Apparently both Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney will be participating in today’s the Oct. 23 Third Party Debate (7 pm, broadcast by C-SPAN). Last week they appeared on Democracy Now, where hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez gave them the opportunity to respond to some of the same questions that McBama was asked at the Hofstra debate last week.

What can I say, except these guys seem to be closer on the issues than McBama is. Maybe we should start calling them “McNader.” Not only do they seem to agree on almost everything, they seem to agree with the American majority about everything, too.

Nader even made a pitch for contributions to McKinney’s campaign, and the Green Party. And the support is not just one way. When I saw McKinney speak in Miami this past summer, I asked her to name some people she would consider nominating to the Supreme Court, and she mentioned Ralph Nader as one of her top choices. [BTW if Democrats feel electorally threatened by Nader, shouldn't they appoint him to the Court so he stops running for President?]

Given their virtual indistinguishability on the issues, I can only imagine the negative campaign ads that they would have to rely on to distinguish themselves.

Posted under Politics, Uncategorized

What is the Question?

The question has been raised (obviously elsewhere, but particularly in this forum) about who should should get the vote of undecided voters in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.  What I believe to be the Implicit underlying question is whether to vote for a 3rd-party candidate whose policies are more aligned with popular opinion, such as Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney.  The question should be somewhat more nuanced – not “Who should undecided voters vote for?”, but “Where should voters cast their ballot for a 3rd-party?”.  (For those who are having difficulty deciding between Obama or McCain, this response will likely not be helpful.)

Fellow contributor Uri Strauss continues to make the pitch to vote for Ralph Nader, based on the popularity of his platform and the agreement on “virtually everything” of the Democrat and Republican presidential platforms.  There is no question for him, and for many others, as to who to vote for – the two major parties offer few, if any, differences in policy, and therefore we should choose a 3rd-party candidate.

There is a critical assertion made in this argument which should be repudiated because, once repudiated, it would lead to more effective strategies for enacting popular policies in the country, and the world (by virtue of U.S. power).  That assertion is that the U.S. government is a constitutional democracy.  This assertion is false, both in theory and in practice, and left unrecognized, popular movements will face little, if any, electoral success.

Not Exactly a Democracy

The United States, institutionally, is a democratic representative government – not a democracy.  The difference is stark: a democracy is one in which the population decides policy.  A representative government is one in which (in theory) the population selects representatives to decide policy.  The historical necessities or difficulties of either form of government can be debated, but that there is a significant difference cannot, as it is a matter of fact.

The United States, in practice, is an undemocratic form of government, with representatives of the population beholden to the business/ownership class of the country on all significant policy issues.  This is almost indisputable to a majority of the population, as reflected in disapproval ratings of 75% for Congress, and a 27% approval rating for the President.  Overall trust in government is tied with the lowest point, measured in 1973, with only 26% of the population answering the question “are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way the nation is being governed” in the affirmative.   Yet another Gallup poll has the satisfaction with the current course of the country at 17%. These are not new (as the source graphs will show) and in a true democracy, would not be tolerated, and certainly not for such a long time.

Our Elections are Rigged

Additionally and unsurprisingly, elections for representatives are not free and democratic.  The Supreme Court has ruled that not only are wealthier citizens entitled to more “free speech”, but that corporations, the largest concentrations of wealth in the country, are allowed to use that wealth to influence elections.  That wealth is perhaps the most dominant factor in elections has been true for some time, however these decisions codified that truth.  Other non-legal forms of exclusion of potentially popular candidates compound the difficulty of being a valid candidate.   Because democracy depends on the exchange of information, and because the ability to convey information (via mail, radio, television) costs vast sums of money, it is self-evident that only candidates with money are able to viably compete in elections.  These facts are so uncontroversial that this year’s record projected costs of $1.2 billion for the presidential campaigns and $1.16 billion for congressional races merely underscore the point.

Elections for political offices in the U.S. are not about who is the best candidate – it is about avoiding the lesser of two evils.  Large legal and class forces push elections in that direction, as does the actual voting mechanism: 1 vote for 1 candidate.  The latter could easily be addressed with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which is in use in parts of the U.S. and around the world, but for obvious reasons faces great difficulty for adoption in higher political office elections.

So the situation that we are in is one in which tremendous legal and institutional forces, in combination with large concentrations of wealth, shape for us an election in which there are only two viable candidates.  The question then arises: are there significant differences between the two?

Are There Significant Differences?

I’ll leave the discussion as to differences in past elections (Gore vs. Bush, Kerry vs. Bush), but for the current election, I certainly agree that Barack Obama and John McCain are almost on par with the destruction they will wreak in foreign policy, environmental policy, criminal justice policy, drug policy, and many more issues in which they truly are in agreement on “virtually everything”.  However, there are at least three issues which they have nearly oppositional policies which are of great significance to many, if not all, people in this country (and elsewhere).  While this is not a comprehensive description of their differences, those differences are:

• Employee Free Choice Act: Obama is a co-sponsor of this legislation, which would make unionization orders of magnitude easier than current labor law.  With the EFCA, up to 57 million working Americans could form unions, which has historically shown to be tremendous engines of democracy in society.  John McCain opposes this legislation, and would almost certainly veto it.
• Supreme Court and federal courts: The federal courthouses of the U.S. have been filled with extraordinarily right-wing judicial appointments by the Bush administration, as have two seats on the Supreme Court.  The next president will likely nominate between one and three Supreme Court Justices with the three most liberal justices being replace.  Obama has stated that he would replace these judges with ones like them, whereas McCain has stated he would nominate judges similar to the most reactionary Justices on the court now (and in recent history).  These are the highest courts in the land, and no one can reasonably argue that an Obama administration’s choices would be more humane and less rabidly ideological than a McCain administration.
• “Roe v. Wade” and other reproductive rights:  Implicit in the decisions each respective candidate would make regarding the Supreme Court is whether Roe v. Wade will stand another challenge.  In addition, the policies of Obama and McCain regarding other reproductive rights are oppositional on virtually every issue – McCain even continues to support the scientifically-proven fallacy of “abstinence-only education”.  A McCain administration presents a clear danger to women’s civil rights and the basic sexual health of every citizen.

If we are to be rational voters with an interest in doing the least harm to the country, then we must recognize the inconvenient truth that who is elected President will at least have this significant impact on the country.  And if we care about that impact, then we have to do what we reasonably can to get the better candidate elected (Obama, in this case).

This does not apply, of course, if there is a viable 3rd-party candidate.  But, for the reasons given above, and several more, there is not.  Even Ralph Nader does not dispute that he will not win this election.  So we have to consider either Obama or McCain.

Therefore, in states where the election is going to be close (and there’s many this election cycle), “progressives” and everyone else should vote for Obama, and encourage others to do so.  However, in states – such as Massachusetts, with a 55-39% Obama lead – where the vote will likely not be close, folks with an interest in supporting 3rd-party candidates getting a little more even playing field (through access to public funds if they receive 5% of the popular vote) should vote for the Nader/Gonzalez ticket (McKinney/Clemente is not polling anywhere near 5%).

What Really Matters

The real issue at hand is not a single presidential election – it’s what happens in between elections, and far from Washington D.C., that is important.  Real change, rather than silly electoral campaign slogans, come from engaging and changing the hearts and minds of the population.  The U.S. is a fertile ground for grassroots organizing and massive, truly democratic movements.  We should be spending our time and resources (and far less posts debating Obama v. McCain) focusing on coordinating our friends and neighbors to address the issues that face us and the world.  Howard Zinn recently wrote, more eloquently than I, that:

Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

…None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Posted under Discussion Question, Politics

Last Wednesday was my birthday. My roommate got me a bright yellow t-shirt with “VOTE FOR JESUS” in bright red “VOTE FOR PEDRO”-style lettering.

On Thursday. I wore it with pride. I was confronted by John, a white supremacist friend of mine. He told me he was offended by the shirt, because it mocked the majority Christian culture.

I told him, it’s not mockery. I genuinely support writing in Jesus for President as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.

As people who know me know, I never support Democrats or Republicans for the presidency, though I will often support Democrats for other positions. I am generally a Nader supporter.

This is not some form of anti-pragmatic political purism, as some have accused. Nader is not the candidate whose views I am most aligned with. If my support for a candidate had no pragmatic component, I would support Cynthia McKinney (of the Green Party) or Brian Moore (of the Socialist Party). In Canada, where I actually vote in elections, I vote for the New Democratic Party – the social democratic party that has traditionally been a third party, but is now poised to overtake the Liberal Party as one of the two frontrunning parties (the Liberals having abandoned liberal politics).

My support for Nader is based on the fact that his platform is much more popular than those of Obama, McCain, McKinney or Moore, and is progressive.

Friday night’s debate, which against my usual practice I watched, was a perfect illustration of just how indistinguishable Obama and McCain are, when viewed against a broader background. The candidates agreed on virtually everything.

Both of them thought the surge was a wild success, apparently based on the fact that there has been a lull in the level of violence since it started. As anyone with even limited analytic ability knows, this is poor reasoning. Those who are knowledgeable and thoughtful about the situation, like Juan Cole, are skeptical that the surge caused the lull in violence. Cole suggests in his debate debrief that the reduced levels of violence in Baghdad is the result of the successful cleansing of the cities of its Sunni residents, who have been either massacred or driven out of the city. In other words, it’s not the American surge but the Shia surge that’s responsible for the reduction in violence.

Both McCain and Obama appear to favor increasing the military budget.

Both candidates apparently buy into the lies that the right-wing Zionists concocted, and the Western media has repeated ad nauseam, about Ahmadinejad threatening to wipe Israel off the map. McCain repeated it several times, and Obama never disputed it.

Among the few differences of substance that the candidates emphasized concerned leaving Iraq. They tried to make it look like an big difference: McCain wants to stay in until victory, Obama wants a timetable for withdrawal. But if you look at Obama’s plan as he has consistently articulated it, he’s talking about redeployment rather than withdrawal. He basically favors pulling troops from Iraq and putting them in Afghanistan instead. Neither candidate favors doing what the law requires: ending the occupation of Iraq.

If I had to characterize the foreign policy differences between the two, I would do it this way: McCain prefers to focus on Iraq, while Obama prefers broader aggression including Afghanistan and possibly including Iran and Pakistan. It comes down not to any difference of principle, but to the tactical or strategic question of where the main battle against al-Qaeda is located. (After the debate, I don’t know what “tactics” or “strategy” mean anymore. Strategery, anyone?)

Both apparently support possibly bombing Pakistan, although McCain thinks it’s wrong to talk about it. I guess he thinks it’s better to sing about it.

Both support missile defense. Both support offshore drilling and nuclear power plants.

What are the real differences? Style. As Noam Chomsky says, the people marketing political campaigns are the same guys that market toothpaste. McCain was on the message that Obama isn’t ready to lead. Obama was trying to tie McCain to the Bush catastrophe.

Nader is highly distinguishable from BaJohn McBama/Jorack O’Cain. He favors a lawful foreign policy, including withdrawal from Iraq and refraining from acts of aggression against other countries. He’s against nuclear energy. For an overview on Nader on the issues, and a contrast with the Republicrats, see here: http://www.votenader.org/issues/

Posted under News, Politics