Justin:
> >substitute for national health. Ralph is is on the side of the angels, a
> >real American hero. He has probably done as much for as many Americans as
> >any living human being.
>
Doug:
> Except for the folks who worked for him who wanted to join a union. Or the
> editor of Multinational Monitor who was told not to run stuff about the CIA
> and its relationship to multinationals.
OK, I'm not saying he's perfect, and I think these are serious failures. They don't obliviate 30+ years of effective, high profile anticorporate grassroots activism taht has led to a great deal of concrete reform which has been tremendously beneficial to lots of Americans. I remind you that Engels was a capitalist, partner in Erman and Engels, a Manchester cotton firms. Do you suppose he was particularly nice to the workers in his mills?
Or that embarrassing half-assed
> presidential campaign in 1996 (which might be partly explained by Ralph's
> reluctance to file financial disclosure forms that would reveal that he
> *is* supported by trial lawyers after all).
Obviously you think taht being supported by the trial lawyers would be a very bad thing. Go ahead, support support deform, see if I care. The campaign wasn't much, but maybe Ralph thought that a symbolic campaign runa gainst the idae of money in politics ought to be low budget.
> Litigation is a classically American approach to politics - individual
> adversaries duking out a private solution to what should be done publicly
> and collectively.
Ralph established the PIRGS to organize in the grassroots for legislative reform, which is collective action and indeed has been a training ground for a lot of left activistim. He propagandizes like crazy, writing useful books, giving those boring speeches. He doesn't just litigate.
As to litigation, yeah, it's got limits. It's also necessary. We needed the civil right movement. We wouldn't have had it ina nything like the form we did without Brown v. Board of Ed. Of course I'm biased. I'm going to be a lawyer.
He seems to have no systematic analysis of anything -
> just one little detail after another in an endless and tedious catalogue.
His systematic analysis is pretty much like Chomsky's: the big boys have too much political power because they have too much economic power and they use in their own interests which oppose ours. That's a pretty sound basis. As I said, he's no theorist. He's still done more good for more Americans thana nyone living. I can't think of the next nearest candidate.
> One of his rants before I heard before hitting the off button was about how
> utility companies overcharge their customers. Yes, no doubt they do, but is
> the most urgent problem facing the U.S. right now overly expensive energy?
>
No, but what's wrong with trying to stop utility companies from overcharging?
--jks