Nader Was Right: Liberals are
Going Nowhere With Obama
by Chris Hedges
www.truthdig.com/, August 10,
2009
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."
Chris Hedges 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.
Chris
Hedges page
Ralph
Nader page
Home Page