Nader

Well, now I look like an idiot. Last night at a cocktail party I was spouting off why Nader won't run. Goes to show how much I know.

But seriously, I don't really get this. We're not in the pre-9/11 world where our largest concern was a disenchantment with the corpo-political elites....and Nader provided a good frustration/protest vote option. People voted for Nader because Gore ran a bad campaign.

Post 9-11, our concerns aren't so heavily geared towards the cronyism, but more towards security and economics (although a reasonable argument can be made connecting cronyism and the job market). Where does Nader fit in here? I guess he can do the same thing as 2000, taking votes from Kerry for being a Republican-lite. But I don't think the mood of the country is the same, and Dean picked up the 2000 Nadar energy and transformed it into something way larger than Nadar. But look where that ended up - people rallying around Kerry.

If anything, maybe the Greens get some votes and make it easier for candidates to get on the ballot in the future. But if this is the goal, why Nader? Aren't there some other Greens that could run? Matt Gonzales nearly won the mayor race in SF. Peter Camejo? Why not run Dean as a Green Candidate? Or some other type of independent, with the support of the Greens.

I don't think a Green candidate will be as successful or meaningful as 2000, nor do I think Nadar is the best Green candidate in 2004.

UPDATE: Well, now I look like even a bigger IDIOT. If I had read closer, Nader isn't running as a Green, but as an independent. This makes more sense to me - now the Green's don't look dumb, just Nader.

Meanwhile, Chuck weighs in "I think I might have to vote for Nader again. I'm fed up. I was just listening to talk of congressional redistricting which has taken place over the last many years. It's really despicable what these politicians have done - create a system in which they're all but guaranteed to be reelected. There are only a handful of congressional seats in which it looks like a competitive election might occur. We've got a class of professional politicians and they've spent their time insulating their positions, more or less finding ways to subvert the democratic process. Add to that the corporate/money control of exerted over these people and this system and it's a fucking bleak picture.

Iraq and the UN are isolated incidents, products of the system. The voter redistricting and corporate control of our government are endemic problems which are only getting worse, consolidating power in the hands of the few. These are the problems which created the system which led us into Iraq based on the assertions of a few men in power (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld), assertions which turned out to be completely wrong.

Voting for Nader is both a personal protest against the system and a beginning. That is, there needs to be some movement towards options other than Democrat or Republican. They're all part of the same corrupt system and I only see things getting worse."

I agree with Chuck's sentiments, but disagree with his conclusions. I compare the US government to other governments around the world and governments of different times, and always end up feeling pretty good - see anywhere in the middle east. But yes, when you compare the US government in reality to the US government in the ideal, we are all let down.

So, although I agree that there are elements of the system that are corrupt, it does not follow that all actions from that system are necessary corrupt. Furthermore, the question isn't whether corruption exists, because in any big system of government or corporations or any type of large bureaucracies, corruption is inherent. The choice therefore, is always between a lesser of two evils. In the case of a post-9/11 world, I fear Islamic fascism more than the corpo-elites that run our country. and with respect to Islam-fascism, it does not function in a vacuum, but for two basic reason 1) the immediate terrorists, ie Al queda, financiers, osama and 2) because of the shitty conditions in the middle east - the primary reason for those shitty conditions are the autocrats running the countries over there - the worst being Saddam, but closely followed by the saudi's, the Ayatollah in Iran, etc, etc.

I think we went to Iraq for idealist reasons - and perhaps those will in time, prove to be wrong. I'm not a conspiracy theorist to believe that we went into Iraq merely for business interests, which I think is a grossly oversimplified and lazy position to take. I have a long post on this in my archives from December.

With respect to redistricting and gerrymandering, it's been going on forever and my basic feeling about it is: So What? I always thought that gerrymandering didn't make much sense, that by trying to shape and carve out districts around pockets of political support, that the parties were trying to be too clever for their own good. The ideal gerrymandering situation is when a single party can shape the districts so that they barely win each district and lump all of the other party into a single district, so in an ostensibly evenly split state, they win 4 seats to 1, or something along those lines. Attempting such a feat seems to me bound to eventual failure. It might work once or twice, but it seems to me just as likely not to work.