More on nonpartisan elections
It is important to examine the arguments for nonpartisan elections from every angle possible.
Why, as some assert, would third party candidates receive more votes in nonpartisan elections? Simply because they are “independent”? I think not. A candidate must do the work to gain recognition and trust regardless of party affiliation.
As for party labels, I for one would like to know if a candidate has Nazi or fascist leanings.
This morning, Oct. 21, on WNYC, it was announced that Mayor Bloomberg may have used his own money to send out a glossy color brochure on the merits of non-primary elections. The mayor’s name was nowhere to be found on the brochure. Why not be honest and open about our intentions? And let the voters decide.
Gabe FalsettaGlendale NY
Anti-immigrant governor
The Southern Poverty Law Center in its Report 2003, September, states that none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the board of the anti-immigrant organization U.S. English.
Here is a present-day organizational tie by the governor-to-be of California (by deceit and manipulation) to an anti-immigrant stance closely tied to white supremacy. Here is a menacing power grab by a Bush and corporate lack. This grab is a clear and present danger to democratic rights that makes it even more urgent to build unity to show Bush the door in 2004.
George FishmanNew Haven CT
Destruction of confidence
Will Bush’s law annihilate the confidence in schools and the teachers’ motivation for teaching? Definitely, if the law keeps labeling the schools as “failing.” This is what Terrie Albano’s article (PWW 10/3) is all about. It gravely discusses how the new law passed by Bush inflicts chaos among the schools and its students.
The article uses statistics to accurately describe its point – that schools are losing confidence due to government tests. Furthermore, it expresses a parent’s and child’s reaction to school that supports how the law is affecting everyone.
The Bush administration passed this law to help increase the students’ achievement; however, he should use a positive method such as expanding the education budget to improve schools who score “below average” on these tests. By putting down the schools, he is only hurting their self-worth and image. Bush must use a constructive technique to get the schools to carry out their dreams of being successful.
Manisha Mishra and Irina TarnaskyChicago IL
Creeping fascism?
Barbara Russum’s letter concerning fascism in Europe and Chile is very appropriate today. Fascism is an open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class in the service of finance (that is monopoly capitalism). That is the classic and still valid Communist definition of fascism developed by the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s. It means that fascism is a movement for the ruling class, even if its most visible supporters are drawn traditionally from racist elements of the lower middle classes.
Without the support of industrialists, bankers, and existing elites generally, the Italian and German fascist parties could not have come to power. It is also important to remember that right-wing governments, especially in Germany in the early 1930s, paved the way for Hitler’s triumph by undermining the people’s democratic rights, while the Social Democratic and Communist parties were in conflict with each other. Only a broad United Front, of the kind Communists fought for after 1935, could defeated fascism before before WWII, possibly preventing what was the most destructive war in history.
The Bush administration, although it has not yet become an open terroristic dictatorship, has definite fascist tendencies – a point that people throughout the world are noticing and commenting on. Fascism in its incipient or full blown form has never been opposed by the upper classes or defeated by Center-Right politicians who offer no solutions to the problems that produce fascist movements to begin with and usually try to co-opt and appease fascist policies, like Joseph Lieberman and other conservative Democrats who support the “Patriot Act,” the Iraq war, and the Ashcroft Justice Department assault on the Bill of Rights. It will take the broadest unity of our Black, Brown, and white, male and female, gay and straight working class to defeat the sinister Bush administration in 2004, before we face a more full-blown expression of fascism that, if history is any judge, may do away with elections and other essential democratic rights.
Norman MarkowitzNew Brunswick NJ
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