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Today's
Stories
July
17, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations
is Must Reading
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War
Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe:
Coffin Bombs in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP,
But a Movement in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
July
15, 2004
Heather
Williams
McMissing
the Point: Supersize Me Crashes on Its Message
Werther
Iraq: Follow the Money
Tom
Crumpacker
The Birds of Guantanamo
Brian
Cloughley
What Does the Bush Regime Object To?
Bill
Christison
Reorganize the CIA? Of Course,
But...
July
14, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Chronicle of a Nomination Foretold:
the Green Deceivers
Neve
Gordon
Of Socrates and the Apartheid Wall
Diane
Christian
The Priesthood of Death
Stefan
Wray
Who Benefits from Missing Data at Los Alamos Nuclear Lab?
Josh
Frank
The Nader / Dean Debate
Conn
Hallinan
Divide and Conquer as Imperial Rules
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Bring My Brother Home!: Class, War
and Education
Website
of the Day
Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of US Empire
July
13, 2004
Ray
McGovern
The CIA and Iraq: an Intelligence
Debacle...and Worse
Mark
Donham
The Sierra Club's Inexplicable Treatment of Cynthia McKinney
Ben
Tripp
Politus Interruptis: With Friends Like
These, Who Needs Electorates?
Mark
Gaffney
Slipping Towards Armageddon: Israel
in Iraq
Dave
Lindorff
Osama Wins! Election Postponed!
Chris
White
Double Think: the Bedrock of Marine
Indoctrination
July
10 / 12, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel
Janine
Pommy Vega
Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against
War
Sherry
Wolf
From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassen
A Transfer of Power, Sort Of
Michael
Donnelly
How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004
Stanton
/ Madsen
Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda?
Richard
Lichtman
The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology
Gila
Svirsky
Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall
Kurt
Nimmo
Clinton's Life
Toni
Solo
Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means
Ron
Jacobs
The Black Panthers and the Rest
Camelo
Ruiz Marrero
Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize
Omar
Barghouti
Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance
Poets'
Basement
Curtis and Albert
July
9, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Carlos Delgado on Deck: Blue Jays Slugger
Stands Up Against War
Justin
Delacour
Wishing Kerry Would Shut Up About
Latin America
Robert
Fisk
Iraq in Reverse: Martial Laws Fuel Insurgency
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Two Congresses and a Funeral
William
S. Lind
The October Surprises
Sibel
Edmonds
Our Broken System: John Ashcroft's War on Truth
Ron
Jacobs
Reading Tea Leaves: What Vietnam Tells Us About Iraq's Future
Gary
Leupp
The Lie That Will Not Die: Cheney and
the Iraq/al-Qaeda Link
July
8, 2004
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Inexplicable John McCain
Toufic
Haddad
Protesting Israel's Apartheid Wall:
a Letter from the Hunger Strikers' Tent
Dave
Lindorff
Liberation as Martial Law
Joshua
Frank
The Fall: How Beltway Dems Sank Howard
Dean
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush & Cheney Play the Hitler Card
James
Petras
The Truth About Jimmy Carter
July
7, 2004
John
Chuckman
Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence
of Meaning
Virginia
Tilley
A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's
Hunger Strike
Susan
Martinez
A Letter to Bill Cosby
Mickey
Z
Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade
Michael
Donnelly
Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire
Sean
Donahue
Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown
Diane
Christian
Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq
July
6, 2004
Lisa
Viscidi
Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans
Risk Lives to Reach El Norte
Marc
Norton
The Felonious Five Ride Again: the
Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants
James
Brooks
Chemical Warfare on the West Bank?
Ray
McGovern
Porter Goss as CIA Director?
William
Cook
Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...
July
5, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept.
11, July 4 and Systematic Torture
Chris
White
A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning
of Independence Day
Joe
Bageant
Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July
Robert
Jensen
Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore
Misses About the Empire
Kathy
Kelly
"Two Days an' a Wake-Up"
July
3 / 4, 2004
Elaine
Cassel
Bush's Police State and Independence
Day
Stan
Goff
ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive"
Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti
Snehal
Shingavi
"We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak
Out
Bruce
Anderson
The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens
Sharon
Smith
Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush"
Josh
Frank
Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates
Robert
Fisk
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing
Joe
Bageant
Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite!
Brian
Cloughley
Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine
Justin
Delacour
The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons
William
S. Lind
Saudi Spillover
Linda
S. Heard
A Joke Called "Justice"
Greg
Moses
"It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't
Back Down
Ron
Jacobs
"Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?"
Toni
Solo
Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There
Dan
Nagengast
Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It?
Stew
Albert
Brando, a Personal Recollection
Dave
Zirin
From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for
Our Brando
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Progressive Case for Dodgeball
Steven
Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad
The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Ford and Davies
Website
of the Day
Global Peace Solution
July
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise
of the Green Party
Douglas
Valentine
Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism
Gary
Leupp
"Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities
Lee
Ballinger
Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights
Robert
Fisk
Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly
CounterPunch
Wire
"What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's
Arraignment
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right
Saul
Landau
Buzz Words and Venezuela
July 1, 2004
Katherine
van Wormer
Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in
His Method
Joe
Bageant
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?
William
James Martin
The Dogma of Richard Perle
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Evacuation Moment
Robert
Fisk
Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq
Alan
Maass
Green Party in Reverse
Website
of the Day
Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?
June
30, 2004
Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson
Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush
Tariq
Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq
Jennifer
Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees
Douglas
Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen
The Quiet American
David
Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass
Roger
Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq
Stan
Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's
War on Art
Henry
David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming
Ben
Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
July 17 / 18, 2004
When
Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry
Whatever
Happened to the Last Radical in Berkeley to Take Off His Tie?
By
LENNI BRENNER
Ralph Nader's liberal opponents call
him an egomaniac. Unfortunately for that argument, the media
takes him seriously, giving him significant coverage. And so
do the Democratic and Republican hacks. The Democrats are using
every trick, legal and beyond, to keep him off state ballots,
while the GOP is suddenly converted to opening them to such independents.
The Democrats are in a pit of their own digging. Kerry's clear
strategy is to keep the loyalty of his party's hawks. He calls
for more troops in Iraq and panders to Zionism's ultra-right.
But that risks a significant number of antiwar activists, presently
frightened at the thought of another Bush administration, realizing
that no one can take them seriously if they preach peace and
then vote for a candidate who talks about staying in Iraq for
the duration and denounces a 14 to 1 International Court of Justice
decision condemning Sharon's wall.
Already some antiwar liberals
are trying to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. Noam
Chomsky and Howard Zinn want us to vote for Kerry in contested
states, and for Nader in states 'safe' for Kerry or Bush. They
want Kerry to know that he faces numerically significant opposition
if and when he replaces Bush's fanaticism with his rational imperialism.
But if Kerry is so criminal that Chomsky, in safe Massachusetts,
can't swallow voting for him, even as a lesser evil, wherein
does he get off telling people in Florida that it is mandatory
to vote for a rogue?
It will come as a shock to
liberals, but, come November, there will be no 'against Bush'
lever in any polling booth in the US of A. You must vote for
a candidate. And for only 1 candidate for 1 office, not an unreasonable
ratio. So which candidate are Chomsky and Zinn for? For Kerry?
How can that be? They will vote for Nader. For Nader? They tell
people to vote for Kerry where it counts. Their double-gaited
electoral stance reveals a stark truth: They are anti-imperialist
intellectuals without an anti-imperialist party of their own.
Indeed, such liberals signal Kerry, yet again, that he doesn't
have to take them seriously.
Wool sellers know wool buyers.
Dealing with everyone from Arabs to Zionists has taught Kerry
and the Democratic establishment to ask themselves a basic question
re everyone: If we don't give the beggars what they want, what
will they do to hurt us? And what will these "crackpot realist"
liberals do to hurt him? They still call for votes for him where
he needs their support on election day. That's all that matters
to him. Even the sparrows know that he doesn't have to give these
folks a damned thing.
Nader contributes to antiwar
voters' confusion. He frequently impresses the media as the one
truth-teller in the race, equally hard on both capitalist parties.
Then up pops Kerry's best advisor in Kerry's campaign against
Bush. Nader gave an interview to Pat Buchanan. "The subservience
of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military
policy has been consistent. Both parties concede their independent
judgment to the pro-Israel lobbies in this country because they
perceive them as determining the margin in some state elections
and as sources of funding".
Nader told Washington's National
Press Club that "This city is composed of people who know
a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and they keep private
their concerns, and they make these public statements that are
like ditto statements. You know the pattern; many of you have
seen it again and again". Then he whirled around and sent
an open letter, urging Kerry to choose John Edwards as his
VP. In effect, Nader certified the ex-trial lawyer as a consumer-champion,
committed on principle to their right to sue corporations harming
them. Nader is incorrect in calling the bipartisan Washington
establishment "puppets" of Israel. To a certainty,
they take Zionist bribes, AKA campaign contributions, speakers
fees, jobs for the family with Zionist-run organizations, etc.
But Zionist lucre only helps explain US policy re the Middle
East. Bush, Kerry and Edwards oppose Castro and Chavez for broader
American imperialist reasons.
However there is no doubt that
bipartisan support for Israel is worthy of Nader's contempt.
It is a bastion of ethnic and religious legal inequality. Given
Democratic crimes re the Middle East, alone, Nader is pathetic
in aiding Kerry. Edwards may be for all kinds of wonderful things
for consumers, but the 7/9 issue of New York's Forward reminded
us that "Edwards scored high marks among pro-Israel Democrats
for his forceful anti-terror language in the Iowa debates. The
North Carolinian ... tried to leverage that support into a bid
for hawkish Jewish voters in the March 2 New York primary, his
last stand against Kerry".
The pro-Democratic weekly is
being delicate. Hawks are significant numerically among Brooklyn's
Orthodox. Their votes are important, but they are also a prime
source of the "funding" Nader referred to. The 3/15/96
Forward put it more candidly: "Once upon a time, Orthodox
Jews were looked upon as exotic creatures in the political whirl.
Candidates went to visit local rebbes for blessings, treating
the event like a little adventure. Now, thanks to fund-raisers
such as Milton Balkany and Noach Dear, who have pumped hundreds
of thousands of dollars into the GOP and the Democratic Party
respectively, the Orthodox community is seen as a money tree".
Edwards voted to authorize
the Iraq invasion. Whatever money he got for ordinary Americans
in the courts, it can't buy him forgiveness for authorizing Bush
to commit murder on the battlefield.
Moreover, Nader is running
as an individual, but Edwards isn't. He is a leader of a party
with a record re the Middle East. In 1948, the patronage of Harry
Truman was essential for the creation of Israel. Carter supported
the Shah of Iran's torture regime to the bitter end and then
gave him asylum. He started the military patronage of Islamic
fundamentalism in Afghanistan and 9/11 was the ultimate blowback
of his crime. Clinton kept 10,000 troops in Saudi Arabia, defending
the male chauvinist absolute monarchy. Additionally, Edwards'
party shares responsibility for Republican administrations' crimes
in the ME and elsewhere, via its control of houses of congress
under GOP Presidents.
Edwards has been a member of
the Senate Intelligence Committee for three and a half years.
Whoever quarterbacks Washington's imperial team, congressional
intelligence committees are its tackles and guards. A really
good trial lawyer wouldn't have too much trouble convincing a
jury that a senator who voted to unleash a politically rabid
pitbull committed a felony. Nader didn't authorize Bush to go
to war. Kerry and Edwards did. But his endorsement of a senator
who did obliges us to be his critical supporters. Nader was famous
during the Vietnam war era for exposure of the automobile industry's
safety record. But I don't recall him ever organizing against
that war or subsequent wars.
Simply put, Nader's activist
career has been as a reformer. As with most reformers, domestic
issues are his priority. He is used to working with Democratic
liberals in congress and elsewhere. When he talks about getting
the troops out of Iraq "in six months", he is trying
to convince those famously reasonable folks that Kerry needs
to adopt his reasonable 6 months program to beat Bush. Given
his advise to Kerry re Edwards, there is a worst-case scenario
possibility. If a situation arose, just before the election,
where pollsters showed that the potential vote for him was going
to be the decisive factor, Nader could deal with Kerry per Chomsky
and Zinn's strategy. But, more likely, Kerry will save Nader
from disgrace by constantly exposing himself as reactionary.
There is another factor that
can move Nader to the left, internationally.
Pete Camejo, his vice-presidential
running mate, for all his nonsense about Edwards, was a major
leader of the 60s antiwar movement. He was prominent in the Young
Socialist Alliance, and the Socialist Workers Party, at that
time avowedly Trotskyist. With time, the SWP became the little
wheel that made the big wheel of the Vietnam antiwar movement
go round. There were lessons to be learned from that experience.
Hopefully Pete can advance Nader's education in this regard.
If you look at the NY Times
of the day, you find little on the SWP. But if you ask people
deeply involved in organizing the largest demos, they will testify
to the truth of my statements. Indeed, from 1985 until his death,
I worked with Kwame Ture, historically known by his birth name,
Stokely Carmichael. He was 2nd only to King as a Black civil
rights leader, and certainly he was its greatest organizer. He
evaluated them in 1 of our discussions: "I know that by
the end of the war the SWP was the dominant factor in the antiwar
movement. But they never provided its emotion. But The SWP had
only ca. 400 members in the early 60s. The party understood that
it had to work with antiwar Democrats, pacifists, Stalinists
and union bureaucrats if it was to build a movement with the
numbers required to stop the war."
While it criticized antiwar
Democrats in its weekly, which few outside its ranks read, its
peace group, the National Peace Action Coalition, never did.
In the interest of unity, NPAC went no further than making sure
that the giant demos didn't adapt to the liberals' Democratic
electoral orientation.
Students for a Democratic Society
was the 1st group to successfully call a national antiwar demo.
But rival factions within diverted it away from a prime focus
on the war. Pacifists, the Communist Party and the SWP replaced
SDS as the movement work horses. In 1968, liberals backed Gene
McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy in the primaries against Hubert Humphrey
and called for "negotiations now" with the Viet Cong.
The SWP understood that Washington had no right to negotiate
anything. Its slogan was "out now!" When they would
unite for a demo with peace coalitions influenced by the Communist
Party, which was in the Democratic Party, they made sure that
the demo didn't endorse either slogan, but allowed individual
speakers to do so.
The problem with the pacifists'
was their strategy of sit-downs and arrests.
Some of their demos got enormous
publicity. But they would attract 50,000, while NPAC-sponsored
demos pulled in hundreds of thousands. The CP tended not to like
demos in the autumn of election years, national or local, preferring
to support anybody-but-Nixon Democrats. The CP had strong influence
in several unions which did likewise. NPAC demonstrated during
election seasons, with the pacifists and new elements like the
Black Panthers, California's Peace and Freedom Party and the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Soon the YSA surpassed the
CP's youth on the campuses.
The SWP also made union involvement
a crucial priority and built up its own clientele among union
bureaucrats. Eventually even the CP's unions realized that NPAC
was best at building the giant peaceful demos their members wanted.I
vividly remember a 1971 planning meet. The CP wanted to support
a Sunday Washington demo with sit-downs. The SWP favored a peaceful
Saturday demo. Suddenly a CP union leader got up and declared
that he had to go for the SWP proposal. His workers preferred
Saturday because they didn't want to get arrested, and they wanted
to get back to their home town on Saturday nite so they could
rest on Sunday for work Monday morning. The result was that the
Saturday, April 24, 1971 demos were the biggest in US history,
500,000 in DC and 300,000 in SF.
The problem with the SWP's
strategy was that few people learned any deep lessons from the
success of the movement. Most came to the marches as Democrats,
heard a lot of Democrats, Black nationalists, pacifists, an occasional
SWP speaker, and walked away with the same ideology they came
with. When America's direct military's involvement in the war
ended in 1973, and the body bags stopped coming home, the hundreds
of thousands went back to their tents.
The SWP focused on organizing
giant lowest common denominator demos, at the expense of educating
marchers, because it feared that pumping up the ideological tone
of the movement would cause splits. Certainly the union bureaucrats
and liberal Democrats would have walked away if the movement's
ranks were educated to understand that the Democrats and Republicans
jointly murdered over a million Vietnamese, in defense of capitalism.
Such an educational process
would have had to have been carefully constructed to win over
the ranks, so that the piecards and liberals would leave in isolation.
The negative side of the SWP strategy was clearly apparent in
the late 70s, when the SWP organized a movement against the Shah
and US patronage of him, a cause as worthy as getting the US
out of Vietnam. The union hacks weren't interested and the SWP
was only able to attract a few thousand marchers, American students,
committed older radicals and Iranian students.
The SWP's cautious approach
in the 60s produced some absurdities. The party's older leaders
went thru the 30s, when workers would 'dress up,' in imitation
of the rich for May Day demonstrations. So Pete and its other
public speakers always wore suits, white shirts and ties. This
went on, he told me in 1968, until they realized that young people,
who wore jeans and never put on a tie if they could avoid it,
began to wonder about them. In the SF Bay Area, SWP leaders and
plainclothes cops were the only ones at demos who still dressed
in the traditional bourgeois 'respectable' fashion.
The party forbade smoking marijuana.
They legitimately worried that the FBI would plant it in their
halls and then raid them. But again they looked strange as millions
of youths took up the herb. While some members would discreetly
sneak off to enjoy a puff or 2, Pete told me that he was probably
the only radical under 40 in Berkeley who hadn't smoked it. Their
'up tight' social conservatism was the basis of Stokely's apt
remark about their never providing the emotions of the movement.
I would add neither the ideology nor the emotion.
Eventually the SWP disintegrated
intellectually. Pete was its presidential candidate in 1976 but
left it some time afterwards. Others walked out individually
or in groups, or were expelled after it officially abandoned
its historic Trotskyist ideology. It still exists and is running
a presidential candidate, but it has led no movements nor played
a significant role in them since the 70s.
It is a bare presence in today's
left.
I'm not familiar with the issues
involved in Camejo's leaving the SWP, nor have I followed his
evolution into a progressive stock broker and Green activist.
But it extraordinary that he
is now such an important figure on the left end of America's
political spectrum. The last radical in Berkeley to take off
his tie, absolutely the last to smoke a joint, yet he is certainly
representative of the best of that era. Pete was a prime figure
in the SWP and, for all his personality quirks, and its mistakes,
it provided the practical ecumenical leadership of the antiwar
movement.
Instead of praising Kerry's
crime-partner, Nader would do better to heed his colleague on
his own ticket. Earlier this year Camejo initiated The Avocado
Declaration:
"We do not believe it
is possible to defeat the 'greater' evil by supporting a shamefaced
version of the same evil. We believe it is precisely by openly
and sharply confronting the two major parties that the policies
of the corporate interests these parties represent can be set
back and defeated .... A resolution was passed in March of 2003
calling for 'Unequivocal Support' to George Bush for the war
in Iraq. It had the full support of the Democratic Party leadership.
Even Democratic 'doves' like Kucinich would not vote against
the resolution. Only a handful (11) of congressional representatives
voted against the motion for 'unequivocal support' to George
Bush .... In no case did the Democratic Party as an institution
support, call for, or help mobilize popular forces for peace
and respecting international law. Yet large numbers of its rank
and file and many lower level elected officials against their
party participated and promoted antiwar protests .... The Democratic
Party has unleashed a campaign to divide and conquer those opposed
to the pro-war policies. On one hand it tries to appear sympathetic
to antiwar sentiment while on the other it tries to silence voices
opposed to Bush's policies ....
"Opposition is rising
against Bush. The overwhelming majority of the world is against
Bush's war policies. The resistance to the occupation in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the inability of the US media and government
to prevent the world from hearing the truth about these events,
is weakening Bush's standing. The corporate interests and their
media apparently want to make a great effort to get Bush elected,
but if this becomes too difficult, the Democratic Party will
be prepared to appear as an 'opposition' that will continue the
essence of Bush's policy with new justifications, modifications
and adjusted forms .
"The only force that could
upset the general direction set by the bipartisan policies voted
over the last few years would be a destabilizing mass development
inside the United States along with world public opinion. This
occurred during the war in Vietnam and forced a reversal of US
policy .... The rise of a large, uncontrollable opposition within
the United States and around the world became a critical brake
on the pro-war policies. An entire generation was starting to
deeply question the direction of the United States in world affairs.
"The Democrats and Republicans,
reflecting the opinion of the major corporate leaders and strategists,
decided they had no choice but to pull back and concede military
defeat in Vietnam because the developing division in U.S. society
threatened to result in the emergence of a massive independent
political force". (www.AvocadoEducationProject.org)
A suggestion to Nader: As 1
of your prime goals is to educate the broad public, and the media
doesn't expect you to be expert on all things below the sun,
where ever appropriate, refer them to Pete when they ask you
questions about foreign policy and militarism. That will impress
the press, put pressure on both ends of the bipartisan hustle,
and increase your vote in all 50 states.
It is to be understood that
my critique of Nader and Camejo is within a matrix of congratulations
to them for taking independence from the Democratic Party as
far as they have. We who have believed that a mass socialist
party is necessary for profound egalitarian change in America,
have not produced anything resembling such a feat. There are
several socialist groups running competing presidential candidates,
but none of them is known to the broad public. As far as it is
concerned, Nader and Camejo are the lefts in the race, and if
it learns anything of enduring importance about politics in 2004,
it will be by observing their successes and failures.
Beyond that, all of the above
elements should agree to start discussions immediately after
the election, on how to build an independent party "of the
people, by the people and for the people". Nader's problems
getting on the ballot in many states confirms a great truth:
One guy, not even one famous for his integrity, can't beat the
devil on his own. A principled party, an electoral coalition,
call it what you will, is the mandatory requirement for success
in the long run in a world inhabited only by winners and losers.
Lenni Brenner is the editor of 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis and a contributor
to Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new CounterPunch collection
Serpents
in the Garden: Encounters with Culture and Sex, where he
recounts his personal role in 1961 in liberating Dylan from the
arftistic and political blind alley of petit-bourgeois boll-weevilism.
He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for July 10 / 12, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel
Janine
Pommy Vega
Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against
War
Sherry
Wolf
From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassen
A Transfer of Power, Sort Of
Michael
Donnelly
How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004
Stanton
/ Madsen
Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda?
Richard
Lichtman
The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology
Gila
Svirsky
Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall
Kurt
Nimmo
Clinton's Life
Toni
Solo
Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means
Ron
Jacobs
The Black Panthers and the Rest
Camelo
Ruiz Marrero
Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize
Omar
Barghouti
Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance
Poets'
Basement
Curtis and Albert
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