www.igc.org/saction/news/200008/nader2.html -> www.socialistaction.org/news/200008/nader2.html
Longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader-currently averaging seven percent in the national polls and nearly 10 percent in California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington-is the current White Knight. He is the Green Party presidential candidate and has already achieved ballot status in 31 states and counting. Nader is the darling of those middle-class reformers, liberals, and social democrats whose political vision ranges from the capitalist Democratic Party to pro-capitalist formations that periodically emerge to pressure the Democrats to change their stripes at least a little bit. Nader and his myriad offshoot citizen-action groups, nicknamed over the years "Nader's Raiders," did spend a generation or more lobbying Democrats and Republicans in Congress, filing law suits, and authoring exposs on behalf of auto safety and positive environmental reforms. Within the framework and norms of establishment politics, and within the parameters of capitalist flexibility when the margins were broader in past decades, Nader has been the champion of compromise and moderate change. By his own admission, however, his efforts have largely come to naught, as the same corporate powers and the bipartisan capitalist government that represents them not only eliminated most of the few reforms Nader and his followers had helped to engineer but largely destroyed the vast social legislation won by previous generations in the course of mass social struggles. In today's world of intensified imperialist competition and the associated globalization of capital, ever narrowing profit margins have rendered yesterday's reformers, like Nader, obsolete. In virtually every nation on earth, the ruling classes have crippled or destroyed much of the social legislation, wage gains, labor rights, and environmental laws won by workers and their allies in decades past. In the underdeveloped world, in the course of stealing natural resources, installing capitalist-friendly dictators, repressing all opposition and chaining poor nations to the imperialist debt machine, capitalism has brought billions to unknown poverty and ruin. In a world of shrinking markets and shrinking average profit rates, world capitalism is compelled ever more to increase the rate of labor exploitation and cripple or eliminate health care, social security, welfare rights, education, and pollute the very air we breath and water we drink to insure the sole reason for its existence-profit. Ralph Nader accepts the fundamental premises of capitalism, the private ownership of productive facilities and the expropriation of worker's labor power for corporate profit. He seeks a few modifications in the distribution end of the equation and a few regulatory measures and reforms so that some capitalists are compelled to take better care of their wage slaves. The July 17 issue of the Democratic Party-oriented Nation magazine quotes Nader's intention quite clearly: "When I saw that the Democrats couldn't even defend this country against the baying pack of right-wing extremists in the Republican Party anymore, that's when I said it's time for a new progressive movement. Can you imagine what Harry Truman or FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have done with the likes of Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay? The bracketed remarks below were provided by the LA Weekly interviewer. Nader states: They the liberals with hesitations about voting for Nader are not thinking tactically. There are very few Green Party candidates: There is Medea Benjamin running for the Senate in California . There are only 16 Green Party candidates for the House of Representatives. So where are these millions of votes brought to the polls to vote for Nader going to go in the House races? That's why is was clear from my meeting with Gephardt a few weeks ago that he is not displeased with this candidacy. He's looking at a few close Congressional District races. A few thousand votes here and there, and he's the speaker. That's pretty important, and they the hesitant liberals are not thinking that way. If they're in Texas, they don't have to make the kind of calculation that they would in Michigan, where the Bush-Gore contest is close. They can say: look we want this Green Party to cross the 5 percent threshold of eligibility for federal campaign funds in the next election , because then it's going to be a real hammer on the Democrats. It's going to pull them in the right direction, where now the corporate lobbies and the DLCs Democratic Leadership Council are pulling them in the other direction. In Texas, they can say, I'm going to vote for Nader because Gore is out of it in Texas, he doesn't have a chance. Nader, a lifelong Democrat, is not shy about stating his real intentions. He wants to pressure the Democrats to be kinder capitalists and less receptive to the so-called right wing of the Democratic Party, the DLC, who Nader considers to be more pro-corporation than the rest of the party. He "tactically" instructs his supporters that in close races between Gore and Bush it's really not intelligent to cast a vote for Nader. The latter option is fine only when there's no doubt about the outcome, as in Texas. Like many pro-capitalist politicians who harken back to the myth of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman as social reformers, Ralph Nader is at best painfully ignorant of the truth of the politics of these clever capitalist politicians. Roosevelt, contrary to popular myth, was a capitalist leader of the first order. In the face of the most massive labor upsurge in American history-characterized by massive strikes and labor actions that successfully took on the capitalist courts, politicians, police, and National Guard to unionize the major centers of capitalist industrial power-Roosevelt acceded to labor's might rather than risk a social revolution that in the era of the 1930s had the potential to end capitalist rule once and for all. But Roosevelt retaliated as best he could, using federal troops to try to break strikes, including the historic miner's strike of 1943, and imprison labor's best fighters-as he did in 1941 when the central leadership of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was imprisoned under Roosevelt's anti-democratic and anti-communist Smith Act. It was the SWP's role in leading one of the nation's most powerful strikes, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, that brought Roosevelt into an alliance with the rightist Teamster national president, Daniel Tobin. Their aim was to eliminate the socialist threat to capital represented by the historic fight of the Minneapolis Teamsters, who brought militant and honest trade unionism to the Twin Cities and the Midwest and Western states. Contrary to the popular myth served up by Nader to make clear his overall Democratic Party orientation, Franklin Roosevelt was known for his wartime wage and job freeze in the face of a rising cost of living; It was Roosevelt himself who declared his so-called New Deal dead. Nader's platform statement contains a provision for the elimination of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. But he neglects to mention that his mentor, Harry Truman, presided over the government that approved the Taft-Hartley Act. It was Truman who gave the go-ahead to the McCarthy witch hunt that Nader decries, and it was Truman who reneged on his famous 1948 campaign promise to repeal Taft-Hartley. The FDR/Truman myth aside, Nader's support for a Democratic Party congressional majority today takes one's breath away. Over the past eight years, the Democrats, led by Clinton and Gore, have engineered the most massive cuts in social expenditures ever recorded. Clinton's "new" Democrats put Nixon, Reagan, and Bush to shame when it came to gutting the social gains of past decades that had been won in struggle by the masses in the streets and factories of the nation. The Clinton forces were able to do this more easily especially because they had the false mantle of "liberalism" associated with them and the attendant support of the liberal pro-capitalist establishment, the labor bureaucracy, and the innocent and not-so-innocent believers in the myth of Democratic Party progressivism. Nader propo...
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