Nader opposes low corporate taxes, but helps Republicans accomplish them

[Bucky]

The inestimable Mr Nader is uselessly pointing out that, as the headline reads, Tax Burden Continues to Shift from the Wealthy to the Working Class. As with all things Ralph, he starts off worrying about the right things, but then goes into his own self serving fuzzthink. He first decries falling top marginal tax rates:

"During the past twenty-five years, the trend has been unmistakable. Both relatively and absolutely, corporations pay less income tax. Relative to the middle class and the poor, the super wealthy are paying on the whole a smaller percentage of their income in overall taxes. Nominal corporate tax rates, the effective rate actually paid, and the taxes on capital gains and dividends all have been dropping."

Damn straight. We all knew that. But Ralph's response is to siphon off votes from the guy who's running against that trend, the guy who says we ought to increase the tax rates on the top income brackets and close the corporate loopholes that have been rewarding the off-shore Bermudification of US corporate assets. Then it's on to his usual misleading "Democrats are as bad as Republicans" raison d'etre.

"Where have the Democrats been? If they couldn't play offense, what about defense? Well, for starters, they were dialing for the same corporate dollars. Second, many seemed to have lost their moorings regarding the public philosophy and rationale of progressive taxation, including taxation of unearned income. Third, some bought into the theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations automatically increased investment and economic growth."

So, *sigh*, once again...

Yes, ¹Democrats seek corporate donations. Never mind that corporate donations run five or ten to one in favor of Republican, depending on how the dollars are counted. Nader would rather have us run on shoestring budgets and feel sanctimonious while the country goes to hell. ^{2 & 3}He continues to indict all Democrats for what "some" are doing. Democrats as a party oppose lowered taxation on corporations and soundly reject the insipid supply-side doctrines that Republicans promote despite all evidence to the contrary. To dump all over the Dems because a small handful of congressmen in swing districts vote with the sitting Republican president on tax cuts sometimes is like attacking the Republicans on favoring abortion rights because of the votes cast by Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee.

The fact is that Nader would fit in far better in the culture of the Republican party. Democrats have a tendency to experiment with, to be open to, and to try out various alternative schemes for public fiscal policy. We're flexible and nondoctrinaire, we're open to debate, we try something out before rejecting it. That's a huge cultural difference between usses and thems. Nader, with his "they're all alike coz they all raise money" arguments is far closer to Republicans in this cultural divide. The facts and nuances and the difference effective outcomes from different courses of actions don't matter to him. He holds his viewpoints as articles of faith. To him there's no distinction between the Clinton boom and the Bushes' busts, between the elective wars of George W and Madeleine Albright's bellicosity to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, between the Clarence-Thomas-is-preferable-to-Roger-Taney pandering of George Bush and the pro-choice Supreme Court nominees of John Kerry.

The key cultural difference between Nader and the Republicans on one hand and the Democrats on the other is one of citizen participation. Nader and the Republicans want you to show up, but only if you'll vote their way. They want you there, but they want you dumb and compliant. Democrats have trouble agreeing with among ourselves, which is a problem sometimes, but it's a problem arising from the fact that we want the citizens to show and argue along with us before deciding on a policy. It's a worldview with fewer moral absolutes and more moral guidelines instead. It's a culture of decentralized decision making and can, at times, lead to charges of flip-flopping. Democrats advocate a world of greater flexibility. I recognize that that scares some people. But I disagree with those who say our country isn't tough enough to handle it.

[madmom]

1. Nader admitted the other day...

that he couldn't win a single state, so why else is he still in the race if not to be a spoiler?

[Bucky]

3. Nader admitting he's a spoiler is like Bush admitting there's no WMDs

The admission may be emotionally gratifying, but doesn't change the materiel reality of the fuck up he's causing.

[AP]

4. He's running so that he can get articles like this one published.

[w4rma]

5. Nader admitted he was only running to be a spoiler in 2000.

For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of “heightening the contradictions”. It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.

Nader often makes this “the worse, the better” point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that the Reagan-era interior secretary James Watt was useful because he was a “provocateur” for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Here's the Los Angeles Times' account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, California, last week: “After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anaesthetiser, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilise us.'”

Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said similar things before. “When {the Democrats} lose, they say it's because they are not appealing to the Republican voters,” Nader told an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, a few months ago, according to a story in the Nation. “We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes.”

That might make it sound like Nader's goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic party to the left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked “about leading the Greens into a 'death struggle' with the Democratic party to determine which will be the majority party”. Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future to run Green party candidates around the country, including against such progressive Democrats as Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, and Representative Henry Waxman of California. “I hate to use military analogies,” Nader said, “but this is war on the two parties.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,393674,00.html

Last Thursday morning CNN showed Nader voters ecstatic and unapologetic about their part in the election mess. “I'm a part of history,” burbled one woman.

Along with that woman CNN showed another Naderite who shrugged off the prospect of a Bush presidency with the following: “I believe things have to get worse before they get better.”

That seems to me to adequately sum up the belief of Ellen Willis who, in a Salon piece supporting Nader last week, wrote: “More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism. We might be better off today if it had never happened, and we had had to continue a state-by-state political fight. Roe vs. Wade resulted in a lot of women declaring victory and going home.”
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/15/nader/

When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: “Bush.”
“If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.” - Nader
http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/200008/200008camp_nader1.html

The only prominent Democrat who Nader seems to believe offers the party any chance for redemption is Russ Feingold, the maverick senator from Wisconsin who cast a lonely vote against the Bush Administration's antiterrorism legislation. Feingold is a rare Democrat who consistently says things like, “Ralph Nader is talking about issues Democrats should be talking about.” But the mutual admiration goes only so far. Nader rejects the idea of backing a Feingold run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. “I'll say a lot of good things about him, but we're not trying to build the same party,” he says.

Nader admits he experiences “lots” of frustration with the Greens. He warns that the party is not running enough candidates to achieve critical mass at election time, and he says it must do so--even where that means challenging relatively liberal Democrats.

Does Nader worry, even just a little bit, that another candidacy might divide progressives and produce another Bush presidency? “Look, I'd rather be engaged in the nonpartisan work of building a civil society. For me, there has been a gradual commitment to getting involved in the electoral process, and I still cling to this civic, nonpartisan vision of how to do things,” Nader says. “But if you do an acute analysis of why things don't change in this country, you come back to what has happened to the Democratic Party. When I look at how the Democrats have responded to Enron so far, it seems to me that we all have a responsibility to try to jolt them into an understanding of what is at stake. If Democrats respond effectively, there will not be much point to me or anyone else challenging them. But if they do not, something has to give. People realize that. People know what the Enron scandal means. This is a test. Are Democrats capable of addressing massive corporate crimes effectively? If Democrats cannot, if they are in such a routinized rut that they are incapable of responding, then how could anyone make a case that they should be given deference at the ballot box?”
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020225&s=nichols

Regarding Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Nader said that he is willing to sacrifice them because “that's the price they're going to have to bear for letting their party go astray.”
In an interview with In the Times, 10-30-2000

In a recent Time magazine interview, when asked if he felt any regret about the 2000 election, Nader responded, “No, because it could have been worse. You could have had a Republican Congress with Gore and Lieberman.” -- Time magazine, 8-05-02

“Let's see what really happens. Ashcroft is going to be a prisoner of bureaucracy.” -- Common Dreams 4-03-2001

“I'm just amazed that people think I should be concerned about this stuff. It's absolutely amazing. Not a minute's sleep do I lose, about something like this - because I feel sorry for them. It's just so foolish, the way they have been behaving. Why should I worry?” -- Common Dreams 4-03-2001
http://www.damnedbigdifference.org/quotes

How the Great Crusader used the Green Party to get his revenge
Ralph Nader, Suicide Bomber
…
Later I was introduced to Nader's closest adviser, his handsome, piercingly intelligent 30-year-old nephew, Tarek Milleron. Although Milleron argued that environmentalists and other activists would find fundraising easier under Bush, he acknowledged that a Bush presidency would be worse for poor and working-class people, for blacks, for most Americans. As Moore had, he claimed that Nader's campaign would encourage Web-based vote-swapping between progressives in safe and contested states. But when I suggested that Nader could gain substantial influence in a Democratic administration by focusing his campaign on the 40 safe states and encouraging his supporters elsewhere to vote Gore, Milleron leaned coolly toward me with extra steel in his voice and body. He did not disagree. He simply said, "We're not going to do that."

"Why not?" I said.

With just a flicker of smile, he answered, "Because we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them."

There was a long silence and the conversation was over.
…
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0418/levine.php

Contrast his statements above with some information on the two pre-Nazi Germany liberal parties:
In 1930 the parliamentary coalition that governed Germany fell apart, and new elections were held. The biggest winner in these elections was Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party. From twelve seats in parliament they increased their seats to 107, becoming Germany's second largest political party. The largest party was still the Social Democrats, and this party won 143 seats and 24.5 percent of the vote. Communist Party candidates won 13.1 percent of the vote (roughly 50 times better than the U.S. Communist Party did in the 1932 elections), and together the Social Democrats and the Communists were large enough to claim the right to make a government. But Communists and the Social Democrats remained hostile toward one another. The Comintern at this time was opposed to Communists working with reformers, and the Communists believed that a collapse of parliamentary government would hasten the revolutionary crisis that would propel them to power.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch16.htm

[bling bling]

2. Good analysis.

If George Bush wins the election, I sincerely hope that the karma gods will make no distinction between this destructive Administration, and those who have helped bolster them to power.