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Ralph Nader
from Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama
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.
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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. [emphasis added. – IW]
Filed under: Action Alert!, activism, afghanistan, Anti-War, Corporations, cynthia mckinney, Ecology, economy, election, Election 2008, energy, Global Warming, grassroots democracy, Green Party, Healthcare, international politics, president
I couldn’t agree more. I voted for McKinney, but at the polls people told me she was not on the ballot. I made them look up whether I could write her in and it turns out, yes! What bothers me is that so much of what Obama is doing now was predictable if you looked at his donors (a $200,000 fundraiser in the primary thrown by General Dynamics’ CEO?). His trip through the south with gaybashers. The undeveloped heath care policy and no real environmental policy. Sigh.