A major factor in America’s vicious expanding wars of aggression, now accelerating under the Democratic Party, is the vacuum at the state and local level such as in Florida of any organized movement for a new foreign policy. The wars are being driven by think tanks and advocacy groups in Washington, the Pentagon and its gigantic military industries, the Establishment media corporations and the two party dictatorship that plays off each other to legitimize what must be described as mental illness. Together these forces form a cultlike subculture that talks to each other at their panel discussions and cocktail parties to create a mental construction that rationalizes a manufactured need for the violence which is then transmitted to the public as a singular reality. While an infrastructure of highly credible alternative policy groups exists, they are outfunded, outnumbered and outgunned by the dominant group thinkers and ignored by the Big Media but they do a good job of informing the few of us who hunt them out. This infrastructure is the foundation for a new foreign policy.
While these groups and their ideas are known, and dismissed in D.C. and New York, they, and their ideas, don’t even exist out here in the states; not amongst the editors and editorial boards of local newspapers and producers at local radio and TV stations who cover foreign policy issues when they periodically heat up; and not amongst most progressive and Democratic Party activists who are shockingly ignorant of the reality of American foreign policy. When foreign affairs get hot, clueless editors and producers and Democratic Party activists who take their cue from the Democratic Party establishment politicians and organs just repeat the beltway bubble version of events in a mutually reinforcing creation of a false and destructive reality.
The exception to this is the anti-war and social justice movements and those who identify with them. Even individuals who don’t understand the details of U.S. foreign policy intuitively know that it is wrong and immoral. And Florida, like a lot of states, has a thriving network of small local peace groups doing great things, scores of them. Individuals will lobby their congressmembers when activated by the D.C. peace groups. The groups turn out to demonstrate every time U.S. aggression flaunts itself. In between, they hold awareness raising peace vigils at busy intersections where the primitive ignorant thugs of our society swear at them, give them the finger, threaten them and even spit at them. From time to time, larger statewide marches are held.
The problem is, that is the extent of it. There is no sustained, statewide, organized effort from within Florida to educate Florida – it’s citizens, its media and it’s politicians – about a new foreign policy. Not all politics is local, but most of it is, and when it comes to the issues of war and peace there is a vacuum in Florida and other states. Personal relationships are important. People from the D.C. new foreign policy think tanks can’t meet Florida’s editors and producers and form ongoing relationships with them. They may lobby our congressmembers, but our congressmembers are always looking back over their shoulders down south to their districts here and wondering what their local funders and pressure groups are thinking. And in this vacuum, we know what they are thinking about foreign affairs. Yet few citizens are personally lobbying them for a new foreign policy, and doing it in the sophisticated, effective, coordinated way that counts. It’s not enough to call Kendrick Meek’s office and leave a message that gets tallied. It requires face to face lobbying, sustained and repeated, and campaign contributions. As a result, our politicians, the better ones who might prefer a new foreign policy if there were more organized support for it, end up as puppets of the beltway bubble foreign policy establishment. They facilitate America’s aggressions with impunity and nothing changes.
Even worse, this vacuum allows asshole warmongers, often under cover of domestic liberalism, to win office without resistance. There is no vetting. And the Florida Democratic Party corporate establishment best exemplified by former Florida Bank of America President Alex Sink, is so corrupted by money and power and the pursuit of them that moral decency, rational thinking and simple honesty are not factors in who they promote to office. The grassroots, which is full of clueless activists when it comes to foreign issues, also has many who are well informed of foreign issues, but their blind loyalty to the party overrides their knowledge. Any Democrat the party establishment serves up to them is at least acceptable just as long as they don’t have a Republican label even if their foreign policy views are just as vicious as a Republican’s.
A shocking current example of this is the thoughtless coronation by Democratic Party activists of State Sen. Ted Deutch to succeed the Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel pro-war hawk Robert Wexler. Deutch has been one of the leading vicious demonizers of Iran, sponsoring sanctions against Iran in the state legislature. The merits of economic sanctions on Iran, and on Israel for its recent invasions and war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza, aside, the resolutions Deutch shepards are AIPAC (the radical rightwing American Israel Public Affairs Committee in D.C.) boiler plate falsehoods, distortions, speculation, selective facts and omissions and at times outright lies borne out of the extremist paranoia of the rightwing mind, the kind of garbage that got us into the Iraq war, which so many Democrats profess to abhor. Yet Deutch is allowed to ascend to Congress without resistance, and even with gushing praise. The Democratic Party grassroots, who either know this and are immoral and don’t care, or who are oblivious, glam on to whatever Democrat emerges in a campaign with a big bankroll and the endorsements of some Establishment groups. For all the anti-war talk, the little of it, coming from the Democratic grassroots, nothing changes. The party activists are just a conveyor belt for hard right war monger politicians who ought to be running as Republicans. The blind loyalty to the Democratic Party’s establishment is a central barrier to a new foreign policy and populist progressive politics in general. Serious progressive change will not come from within the Democratic Party. An independent movement is needed to end this dynamic, yet we have only vacuum in Florida.
The average Floridian and Democrat follows Washington and the national Establishment media for foreign policy information. They know only the propaganda of the bubble. The congressmembers who fund these wars and often pressure for them rise from Florida’s communities to the state legislature and to congress, yet the anti-war movement is not recruiting candidates, vetting them or holding them accountable once elected. The war makers are getting a free pass. We need to cut the pipeline of war makers being sent to congress from Florida. We need to create a new American foreign policy from within Florida. This is my master plan for how we do it.
To start, we do not need to deal with the Republican Party. They are the primary war party, nothing will change that nor do we need to. What is lacking is an opposition party to oppose them and offer a cogent, aggressively articulated new foreign policy. That can be either New- Foreign policy Democrats or Green Party candidates (who are naturally anti-imperialist). While the primary strategy, out of realism and necessity, must be to reform the Democratic Party, there is an important role for the Green Party and I urge anyone who is so inclined to choose the party that most reflects their values, regardless of immediate ability to win an election, a criteria that will corrupt you as it has so much of the Democratic Party grassroots. Beware its seductive power. Reject it. We need to develop strong Green candidates who can organize vigorous campaigns and take their message to the voters and win as many seats in government as possible as is happening around the world. But until that happens, the Green Party can play a critical role in pushing unprincipled Democrats to the Left or even subjecting them to the shock therapy of siphoning off just enough votes so that they lose to a Republican. The Democrats may need to lose a few elections to break the cycle of Democrats who use the Left for winning margins and then disrespect us the day after the election as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have so notoriously done. This is our leverage, a Green winning only five percent of the vote is enough to deny election to a war maker Democrat.
A key to creating a new foreign policy from within Florida is what I will call the AIPAC strategy, after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that has been so dramatically successful in controlling U.S. policy in much of the Middle East for decades. We need to match in Florida, what they do in Florida, not out of Washington D.C. but out of our local anti-war organizations working together as a cohesive statewide whole.
A promising foundation for this was the creation earlier this year of the Florida Peace Congress, a coalition of most Florida anti-war groups who are now communicating and working together on statewide rallies, demonstrations and marches. Major events have been held in Melbourne and Miami. But the Congress needs to do much more than it is doing. It is solely an activist volunteer effort. Its influence could be dramatically increased with a full time professional, paid director with experience in anti-war movement organizing who could guide a sophisticated messaging, media and political strategy. Currently, there is no one even answering, let alone returning, phone calls or emails, or organizing an active internet discussion group. The group doesn’t even have a website or a blog. Yet it is the only state coordinating anti-war group that I know of. Maybe the Florida Green Party should take on this role. Whatever ends these wars. Ideally, there should be a local demonstration somewhere in this state every couple of weeks, with major statewide actions quarterly or during crises, and all of this as part of a statewide strategy that might, for example, target congressional district offices, Rush Limburger’s studio, or even filthy pro-war media such as WIOD-AM and the Miami Herald in Miami, as part of a larger media, lobbying and campaign contribution strategy.
Therefore, I am calling upon every rational or peace loving Floridian to come together to establish a Florida New Foreign Policy Project. Initially this will be a volunteer group of founders, with the midterm goal of raising $50,000 to hire an executive director with a small budget for operating expenses. Then we grow it from there by prospecting for anti-war donors such as Alan Grayson, the 12th richest man in Congress, and Miami Beach good works millionaire Matt Damon among so many others. The Left is often intimidated and disdainful of fundraising, but it’s actually very simple though time consuming. Dialing for dollars is all it is. You get together. You brainstorm potential donors. You call them with your well-prepared organizing plan so they know they are dealing with competent professionals who have a written strategic plan, experience and know what they’re doing. However, it is essential this project be independent from the Democratic Party and never be allowed to be captured by Democratic Party loyalists, which may be problematic for Grayson, depending on how much of an independent streak he actually has. This is a great danger, because inevitably there will be those who identify too closely with the Democratic Party who will find the Project’s organizing a threat to the party war Establishment’s control over its candidates. One of the outrages of the Obama administration is that it has co-opted most of the “progressive” advocacy groups and talked or coerced them into “shutting up” about their issues. Moveon.org is a notorious example. The group that was founded to oppose Bush’s Iraq invasion has been silent and complicit with Obama’s expansion of the wars on Afghanistan and Pakistan in an effort to maintain its access to and influence with the Obama administration on the Iraq non-withdrawal and other issues (although it has recently opposed further escalation, it still isn’t organizing for an exit).
I can’t emphasize this enough. The Democratic Party Establishment is one of the great threats to the anti-war movement and a new foreign policy, actively working against us. The party is dominated by cold hearted soulless amoral political operative whose overriding worldview is to win elections regardless of the values or thinking of those of us in the anti-war Left. These operatives generally take the path of least resistance to winning elections and to power and will appease every powerful, well funded and organized group out there. They are lazy, venal politicians who don’t share our values and will not do the hard work of organizing the genuinely progressive forces in their campaigns and create new sources of power in American society, finding it much easier to dial for the dollars of the wealthy and their organized groups and corporations. The epitome of this type of politician are Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
While it is critical to work with the genuinely progressive anti-war elements in the party, I swear to you, as long as I have any role in the Florida New Foreign Policy Project, I will never permit the Democratic Party war-complicit Establishment to capture control of the organization.
A second important guiding strategy of a Florida New Foreign Policy Project is to reach out and join with the social and economic justice communities. It is not enough for the Project to represent solely the anti-war community not only because we lack the power and numbers to be truly effective ourselves but because the crowding out and starvation of human needs by America’s Imperial foreign policy is an integral issue of a New American foreign policy.
The duties of the executive director will be to fundraise and procure grants and organize supporters throughout the state. A working group should be created in each media market (where there is a newspaper and/or TV/radio station). I think there are 13 in the state. These people are already there in the peace and human needs groups scattered across the state. We just need to organize them into coherent units with specific missions, support and statewide coordination.
One of the local group functions will be to establish contacts with the local media, get to know reporters and editorial boards. They will write letters to the editor and longer op-ed pieces. With support from the state director, they will communicate with editors and producers to include “anti-war” viewpoints in their coverage of U.S. ruling class targets for aggression. While Florida papers do little original reporting on foreign policy, their editors select which foreign stories to run from their wire services and they do write editorials. We need to supply them with “anti-war” perspectives that are available from a number of Washington, D.C. foreign police think tanks. We need to have local, knowledgeable new- foreign policy advocates available to communicate with local media reporters and editors to give them the left perspective on breaking events that they are covering. Editors, for example, can combine wire service stories and insert paragraphs into the stories they run. We need to get the local media to quote local new-foreign policy advocates in their stories to create balance. The state director would also be a policy resource for local papers, but it is important to have local people who can have a regular physical presence. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, is much more likely to meet with knowledgeable local new foreign policy advocates than it would be a state director in Tallahassee or elsewhere.
In addition to the media strategy, local groups would meet with their local congressmembers to educate them and lobby them to end the wars and work for a new foreign policy. When deserved, local groups would raise campaign contributions for them. While there are exceptions, the sad fact is that most politicians are empty vessels who know little about foreign policy other than the shallow stories they read in the papers and right now they are being “filled up” with Imperial war rationalizations by the organized Washington beltway bubble conservative groups (Republican and Democrat). We need to be “filling them up” at the local level and we’re not doing that.
A sadder fact is that only one of Florida’s congressmembers, only one, Alan Grayson of Orlando, is a principled advocate of a new foreign policy. All others need to be booted out of Congress. Since that is impossible, we have to prioritize. We have to monitor and communicate with candidates for congress and recruit new foreign policy candidates of our own for public office and support their campaigns. There needs to be an organized, sustained long term effort to identify talented political people throughout the state who are known advocates of in a new foreign policy. Fortunately, a lot of these people are members of our local anti-war groups and the Green Party. Much of our infrastructure is already here; we now need a systematic process for identifying and recruiting this local talent. Since it is extremely difficult for an unknown to win a congressional seat (although it is possible in certain circumstances, which we need to be monitoring and take advantage of), practically speaking we need people to run for the state house or mayorships, offices that will serve as launching pads for congressional runs.
The Florida anti-war movement is not doing this. This is the vacuum. Candidate recruitment is largely being done by the Democratic Party organizations and they are just an amoral pipeline for continuous war.
And this is what AIPAC does from D.C. They identify potential winners in every congressional race across the country and they ask those candidates to come to Washington to meet with them. They subject the candidate to what one congressional candidate told me is an “intense” vetting where they ask the candidate detailed questions about U.S. policy towards Israel and the Middle East and gauge how committed the candidate is to their agenda. They raise money for supportive candidates and notify their members in the congressional district who to support. They also work actively against any candidate insufficiently supportive of the AIPAC agenda. They will spend money on negative advertising to defeat them and finance the campaign of a friendly opponent. They will activate their network of members to organize against and speak out against that candidate. Yes, it’s hard ball, but we need to do the same. There is no comparable anti-war effort in Florida. That’s why we’re losing and America’s Imperial wars are proliferating.

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