This entry is a response to Brian Mann, "Ralph Nader manages To Be Relevant Again, Sort Of"
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/blogs/ballotbox/blogger.php
Brian, as always I find it very disturbing that much of your argument as a Democrat is simply based on the feeling that if I and others could not vote for Ralph Nader, we would vote for the Democrat's corporate prole instead.
Just in case there is any doubt in your mind, we would NEVER do so. Simply can't see the margin in it. I don't ever vote for the two war parties' candidates regardless of which side of the fake aisle they pretend they're on. Not ever.
I also take great umbrage at the constant labeling of "Naderites" as "fans". We are not "fans". We are SUPPORTERS. We support Ralph's platform. I came to see things in a very similar common sense way to Nader long before I really knew much about him or knew him which I do). That's something I find that most Nader SUPPORTERS have in common and do not share with our two-party brethren. We are not followers. We can all articulate our viewpoints and argue them. I resist the urge to call Democrats "Obamaniacs" (regardless of the temptation) so please give us a little more credit than that. I see far less substance on your chosen side of the aisle than on mine.
All that aside, part of the Democrats' mantra is that great damage can only be done by Republicans. This is patently ridiculous. Bill Clinton waged a daily bombing war against the civilian population of Iraq and starved a million children to death there. He destroyed our manufacturing base by pushing NAFTA through (a corporate Republican enslavement plan that the Reaganites couldn't get through congress even when they had a majority). He passed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Workfare.
Clinton failed to get us meaningful health care (that's why he had is wife spearhead it, so the "failure" would be attached to her). Its no accident that she became the second highest recipient of HMO and Big Pharma money in history.
I could go on for days but the basic point is this; Obama is NOT different than the Clintons and Bush is not Satan. He's just another smarmy blue blood fleecing the public without style or grace. Democrats are no longer different than Republicans. Our new president ill simply take on the mantle of CEO of USA Inc.
He will keep us at war and occupation in the Middle East for the same reasons that we went in the first place, control of oil and the military industrial complex's need for bloodshed to feed its constantly gaping maw.
We will not have single payer health care. We will have mandatory HMO care at twice the price of any modern country.
We will see no living wage passed at the federal level.
We will see more socialism. Not the kind where Rush and the John Birchers run around screaming that "Obama is a commie" but the REAL kind where $700 billion is given to Wall Street speculators for no good reason anyone can think of at the expense of those who work for a living. Socialism for the rich. Capitalism for the poor.
Clean energy? Where was that during this campaign? Clean COAL? SAFE nukes? We will not see wind and solar developed along with a national energy job creation plan which is what we need NOW.
Democrats like to say that Bush is the devil and that Gore would have been better. You know Gore, the "environmental hero" who should be best known for never doing anything for the environment in his entire political career but who is instead known for his little enviro-movie (he should primarily be known as the guy who refused to fight for the rights of 57,000 disenfranchised black voters in Florida in 2000). We all know that Gore never would have gone to war in Iraq even though exactly the same conscienceless corporations run him that ran Bush. Says who?
Democrats love to say that John Kerry (the guy who had a draft on his 2004 campaign website and who voted for all the wars Bush has spearheaded) would have been a much better president and would have gotten us out of Iraq. From his Senate record, I see absolutely NO evidence of this at all.
My own feeling is that Democrats are happy to support COVERT fascism but like to stop short of those crazy Republicans and their OVERT fascism.
I am not any better off having an intellectual articulate a case for war than I am when a simpleton does it. Either way, it kills children. I do not choose either.
I choose common sense. I choose Nader. It is a matter of principle as you say BUT in NY, and in 39 other states, it is also the only position that makes ANY sense if one understands the electoral college. Why vote for either type of fascism in a SAFE STATE? Where's the margin in that? How is this a success? It is the poster child for throwing your vote away!
That said, Nader did NOT call Obama an "Uncle Tom". he said that Obama now had to choose between being an "Uncle Sam" for the American people or an "Uncle Tom" for the corporations that put him in office. Big difference but thats what you get for watching Fox News and taking things out of context.
Lets revisit this in a year when we're still in Iraq, we've seen another bailout and are still without health care. Lets talk about what kind of "Uncle" you think Obama is then. ;-)
Peace,
Matt
P.S. Remember Molly Ivins; "You gotta dance with those what brung ya". Obama received more money from Corporate America than any president in history. Who do you think he'll be dancing with?
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7 comments:
What these people who attack the fact of Nader's candidacies don't realize is that they're really attacking those of us who voted for Nader. (No one cares about a guy who runs and gets no one's vote other than his own)
But even more, they don't realize that those of us who vote for Nader or other smaller party candidates aren't just Democrats who don't like the particular year's candidate. Nor are we people who just like voting differently for shits and giggles. We vote for these candidates because we believe the corporate party duopoly is fundamentally corrupt, because it is irredeemable. If Nader weren't on the ballot, I wouldn't have voted for Obama. I would've voted for McKinney. If neither of them had been on the ballot, I would've probably voted for Calero or maybe Barr.
Debs said (and I may be paraphrasing), "The American people have a Constitution that gives them anything they want. My main regret is that they seem not to want much of anything at all."
Obama is a corporate candidate of a corporate party. He will be less bad than Bush, no doubt. But his presidency will also neutral liberals who were under the delusion that they would vote for him first and then push him to be more progressive afterward. Politics doesn't work that way. The voters' only leverage is their vote.
The stalling of the progressive agenda is due not to the conservatives, but to the liberals. People who claim to support a progressive agenda could have voted for Dennis Kucinich in the primaries. And they could've voted for Nader (or McKinney) in the general election. But these candidates got a microscopic fraction of the vote while most of the 'progressive' votes went to corporate Hillary and Obama.
Harry Truman called for universal health care in the 1940s. Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency several times since then, including after the landslide of '64. Where is universal health care?
The right demands their candidates be conservative or the candidates don't get conservative support or money. The left settles for charisma. The left settles for 'electability,' which of course means nothing once the values have been sacrificed. This is why the conservative agenda gets implemented when the right is in power but the progressive agenda stalls when liberals' cult figures take power.
The right expects things. The left expects nothing. Both get what they expect.
I have voted in four (4) presidential elections; and every time I have voted for Nader (1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008).
So, I never really understood how some people can say my vote "would've" gone to the Democratic candidate, had I not decided to "waste" it; even though I've never once voted for the Democratic candidate in the first place?
Is there any advantage to having voted for Ralph Nader rather than voting for Cynthia McKinney? Voting for McKinney validates the Green Party primary process and would afford greater ballot access (although it is a moot point as McKinney and Nader together didn't gather 50,000 votes, it seems). As a point of structure, Nader/Gonzalez was listed on NY ballot as EPF ballot. "EPF" isn't even described as an organization on the Nader-Gonzalez website (at least I couldn't find it).
Ben, thats a good question. I, personally, would say that there is a big difference. The national Green party has been taken over by the Democratic party. Cynthia was used by these DemoGreens to align grassroots Greens behind someone other than Ralph (much as these same Dems did when they manufactured our embarrassing failure of a national race in 2004). Greens are not allowed to directly vote for their candidates as the Green Party tenet of "grassroots democracy" suggests they might. In the end, Cynthia's campaign received about 1/8 the vote totals that Ralph's did, was only on in a handful of states and is probably the last presidential race we will run. Nader supporters are starting up the Populist Party in NY and elsewhere in the 45 states where we made the ballot and where there is an organization. It took us longer than it did Ralph to see how hopeless the Greens are.
Probably the most important thing to do is to avoid focusing on the presidential election as though it would mean much of anything anyway. (We don't really think that top-down approaches work anyway, do we?) Moreso, we should be looking at the local elections. What does it say that Betty Little runs unopposed? That doesn't sound like a functioning democracy. And if meaningful issues are raised on the local level, one should find that would percolate through to the larger, more national (more expensive) contests.
The national race matters more than any other race because it is the only one that the majority of Americans are forced to pay attention to. It shows those who choose to participate in the process how completely fixed the whole process is from ballot access to party structure to media control. Its absolute. No local election can motivate people that way. If I ran against Betty (or some other Green or Indie did), how much media attention do you think we/they would get? Would we be in the debates? How much money could be raised to fight the battle? We can't even get five Greens to meet regularly to talk about activist issues, never mind to run a serious political campaign. I see Matt Gonzalez's mayoral campaign in San Fran as the purist answer to your question. If you get somewhere in small politics as he did (elected three times to the City Council), you then want to run for higher office. He ran for Mayor and the Dems, frightened beyond reason of a Green mayor, brought in $10 million dollars of ad money and Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson to stump for their candidate to defeat him. He still got 47% but in a fair fight, he would have been elected. Now, instead, he's been excoriated by Greens as an egomaniac (sound familiar?) and as someone who is now strangely unworthy of Green support. The Dems will make sure (now that they know he is a real danger to their stranglehold) that he never holds any elected office again. I think focusing on the little unwinnable races no one ever hears about is actually the counterproductive activity in out. Running the national race (which everyone pays some attention to) is probably the ONLY thing that makes sense in a democracy that is totally manipulated by corporate interests.
I would think that money is the bigger problem in national elections than the local ones. (At least it seems that the more electorate there is, the more it is going to cost). Also I would think that the goal isn't necessarily to win the office, but to give voice to issues that seem unspoken (at least that would be a start, no?). At least that is the reason I voted for McKinney, who I feel has been most consistently eloquent (even as a democrat in congress) questioning the likes of Rumsfeld about trillions of dollars of misappropriated funds (they aren't lost, we just aren't sure where they are) or on the wars or on the poor.
Perhaps I am just not getting it.
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