Naders' letter to Obama (new)

[Dmitri]

Lets be fair ... there is not much difference when it comes to politicians ... we are always talking the lesser of two evils when it comes to power hungry humans who want to get into any position of dominance and importance .... it comes with the territory! Lets not kid ourselves!

Sure, but there are exceptions to this -- it's just that "the people" don't want those exceptions in power, apparently. The alpha should be tall and presentable, apparently that is at least as important to most people as what he or she would actually DO when in office. Still thinking sorry, I mean behaving, like a pack of apes that we are.

the US constitution

Huh? What's that?

[Michael]

Didn't you hear? It's just a G-D piece of paper! What's painful is that idiot has surely never read it and was simply told that by Cheney who's part of the Continuity of Government program that they believe supersedes the Constitution in an emergency. But then we've officially been under and emergency in the USA since 1933, so there ya' go.

[Bill]

Between Hope and Reality

Dear Senator Obama

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.

You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."

During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.

David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President."

Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see http://www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"

[Bill]

continued........

In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.

Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."

A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.

Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.

Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.

Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!

But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.

Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.

Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

[Darth Rock&Roll]

Is it just me or is Nader being a big whiny bitch who is demonstrating that he doesn't understand how to reach across and bridge?

What would Nader do? Alienate everyone that has power? Doesn't Nader recognize what power is, how it is held and how it is maintained?

clearly, Nader doesn't have any idea of how to create interactions that lead to change. He has consistently failed in any work at being able to do that.

In short, when it comes to safety standards, I agree with Nader. But when it comes to the reality of power and money and how people actually work, he's a dreamer and out of touch. A hippy with no solid ground. He should of stuck to consumer advocacy and kept forcing change there. He was good at that. I agree with nothing he has to say about foreign policy in Israel and his palestinian rabble rousing sympathies are in my view purely contrary to American interests and alliances.

[steelincotton]

Wow, Nader has finally lost it! A very sad bitter angry man. No wonder why nobody wants to vote for him.

[meeks]

qft *dissappointed*

[ashe]

Wow, that interviewer/anchor is such a disgusting pretentious piece of shit, it's mind-boggling.

I would have voted for Nader, if he was on the ballot in this stupid state... Unfortunately he wasn't, and write-ins aren't counted here, so...

it's just another attempt by corporate power to prevent third parties in this country from gaining momentum, which they are.

if you think about it, all the third party candidates combined took a total of about 3% of the vote nationwide, and that's with ZERO media coverage and no participation in the debates. that's about 2 million people, which is not an insignificant number.

big business sees a threat there, because they've tamed the two major parties.

i'll gladly say it again, i'm glad i'm a registered green and i'm glad i voted for him.

[ashe]

Is it just me or is Nader being a big whiny bitch who is demonstrating that he doesn't understand how to reach across and bridge?

he's being principled and holding the powers that be to much higher standard then what most people have come to expect.

his runs for president have never been about winning. he's a very smart man, and he knows he can't win in a rigged system. his exercising his, and every other natural born americans right to run for the office of president to HIGHLIGHT THE BROKEN SYSTEM of democracy in this country.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

I agree Nader is smart. I would venture to say he is an intellectual of very high caliber and wouldn't call him stupid if you paid me.

But...

If he is so great why does he get so little support?
When he started, he was a consumer safety advocate and got Detroit to start putting safety features into automobiles that reduced deaths by the thousands and got people really thinking about public safety.

But he really stumbles when it comes to figuring out how to run an entity like a full country.

He just doesn't get it and gets lost in the weeds without actually getting a good look at the scope of what he is dealing with.

He has wasted so much time with his futile cries of inequity in government. welcome to history Ralph. lol

He really should stick to what he was best at, at least he made measurable positive societal change there. he hasn't achieved a damn thing otherwise every since he began his offbeat campaigns for grabbing power.

who knows what he would do with it when he got it.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

why are there two threads on teh same subject. please merge these so we can have a continuum?

[Michael]

I don't agree that Nader "hasn't achieved a damn thing" or that he doesn't understand realpolitik. He knows that actions must be guided by principles and tempered by compromise with politics, but corporate control of America has gone too far. At some point you've got to take a stand and recognize, just as Ashe said, that the fundamentals of the system are broken. We are outside the boundaries of a viable system and the only way to get back is to remember our principles.

And Nader's letter is very specific in its criticisms. Ron Paul said that during the last two years, with all of the money spent by Obama that is reported to the FEC, plus all the money spent for Obama by PACs, corporations, etc., we're looking at $2 BILLION. The system is broken and needs fixin'.

[meeks]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom

Uncle Tom is a pejorative for a black person who is perceived by others as behaving in a subservient manner to White American authority figures, or as seeking ingratiation with them by way of unnecessary accommodation. The term Uncle Tom comes from the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, although there is debate over whether the character himself is deserving of the pejorative attributed to him. Stowe never meant Uncle Tom to be a degrading character, but the term as a pejorative has developed based on how later versions of the character, stripped of his strength, were depicted on stage.[1]

It is commonly used to describe black people whose political views or allegiances are considered by their critics as detrimental to blacks as a group.

and you guys call the reporter a 'disgusting pretentious piece of shit'? Now, I realize you're jaded because you were McCain and Nader supporters, but would anyone make a question like "so is McCain going to be an Uncle Sam or is he gonna be a whip cracker on the black americans?" because in my interpretation, this is the same level of question. I think Nader's finally shot his mouth off with his foot still in it. He could have honestly asked "is he going to pander to the corporations" but this is the same level as dropping an 'N' bomb on the statement.

[Michael]

I think it's a fair question from Nader because of what he specifically lays out as criticisms of Obama:
~ taking unprecedented amounts of money from Wall Street bankers
~ never mentioning the poor when statistically there are more poor per capita blacks than whites within those two racial groups, as opposed to overall US pop. For example, within the total number of blacks, a higher percentage of them are poor than the number of poor whites within the white population.

I don't equate Uncle Tom with calling someone the N word, which is simply a huge insult. Asking if you're an Uncle Tom implies an specific criticism to just one person based on future behavior. I don't think using this phrase is insulting to anyone except the intended target, whereas using N------r is really considered insulting to all blacks by many people.

[chud]

I sorta like Nader, he's like the left's version of Ron Paul. He seems like an intelligent person who is sincere in his beliefs, not just a paid-for politician.