There is no way this can be called anything but a defeat

There is no way this can be called anything but a defeat
Date: Nov 3, 2004 1:30 PM

There is simply no way to sugarcoat the bad news. The 2004 General Election was
in every way a disaster. It was a disaster for political progressives and the left.
It was a disaster for civil liberties and freedom. It was a disaster for workers.
The biggest disaster of all is that it brings us one step closer to Fascism in America
and we're already too damn close.

Once again this election has proved that if the left hitches its wagon to the increasingly
conservative pro-capitalist horse of the Democratic Party it will be lead into a
tar pit.

Despite the unprecedented and well intentioned efforts of liberal organizations
like Moveon.org, America Coming Together, the AFL-CIO, and others George Bush won
this election hands down in just about every conceivable way, assuming that there
wasn't massive election fraud (and we have no easy way of knowing that didn't happen).
Kerry supporters cannot blame this defeat on Ralph Nader either, because there is
no state where his vote total exceeded the margin of difference between Bush and
Kerry, nor did the vote total of any other third-party / independent candidate have
an effect.

There have been widespread accounts of polling location irregularities and violations,
and despite the corporate media's claim that this election happened "smoothly",
this election was anything but "clean". It will take weeks, if not months,
to sort it all out. None of this takes into account the still unresolved problem
of the electronic, touch-screen voting machines that do not provide a paper trail
to prove that the vote totals counted by the machines reflect the actual votes cast.
It has been alleged that these machines, all of which are produced by five corporations
all run by conservative republicans, are easy to hack (which can easily be done
under the cover of secrecy). How do we know that this didn't happen in this election?
We don't. John Kerry promised to legally challenge all cases of fraud, but the
morning after the election he conceded without so much as a whimper!

In California, despite Kerry's overwhelming, but meaningless victory, progressives
and those that care about freedom suffered devastating defeats in the state ballot
initiative races.

Proposition 66 would have put a dent in the prison-industrial complex by reforming
the draconian "Three-Strikes" proposition (184, passed in 1994) by requiring
that the third "strike" must be a violent felony (just as the first two
"strikes" must currently be violent felonies) before receiving a legislated
mandatory life sentence. That proposition lost.

Proposition 72 would have mandated that all businesses in California with 200 or
more employees would have to pay 80% of all of their employees health care costs
into a state run pool that would have been used as a watered-down version of Canada's
"Single Payer" health care system. That proposition lost by a razor thin
margin.

Proposition 64 is designed to shield corporations from class-action lawsuits brought
on by consumers. It was a terrible proposition which is designed to give corporations
the freedom to pollute and produce unsafe consumer products. It won by an overwhelming
margin.

But the absolute, worst defeat of them all is the overwhelming victory of Proposition
69, which now makes it a requirement that any individual charged with a felony,
regardless of whether or not they're eventually found to be innocent, must provide
a DNA sample to the arresting police agency. That DNA will then be entered into
a state owned and run database which can be used for any purpose the state chooses.
There are little if any protections against fraud and abuse. This is yet another
blow to the (now almost entirely nonexistent) Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution
which is supposed to protect against unwarranted searches and seizures. fascism
is knocking at the door folks. It's a very scary day here in America.

And in each of the eleven states, where homophobes, religious fundamentalists, and
conservative constitutionalists placed a measure on the ballot to ban gay marriage,
the measure won hands down.

How did this happen? What went wrong?

No doubt this is a question that the left is going to choke on and bitterly debate
for the next four years (at least). I don't have all of the answers myself, but
in all cases it comes down to at least the following points (this assumes that the
computerized voting machines were NOT hacked):

(1) The Democratic Party is still trying to be a centrist alternative to the Republican
Party, and they are almost totally a party of the employing class. They have abandoned
almost all pretense of being the party of workers and labor. I am convinced that
it is a myth that the Democrats were ever anything different, but liberals seem
to think that they can convince the Democratic Party to take up the New Deal torch
again (they seem to forget or do not know that it was the fear by Roosevelt and
other liberals in the Democratic Party of the "specter" of "Communism"
(i.e. militant organized labor and a mass based workers' movement in the 1930s)
that lead them to create the New Deal which was designed to steal the thunder of
the labor-left movement; it worked). The liberals keep trying to recreate the party
of Roosevelt, but right now there isn't a functional, mass-based labor movement.
The energy essentially wasted on the Democratic Party must now be channeled into
building a massed based, rank & file workers movement to undermine and overthrow
wage slavery. Whether that is done through rank & file militant unionism, a
workers party, or another alternative is a debate we can have elsewhere. I favor
the first alternative, but there are many ways to skin a cat.

(2) When economic issues remain unaddressed, workers and small merchants tend to
focus on "moral" issues, such as abortion, gay marriage, religious affiliations,
sex education, "pornography", birth control, and so forth. As Thomas
Frank so depressingly points out in his book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?",
the voters in the "red" (Republican) states tend to vote Republican, often
against their own material best interests, because the religious right offers them
an alternative to the decadancy of the rich, moderate capitalist leadership of the
moderate Republicans and the Democrats. Many of these Republicans live in states
where good union manufacturing jobs have been lost to corporate globalization and
family farms have been swallowed by by huge corporate agrobusiness interests. Democrats
and even liberals have abandoned any acknowledgment that there is a class war between
the employing class and the working class. The Religious Right has managed to fill
the political void by taking up the mantle of "Class war", but they have
horribly distorted the issue so that the "class war" being fought is between
"liberal, latte drinking, Volvo driving, effete, educated, atheistic, europhiles"
on one side and "god fearing, family values loving, moralistic, church going,
blue-blooded, church going Americans" on the other. That these same Religious
conservatives keep enacting laws that worsen the plight of their hapless followers
is simply lost on them, but the Democrats continue to ignore their material plight
as well. The Kerry campaign continued on this suicidal course.

(3) The left has a huge blind spot when it comes to image and spiritual issues.
It simply doesn't matter that most of the religious beliefs that persist in America
are irrational, unscientific, or unprooven. The very fact that they are all of
these things is why the working class keeps clinging to them. These things provide
a false sense of security to people who have been devastated by capitalism that
everything will be all right if they just pray to their god. If there is no organized
movement to address workers' material needs, issues like Gay Marriage can mobilize
millions. I suspect that all of the liberals at moveon.org, Air America and other
organizations who thought that all of the new registered voters and the unprecedented
turnout would favor them didn't account for the motivating influence the Gay Marriage
issue would have for the other side. The left and the workers' movement makes the
mistake of turning their nose up at religious fundamentalists, especially in the
popular media. These religious nuts have learned to fight back. However it would
be a mistake to give in to religious fundamentalism. On the contrary, it is necessary
to steal their thunder. The best way to do this is to focus on material issues,
such as protection of family farms, sustainable communities, abolition of wage slavery,
and locally controlled, renewable energy (the latter has enormous potential to revitalize
the economy of all of the "red" states in as little as five to ten years).

(4) Kerry and the Democrats made the mistake of blindly following Bush and the Republicans
down into the abyss of the current quagmire in Iraq and the suicidal "war on
terrorism". Kerry and the Democrats say that the war on Iraq "has been
run poorly", and that they can "more effectively win the war on terror".
This is also a mistake. The war on Iraq hasn't been "run poorly", it
should never have been fought in the first place. It was and continues to be founded
on a foundation of lies. Right now the US is bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq
that can only get worse and is likely to exceed the devastation of Vietnam. Likewise
the so-called "war on terror" is really a war *of* terror. It too is
founded on lies and half truths. It has been used as an excuse to pass repressive
and fascistic legislation such as the so-called "Patriot Act", to deny
thousands of people of middle-eastern descent their civil liberties, and to foster
an atmosphere of fear and repression in America. Neither Bush nor Kerry are willing
to address the root causes behind the greatly exaggerated threat of "terrorism".
In every country where radical Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (which is but one
of many terroristic tendencies) runs rampant, there is massive class division and
repressive authoritarian governments. Most of these governments are currently in
power because the United States has essentially put them there, as is well documented
in "Killing Hope" by William Blum. Furthermore, there is growing evidence
that the 9/11 catastrophe may be the result of deliberate complicity by the Bush
Administration. While that is a very controversial subject, one that many on the
left would dismiss out of hand as being a "paranoid conspiracy theory",
such wholesale rejection is unscientific and ideologically driven. Two very important
sources reveal just how vast the 9/11 hoax may indeed be: "The New Pearl Harbor",
a book by David Ray Griffin, and 911truth.org. At the very least, these claims
should be tested on the merits of the evidence, not whether or notthe hypothesis
seems too wild to believe. Nobody took the roundness of the Earth or the notion
that the Earth is not the center of the known universe seriously at first either.

(5) Kerry and the Democrats have not articulated a real, credible alternative to
America's continued and suicidal addiction to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels like petroleum
oil, coal, and even natural gas, result in greenhouse gases and lead to global warming.
Global warming is an accepted fact in every industrialized nation but the United
States, and there is mounting evidence that Global Warming is a serious threat to
the current mode of human civilization. While the planet Earth can and probably
will adapt quite well to global warming (by seeking to return to balance) the results
for human beings could very well be devastating. Additionally, fossil fuels pollute
the environment in many ways contributing to habitat loss, extinction of endangered
species, and health hazards to human beings. Fossil fuels also facilitate the continued
centralization of power and wealth into the hands of corporations or the state,
because they are capital intensive. Finally, though there is great debate on when
it will happen, there is mounting evidence that the production and supply world's
limited supply of fossil fuels (assuming they have biotic origins) are starting
to "peak". If that happens (or if it has already happened as some, but
not all suspect), the increasingly scarce supply of fossil fuels will become increasingly
expensive and coveted. The more we delay the development of renewable alternatives
and the implementation of conservation measures, the harder it becomes to change
course as time passes. The Europeans seem to have figured this out, but Americans
have not. While Kerry and the Democrats were slightly more willing to at least
pay lip service to alternatives to fossil fuels, they did little or nothing to emphasize
how crucial this issue is to our continued survival. Likewise, Kerry and the Democrats
didn't emphasize how manufacturing the technology for renewable energy could significantly
undermine the threat or incentives for terrorism around the world, nor did they
emphasize the potential for the revitalization of the US economy. This was a bad
move.

(6) The left seriously needs to analyze how much influence Arnold Schwarzenegger
has. Schwarzenegger campaigned heavily against Propositions 66 and 72 and he campaigned
heavily in favor of Propositions 64 and 69. He was able to make a 20 percent lead
by the pro-Proposition 66 forces in pre-election polls disappear. Why? The answer
is simple. No matter how hard we try to deny it, Americans still have very deeply
entrenched fascist tendencies. No, I am not talking about Schwarzenegger's father's
support for the Nazis. I am referring to the fact that Schwarzenegger perfectly
matches the "aryan superman" stereotype. He is a tall, muscular, blond
(or light brown) haired, white male with classic facial features. It is simply
unbelievable how many people will automatically trust someone simply because they
look like him (and is a movie star to boot). Just as Ayn Rand peppered her hysterical
elitist fiction with similar stereotypes (all of her heroes looked like Arnold,
and all of the villains had stereotypical "Jewish" features), Hollywood
produces the same illusory myth, but Americans continue to fall for it! I will
say this with assurance: Schwarzenegger is an IDIOT. None of his ideas, outside
of his lukewarm support for the environment, are based in rational thought. If
people support causes he champions, then they are fools. To make matters worse,
to even initiate this discussion is to risk being labeled a "Politically Correct"
loony leftist, but the evidence speaks for itself. The left is never going to achieve
any progress in the continued attempts to eliminate tyranny and class rule if the
powers that be can trot out someone who looks like Schwarzenegger and the people,
including many on the left blindly follow him! Once again, the solution to this
problem is that the left needs to organize around real issues and actual issues.
It cannot continue to follow the destructive "lesser of two evils" strategy.

So what can be done? I don't have any specific suggestions other than addressing
the six points I just raised. The left will continue to lose and lose badly if
it hitches its wagon to leaders who won't lead us where we want to go. It's demoralizing
and disempowering. If we want a better world, we have to be the leaders. Trusting
in Democrats--heck, trusting in ANY party leaders, political gurus, or union bureaucrats--is
a continued recipe for defeat and disaster. Everyone who worked so hard but fruitlessly
on the Kerry campaign should refuse to be demoralized. The Bush Administration
and the Neo-cons may have won this battle, but ultimately they will lose the war.
The continued quagmire in Iraq is going to eventually spell the end of America as
a world super power. In fact, it may already have done so. The value of the US
Dollar is very weak. The United States is a debtor nation. It has almost no manufacturing
base (other than agriculture, if you can classify the growing of food as "manufacturing")
The only thing keeping the US economy from utter collapse is the fact that the US
dollar continues to be a benchmark currency for the rest of the world. Should the
Euro replace the dollar, then many creditors will start demanding that all of these
debts the US owes be paid (because the dollar will be a bad investment). There
are some that are suggesting that this will happen as early as next year. If we
do nothing, It is entirely possible that Bush will launch a nuclear war against
the rest of the world out of desperation. Perhaps they might even manufacture a
fake "terrorist" threat (or perhaps even a fake terrorist "attack"
in the US) to justify such actions. If even a 100th of the 55 Million Americans
who voted for Kerry organize rank & file resistance to the powers that be and
fight for real alternatives, we may be able to ultimately turn the tide. The ball
is still in our court. How will we respond?

By Steve Ongerth, San Francisco, California
http://www.iww.org (listed for identification purposes only)