, Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern and liberal senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) have recently sounded the retreat on the goal of universal single-payer health care. [10] Thomas Harrison accurately describes the liberals’ state of mind:
The Democratic Party is not reformable, and it’s all too obvious that the plans of [John] Sweeney, [Gloria] Steinem, [Rev. Jesse] Jackson & Co. to reform the party from within amount to little more than pious hopes. Significantly, their reaction to Gore’s defeat was to attack Nader, not to blame Gore for his inability to beat a smirking, ignorant, overgrown frat boy. Liberals are mostly a dispirited and increasingly cynical bunch these days. Few of them actually believe they’ll ever be able to influence the party. The editorials in liberal magazines exude a damp air of hopelessness and depression, with an occasional wan flicker of wistful fantasy (”now that the Democrats see how faithful workers, blacks, women, etc., are they’ll turn left!”). Actually they assume that the mass of Americans are so right wing and hopeless that Clintonism is the best we can get. [11]
The liberal rot goes even deeper than the liberals’ fronting for Clinton during the last eight years. As liberal organizations have become little more than Washington lobbies, they have become increasingly unable to mobilize their mass memberships around any major demands. No wonder Democratic leaders, the media, and millions of Americans don’t pay attention to them. No wonder conservative Republican and Clintonite Republican-lite politics seem unchallenged. The current California power crisis and the April 22 “Emergency Action for Women’s Lives” in Washington, D.C., illustrate the results.
The current California power crisis provides the best example yet of the disaster that free-market ideology is wreaking on millions of ordinary people. Millions of Californians are fed up. They blame electricity suppliers (including Bush’s biggest campaign contributors) for price gouging. With the state government under firm Democratic control, Governor Gray Davis and other Democrats could take strong action – like seizing California’s power plants – and win massive popular support. Instead, they are more worried about maintaining a pro-business image and the campaign contributions that go with it. So they have opted for a series of half-measures that have virtually handed the state budget surplus over to the energy profiteers. A small group of dedicated activists have tried to rally public opposition to rate hikes and support for publicly owned power. Yet they don’t have the resources to be able to reach and to organize the millions of Californians who could join a movement for public power. The unions, for one, could provide that sort of mass base. But they remain largely passive, unwilling to challenge Davis, even though his dithering has made the crisis much worse. As a result, a promising movement that could strike a blow against Bush and other free-market ideologues remains unorganized.
A second example involves the “Emergency Action for Women’s Lives.” This demonstration for abortion rights, called by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other women’s rights groups, attracted a maximum of 15,000 demonstrators. While the crowd was predominantly young and energetic – a good sign for the future of the abortion rights movement – it was much smaller than it could have been. NOW put neither the resources nor the organizational muscle into turning out large numbers for the demonstration. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, NOW-organized demonstrations against GOP-sponsored attacks on abortion brought hundreds of thousands to the capitol. But eight years of a nominally pro-choice Democratic administration sapped NOW. It failed to mount a strong, activist campaign against the erosion of abortion rights, which accelerated during the Clinton years. NOW became little more than a Democratic Party caucus, and its active membership declined throughout the 1990s. Although it pleaded poverty when organizing for the April 22 march, NOW spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on national press ads bashing Ralph Nader on behalf of the Democrats only a few months earlier.
Only a few months into the Bush regime, a huge disconnect has opened up between the administration, its nominal opposition, and the public. An illegitimate administration is trying to push through a hard-right program that gained only minority support in the national election. The supposed opposition party – whose policies are more popular than the administration’s – wrings its hands. The popular organizations that could focus and mobilize the discontent that exists remain weak and demoralized. The combination of these factors gives Bush more running room than he deserves, feeding elite commentary insisting that Bush has established a “mandate.”
One figure who could rally large forces against Bush is Ralph Nader, whose Green Party run for the presidency last year won 2.7 million votes. Nader’s super rallies sparked the only genuine enthusiasm for any candidate in the 2000 election campaign. Nader’s anticorporate, pro-worker message would seem perfectly tailored to rally opposition to an administration that personifies everything Nader campaigned against. But since the 2000 election, Nader has been missing in action. He remained aloof from the Florida fiasco, unlike lesser-known Greens like California senate candidate Medea Benjamin. And as the Bush administration has announced its slash-and-burn policies on energy, the environment, workers’ safety, and more, Nader has had little to say. Nader was even absent on an issue that he and his organizations helped to raise: opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. When questioned, he insists that he’s building the Green Party away from the media spotlight.
Meanwhile, Democrats and liberals continue to attack Nader with greater ferocity than they’ve managed against Bush. For the liberals, the attack on Nader keeps them from looking at problems within their own backyard. As filmmaker and Nader supporter Michael Moore put it:
Of course they hate Ralph Nader. He’s an ugly reminder that they sold out a long time ago – and he didn’t. Blame Nader, blame Bush, it’s all part of the same distraction, to keep you from focusing on this one, very important fact: Republican arsenic or Democratic arsenic, it really is the same damn crap being forced down your throat. [12]
Whether the liberal attack has stymied Nader or not, he has been largely passive at a time when he could help to galvanize opposition to Bush and the Democrats. His passivity since November has fed a sense of disillusionment among large numbers of activists who worked for and voted for him.
Polls taken immediately before and after election day estimated that as many as one-half of potential Nader supporters held their noses and voted for Gore. For the remaining Nader supporters who didn’t succumb to the “lesser evil,” many felt that they were planting the seeds for a new progressive movement. As he wound up his campaign, Nader himself made the point that he was trying to build a movement that would last beyond election day. The Nader vote, as one of the campaign’s slogans described it, represented a vote for hope, not for fear. Months later, with Bush in the White House, with liberals bashing Nader, and with Nader invisible, thousands of Nader activists feel demoralized, if not betrayed. Many have dropped out of political activity. The relentless Bush attack will likely revive many of them. But for the immediate period, their inactivity feeds the sense that Bush’s program is sailing through with little opposition. The sooner Nader activists return to activity, the better, as Gary Younge is correct to stress:
The corporate domination of American politics cannot be undermined once every four years at election time or on television-panel discussions and on the lecture circuit. The truth is that it will take not just a party but a movement, joining together the disparate forces of labor unions, tree huggers, and pressure groups that made themselves heard at Seattle, to make complete sense of [Nader’s] candidacy. Having made a difference at the polls, he must now make a difference in civil society. Only then will it be clear that the consequence of Nader’s candidacy was not to derail the Democrats, but to restore democracy. [13]
The major wild card in all evaluations of the shape of U.S. politics remains the U.S. economy. For more than a decade, the U.S. economic boom provided a backdrop for particular political developments. On the level of the ruling class and its politicians, it cemented the hold of U.S. free-market triumphalism at home and abroad. As the boom took hold in the mid-1990s, right-wing politics of the early 1990s – anti-immigrant agitation, government austerity, law-and-order politics – lost their hold. Meanwhile, the increasing gap between rich and poor gave greater currency to the politics of social justice – as measured by opinion polls and the growth of antiglobalization sentiment, as shown in Seattle and Quebec City. A persistent labor shortage fueled a noticeable, if insufficient, increase in union struggles at the end of the 1990s.
Today, all of that seems to be coming to an end. The reported job losses of 230,000 in April 2001 were the highest since 1990. The U.S. economy may already be in recession, despite the unexpected 2 percent growth in GDP in the first quarter of 2001 (revised later to 1.3 percent). Profits continue to fall while labor costs continue to inch upward. Meanwhile, energy profiteering – the fruits of deregulation and industry consolidation – is hitting ordinary Americans with skyrocketing energy bills and gasoline prices. The California electricity disaster is a time bomb waiting to explode in states across the country. Already, Republicans and Bush loyalists worry that these accumulating crises could turn the Bush administration into a rerun of Jimmy Carter’s rather than Ronald Reagan’s administration.
The return of recession to the heart of the world system will shake up the political status quo for better and worse. Mounting layoffs can sap workers’ confidence. But coming after a decade in which the rich made out like bandits while working people struggled just to keep up, class anger and resentment against the bosses could erupt in many different ways. The recent riots in Cincinnati could be a harbinger of things to come. What is more, bosses that bought labor peace with improved contracts during the boom years will try to claw back wages and benefits. Recession will lay bare the underlying realities of the tattered social safety net that the boom had pushed into the background. In this recession, only about 40 percent of the unemployed will be eligible for unemployment assistance. And, for the first time since the 1930s, millions will face unemployment and poverty without a federal guarantee of a minimum standard of living – thanks to Clinton/GOP welfare reform.
At the same time, the voices that prosperity pushed to the margins – the protectionists and anti-immigrant racists – will gain a greater hearing. During a recession, politics become nastier and more sharp-edged. Much more is at stake. So the growth in right-wing forces, from Buchananites to the Ku Klux Klan, can’t be ruled out.
The Bush spinmeisters want to make their man seem like Ronald Reagan, whose election marked a major shift to the right in the United States. Yet the conditions they face today are not those of 1981. Reagan pulled 8.3 million votes more than Carter in the 1980 election. Bush lost the popular vote and stumbled into the White House on the back of a one-vote Supreme Court majority. A recession and an energy crisis brought down Carter. These same factors might bring down Bush. But, most importantly, Reagan took office as the left of the 1960s and 1970s was burning out. Bush has taken office in a period when the broadly defined left is growing.
The movement in opposition to Bush remains in its earliest phases. Larger social forces, like organized labor, haven’t yet demonstrated the will to go head-to-head with Bush. Nevertheless, the 2000 election left millions of people fighting mad. Even in the earliest days of Bush’s administration, signs of popular opposition to Bush and his right-wing cohorts appeared – at the Washington protests on Inauguration Day and the April 22 pro-choice march. The movement against corporate globalization again made its presence felt in the April demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
As yet, this opposition is diffuse. And with traditional liberal leaders failing to react, it appears as an army without generals. It rises to fight around a particular issue and then disappears. A sustained fight still has to be built.
For socialists, this presents a challenging, but hopeful, terrain. If socialists take the steps to initiate small struggles today, they will find that wider layers of people will want to get involved. The new activists becoming involved in the abortion rights struggle or in the antiglobalization movement don’t necessarily see the need to connect the issues that they fight around to a broader fight against Bush and the bosses. Socialists have the opportunities to help forge those links. Finally, we have to help rebuild the unions and other working-class organizations to put working-class demands at the forefront of a movement against Bush. The Reagan years were a tragedy. It’s up to us to make the Bush years a farce.
Lance Selfa is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.
1. Editorials quoted in Howard Kurtz, Bush’s first 100: Good, bad and ugly, Washington Post, April 30, 2001.
2. This phrase comes from a famous 1992 internal Pentagon strategy paper laying out the post-Cold War foreign policy of the U.S. during the elder Bush’s administration. When the press caught wind of its contents, it outraged U.S. allies. The Pentagon then repudiated it, but continued to act on its central points. The author of the paper was Paul Wolfowitz, the number two man in the current Bush’s Pentagon.
3. In a January 2001 Gallup poll, Americans ranked tax cuts 12th of 14 major priorities. In a February 2001 Gallup poll, tax cuts came in last of six major priorities for the Bush administration. See David W. Moore, Gallup News Service, No change in public opinion on the desirability of tax cuts, May 1, 2001, available on their Web site at www.gallup.com.
4. Susan Page, Poll shows Bush still has much work to do, USA Today, April 25, 2001, pp. 1, 3.
5. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Bush’s base backs him to the hilt, April 26, 2001, available on their Web site at www.people-press.org.
6. John F. Harris, Mr. Bush catches a Washington break, Washington Post, May 6, 2001, p. B01.
7. Robert B. Reich, The Democrats’ pet shop, American Prospect, March 12–26, 2001.
8. The Nader campaign and the future of American politics, Monthly Review, February 2001.
9. E.J. Dionne Jr., Gutless moderates of the Democratic Party, Washington Post, May 4, 2001.
10. For example, see Jonathan Oberlander and Theodore R. Marmor, The path to universal health care, in The Next Agenda, Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey, eds. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), pp. 93–126.
11. Thomas Harrison, Election 2000: Infamy and hope, New Politics, Winter 2001.
12. Michael Moore, Why don’t we all just cut the crap right now, May 1, 2001, available on the Common Dreams Web site at www.commondreams.org.
13. Gary Younge, Nader was right to make a stand against corporate domination of politics, even if it did let Bush win, Guardian (London), April 16, 2001.
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