I knew Chris Hedges was crazy as a shithouse rat

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/?ln

Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama

Posted on Aug 10, 2009

AP / Carolyn Kaster
Ralph Nader waits for his turn to speak at a news conference during the run-up to the 2008 campaign.

By Chris Hedges

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party an apology. They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We have surrendered this power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is the foreclosure movement? Where is the robust universal health care or anti-war movement? Where is the militant movement for sustainable energy?

“Something is broken,” Nader said when I reached him at his family home in Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms of passivity, but we are getting there. No one sees anything changing. There is no new political party to give people a choice. The progressive forces have no hammer. When they abandoned our campaign, they told the Democrats we have nowhere to go and will take whatever you give us. The Democrats are under no heat in the electoral arena from the left.



If we took lunatics like this seriously McCain would be president and Palin would be the vice president right now. Think about that for a minute.

[geek tragedy]

1. People like Hedges have led the American left

to complete irrelevance. Why is there no mass movement, Chris?

Because you are on the fringe, not in the mainstream.

[redqueen]

2. It's only the fringe due to the situation described here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6277835&mesg_id=6286429

[Old and In the Way]

3. I'll wait for Republicans to fracture first.

I'd gladly have traded 8 years of Gore for 8 years of Bush...how about you, Ralph?

Until the organized crime party can no longer maintain a viable, national coalition, it's stupid to cede control by walking from the Democratic Party. When the dominant 2 Party system is Blue Dogs vs. Progressives, we might finally get real reform in our government.

[redqueen]

4. Liberals in France got a good lesson about this subject in 2002,

when they nearly ended up with LePen.

[HamdenRice]

5. I have to admit, I thought Hedges was crazy the first time I heard him talking about Uganda

This was when his first book about War...gives us meaning came out. He was talking about being in a killing field in Uganda, presumably the result of Idi Amin's era. He was reading from his book, talking about watching some Ugandan guy in the killing field who had found some woman's clothing and Hedges immediately assumed it was the guy's wife.

I thought that number one, he had no evidence that the victim was the guy's wife. And second, he seemed clueless about the social structure of Uganda where presumably he had lived for at least some length of time.

In Africa, as in most of the world, what Germaine Greer called the "conjugal couple" is not the main relationship in one's life. Men are very, very close to their sisters, for example in eastern and southern Africa, and one's "sister's-son" is almost more like a son than one's biological son. (It has to do with how family, or lineage, is calculated.) The man could have been grieving over a sister, a sister's-daughter, a mother, any number of female relatives, but he just assumed, without even asking the guy, who he was grieving over.

It seemed to me at that moment that Hedges just makes shit up.

[frylock]

6. feel free to argue point by point..

or is name calling all you gots?

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

7. I rescued a shit-house rat one time, and she was a complete lady.

A little funny about making random nests out of TP, but nothing TOO crazy.