TRUTHDIG – Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential
election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4
million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted,
his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many
of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring
themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader
is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we
must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate
state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in
2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an
act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.
“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left
becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on
Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to
accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”
Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a
cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the
Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a
lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the
country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a
fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance
that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the
inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of
the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast
around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as
Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in
Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope. If you were one of
the millions who backed down in the voting booth in 2008, don’t do it
again. If you were one of those who thought about joining the
Washington protests against the war where 131 of us were arrested and
did not, don’t fail us next time. The closure of the mechanisms within
the power system that once made democratic reform possible means we
stand together as the last thin line of defense between a civil society
and its disintegration. If we do not engage in open acts of defiance,
we will empower a radical right-wing opposition that will replicate the
violence and paranoia of the state. To refuse to defy in every way
possible the corporate state is to be complicit in our strangulation.
“The
left has nowhere to go,” Nader said. “Obama knows it. The corporate
Democrats know it. There will be criticism by the left of Obama this
year and then next year they will all close ranks and say ‘Do you want
Mitt Romney? Do you want Sarah Palin? Do you want Newt Gingrich?’ It’s
very predictable. There will be a year of criticism and then it will
all be muted. They don’t understand that even if they do not have any
place to go, they ought to fake it. They should fake going somewhere
else or staying home to increase the receptivity to their demands. But
because they do not make any demands, they are complicit with corporate
power.
“Corporate power makes demands all the time,” Nader went
on. “It pulls on the Democrats and the Republicans in one direction. By
having this nowhere-to-go mentality and without insisting on demands as
the price of your vote, or energy to get out the vote, they have
reduced themselves to a cipher. They vote. The vote totals up. But it
means nothing.”
There is no major difference between a McCain
administration, a Bush and an Obama administration. Obama, in fact, is
in many ways worse. McCain, like Bush, exposes the naked face of
corporate power. Obama, who professes to support core liberal values
while carrying out policies that mock these values, mutes and
disempowers liberals, progressives and leftists. Environmental and
anti-war groups, who plead with Obama to address their issues, are
little more than ineffectual supplicants.
Obama, like Bush and
McCain, funds and backs our unending and unwinnable wars. He does
nothing to halt the accumulation of the largest deficits in human
history. The drones murder thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, as they did under Bush and would have done under McCain. The
private military contractors, along with the predatory banks and
investment houses, suck trillions out of the U.S. Treasury as
efficiently under Obama. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus, have
not been restored. The public option is dead. The continuation of the
Bush tax cuts, adding some $900 billion to the deficit, along with the
reduction of individual contributions to Social Security, furthers a
debt peonage that will be the excuse to privatize Social Security,
slash social services and break the back of public service unions.
Obama does not intercede as tens of millions of impoverished Americans
face foreclosures and bankruptcies. The Democrats provide better cover.
But the corporate assault is the same.
“Obama has the formula
now,” Nader said. “You give the Republicans a lot of what they want.
Many of them vote for you. You get your Democrat percentage. You weave
a hybrid victory. That is what he learned in the lame-duck session. He
gets praised as being a statesman and a leader and getting things done.
Think of all the rewards he can contemplate while he is in Hawaii
compared to what they were saying about him on Nov. 5. All the
columnists and pundits say that now he can work with John Boehner. But
once you take a broader view, it is the difference in the mph of
corporatism. McCain is 50 miles per hour and Obama is 40 miles per
hour.
“The left has disemboweled itself,” Nader said. “It
doesn’t even have a strategy every four years like a good poker player.
The best example is Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO. Obama has given
them nothing. Therefore, they are demanding nothing. They huff and
puff. They make tough speeches. But Trumka hasn’t even made Obama’s
campaign pledge of a $9.50 minimum wage by this year an issue. If you
want to increase consumer demand, what better way to do it than to
unleash $300 billion in wages? The card check for unionization, which
Obama pledged as his No. 1 sop to the labor unions, is dead. The unions
do not even demand a hearing. And now wait till you see what they will
do to the public employee unions. Part of it is their own fault. They
are going to be crushed. Everybody is ganging up on them. You have new
class warfare. It is non-unionized lower income and middle class taking
it out on the unionized middle-income public employees. It is a classic
example of oligarchic manipulation. It will start playing out big time
in New York State with Andrew Cuomo and others. They will start saying,
‘Why are you getting this? Most workers who pay the taxes, who pay your
salaries, are not getting this.’ This plays.”
The banishment from
the corporate media, Nader argues, has been one of the major
contributors to the demoralization and weakening of the left. Protests
by the left, which get little national or local coverage, have steadily
dwindled in strength across the country. The first protest gets little
or no coverage and this leads to movements, as well as the voices of
activists, being diminished and finally suffocated.
“The
so-called liberal media, along with Fox, is touting the tea party and
publicizing Palin,” Nader said. “There was an editorial on Dec. 27 in
The New York Times on the Repeal Amendment, the right-wing
constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn federal law. The
editorial writer at the end had the nerve to say there is no
progressive champion. The editorial said that the liberals and
progressives have faded out to let the tea party make history. And yet,
for months, all The New York Times has done is promote Sarah Palin and
Glenn Beck. They promote Newt Gingrich and the neocons on the Op-Ed
pages. The book pages of the newspaper ignore progressive authors and
pump all the right-wing authors.
“If we don’t raise hell, we
won’t get any media,” Nader said. “If we don’t get any media, the
perception will be that the tea party is the big deal.
“On one
notorious Sunday, Oct. 10, two of The New York Times’ segments led with
a big story about Ann Coulter and how she will change her strategy
because she is being outflanked by others,” Nader said. “There was also
a huge article on this anti-Semite against Arabs, this Islamaphobe, Pam
Geller. Do you know how many pictures they had of Geller? Twenty on
this front-page segment. The number of anti-war Op-Eds in The
Washington Post over nine months in 2009 was 6-to-1 pro-war. We don’t
raise hell. We don’t say Terry Gross is a censor. We don’t say that
Charlie Rose is a censor. We have got to blast publicly. We have got to
hammer them, because they are the tribune of right-wing fascist forces.
“Three
thousand people rallied to protest the invasion and massacre in Gaza
two years ago,” Nader said. “It was held four blocks from The
Washington Post. It did not get a single paragraph. People should march
over to the Post and say ‘Fuck you! What are you doing here? You cover
every little blip by the right-wing and you don’t cover us?’
“They
are afraid of the right-wing because the right-wing bellows, and they
have become right-wing,” Nader said of the commercial press. “They have
become fascinated by the bias of Fox. And they publicize what Fox is
biased on. The coverage of O’Reilly and Beck and their fights is
insane. In the heyday of coverage in the 1960s of what we were doing,
it was always less than it should have been, but now it is almost zero.
Why do we take this? Why do we accept this? Why isn’t Chris Hedges
three times a year in the Op-Ed? Why is it always Paul Wolfowitz and
Elliott Abrams and all these homicidal maniacs? Why are they there? Why
is John Bolton constantly published in The Washington Post and The New
York Times? Where is Andrew Bacevich? Bacevich told me he has had five
straight Op-Eds rejected by the Post and the Times in the last two
years. And he said he is not inclined to send anymore. How many times
do you hear Hoover Institution? American Enterprise Institute?
Manhattan Institute. These goddamned newspapers should be picketed.”
The
timidity and silencing of the left fuels the steady impoverishment of a
dispossessed working class and a beleaguered middle class. It
solidifies a corporate oligarchy that is dismantling the anemic
regulatory agencies that once protected citizens from predatory
corporations. The economic system is designed to bail out Wall Street
rather than replace the trillions of dollars and millions of jobs lost
by workers. And the only hope left, Nader argues, is if the
conservatives in the right-wing movement break from the corporatists.
If the big banks again start going to the cliff and calling for new
bailouts, Nader says, this may provoke a schism between conservative
groups embodied by figures such as Ron Paul, and corporate lackeys.
“Every
major movement starts with field organizers, the farmers, unions, and
the civil rights movement,” Nader said. “But there is nothing out
there. We need to start learning from what was done in the past. All
over the country people are pissed off. They hate Wall Street. They
know they are being gouged. They know they are slipping behind. They
know their kids will not be as well off as they were, and they were not
that well off. But no one is putting it together. Who could put a
thousand organizers in the field, besides George Soros? The labor
unions. They have the money. They have a lot of cash. These idiots are
going down. The UAW is a paradigm of a suicidal, supplicant labor
union. It is disgusting. They are a puppy dog of GM, Ford and Chrysler.
They have huge reserves. The labor unions could organize the country,
but they are into their own emoluments and high salaries. The union
leadership has so distanced itself from the rank and file that it is
ashamed to do anything controversial. These union leaders will not go
on TV on Labor Day because they do not want someone saying ‘Why are you
making $500,000 a year with a pension that is six times your rank and
file?’ There is corruption at the top. The only way the union leaders
can continue is to be in the shadows. And you don’t build a strong
movement in the shadows.
“The black swan question is whether
something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable,” Nader
said. “It is amazing that it hasn’t happened in any pockets of the
country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And
can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important
questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don’t.”
© 2011 Truthdig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was
for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He
is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Photograph by Flickr User: Nick Bygon
For supporters of an open Internet, Daley’s appointment raises the prospect that the president will break all promises to defend Net Neutrality at the urging of a chief of staff determined to cozy up with industry and protect the status quo. 
“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left
becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on
Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to
accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”
POLITICO