Helms deserves scrutiny, not praise

By Tom Acitelli

Jesse Helms has been the source of some of the worst invective spewed in Congress since the abolition of slavery. He remains, even as he approaches his 80th year on earth and his 30th year in the US Senate, an unrepentant demagogue, buoyed over the decades by playing upon the worst prejudices of his fellow Americans.

You wouldn’t know this, though, by the majority of media coverage given to Senator No’s much-ballyhooed announcement that he would not seek a sixth term in 2002.

Bland summaries of his political career have instead focused on him as an old-school conservative icon or Cold War soldier who never gave up the Reaganesque faith. The coverage has invariably included references to Helms’ mounting physical infirmities. He therefore comes across, especially on TV, as very vulnerable, a put-upon old man deserving of sympathy instead of critique.

It would not hurt, however, to remind people that, underneath the human veneer of a good ol’ boy grandfather, beats the heart of one of the most prolific bigots to ever win election, time and again, to the Senate.

Don’t believe it? Let’s take a quick history lesson.

Throughout the 1960s, Helms did the on-air editorials for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, the state capital. They were ostensibly based on the issues of the day, but, lucky for Helms, the issues of the day included civil rights, communism and the Vietnam War. Helms regularly attacked the fledgling civil rights movement and supported the so-called Speaker Ban, a 1963 order passed by the state legislature that banned known and suspected Communists from speaking at the state’s public universities.

The Speaker Ban was eventually overturned after much mockery and statewide disobedience, but not before Helms used it as a springboard to become the first Republican elected to the Senate from North Carolina in the 20th century.

Of course, for Helms, the invective started well before the tumultuous 1960s.

In 1950, progressive Frank Porter Graham, the popular former president of the University of North Carolina and a United Nations official under President Truman, was seeking his first full term in the Senate. He had been appointed in 1949 to fill a vacancy.

Graham was a liberal by any conventional measure of the term in the 1950s South. He was for civil rights, for the rights of the working class, particularly in North Carolina’s textile mills, and for international cooperation with America’s allies.

Graham’s opponent in the Democratic primary, Raleigh attorney Willis Smith, ran a campaign of blatant racism, urging “White People Wake Up” through widely distributed fliers and signs. Graham lost the primary, and, because North Carolina was then a one-party state, Smith went on to win the general election.

One of Smith’s most enthusiastic operatives during that campaign was a young Democrat named Jesse Alexander Helms.

Helms would turn Republican before his 1972 run, but his nastiness would remain unchanged. He would, in fact, be a pioneer of the highly personalized negative campaigning that has become a staple for American politics.

Take his first Senate race. Helms ran against Nick Galifianakis, a congressman and lawyer of Greek descent. Helms played up Galifianakis’ ethnicity with a slogan of “Helms: He’s One of Us,” never explaining who “Us” was and never having to, really.

Flash forward 18 years to the 1990 Senate race. Former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, an African-American, is leading Helms in some polls. Helms is well-known for not actively campaigning until the end of a race and, even then, doing so largely through advertisements.

Near the November election date, Helms unleashed a TV ad that proved decisive. The ad showed white hands crumpling up a job-rejection letter. A voice-over intoned: “You needed the job. You were the most qualified. But they gave it to a minority because of racial quotas.” The ad finished off Gantt’s campaign that year. Similar tactics were used during a rematch in 1996, with identical results.

The 1990s remained a banner decade for Helms’ bigotry. During a Larry King Live appearance in 1995, almost a half-century after his auspicious political debut with the Willis Smith campaign, a caller phoned in with this particular praise: “And Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct these days, but I just think you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you’ve done to keep down the niggers.”

Helms thanked the caller, but later sputtered an apology after prompting by guest host Robert Novak.

In 1997, Helms, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stymied the appointment of James Hormel, an openly gay man, to be the ambassador to Luxembourg. President Clinton eventually appointed Hormel during a 1999 Senate recess, thereby bypassing the powerful committee that Helms chaired until Democrats retook control of the Senate this summer.

And just this past June, Helms successfully spearheaded an initiative that blocks federal money to school districts that deny the Boy Scouts of America equal access to their facilities because of the scouts’ ban on homosexuals. Helms praised the measure as an effort to combat what he called “the organized lesbians and homosexuals in this country of ours.”

Now back to the present day and the end of our all too brief look at Helms’ disturbing political history. It is a history you’ll be hard-pressed to find in the mainstream press, which is greeting Helms’ exit from the public arena with a collective amnesia about just what kind of person he actually was and remains.

Helms may seem like a kindly old gentleman, but he is something else entirely.

Source: Spectator Magazine

MEDIA WATCH

Lessons of Argentina’s economic experience ignored by US media

By Geov Parrish

Aug. 27— Mostly, what the American public knows about protests against the global economic regime, it has learned from the sneering news reports of “violent protesters” in places like Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, and — coming again in four weeks — Washington, DC. The focus on these demonstrations comes for two reasons. First, media follow elected big-shots, who often have been convening at the same summits as protesters.

But second, and more disturbingly, the allegedly objective US media seems to find something comforting in the notion of wacky, spoiled Euro-American protesters, sputtering allegedly incoherent rage while their countries enjoy (the story goes) unprecedented prosperity. Non-white protesters, much closer to the business end of the discontent and repression that fuel the global justice movement, are usually ignored.

For these two reasons, we heard a lot about Carlo Giuliani’s death at the hands of Italian police in Genoa, but nothing, the previous month, of the deaths of four anti-globalization protesters in Papua New Guinea.

And last week, when crisis-stricken Argentina agreed to accept an $8 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, the terms of the loan were widespread news. But the daily anti-IMF demonstrations before and after the loan agreement, by tens of thousands filling the streets of Buenos Aires, effectively did not exist.

The New York Times coverage was unrepresentative only in the sense that it paid more attention to the agreement than most US dailies, which usually bury or ignore all things foreign. Last Wednesday, it featured two stories on the pact. One of the protests was mentioned in one of the stories — in passing, in the 13th paragraph — as follows:

“In another sign of the difficulties the [Argentinean] government must confront, thousands of teachers and doctors protesting the planned budget and salary cuts marched on the presidential palace today, carrying banners denouncing the government’s ‘submission’ to the IMF and the United States.”

No quote from loan opponents; certainly, no explanation of why well-respected professionals were angered by the IMF, or the US, or why the two are linked, or why they think the loan a “submission.” (Note the quotes, rather than simply explaining the viewpoint.)

An attentive reader might have gotten a bit more from the accompanying “news analysis,” where, in paragraphs 12-14, without mentioning any street protests, the Times concedes:

“...Argentina’s problems have become severe enough that new loans are seen as having no more chance of success — and maybe less chance — than the last round [$13.8 billion] agreed to during the final months of the Clinton administration. Argentina’s economy has been shrinking for three years. Falling exports and capital flight have threatened its ability to repay some $128 billion in dollar-denominated foreign loans.

“But while it is hardly a model for economic development among emerging markets, Argentina has often followed the advice of the IMF. In the early 1990’s it committed itself to keeping its peso equal to a dollar in an effort to tame inflation, and overhauled its banking system, which was mired in mismanagement.

“Moreover, political support for fiscal austerity and open markets is shaky, both in Argentina and neighboring Brazil. Some fear a popular backlash if the experiments fails [sic].”

Left unsaid, of course, is that Argentina — by faithfully following IMF loan conditions that crippled its economy and public well-being, but left banks in the North (especially the US, which dominates the IMF) considerably richer — is, in fact, a fairly accurate model for economic anti-development among euphemistically titled “emerging markets.”

The current Argentinean experience — “unemployment surging, currency reserves dropping, tax revenues plummeting and credit virtually impossible to obtain,” coos the Times — has happened all over the world. Inflicting it continues to be a high bipartisan US priority. Hence, “free trade” agreements that require IMF-style “austerity” remain the norm after 30 years of such policies’ consistently not only ensuring public misery, but increasing the massive interest levels on Northern debts (a staggering $128 billion, for Argentina) often stretching back decades.

Argentina’s current president, Fernando de la Rua, campaigned by promising to oppose the IMF (a detail omitted by the Times). Little wonder people are in the streets in Buenos Aires, calling enslavement to banks in New York and London a “submission.” Little wonder “some fear” a “popular backlash” (but not, please note, an elite backlash) in other countries as well. The same scene is being played out all over the world. As only one byproduct, America is almost universally despised by the people thus victimized. As another, millions may die.

But next month, when the IMF and World Bank meet in Washington and protesters converge, you won’t hear about all that. Our nation’s liberty has to be protected against that wacky Black Bloc, you know.

Source: Workingforchange.com