[THS] Chris Hedges: Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24889.htm

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama

By Chris Hedges

March 01, 2010 "Truthdig" - - 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 was 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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