I saw this new video of a short speech by Ashley Sanders on the votenader08 youtube channel (if you haven't subscribed and friended it, you should!), and I loved it so much, I decided to transcribe my favorite quotes--in which process, I ended up transcribing the whole thing. My favorite quotes are in bold. But if you want to watch the video you can see it here:
The best thing about it is how she helps emphasize what's at stake (something I've emphasized in posts before), and gives some perspective to how ridiculous the way we keep betraying our own interests is. And here's the transcript:
I wanted to tell you why I support Ralph Nader but to do that I'll have to tell a story first. A few months ago, I attended the "Take Back America" conference in Washington, D.C. And so, if you haven't been to it, it's a big shot gathering of all the best policy minds in D.C. and they were trying to solve all these problems through progressive democratic stances, so they were addressing globalization, global warming, immigration, health care and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I got there and I was really excited to hear about all these solutions, and as I went from panel to panel, I started noticing a disturbing trend.
At the beginning of every panel somebody would stand up and they would say, "We know that fill-in-the-blank is a huge problem, and we'd like to do blank to fix it," and then everybody would nod and would wait for the clincher and they'd say, "But of course, we can't fix it right now, so here's Plan B," and a guy would come up and show Plan B on a projector and we would clap. And after about five sessions of this I started getting a little bit disturbed and then I went to the health care session.
And everybody stood up and said, "We're fighting for single-payer, that's our goal, but since no candidate's offering single-payer right now, we're going to go with Plan B." Once again, there was an elaborate Plan B put up on the board. And the good thing they assured us about this elaborate Plan B was that it would eventually become Plan A, and the complicated chart we were all looking at would somehow evolve into health care for everyone. Finally, a guy at the back raised his hand, this is before Nader joined the race, and he said, "Excuse me, but I think Dennis Kucinich is backing a single-payer health care program, why don't you throw your collective weight behind him?" And everybody said, nothing, for a few minutes. And then a brave panelist said, "At this point we really have to go with the viable candidates sir." And the meeting went on.
And a panelist stood up and said, "You know, health care is all about votes, votes, votes--sixty in the Senate, we've gotta have it." And another panelist stood up and said, "Health care is all about politics, politics, politics--gotta know the right people, etc., etc." And then finally, the last woman stood up and she said, "The health care movement is the civil rights movement of our time." And I thought, well that makes sense, but the combination of statements was a little strange to me. Because basically, what the Democrats had done is they had gotten it backwards. They had decided that Congressional politics would jump start the single-payer movement and that sixty in the Senate would somehow produce people rioting in the streets, marching for justice and health care. In other words, they were silencing the movement, to get the votes, to put the movement forward. And they asked their constituents to "stick with us, have another 4 to 8 years of less than ideal health care, adopt a second-rate plan, and heaven forbid, do not vote for the single-payer guy. And if everybody does this, we'll have slowly, over time, single-payer health care for everyone."
And so, I left the conference wondering what history books these people had been reading, because I would like to know what movement has ever succeeded because people sit quiet and wait for Washington politicians to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Because the fact is that no politician, no matter how good, cannot push for real change unless he has a mandate from people like us, unless he's promised us something or else we are in the streets making him promise us something. And so, like I said, I left the conference that day with some kind of sinister realizations. First, that the Democratic Party has become the party of perpetual Plan B, and secondly that progressive voters are consequently in a strange position of perpetual contradiction--voting against the people who have the platforms that they stand for.
And it isn't just a matter of health care, I wish that it were, but everyday I meet union workers who would like fair organizing rights, and I meet peace activists who want to end the war, and I meet environmentalists who want a carbon tax, people who want to get their homes back in the mortgage crisis--and then I ask them who they're voting for and I think it's gonna be obvious, I think they're going to say, "Well I'm gonna vote for someone who stands for union rights, who has condemned the immorality of war, who has doggedly protected the environment, and who will take on predatory lenders and discipline Wall Street."
And that's what I expect, but what happens is quite different. I look around and I see unions endorsing Wal-Mart board members, peace activists voting for Iraq and escalated war in Afghanistan, environmentalists resigning themselves to capping and trading, and the new homeless cashing $500 checks and hoping for the best. And uh this apparently is our golden strategy, I can't quite understand it, but what it now means to be viable is apparently to vote for a candidate who can't give you what you want.
And these days I guess a viable candidate is someone who has impressed enough rich people that they can't help the poor, enough mercenaries that they've forgotten the civilians, and enough people with bad ideas that they've forgotten how to think. Obviously I don't think this is a very good plan.
So, it would be different if this had been the first time we'd been here, but the fact is we've been in this exact position before. In 1992, progressives voted for the change candidate and got 8 years of soft imperialism and a corporate dream economy--and the poor got poorer, surprise, surprise. In 2004, progressive Democrats again voted in droves for a candidate who did not even morally oppose the war, and who only promised to kill the bad guys faster and better than the next guy. And what did we get? Four more years of war.
To sum it up, what I'm saying is that, if after 5 years of bloody, needless and costly war we are once again ready to throw ourselves into another preemptive illegal war based on trumped up weapons charges, we really haven't learned that much about war and we certainly haven't learned enough about change. So we've been here before and we know where it got us and now we're being asked to sign up for 8 more years of it. And we're asked to do that believing that it can happen without challenging corporate campaign donations, without challenging Wall Street, without changing the old economic and military guard, and without basically doing much of anything structural. But the fact of the matter is that the only change we'll get from this kind of thing is chump change, from changing in the movement to buy the machine, which is hardly worth it.
And so, in my opinion this is the time to stay strong and to refuse contradictions, and to remember that politics--as we should remember every day--is not what politicians do, it's what people do. And if we'd been convinced otherwise, if we'd been convinced that bureaucracy is stronger than we are or that we need to put down our picket signs and fold our hands and wait for change--then we've been more bought than our politicians, and it's unacceptable.
And so, I know that maybe what you're thinking is that "this is the year that I can't vote for Nader because too much is at stake this year" and the Democrats and Conservatives like to say that a lot, "because this year the Democrats have to win." And I think this attitude in that statement reveals a very frightening notion of what the Democrats think is at stake. According to them what's at stake is the Democratic Party, and they believe this because they've been resigned to believe that their party is a strategic machine rather than the voice of the People. But I think that that is a very anemic notion of what is at stake in politics.
Because everybody here, without thinking hard, knows exactly what is at stake in politics. What's at stake is human beings. And what's at stake is whether or not another Iraqi soldier will return with a case of PTSD, and what's at stake is if another Iraqi family will have to bury another sister, brother, father or mother. And what's at stake is if somebody will sleep in a shelter tonight or sleep in their home. What's at stake is if we're going to protect our environment or continue to destroy it. What's at stake is real human things and real human beings that we care about, and that's what we should stand for in an election year.
So, I want to challenge all of you tonight...to decide what your breaking point is, and what you will refuse to give up, and to stick with that no matter what happens, and to demand your democracy back. To decide what year you will stop voting for the least-worst, and what year you will decide that your government is your representative rather than your master. And I of course suggest you pick the year 2008 and start right now, and I certainly suggest you vote for a candidate who knows whose government this is and who has spent his life trying to give people like you the power that they need to live the political lives that they should, and I think it is time to vote for Ralph Nader. Thank you.
*I got the title for this post from a comment left on this video at youtube by a user called "Uber99"
