I am writing here as a rank-and-file member, not a leader, in the political struggle. My internal monologues may or may not speak to others who, like me, are highly attracted to Michael Lerner’s vision but are not so adept at carrying it out. Like many of us I have a love-hate relationship with electoral politics.

• Love the people who fought tooth and nail for us to have votes and political rights.


• Aware that the power elites fought those heroes and lost some major battles to them. The power elite wanted to pursue their wars with our money as they pleased (Charles I got into a spat with Parliament about that and lost his head), wanted the slaves to stay slaves, wanted to make their money any way they pleased and let us go to the wall (and so called every promoter of trade unions, safety regulations and nets, everyone who cared about the powerless, “Commies” and “enemies of freedom”).


• But also aware that electoral politics function as a safety valve for the power elite, enabling them to concede some big battles while winning the war. (They ridiculed FDR for saying his New Deal would save America from socialism and fought him hard, but of course he was right, it did. They waited a good long while before mounting an all-out effort to reclaim their privileges, and they haven’t taken us all the way back there yet, as my official What You Will Get From Social Security letters promise me).


• Aware that life is compromise and innumerable ordinary lives like mine have been made safer and better from progressive legislation passed after elections were won.


• Hate the way money and media manipulation work on our fears, while our vision and hope is ridiculed.


• Love the Michael Lerner / Peter Gabel approach to this in their many editorials, articles and books (which is why I am here). They advocate shifting the emotional tone of the Left away from anger, bitterness, demonization of opponents (including contempt for working class religious people), and appeals to purely materialistic issues — however well justified that tone may be — and towards an understanding of people’s deeper longings for meaning, for a caring society more even than for a wealthy one, for honesty in politics, for vision of what could be, for appeals to hope and cooperation. They believe this would actually work, politically. I agree. It would. But it’s just too radical for the Left.


• Am baffled by our human tendency, including my own, towards rejecting the spiritual wisdom of the ages.
  
  

This was not a defeat for progressives. With a few exceptions such as Russ Feingold, and Nancy Pelosi, there were no progressives on the ballot. This was defeat for the corporate politics that Obama, Geithner, and Schumer represent. No one should mourn for a defeat of this politics.

Obama lost because he made the most elementary mistake that a president can make. He ignored, dissed, and was even ashamed of, his base. He was put in office by people who wanted, not change in general, but change toward peace and away from unregulated markets. Once he became President he ignored them in favor of the bankers and generals, insisting we have to get beyond left and right. As a result, all the ideas, all the passion, all the hard work was on the other side. Very few progressives should be upset to see him rebuked today, even if they are worried about the future.

This came in from our friend Fred Branfman. It’s very long for a blog post, but I found it gripping and extremely disturbing reading. This is the utter horror of empire. Just read the first five paragraphs to get the gist, along with Fred’s response to today’s expected electoral results. DB.

Ban Tajock Village in Plain of Jars. This Hmong village is so poor that the fences are made from unexploded U.S. bombs. (Photo: Andre Vltchek, at www.worldpress.org/Asia/2562.cfm)

I leave tomorrow for Laos for 3 weeks and include below “A Cry for Humanity”, a new introduction to Voices From the Plain of Jars – the only book to emerge from the Indochina war written by the peasants who suffered most and comprised 90% of the population but were almost never heard from.

The book is being republished in conjunction with a November 9-12 meeting in Laos to implement a new treaty banning cluster bombs. U.S. leaders left 80 million unexploded cluster bombs behind in Laos, more than in the rest of the world combined, which have killed and wounded 10s of 1000s of innocent peasants since the war ended. They have spent almost nothing on cleanup (only 0.28% of contaminated land has been cleared in the past 35 years), an amount equivalent to two weeks’ bombing and far less than their expenditures searching for the remains of those [American airmen] who dropped the bombs.

I also intend to spend a week of reflection and meditation on the Plain of Jars – which increasingly seems to me a mirror in which one can see with full clarity both the great evil and indifference to human life our (and many other) leaders exhibit, as well as the profound decency and humanity of their victims. I also see it as a mirror to understand the human condition that is today leading to the death of human civilization in our children’s lifetimes due to our failure to address climate change.

“Back To The Future” seems a literal description of this journey. Nothing so resembles the automated war being conducted in northern Pakistan today as the bombing northern Laos then – unilateral Executive branch murder with no outside oversight, indifference to the laws of war, an internal dynamic of escalation leading to increasing murder of civilians, etc. And, as drone warfare and General Petraeus’ team of 13,000 assassins escalate and expand throughout the world, it seems clear that the horror of the secret automated war against innocent and lovable Lao peasants – and the nonhuman mentality behind it – will become increasingly relevant at home as well as abroad in the decades to come.

It is also ironic that I fly out the day after the midterm election. If the polls are correct, there will be little of significance that can be achieved in the next 2-6 years (we can at best avoid even worse things), and I expect to focus my own future efforts on the long-term solutions which alone can keep America from becoming an oligarchical police-state, and to hope that conditions some years out make these solutions – e.g., a carbon tax and massive investment to spur a clean energy revolution, totally restructuring of the financial sector, creating jobs through greater income equality, single-payer health insurance and other needed cost-effective social spending, ending America’s insane escalation of automated war-making into the 1.8 billion strong Muslim world – not only possible but necessary to end America’s present free-fall into economic decline, political chaos, social madness and increasing authoritarian control.

We never endorse candidates or parties. But the debate on the Left about how to deal with Obama’s betrayal of his base has political implications that go far beyond who to vote for or what political party to support. We present, without endorsing, these two quite different perspectives. Stephen Zunes is a contributing editor to Tikkun Magazine. Chris Hedges has written for Tikkun. Both are smart and serious progressive voices. We at Tikkun urge and the Network of Spiritual Progressives urge you to vote on Tuesday!

My Support for Ralph Nader, Ten Years Later: Lessons Learned for 2010

by Stephen Zunes

Like many people who campaigned and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, the upcoming tenth anniversary of that disastrous election and awareness of the tragic results continues to haunt me. While it was perhaps the most serious political misjudgment I have ever made, it is important to recognize why at the time it seemed to be a quite rational course of action. It is also important to recognize what both the Democratic Party as well as progressives who are tempted to support left alternatives to the Democrats can learn from it.

Read the whole article here.

The Phantom Left

By Chris Hedges

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power – masked, ruthless and unexamined – happily devour the state.