Ralph
Nader Was Right About Barack Obama: Filibustering
Amendments
3 March 2010By Chris Hedges
We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology.
They were right about Barack Obama. They were right
about the corporate state. They had the courage of
their convictions and they stood fast despite
wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and
progressives.
Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George
W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8
trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open
up credit and lending to the average consumer. The
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however,
admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at
the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama
promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA
Reform Act that retroactively made legal the
wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American
citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage
of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would
withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the
detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore
civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new
jobs. None of this has happened.
He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that
would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to
the private health insurance industry in the form of
subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans
to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies
would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and
premiums and see most of the seriously ill left
bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did
nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate
conference, after promising meaningful environmental
reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations
such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel’s brutal
apartheid state. He has expanded the war in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians,
including entire families, have been slaughtered by
sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire
missile, which sucks the air out of victims’ lungs.
And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia
and perhaps Iran.
The illegal wars and occupations, the largest
transference of wealth upward in American history and
the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun
under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid
protest from liberals when propagated by the
Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are
emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The
tea-party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah
Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and
the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into
their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry
libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now,
were never politically active. They articulate a
legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the
bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave
emotion and anger to the protofascists. Take a look at
the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who
flew his Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office
in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring
dozens. He was not alone in his rage.
“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can
commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the
GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time
for their gravy train to crash under the weight of
their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force
of the full federal government has no difficulty
coming to their aid within days if not hours?” Stack
wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the
American medical system, including the drug and
insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands
of people a year and stealing from the corpses and
victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t
see this as important as bailing out a few of their
vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political
‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving
scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to
sit around for year after year and debate the state of
the ‘terrible health care problem’. It’s clear they
see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in
the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”
The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack
of a moral compass and mounting political impotence.
The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the
Democrats have done is immense. But the damage
liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the
Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to
walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back
alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots
movements, no matter how marginal such support may be.
If we do not take a stand soon we must prepare for the
rise of a frightening protofascist movement, one that
is already gaining huge ground among the permanently
unemployed, a frightened middle class and frustrated
low-wage workers. We are, even more than Glenn Beck or
tea-party protesters, responsible for the gusts
fanning the flames of right-wing revolt because we
have failed to articulate a credible alternative.
A shift to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader, along
with genuine grass-roots movements, will not be a
quick fix. It will require years in the wilderness. We
will again be told by the Democrats that the
least-worse candidate they select for office is better
than the Republican troll trotted out as an
alternative. We will be bombarded with slick
commercials about hope and change and spoken to in a
cloying feel-your-pain language. We will be made
afraid. But if we again acquiesce we will be reduced
to sad and pathetic footnotes in our accelerating
transformation from a democracy to a totalitarian
corporate state. Isolation and ridicule—ask Nader or
McKinney—is the cost of defying power, speaking truth
and building movements. Anger at injustice, as Martin
Luther King wrote, is the political expression of
love. And it is vital that this anger become our own.
We have historical precedents to fall back upon.
“Here in the United States, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to
spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name,” the
late historian and activist Howard Zinn said in a
lecture a year ago at Binghamton University. “Millions
of people in the United States read socialist
newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress
and socialist members of state legislatures. You know,
there were like fourteen socialist chapters in
Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who
stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma
Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair.
Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be
restored.”
Social change does not come through voting. It is
delivered through activism, organizing and
mobilization that empower groups to confront the
hegemony of the corporate state and the power elite.
The longer socialism is identified with the
corporatist policies of the Democratic Party, the
longer we allow the right wing to tag Obama as a
socialist, the more absurd and ineffectual we become.
The right-wing mantra of “Obama the socialist,”
repeated a few days ago to a room full of Georgia
Republicans, by Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. speaker
of the House, is discrediting socialism itself.
Gingrich, who looks set to run for president, called
Obama the “most radical president” the country had
seen in decades. “By any standard of government
control of the economy, he is a socialist,” Gingrich
said. If only the critique were true.
The hypocrisy and ineptitude of the Democrats become,
in the eyes of the wider public, the hypocrisy and
ineptitude of the liberal class. We can continue to
tie our own hands and bind our own feet or we can
break free, endure the inevitable opprobrium, and
fight back. This means refusing to support the
Democrats. It means undertaking the laborious work of
building a viable socialist movement. It is the only
alternative left to save our embattled open society.
We can begin by sending a message to the Green Party,
McKinney and Nader. Let them know they are no longer
alone.
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