Dissident Veteran For Peace

Around noon yesterday, the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets anointed Joe Biden as the "president-elect". Consistent with a plan Axios described on Nov. 3, Biden publicly assumed the mantle of leadership that same day.

Yesterday, I also searched the New York Times archive. As it turns out, they didn't refer to George W. Bush as the "president-elect" until December 13, 2000, the day of Al Gore's concession speech.

Yet, in 2020, despite the fact that the incumbent president has not conceded defeat and has made allegations of voting irregularities that he says he will litigate the mainstream media has already declared the election decided and settled. This comes less than four days after Election Day, following a highly unusual and hotly contested election, and before a single state has certified their election results.

I doubt that Trump's campaign will be able to muster evidence of election irregularities substantial enough to overturn the presumptive Biden victory. I am inclined to believe that he actually lost the election due to his unpopularity, not error or fraud. However, there appears to be enough anecdotal evidence of election errors and fraud (see e.g. here and here and here) to warrant targeted, thorough, and transparent investigations.

Nevertheless, true to form and in stark contrast to their reporting on canvassing problems in 2000, the mainstream media has repeatedly asserted there are no problems with the elections results. They may be right but this is a continuation of their unprincipled sabotage of the Trump presidency since before his inauguration. There were plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose Trump—I did and still do—but the media was not content stick with those and with honest reporting.

If the allegations of election problems are demonstrably false then why not demonstrate their falsehood with evidence instead of bare assertions repeated incessantly? If the claims are false then a proper investigation would, to most people, strengthen confidence in the integrity of the process and results. Of course, that presumes people value such integrity above their preferred outcome.

And sure, there are some people who will never believe that Trump lost in a technically free and fair election but why the rush to anoint Biden? Why not wait until the states certify enough results to give the winner 270 electoral college votes?

And why take the wholly unprecedented step of censoring the POTUS on radio and television when he spoke on Thursday? TV and radio are the primary or only sources of news for many. Here's the speech that your corporate media guardians did not want you to see or hear in order to make up your own mind.

See also:

• Lessons of the 2020 Election
• Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations II

Labels: Biden, media, politics, Ralph Nader, Trump, voting

I first joined Veterans For Peace well over a decade ago. As I explained earlier, one of the main reasons I recently gave up on VFP was because it finally became clear that the VFP national leadership was dead set against involving the group in the kind of broad-based effort that will be required for an effective peace movement in the US. On the contrary, their misguided idea of "broad-based" is to work with Lefties of all types and virtually no one else in pursuit of a statist, Left-Liberal agenda along with all the violence inherent in that. I cannot say that the tiny VFP rank-and-file affirmatively endorses this program as much as they acquiesce in it.

Fortunately, not everyone on the Left is as short-sighted as the leaders of VFP. Last spring Yes! magazine ran an interesting article entitled "Can the Left and Right Unite to End Corporate Rule? An Interview with Ralph Nader and Daniel McCarthy". It may be too little, too late but it is a hopeful sign nevertheless. Below are a two excerpts from the interview.

Ralph Nader: Well, liberalism and conservatism, in various ways, have been hijacked by corporatism.

Liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was the classic philosophy aimed at restraining arbitrary government power—then often exercised by kings and emperors. Civil liberties were the foundation of freedom of speech and due process of law, which became part of our Constitution.

Fast forward, you now have corporate liberals— like the Clintons—and you have the corporatists who call themselves conservatives throughout Congress. They're all pushing corporate welfare and bailouts for banks.

What we're trying to do here is go back to fundamental principles and un-hijack conservatism and liberalism. When we do that, we see that there's a convergence of support on a lot of major issues.

McCarthy: Yeah, the two parties and the bipartisan elite have had their own kind of convergence on a strategy for dominating the country, both in government and in big business.

Americans of all ideological stripes have been feeling a great deal of alienation, resentment, and anger. But it's very difficult to talk about the actual structure of government and of the economy and to explain how it is that people have been effectively disenfranchised and manipulated. It’s much easier on both the left and the right to focus on cultural issues, where you can have scapegoats and think that those are the central issues, and to ignore these more structural problems.

I think the left's embrace of identity politics in the 1960s and '70s was disastrous for the working class. It was very bad for the labor union movement, it was very bad for any number of economic issues. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a place for the civil rights movement. Of course there was. But identity-based politics went from being a necessary thing to being something that started to preclude some of the economic and other policy efforts that needed to be undertaken.

And similarly on the right. It's not just a matter of a cynical manipulation of the public by going for hot-button issues. There really was a sense among many ordinary people in the 1960s that something had gone culturally wrong in the country. Crime rates were going up, promiscuity was going up. There were changes that people found weird or disorienting. Whether or not they were right or wrong, they were unfamiliar and new, and therefore alarming.

This set of emotional complexes was turned into the so-called culture war, to the detriment of anything that would reform our economy, our self-government, or our foreign policy. Those sort of complex issues have been thrown by the wayside in favor of identity politics.

Labels: anti-war movement, Clintons, identity, politics, Ralph Nader, United States, Veterans for Peace

Ralph Nader announced last weekend that he is running for president again this year and all across the country adherents of the 'moderate' wing of the single business-war party--the Democratic Party--whined, "No, not again." This blog post is dedicated to them.

Below is Steve Rosenthal's article from 2000 on the Nader-Gore-Bush contest of that year. I would provide a link but I can't find it on the web anywhere except archived here. At bottom, Ralph Nader deftly answers a critic on the 2000 election controversy in a Youtube video. To Rosenthal's list, I would add:

And, if only one Democratic Senator--Kerry, Kennedy, Wellstone, Harkin, Boxer, Clinton or one of the Florida senators, Graham or Nelson--had supported the efforts of Congressional Black Caucus members to challenge Florida's electoral votes during the Electoral College count, Gore might very well have won. At the least, Americans might have gained a better understanding of the colossal fraud perpetrated in Florida where thousands of mostly Black voters were systematically disenfranchised by being illegally removed from the voting rolls, having their ballots disqualified, or simply not being allowed to vote (and this had nothing to do with butterfly ballots).

I don't want to overstate the importance of electoral politics, though. On the contrary, because we have the best democracy money can buy (and I don't mean voting machines), I have little faith in elections to provide solutions to the problems we face (see also Rosenthals' concluding remarks). Instead, we must realize our own power and struggle primarily outside the electoral arena.



So we're still debating whether Nader cost Gore the election.

Well, if Nader hadn't been in the race, Gore probably would have picked up enough of Nader's 2.7 million votes to beat Bush.

And, if some six million registered Democrats hadn't voted for Bush, Gore would have won.

And, if Gore had inspired a few of the 50 million eligible voters who did not vote, Gore would have won.

And, if Gore and his "new" Democrat friends hadn't supported the war on drugs, the prison construction boom, and the disenfranchisement of over four million citizens, disproportionately black and poor, at least enough of them would have voted Democratic to put Gore in the White House.

And, if Democrats hadn't joined Republicans in refusing to spend money to update election machines in poorer counties, fewer ballots would have been thrown out, and Gore would have won.

And, if Democrats hadn't traditionally agreed with Republicans that immigrants, documented and undocumented, are not eligible to vote, Gore would surely have gained enough Latino and Asian votes to win the election.

And, if Democrats hadn't joined with Republicans in preventing U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico from being eligible to vote for president, Gore no doubt would have picked up enough votes to win.

And, if Democrats had refused to confirm Clarence Thomas or one of the other racist pro-Bush majority on the Supremely Racist Court, maybe the court would not have helped Bush steal the election.

And, and, and so on. You can undoubtedly add much more to this list.

So to select one factor (Nader) as THE factor that determined the winner of the election strikes me as mainly of an indication of who you want to scapegoat.

More importantly, the Gore vs Nader discussion rests on the premise that at least one of those two candidates was worth supporting. Frankly, I think that what Nader said about Gore was mostly true, and much of what the Gore supporters said about Nader was also true.

Both Gore and Nader played the ideological role of telling masses of oppressed and/or disaffected people that the capitalist economic and political system can be reformed, and both Gore and Nader diverted people away from seeing the crucial necessity to make anti-racism central in building an anti-systemic movement.

Alan Harrison asked why the U.S. doesn't have at least a right wing social democratic party. My answer is that the Democratic Party basically plays that role in U.S. politics. Like the Labor Party in Britain, the Democrats have close ties to the unions, and both parties have moved to the right and adopted what some call "neo-liberalism" during the past decade or so.

Whether the U.S. has a "soft landing" or a recession next year will be determined a little bit by the the Fed, but it will be determined mainly by the laws of capitalism. So will the continued pervasiveness of racism and future imperialist adventures and wars.

It won't matter who stole the election. The ruling class did us a favor by staging an election so corrupt and fraudulent that it must have deepened the contempt that more and more people have for the system.

By all means, let's analyze this election. It will help many to shed illusions they have had about the political institutions of U.S. capitalism.

Ralph Nader on the 2000 Election

Labels: Bush, Clintons, Democrats, politics, Ralph Nader, Supreme Court, video, voting