It's hard to precisely define the political establishment, the fixed group of financiers, political operatives, journalists, and politicians who make up the swirl of right-wing power in Washington D.C. But if it's not always simple to define in its totality, one man stands out as an innovative and particularly venal power broker: Thomas Donahue, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In a lot of ways, the new challenge after the 2006 elections for the progressive movement boils down to finding the unethical and unaccountable purveyors of systemic corruption and rooting them out. It is these forces that put Bush in the White House and reelected him. It is these forces that corrupt both parties. It is these forces that are going to fight tooth and nail to defeat the Democratic majority, while attempting to also corrupt it from within.

Fortunately, in this case, we can put a face to the force. Tom Donahue is possibly the most powerful business lobbyist in D.C. Most recently, he has been pushing aggressively to weaken the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in the wake of the Enron scandal to ensure corporate accountability and protect investors. And right now, he's reeling, because he's been caught in an unethical stock scandal of his own. What happens to Donahue, whether he's able to maintain his stewardship of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will go a long way towards answering the question of whether progressives can be confident in our ability to begin repairing some of the damage Bush and his ilk have done.

Here's the short story. Donahue is on the board of directors of Sunrise Senior Living, a company that offers assisted living facilities to the elderly, and according to Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, he sold stock in advance of an accounting problem which later became public and shaved $342 million from the company's market value. Shareholders are demanding answers, including an independent probe. This isn't the first time Donahue has had problems with corporate scandals. As Public Citizen has documented, this seems to be a behavior trait. Donahue sat on the board of Qwest as it defrauded investors, and on Union Pacific as the company was caught for massive safety violations. All of the companies on whose board he sits are members of the Chamber of Commerce, and he has often dedicated the brand and prestige of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to serving the interests of specific corporate donors instead of the general interests of the business community.

Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce itself is a powerhouse. According to the New York Times, the Chamber has more than three million members, from businesses of every size, sector and region; its 2,800 affiliated state and local chambers give it a presence in nearly every state and Congressional district. It spent more than $53 million on lobbying in 2004, more than any organization has ever spent in a year. In 2004, it deployed 215 people in 31 states, sent 3.7 million pieces of mail, made 5.6 million phone calls and sent more than 30 million e-mail messages on behalf of its candidates.

This institution is one of the most powerful vehicles in D.C. One characteristic of Republican rule is how right-wingers have seized on groups like this and moved them away from helping their members and towards becoming part of the Republican establishment. The Chamber purports to work for a business-friendly environment that helps its members, but it lobbies for anti-science policies that have to do solely with ideology. Despite massive costs for the insurance industry, for instance, the Chamber is still in denial over global warming, urging "Congress to carefully review the climate change issue before taking further action." Despite the obvious interest small businesses have in a free and open internet, the Chamber of Commerce opposes net neutrality. The Chamber wants to weaken or eliminate the Family and Medical Leave Act, the minimum wage, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. They want to cut every possible tax despite massive deficits, privatize Social Security, and just generally pursue the right-wing agenda down the line. Far from a business-friendly umbrella group for its 3 million members, the Chamber under Donahue's management has turned into a pay-to-play vehicle for right-wing causes and corporate dishonesty. As Eliot Spitzer put it, ''Tom Donohue has never once found a crime that he couldn't justify, as long as it was committed by one of his dues-paying members."

The national Chamber of Commerce isn't pro-business, in other words, it's just a fully captured right-wing organization that has been taken over by the Republican Party. There are state and local Chambers all over the country that are not right-wing, but are genuinely apolitical organizations fostering networking and business growth in local areas. Many trial lawyers in the South belong to local Chambers, unwittingly contributing to a massive lobbying operation in D.C. undercutting their ability to represent the public against abuses.

The core of the right-wing takeover the country lies in corrupting institutions like the U.S. Chamber and concentrating power in the hands of a small group of elite actors. These people sit on corporate boards, they know each other, they pay each others' salaries, they go to conferences in Davos, and they fund campaigns for both parties. They are willing to invest in substantial sums and make alliances with right-wing Christian Nationalist groups to eviscerate the power of the Federal government and prevent progressive policies from being effective.

The 2001 tax cuts, for instance, aside from giving billions to the wealthy, destroyed the capacity of the government to do much affirmative good work. By crippling governance, these elites are pushing the public to accept private goods in lieu of what should be public services. Private schools, bottled water, health food, private and chartered travel, elite medical institutions -- these are all part and parcel of building what John Edwards calls the 'Two Americas'. It really is quite stark. If you are in the business or political elite, compared to normal Americans, you live in different areas, have different crime rates, eat different food and drink different water, send your kids to different schools, travel more efficiently, are subject to a different set of laws, and have access to superior medicine. The public at large responds to this in different ways -- liberals get despondent and cynical, and blue collar ethnic whites begin to rely on right-wing church networks for what had been public services.

The key to building and sustaining this reactionary America is allowing individuals like Tom Donahue to act above the law for personal profit, while lobbying to weaken agencies that might hold them accountable. It fits perfectly into this destruction of the public sphere, and allows bad actors to profit from doing bad. We will not and cannot build a progressive America as long as we have an economy that gives incentives to people like this to steal from investors and use that money to lobby against us.

Tom Donahue is now facing pressure because of the corporate malfeasance in which he himself seems to have engaged. It's not clear if it will matter that he is corrupting the major face of American business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We'll see if corporate chieftains are willing to stand up for ethical practices, and if local Chambers speak out. It's not clear they will. And it's not clear that there is enough strength within the current Democratic caucus to go after such a powerful adversary, even knowing the obstacles that he's going to present down the road to a progressive agenda. Nevertheless, it's our job to understand the situation in our country, and to pressure our lawmakers, local Chambers, and business elites to correct the abuses they have allowed to happen.

After all, a president as stupid, venal, and petty as George W. Bush doesn't get elected and reelected without some serious institutional forces at work. Progressives would be seriously mistaken if we assume that when Bush leaves office those forces will go away.

This piece originally ran in the New York Times.

If you needed to find out how much pollution an industrial plant in your neighborhood was spewing, or what toxic chemicals were in a local river, where would you go? Until recently, you could discover the answer at one of the Environmental Protection Agency's 29 libraries. But now the E.P.A. has obstructed the American public -- as well as its own scientists and staff -- by starting to dismantle its crown jewel, the national system of regional E.P.A. libraries.

Until now, any citizen could consult these resources, which include information on things like siting incinerators, storing toxic waste and uncovering links between asthma and car exhaust. E.P.A. staff members and other scientists have counted on the libraries to support their work. First responders and other state and local government officials have used E.P.A. information to protect communities. In the age of terrorism, when the safety of our food and water supply, the uninterrupted flow of energy and, indeed, so much about our environment has become a matter of national security, it seems particularly dangerous to take steps that would hinder our emergency preparedness.

Although lawmakers haven't yet agreed to President Bush's proposed 2007 budget, which includes $2 million in cuts to the agency's library system, the head of the E.P.A. has already instituted cuts. The agency's main library in Washington has been closed to the public, and regional E.P.A. libraries in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo., have been closed altogether. At the Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle branches, hours and public access have been reduced.

Anyone who needs to understand the environmental impact of, say, living downwind or downstream from a new nuclear power plant, or the long-term public health impact of Hurricane Katrina, cannot afford to find the doors barred to potentially lifesaving information. But neither can the rest of us, whose daily lives and choices will be affected by global warming. We all have a right to be able to get access to information about our air, water and soil.

"Libraries and their professionals are integral to the work of E.P.A. toxicologists," says an agency toxicologist, Suzanne Wuerthele. "Without access to their expertise and extensive collections, it will be difficult to explain to the public, to state agencies, industry and to the courts how and why E.P.A. is protecting the environment over time."

Some members of Congress have begun to bring these cuts to light. The Senate minority whip, Richard Durbin, urged the president to reopen the libraries and rethink his budget request. Eighteen senators sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee asking it to make the E.P.A. keep the libraries open. Representatives John Dingell, Bart Gordon and Henry Waxman recently had the Government Accountability Office start an inquiry into the closings and requested that the E.P.A. administrator, Stephen Johnson, cease the destruction of library materials immediately.

The E.P.A. cannot hide behind the fig leaf of fiscal responsibility. While the agency says the closings are all part of a commitment to modernize and digitize, we are not assured that its public plan is adequate or its skills sufficient. Users within the E.P.A. and the American public need information specialists, like librarians, to manage paper collections and to help them get access to digital material and organize online information.

Fortunately, there's still time to reverse this dangerous threat to a healthy future. The administration could immediately reopen the closed libraries. Congress could conduct oversight hearings to reverse these decisions and prevent any more E.P.A. libraries -- all of them containing invaluable information about our environment, all of them paid for by our tax dollars -- from closing. The American public deserves no less.

So while Bush may not like any of the Group's 79 proposals (so impractical and unrealistic), he's ready to adopt its slogan, "New Way Forward." Newsweek says that next week "Bush is expected to announce what he calls 'The New Way Forward,' his latest plan to salvage the mission in Iraq."

Of course, that's been the problem during this entire fiasco -- the substitution of rhetoric for policy -- the belief, even at this late date, that reality can be changed simply by changing the language used to describe it. Bush makes a big show of his religious faith, but what's truly impressive is his incredible faith in the power of PR, and, accordingly, his lack of faith in the American people.

Nowhere was this rationale laid out more succinctly than in the internal memo Donald Rumsfeld wrote in his last month in office, which included this slippery strategy: "Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'"

It's not about losing and winning, but, rather, about "losing" and "winning," which are very, very different things.

So now we're going from "Stay the Course" to "New Way Forward." Will that change anything? Not likely. But, in Bush's mind, it'll buy him some time, at least until the next slogan.

And what will that be? Following is the HuffPo Iraq War Slogan Timeline -- past, present, and, yes, future:

2001:

GATHERING THREAT

2002:

AXIS OF EVIL

2003:

SLAM DUNK

SHOCK AND AWE

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

2004:

FIGHT 'EM THERE, NOT HERE

2005:

LAST THROES

ADAPT TO WIN

STAY THE COURSE

2006:

NEW WAY FORWARD

2007:

THE NEW NEW WAY FORWARD

STAY THE NEW NEW WAY FORWARD

2008:

A NEW WAY BACKWARD

A FASTER NEW WAY BACKWARD

HOLY SHIT, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE

2009:

A NEW WAY OF FORGETTING THAT EVER HAPPENED

2010:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

2011:

THE NEW GATHERING THREAT

WASHINGTON -- There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world.

The White House had no immediate comment on the reports, which set off a firestorm of controversy in the nation's capital.

Speaking on background, a high-ranking official at the State Department discounted the possibility that the reports would turn out to be true. "If that were the case," he said, "don't you think we would have known about it a long time ago?"

On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties were quick to rebut the assertion. "That certain news organizations would run with such a poorly sourced and obviously slanted story tells us that the liberal media are still up to their old tricks, despite the current crisis," a GOP lawmaker fumed. A prominent Democrat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that classified briefings to congressional intelligence panels had disproved such claims long ago.

Scholars at leading think tanks were more restrained, and some said there was a certain amount of literal truth to the essence of the reports. But they pointed out that, while it included factual accuracy in a narrow sense, the assertion was out of context and had the potential to damage national unity at a time when the United States could ill afford such a disruption.

The claim evidently originated with a piece by a Lebanese journalist that appeared several days ago in a Beirut magazine. It was then picked up by a pair of left-leaning daily newspapers in London. From there, the story quickly made its way across the Atlantic via the Internet.

"It just goes to show how much we need seasoned, professional gatekeepers to separate the journalistic wheat from the chaff before it gains wide attention," remarked the managing editor of one news program at a major U.S. television network. "This is the kind of stuff you see on ideologically driven websites, but that hardly means it belongs on the evening news." A news magazine editor agreed, calling the reports "the worst kind of geographical correctness."

None of the major cable networks devoted much air time to reporting the story. At one outlet, a news executive's memo told staffers that any reference to the controversy should include mention of the fact that the United States continues to lead the globe in scientific discoveries. At a more conservative network, anchors and correspondents reminded viewers that English is widely acknowledged to be the international language -- and more people speak English in the U.S. than in any other nation.

While government officials voiced acute skepticism about the notion that the United States is not the center of the world, they declined to speak for attribution. "If lightning strikes and it turns out this report has real substance to it," explained one policymaker at the State Department, "we could look very bad, at least in the short run. Until it can be clearly refuted, no one wants to take the chance of leading with their chin and ending up with a hefty serving of Egg McMuffin on their face."

An informal survey of intellectuals with ties to influential magazines of political opinion, running the gamut from The Weekly Standard to The New Republic, indicated that the report was likely to gain little currency in Washington's elite media forums.

"The problem with this kind of shoddy impersonation of reporting is that it's hard to knock down because there are grains of truth," one editor commented. "Sure, who doesn't know that our country includes only small percentages of the planet's land mass and population? But to draw an inference from those isolated facts that somehow the United States of America is not central to the world and its future -- well, that carries postmodernism to a nonsensical extreme."

Another well-known American journalist speculated that the controversy will soon pass: "Moral relativism remains a pernicious force in our society, but overall it holds less appeal than ever, even on American campuses. It's not just that we're the only superpower -- we happen to also be the light onto the nations and the key to the world's fate. People who can't accept that reality are not going to have much credibility."

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

This is actually a very old debate, which Americans have thrashed out in every generation. The expansive, idealistic, interventionist approach to the world has deep roots in the American character, going back to the nation's founding and the universal principles of liberalism embedded in the Declaration of Independence. As George Will once put it, the "messianic impulse" has been "a constant of America's national character, and a component of American patriotism."

But no less constant has been opposition to this grand vision, which critics since the nation's founding era have regarded as a recipe for endless war abroad and the undoing of American democracy at home.

The fight began at the beginning, in the ratification debates over the Constitution. Supporters such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison insisted that a strong central government was vital if the United States was to become a world power capable of shouldering its international responsibilities.

The young United States was the "embryo of a great empire," Hamilton proclaimed. Patrick Henry, in turn, accused supporters of the Constitution of trying to "convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire," thereby betraying the nation's purpose. "When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object."

John Quincy Adams took both sides of the struggle, warning in 1821 against idealistic ventures abroad "in search of monsters to destroy" but a few years later insisting Americans had a duty "to take a conspicuous and leading" role in the world on behalf of their "principles and morals."

In the last decades of the 19th century, Lincoln's Republican Party widened this expansive and interventionist view, celebrating "the future greatness and destiny of the United States" and its pivotal role "in the improvement of the world." Democrat Grover Cleveland's secretary of state, Walter Gresham, in response, warned against the nation's natural "impulse to rush into difficulties that do not concern it, except in a highly imaginary way." To restrain this "indulgence" was "a duty we owe to the world as an example of the strength, the moderation, and the beneficence of popular government."

Robert Taft continued the battle against the ambitious, world-transforming policies of FDR, Harry Truman and Dean Acheson.

"We should not undertake to defend the ideals of democracy in foreign countries," the influential Republican senator cautioned, lest the United States become a "meddlesome Mattie" with "our fingers in every pie." He warned against the arrogance and temptations of dominant power, for such power "over other nations, however benevolent its purpose, leads inevitably to imperialism." Truman and Acheson rejected this advice and instead pursued a preponderance of global power, "situations of strength" around the globe, and an ideology-laden strategy of containment that theoretically could lead America to war anywhere on the planet, as it did in Vietnam.

Today Taft is in bad odor in polite society, but his arguments against American overseas adventurism have been picked up again by the latest critics of our expansive foreign policy tradition. The old argument continues.

The problem for those who have tried to steer the United States away from its long history of expansiveness, then and now, is that Americans' belief in the possibility of global transformation -- the "messianic" impulse -- is and always has been the more dominant strain in the nation's character. It is rooted in the nation's founding principles and is the hearty offspring of the marriage between Americans' driving ambitions and their overpowering sense of righteousness.

Critics have occasionally succeeded in checking these tendencies, temporarily. Failures of world-transforming efforts overseas have also had their effect, but only briefly. Five years after the end of the Vietnam War, which seemed to many to presage the rejection of Achesonian principles of power and ideological triumphalism, Americans elected Ronald Reagan, who took up those principles again with a vengeance.

Today many hope and believe that the difficulties in Iraq will turn Americans once and for all against ambition and messianism in the world. History is not on their side.

NAFTA was the Vanguard

Recalling the extremely close vote over one of Clinton's premier foreign policy initiatives - the passage of NAFTA in 1994 - his operatives had to depend upon a higher percentage of Republican than Democrat legislators to achieve a narrow victory. A heavy majority of Democratic legislators mobilized against NAFTA while the Republicans overwhelmingly supported it. The same political division is likely to once again occur if the hemisphere-inclusive FTAA trade bill ever manages to reach the floor of Congress and is voted upon.

Clinton's Latin American Docket

Upon taking office, President Clinton and his administration envisaged a strictly defined, trade-dominated agenda towards Latin America. Looking back on his largely failed regional policy, one can see that the delimited nature of its focus on trade and more trade was the key ingredient of its relative lack of success. If there was any exception to the Clinton administration's mainly languorous interest in the region, it was its Jacobin orientation toward Cuba-related issues. In the first Clinton campaign, the Democratic candidate cynically moved to the right to outflank the first President Bush by taking a more bellicose stand on Havana; he therein relentlessly socked away at Castro in order to push Bush aside so as to obtain a share of the campaign donations and tap into the political clout of Miami's Cuban-American community.

Clinton apparently felt no great loss in sacrificing a balanced Cuba policy in favor of shrill invective, as well as as artful tactic to win over Florida's vital Electoral College votes. The Clinton administration soon revealed that there were a great number of dark spots in its snapshot of the region. If one accepts that such benchmarks as social justice, pressing environment issues, the aspiration for a just society, as well as the conviction that the implementation of hemispheric inclusiveness is where U.S. regional policy should be, then both the Clinton and the successor Bush administrations got it wrong both in theory as well as in practice.

An Impoverishment of Vision

For the Bush administration, there was a lingering line of now irrelevant Cold War ideology that would have been best to foil and then sweep away, because the basis for such concerns were eliminated with the demise of the Soviet bloc in 1991. Nevertheless, without the distraction of the anti-Soviet crusade still at work, the battlefield was left clear for a right-wing Republican absorption of Clinton's thirst for trade deals, which, after all, was basically entirely congruent with traditional Republican values. In addition to this mix however, was a potent brew of neo-con negativity from a dramatically radicalizing Bush State Department, particularly emanating from its Bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs. This office had been rendered even more extremist by the strident orientation of its first Assistant Secretary of State, Otto Reich and his equally rabid successor, Roger Noriega. For these envenomed regional players, trade matters could be left to the Treasury and the White House's Trade Office, while they continued with their main lethal obsession that sprang from their determination to bring down the Castro regime and any other rogue states that looked or sounded like Havana. This was the assessment that they would apply before implementing any other major regional policy-making initiatives, and was also the yardstick used to evaluate the worth of other Latin American leaderships. Where nations stood within the region in relation to Castro and what they were doing to isolate Hugo Chávez, in addition to whether they were prepared to join the coalition of the willing on Iraq, became the visa-to-friendship between these countries and the current administration.

In fact, any amateur historian could have told Clinton - as well as the Bush administrations - that Cold War ideology did not die in the early 1990s, as Clinton once claimed - it merely had gone underground where it would hibernate until a more propitious season for it to thrive came along. At the beginning of the Bush administration's term, an intense ideological posturing began in addition to the reassertion of the pro-free trade docket, while anti-Castro diatribes that were tempered to new extremes of hardness, were once again launched at the aging Cuban strongman.

At this point, a fast-breaking scenario began to unfold. The Soviet era's Cold War compass was still sympathetically spinning for the Bush administration and its impact was not only theoretical. Meanwhile, memories of that period were profoundly and irrationally honored in U.S.-backed Latin American national security doctrines, even though the themes of privatization programs, bilateral free trade pacts, and market integration had substituted a new vocabulary and a new emphasis for Washington's new regional jihad - the war against terrorism. Meanwhile, the ideologues - Reich and Noriega - free of any admonishment by their seniors due to the distractions posed by the Iraq War, could now, undisturbed, commit themselves to their life's work of mopping up Castro, and later Chávez.

While such a gameplan would be good enough for Know-Nothing Americans and affluent Latin Americans led by their local captains of industry, along with the new professional class who were admirably suited to feast off of expanding commerce, it turned out to be pretty thin gruel for the chronically poor, the indigenous, and the millions of a given population who found themselves part of the rural and urban unemployed and underemployed. For those seeking even slightly improved standards of living and a portal into a better life, the contrast was embittering.

Clearing the Decks for Trade

During the time that it has ruled, the Bush administration's paramount mistake with regional issues has been that, in its concentrated quest for orthodox trade models that adhere to traditional conservative ideals and the raw ideology that was targeted at a number of Latin American leftist bull's eyes, it acted as if it had found the globe's most potent concoction. This was reflected in militant proselytizing for the full implementation of the Washington Consensus trade model, first devised under Clinton. But the fact was that, at this end of the political spectrum, those of that persuasion were only nursing an illusion. Like Hitler's Third Reich, Washington's game plan for expunging a radical strain from anywhere in the hemisphere where it surfaced, would not last for a thousand years, but scarcely a decade.

Because of their preoccupation with the time-consuming Iraq debacle, senior U.S. policy makers had hardly any quality moments to soothe a maladroit strategy or to soberly assess the proper mixture of good ideas and high quality personnel. In this respect, they were unable to field what could pass as a successful regional policy, value-driven both in concept and practice. Such a plan would want to reflect both rectitude and a readiness to address their national interests as well as Washington's. Poverty abatement, social justice issues, and attending to the correct practices, whose lack would otherwise hobble society's reasonable expectations, and prevent a commitment to an authentic rather than a faux democracy, which would be part of the recipe.

But the neo-cons charged with working hemispheric issues under Bush - who were particularly fertile in the Defense and State Departments - neither represented an undeniable strong moral force nor were comparable to the Pope's army in the service of an indisputable cause. Rather, they were little better than a gaggle of bullies and ill-motivated Pharisees, who used perverse versions of such concepts as democracy, human rights, and market liberalization to express their selective indignation against those on the left, including such leftist luminaries as Ecuador's Rafael Correa or Bolivia's Evo Morales, let alone Chávez, and of course, Castro, all of whom were accused by U.S. officials at one time or another of being the dupe of some progressive cause.

Selective Indignation

Of course, a policy based upon the pursuit of social justice and a respect for a nation's authentic sovereignty would be the antithesis of what the Bush policy was plying in Latin America. The role played by its questionable certification process, for example, which almost entirely relied upon spurious evidence and cooked data to make its case regarding Venezuela's supposedly unacceptable performance in such areas as drugs, terrorism, and human trafficking, ended up by being little more than self-discrediting. An example of this was intelligence czar John Negroponte's recent establishment of a special Cuban-Venezuelan unit with great fanfare and whose implications were perfectly clear, since the only other special units were those set up for North Korea and Iran. Moreover, one of Negroponte's previous avatars - as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s - could be handily cited as how to be deeply involved in covering up something like Contra death squad activities against Hondurans opposed to U.S. policy in Nicaragua, and get away with it by repeatedly claiming, as Negroponte did, amnesia during his confirmation hearing to be ambassador to the UN, where he denied any such role before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite impressive in-depth evidence to the contrary.

Parallel to when Negroponte's especially set-up Cuban-Venezuelan unit became operational, the State Department, ever since Chávez's landslide win in the presidential race, has switched directions and is now ostensibly trying to engage Venezuela in joint projects. After repeated bashings of Venezuela and castigating that Caracas was unworthy of being certified for its cooperation in Washington's anti-drug war, it abruptly changed its line. State Department spokesman Scott McCormack redacted the Bush administration's usual tart language that it lavishes on Chavez, calling on Caracas to "work together." He noted that "we have been able to work pretty effectively together." Ironically, McCormack is extending his hand to Chavez over the very transgressions on Chávez's part, whose alleged failure the Bush administration recently used to discredit Caracas, as exemplified by the U.S. denying Caracas its anti-drug certification.

A Prescription for Success

If Washington now means to turn its attention to salvaging its currently deformed relations with it southern neighbors, it must come to the realization that to be a true friend of the hemisphere, it must approach the table with a policy in which each constituent nation must be allowed to go in its own direction and generate its own autonomous choice of global options, in order to service each one's unique perspectives, as has not been the case of Washington's style of dealing with Cuba and Venezuela. This means that it should not be automatic, or necessarily entirely kindred to the White House's hypertrophied passion for control and definition.

Washington's regional policy today is one frozen in time, concretized by a non-stop effort to defame and marginalize, as has been the case with its attempts to war in this matter against Cuba and Venezuela, as well as to try to tarnish individuals and movements throughout the continent whose mortal offense could begin with their rejecting the thesis that what is private is intrinsically superior to what is public, and that the private corporation should be equal to the state in its legal personality. This is not so much a policy as it is a self-indulgent wayward gambol that has little appeal to either Latin American leaders or their multiple publics.

To initiate a policy of relevance which at the same time is hallmarked by gravitas, while it reaches out for opportunities for constructive engagement with Latin American nations that previously have been demonized as rogue powers, Washington must first honestly address its differences with Cuba and Venezuela. This must be carried out not through imposing some Miami-pandering Republican-authored diktat, but by means of a convergence of a mature application of traditional diplomatic skills. The result of such efforts should, in turn, be fused to a balanced policy based on addressing some of the main economic, political and social issues plaguing the entire hemisphere. Some of the latter could involve the heavy hand of debt burdens, the shortage of investment capital, or the snares of profound differences over immigration policy.

This trajectory could at least provide U.S. negotiators and those speaking for an increasingly united Latin America, with some basis for hope for a successful resolution of some of the most long-lived differences existing today between Washington and its two Caribbean basin foes. Even if one is quick to dismiss such musings as a pipe dream, it still remains critically important that an awareness of the debilitating impact of a series of misguided State Department policies on the hemisphere must be nursed in order to reverse the detrimental effects. Perhaps Latin America could appeal to the U.S. Democrat leadership to take a bold move inspired by the Baker-Hamilton mission to tackle the regional problem as a cluster project, but this time applying the formula in the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East. Here the Democrats can say that we will solve the Cuba and Venezuela issues, but we will do it as a cohort involving all of the regional players, similar to the proposal, that Iran, Syria and Palestine are included in solving the question of Iraq.

The Democratic Alternative

U.S.-Latin American relations under President Clinton now seem barely discernable from the harshly politicized bad patches of the Bush era. It is this seamless fusion that is so disturbing, as well as the conviction that little is likely to change in the near future under those who will continue to control the White House until early 2009. This is reason enough to treasure the few instances where Democrats showed more than random spunk and some slightly less formulaic insights into the complexities of the triangular relations between the U.S., Cuba and Venezuela.

Generally, the Democratic leadership has either ignored or all too often trivialized the importance of regional relations, numbly accepting an obsolescent and grossly sterile manner of relating to Cuba. It might be useful to prescribe a more simple approach to the Democrats on how to make amends - simply do everything opposite of what was done yesterday when it comes to U.S.-Latin American strategies. Meanwhile, the combative rhetoric borrowed from a Republican lexicon will soon be handed over to Democratic counterparts. The question is whether the Democrats will make use of it or unlikely enough decide to go their own way. For example, presidential contender John Kerry, during his last presidential race, found that Hugo Chávez's "close relationship with Fidel Castro has raised serious questions about his commitment to leading a truly democratic government." Could they not say the same about Kazakhstan or thirty or forty other countries, some of them close allies of the U.S.? This relatively unlettered remark may have been one of the few occasions that Kerry has referred to the region at all.

In general, mainstream Democratic speechmakers consistently used dismissive language when it came to references to Chávez, let alone Castro. Anti-Chávez rants peaked with his recent "devil" speech delivered at the UN on the occasion of the duel between the U.S. and Venezuela, over who would fill the two-year Latin American seat on the UN's Security Council. For Nancy Pelosi, "Hugo Chávez fancies himself a modern day Simon Bolivar but all he is an everyday thug," while the venerable House Democrat and Black Caucus leader, New York's Charles Rangel, contributed the shameless piece of puffery that "You don't come into my country; you don't come into my congressional district and you don't condemn my president." U.S.-Venezuelan and Cuban relations deserve better than that, especially because there are a number of knowledgeable senators, which would include Kennedy, Leahy, Dodd and Harkin, who readily come to mind, as well as Congressman Delahunt of Massachusetts.

The Irreducible Agenda

The issues of immigration, terrorism, drugs, energy questions and incipient rivalries with China over resources and new investments in Cuba, should afford a lively time for U.S.-Latin America relations in the near future, even though it is likely to generate more heat than light. It is not too much to say that the incoming Democratic leadership remains sadly under-equipped to coherently debate a range of serious issues that deserve to be ventilated beyond sound bites and canned quips.

When it comes to regional ties, with only few exceptions, the entire U.S. Congress is all but functionally illiterate, so that an attempt to ferret out a "Democratic" as distinguished from a Republican Latin American policy will likely be a thankless task. When it comes to hemispheric relations, the Democratic leadership is hardly more conversant than its Republican colleagues. If there is any way to improve U.S. policy, it must be as a result of more than happenstance. It must come about due to specific people responding to specific needs that are being recognized at the highest places in governance. An array of important hemispheric issues must be made the subject of a free-wheeling, and constructive debate that would serve the common interests of the entire hemisphere. This process hopefully will end up conveying a spirit of flexibility, mutual respect, and a recognition that no one nation, including the U.S., has a monopoly on good thinking or upon gracious vision, or possesses the unique capacity to innovate and move the region along its own natural path in friendship and mutual respect. It is something that has to be worked towards.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns, and is a slightly modified version of an article appearing in the winter issue of the Democratic Left, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Some years ago I briefly worked as a social worker. Occasionally I would visit clients in jail to determine their eligibility for continued benefits. They were all men -- with one exception. She was a young black woman serving time for theft. She had two small children.

She entered the visiting room handcuffed to another woman and dressed in drab prison garb. We talked through a reinforced glass window. The guards stared hard and barked out gruff commands to the women.

The idea of a woman in prison then was a novelty. It isn't anymore. According to a recent Justice Department report on America's jail population, women make up about 10 percent of the America's inmates. There are now more women than ever serving time, and black women make up a disproportionate number of those women. They are twice more likely than Hispanic, and over three times more likely than white women, to be jailed.

In fact, black women have almost single-handedly expanded the women's prison-industrial complex. From 1930 to 1950 five women's prisons were built nationally. During the 1980s and 1990s dozens more prisons were built, and a growing number of them are maximum-security women's prisons. But the prison-building splurge hasn't kept pace with the swelling number of women prisoners. Women's prisons are understaffed, overcrowded, lack recreation facilities, serve poor quality food, suffer chronic shortages of family planning counselors and services, and gynecological specialists, drug treatment and child care facilities, and transportation funds for family visits.

Female prisoners face the added peril of rape, and insensitive treatment during pregnancy. A United Nations report in 1997 found that more than two dozen states permitted pregnant women to be shackled while being transported to hospitals for treatment. A report by the National Corrections Information Center revealed that the U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that allow men to guard women, often unsupervised. Author Donna Ann-Smith Marshall, who served several years at Central California Women's Facility, California's top maximum security prison, in her new book, Time on the Inside, tells in shocking and graphic detail the callous, often brutal treatment many women are subjected to in women's maximum security jails.

Unfortunately, the tepid public debate over the consequence of locking up so many women is riddled with misconceptions. One is that women commit violent crimes for the same reasons that men do. They don't. Women are less likely than men to assault or murder strangers while committing crimes. Two-thirds of the women jailed assaulted or killed relatives or intimates. Their victims were often spouses, lovers, or boyfriends. In many cases they committed violence defending themselves against sexual or physical abuse. Women's groups and even the more enlightened governors have recognized that women that kill abusive husbands or lovers have acted out of fear and have loosened parole standards. The governors have granted some women earlier release from their sentences.

More women, and especially black women, are behind bars as much because of hard punishment than their actual crimes. One out of three crimes committed by women are drug related. Many state and federal sentencing laws mandate minimum sentences for all drug offenders. This virtually eliminates the option of referring non-violent first time offenders to increasingly scarce, financially strapped drug treatment, counseling and education programs. Stiffer punishment for crack cocaine use also has landed more black women in prison, and for longer sentences than white women (and men).

Then there's the feminization of poverty and racial stereotyping. More than one out of three black women jailed did not complete high school, were unemployed, or had incomes below the poverty level at the time of their arrest. More than half of them were single parents.

While black men are typed as violent, drug dealing "gangstas," black women are typed as sexually loose, conniving, untrustworthy, welfare queens. Many of the mostly middle-class judges and jurors believe that black women offenders are menaces to society too.

The quantum leap in black women behind bars has had devastating impact on families and the quality of life in many poor black communities. Thousands of children of incarcerated women are raised by grandparents, or warehoused in foster homes and institutions. The children are frequently denied visits because the mothers are deemed unfit. This prevents mothers from developing parenting and nurturing skills and deeply disrupts the parent-child bond. Many children of imprisoned women drift into delinquency, gangs and drug use. This perpetuates the vicious cycle of poverty, crime and violence. There are many cases where parents and even grandparents are jailed.

There is little sign that this will change. The public and policy makers are deeply rapped in the damaging cycle of myths, misconceptions and crime fear hysteria about crime-on-the-loose women. They are loath to ramp up funds and programs for job and skills training, drug treatment, education, childcare and health, and parenting skills. Yet, this is still the best way to keep more women from winding up behind bars.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the forthcoming book The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and The GOP's court of black voters.