Senator Jack Reed – RI Future

Providence Mayoral candidate Jorge Elorza campaigned on Broad St. Monday afternoon in the company of Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, visiting businesses and glad-handing pedestrians along the way. State Representative Grace Dias led the tour and State Senator Juan Pichardo came along for the stroll.

Closer to downtown Providence, also on Broad St., Buddy Cianci, the once and (he hopes) future mayor was followed by a small group of reporters as he campaigned, but I was more interested in watching Elorza take half of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation on a tour of a vibrant, yet financially struggling part of the city.

Cianci, in my estimation, is willing to say anything to anyone in the hope of getting a vote. Elorza, by contrast, is running as a progressive, and I am interested in seeing how he navigates issues such as class and economic inequality under that identifier.

Traditionally, people from struggling communities like South Providence have been underserved by the political class, who only show up every couple of years to secure the votes needed to keep their jobs. Yet ironically it is these same communities that often have the power to determine election outcomes. Elorza and Cianci both know this, which is why they are campaigning so hard here, but this truth is not lost on those in the community.

“He’s just complaining,” said Representative Dias, roughly translating the words of a man who stopped the delegation in the Family Dollar parking lot. In Spanish, the man had asked Elorza and the senators if they will be out walking in his neighborhood when his vote wasn’t needed. To be fair, Dias wasn’t being condescending in dismissing the man’s question. The political reality is that these visits are made to secure votes and listening to the concerns of voters is a secondary consideration.

But still, the man’s question implied an important point: Providence mayors too often get bogged down in developing projects downtown, or dealing with issues of interest to the East Side and Brown University. When money is tight, services are cut, and those services aren’t always central to the well being of most East Side residents and college students. Instead, service cuts, like the brunt of economic downturns, affect the poorest communities disproportionately.

So what the man seemed to be asking was, “If I am there for you with my vote tomorrow, will you be there for my community as mayor?”

As Elorza and his supporters continued to walk door to door, currying votes from business owners and workers, they focused on likely Democratic voters, bypassing businesses that had large signs supporting Cianci or Republican gubernatorial candidate Alan Fung. They also bypassed people like this man, collecting plastic soda bottles from trash cans.

After all, the clock is ticking, and the mayoral campaigns needs the support of engaged voters, not the marginal, the forgotten and the underclass. As Elorza’s campaign passed by, the man didn’t look up from his shopping cart and trash can. There are two worlds here: the world of the political campaign and the world we live in. Rarely do these worlds communicate, which is a shame.

I hope Jorge Elorza will be the kind of mayor who tries to close that communications gap.

Iran 2012: Iraq 2003 All Over Again? presented the neoliberal case for the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran. The panel was moderated by Karen Finney and consisted of Democratic strategist Bob Creamer, Alireza Nader from the Rand Corporation, National Security Network executive director Heather Hurlburt, and Rhode Island’s own Senator Jack Reed. Reed was quick to point out (to some applause) his 2003 vote against the authorization of force in Iraq. But still it’s no surprise I suppose to see him defending the administration’s plan for projection of U.S. power via sanctions on Iran, a strategy he described as a “peaceful” alternative to outright military force. What was odd for me was that the discussion focused entirely on justifying economic sanctions on Iran without a single panelist to the left of the empire lite position of the Obama administration.

Essentially panelists sought to convince progressives that although sanctions in Iraq led eventually to the disastrous invasion and occupation, this time it will be different. War weariness, a faltering domestic economy, a changed Middle East, and the “one extraordinary difference, unilateralism,” as Senator Reed put it, make it different than 2003. Certainly there are some differences, but I couldn’t help but think the panel should have asked, Iraq 1990 All Over Again? As the Times put it in 2003:

For many people, the sanctions on Iraq were one of the decade’s great crimes, as appalling as Bosnia or Rwanda. Anger at the United States and Britain, the two principal architects of the policy, often ran white hot. Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, expressed a widely held belief when he said in 1998: ”We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.” Even today, Clinton-era American officials ranging from Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, and James P. Rubin, State Department spokesman under Albright, to Nancy E. Soderberg, then with the National Security Council, speak with anger and bitterness over the fervor of the anti-sanctions camp. As Soderberg put it to me, ”I could not give a speech anywhere in the U.S. without someone getting up and accusing me of being responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.”

I asked exactly that question when given the chance. I traveled a bit in the Middle East in the 90s and was approached by an Iraqi who begged me to tell people back home the effect the sanctions were having on Iraqi civilians. “You’re killing the children and old people,” he said with the hope that if Americans only knew we’d stop. That’s a difference now too. Americans can no longer claim to be unsure or blissfully ignorant. We now know the effect these sanctions will have on the civilian population.

As Madeline Albright said it, “this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” Heather Hurlburt, a speechwriter for Albright, similarly defended the calculus of the collective punishment of civilians as preferable to war. But these rationalizations conveniently omit the effect the sanctions and the Clinton administration’s eventual signing of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 had in laying the groundwork for the Bush invasion. By 2003 the die was cast, and progressives could do little to stop it. The question now, will we do it all over again? Just don’t say you couldn’t have known.

Tag: Senator Jack Reed

What kind of mayor will Jorge Elorza be?

Iran: the Progressive War?