============================================================================ Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 09:01:09 -0800 (PST) From: IBS <•••@••.•••> Subject: Re: cj#1145> Ronnie Dugger: 17 Very Good Reasons for Nader To: "Richard K. Moore" <•••@••.•••> Thanks to whomever it is that is sending this to me. David C., Richard Moore, Ron Dugger??? (Please Clarify) There is not anything (or very little) in the paper which I disagree with. The criticism of corporate domination is very accurate My main concern is that if the Greens want to create social change then create it! Don't waste time and resources running unwinnable national campaigns. Nader never would have accepted the nomination if he thought there was a chance that he would win and have to serve. And yet the Greens are transforming from within into Naderites ready to annoint him savior and make him the Party's eternal candidate. Nader also has so many people annoyed for accepting GWB advertising contributions and essentially getting GWB elected (or almost) that he has made the Greens the laughing stock of American politics. If the Greens are planning to continually run in national politics before ever having won statewide seats then at the very least they need to demonstrate their broad-based support and diversity by nominating someone else. I just don't think it makes sense to risk burning out the fomenting political activism with defeatest politics. Why not use that energy to develop local councils and transform progressive rhetoric into positive examples? ---<snip>--- Phil Ferraro Institute for Bioregional Studies Ltd. RR#4 Souris, Prince Edward Island Canada C0A 2B0 Phone:(902) 892-9578 Fax: (902) 368-2520 Email •••@••.••• ========================= Dear Phil, Ron Dugger wrote the piece, Brian Hill forwarded it to me, I posted it, and some unknown person then forwarded the posting to you. The headers tell the story. I'm not sure what you mean by 'local councils', but I'm all in favor of local self-determination, bioregional focus, and bottom-up democracy. How to achieve those things - or any significant change in the current entrenched system - is the burning question of the day. To answer that question we need a political movement. I can't share your concern about 'burning out' activist energy. This new anti-capitalist movement is in a growth phase, not a burnout phase. We need multiple initiatives and not all will succeed. Those which succeed will attract more followers. A bit of darwinian movement evolution won't do us any harm. Before Seattle, most Americans didn't even think of globalization, or the WTO, as being debatable issues. Most of them hadn't even heard of the WTO, and globalization was simply the name for a phase of history. Getting these words into people's vocabularies as political issues was one of the main positive outcomes of Seattle. I think the Nader campaign contributed further toward putting globalization, and even capitalism, forward as issues that need to be examined rather than accepted as inevitable facts of life. This is a strategically valuable outcome. Yes, some Nader supporters are probably hooked into the third-party scheme in an unrealistic way - that was probably necessary in order to put their full energy into the campaign. And those will go through a period of depression and burnout. But they'll recover, get back on their feet, and move on to the next phase with some of their illusions left behind. Nader's next challenge will be to find a way to encourage his supporters to embark on new and useful intitiatives, building on their current momentum. As for the Green Party itself, my own view is that third parties are, strategically, a serious waste of time. They only buy into the game of competitive party politics, and that game itself is counter-democratic. By its very nature, such competition leads to power-brokering and eventually to domination by elites. The system was designed the way it is for that very purpose. (See Fresia's, "Toward an American Revolution", http://cyberjournal.org/cj/fresia/ ) We need to transend the party system by creating a civil-society movement which includes its own democratic mechanisms and which makes elections irrelevant. Perhaps your 'citizens council' notion reflects thinking along these lines. rkm ============================================================================ Richard K Moore Wexford, Ireland Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance email: •••@••.••• CDR website & list archives: http://cyberjournal.org content-searchable archive: http://members.xoom.com/centrexnews/ featured article, "Escaping the Matrix": http://cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/WE/jun00_Matrix.shtml A community will evolve only when the people control their means of communication. -- Frantz Fanon Permission for non-commercial republishing hereby granted - BUT include and observe all restrictions, copyrights, credits, and notices - including this one. ============================================================================ .
