In 2008, in the midst of the global food crisis, Al Jazeera travelled to Haiti to look at the politics of rice – how such a fertile country became dependent on food aid. In the wake of this current disaster, that dependence is – initially – going to deepen. But as relief efforts slowly turn to plans for reconstruction, it is important to look back at the policies that brought Haiti to the brink in the first place, and the people who had their own vision of self-sufficiency all along. Avi Lewis talks about the US role in the development of Haiti with PJ Crowley, the spokesman at the US State Department, and Emira Woods, the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and an expert on US foreign policy.

The more accepted reasons for Haiti’s enduring poverty have been its internal racial divisions (a small mulatto class dominating a larger negro underclass – in the post independence era some 30,000 mulattos, gens de coleur, usurped power ruling over some 400,00 blacks), the violence of its war for independence that destroyed the economic base of the island and which claimed the lives of one in five Haitians over a 13 year period, the country’s isolation after independence (no one would trade with Haiti until 1821 when Britain finally established ties), political instability, internal divisions, poor governance and above all the crushing indemnity that Haiti agreed to pay France to stave off a second invasion of the country in 1823. Haiti would not finish paying off that debt until 1947.

More recently Haiti’s problem revolve around kleptocratic governance (the Duvalier regimes), the rise of militias as a destabilizing force (political parties in Haiti are little more than armed gangs), overpopulation put pressure on the land and the Reagan/Clinton imposed Washington Consensus that turned Haiti into the most liberalized trade regime in the Western Hemisphere. The tariffs on rice were slashed from 30% to 3% and the result was the destruction of Haiti’s agricultural sector.

Neoliberalism turned Haiti from being self-sufficient in its food production into a basket case dependent on food aid for its survival. Who benefits from this?

Arkansas rice farmers and Tyson foods. (more…)

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According to reporters Mark Halperin of Time and John Heilemann of New York Magazine, senior members of the McCain campaign staff considered telling McCain if he were elected president that he would have to replace Sarah Palin as Vice President because she was “mentally limited” and “attitudinally limited”.

In the year plus since the 2008 presidential campaign, the former Vice Presidential candidate and now former Governor of Alaska has yet to refute such arguments. She is, indeed, a terrifying figure who still commands wide popular support because the rather inarticulate politician somehow articulates what is perceived by many as “commonsense conservatism.”

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I feel sorry for Chris DeHaven of Hoover, Alabama. He’s about to have his life upended. You see he made these comments while canvassing this weekend for Organizing for America that are frankly reprehensible, vitriolic and are wholly unreflective of the values that liberals and progressive hold. Mr. DeHaven is quoted in the Birmingham News:

“We’re looking for supporters,” said DeHaven of Hoover, one of the event’s organizers. “We’re not looking for a fight. That will come later, when we have an army.”

Well, that quote is now all over the right blogosphere as evidence of some nefarious plot to take over the country by force. Mr. DeHaven is simply an overzealous Obama supporter. It’s not the first time he’s been quoted in the press speaking on or about Barack Obama. Here’s an article from January 28th, 2008.

Sen. Barack Obama exhorted an overflow crowd of 11,000-plus emotional supporters Sunday afternoon to change America, delivering a message of hope, unity and change in an event that was part rock concert and part old time church revival.

“There is nothing we cannot do if the American people decide it is time,” Obama told the cheering crowd at UAB’s Bartow Arena. “There is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, its spirit has to come through. This is our moment.”

Then in the soaring rhetoric that has marked so many of his speeches over the past month, Obama brought the crowd to its feet….as the crowd filled the arena with shattering applause and shouts of, “Obama, Obama, Obama!”

One of the thousands pushing in around Obama as he worked the rope line after his speech was Chris DeHaven, 62, of Hoover. A lifelong Republican, DeHaven said he has finally found someone to vote for, and not against.

Why? “Because he wants to bring us together. He will bring us together,” DeHaven said. “He speaks from the heart, and he speaks the truth in a way I have not heard since Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy 40 years ago.”

I am happy that he, the lifelong Republican, has seen the light. Now he has to understand the values of liberalism and progressivism and he has to tone down the rhetoric because it’s not conducive to the national interest.

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The states have finished their tallies and have certified their results. It becomes official tomorrow when the Electoral College meets to elect Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States. All told, the number of voters increased 7.37% in the United States in the 2008 Presidential election over 2004. More than 131 million people voted this time around, the most ever for a Presidential election, compared to a little more than the 122 million who voted in 2004. Overall, 61.6% of the nation’s eligible voters turned out to cast their ballots. That’s the highest turnout rate since 1968, when Republican Richard M. Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey and native son George Wallace. Four years ago in the Bush-Kerry race, 60.1% of those eligible voted.

As a measure of comparison, the electoral turnout rate in Spain’s March Parliamentary elections (9-M) was just under 75% (though only 53% voted in the Basque Country) and 59.1% in Canada’s recent election. In Canada, the highest voter turnout was in Prince Edward Island., where 69.5% of registered voters cast ballots. The lowest turnout was in Newfoundland and Labrador, where just 48.1% of registered voters took part.

Here are some other highlights:

– Early voting hit a new high, with about 41 million people — or more than 31 percent — voting before Election Day, either by mail or at designated sites, according to returns compiled by The Associated Press. Early voting accounted for 22 percent of the votes cast in 2004.

– Voter turnout increased substantially in newly competitive states such as Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, which all went for Obama after decades of favoring Republican presidential candidates. Turnout also increased in some Republican states with large black populations, such as Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia.

– North Carolina, which had competitive elections for president, governor and Senate, had the biggest increase in turnout, from 57.8% in 2004 to 65.8% this year. Obama won North Carolina by 14,177 votes, out of more than 4.3 million cast. Safe to say, without that turnout it’s unlikely Obama would have carried North Carolina.

– Minnesota, with a competitive Senate race that still hasn’t been decided, had the highest turnout rate, even though it dropped slightly, to 77.8 percent. It was followed by Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire and Iowa.

– West Virginia and Hawaii tied for the lowest turnout rate, at 50.6 percent. Arkansas, Utah and Texas came close.

– In all, the turnout rate increased in 33 states and the District of Columbia.

– Turnout dropped in some states that did not have competitive presidential contests, such as Utah and Oregon. Oregon had been a battleground in previous presidential elections and the state had a competitive Senate race.

More from the New York Times.

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Kudos to Paul Starr for writing a piece that correctly frames the debate of whether or not the election of 2008 is a realignment one in a provocative piece entitled The Realignment Opportunity. He’s right for recognizing that true realignment is a series of elections each building upon the last to constitute an epoch of American politics. We may be on the cusp of a Democratic era but we won’t really know until 2012 or 2016 to see if the inroads made in 2008 can be made permanent.

Conservatives say that America remains a center-right country and Obama won only because of special circumstances, while some liberals claim that the election marks a historic realignment. Neither is the right way to read the returns.

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The race for Missouri’s 11 Electoral College votes remains undecided with Senator McCain currently leading Senator Obama by some 5,000 votes. At stake is more than just icing on the cake for Obama, we are all anxiously awaiting whether Missouri’s bellwether status remains intact. Missouri has picked the winner in every election since 1960. From Politico:

Nearly two weeks after Election Day, Americans know who their next president will be. But voters in Missouri still aren’t quite sure which candidate their state preferred.

With John McCain leading Barack Obama there by fewer than 5,000 votes with thousands of provisional ballots yet to be counted, election-watchers have been reluctant to toss the battleground into either candidate’s column, and it will still be days before the outcome is finally resolved.

Hanging in the balance along with Missouri’s 11 electoral votes is the state’s reputation as a national bellwether — Missourians have voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1904, except for 1956.

“It looks like we’re going to have about 6,300 [provisional ballots] that are going to be reviewed statewide,” said Laura Egerdal, a spokeswoman for the Missouri secretary of state, adding that about 2,000 of those ballots will come from heavily Democratic St. Louis County.

But though those ballots provide a glimmer of hope for the Obama campaign, even Democrats concede that it would be an astonishing turn of events for their candidate to overtake McCain.

“It’s possible, but unlikely,” said Jack Cardetti, communications director for the Missouri Democratic Party. “We’re obviously watching to make sure that every eligible voter that wanted to cast a vote was able to.”

Tina Hervey, communications director for the Missouri Republican Party, was more blunt in her assessment of Obama’s chances of pulling out a win thanks to provisional ballots.

“He’d have to win them all,” Hervey said. “It looks like the victory for Sen. McCain will be roughly similar to two or three thousand individual votes.”

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A second in a series exploring political realignment in the United States post the election and was provoked by the comments of BTF reader Hir.

As those of us who are political junkies and have a historical bent look at the 2008 US Election, we can not help but ponder the significance of Obama’s win in the longer term. While I do believe that demographics is political destiny and that the demographics in certain parts of the country favour the Democratic party, I would not also necessarily conclude that the GOP is over and done as a political force in the United States. One of the keys to this election especially in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida were voters with incomes over $75,000 that in the previous cycle broke decisively for Bush but in this cycle split more evenly between Obama and McCain.

Charlie Cook tackles a number of key points in a thought-provoking piece in the National Journal.

What did we learn from this election? The results certainly confirmed that Republicans are demoralized. President-elect Obama’s vote total — 66 million — was about 4 million higher than President Bush’s total of four years ago. Sen. John McCain’s 58 million tally was about 1 million votes fewer than Sen. John Kerry garnered last time. As expected, overall turnout went up, but much of the gain among Democratic voters was offset by a decline among Republicans.

Although young people turned out in higher numbers than they did four years ago, the increase was proportionate with the electorate as a whole. Most non-Republican voters turned out in higher numbers this year than in 2004. One key to Barack Obama’s victory, however, was his overwhelming support among voters ages 18 to 29, whom he won by 34 points, 66 percent to 32 percent; and his support among those ages 30 to 44, whom he carried by 6 points, 52 percent to 46 percent. Those numbers are ominous for Republicans looking to 2010 and beyond.

Moreover, this election reminded us yet again that organization matters. Where the huge Obama machine was at work, Democrats tended to do very well. In states that his campaign didn’t target, his party fared less well. Democrats looked quite strong in some parts of the country but much less so in others, flipping five state legislative chambers into their column while losing four others. Where Obama was an asset, he really was, and where he was a liability, he really was that, too.

We also learned that there are two Souths. There is a “New South,” which includes Virginia, North Carolina, and, to a lesser extent, Georgia. In this South, which has lots of suburbs, transplants, and younger college graduates, Obama and other Democrats won or ran well above the norm for their party. In the older South, which has more small-town and rural voters, fewer transplants, and a more downscale electorate, Obama actually performed worse than Kerry.

In general, in the higher-growth segments of our country, Republicans lost ground, prevailing only in small towns and rural areas. When Democrats win the suburbs, Republicans are in trouble.

Republicans have lost an enormous amount of support among upscale voters, basically just breaking even among those with household incomes above $50,000 a year, a traditional GOP stronghold. Similarly, McCain’s losing to Obama among college graduates and voters who have attended some college underscores how much the GOP franchise is in trouble. My hunch is that the Republican Party’s focus on social, cultural, and religious issues — most notably, fights over embryonic-stem-cell research and Terri Schiavo — cost its candidates dearly among upscale voters.

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Ah the insanity of the Catholic Church rears its ugly head once again but a parish priest in Greenville, South Carolina has informed his parishioners that they should refrain from the sacrament of Holy Communion if they voted for the Obama-Biden ticket. Pray tell, why doesn’t he just excommunicate them and do them all a favour?

A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

“Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president,” Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

“Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, many bishops spoke out on abortion more boldly than four years earlier, telling Catholic politicians and voters that the issue should be the most important consideration in setting policy and deciding which candidate to back. A few church leaders said parishioners risked their immortal soul by voting for candidates who support abortion rights.

But bishops differ on whether Catholic lawmakers — and voters — should refrain from receiving Communion if they diverge from church teaching on abortion. Each bishop sets policy in his own diocese. In their annual fall meeting, the nation’s Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights.

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The above map compares the 2004 US Electoral Map by county with the US map at night. It should be pretty evident that in 2004 as Seattle’s The Stranger noted that the liberal Democratic-leaning areas of the United States are but an urban archipelago scattered across the land.

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion–New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too–a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida.

While the maps for the 2008 US Presidential Election will show larger islands as red seas recede especially in New England which is now a veritable Democratic continent with a red lake or two, but does this constitute a realignment of the American electoral map?

Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post that upon three glances he has come to the conclusion that the 2008 election represents a realignment of the electoral coalition in the United States.

At first glance, the victory of Barack Obama and the Democrats inspires that sense of awe that comes when we realize we are in the presence of a momentous historical transformation. At second glance, though — how much of a change in the American political order does it actually portend?

After all, Obama ran only slightly ahead of John Kerry four years ago among white voters — raising the Democrats’ total from 41 to 43 percent in the midst of a major recession, according to Tuesday’s exit polling. John McCain actually bettered George W. Bush’s margins four years ago in 22 percent of the nation’s counties, most of them in the South. And Obama won a number of his states by the slimmest of margins.

But this is an election that demands a third glance. Even though Obama’s victory was nowhere near as numerically lopsided as Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1932, his margins among decisive and growing constituencies make clear that this was a genuinely realigning election.

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It’s likely that this in respect both a President Obama or a President McCain would have reversed the Bush Doctrine of American exceptionalism and its willingness to use force in a preemptive manner. Though it can be argued that each would have approached the reversal in different ways since I am not quite sure that Obama sees the world the way McCain did. Certainly, I welcome the return of the United States to a multi-lateralist approach to foreign policy.

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