Nader Was Right: Liberals are Going Nowhere With Obama
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/
Posted on Aug 10, 2009
By Chris Hedges
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 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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