Script for a J.D. Vance political ad 

Peter Costantini ~ Seattle

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote

https://amazon.com/Handmaids-Victorian-Handmaiden-Cosplay-Accessory/dp/B0B8H6RZB7

Over the past few centuries, the Spanish Inquisition has suffered from a less-than-stellar reputation. But finally, a man and a movement have risen up to reclaim the moral fervor and persuasive methods of Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor.

J.D. Vance, J.D. Vance
wants to know what’s cooking in your underpants

White lady, white lady
better have a white baby

Hush, brown baby, hide in the basement
MAGAs are afraid of the Great Replacement

Need an abortion? Where can you go?
Try Canada or Mexico

If you’re using contraception
better stock up before the next election

If naughty pictures dance in your head
Vance will find the evidence underneath your bed

J.D. will use his elected position
to bring back the Spanish Inquisition

J.D. Vance, J.D. Vance
wants to know what’s cooking in your underpants

Music: Rap this as a call and response, with a chorus echoing back each line. Instrumental accompaniment should be a syncopated beat on a bass drum or bodhran.

Video: A chorus of menacing dancers does a heavy, stomping dance to the drumbeat and echoes each line of the lyrics.

The men are dressed in the long red robe and capirote (white conical hood) of the Spanish Inquisition. They carry crosses, swords, and branches, swing censers that release thick smoke, and brandish rolled up copies of porno magazines with which they beat sinners.

The women are dressed in the outsize white bonnets and red robes of A Handmaid’s Tale, with masks on their faces. They also carry crosses and white baby dolls with which they beat the sinners. Between verses, the female dancers ululate.

The visual for each verse is a flash scene staged as a tableau vivant:

First J.D. Vance … - J.D. Vance introduces his new religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who dance in a dungeon displaying the torture instruments of the Spanish Inquisition. J.D. does a clog dance with a large pair of women’s panties. Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor, peeks out from a dungeon door.

White lady … - A white woman walks up the steps of her urban brownstone. Suddenly, the religious police jump out of the shadows and beat her with white baby dolls.

Hush, brown baby … - A terrified dark-skinned mother carries her baby downstairs to the basement as the religious police bang on her door.

Need an abortion … - A young white woman carrying a pregnancy test arrives at a women’s clinic, where the religious police suddenly appear to block her access to the clinic door and beat her with white baby dolls.

… contraception … - The religious police break down the door of the bedroom of a white couple in bed, and beat them with rolled-up porno magazines and baby dolls.

… naughty pictures … - The religious police burst into the room of a teenage boy looking at a porno magazine, pull some more of them out from under his bed, and beat him with them.

… Spanish Inquisition & final J.D. Vance … - The final scenes are a MAGA/Spanish Inquisition bacchanalia. The dancing religious police are carrying torches, and the characters from the other scenes are tied to stakes with kindling underneath. Tomás de Torquemada and J.D. Vance dance the tango together while flashing large pairs of women’s panties. The video ends with Stormy Daniels (hopefully a live cameo) chasing Trump across stage, spanking him with a rolled up porno magazine.

Creative Commons Attribution: Peter Costantini 2024

Deep in the heart of taxes - download

Peter Costantini

Photo credit: Ken Lambert, Seattle Times, 2015

On May 14, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved an ordinance to raise money for services for the homeless and construction of affordable housing, and on May 16 Mayor Jenny Durkan signed it. The legislation imposed a head tax – a simple per-capita fee paid by businesses – of $275 for each employee of the over 500 businesses with gross annual revenues of over $20 million. The approved measure cut nearly in half an initial proposal for a head tax of over $500 that had been developed over months of debate.

The final bill was expected to raise $47.4 million, down from $75 million from the original proposal.

The head tax ordinance faced loud opposition from Amazon and some other large businesses, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and the Downtown Seattle Association, among other groups. As soon as the law passed, they mounted a referendum campaign to repeal the tax, and reportedly were able to gather sufficient signatures to put the repeal proposal on the November ballot.

In the face of an opposition with “unlimited resources”, as one Council member put it, and the prospect of a divisive political battle, on June 12 the Council voted 7 to 2 to repeal the head tax.

Seattle faces two particular obstacles in raising funds to deal with a crisis of homelessness and lack of affordable housing in a booming economy.

The Washington state Supreme Court ruled in the 1930s that taxes on income were not permitted under the state constitution. This leaves Washington as one of only seven states that do not allow any form of income taxes. Its state and local taxation methods may be the most regressive in the country. The sales and property taxes on which they rely on primarily are now widely viewed as maxed out and squeezing middle and lower income families. This was a major motivation for the head tax proposal.

The other particularly acute issue for Seattle is that it only recently began to build out a regional rapid transit system. In 1970, when many cities were building systems with substantial federal funding, local voters rejected a major transit proposal. Finally, in 2009, Sound Transit opened the first line of a light-rail network scheduled to cover the area by around 2040. The late start means that considerable tax increases are now required to build out the system, in a period when federal funding has declined sharply. The lack of decentralized regional development hubs built around transit also makes it harder for the city to reduce pressure on housing and transportation in the central city, where Amazon and many other tech firms are now concentrated.

*                       *                       *

I sent my paper, “Deep in the heart of taxes”, to the Seattle Mayor, City Council and other elected officials, under this cover letter:

What's all this about a head tax? Why, next thing you know, they'll be taxing necks and arms and legs and ... What? ... Oh ... never mind.

- tip of the hat to Emily Litella

Attached, please find my $0.03 (inflation-adjusted) on the path forward from the head tax.

*                       *                       *

Download “Deep in the heart of taxes” as a PDF file:

https://tinyurl.com/ya8vg6rh

The LFTA (Lambos for the Few Tax Act)

In a piece on the Brookings Institution web site, Benjamin Page and William Gale offer an important insight into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act by clarifying the distinctions between gross domestic product, gross national product, and net national product. Their analysis of the CBO numbers - concluding that foreign investors will reap nearly all of the benefits, and that the net domestic effect is likely to be a wash for the domestic U.S. economy over 10 years – surfaces an effect of the law that has remained mostly buried. [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/05/10/cbo-estimates-imply-that-tcja-will-boost-incomes-for-foreign-investors-but-not-for-americans]

However, even if U.S. investors benefited more, change in total national income is not a particularly relevant way to measure on-the-ground economic benefits of government policies to the inhabitants of the economy. It ignores crippling levels of income inequality, vast unexplored opportunity costs and the established improbability of the tax cuts actually spurring much investment.

If Jeff Bezos lives down the block and Amazon stock goes on a tear, the total and mean income and wealth of our block will rise steeply, but that won’t make most of the rest of us better off (unless maybe he throws a lot of block parties and yard sales). Home values may rise, a mixed blessing, but so will property taxes and rents, as we have learned in Seattle. If he’s a good neighbor, though, we’ll all get Prime free one-day delivery.

In other words, any meaningful measure of the costs and benefits of government action needs to exclude high incomes: most of those from investment, except for middle and low-income retirees, and the upper stratum of incomes from employment, perhaps the top quarter or fifth. For decades, the incomes in the top brackets have continued to pull away from those of the majorities of working people. There is no collective social benefit in showering the wealthy with more tax largesse and increasing the gap. But, not surprisingly, there is a political payoff: they include the big Republican donors that the tax bill is designed to reward.

Another critical dimension of any fiscal proposal is the opportunity cost. Even if many lower and middle-income families would get some reduction in taxes from the TCJA, the operative question is still whether the same total expenditures on a less regressive tax reform - or an infrastructure bill or jobs program or universal basic income scheme or any other kind of spending – would give the working majority more bang for the buck, and the productive economy a more sustainable stimulus. It’s not enough that tax cuts offer some benefit: any such benefit needs to be weighed against other ways to use the same money that would produce more and better-distributed benefits, and be more effective in reducing economic inequality.

Finally, we need to go downstairs and pay a visit to the dementia-plagued great-uncle holed up in the basement of this and previous conservative tax plans: How likely is it that fat tax cuts lavished on big corporations and wealthy individuals will be invested in ways that create well-distributed growth and jobs?

We have plenty of evidence from the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, According to Dean Baker, economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “It didn’t work.” [http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/can-tax-cuts-spur-growth-46-254]

As Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote last year: “The sordidness of all of this [the then-proposed Republican tax plan] will be sugarcoated with the hoary claim that lower tax rates will spur growth. There is simply no theoretical or empirical basis for this, especially in countries like the U.S., where most investment (at the margin) is financed by debt and interest is tax deductible. The marginal return and marginal cost are reduced proportionately, leaving investment largely unchanged. In fact, a closer look, taking into account accelerated depreciation and the effects on risk sharing, shows that lowering the tax rate likely reduces investment.” [https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/why-tax-cuts-for-the-rich-solve-nothing]

Testimony by Professor Peter Dreier to Seattle Mayor and City Council on state preemption of local rent regulation

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2015
From: Peter Dreier
To: ed.murray@seattle.gov; council@seattle.gov
Subject: Lessons for Seattle from the Rent Control experience in California and Massachusetts

Dear Mayor Murray and Council members:

I urge you to pass the resolution, sponsored by Council members Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant, asking the state legislature to repeal the law banning localities from enacting rent regulations.

I write as both a policy practitioner and a scholar who is very familiar with the issue of rent control and housing policy in general.  For eight years I served as housing policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn and as housing director of the city’s planning and redevelopment agency, the Boston Redevelopment Authority.  I left those positions in 1993 to teach at Occidental College in Los Angeles.  For the past 15 years I have been chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. I have written extensively about housing policy in general and rent regulations in particular.  In 1997, in my capacity as a professor at Occidental, I did a comprehensive study of the efforts by the real estate industry in Massachusetts and California to pre-empt localities from adopting rent regulations of any kind.  The report was commissioned by the New York City local government; at the time, the state government was considering weakening  the rent regulations allowed by local governments in New York State. The effort to weaken rent regulations was successful in Massachusetts but only partially successful in California. Here is a copy of the report: http://www.nycrgb.org/downloads/research/pdf_reports/dreier.pdf.  I drew on this report to publish a number of articles on this topic in scholarly journals, but the report itself is more comprehensive and more accessible. Among other books and articles, I am coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century, currently in its third edition. The book is used in many graduate and undergraduate courses in urban planning and urban policy.

The Massachusetts state government pre-empted local governments from adopting rent control. A number of cities which had adopted local rent regulations, including Boston, were impacted. Boston and adjacent Cambridge experience an immediate wave of rising rents which has not abated, although the scale of rent increases has fluctuated.  The cities’ demographics changed dramatically.  The proportion of low income families, and families of color, declined significantly as rents increased and widescale displacement took place. The number of homeless people increased.  The number of families who double-up and triple-up in overcrowded apartments increased.  Working families, especially those working for wages below the regional and state median, confronted higher and higher rent burdens; the proportion of families paying 50 percent of more of their household income for rent increased significantly. As a result, they had less disposable income, and thus less money to spend in the local economy (retail stores, etc) because so much of their household income was absorbed on rent, much of which went to absentee landlords who did not live in the city and many of whom did not even live in the state.  The trends have continued in the past two decades since I wrote my report.

In California, where many cities had adopted rent control, the real estate industry had sought for many years to pre-empt local rent regulations.  Finally, in 1995, they succeeded in weakening, but not eliminating, local rent regulations. The state legislature passed the Costa Hawkins act, which banned local rent controls but allowed cities to adopt “vacancy decontrol.”  This allows landlords to raise rents to market levels when a tenant leaves, after which cities can regulation rents.  Obviously, this is a way to slowly eliminate rent control. It also creates an incentive for landlords to pressure long-term tenants to leave so they can raise rents to market levels.  Landlords routinely harass long-term tenants, especially the elderly, to leave, resorting to a variety of illegal tactics as well as deferring basic maintenance of apartments.  Many of the same trends that occurred in Massachusetts also happened in California, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and other cities, although they occurred more slowly.  Los Angeles now has more homeless people than any other city in the United States. This is not entirely due to the weakening of rent regulations, but it played a critical role. In the wake of the current severe housing crisis in California cities, there is growing discussion about repealing the Costa-Hawkins law and once again giving cities the authority to adopt full rent control.

There is much research about the impact of rent control.  Research conducted by independent scholars who are not tied to the real estate industry agree that rent control helps preserve economic and racial diversity in a city but does not have any impact on inhibiting new construction of rental housing. Nor does it create a disincentive for landlords to maintain their properties. Rent regulations protect the existing supply of affordable housing. Given the shortage of funding for affordable housing at the federal, state and local levels, it is impossible to address the shortage of affordable by creating new  housing units affordable to low- and moderate-income families.  Even raising the minimum wage to $15/hour – which you did in Seattle and which Los Angeles and a few other cities have now done in the wake of your policy – cannot, on its own, solve this problem.  The “housing wage” – the amount families need to afford a typical apartment rent – is close to $30/hour in Los Angeles.  Finally, it is not possible for cities to build their way out of shortage of affordable housing by building more market-rate housing. This assumes that there is a filtering process, or a trickle down process,  in the housing market.  Instead, there’s a trickle up process; when developers build more market-rate housing, landlords of existing apartments raise rents.

Irrespective of the impact of rent control, the broader issue is one of local control.  Rent control is only one tool that cities can adopt to address the widening gap between family incomes and the price of rental housing, but it is an important one.  The underlying question is whether local governments should have the authority to adopt policies that they consider to be useful and effective in addressing local problems.  I believe they should and I hope you agree and will thus urge the state legislature to give Seattle the authority to adopt whatever rent regulations you considered appropriate to address Seattle’s needs.

Thank you.
Peter Dreier, Ph.D.
Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics
Chair, Urban & Environmental Policy Department
Occidental College
1600 Campus Road
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Phone: (323) 259-2913
Email: dreier@oxy.edu

[Another relevant article by Professor Dreier]
Peter Dreier. “Californians Defend Rent Control”. Montclair, NJ: Rooflines, June 5, 2008. http://www.rooflines.org/941/californians_defend_rent_control

Testimony by Professor Dennis Keating to Seattle Mayor and City Council on state preemption of local rent regulation

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2015
From: Dennis Keating
To: Mayor and City Council, City of Seattle, Washington
Subject: State preemption of local rent regulation

I have been asked to comment on a Rent Control Resolution to the State of Washington to repeal the legislation banning localities from enacting rent regulation. From my long interest and knowledge of issues related to rent regulation, I am familiar with this issue. I have written extensively about rent regulation, including co-authoring the book entitled "Rent Control: Regulation and the Rental Housing Market" and a forthcoming article entitled "Forty Years of Rent Control' to be published in Cities: International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning (Vol. 49: 121-135).

Whatever you think about the efficacy and impact of the adoption of rent regulation, given differing local rental housing markets and the situation of renters in very tight local rental housing markets, I do not believe that it is sound public policy for state governments to deny to local governments the right to consider polices like rent regulation to address local housing needs. This is also true of other affordable housing policies like Inclusionary Housing to address the needs of low-and-moderate income households. In the case of rent regulation, I believe that the policies of the states of California and New Jersey which allow rent regulation by local option are the best approach to this issue, as opposed to requiring authority from the state before localities can consider the adoption of rent regulation (whether or not the state imposes certain restrictions on what type of rent regulation
is allowed).

Sincerely,

Dennis Keating
Professor, Department of Urban Studies
Levin College of Urban Affairs
Professor, Cleveland Marshall College of Law
Cleveland State University
2121 Euclid Ave.
Cleveland, Ohio 44115
Tel: (216) 687-2298

[A relevant article by Professor Keating]
Dennis Keating & Mitch Kahn. “Rent Control In The New Millennium”. Montclair, NJ: Shelterforce, May / June 2001. http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/117/KeatingKahn.html

Pass the Licata & Sawant Rent Control Resolution

(Testimony to a hearing of a Seattle City Council committee considering a resolution on the Washington state ban on any form of rent regulation)

To the Mayor and City Council of Seattle,

I’m writing to urge you to support the Rent Control Resolution introduced by Councilmembers Licata and Sawant. This resolution calls on the State of Washington to repeal or modify RCW 35.21.830, the state law that prohibits ordinances or other provisions that regulate the amount of rent. It also requests that the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development consider whether RCW 35.21.830 is an impediment the State’s obligation to affirmatively further fair housing.

I am probably one of the few citizens left standing who can speak from personal experience to how this state ban on local autonomy was enacted. I was one of the founders of the Seattle Tenants Union in 1975, and served on the executive board of the National Tenants Union in the early 1980s. I volunteered full-time on the Initiative 24 Fair Rent campaign in 1980, and briefly lobbied afterwards in Olympia against the state restrictions.

The real estate and financial industries reportedly raised over $870,000 dollars and spent nearly $500,000 to defeat I-24, a record for city initiatives that may still stand. The I-24 campaign raised and spent $40,000 in support of the initiative. With this 12 to 1 advantage, the opposition to I-24 hired a San Francisco public relations firm, Donald Solem & Associates, that specialized in defeating rent stabilization initiatives. They blanketed the city with an estimated seven mailings to each household opposing I-24. The campaign had little to do with democratic debate, and much to do with the raw power of concentrated wealth to impose its will on electoral processes.

With its remaining war chest and tremendous statewide cloud, real estate and finance went to Olympia and easily pushed the ban on local autonomy through the legislature. There was virtually no investigation or debate: it was a gimme putt for the big money and property guys. And it was a reflection of ignorant resentment, among some legislators from other areas of the state, of the big city that pays a lion’s share of the state’s bills.

As is still the case, restricting local autonomy runs counter to many conservative positions on other issues. Is this hypocritical? It certainly is wrong-headed. Ironically, there  may be no issue on which local autonomy is more sensible and necessary than affordable housing. In Washington state, as in many others, housing markets and issues in big, booming cities like Seattle are qualitatively different from those in most smaller cities and rural areas. One-size-fits-all legislation for the whole state is not a solution, but a barrier to solutions.

Incidentally, have we forgotten that those same real estate and financial industries, and their ideological co-dependents, are guilty of inflating a huge housing bubble and entangling us in a financial crisis that triggered a global Great Recession? Does anyone remember Washington Mutual and credit default swaps? Nobody has gone to jail for these economic crimes, and now the same laissez-faire hucksters are back trying to sell us very similar snake oil: shut out local democracy and accountability; blindly trust the same markets that melted down less than a decade ago.

This vote is not about rent regulations, but about the ability of cities to enact the kinds of measures they see fit to deal with the intractable problems they face of preserving and expanding affordable housing and protecting tenants from the ravages of housing market failures.

However, you should know that modern rent stabilization covers over a million units in New York City, and millions more in hundreds of cities in New Jersey, the District of Columbia, Maryland and California. It is not a rent freeze – the old NYC law dating from World War 2 that imposed a hard ceiling is now close to defunct, and nobody has proposed a similar one anywhere in the U.S. for the past 50 years. The standard model of rent stabilization adopted everywhere allows rents to increase according to a formula usually tied to inflation, and grants landlords further increases when necessary to ensure a reasonable return and to cover improvements. All such laws exclude new construction and many exempt small landlords. Modern empirical studies of their effects have nearly all found that they have no negative effects on rental housing construction or maintenance of existing units, and promote tenant stability by limiting extreme rent spikes and moderating the pace of rent increases in hot markets. They also often help to protect low-income communities, especially those of color, from displacement and gentrification.

If you give us a chance, I think we supporters of modern rent stabilization will be able to convince you that it is a useful tool to preserve existing affordable housing and protect vulnerable tenants, in conjunction with the many promising ideas being considered to stimulate new construction, such as those suggested by the HALA report and the linkage proposal. But for now, all I’m asking is that the City of Seattle show the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the power of concentrated wealth and demand that the state stop tying our hands.

Sincerely yours,

Peter Costantini

Seattle

 

An important afterthought that I would have liked to include:

 

California has demonstrated that voters with long experience with rent regulations believe they should be decided on a local, not state, level.

In 2008, California voters defeated a statewide initiative by the real-estate industry that would have eliminated all rent regulations by a landslide 61% to 39%.

Sixteen cities in California, including Los Angeles, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, have rent stabilization ordinances in effect, many since the 70s. Voters have had three or four decades to evaluate how well they work. Their verdict was clear.

This vote came in spite of a well-funded and deceptive campaign by real-estate and big landlords, who tried to disguise the initiative as one opposing the abuse of eminent domain.

The vote said in effect that a large majority of citizens have found that rent stabilization has worked well in many cities, and should be available as a policy option to others who want to implement it.

This August, the East Bay city of Richmond passed a rent stabilization ordinance, the first new rent regulations anywhere in many years.

Washingtonians may traditionally have mixed feelings about Californians, but in this case we should thank them for demonstrating the value of implementing rent stabilization on a massive scale, and rejecting the proposed statewide ban on it.

Peter Dreier. “Californians Defend Rent Control”. Montclair, NJ: Rooflines, June 5, 2008. http://www.rooflines.org/941/californians_defend_rent_control

Jake Blumgart. "In Defense of Rent Control". Santa Barbara, CA: Pacific Standard Magazine, April 1, 2015. http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/in-defense-of-rent-control

Two related posts:

Testimony by Professor Dennis Keating to Seattle Mayor and City Council on state preemption of local rent regulation. September 18, 2015. http://petepaycheck.blogspot.com/2015/09/testimony-by-professor-dennis-keating.html

Testimony by Professor Peter Dreier to Seattle Mayor and City Council on state preemption of local rent regulation. September 18, 2015. http://petepaycheck.blogspot.com/2015/09/testimony-by-professor-peter-dreier-to.html

1996 Interview with Dr. Mariano Fiallos

A law professor could be Nicaragua's next Foreign Minister

by Peter Costantini, MSNBC News
Managua, Nicaragua
October 16, 1996
 
If the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) wins Sunday's elections in Nicaragua or an ensuing runoff, Dr. Mariano Fiallos will become Foreign Minister for President Daniel Ortega in what the party has dubbed Everybody's Government [el Gobierno de Todos].

For Nicaragua's 1984 and 1990 elections, Dr. Fiallos directed the electoral process as President of the Supreme Electoral Council.  His efforts in this critical position were widely praised by Nicaraguan and international observers.

From 1980 to 1984, Dr. Fiallos served on the Council of State, Nicaragua's provisional government.  He advised the National Assembly on the drafting of the nation's constitution from 1985 through 1987.  President of the National University of Nicaragua from 1974 to 1984, he has been professor of Constitutional Law there since 1964.

Dr. Fiallos holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kansas, and law degrees from the University of Paris, Southern Methodist University and the National University of Nicaragua.  In 1986, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Washington.

In 1979, the Sandinista guerrillas overthrew the 43-year Somoza dictatorship, which had been supported by the U.S., and assumed power.  The Reagan and Bush administrations made removing the left-nationalist FSLN government a centerpiece of their Latin American policies.  A U.S.-funded and directed group, the contras, fought a war of attrition from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica.  The U.S. also imposed an economic embargo on Nicaragua in the mid '80s.  After the U.S. blocked military aid from Western Europe, the FSLN received substantial amounts from the Soviet Union and Cuba.

In 1984, the FSLN won the first reasonably democratic elections in Nicaragua's history, according to observer groups from the British, Irish and Dutch parliaments.  In the 1990 elections, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were defeated by the United Nicaraguan Opposition coalition of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, which was supported politically and financially by the United States.

MSNBC spoke to Dr. Fiallos, a courtly man with a salt-and-pepper beard, at his office in the FSLN's Managua headquarters.  In the interview, conducted in Spanish, he talks about his plans for a foreign policy of non-confrontation and reconciliation.

---

MSNBC

What foreign policy will the Sandinistas pursue if they win the elections?

Fiallos

In the case of Everybody's Government [el Gobierno de Todos], which is the name of the future government of Nicaragua, headed by Daniel Ortega as President and Juan Manuel Caldera as Vice-President, the general line of our foreign policy is basically the line of non-confrontation.

That is to say, first, to seek relations with all the nations of the world.

Second, to avoid confrontations or clashes or conflicts with those countries with which we had them in the previous [Sandinista] government.  This means the United States, the countries of Central America.

We don't want to begin to go over what happened, who was at fault, who did this or that, bad or good, but simply to design a policy that does not bring Everybody's Government into conflict with the countries and the world around us.

This is easier now than before, because the confrontation of the Cold War has disappeared from the world.  And on the other hand, there is globalization.

So this approach is easier, and besides, it's impossible, at this point, to have a situation like that of the '80s.

This is the more general policy.

This is reflected in our domestic policy as well, which is complementary.  Within the country, the government proposes to form Everybody's Government.  As its name indicates, this government will make or is making arrangements or agreements with different social sectors.

First, the vice-presidential candidate is an agricultural producer, and therein lies one of the most difficult points for the future of Nicaragua: to increase production, particularly that of moderate-sized producers.

Then we have reconciliation with the contras.  This reconciliation with the contras is also reflected in the foreign policy, because the reasons for an internal war have disappeared.  And the reflection of U.S. policies that we saw in this have also disappeared.  So this is an element that helps to avoid a confrontation.

MSNBC

Do you think peace can be reached with Somocista elements in Miami?  Do you hope to achieve that with this strategy? [Somocista refers to supporters of the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1979.]

Fiallos

The groups in Miami are not the important thing.  The important ones are those who are here in Nicaragua.  Those in Miami are important inasmuch as they help those who are here, or to the extent that they can influence powerful groups in the United States.  So in this sense, they are important.

Therefore, if we establish a policy of non-confrontation and friendship with the government of the United States, the government of the United States will continue its policy of recognizing the government that is elected October 20.

If the government of Nicaragua, from January 10 on, maintains good relations and meets the requirements of strengthening democracy and human rights, takes care of the pending problems of justice with respect to North American citizens, etcetera, then there is the possibility of having good direct relations with the United States government.

A Democratic triumph might possibly help, in the sense that it is groups of Republicans that are creating bigger problems because they have relations with the groups in Miami.  And inside Nicaragua, the people in Miami have relations with those people who are fighting here or who were fighting here.  And with the remnants of these groups. [the contras or Nicaraguan Resistance]

They are the ones with whom Everybody's Government has tried directly to reach an understanding.

MSNBC

It seems likely that Clinton will win, but perhaps Jesse Helms will still be there.

Fiallos
Look, of course the problem will still continue.  I'm not saying that it will disappear.  What we want is to establish a government which is not the source of the confrontation, Everybody's Government.

Rather, we want, one, to try to resolve the conflicts that exist, two, to not create any conflicts.

MSNBC

Can the problems around the properties be resolved?  Are the funds there to resolve them? [The Sandinista government confiscated properties owned by the Somoza dictatorship, by some of those close to it and by some other opponents during the '80s.]

Fiallos

No, the funds don't exist, but the will does to continue resolving the problems.  And just as this government has tried to resolve them for six years, the next overnment, Everybody's Government, the Sandinista government, will try to resolve them.

MSNBC

What about economic foreign policies?  I recall that in the '80s, there was a policy called the "four-legged stool" of trade with the United States, Europe, Japan and the Eastern Bloc.  Will there be a new incarnation of this policy of "diversifying dependency"?

Fiallos

What's happening is that we have little margin of action or of liberty in choosing our markets.  And there's the situation of the disappearance of the Cold War, of the blocs.  So in reality what we have to do is make deals and seek trade relationships of all types with all countries.

MSNBC

With Europe, for example?

Fiallos

We've always had contact with the European countries.  We've never stopped trading with them or with Japan or with the Central American countries.  The problem is to increase these relations.

...

MSNBC

[And the foreign debt?]

Fiallos

The foreign debt has been reduced under the present government, and the government that takes office January 10 will have to continue this task of reducing it.

---

Interview and translation from the Spanish by Peter Costantini for MSNBC News.