[Peace-discuss] Nader follies?

[Morton K.Brussel]

What follows proves proves my point: Some are more upset with Kerry 
than with Bush. It almost seems that these folks have an obsessive 
apocalyptic death wish to accept a Bush régime; they refuse to see, or 
acknowledge, the extreme danger of  four more years…. They seek to 
deflect the deep anger of those against Bush to Kerry. 'Tis a pity.

MKB

See comments below.

On Jun 27, 2004, at 10:32 PM, Ken Urban wrote:

> *Sigh*, yet another white male arguement begins.

Racism?  What the hell does this mean!?
>
> I think Kaufman is right on the money.  I fear a Kerry regime as much 
> as
> I fear the Bush regime.

QED.

> He will BS us with 'feeling our pain' while
> giving us Free-trade, 'Democracy building' in Iraq, pro-corporate,
> anti-union rules and laws while giving us lip service and small
> meaningless victories about the enviornment, gay rights, women's rights
> etc.   [anti-abortion judges ... that alone should cost him the
> election, but, like us no-war types, there's no where else for 
> feminists
> to go, or, get this,  Bush will be reelected!]
>
> How many corporations is Kerry in bed with.  Another billionaire 
> working
> for us? Get real!   From factcheck.org:

Yes, so let's elect Bush.
>
> [Kerry's most recent financial disclosure  shows the couple's assets
> worth between $198,794,683 and $839,038,000, mostly in his wife's name.
> Federal law does not require Kerry to report the exact value, only the
> general range of value into which each asset falls. And the totals 
> don't
> include the value of personal residences (of which there are several) 
> or
> personal property such as cars and boats, since federal law doesn't
> require Kerry to report them at all. Kerry has in the past worn
> expensive "designer shirts" from Turnbull & Asser, pays in the range of
> $75 for a haircut, and owns a 42-foot Hinckley powerboat that lists new
> for $695,000, stripped. Kerry also has use of  multimillion-dollar 
> homes
> in Boston, Washington, and Nantucket Island, a 90-acre estate near
> Pittsburgh and a ski lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho. The Boston home was
> valued recently at $12.8 million when Kerry took out a $6.4 million
> mortgage on it to finance his nomination campaign, and the home in the
> Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC (owned by his wife) is valued
> at $4.3 million and has 10 bedrooms and seven fireplaces.]

So let's elect Bush.
>
> Maybe ketchup will continue to be a vegetable.  Wonder which 
> corporation
> is going to pay for his 6.4 million dollar mortgage. As Kaufman says
> "depending on the Democrats to defend us against policies in which they
> are 100 percent complicit is so transparently absurd and
> self-contradictory, that 'no one in his right mind,' ...  could 
> possibly
> seriously argue in favor of it."

So let's elect Bush!
>
> To you Anybody But Busher's: A person I spoke with while campaigning
> door-to-door say 'Be careful what you wish for ...'

So let's elect Bush.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Ken Urban
> Assoc. Prof., Computer Science
> Parkland College
>
> Office: B129A
>            (217)-353-2246
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>>>> Morton K.Brussel <brussel4 at insightbb.com> 06/27/04 9:10 PM >>>
> I think that the bitter vituperation (That's what it is.) in Kaufman's
> piece is elicited by the validity of what Kovel said in his article.
> There seems more venom about Democrats and Kerry than there ever seems
> to appear against Bush from these people. Some of the bitterness may be
> due to some of what some Democrats say, although I think they greatly
> exxagerate. I don't find the same tone in The Nation, which they like
> to castigate as they do Kovel. I think that is the crux of the
> argument.  MKB
>
>
> On Jun 27, 2004, at 1:30 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 27 Jun 2004, Morton K.Brussel wrote:
>>
>>> Here's another contribution to the debate about the progressives'
>>> dilemma ... Joel Kovel ran against Ralph Nader in the 2000 Green
> Party
>>> presidential primary in New York and California, and was the Green
>>> Party's candidate for US Senator from NY in 1998. His two most recent
>>> books are Red-Hunting in the Promised Land and The Enemy of Nature.
>>
>> [Kovel's an interesting guy -- been around a long time and wrote an
>> original psychoanalytical take on racism years ago.  Here's an attack
>> on
>> the opinion expressed in Kovel's article.  (I don't quite agree with
>> either.) --CGE]
>>
>> 	June 24, 2004
>> 	Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader
>> 	Another Marxist for Kerry
>> 	By BILL KAUFMAN
>>
>> Life is full of bitter ironies! Behold the spectacle of Joel Kovel,
> who
>> loudly proclaims his credentials as a Marxist socialist, who ran
>> against
>> Ralph Nader for the Green nomination from the left in 2000, claiming
>> that
>> Nader failed to enunciate a sufficiently radical critique of the
>> capitalist system--this same Kovel is out of the closet as a
>> cheerleader
>> for the prowar, pro-Patriot Act, pro-WTO and NAFTA John Kerry--loyal
>> servant of . . . capitalism!!!! How odd that there is not one word
> from
>> Kovel about Kerry's failure even to propose incremental progressive
>> reforms of capitalism--much less a comprehensive critique of it--in
>> Kovel's festival of political double standards, the ardent
>> anticorporate
>> crusader Nader is found insufficiently radical, yet the craven DLC
>> corporate apologist Kerry merits not even a mild syllable of rebuke!
>>
>> So now Nader's insufficient radicality of 2000 becomes transmogrified,
>
>> in
>> Kovel's infinitely elastic mind, into Nader's excessive radicality in
>> 2004! This from the same Kovel who, after his presidential aspirations
>> were rebuffed by the Greens in 2000, disappeared to write a book and
>> thus
>> abstained from the Nader campaign, which was responsible for an
>> explosive
>> growth in the Green Party. And this is the man who professes an ardent
>> concern for the growth and welfare of the Green Party? We are truly
>> through the looking glass now.
>>
>> Behold further the "substance," such as it is, of the critique that
>> underlies Kovel's strenuous exercise in posturing and sneering at the
>> "Naderites": that there is some profound difference between the
>> Democrats
>> and Republicans. Throttling the purple prose into overdrive, Kovel
>> breathlessly intones,
>>
>>     "The problem is, however, that a very big difference between
>> Democrats
>> and Republicans has evolved over the past generation or so. It has
>> taken
>> root in the Bush administration, who have every intention of making it
>
>> a
>> permanent feature of the political landscape. Look at Bush, at Rove,
>> and
>> at Ashcroft, and you can see the newly malignant face of big business
>> linked with a massive social base of Christian fundamentalism. Its
>> inner
>> logic points to the demolition of the Constitution and the replacement
>
>> of
>> the Republic--however compromised this may be_by a theocratic brand of
>> fascism, in which the space for political change will shrink
>> drastically,
>> and the lives of those who do not fit--women, homosexuals, Muslims,
>> anyone
>> in the crosshairs of the police apparatus_will be greatly worsened.
>> Nobody
>> in their right mind can say that the wretched Democrats promise the
>> same."
>>
>> Note the lack of a SINGLE SPECIFIC POLICY, the utter void of empirical
>> data, by which one might actually get a grip on this gooey gob of
>> fear-mongering. Could this unspecified threat to the Constitution be
>> the
>> Patriot Act--the act so vociferously supported by most mainstream
>> Democrats, including John Kerry, but opposed by Nader? Could the
>> threat to
>> the rights of homosexuals take the form of a ban on gay marriage,
>> shared
>> by both Bush and Kerry but opposed by Nader? Perhaps the threat to the
>> rights of women was signaled by Kerry's announcement that he is open
> to
>> appointing antiabortion judges to the federal bench? Could the
>> "fascist"
>> threat to democracy be prefigured in the systematic assault on the
>> rights
>> of third parties, pursued most vigorously not by the Republicans but
> by
>> the Democrats, who endlessly rant about leftist "spoilers" of their
>> duopoly rights to office and who openly avow their intention to
>> challenge
>> every one of Nader's petition signatures throughout the country? Or
>> perhaps Kovel is referring to Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism bill,
> which
>> prefigured many of the most noxious features of the Patriot Act,
>> especially in its assault on the constitutional right of habeas
>> corpus? Or
>> perhaps Kovel is speaking of WTO and NAFTA, so ardently pushed by
>> Clinton/Gore/Kerry, which threaten to dismantle the very EXISTENCE of
>> civil society throughout the planet by giving private corporations
>> standing to challenge the labor and environmental laws of sovereign
>> nations in private courts whose proceedings are closed to public
>> scrutiny?
>> Now that REALLY IS FASCISM--corporate displacement of the public
>> sphere of
>> civil society--yet Kovel's newly beloved Democrats have pushed this
>> authentically fascist threat just as hard as the Republicans.
>>
>> Is it any of these SPEFICIC POLICIES, supported with equal tenacity by
>> Democrats and Republicans alike, that Kovel might be speaking about in
>
>> his
>> overheated warnings that the sky is falling? Could it be these
> policies
>> that are propelling Kovel so swiftly into the arms of the Democrats,
>> who
>> endorse all of them? Yet depending on the Democrats to defend us
>> against
>> policies in which they are 100 percent complicit is so transparently
>> absurd and self-contradictory, that "no one in his right mind," as
>> Kovel
>> none too delicately phrases it, could possibly seriously argue in
>> favor of
>> it. All of which leads us to believe that Kovel is either (a) not
>> serious
>> or (b) not in his right mind. Given the fact that Kovel is a
>> psychoanalyst
>> who is professionally responsible for the rightness of mind of his
>> patients, I would much prefer to believe the former--that Kovel is
>> having
>> a good joke on us. Yes, Kovel is having a good laugh at our
>> expense--contending that we should have preferred Kovel to Nader in
>> 2000
>> because Ralph's criticisms of capitalism were not radical enough, and
>> now
>> urging us to bypass Nader again because Ralph's criticisms are . . .
>> too
>> radical! Good one, Dr. Kovel!
>>
>> And what about all the "fascist" bogeymen Kovel parades before us to
>> scare
>> us witless into supporting the corporate hack John Kerry? Bush, Rove,
>> Ashcroft, Cheney, et. al. The simple fact is that the Democrats--the
>> very
>> same Democrats that Kovel now upholds as our last best line of defense
>> against the fascist onslaught--have had enough votes to filibuster and
>> thus block EVERY ONE OF BUSH'S CABINET APPOINTMENTS, INCLUDING
>> ASHCROFT,
>> AND EVERY ONE OF BUSH'S NOXIOUS POLICY INITIATIVES, INCLUDING THE WAR,
>
>> THE
>> PATRIOT ACT, THE TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, ETC.,
>> ETC.
>> Yet these bold "anti-fascist" Democrats somehow managed to roll over
>> and
>> play dead. Yet these are the very people in whom Kovel wants us to
>> invest
>> our hopes for warding off reaction--the Democrats who have PAVED THE
>> WAY
>> for reaction at every turn. This reminds us of the way in which the
>> liberals and social democrats of Germany were equally docile in the
>> advances of Hitler's fascist initiatives. The lesson of history is
>> clear--it not by laying down our arms of criticism and trusting the
>> agents
>> of the status quo that we can ward off threats to democracy. It iis
>> only
>> through the indefatigable building of a strong, independent people's
>> movement that we can defend and extend democracy in the United States
>> and
>> the world. And now that means vigorously supporting and building the
>> campaign of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo--NOT by playing dead before
>> the
>> Democrats so that they in turn can continue to play dead before the
>> worst
>> depradations of the bipartisan imperial/corporate agenda of the Bush
>> administration and then, if elected, put a reassuing Clintonesque
>> smiley
>> face on the very same policies.
>>
>> So Joel--you're kidding, right?
>>
>> Bill Kaufman can be reached at: kman484 at earthlink.net
>>
>>
>>
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