Ralph Nader's flawed strategy

by Jeff Mackler

If truth be told, veteran consumer advocate and Green Party 2000 presidential candidate Ralph Nader largely disappeared from the political scene for the past four years. Campaign rhetoric aside, both Nader and the Greens were essentially non-players in the great struggles to mobilize mass opposition to the U.S. wars against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Serious activists in these struggles rarely encountered leading Greens or Nader himself, as they organized millions to partake in the broad-based united actions against the U.S. warmakers, who planned to slaughter tens of thousands in the interests of profit.

The Greens, essentially an election-time formation, employ an "inside-outside" operation to achieve their aim of reforming the Democratic Party and making capitalism a bit kinder and gentler. Greens and Nader regularly support liberal and not-so-liberal Democrats at the local, state and national level, and on occasion run their own candidates.

In 2000 Ralph Nader and the Greens told supporters that at least a portion of their efforts were designed to help the Democrats regain a majority in the House and Senate. Nader met with top Democratic Party strategists like Richard Gephardt to assure him that his election effort would help to register and activate a layer of voters who would not otherwise partake in the electoral process and who would likely vote for the Democrats.

Nearly half the electorate, or 100 million eligible voters, don't vote, Nader was fond of saying Given the fact that Nader assured Gephardt that there would be few if any Greens on the ballot for these House and Senate races, his pledge was far from bluster. He employed the same tactic this year, meeting with the head of the Democratic Party, Terry McAuliffe, to pledge support to "progressive" Democrats in an effort to recapture the House and Senate.

At the presidential level Nader explained in 2000 that his sophisticated followers would understand that a vote for him was on the agenda in only those "safe" states, that is, where the polls showed that a Nader vote wouldn't matter. If the contest were close, Nader continued, his supporters would know better than to waste a vote on him.

But when Nader's 70,000 votes in Florida far exceeded the few hundred margin by which Bush "won" the state—lying, cheating, and stealing aside—along with a similar outcome in New Hampshire, both Nader supporters and detractors attributed the Bush "victory" to Nader's presence.

An eerie silence has since enveloped the Greens as well as Nader, broken only with Nader's announcement in mid-February that he would challenge for the presidency as an independent.

The national Green convention, scheduled for late June is the only body capable of choosing a candidate, but most observers, including Nader, who withdrew from the Green primary process, consider that the timing had been purposefully set to thwart a serious campaign effort, not to mention the securing of ballot status in all 50 states.

In response to Pacifica Radio’s Amy Goodman, Nader stated bluntly, "Well, first of all, I think the Greens brought it on themselves because they weren't going to decide whether they're going to have a presidential candidate or if they were, under what conditions, like staying out of the close states and so on, until June in their Milwaukee convention, which would be too late for ballot access deadlines. So, I withdrew."

Nader has been attacked mercilessly by a broad range of American liberal publications, including The Nation magazine and Mother Jones, as well as by liberal journalists like Norman Solomon and Robert Sheer.

He explained his decision to run to Amy Goodman, who also taunted him on the subject. "Procedurally," said Nader, "it's to break this autocratic mindset of the liberal intelligencia that somehow the country belongs to two parties and everyone else should not compete and not provide more challenge, not provide more voices and choices to the American people, and not even provide a simple trim cap campaign that maybe can turn the rudder of one of these parties away from their corporate masters."

I was intrigued by Nader's formulation about how a campaign spending cap might "turn the rudder" of one of capitalism's heavyweight parties. Nader continued, "And that's what's so disturbing about the liberal intelligencia, that they have lowered their expectation levels. They're totally freaked out with the Bush regime, which is a very bad regime. But if they simply say, anybody but Bush, they're not going to provide a mandate for the Democratic nominee. They're not going to provide a constituency.

"They're going to end up being very disappointed, as many of them were by the Clinton-Gore regime. And I would say to them, relax, watch how this campaign unfolds, rejoice in many of your issues being highlighted around the country, think of how much better Kerry and Edwards will be as potential nominees, and work on getting more people out to vote and more people involved so that we're not just spectators of the campaign, but we're participators, to use Jefferson's word."

Here Nader expresses his view that he can pressure Democrats like Kerry and Edwards to become better candidates.

"The Democrats’ leaders are now talking anti-corporate talk. They're talking the right talk, but we have heard it before. The main thing is to make sure that there's enough pressure and there's enough mobilization right through to November that they feel they have a mandate because once they go into the White House it's like a corporate prison.

"And all of the pressures, inside the government, with all of these business appointees, assistant secretaries, and secretaries, plus all of the tens of thousands of lobbyists and corporate lawyers who really wear these people down. So, even if they're well-intentioned, they can't deliver.

"That's why the public has to be much more organized. And with the expanding war on the Bill of Rights and the civil liberties problems and the lack of due process and arrests without charges and imprisonment without lawyers, I think there's going to be more energy to raising these issues."

Again, Nader refers to the "pressure" that is necessary to keep Democrats on the straight and narrow, to allow them to resist the "pressures" from the "tens of thousands of lobbyists and lawyers who really wear these people down."

Ralph Nader expounds a mass of contradictory views that merit discussion. It is true that the Democrats are now talking "anti-corporate talk." A clever Bush staffwriter had the president humorously comment on this phenomenon when Bush stated to an amused Republican fundraising gathering in mid-March:

"The Democrats are interesting people. Some are for the PATRIOT Act. Some are against the PATRIOT Act. Some are for NAFTA. Some are against NAFTA. Some were for the liberation of Iraq. Some were against the liberation of Iraq. Some were for the tax cuts. Some were against the tax cuts. And in this case we're talking about just one Democrat, the Senator from Massachusetts."

In this simple statement Bush exposed John Kerry's pretense at talking the anti-corporate talk. It is well known that Kerry wholeheartedly supported virtually every piece of Bush-sponsored reactionary legislation as well as the Clinton-sponsored NAFTA, which also passed with bi-partisan support.

Today, however, aware of the change in the public mood regarding issues related to war, the economy, jobs, and civil liberties, Kerry, as well as Edwards, have chosen to "talk the anti-corporate talk." Nader seems to be at least in part satisfied with this development.

"Kerry is certainly better than Bush," said Nader to Amy Goodman, "and so is Edwards better than Bush and so is Kucinich and Gephardt. The important point about John Kerry, and I have known him for years, is that if he is surrounded by corporate lobbyists, he tends to bend. His record shows that.

But if there's real organized voters, and they tell him what they expect of him, his better instincts take hold and he expands to absorb their concerns.

"So, that, I think, is a fair summation of John Kerry. He did vote for GATT, WTO, he did vote for NAFTA, against the pleas of labor unions, who just endorsed him, against the employee pleas of environmental groups who are about to endorse him, against the pleas of small investor groups who he hasn't really stood up for. He hasn't been very good on demanding a crackdown on corporate crime, fraud and abuse by pushing for a larger Justice Department investigative and prosecution budget.

"On the other hand, you know, he did yeoman's work in Central America, and in post-Vietnam War. He's got a lot of good in him, but there's got to be a lot of good citizens on his back to push him."

Nader's arguments are naïve at best. They stand in sharp contrast to his often-repeated thesis that the duopoly, the twin parties of corporate America, control every aspect of public life in the interests of profit. But Nader has always stood for the reform of these parties of the capitalist class.

He has spent 40-plus years in this endeavor, standing among the "tens of thousands of lobbyists," bargaining votes for bits and pieces of social change, only to admit that his life's achievements have almost entirely evaporated in a matter of a few years in the face of the present voracious corporate drive for profits and domination.

Nader cannot bring himself to face the truth about the capitalist system he has battled, virtually as an isolated individual lobbyist, for one lifetime. His allegiance to the lesser evil inevitably leads him to indefensible and contradictory political positions, as when he states above that Kerry has "a lot of good in him" despite a voting record that reveals the exact opposite.

Here's Nader speaking to Amy Goodman about campaign funding: "Well, by comparison, George Bush in one fund-raising dinner raises two to three times more of commercial money than has gone to John Kerry in the last 10 years.

That doesn't excuse John Kerry, but you know, Route 128, Boston, the banks, the technology companies, they have a way of getting their hooks into progressive Democrats up there.

"I expect John Kerry to put forth a very powerful statement for public funding and public campaigns if he is going to start removing the stigma of all of the corporate money that he has taken. There ought to be much more focus on Bush trying to buy the elections with $200 million of commercial money.

"I mean, Bush is really a big corporation in the White House disguised as a human being. He is busily selling our government to the highest corporate bidders, and in return they pour money into his campaign so he can buy the election."

Nader has it backwards. Bush is the representative of corporate America, not its salesperson. Bush is funded by corporate America because he represents its interests. Two hundred million is a pittance in comparison to the trillions corporate America receives in return.

"It's amazing that the Democrats have any trouble beating someone like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the extreme corporatist Republican party," says Nader. "They should be land-sliding them just the way FDR would have and just the way Harry Truman would have. But that reflects the decay in the Democratic Party."

In his romantic depiction of the Democratic Party’s alleged "golden age," Nader ignores that fact that FDR and Truman were American capital's best representatives at the time. While prices rose drastically during World War II and corporate profits skyrocketed, Roosevelt saddled American workers with a wage freeze and expanded income taxes. He proposed outlawing strikes and even conscripting workers into forced labor.

After the war, Truman expanded government regulation of the unions by backing such measures as the infamous Taft-Hartley Act—which allowed court injunctions, Presidential "fact-finding" commissions, mandatory "cooling-off" periods, and other provisions that inhibit strikes and union organizing to this day.

One must wonder why Ralph Nader expects Boston Brahmin [a member of Boston's ruling capitalist elite] John Kerry to "put forth a powerful statement for public funding" of election campaigns. Indeed, Nader knows the answer. Nader's presidential effort contains more bluster than substance. He understands full well that any Kerry move to limit campaign spending would be for public consumption only, just as Kerry's other new positions serve to advance the perception that he is a "progressive."

The Nader-Goodman interview continues: "So, if there's a Kerry-Edwards Ticket," says Nader," I think it will be pretty strong. I think the record of the Republican Party is so miserable that the Democrats should easily win, but the question is whether they're going to put more time on the House and the Senate, and if they don't win the White House, they'll at least win back the House and Senate.

"My candidacy will have a spillover vote, obviously, for more deserving [Democratic Party] members of the House and Senate who are engaged in close races. I might say, my meetings with the top Democrats in the House and Senate did not get any objection to that part of my campaign, although they certainly objected to a presumed risk to the Democrats at the presidential level".

Nader continues, "This campaign will take far more net votes from Republicans and Independents than from Democrats because, as Senator Kerry properly said the other day, the out-of-power party and its members come back into the fold. The in-power party will have its edges flirt with the Independent candidacy. They should stop whining and should focus on George W. Bush."

This is perhaps the most revealing Nader statement to date. It is a public admission that he desires to serve as a virtual stalking horse for the Democratic Party, a con-man aiming at ripping off a few Republican votes to deliver the presidential prize to one of the two parties of the "duopoly."

Of course, the 2000 experience has soured Nader's former "liberal intelligencia" friends on the idea that Nader can actually deliver to the Democrats via his "safe state" strategy. They fear that honest voters will actually vote for Nader because they believe his rhetoric about really building a new party aimed at replacing the duopoly.

A panicked front-page "Open Letter to Ralph Nader" in the Feb. 16 Nation magazine concludes with the admonition, "Ralph, please think of the long term. Don't run."

The Nation doesn't believe in Nader's hype regarding his capacity to rip off Republican voters discontented with Bush's abandonment of traditional Republican principles like deficit spending. Nader has given his friends a taste of his Republican appeal by condemning Bush for his favorable trade relations with "Communist" China.

"And if you think you can help the anti-Bush cause by running and peeling off disgruntled Republicans, McCainiacs, Peronistas and the like while not disrupting the Democratic charge, please be honest with yourself."

The Nation, along with most all of "liberal America," or, as Ralph Nader would say the "liberal intelligencia" remains trapped in the two-party shell game according to which the lesser evil is always preferable. It is the adage by which supporters of the status quo, including Nader, have explained politics for the past 70 years.

It is based on the acceptance of the capitalist system, the rule of an elite minority class that lives at the expense of the great majority, that plunders the world, that generates its wars, poisons its environment and, with inevitable and notable exceptions, bends the minds of its exponents to its will.

Robert Sheer, in an Alternet article entitled "Nader is Crashing the Party Again," writes: "The two-party system has its shortcomings, but we are up against one-party domination. For Nader to cavalierly dismiss this concentration of power in the hands of right-wing ideologues attempting to roll back the clock on the bipartisan accomplishments of the last 50 years is dangerous nonsense. How glib to grade the difference between the two parties as that of a D-plus and a D-minus."

Bush's rightist course has permeated liberal intellectual discourse, bending the minds of a diverse range of reformist thinkers from Sheer to Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and from the leaders of United for Peace and Justice to the National Organization for Women. They have, with few exceptions, lined up to pay homage to cunning Democrats who lie with a smile and open shirt to portend common ground with working people.

The Nader campaign announcement has been met with a barrage of liberal outrage. "Now he [Nader] acts with an almost messianic fervor, a Lone Ranger intent on holding onto his own moral purity whatever the pleas of his compatriots. By denying the real choices we face, he betrays the best of his legacy," says Paul Loeb author of "Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time."

Poor Ralph Nader, who is himself locked into the two-party system, has to endure the wrath of critics who can't see Nader's Democratic Party forest for his pathetic "independent" trees.

An honest story without verification

The Democratic Party primary circus has drawn to a close with Kerry the winner. The race started, if we are allowed some unsubstantiated conjecture, in the living room of a mighty corporate magnate who posed the question to 10 specially-invited guests, "How can we get some of those 100 million abstaining fools back into the fold so that our portion of the wealth created by our wage slaves is enhanced a bit more and our brothers in the Republican Party correspondingly reduced?

"How can we organize this contest so that we appear to be debating issues of substance while we prepare to take the reins of power from our friends across the isle and employ them for our common advantage, plus or minus a few billion dollars here or there?"

A deal was sealed. The multi-colored Democratic Party robe was once again drawn from the political closet. Each of the 10 was assigned the work of organizing their specialized constituencies.

A Southern Democratic Party populist was enlisted to register his "family values" constituency. His Northern counterparts agreed to the same in their neck of the woods, with a twist here and there. A few Blacks were thrown into the mix to fill in for Jesse Jackson, who had always proclaimed that "we Democrats are like a bird. We need two wings to fly, a left and a right."

Last election's old guard was included, along with a more youthful "pro-labor" day-to-day party hack who also had deep links to the corporate base. A few were picked to hold up a banner opposing overt U.S. control of Iraq. They were assigned to wave the UN flag to cover the U.S. occupation.

For some, like John Kerry, radical surgery was required, as in the times when the racist Jimmy Carter was transformed into a populist "human rights" advocate.

The deal was set. The kept media were informed as to the general rules of the game. The production was underway. The 10 players agreed to support the victor, for a price to be negotiated later, depending on the size of the prize delivered by each to the common effort. The game had begun! Behind the primary whoopla and the denunciations of Nader as evil spoiler stands the argument that George Bush is an historic aberration, a product of a calculating family elite surrounded by a handful of evil warlords that had usurped power for personal ends. They based themselves on the fanatical religious right, who liberals claim represent 40 percent of the nation's voting constituency.

Bush's list of crimes, the PATRIOT Act, war and more war, massive deficit spending and social cutbacks, "unfair trade," horrific globalization policies that ruin the lives of billions, homophobia, unprecedented military spending, and all the rest are employed to make the case that this man is the exception to the usual run-of-the-mill pro-corporate presidents. He must be replaced by whatever Democrat makes it to the finish line.

The liberal wish list began with Dennis Kucinich, progressed through Dr. Howard Dean, and perhaps a few even engaged with Michael Moore's choice, Wesley Clark. With the "demise of the candidates of the "left wing" of the Democratic Party, liberal eyes are today glued on the recast billionaire Boston Brahmin John Kerry, a man who would be the third richest president in U.S. history.

Liberals credit the ousted Dean with forcing Kerry and Edwards to the left. Nader claims to be accomplishing the same end but unlike the rest, he will continue to set the stage, that is, force Kerry to the "left" past the primaries and to the election itself, thereby creating a "mandate," says Nader, that will bind Kerry, the president, to the liberal agenda.

These ridiculous maneuvers, interpretations, rationalizations, and self-delusions have the effect of numbing the senses. Kerry's newfound liberal words fool no serious observer and he will not be held to them. His defense adviser, William Perry, is organically connected to the military-industrial complex as much as Bush's Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. "All Kerry can offer is superior management of the imperial bandwagon at home and abroad," says Alexander Cockburn, who seriously researched Kerry's record of subservience to big capital. (The Nation, March 8, 2004). In truth, George Bush is not an aberration at all. He is the reflection of the current needs of the crisis-ridden U.S. capitalist class as a whole.

Stupid and vicious as he may appear, his deeds, accomplished only with collaboration of Democrats and Republicans, are designed to mitigate problems inherent in the functioning of the barbaric system itself. Unprecedented and massive military expenditures are approved with bipartisan support to bolster flagging profit rates arising a crisis of overproduction triggered by intensified worldwide competition. The U.S. weapons of mass destruction are also employed to the disadvantage of America's imperialist competitors, as well as for the slaughter of innocent people to steal their lands and resources.

Jobs and industrial plants are increasingly exported, again to secure the same end—increased profit rates in the face of the opposite downward spiraling trend. Simply put, whatever temporary advantage a capitalist achieves by lowering labor costs is eventually offset as the competition is forced to make the same, if not superior move.

Wages, working conditions, taxes, health care, social security, the air we breathe and the water we drink are all subject to the same competitive forces and adjusted to the detriment of workers in the U.S. and worldwide to keep the failing profit-driven ship afloat.

The crimes of George Bush are committed against working people and the poor by "Labor Party" Tony Blair in England and by social democrats in Europe and their equivalent ruling elites in every nation. Indeed, there are no capitalist regimes on earth today where working people are not increasingly subordinated to capitalist necessity. Bush is merely the tool and fool employed to do the dirty deeds for the U.S. capitalist class as a whole.

Ralph Nader rails at the corporate elite without bothering to explain that its deeds are not the product of accidental evil-doers or flawed personalities but rather the workings of the system, a system that is as reformable as a cancer that threatens to devour the entire living organism.

No corporate master in history has voluntarily acceded to the interests of its wage slaves. If he did, he would be compelled to give ground to others in the business-for-profit rat race who see scruples as an unaffordable luxury. All players understand that there is but one principle involved—survival, by any means necessary.

Bush is a crude and ignorant man who daily reads a prepared script. He is encouraged to appeal to the base prejudices manufactured by a social order that requires hate and division among the exploited to achieve its ends as well as ever deeper economic and social exploitation and oppression.

Over the past several decades unprecedented competition has moved the remaining players to proceed increasingly from covert to overt war. When profits were more easily obtainable in a less competitive environment, gains could be achieved by stealth. Iran's president was removed via a secret CIA coup in 1958; Guatemala's president was similarly removed via CIA action; the same for the Congo's Lumumba in 1960, who was assassinated quietly by U.S. agents disguised as UN peacekeepers.

Today the game is played out in the open. Stealth has give way to brute force and open war, the requirements when the competing imperial powers struggle for a piece of the booty and are eager to take it. Iraq was "won" by brute force, the protests of France, Germany and others with interests in the region be damned.

Like Bush, President Clinton was the man of the capitalist hour. He cut more social services than the combined presidencies of Republicans Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon. He did it with a smile while inviting a few liberal friends to toasts or dinner in the White House.

Bush doesn't smile as much at the liberals. He lacks Clinton's tact but he knows know to read the same prepared script. Kerry will do it even better, or Edwards, or whoever else gets the nod to inhabit the White House and keep order for American capital, by any means necessary.

There is no solution in Ralph Nader's version of lesser evilism—that is, posturing as the people's candidate while shilling for the Democrats. There are no progressive Democrats or progressive candidates of any capitalist party.

Only when labor's minions enter the political and economic arenas in their own name and fight, collectively and in solidarity with all the exploited, for their own interests and for all humanity's, will the corporate capitalist beast be effectively challenged and driven from power.

The independent mobilization of working people against imperialist war, intervention, and occupation and in defense of all social and economic struggles for a better life is the starting point for today's emerging activists. The coattails of the ruling rich and their twin parties are no place for those who seek a new world that will champion the interests of the vast majority.