Rakesh Narpat Bhandari wrote:
>
> >
> What would Secty of State Dolan recommend? You have to judge to Nader
> by whom he surrounds himself with (even Bhagwati likes Nader himself
> according to Doug).
This is the sort of thing I meant when I suggested that very intelligent people can say the most stupid things. It is bizarre to talk aboutn what a Nader administration would do, since there never will be a Nader administration. The issue is how to build a left movement in the U.S., not what policy the U.S. will follow, since leftists at this time cannot possibly affect U.S. policy. There exist many barriers to the creation of the left, but at least two were threatened by the Nader campaign (independently of anything Nader actually stood for). One was the hegemony on the "left" of the progressive wing (or allegedly progressive wing) of the Democratic Party. That hegemony must be destroyed -- "soft" leftists must be made to see the hopelessness of supporting the DP. Part of achieving that goal is making it impossible for a Democratic candidate to win elections, at every level from township clerk to president. Another barrier is the loneliness of leftists in the U.S., the lack of any machinery by means ofm which they can find each other. So every vote for Nader was a message sent out around the country that here was another refuser of the DP: I did not vote *for* Nader, I voted for him only as an act of solidarity with other Nader voters. The size of the vote for Nader was a partial index of the potential strength _at this time_ of the left movement in the U.S. And what counted was not Nader but Nader voters (and what they thought they were voting for).
Nader has already said in no uncertain terms that
> he opposes the WTO
The WTO, like the Pentagon, the CIA, and the New York Times, is merely one more arm of u.s. imperialism. Trying to understand why any alleged leftist would support it calls for peering more deeply into human nature than I care to venture.
Carrol