Salon.com > Andrew Gumbel

America’s forgotten war

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

IN THE EUPHORIC FIRST WEEKS after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German protesters who had risked everything to overthrow their government and were now jockeying for position in the emerging new Germany were puzzled by a growing number of news reports from the other side of the Atlantic.

American conservatives, they kept hearing, were claiming credit for ending the Cold War and “liberating” them from the yoke of Soviet communism.

They were puzzled not just because the names of these conservatives — Gingrich, Buchanan, Kemp — were unfamiliar. What baffled them was more fundamental: they hadn’t received American help at all. The CIA, by its own later admission, was entirely absent during the long months and years when East German dissidents organized covert meetings in churches and semi-derelict apartment buildings, usually no more than a step or two ahead of the Stasi, the all-pervasive secret police.

Could voting irregularities sway the election?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 01:36:00 +0000

This is the $6 billion election – the most expensive ever – and yet voters in parts of Florida and other swing states are still having to wait four hours or more to cast their ballots. Households in the biggest battlegrounds have been inundated for weeks by carefully scripted robo-calls, glossy campaign mailers and a blizzard of TV ads – no expense spared -- and yet in far too many places the voting machinery is old, creaky and in short supply. Since the polls opened this morning, there have been reports of machines freezing, misaligning, jamming and awarding votes to the wrong candidates, and of voter disinformation and intimidation, some of it generated directly by the candidates and their campaigns.

In Ohio and Florida, high-profile officials responsible for overseeing the vote weren't shy about showing their naked partisanship, seeking measure after measure – with varying degrees of success – to suppress votes likely to trend Democrat. In at least two states, Iowa and Texas, international election monitors were threatened with arrest if they got too close to a polling station.

California schools on the brink

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:40:00 +0000

California’s public education system, once the finest in the nation, is on the edge of the abyss.

If the state’s voters don’t approve a package of emergency tax increases at the ballot box in November, the system – already pushed to the brink by decades of budgets cuts, swelling class sizes, skyrocketing inner-city dropout rates, shrinking libraries and disappearing arts and music programs – will start to shut down altogether.

That’s the dire scenario laid out by John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the state, who says he won’t be able to afford to keep his schools open beyond April unless voters approve a new injection of cash.

“The school year will have to end ... about a month and a half early,” Deasy told a group of district students recently. “We won't have enough days for seniors to graduate. The year will end before APs [Advanced Placement exams], before graduation ... And things will get progressively worse each year from now on."