Chris Hedges Says He'll Work for Nader in 2008

When the book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" came out, intellectuals and peace activists alike flocked to it. It was intelligent, well-reasoned and written by a true craftsman with some truly horrific war stories to tell and a keen eye to analyze the costs for all concerned. Hedges says that he will work for Ralph Nader in 2008 if he runs again (he will). In Hedge's article, he talks about the corporate rape of our government and how Nader is one of the only national figures to recognize this and to speak openly about the corrupt corporate ownership of our nation. He notes that someone with Ralph's incredible resume must have only entered the public arena to fight the "rapists" after their purchase of the Republican Lite Party back in the 1980's and this presumes that those who further the "ego trip" theory are just buying into propaganda for those too limited intellectually to think for themselves.

Thank you Chris Hedges for being brave enough to tell the truth! I sincerely hope that the "propaganda-eaters" don't malign and abuse you for telling the truth, though I suspect they will. They don't appreciate the truth at all and they don't like to talk about it either.

On a similar topic, I spent half a day on "Democratic Underground" about a month ago and was kicked off (with absolutely no explanation). For those unfamiliar, DU is a website with many forums to discuss "progressive" issues, like who you like better, Gore or Hillary. They also enjoy talking about which pro-war Democratic candidate they should vote for to end the war. Not exactly a hotbed of rational thought .... but they're Democrats. What do you expect?

The "progressives" I was chatting with were discussing the new Nader film, "An Unreasonable Man". They were literally calling Ralph an "idiot", "a fucking asshole" and a "scumbag". I can only assume that this Democrat venom is residual from the 2000 presidential run although none of these idiots could explain their way out of a paper bag nor do they feel that they owe me, their enemy, any explanation. In their minds, Nader was that guy who was "not a factor" when they mailed out all the debate invitations but who became the "ONLY factor" when Al Gore ran such a weak-assed campaign that he lost his own home state and Clinton's, too! All I did on the forum with a particularly stupid chatter was call Hillary a "fascist". I backed that up by asking how someone can support the Imperialist/Big Oil/Ruling Class agenda and vote for illegal occupation and genocide and also refuse to debate your legitimate opponents, Tasini and Hawkins? I may have also pointed out to a few Nader-haters that there were many other third party candidates on the ballot in Florida in that infamous election and that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM had enough votes to "spoil it" for Gore. Using the Dems own questionable math skills, shouldn't they be propagandizing against all of those candidates! Why have they persisted in vilifying only ONE guy, especially when that one guy has done more for them than any elected official has ever done?

I guess they don't like having a conversation or they're just frightened that their "logic" doesn't make any sense? Very strange behavior, indeed. These "sheeple" who call themselves progressives lack even a basic willingness to try and defend their viewpoint and their blind obedience to their party bosses. This fearful behavior fortifies me in my certitude that Ralph is right and that we need to support him in whatever number of elections he may choose to run in.

Peace to all those with open minds who are brave enough to stand up and fight!




Pariah or Prophet?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070226_an_unreasonably_principled_man/
Posted on Feb 26, 2007
By Chris Hedges

I can’t imagine why Ralph Nader would run again. He has been branded as an egomaniac, blacklisted by the media, plunged into debt by a Democratic Party machine that challenged his ballot access petitions and locked him out of the presidential debates. Most of his friends and supporters have abandoned him, and he is almost universally reviled for throwing the 2000 election to George W. Bush.

I can’t imagine why he would want to go through this one more time. But when Nader hinted in San Francisco that he might run if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee, I knew I would be working for his campaign if he indeed entered the race. He understands that American democracy has become a consumer fraud and that if we do not do battle with the corporations that, in the name of globalization, are cannibalizing the country for profit, our democratic state is doomed.

I spent the last two years reporting and writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” The rise of the Christian right—the most dangerous mass movement in American history—can be traced directly to the corporate rape of America. This movement, which calls for the eradication of real and imagined enemies, all branded as “satanic,” at home and abroad, is an expression of rage. This rage rises out of the deep distortions and dislocations that have beset tens of millions of Americans shunted aside in the new global marketplace. The massive flight of manufacturing and professional jobs overseas, the ruthless slashing of state and federal assistance and the rise of an unchecked American oligarchy have plunged many Americans into deep economic and personal despair. They have turned, because of this despair, to “Christian” demagogues who promise magic, miracles, angels, the gospel of prosperity and a fantastic Christian utopia. And the Republicans and the Democrats are equally culpable for this assault.

There are only two solutions left. We must organize to fight the corporate state, to redirect our national wealth and resources to fund a massive antipoverty campaign and curb the cycle of perpetual war that enriches the military-industrial complex and by extension the two political parties that dominate Washington, or we must accept an inevitable Christo-fascism backed by these corporations. Don’t expect glib Democratic politicians such as John Edwards, Sen. Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama to address these issues. They are, as Nader understands, hostage to corporate money.

Nader, perhaps better than anyone else, has grasped the long, disastrous rise of the corporate state.

He and his small army of activists helped write citizen legislation in the 1960s and 1970s that gave us, among many bills, the Clean Air Act, the Mine and Health Safety Act and the Freedom of Information Act. He worked with and was courted by sympathetic Democrats. Presidential candidate George McGovern saw him as a potential running mate, but Nader refused to be enticed directly into the political arena. He was a skilled Washington insider, one of the greatest idealists within the democratic system.

But the corporations grew tired of Nader’s activism. They mounted a well-oiled campaign to destroy him. These early attempts were clumsy and amateurish, such as General Motor’s use of private detectives to try to dig up dirt on his private life; they found none. The campaign was exposed and led to a public apology by GM. Nader was awarded $425,000 in damages, which he used to fund citizen action groups.

Lewis Powell, who was the general counsel to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and would later be appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote a memo in August 1971 that expressed corporate concerns. “The single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader,” the memo read, “a legend in his own time and an idol to millions of Americans. ... There should be no hesitation to attack [Nader and others].”

Corporations poured hundreds of millions into the assault. They set up pseudo-think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, which invented bogus disciplines including cost-benefit and risk-management analysis, all geared to change the debate from health, labor and safety issues to the rising cost of big government. They ran sophisticated ad campaigns to beguile voters. These corporations wrenched apart, through lavish campaign donations and intensive and shady lobbying, the ties between Nader’s public interest groups and his supporters in the Democratic Party. Washington, by the time they were done, was besieged with 25,000 corporate lobbyists and 9,000 corporate action committees.

When Ronald Reagan, the corporate pitch man, swept into office he set out to dismantle some 30 governmental regulations, most put into place by Nader and his allies, all of which curbed the abuse of corporations. The Reagan White House worked to gut 20 years of Nader legislation. And, once a fixture on Capital Hill, Nader became a pariah.

Nader, however, did not give up. He turned to local community organizing, assisting grass-roots campaigns around the country such the one to remove benzene, known to cause cancer, from paint in GM car plants. But by the time Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office the corporate state was ascendant. Nader and his citizen committees were frozen out by Democrats as well as Republicans. Clinton and Gore never met with him.

“We tried every way to get the Democrats to pick up on issues that really commanded the felt concerns and daily life of millions of Americans,” Nader says in the new documentary about his life, “An Unreasonable Man,” “but these were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to, and so when people say why did you do this in 2000, I say I’m a 20-year veteran of pursuing the folly of the least worse between the two parties.”

The Clinton administration pushed through NAFTA, gutted welfare, gave up on universal healthcare, deregulated the communications industry and abolished federal aid to families with dependent children. It further empowered the growing corporate state and exacerbated the despair that has fueled its allies in the Christian right.

“For 20 years,” Nader says in the film, “we saw the doors closing on us in Washington, on our citizen groups and a lot of other citizen groups, and what are we here for? To improve the country. We couldn’t get congressional hearings, even with the Democrats in charge.”
There is a fascinating rage—and rage is the right word—expressed by many on the left in this fine film about Nader. Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman and Michael Moore, along with a host of former Nader’s Raiders, spit out venomous insults toward Nader, a man they profess to have once admired, the most common charge being that Nader is a victim of his oversized ego.
This anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They allowed themselves to buy into the facile argument of “the least worse” and ignore the deeper, subterranean assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed.
It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, that threw the 2000 election to Bush, not Ralph Nader. Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of 1 percent in 2004. All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida—there were about half a dozen of them—got more votes than the 537-vote difference between Bush and Gore. Why not go after the other third-party candidates? And what about the 10 million Democrats who voted in 2000 for Bush? What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty—he never mentioned global warming—that he could not carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 cartoon-like candidate, John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us “victory” in Iraq?

Nader argues that there are few—he never said no—differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. And during the first four years of the Bush administration the Democrats proved him right. They authorized the war in Iraq. They stood by as Bush stacked the judiciary with “Christian” ideologues. They let Bush, in violation of the Constitution, pump hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into faith-based organizations that discriminate based on belief and sexual orientation and openly proselytize. They stood by as American children got fleeced by No Child Left Behind. Democrats did not protest when federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudo-science about creationism, reproductive rights and homosexuality. And the Democrats let Bush further dismantle regulatory agencies, strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act and other draconian legislation, and thrust impoverished Americans aside through the corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. It is a stunning record. Bush is the worst president in American history. If Gore, or Kerry, had the spine to take him on, to challenge corporate welfare, corporate crime, the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate bailouts and issues such as labor law reform, if either had actually stood up to these corporate behemoths on behalf of the working and middle class, rather than mutter thought-terminating clichйs about American greatness, he could have won with a landslide. But Gore and Kerry did not dare to piss off their corporate paymasters.

There are a few former associates in the film who argue that Nader is tarnishing his legacy, and by extension their own legacy. But Nader’s legacy is undiminished. He fights his wars against corporate greed with a remarkable consistency. He knows our democratic state is being hijacked by the same corporate interests that sold us unsafe automobiles and dangerous and shoddy products. This is a battle not for some unachievable ideal but to save our democracy.
“I don’t care about my personal legacy,” Nader says in the film. “I care about how much justice is advanced in America and in our world day after day. I’m willing to sacrifice whatever ‘reputation’ in the cause of that effort. What is my legacy? Are they going to turn around and rip out seat belts out of cars, air bags out of cars?”

These corporations, and their enraged and manipulated followers in the Christian right, tens of millions of them, if left unchecked will propel us into despotism. The corporate state has rigged our system, hollowed out our political process and steadily stripped citizens of constitutional rights, federal and state protection and assistance. This may be the twilight of American democracy. And it is better to stand up and fight, even in vain, than not to fight at all.

Chris Hedges’ latest book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Democrat Treachery Alive and Well in CD 20

This type of abandonment of both principle and spine is exactly why I told area progressives that I would be voting for Erik Sundwall in CD 20's latest Congressional race. Sundwall is
the Libertarian who was successfully blocked from the ballot, even though he had collected almost twice the required number of signatures, by the two-party rules developed to help the Gillibrands and the Weeneys of this world. Like most aspiring politicians, Gillibrand is neither a progressive nor a friend of the peace movement. She is simply (much like her evil predecessor) a climber and a neophyte who was a safe candidate for the Republican-Lites precisely because she can be counted on to do whatever her party bosses and handlers "advise" her to do.

Nancy Pelosi - "Impeachment is off the table!"

Perhaps, we should hold a celebration reveling in the treachery of these so-called "anti-war leaders". ;-)



Gillibrand Won't Block Iraq funds
Congresswoman says she wouldn't deny money meant to support troops

By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer Click byline for more stories by writer.
First published: Tuesday, January 30, 2007

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand would not support a resolution that blocks funding to troops in Iraq, she said Monday at her first public town hall meeting.
"You never want to make the troops vulnerable," Gillibrand told more than 150 people in the Saratoga VFW Hall on Excelsior Avenue.

Iraq and health care -- in that order -- are the most vital issues facing New York's 20th Congressional District, said the congresswoman, who has become the local face of the new 110th Congress. She detailed to a standing room only crowd what it was like to be part of a flurry of legislation passed by the House of Representatives during its first 100 hours of work.
The Greenport Democrat talked about her party's efforts to ban some gifts and trips given to elected officials; beef up port and airport security; reduce interest rates on student loans; increase the minimum wage; and more.

"The first 100 hours were incredibly important," said Gillibrand, who defeated Republican incumbent John Sweeney in a bitter campaign last year. "These were all issues I campaigned on."
But questions and her remarks about the ongoing conflict in Iraq produced the most passion. Several members of the audience said afterward that they had come to Gillibrand's first district meeting because they wanted to know her stance on funding President Bush's 21,500-troop "surge" in Iraq.
"I think this is going to be a big test," said Jeffrey Halpern of North Galway, a member of the Saratoga Peace Alliance. "Some political figures say they are against the war, but still vote to fund it, and the Saratoga Peace Alliance feels that is hypocritical."

The new Democrat-led Congress is debating multiple resolutions on Iraq that call for taking President Bush to task on the issue with varying degrees of confrontation. The most drastic measure would cut off funds for the war effort, something Gillibrand said she wasn't prepared to do.

Gillibrand has joined the "Blue Dogs" in Congress, a group of conservative Democrats, and as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has questioned the nation's top military leaders about Iraq. She said Monday she wants to ensure that deployed troops continue to receive funding for basic necessities like food and body armor.
But she also said the President's war plan was strategically misguided, and that any additional spending on military operations should be monitored. The United States should engage Syria and Iran in trying to reach a peace agreement in Iraq, Gillibrand said.

"The solutions really reside in the political and economic arenas," said Gillibrand, who has pledged to voters to hold at least one public meeting a month in the district. On Monday, she spent a hurried hour in the VFW hall, fielding various questions on a variety of issues, ranging from the attack on the World Trade Center to whether the United States is poised to attack Iran.
She said the President does not have congressional approval to attack Iran.
The crowd was generally supportive, but anxious about Iraq.

The right thing to do would be to end funding for the war, said Myrna Sack of Saratoga Springs. "You either are for the war, or not for the war. Period," Sack said.
But both Sack and Halpern, the member of the Saratoga Peace Alliance, said they remained hopeful for Gillibrand's term.

The meeting ended with 1st Lt. Matthew McLoughlin of Malta, who served in Iraq in 2004-05 with the New York Army National Guard, urging that Gillibrand consider the troops with her vote. He said voting against funding the troop increase in Iraq would achieve nothing, and only undermine the efforts of the troops.
"Thank you for your service," the congresswoman replied. "I will consider that."

Dennis Yusko can be reached at 581-8438 or by e-mail at dyusko@timesunion.com

Another "Hurricane" ....

Op-Ed Columnist
A Death in Destrehan
By BOB HERBERT

Destrehan, La.
On the afternoon of Oct. 7, 1974, a mob of 200 enraged whites, many of them students, closed in on a bus filled with black students that was trying to pull away from the local high school. The people in the mob were in a high-pitched frenzy. They screamed racial epithets and bombarded the bus with rocks and bottles. The students on the bus were terrified.
When a shot was heard, the kids on the bus dived for cover. But it was a 13-year-old white boy standing near the bus, not far from his mother, who toppled to the ground with a bullet wound in his head. The boy, a freshman named Timothy Weber, died a few hours later.
That single shot in this rural town about 25 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans set in motion a tale of appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day.
Destrehan was in turmoil in 1974 over school integration. The Supreme Court’s historic desegregation ruling was already 20 years old — time enough, the courts said, for Destrehan and the surrounding area to comply. But the Ku Klux Klan was still welcome in Destrehan in those days, and David Duke, its one-time imperial wizard, was an admired figure. White families in the region wanted no part of integration.
When black students were admitted to Destrehan High, they were greeted with taunts, various forms of humiliation and violence. Some of the black students fought back, and in the period leading up to the shooting there had been racial fights at a football game and inside the school.
While the Weber boy was being taken to a hospital, authorities ordered the black students off the bus and searched each one. The bus was also thoroughly searched. No weapon was found, and there was no evidence to indicate that the shot had come from the bus. The bus driver insisted it had not come from the bus, but from someone firing at the bus.
One of the black youngsters, a 16-year-old named Gary Tyler, was arrested for disturbing the peace after he talked back to a sheriff’s deputy — one of the few deputies in St. Charles Parish who was black. It may have been young Tyler’s impudence that doomed him. He was branded on the spot as the designated killer.
(Later, at a trial, the deputy, Nelson Coleman, was asked whose peace had been disturbed by Mr. Tyler’s comments. “Mine,” he replied.)
Matters moved amazingly fast after the shooting. Racial tension gave way to racial hysteria. A white boy had been killed and some black had to pay. Mr. Tyler, as good a black as any, was taken to a sheriff’s substation where he was beaten unmercifully amid shouted commands that he confess. He would not.
It didn’t matter. In just a little over a year he would be tried, convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death by electrocution.
The efficiency of the process was chilling. Evidence began to miraculously appear. Investigators “found” a .45-caliber pistol. Never mind that there were no fingerprints on it and it turned out to have been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s deputies. (Or that it subsequently disappeared as conveniently as it was found.) The authorities said they found the gun on the bus, despite the fact that the initial search had turned up nothing.
The authorities found witnesses who said that Mr. Tyler had been the gunman. Never mind that the main witness, a former girlfriend of Mr. Tyler’s, was a troubled youngster who had been under the care of a psychiatrist and had a history of reporting phony crimes to the police, including a false report of a kidnapping. She and every other witness who fingered Mr. Tyler would later recant, charging that they had been terrorized into testifying falsely by the police.
A sworn affidavit from Larry Dabney, who was seated by Mr. Tyler on the bus, was typical. He said his treatment by the police was the “scariest thing” he’d ever experienced. “They didn’t even ask me what I saw,” he said. “They told me flat out that I was going to be their key witness. ... They told me I was going to testify that I saw Gary with a gun right after I heard the shot and that a few minutes later I had seen him hide it in a slit in the seat. That was not true. I didn’t see Gary or anybody else in that bus with a gun.”
Mr. Tyler was spared electrocution when the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional. But in many ways he has in fact paid with his life. He’ll turn 50 this year in the state penitentiary at Angola, where he is serving out his sentence of life without parole for the murder of Timothy Weber.