Daily Archives: 2007-10-14

Kucinich won’t leave the Democrats, Nader is still punished for not obeying them

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Sharon Smith’s excellent article in CounterPunch takes you step-by-step through Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s biggest flaw: he’s a Democrat party loyalist to the end. Smith concludes that

Kucinich must therefore be faulted for compromising his principles in one crucial respect. He remains beholden to the Democrats-a ruling-class, imperialist party that coexists in a power-sharing arrangement with the Republicans-offering voters no genuine alternative to the status quo. If Kucinich truly believed his own rhetoric, he would leave, creating the possibility for building a viable third party that could provide an electoral vehicle to express popular opposition to corporate rule and the imperialist wars it inevitably produces.

Does the last sentence remind you of anyone–someone who left a party and ran for president as an independent while the Left blamed him when their pro-corporate Democrat didn’t earn his own votes? An Unreasonable Man blows up the myths proper Leftists still hold dear.

There are elected Democrats across the country facing the same problem: they win elections as Democrats even though they agree with Smith’s analysis. The duopoly keeps its strength in part because the people in the Democratic party refuse to leave. And the Democrats have no reason to pay attention to the Leftists who vote for them regardless of what they do (including: supporting invading Iraq, saber-rattling with Iran, eliminating candidates from Democratic party debates, raising ballot access restrictions in concert with Republicans, and scuttling voter registration efforts to keep voter participation at around 50%). Thus the Left marginalizes itself.

I’m not convinced another political party will help fix things, but a small step in the right direction is to give candidates a better chance to be heard. We have the technology to hear from all the ballot-qualified candidates on uninterrupted prime time TV, free of charge to the candidate’s campaign. I’d even go for repeat airings and restricting this offer to candidates that use state funding for their campaign. I’d like it if poorer candidates gained the opportunity to speak to the voters to help make up for what they couldn’t otherwise afford. If we leave candidate messages to the compliant corporate media entirely, they’ll edit critical candidates right out of the picture.

Mainstream media favors price at expense of freedom, fairness

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The New York Times’ review of Dell machines featuring the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution is a recent illustration of the problems one faces confusing price and freedom, then deciding that freedom (the more important of the two) isn’t worth talking about.

But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.”

That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price: Linux is free, or nearly so.

The same could be said of a copy of Microsoft Windows or MacOS X that comes with a computer (the cost of either when purchased with hardware is quite low). An illicit copy of the software costs no money at all, and Microsoft and Apple will probably do nothing to you if you get a copy from someone illicitly. Both companies agree with the implied message of this article that popularity is king, so why stifle people who are helping others become dependent on their favorite proprietor? The only way you can respond to this is if you learn to value software freedom for its own sake.

When all you see is price, you throw away something more valuable. Proprietors know this and are eager to get you into their thrall. Talk about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

To explain to people what freedom means (and how “choice” is a profound misreading of freedom–after all, Microsoft and Apple give you “choice” all by themselves, pick your master!) you have to be willing to say the things the Times apparently isn’t willing to say. You have to be willing to mention that bringing users into the free software community without teaching them about freedom isn’t helping the cause of freedom as much as teaching them about freedom because these new users have no reason to reject proprietary software. If all one values is price, then there is no reason to reject low-priced proprietary alternatives. When a proprietary alternative functions in a better way than the free program, users need a reason to actively choose their freedom. The free software movement provides that reason—social solidarity and helping oneself, one’s neighbors, and one’s community—and the open source movement doesn’t.

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