POST-DEMOCRATIC AMERICA

Ralph Nader: The US Needs Regime Change: He's the most radical US politician alive, blamed for losing Gore the 2000 election and allowing America's most conservative president ever to gain power. Now, he has a message for the world (Chris Lee, 29 June 2003, Sunday Herald)

'Not enough Americans are rolling up their sleeves as active citizens and as a result, they are watching their country be hijacked by giant corporations and their political allies in Washington,' he says. 'With 9/11, the politicians have seen a political advantage. We are moving away from democracy and into a plutocracy. This is an extremely serious condition.'

Call it a leadership disorder. In Nader's mind, Bush's wartime presidency and his quixotic war on terror are responsible for an era of eroded civil liberties and the reckless build-up of the munitions and defence industries. Government corruption and distortion of the truth, Nader feels, are taking place on the most serious level possible. 'The president has lied to the American people,' he exclaims. 'We were misled, or worse, about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction, his ties to al-Qaeda, his threat to the rest of the world. This is an impeachable offence. Now the president is emphasising the 'liberation of the Iraqi people' because that's the only reason left. Everything else has been shown to have been phoney. More people are getting killed and injured every day while his propaganda enriches corporations and the president's friends, not to mention his re-election campaign. But as long as he beats the drum of war and struts as a wartime president, he's able to camouflage what is essentially a losing presidency and inoculate himself from impeachment.'

To hear Nader tell it, the White House is in the grip of big-money contributors and conservative ideologues. And Bush's prime motivation for launching an invasion of Iraq is the same one that many observers suspect prompted the first Gulf War: oil. [...]

Furthermore, Nader believes that the US -- and, perhaps, the UK -- teeters on the brink of its own regime change. 'There has to come a time when people say 'Are you exaggerating the war on terrorism? Are you exaggerating the terrorist threat?' Iraq? It's in Bush's interests to keep saying that there are terrorist cells here and there. But no Democrat has asked if there are al-Qaeda cells all over the United States and if they are suicidal and they are funded and they hate us, why hasn't anything happened?' he says. 'If whistle-blowers start leaving the Pentagon or the CIA, he is going to be in serious trouble. If Tony Blair gets in more serious trouble, then the trouble is going to spill over here. They are one step away from serious political disaster. That step is if the parents of the troops killed over in Iraq convene for a news conference and accuse them [Blair and Bush] of costing their sons' lives, they'll be in serious trouble.'

Supposing for a moment that we accept the Left's hysteria as a legitimate response to the turning of America into some kind of repressive police state and international agressor, doesn't this argument answer Mr. Nader's last objection? "Why hasn't anything happened?" Because crypto-fascism is working?


MORE:
-Rage. Mistrust. Hatred. Fear. Uncle Sam's enemies within: While the US fights a war on terror, it is also systematically crushing its citizens' rights. Neil Mackay on the alarming rise of a new tyranny (Sunday Herald, 29 June 2003) Posted by Orrin Judd at June 29, 2003 9:05 AM