Chris is great of African issues. <clowe at igc.org>
portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left.
>From Chris Lowe Re: Lorna Salzman on Nader <http://lists.portside.org/mailman/htdig/portside/Week-of-Mon-20040628/006151.html>
About Lorna Salzman's accusations of undemocratic practices internal to the Green Party I am unable to judge, beyond observing that her smears against the motives of people like Medea Benjamin and Ted Glick who disagree with her make me distrust the quality and fairness of her thinking. However, in one respect I know she is wrong. Ralph Nader is playing footsie not just with conservatives but with racist, patriarchal reactionaries, to wit, Patrick Buchanan.
The best that might be said of this, speaking of undemocratic small-party politics, is that a cynically pragmatic Nader hopes to get the ballot lines in a few states retained by the Reform Party that the Buchanan/Fulani alliance stole from its real grassroots founders and supporters in 2000. However, an interview printed in Buchanan's magazine shows Nader going further. The URL is supplied below.
Three items in the interview should particularly give progressives pause. First (because it is the first item in the interview) Nader advances a conspiratorialist rather than a political or political-economic analysis of Israeli influence in the U.S. and U.S. interests in supporting Israel against the human rights of Palestinians. When Nader speaks of U.S. officials as "puppets" and the Israeli government as their "puppet- masters" to an anti-semite like Buchanan, he is playing with matches around a gas can. Such puerile thinking can do nothing that can advance the cause of Palestinian rights or building an effective movement to change U.S. policy on Palestine/Israel.
Second, Nader's opposition to "free trade" as defined by corporate interests appears to lead him into a backward nationalist position on immigration and immigrant workers, one whose practical effects would be racist. The people in the Buchanan camp to whom he reaches out on this basis include some of the most unashamed open bigots in the country, who encourage their followers to adopt a politics of fear. Nader appears either unaware of or uninterested in the progressive shift of the AFL- CIO away from anti-immigrant-worker politics. Nor does he seem to understand that there is experience with employer sanctions which demonstrates that they have a racist effect not only on undocumented immigrant workers, but on legal immigrants and on U.S. citizens whom employers identify as coming from categories they regard as risky.
Third, in "reaching out to conservatives" of Buchanan's reactionary stripe, Nader sheds some of his coyness about matters relating to gender and sexuality. Of particular note is his statement that he opposes what he calls "feticide," i.e. abortion of fetuses, apparently as distinct from earlier developmental stages during a woman's pregnancy. How exactly he defines those stages and what he means by "fetus" is unclear. But it is clear that his use of the term "fetus" is idiosyncratic, and that enacting his position would require a considerable constriction of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade. It also raises some interesting questions about what a Nader-formulated universal health insurance plan would look like with respect to women's reproductive health issues.
The full interview can be found at:
<http://www.amconmag.com/2004_06_07/index1.html>
Chris Lowe Portland, Oregon
Michael Pugliese