...glemte å sende med noe om Ralph Nader..
Her kommer en uttalelse fra den amerikanske organisasjonen Solidarity, som
støttet Nader i valgkampen.
Bjarke Friborg, Oslo
From Solidarity <www.solidarity-us.org>:
Solidarity Statement on the National Election
Content-Length: 8402
X-Lines: 141
Status: O
THE ELECTION OF 2000 has produced a virtual deadlock between the two
bourgeois parties-a probable Electoral College victory for Bush (pending
the Florida recounts and lawsuits), a tiny popular vote margin for Gore,
Republican majorities in both houses of Congress shrunken to near zero.
For the capitalist ruling class of America, of course, "divided government"
is no fundamental threat when both parties are firmly right-of-center
corporate-dominated organisms, especially when profits are high at home and
there is no huge crisis for imperial global management. While there will
be plenty of bitter partisan rhetoric-over the size of tax cuts for
corporations and the wealthy, the pace and degree of social security
privatization, campaign finances etc.-the bipartisan consensus on the
program of corporate neoliberalism at home and abroad will ensure that U.S.
politics stay the course set by the ruling class.
Should the Democrats or Republicans stray from that program, unelected
bodies like the Federal Reserve will impose the necessary discipline to
guarantee fiscal austerity and deregulation, and to prevent restoration of
social programs.
What does unsettle the elites is the prospect of a drawn-out struggle over
who actually won the presidential election, resulting in a new
administration with gravely weakened legitimacy. Financial markets have
already sent a strong signal that the result must be determined quickly.
The threat of political and legal chaos surrounding Florida's 25 votes in
the anachronistic Electoral College may begin to throw some unwanted
popular attention on the more fundamental ways in which the "democratic
process" in the United States is deeply flawed.
The longer the dispute continues, the more time for bigger questions to be
raised-the role of money, of the corporate media, of the rigged "debates"
in choking off alternative voices and closing rather than opening up
discussion of issues.
That is why the system needs to preserve the reputation of "the process"
more than the actual result. In a closely divided Congress, for example,
it is unlikely that a Bush administration would undertake initiatives, such
as banning union campaign contributions or imposing abortion rights
restrictions, that would enrage key sectors of an electorate when the next
Congressional elections are only two years away. At the same time, whether
Bush or Gore are eventually declared the winner, there will be no
meaningful debate on fundamental structural questions-the enormous gap
between the affluent and the working poor, the exploding prison population,
a massive sector of people without medical insurance, or tens of millions
who will have no protection when the next economic downturn arrives.
The shameful hollowness of the electoral "debate" can be summed up this
way: George Bush's drunken driving conviction 24 years ago became a
last-minute "issue," while the fact that this year he carried out the
execution of Shaka Sankofa, whom everyone knew was innocent, was never
raised by Gore, by the Black leadership or by the media-to say nothing of
Texas' infamous death-row assembly line. It was more important for
Democratic liberals to denounce Ralph Nader as a "spoiler" than to tell the
plain truth that George W. Bush is the nation's number one serial murderer,
and for good reason: The Democrats are full partners in this crime as the
co-authors of the Effective Death Penalty Act along with the rest of the
Clinton-era "war-on-crime" legislation.
For Solidarity and other socialists and radical activists in the labor and
social movements, the results of this election are a mixed bag.
We are proud to have supported a candidate, Ralph Nader of the Green Party,
who told the truth-the truth about corporate power and a political system
purchased by corporate lobbies, about human rights and workers' rights,
about the basic causes of environmental degradation. It is not surprising
that it was Nader who also spoke the truth about the Middle East-that the
unconditional United States support of overwhelming Israeli firepower makes
a viable peace impossible in Palestine-in contrast to the obscene pandering
that we saw from such "mainstream" candidates as Hillary Clinton.
We do not regret in the slightest that Ralph Nader's vote exceeds the slim
margins of difference between the bourgeois parties in several states,
notably Florida. We congratulate the Green activists and the nearly three
million Nader voters who stood firm in the face of the repulsive scare
tactics of "liberal" Democratic party hacks, whose sole remaining function
is to smear any principled political opposition to corporate power as a
"spoiler." We are delighted that in a number of states the Nader campaign
has solidified ballot status for the Green party.
On the other hand, we are of course disappointed that Nader's vote fell
considerably short of the 5% national threshold (even though we don't know
how much of the vote for him was actually counted). In part, the closeness
of the Bush-Gore race undoubtedly hurt Nader's chances. Of even greater
importance was the desperate shortage of financial resources and the fact
that so much effort had to be thrown into getting ballot access. And there
was the fact that the so-called "non-partisan" commission on the
presidential debates actually functions as a bi-partisan machine to exclude
all third-party voices.
There is also a bigger conclusion to be drawn from the national results.
We saw in this election a mobilization of working class and African
American votes that is both genuinely inspiring and at the same time
tragic. In one state after another, we saw the unexpected union and Black
turnout deprive Bush of victory and erode the Republican Congressional
majority nearly to the vanishing point. In Detroit, for example, the
turnout literally swamped many inner-city polling places, resulting in
thousands of mainly African American voters being turned away from the
polls and effectively disenfranchised.
People who had never voted before felt a genuine stake in this election for
themselves, their families and their communities. The gap between the
power of this mobilization and the pathetic choices actually offered to
these voters is thus all the more staggering. To bring millions of working
class and oppressed people to the polls, in order to vote for a Democratic
ticket committed to the death penalty, the World Trade Organization and the
religion of the World Bank, almost defies comprehension.
It has never been clearer how urgently needed is a big break from the
Democratic Party-a deep, decisive and permanent break that will be seen as
serious by those crucial sectors who have been rightly cynical about the
whole system but who equally justly feel genuinely threatened in their own
lives by right-wing Republican policies.
Did the Ralph Nader/Green 2000 campaign contribute to such a break? Time
will tell. Certainly, if those voters who agreed with Nader on the issues
had voted for him, his vote not only would have well exceeded the 5% level,
but would make the Democrats unelectable on the basis of the right-wing
economic program that Clinton-Gore-Lieberman and the Democratic Leadership
Council stole from the Republicans. Even in the face of Democratic fear
mongering, a significant minority of young people, especially those
radicalized in the new movement for global justice, voted against corporate
rule in both its Democratic and Republican guises.
The viciousness of the anti-Nader assault by Democratic hacks has if
anything intensified in the wake of the election. The radicalized layer of
global justice activists may come to see the Democratic Party, as much if
not more than the Republicans, as their immediate enemy. For the first
time since the mid-1960s, a social movement may be producing a generation
of activists prepared to move to independent politics.
For us, as socialists and as activists, the struggle continues-the struggle
to build both independent politics and most important, the social movements
that give those politics energy, momentum and hope. For the bourgeois
parties, this election is a dead heat and the result will be more politics
of a "dead center." For those with a pro-working class agenda, especially
those with a perspective for abolishing corporate power instead of
tinkering with it, the job has just begun.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 18 2001 - 10:59:26 MET