Ralph Nader Comes to Ann Arbor

Posted by Rustbelt Radical on October 29, 2008
Posted in: News. Tagged: , . 3 Comments

Ralph Nader Independent For President
Fri. Oct. 31st, 12pm Ann Arbor, MI
Michigan Union Ballroom
530 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Suggested Contribution: $10/$5 students
(715)703-0353 or events@votenader.org

3 comments on “Ralph Nader Comes to Ann Arbor”

  2. Were you at this event? How much visible support is there for Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader in the liberal college town of Ann Arbor?

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  3. “Left Intellectuals” or Well-Respected Followers of Fashion?

    The so-called “left intellectuals” support for Obama is about as surprising as CP’s is. After all, they supported John Kerry last time…even though he was a pro-war candidate. And they would have supported Hillary Clinton, or any other Democrat, for that matter, in place of Obama. Only then we would be hearing about the first woman president instead of the first Black one…as if either would make a difference for workers, Blacks or women. Since when was sprucing up the image of imperialism the job of the “left?” For the fake left, however, identity politics is the last resort of scoundrels.

    The real problem is that for all of them, from Zinn to Chomsky to Naomi Klein, the eternal existence of capitalism is taken as a given and “reforming” it is as good as good gets for them. Only there are no “New Deals” on tap in the epoch of lean production. The only deal that the workers are going to get is a raw one, whether it’s Obama or McCain who is doing the dealing. It says a lot about “left intellectuals” when they can’t think of one positive reason to vote for the Democrats, so that they have to resort to telling their audience to vote against the Republican!

    Of course back in 2000, the “progressives” were singing a different song as the winds blowing from Seattle stiffened up their backbones a bit. The fact that they had a Democrat in the White House and another one on the way in, or so it seemed, also helped. Hence they thought it was safe to thumb their noses at Clinton, Gore and the DLC for taking them for granted for the previous 8 years. All it took was a few years of Bush, aided and abetted by the Democrats every step of the way, for them to go back to being taken for granted. Or as Malcolm X said, they keep putting the Democrats first even though the Democrats always put them last

    No matter which way you cut it though, it still come’s out the same. Do the same thing year in and year out even though it didn’t work, doesn’t work and never will work. While the more honest amongst them may call it “the lesser of two evils,” Albert Einstein had a better word for it…insanity. The first “lesser-evil,” in Germany, Field Marshall von Hindenberg, got the support of the Social Democratic left and then appointed the greater evil, Adolf Hitler, as Chancellor. The latter then proceeded to smash the left and the labor movement with the blessing of the former. Who, outside of a Trotsky, would have imagined that it would be recycled over and over again, after such an ignominious opening?

    In the US, the mainstream liberal left, intellectuals included, routinely vote for Democrats, who implement policies that are barely distinguishable from those of their Republican rivals so the ruling class doesn’t even need to resort to any Hitlers to get its way. Of course, to be fair, the “progressive” small-fries, are only following in the footsteps of the big boys in the trade union bureaucracy and those of the middle-class misleaders of the Black community, who long ago sold their souls to capitalism through their dead-end deals with the Democrats. While the liberal left obviously wields no real clout within the working class or the Black population, it does influence the behavior of radical activists within the “mass movements.” Taking them off the streets and getting them into the Democratic party is their chosen lot in life.

    So back in the sixties, it was “Half the Way with LBJ,” since Goldwater was going to get the US into a war in Vietnam. LBJ won and the rest is history. Bush I and Dole had to be kept out at any cost too. So they held their noses and supported Clinton, who not only abolished welfare but made more cutbacks in social services than Reagan and Bush combined and carried out more military interventions as well. We all know about “ABB” and how it demobilized the anti-war movement in 2004. Now they’re going all out for Obama, who wants to send even more troops to Afghanistan than McCain does and who was even more supportive of the Wall Street bail-out than the Republicans were. What was it that that Karl Marx guy said about “first time tragedy, second time farce?”

    The only way to fight the “right,” or, to call the enemy by its real name, capitalism, is by building an independent left. Yeah, we know that Nader or McKinney can’t win but how will they even make an impact when everyone who really agrees with them votes for candidates that they don’t agree with? Sure, there’s no viable independent party around either. But how is the latter ever going to get off the ground when the left supports right-wing (“centrist”) Democrats every time around. You gotta’ start somewhere, sometime. Did Fremont and Lincoln win the first time they ran as abolitionists against the pro-slavery parties? Or should they have supported the more “progressive” section of the slave-owners instead?

    And speaking of the designer “left” and the internet fan club of Ba-Rock Star Obama in particular and “lesser evilism” in general, I’ll let one of them have the final word. As none other than Michael Moore said at a Nader rally in 2000, “We are at the place we are at now because we have settled for so less, for so long. If we keep settling it is only going to get worse. [With] the lesser of two evils, you still wind up with evil. We are being asked to choose the second worst candidate.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

    Vote against Wall Street and its wars!

    Vote for Nader or McKinney!

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