--- frank scott <frank at marin.cc.ca.us> wrote:
> "California's Greens reject Nader's bid for state
> ballot"
>
> yay!...now the dems only have to worry about the
> egomanical leonard
> peltier taking votes away from whatsisname...
>
> fs
SDF: look, I realize that Frank Scott is probably saying this all tongue-in-cheek, but, to dethrone the reigning mythology if I may;
As if Kerry were ENTITLED to the votes of those of us who were not going to vote for him ANYWAY.
As if eliminating OUR choice(s) for President was going to make us love Kerry MORE. "The Democrats deprived me of a choice, now I think I'm going to reward them with a Kerry vote..."
***************************
Why I won't be voting for Kerry this year by Samuel Day Fassbinder
1) Kerry's most unpardonable sin this year was to silence the antiwar contingent within the Democrats. The war needs serious debate this year; don't expect it to happen under Kerry, as the Democrats will keep us busy fending off those evil Republicans, said to be sliding into insurgency mode as their President's reelection is looking increasingly unlikely, and everyone will feel obligated to leap behind the Democrat agenda, as they do today. The world is in emergency mode today; Kerry's message is "make the emergency worse."
For more well-informed (Democrat, even) opinion as regards the Repubs, see the post at
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/53
2) All of Kerry's promises as regards social programs, environmental protections etc. have been weasel-worded so as to make them practically meaningless when it comes to "keeping his promises." So amidst all the talk on that Greens for Kerry website
about things Kerry can do, it doesn't really come down to much as far as the future is concerned, past the promise that "Kerry will actually fund programs which have been mandated." One of the most sinister aspects of the Kerry "promise" as regards social programs, BTW, is his near-total reliance upon the device of "tax breaks" to push corporations to foot the bill for what little support the working class can expect under a Kerry Administration.
3) Even those promises are in jeopardy. For the current economic situation is likely to come to a head, with the slow collapse of the dollar appearing to be in process already:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jul2004/nf20040729_9971_db045.htm
Kerry will be pressured to make good on his promises to further buttress the military industrial complex, against his shrinking ability to do so (given the inevitable fall in the value of the dollar that $8 trillion in national debt will engender) and with the connivance of "Kerry's neo-cons," military fantasists with the Kerry Team:
http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/Opinion2.asp?ArticleID=124917
This is what makes Kerry's silencing of the antiwar movement within the Democrats all that more egregious.
For any moves a John Kerry might make, to do anything outside of the Republican consensus, will be limited by his need to keep the Democrats down so as to maintain the troops in Iraq. Kerry will be put under immense pressure to keep his alliance with Halliburton strong (yes Kerry did accept Halliburton money, plenty more than Nader accepted from the Republicans as a whole), and maintain his macho posture whilst the dollar crumbles, interest rates go up to contain inflation, and investors run for cover by putting the financial bubbles into raw materials and real estate.
After all, the war, which costs $5 billion a month, won't make much else affordable, especially if there's a drawdown in the dollar. So the anti-war effort is crucial to success with all the other issues. Pro-Kerry liberals like to say that we non-voters-for-Kerry "have a few (petty) issues" with Kerry -- but not all issues are equal.
4) With the failure of the Ralph Nader campaign to even get on the ballot in high-stakes places like California:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0811-01.htm
one has to wonder whether democracy at the Federal level is possible anymore (even conceding the unlikelihood that some immediate revolution in public opinion would garner a plurality in favor of Nader's campaign). Will we always be obligated to choose between two white male millionaires who belong to the Skull and Bones fraternity, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group, as we are this year? We can only hope for a later resurgence in democratic spirit to subvert the power structure and break through the power monopolies.
One of the most despicable acts of the Democratic Party this year has been to massively interfere with Ralph Nader's attempts to obtain ballot access. This has been motivated by the mistaken notion that "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush," and the implicit notion that "Kerry is entitled to our votes." Kerry isn't entitled to our votes. He will have to earn them, and so far, he hasn't earned mine. The Democrats' depriving me of any real choice will not make me like Kerry more.
We will all, at the least, have to wait until after the Kerry Administration has had its honeymoon with the voters before seeing an antiwar movement -- for only an antiwar movement will start to save the planet from the damage we are about to do to it -- by which time things will have deteriorated further.
5) I reject the whole liberal Democrat agenda, despite my approval of its simplest moral overtones. I approve of the attempts to resolve immediate social problems such as environmental devastation and poverty through immediate government action, but I think the actions that ought to be taken are actions that will restructure society rather than maintain it while applying the sort of liberal Democrat band-aids that are becoming in shorter and shorter supply as corporate hegemony becomes stronger and stronger.
6) Being a "progressive" doesn't seem to have much of a connection to "progress," as the moral universe of US politics seems to have regressed quite dramatically since 1980. (Think about it -- Kerry's politics compare well with those of Barry Goldwater when he ran against LBJ, only Kerry runs in 2004, whereas Goldwater was a 1964 candidate.) Rather, being a "progressive" means acting out of a political nostalgia for the values of 1970s politics. Real progress would mean creating a global, sustainable society -- what I call "ecosocialism." In other words, we will have to create a society where "progress" becomes obsolete, and is replaced by "continuance." Most work in the ecosocialist society will not be "progressive," either -- it will entail the cleaning up of the ecological and social messes we are creating to this very day, and the down-scaling of material ambitions to preclude further sh*tting-in-the-nest.
7) Liberal Democrats typically claim that they favor "incremental change," and that revolution "won't work." Au contraire, I hold to the opinion that revolution is the only thing that can work, that most of the world's effective social progress is due to the efforts third-party uprisings and revolutions, and that the Democrat's policies of "incremental change" have brought us nothing beyond a) the steady creep backward in politics since 1980, and b) "star power" hucksters such as Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson. Liberal Democrat politics fails because it assumes that all political movement is to be achieved while preserving the capitalist system, the hegemony of huge multinational corporations, and the property system. As a result, no political movement occurs.
8) The liberal Democrat adherence to the philosophy of possessive individualism, which maintains that the world is a thing to be owned by individual people, marks the liberal Democrat's acquiescence in the dismantling of Earth's ecosystems. How much further will they be dismantled before humanity gives up its lesser concerns and revolutionizes itself to deal effectively with the threat the present-day, obsolete, social infrastructure poses to the ecology? Thus I cannot be a participant in any movement where that movement's possessive individualist values would doom my actions to ineffectuality.
We need to move world-society ASAP onto a basis of "sharing," and it's all a question of a) how badly the current emergency will expand and b) whether global society is flexible enough today to permit itself to engage emergency-sharing contingencies everywhere, appropriating the power of the rich and the corporations for the sake of survival, or whether we have all become so comfortable with genocide that we don't really care anymore.
In summary, I can't be a liberal Democrat, or a "progressive," because I don't believe what those people believe. And I won't vote for Kerry, because I don't think he represents any qualitative change from Bush and because the harm that Bush causes today will be just as harmful when Kerry is doing the dirty work.
I prefer to think carefully about protecting my family, my community, and my life from the onslaughts to come, rather than getting caught up in a Presidential race that appears (right now) to be of no consequence to me.
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