{news} Nader, McKinney, Greens were right: Obama & Dems are going nowhere (Chris Hedges)

[Tim McKee]

----- Original Message -----

From: "Scott McLarty"
To: natlcomaffairs at green.gpus.org
Subject: [usgp-dx] Nader, McKinney, Greens were right: Obama & Dems are
going nowhere (Chris Hedges)
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:35:45 +0000



Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama

By Chris Hedges
Truthdig, August 10, 2009
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/


The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as
brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as
it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to
enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us
universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture
or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the
warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not
push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street
or end our relationship with private contractors that provide
mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and
costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals
who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of
pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil
liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again
suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new
story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton.
It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if
we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as
citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a
corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant,
we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the
two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and
the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo
a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party an
apology. They were right. If a few million of us had had the
temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and
the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a
platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from
accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The
Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled
for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights
movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people
to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but
how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass
movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to
our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We
have surrendered this power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is
the foreclosure movement? Where is the robust universal health care
or anti-war movement? Where is the militant movement for
sustainable energy?

“Something is broken,” Nader said when I reached him at his family
home in Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms
of passivity, but we are getting there. No one sees anything
changing. There is no new political party to give people a choice.
The progressive forces have no hammer. When they abandoned our
campaign, they told the Democrats we have nowhere to go and will
take whatever you give us. The Democrats are under no heat in the
electoral arena from the left.

“There comes a point when the public imbibes the ultimatum of the
plutocracy,” Nader said when asked about public apathy. “They have
bought into the belief that if it protests, it will be brutalized
by the police. If they have Muslim names, they will be subjected to
Patriot Act treatment. This has scared the hell out of the
underclass. They will be called terrorists.

“This is the third television generation,” Nader said. “They have
grown up watching screens. They have not gone to rallies. Those are
history now. They hear their parents and grandparents talk about
marches and rallies. They have little toys and gizmos that they
hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or
activity. It is a tapestry of passivity.

“They have been broken,” Nader said of the working class. “How many
times have their employers threatened them with going abroad? How
many times have they threatened the workers with outsourcing? The
polls on job insecurity are record-high by those who have
employment. And the liberal intelligentsia have failed them. They
[the intellectuals] have bought into carping and making lecture
fees as the senior fellow at the institute of so-and-so. Look at
the top 50 intelligentsia—not one of them supported our campaign,
not one of them has urged for street action and marches.”

Our task is to build movements that can act as a counterweight to
the corporate rape of America. We must opt out of the mainstream.
We must articulate and stand behind a viable and uncompromising
socialism, one that is firmly and unequivocally on the side of
working men and women. We must give up the self-delusion that we
can influence the power elite from the inside. We must become as
militant as those who are seeking our enslavement. If we remain
passive as we undergo the largest transference of wealth upward in
American history, our open society will die. The working class is
being plunged into desperation that will soon rival the misery
endured by the working class in China and India. And the Democratic
Party, including Obama, is a willing accomplice.

“Obama is squandering his positive response around the world,”
Nader said. “In terms of foreign and military policy, it is a
distinct continuity with Bush. Iraq, Afghanistan, the
militarization of foreign policy, the continued expansion of the
Pentagon budget and pursuing more globalized trade agreements are
the same.”

This is an assessment that neoconservatives now gleefully share.
Eliot A. Cohen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, made the same
pronouncement.

“Mostly, though, the underlying structure of the policy remains the
same,” Cohen wrote in an Aug. 2 opinion piece titled “What’s
Different About the Obama Foreign Policy.” “Nor should this
surprise us: The United States has interests dictated by its
physical location, its economy, its alliances, and above all, its
values. Naive realists, a large tribe, fail to understand that
ideals will inevitably guide American foreign policy, even if they
do not always determine it. Moreover, because the Obama foreign and
defense policy senior team consists of centrist experts from the
Democratic Party, it is unlikely to make radically different
judgments about the world, and about American interests in it, than
its predecessors.”

Nader said that Obama should gradually steer the country away from
imperial and corporate tyranny.

“You don’t just put out policy statements of congeniality, but
statements of gradual redirection,” Nader said. “You incorporate in
that statement not just demilitarization, not just ascension of
smart diplomacy, but the enlargement of the U.S. as a humanitarian
superpower, and cut out these Soviet-era weapons systems and start
rapid response for disaster like earthquakes and tsunamis. You
expand infectious disease programs, which the U.N. Developmental
Commission says can be done for $50 billion a year in Third World
countries on nutrition, minimal health care and minimal shelter.”

Obama has expanded the assistance to our class of Wall Street
extortionists through subsidies, loan guarantees and backup
declarations to banks such as Citigroup. His stimulus package does
not address the crisis in our public works infrastructure; instead
it doles out funds to Medicaid and unemployment compensation. There
will be no huge public works program to remodel the country. The
president refuses to acknowledge the obvious—we can no longer
afford our empire.

“Obama could raise a call to come home, America, from the military
budget abroad,” Nader suggested. “He could create a new
constituency that does not exist because everything is so
fragmented, scattered, haphazard and slapdash with the stimulus. He
could get the local labor unions, the local Chambers of Commerce
and the mayors to say the more we cut the military budget, the more
you get in terms of public works.”

“They [administration leaders] don’t see the distinction between
public power and corporate power,” Nader said. “This is their time
in history to reassert public values represented by workers,
consumers, taxpayers and communities. They are creating a jobless
recovery, the worst of the worst, with the clear specter of
inflation on the horizon. We are heading for deep water.”

The massive borrowing acts as an anesthetic. It prevents us from
facing the new limitations we must learn to cope with domestically
and abroad. It allows us to live in the illusion that we are not in
a state of irrevocable crisis, that our decline is not real and
that catastrophe has been averted. But running up the national debt
can work only so long.

“No one can predict the future,” Nader added hopefully. “No one
knows the variables. No one predicted the move on tobacco. No one
predicted gay rights. No one predicted the Berkeley student
rebellion. The students were supine. You never know what will light
the fire. You have to keep the pressure on. I know only one thing
for sure: The whole liberal-progressive constituency is going
nowhere.”
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******************************************
Tim McKee, New Britian, CT, main number cell-860-778-1304, 860-505-8454
 National Committee member of the Green Party of the United States and is a spokesperson for the Green Party of CT.
/www.ctgreentimes.org
BLOG-http://thebiggreenpicture.blogspot.com

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