absolutely! anyone to the left (and I do NOT include Clinton here) will be attacked in every possible way, including actual force if seen as necessary the right. When Jesse Jackson made remarks about "Hymie town" (on or off the record) should have known ahead of time that it would bring down a shit-storm. A left leader has to be totally and utterly "clean" -- but they'll dig up dirt about him or her anyway. Nader's clean, but he blew his chances to have an impact (a marginal one) by not taking the whole enterprise seriously.
Better would be to avoid the whole bit about relying on leaders. The point is not to promote leaders to to empower a mass movement at the grass roots. If there's a mass movement calling for social change, the foibles of the leaders will fade by comparison...
>3. Capital accumulation. Someone in the Bremmer
>debate mentioned the accumulation of debts. Let us not
>forget that at a mild 3% inflation rate the real value
>of a debt will erode by 50% over about 21 years or
>so. So "industrial capital" has many strategies for
>coping with debt accumulation: e.g., paying the debt
>off, letting inflation word down its real value, and
>bankruptcy.
the problem is that sustained inflation implies higher nominal interest rates, which compensates the rentiers for any losses due to inflation.
>But as I used to tell people when I was writing about
>the oil industry: you can't nationalize the oil
>industry without first nationalizing the goverment.
that is, _democratizing_ the government.
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html