Thoughts on empire, corporatismand the presidential race

The clearest way to explain my thoughts on empire and the unlikelihood that any of the major-party candidates will do anything to slow its growth is to quote Chris Floyd from his Empire Burlesque blog:

All indications continue to suggest that those who look to Obama to undo “the terrible damage done over the past eight years,” as Bruce Springsteen put it in his public endorsement of Obama last Friday, will be disappointed – especially as they watch Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other perpetrators of war crimes enjoy their comfortable, lucrative retirements in the years to come.

Basically, the Washington power structure is all too willing to allow the Bush cadre to fade peacefully into the sunset, to retire, as Floyd writes, with nice pensions and rich book deals without having to pay the price for their brazen destruction of the constitution and the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis.

It leaves progressives like me in a difficult position — do we vote for Obama knowing full well that he will disappoint us, or do we vote for someone like Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader and potentially shift enough electoral votes to John McCain?

We’ve been down this road before, and will likely head down it again. While some on the left blame Nader and his supporters for the 2000 election, claiming he siphoned off just enough votes to allow Bush to take Florida and the election despite Gore’s popular vote majority, the reality is that other factors — fraud, human error, Gore’s inept campaign, press bias — led to the Bush debacle.

But that doesn’t mean that, if enough voters back McKinney or Nader, it couldn’t swing the election to McCain. That’s what makes this such a tough call.

Chris Hedges is ready to walk away from the Democrats. During a radio interview on WHYY’s Radio Times, he expands on a theme he focused on in an op-ed in this weekend’s Philadelphia Inquirer. He writes that the American left has failed, that it has lost its nerve and

has been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of its refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupation of Iraq to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.

Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If the left wants to regain influence in the nation’s political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the nominee, and back progressive, third-party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.

The left, he says, has forgotten a central lesson of its own history, that political change is “created by the building of movements.”

The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.

And this has left the field to the corporations, what Hedges calls the “rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations.” Progressives have allowed the Democrats to abandon their core because the Democrats know that progressives have nowhere to turn and are too afraid — especially after seven-plus years of Bush and Co. — to flee the party. Demcorats know that Progressives will vote for Obama in the general election, regardless of his votes on bankruptcy and other corporate reforms and his lack of anything more than rhetoric on the war. And they will vote for Clinton — should she win the nomination — despite her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion and her vote on Iran.

Obama and Clinton both will be better than McCain, but they will not challenge the corporate status quo. They will not challenge American exceptionalism. Their presidencies would be better, but only by several degrees. They are not reformers.

And we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet