Swans
The Case for Nader-Camejo by Louis Proyect
(Swans - July 19, 2004) Although liberal attacks on Ralph Nader have been marked by a level of vituperation usually reserved for such as Slobodan Milosevic, Greg Bates's Ralph's Revolt is completely rancor-free by contrast. It is a calm, dispassionate "case for joining Nader's rebellion," as the subtitle puts it.
As founder and publisher of Common Courage Press, Greg Bates selects works that go against the grain of conventional thinking. They include Jeffrey St. Clair's "Been Brown So Long" (reviewed on Swans in March 2004) and numerous titles by Paul Farmer, the Harvard physician who has dedicated his life to helping AIDS patients in Haiti. On the Common Courage website, the mission statement refers to Farmer, who had invited Bates to a ceremony in Boston where Jean Bertrand Aristide was to give a speech. In explaining to Farmer why he publishes his books and those of other progressives, Bates says, "Some ask why we do this work. We ask a different question: How can we not?"
Throughout Ralph's Revolt, Bates likens Nader to Don Quixote, a somewhat unflattering comparison if you think solely in terms of tilting at windmills, etc. However, one must remember that Cervantes chose Quixote as a vehicle for his own unhappiness with the bourgeois transformation of Spain. If Don Quixote was a fool to romanticize Spain's feudal past, at least he had the wisdom to assert "There are only two families in the world, the Haves and the Have-nots," a phrase used by Bates as the epigraph for chapter nine of his book.
In that chapter, titled Appease the Bond Market: the Kerry Plan to Make the Rich Richer, Bates lays out in convincing detail how Kerry would reinstitute Clintonomics. As a "deficit hawk," Kerry promised to abandon earlier plans to expand college tuition subsidies and aid to state government in order to "help the higher priority of halving the federal deficit in four years." These announcements worried liberal supporters such as Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect who shrewdly observed that Kerry was running an election campaign on the basis of how Clinton governed, rather than the way that he ran for office. He worried that "No president ever got elected by promising to appease the bond market." Of course, it makes things a lot easier if you don't have a gadfly like Ralph Nader calling attention to this in televised debates.
While Paul Krugman advised his readers in the New York Times on July 9 that "John Kerry has proposed an ambitious health care plan that would extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, while reducing premiums for the insured," Bates reminds us that this does not include a provision for single payer insurance, the most cost efficient and effective means for insuring access to health care for all. Instead, tax-payer money will be showered on corporations to ease the cost of private insurance plans. The May 3rd Wall Street Journal quotes Kerry: "I would think American business would jump up and down and welcome what I am offering."
By contrast, votenader.org says: "The Nader Campaign supports a single-payer health care plan that replaces for-profit, investor-owned health care and removes the private health insurance industry (full Medicare for all)."
If Nader's campaign suggests elements of Don Quixote, then Bates sees George W. Bush in terms of another familiar literary figure from the same period. "The year 1605, or possibly 1606, saw the creation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. There are some parallels between this assassin and George W. Bush. The one murdered to become king, while the other stabbed democracy in the back by convincing his allies on the Supreme Court to anoint him. But, as with the Ralph Nader/Don Quixote comparison, it is the differences, not the similarities, that illustrate."
As tempting as it is to understand everything that's gone wrong with the USA in the past four years as the plot of an evil King (a trope that was also found in Barbara Garson's Macbird, a send-up of LBJ during the Vietnam war), the real problem is the lack of a hero to come to the rescue in the final act. While so many liberals (including Michael Moore) hope that the Democrats arrive on a white horse to rescue the American people, the truth is that the Democrats have been complicit in the right wing drive to make war abroad, deprive us of decent jobs and curtail civil liberties.
With respect to his ambitions, Bush is not qualitatively different from previous scary Republican Party presidents, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. What he has and what they lacked is control over the Congress and Judiciary, something that has not occurred since the 1950s. Furthermore, Bush benefits from having a supine Democratic legislative opposition that has voted for the Patriot Act, "No Child Left Behind," the invasion of Afghanistan, and many other Bush initiatives. If Bush represents some sort of fascist threat, it is remarkable that none of the leading Democrats, including Kerry, have seen fit to filibuster against his proposals.
[Full: http://www.swans.com/library/art10/lproy17.html ]
Greg Bates, Ralph's Revolt: The Case for Joining Nader's Rebellion, Common Courage Press, ISBN 1-56751-316-6
Ralph Nader, The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence & Close the Democracy Gap, ReganBooks, ISBN 0-06-075604-7
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