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A very....intriguing editoral, to say the least... If truth be told, veteran consumer advocate and Green Party 2000 presidential candidate Ralph Nader largely disappeared from the political scene for the past four years. Campaign rhetoric aside, both Nader and the Greens were essentially non-players in the great struggles to mobilize mass opposition to the U.S. wars against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Serious activists in these struggles rarely encountered leading Greens or Nader himself, as they organized millions to partake in the broad-based united actions against the U.S. warmakers, who planned to slaughter tens of thousands in the interests of profit.
The Greens, essentially an election-time formation, employ an "inside-outside" operation to achieve their aim of reforming the Democratic Party and making capitalism a bit kinder and gentler. Greens and Nader regularly support liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats at the local, state and national level, and on occasion run their own candidates...
I was intrigued by Nader's formulation about how a campaign spending cap might "turn the rudder" of one of capitalism's heavyweight parties. Nader continued, "And that's what's so disturbing about the liberal intelligencia, that they have lowered their expectation levels. They're totally freaked out with the Bush regime, which is a very bad regime. But if they simply say, anybody but Bush, they're not going to provide a mandate for the Democratic nominee. They're not going to provide a constituency.
"They're going to end up being very disappointed, as many of them were by the Clinton-Gore regime. And I would say to them, relax, watch how this campaign unfolds, rejoice in many of your issues being highlighted around the country, think of how much better Kerry and Edwards will be as potential nominees, and work on getting more people out to vote and more people involved so that we're not just spectators of the campaign, but we're participators, to use Jefferson's word."...
Nader's arguments are naïve at best. They stand in sharp contrast to his often-repeated thesis that the duopoly, the twin parties of corporate America, control every aspect of public life in the interests of profit. But Nader has always stood for the reform of these parties of the capitalist class.
He has spent 40-plus years in this endeavor, standing among the "tens of thousands of lobbyists," bargaining votes for bits and pieces of social change, only to admit that his life's achievements have almost entirely evaporated in a matter of a few years in the face of the present voracious corporate drive for profits and domination.
Nader cannot bring himself to face the truth about the capitalist system he has battled, virtually as an isolated individual lobbyist, for one lifetime. His allegiance to the lesser evil inevitably leads him to indefensible and contradictory political positions, as when he states above that Kerry has "a lot of good in him" despite a voting record that reveals the exact opposite.http://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/nader.html |
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