[Peace-discuss] Arguments…

[Morton K. Brussel]

Presented below are arguments we've heard among AWARE members. If you  
read this piece, read also the commentary which follows it on the  
website. Lindhoff is betting that there is uncertainty about Obama,  
given his cv, which allows a degree of hope.  --mkb

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/16

The end seals the argument for Lindhoff:

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As  
crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a  
solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill  
old man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded,  
bigoted and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up.  
Sarah Palin, as vice president, would in all probability end up  
becoming president during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader of  
America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It's not  
just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under  
a Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth.

Published on Thursday, October 16, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Why I’m Voting for Obama
by CommonDreams.org

by Dave Lindorff

Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.

It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now,  
according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the  
Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of  
14 percent over Republican John McCain-enough to overcome even the  
most devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting  
machine chicanery.

I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a seriously  
flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform, saying  
not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that it was  
"the wrong war." Since then, he has backed away even from saying he  
wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable that  
would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer  
than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an  
escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that  
more troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called  
for an expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of  
the Army and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering,  
more killing and more waste of precious resources.

Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by  
President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and  
abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the  
National Security Agency-spying that we now know is massive almost  
beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private  
family conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of  
journalists, and almost certainly of Bush administration political  
"enemies." By backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost  
impossible for victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to  
sue and find out what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to  
all these years.

In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right,  
while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about "change."

Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has  
consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that  
they are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care  
system, which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a  
more cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system  
than the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest  
of the Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the  
economic bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate  
criminals who have been sucking the life out of the US economy for  
years.

And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I lived  
in Ohio or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is too  
close to call, and so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to do  
so here in Pennsylvania is really a cop-out.

But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and right- 
wing yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear people  
calling for Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the rabid  
hate mail circulating in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a  
secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Marxist and a black nationalist, I want  
to see the man resoundingly win this election.

But it's more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and  
experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep thinking  
that a guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard Law  
School grad (and even law journal editor!) who could have named his  
price at a Wall Street law firm, but who chose instead to be a  
political and community activist, a guy who has relatives who live in  
humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent some of his childhood  
actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to mention a guy  
who has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to bring  
something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the  
history of the country has come to the office with such a background.

Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn't be  
heading for an election victory. He wouldn't even be the Democratic  
nominee. He'd be, at best, where Dennis Kucinich is-holding a seat in  
Congress where his every progressive effort would be stymied or  
mocked by the House leadership.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke  
(many of its purists even mock successful left candidates political  
figures like Kucinich, for god's sake!). Fractured and fractious  
small groupings have little or no link to the organized labor  
movement-traditionally the bedrock of any successful left political  
power. And the labor movement itself is as weak as it has ever been  
and keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such as it is, has even  
less connection with the broad mass of the American public, thanks to  
years of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao and Soviet  
Communism.

I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic Party.  
Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made it  
into office-people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ  
Feingold, Rep. Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the  
Democratic Party has shown itself to be in thrall to the moneyed  
interests on Wall Street and in the corporate suites.

That said, there are important things that could happen-and I stress  
the word could, not would-if this election were to be won by Obama  
and by Democrats in the Congress. One of these things is that there  
will be new Supreme Court justices named over the next four years.  
Some will inevitably replace some of the aging "liberals" on the  
bench (some of whom have not always been so liberal on economic  
issues). Some could also replace current conservative justices  
(Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don't  
look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years,  
and even Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem  
with epilepsy or some other ailment that has caused him to collapse  
in a frothing fit of unconscious on occasion).

Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course  
for workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the  
job. A major reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of  
the workforce in the 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce  
(and 13 percent of all workplaces, public and private) today, is that  
labor law has been whittled away and turned to management's advantage  
to such an extent that it is almost impossible now to win a union  
election. Employers who break labor laws suffer no penalty even when  
found guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for union activity  
can hope, at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and back  
pay after fighting for years. Most just give up.

If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a President  
Obama signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if new pro- 
labor officials were appointed to the national, regional and local  
labor relations boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see a  
genuine revival of the labor movement in America with consequences  
for workers' lives, and for the political system that would be far  
reaching and profound-and that could even pave the way for a  
resurgence of a left/labor political movement.

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take  
Obama's warmongering seriously. Given the man's background, I am  
confident that he is not a militarist by nature. It may be  
politically opportunistic for him to try during this campaign to out- 
tough McCain on Afghanistan while calling for a wind-down of the war  
in Iraq, but it would be a disaster for him to pursue a wider war in  
Afghanistan after taking office, ensuring that his presidency, like  
Bush's, Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's before him, would be  
dragged down by an endless bloody conflict.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an  
unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate  
as quickly as possible. Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, but I simply  
can't see a smart guy-and Obama is a smart guy-getting dragged into  
another quagmire.

Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global  
warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make  
itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which  
will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right  
person at the right time, to lead that response.

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As  
crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a  
solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill  
old man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded,  
bigoted and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up.  
Sarah Palin, as vice president, would in all probability end up  
becoming president during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader of  
America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It's not  
just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under  
a Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His  
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment [1]" (St. Martin's Press,  
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net [2]

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/16
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