The presidential election of 2004 is all about fear.

     That is the simple yet complete truth. November 2, 2004 is a referendum on fear: should we, a nation of 260 million people, make all of our major political and life decisions based on the actions of nineteen monsters who hijacked four airplanes on a beautiful morning in September three years ago and murdered 3000 of our fellow citizens? Are we obliged due to our natural and understandable terror on that horrible day to eliminate civil liberties and common decencies for which Americans have fought and died since our country’s inception?

     When the citizens of the United States step into their voting booths, they should understand that the choice is not between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry. The ballots should read Fear and Freedom.

     Anyone who votes for Bush, regardless of their stated reasons, is casting a ballot for fear; for making decisions based upon what scares them, or what they are told by the Bush administration should scare them.

     Kerry is the choice of those who would live and decide without fear, because only those who do so can be truly free.

When the Iraqi Survey Group released its long awaited report last week that said Iraq eliminated its weapons programs in the 1990s, President George W. Bush quickly changed his stance on reasons he authorized an invasion of Iraq. While he campaigned for a second term in office, Bush justified the war by saying that that Saddam Hussein was manipulating the United Nation's oil-for-food program, siphoning off billions of dollars from the venture that he intended to use to fund a weapons program.

The report on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program and "created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last year," reports The New York Times.

"Through secret government-to-government trade agreements, Saddam Hussein's government earned more than $7.5 billion," the report says. "At the same

The American Presidential election is always important for the rest of the world. The US is the primary sponsor and maintainer of the present global order and changes in the US can have direct impact in the economic and political structure of the world.

This time the elections are doubly important because of the enormous ideational and ideological differences between the two candidates on how the global order must be structured and serviced.

If Bush Wins

If George W. Bush wins he and his neoconservative ideologues will assume that their departure from traditional American foreign policy positions has been vindicated and they may be tempted to pursue the same course with greater arrogance, recklessness and abandon.

1. Expect more attempts at regime changes, particularly in Iran, Sudan, Syria and perhaps Saudi Arabia. It is possible that the Neocons may turn on Pakistan and its nuclear capabilities to ensure that no Muslim country has the capacity to ever balance/threaten Israel in the near or distant future.

Seems like every group and its hamster has put out some kind of dossier on the last four years. Top Bush Lies. One Hundred Mistakes Bush could admit to. Best scandals. Biggest Bush flip-flops. Iraq. The economy. The environment.

            Corporate pork and payoffs galore. Homeland insecurity. The deficit. On and on it goes.

            But I like to remember the little things, those itty-bitty things that really made it special. Those touches of style. The je ne sais quoi of it all. Like choosing Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday to announce his administration would oppose affirmative action in the University of Michigan case, calling it "divisive," "unfair" and "unconstitutional." Classy timing. Of course, Bush (Andover, Yale, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Harvard Business, three failed oil companies rescued by Daddy's friends, set up by Daddy's friends in baseball and given a huge cut for a tiny investment) never experienced affirmative action in his life. Made it all on his own, pulled himself up by his bootstraps -- black people can do it, too.

Forty years ago this month, a young man named Mario Savio, 21 years old, climbed on top of a car in Berkeley, Calif., and let fly with a stream of incendiary rhetoric, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born.

            I'll skip the next chapters and go straight to "forty years later," meaning Oct. 7, 2004, when a fellow two years older than Savio would have been if he hadn't keeled over a few years ago, clambered onto a chair at the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, right outside the entry to the University of California at Berkeley and let fly with a stream of rhetoric that would have been a lot more incendiary for the crowds in Sproul Plaza if Lenni Brenner had remembered to bring a bullhorn.

            These days, the Free Speech Movement is comfortably, maybe too comfortably, installed on the Berkeley calendar as an annual event where FSM veterans look back on the Sixties (initial phase), hold panels on such topics as -- I'm quoting from the Fortieth Anniversary program, which stretched across four days -- on "the FSM: Its Genesis, Meanings and Consequences" and seek to hector youth for their lack of revolutionary zeal.