Will Nader run?
While Ralph Nader says that he will decide within the next week or two whether there is enough grass-roots support for him to run for president, so far it is not easy to discern a groundswell.
Hmm, I’m not sure Nader needs a groundswell to run. Plus, with Kerry being the presumptive Democratic candidate, we need a genuine antiwar candidate. Kerry wants 40,000 more troops in the Army and wants more of them stationed overseas. This is a recipe for disaster, should he become President.
From Kerry’s website:
As we internationalize the work in Iraq, we need to add 40,000 troops – the equivalent of two divisions – to the American military in order to meet our responsibilities elsewhere – especially in the urgent global war on terror.
That’s not even remotely an antiwar view. In fact, it is indistinguishable from what Bush is doing now. Oh yes, Kerry promises a kinder gentler foreign policy, but if you’re sending more troops to occupy countries, then it’s not kinder and gentler at all, is it?
If you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’re getting. What we’ve been getting is the enmity of the world, an Iraq trap we arrogantly blundered into, and ballooning budget deficits. I see nothing in Kerry’s ‘plan’ that even attempts to resolve any of these problems.
His pretend antiwar stance is just another example of that old trick of the Democratic Party – to co-opting and defusing any real dissent.
As Peter Camejo eloquently puts it in the Avocado Declaration
The difference is not over whether to “defeat Bush” – understanding that to mean the program of corporate globalization and the wars and trampling of the Constitution that come with it – but rather how to do it. We do not believe it is possible to defeat the “greater” evil by supporting a shamefaced version of the same evil. We believe it is precisely by openly and sharply confronting the two major parties that the policies of the corporate interests these parties represent can be set back and defeated.