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Burn The Motherfucker Down, And Then Blow It Up

In his Saturday rap session with Mike McCormick [on Sept. 23], Geov Parrish said that the four-percent showing of Hong Tran in the Democratic Party's little primary operation, their rigged casino, indicated a loss of credibility of the antiwar movement.

I'm a fulltime antiwar activist and I didn't vote for Hong Tran. I know lots of antiwar people who didn't vote for Hong Tran. Hong Tran's four percent means the antiwar movement is not going to vote in the November election.

First of all, the Democratic Party can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned. What have they done to get us out of Iraq? Did they lift a finger to stop the Israeli attack on Lebanon? Show me one single Democrat calling for impeachment. If I were in the Senate, I would be doing civil disobedience there.

You have to get realistic about the Democratic Party. Going to the polls to vote in their rigged little game is not the thing to do - unless there's a serious challenger.

Secondly, Hong Tran hasn't demonstrated competence to sit in the US Senate, issuing commands to run this country of 300 million people. You can't be serious.

Politics isn't a game. It's deadly serious. Party machines are so far off course that our duty as citizens is to refuse to obey this political economy, withdraw from it and commit our time instead to overturning it.

A new political economy must be built based on a higher vision of human progress. It must take the achievements we have in law, business, telecoms and technology, and produce better results with them. This requires an exceptional competence in many different domains. Hong Tran didn't express any comprehensive vision of how the economy can be reorganized, or how the information commons and national dialogue can be recaptured from corporate direction. She didn't even express a competent analysis of the problem, in my opinion. What she said was terrific - but it was way too narrow.

Give me somebody like Ralph Nader who knows more about this (sic) economy. Or even Mark Wilson. At least he had a competent analysis. He was a terrific ranter and educator. I would have loved to see him in the Senate.

Todd Boyle, via e-mail

Civil disobedience? Half-dozens at a time. Opinion polls? We can already see how the Democrats are trying to reframe those polls-away from troops out now, and instead toward executing the war more competently. What's that supposed to mean? We torture all our prisoners, rather than just some, or we do a better job of bombing and shooting everyone rather than merely arresting some of them?

Voting for anyone is no panacea. And I agree, this month and in November far more antiwar people will simply not cast a vote for anyone for Senate, rather than vote for Tran (this month), or Dixon or Griffith (in November). But those non-votes are invisible, and deciding you didn't want to vote for Tran because you liked someone not on the ballot better simply helped tell establishment pols like Cantwell that they have nothing to fear by continuing to sign off on war crimes, in Iraq, Iran or anywhere else. That's not the lesson I'd rather they have taken away on Sept. 19.

There Is No Struggle Without Tired Rhetoric

Yeah, I read your article (Jeff Stevens' reply to Nicholas Hart's letter accusing Jeff of supporting Maria Cantwell, ETS!, Aug. 24) and I'm not buying your "I didn't endorse Cantwell" BS. Regardless of whether you wrote the word "endorse" or not, your article gives support to Cantwell and marginalizes the only independent left-wing campaign in the Senate race. I'm no Maoist, but I do understand the class nature of society and the fact that class struggle is the motor force of history. Only struggle can bring about change, which should be obvious to any allegedly independent, left-wing and anti-authoritarian political writer. Your cynical support for the Democrats only serves to put off progress. It is support for lesser-evilism and the Democrats that has held back struggle for the last 30-plus years.

The antiwar movement ended the Vietnam War under Nixon-not because we elected Democrats (who started, funded and continued the war to the bitter end) but because mass movements of civilians and GI's resisted the war. How did women win the right to vote? By voting? It was the Democrats who destroyed post-Civil War Reconstruction and ushered in Jim Crow-and defended it until the '60s when another mass movement forced them to abandon it. We even won the right to abortion under Nixon and a conservative Supreme Court-but under Clinton abortion rights were rolled back state by state while the Democrats did nothing. Abortion is now unavailable in 90 percent of counties in the US and is so unaffordable for working class women that some clinics offer cheaper, painful abortions without anesthesia.

Your "pragmatism" is an illusion. We're not going to win anything by electing Cantwell and more Democrats-especially if we continue to let them take the Left for granted. We're not even going to keep the status quo in a holding pattern, because as we've seen, without pressure from the left the Democrats will continue to move to the right. McGavick may be bad, but in many ways Cantwell is worse, because supporting her means abandoning the movements today that will win struggles tomorrow.

Finally, how can your magazine pretend to be anti-authoritarian when you openly support ruling class corporate parties like the Democrats? Hell, even the liberal, pro-Democrat magazine The Nation urged people on a recent cover not to vote for pro-war Democrats.

As abolitionist Frederick Douglass wisely stated: "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

As for Al Gore-yeah, he is a corporate shill and we would still be fighting wars in the Middle East if he (or Kerry) were President today. The US ruling class needs to control the Middle East's oil supply in order to use it as leverage against its competitors. This has been the strategy of the US government, as early as WWII when a state department memo in 1945 remarked on Saudi Arabia's oil as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."

The Carter Doctrine went even further: "Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

The Democrats have supported the war on terror, the PATRIOT Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unanimously support Israel's despicable war on Lebanon and Gaza. Gore wouldn't have been any different. His environmental doublespeak is a sham-he helped roll back numerous environmental regulations as VP and he completely supports the US's supposed right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world. After all, he didn't raise a peep when the Clinton administration killed over one million Iraqis with eight years of economic sanctions and almost weekly bombings.

As for Cantwell's record, whatever the wording of Biden's amendment it has done nothing to stop the US from building bases in Iraq. If she really wanted to halt building bases then she would stop voting to fund the war. Her support for that amendment is nothing more than a trick to convince people like you to vote for her. Her opposition to Ted Stevens is admirable, but she can hardly turn back the environmental destruction caused every day by corporations-neither does she want to. As for Enron, it was easy for her to oppose them after the full scope of their duplicity was revealed, but where was she and the other Democrats during Enron's implosion? There have been numerous corporate scandals in the last 6 years, but neither she nor the Democrats want to create any real reforms to prevent future abuses. After all, that would hurt their corporate backers-and themselves. Because the Democrats profit from the status quo, just as the Republicans do.

We will only win reform if we raise our expectations and fight for it. No one ever won anything by conceding.

-Nicholas Hart, Seattle

First, get your facts straight. ETS! has been nothing but supportive of Aaron Dixon's campaign. Google it yourself if you don't believe it. (And maybe you should have, you know, researched it in the first place.) If you want my opinion of how Aaron has conducted his campaign, e-mail me privately (geovlp@earthlink.net); I haven't said a word one way or the other in the pages of ETS!, and I'm not about to now. Meanwhile, both Jeff and Lansing Scott have written favorably about Aaron's campaign (stories which ran in issues I edited); Jeff did a front page article ("Educating Senator Cantwell," ETS!, March 16), ripping Cantwell and lauding Aaron, when Dixon announced. So enough of the martyr crap.

Meanwhile, back in reality-where Dixon's campaign has been completely invisible to all but a handful of the four million or so Washingtonians opposed to the war in Iraq (even in Seattle's most liberal neighborhoods), McGavick is mounting a very well-financed effort, pulling close in the polls while successfully avoiding saying anything on what he'd actually do as a US senator. To quote Jello Biafra: We've Got A Bigger Problem Now. (From the Dead Kennedys' 1981 follow-up to the Jerry-Brown-ripping "California Uber Alles," after Reagan's election.)

As dreadful as Cantwell has been on innumerable issues (both Jeff and I have written extensively on that point), there is a difference between her and McGavick. Is it a victory for The Grand Struggle? Of course not; but it's still significant, in real time, for real people, as opposed to your mostly empty ideological posturing.

Unless a political earthquake forces a majority of the Senate to block the appropriations process, there is zero a US senator can do, practically speaking, about Iraq right now, but there is plenty she or he could do about forestalling a military attack on Iran. Put your pressure on Cantwell there; she's been backpedaling furiously on Iraq this campaign, so there's at least a chance she could do the right thing on Iran. McGavick is, if anything, to the right of Bush on foreign policy. Cantwell is reliably pro-choice; the Supreme Court's most liberal justice, John Paul Stevens, is in his late eighties and could well retire or pass away in the next two years. If Bush picks another replacement, it will cement an Uber-reactionary Supreme Court majority (Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito, new guy) for a generation, and Mike! will cheerlead all the way. And Cantwell, to her credit, fought off Enron from its attempt to fleece hundreds of thousands of Washington state utility customers of $500 and more in money "owed" for fraudulently overpriced services never rendered. Cantwell might, conceivably, do something about global warming. McGavick? His biggest Senate patron is Alaska's Ted "VECO Oil Field Services" Stevens of the now-infamous "Corrupt Bastards Club." I could go on, but even if you don't get the idea, many other people do. McGavick is bad news, worse, even, than Cantwell. Much worse.

I still don't know how I'll come down on this race. I'd like to avoid voting for Cantwell if at all possible, but if the polls are too close, I'll probably hold my nose and do it. But oddly enough, Nicholas, you've yourself given good reasons for not voting for Aaron Dixon: he's not going to win, and if his campaign isn't just about getting votes, then it really doesn't matter how many votes he gets in the end, does it? Or to take another tack, if you're such a proper anti-authoritarian, why are you urging anyone to vote at all? Or is it all OK so long as there's no chance of, you know, winning?

More to the point, the enormous challenges we face will require organizing, not voting, and public policy won't reflect (or be rendered irrelevant by) necessary changes until we do a whole lot more and better organizing. You know that historical dates column ETS! runs each issue? It's from a database of over 20,000 such dates I compiled, and virtually none of them involve electoral politics. Please don't lecture me, or us, about either the need for struggle or the general futility of voting. But that historical knowledge also means I could not care less about boilerplate rhetoric like "earnest struggle." I want to win, locally and globally, and to save and improve lives, preferably before our sick, corrupt culture effects omnicide.

We can disagree on tactics; that's fine. But Nicholas, you'll get a lot farther if you lay off from lecturing your allies like we're ahistorical idiots.