By Manila Ryce
Published Sunday, November 2nd, 2008, 7:37 am
Filed under: Videos: Political, Videos, US Politics

9 Responses to “Special Announcement: 2008 is Just the Beginning”

1. Great Video!

   BuelahMan
   11/2/08 at 7:56 am
   
2. 

   Excellent. What exactly does Nader have in mind when he talks about shifting from the executive to the legislative?

   Andy
   11/2/08 at 7:31 pm
   

3. I think the Nader videos are awesome, great message, brilliantly developed, with a nice soundtrack to the background…

   Just one thing bothers me and it’s not the electability of Nader. Let’s say there were real media coverage and his message could be widely received, and let’s say he even got elected. Am I stupid to think that he’d be assassinated in no time at all?

   There’s a certain body of circumstantial evidence that JFK opposed the industrial military complex; he was not interested in overthrowing the Cuban government, his resolution to the missile crisis was through talks with the Russians and through the dismantling of US nukes stored in Turkey and he was interested in drawing down forces in Vietnam and even ending the war there.
   To think that Oswald was the shooter is honestly naive and quite clearly not the case. JFK’s actions and plans resulted in his assassination and a coup d’état in which the American government and its foreign policy decisions were covertly taken over by the military.

   Does anyone seriously think that a truly progressive candidate like Nader (or the candidate Obama could be if he found his balls) would be able to survive office?

   Vey Nadarajah
   11/3/08 at 3:24 am
   
4. 

   You have a point here. Even Obama in his current right-wing frenzy still stands a pretty high risk of being assassinated; just look at all the Muslim, terrorist, socialist rhetoric being thrown about.

   Andy
   11/3/08 at 7:02 am
   
5. 

   The election will be stolen …again.

   vidaloon
   11/3/08 at 9:02 am
   
6. 

   This is extremely well done. Wow. Your skills, both technically and thematically, have gotten so sharp over the past year.

   I also wanted to briefly respond to Vey Nadarajah, who makes an interesting point I hadn’t heard before…

   I think Nader could be assassinated. Just like Obama could be assassinated. Whether by an organized group of individuals, or a clique of power-brokers, or whatever. But at least in Nader’s case, I don’t think that the point of his campaign is to put him, the individual, in power. It’s to empower the people, and show us that we are in control of our own destiny in every regard. Nader is a symbol, and I suspect that some of his first actions while in power would be to try to open up the system to more voices, more candidates, and more choices.

   There’s really not much we, at this moment, can do about the threat of assassination. If there are powerful interests who want someone dead, I wish I could stop them, but I can’t. What we need to do, whether we support Obama or Nader or whoever, is make sure there is a distributed network of people committed to these ideas in place, so that if a leader goes down, the force of the ideas does not go down with them. Luckily, for the best ideas, this process occurs naturally once they are heard by enough people.

   Think about an idea like freedom of speech. There is no longer one person or group representing this principle. It is ingrained in our very being. I’m not saying it doesn’t face challenges, but over the long run, the vast majority of people in democratic societies recognize its centrality to everything we believe in.

   Another example is MLK. Sure he was assassinated, but the force of his ideas about racial justice and the essential equality of all people were powerful enough to live on, and indeed become conventional wisdom today. We’re not at the mountaintop, but as a people we’ve traveled a significant distance over the last 40 years.

   So anyway, I don’t think assassination is something we need to worry about. Most of the true revolutionaries are fine with dying so long as the ideas they espouse live on. Those ideas are what we should focus on.

   evmonk
   11/3/08 at 9:24 am
   

7. “Humane values”? What kind of unamerican talk is that? How dare Nader suggest our glorious republic doesn’t have a god-given mandate to rule the world? If the misguided masses in other countries resist, we have every right to wipe them out. They’re probably all terrorists, anyway.
   Yes, I voted for Nader yesterday.

   Rosemary Molloy
   11/5/08 at 5:56 am
   

8. “Shifting focus from the executive to the legislative” refers to his plan to form congressional watchdog/lobbyist groups in each district around the country. These would be made up of ordinary citizens, dedicating their time to putting pressure on their representatives and trying to get the Nader/Gonzalez platform—living wage, single-payer healthcare, clean energy, peaceful foreign policy, etc—into play.

   In some ways I think we can see his presidential run as a rallying cry, to get progressives networked and fired up so they will form these groups.

   I think each group is supposed to have something like 2,000 volunteers with a very small number (2 or 3) working close to full time.

   Kimchi
   11/5/08 at 11:03 am
   

9. The new Nader/Gonzalez website dedicated to this is:

   http://novemberfive.org/

   Kimchi
   11/5/08 at 11:10 am
   

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