[Peace-discuss] Anti-war anti-Wall St. tactics in US politics

[C. G. Estabrook]

As the Obama administration continues to run the world’s greatest terrorist campaign - drone assassinations and special forces death-squads around the world - and continues to prolong the economic misery of Americans in accord with the wishes of the 1% (vastly inadequate jobs, health care, and education support), it may be time to participate in Republican party politics in hopes of making it into an anti-war anti-Wall St. party - in opposition to the Democrats’ pro-war pro-Wall St. position, which will simply continue with a Clinton candidacy in 2016.

At the just-concluded Conservative Political Action Conference, Sen Rand Paul won the presidential straw poll with a third of the vote; Sen. Cruz, a distant second with 11%, immediately attacked Paul for his “non-interventionist” foreign policy. While not so clear as his father, the younger Paul has been a critic of Obama’s war-making.  

The anti-war movement has hung on to the fringes of the Democratic party for a generation, and it’s been important enough that Obama had to lie about being anti-war in order to be elected. But his betrayal - hardly unprecedented - should have made the place of the liberal, anti-war wing clear: on the outside.

As a Chomskyan anarchist, I’m committed to doing politics in whatever way will advance democratic control of the economy and the end of corporate imperialism. That’s why I ran for Congress as Green 12 years ago: the Greens continue to support an anti-war anti-WS position. But now it looks as though a major party might embrace such a position, in opposition to the Obama-Clinton Democrats’ pro-war pro-WS position.

Such realignments are not unknown in US political history; in fact they are the rule, over time:

COUNTERPUNCH November 08, 2012 
An Anti-War / Anti-Wall Street Republican Party?    
Could 2012 be a Realigning Election - Like 1968, 1932, 1896, 1860 ... ?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/08/an-anti-war-anti-wall-street-republican-party/   

Since a generation of dickering with the Democratic Party has been a dead […] loss for the anti-war movement - as the pile of child corpses around Obama’s White House makes clear - it may be time to try some other tactics - like accentuating the growing split in the Republican party. The Democratic party unfortunately is not split - just disingenuous, to be polite.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/03/sen-ted-cruz-breaks-with-sen-rand-paul-on-foreign-policy/

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