Peter Camejo.
File photo by Luke Thomas
From the Nader/Gonzalez Campaign
Editor’s Note: This is an essay by Peter Camejo that was sent out by the Nader/Gonzalez campaign. Camejo wrote the following essay in response to Medea Benjamin’s comment on The Nader Team’s April 17 blog.
By Peter Camejo
April 25, 2008
I was stunned to see Medea Benjamin complaining to the Nader/Gonzalez campaign because the campaign had used the word “shameful” in referring to “progressive” Democrats who had supported the pro-war, pro-Patriot Act, anti-labor, and anti-environmental candidate John Kerry in 2004.
I have great personal admiration for Medea Benjamin for many of the stands and actions she has taken through the years. But her capitulation to the Democratic Party has been truly disappointing.
Medea Benjamin (right) at the California State Democratic Convention in March.
Photo by Luke Thomas
Medea Benjamin eventually joined the “progressive” Democrats and has become an active supporter of the Democratic Party.
Without the Democratic Party’s support, Bush’s war policies could never have been implemented. The Democrats voted in Congress a resolution that included the phrase, “unequivocal support for George Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq.”
They have voted for all the funding requests for the war in Iraq. In 2005 at the State of Union address, the entire Congress, with few if any exceptions, gave George Bush 39 standing ovations in one hour. They rose to their feet and applauded every time Bush used the word Iraq even before he finished his sentence.
Of course this is nothing new for the Democratic Party. This is the Party of human slavery, of the Jim Crow of 5,000 lynchings, of fighting the right of women to vote, and of imprisoning Japanese Americans in camps.
This is the Party that launched a war of mass murder killing two million Vietnamese as the “peace” party in the 1960s. It is the party that has supported the destruction of the trade unions, lowered taxes for the rich — while raising them for the poor.
The Democrats voted 98% in favor of the Patriot Act in the Senate without reading it. Earlier, 100 percent of Senate Democrats voted to confirm the right-winger Antonin Scalia for the Supreme Court.
In 2004 the Democrats ran John Kerry for President — the same John Kerry who said he could implement Bush’s war policies better than Bush especially in increasing militarization in America and promoting the war in Iraq.
What confuses so many progressively inclined people is they do not really understand that our society is controlled by the corporate power of concentrated money.
The corporations and the super rich — through their domination of the government, the media, and educational institutions and of course the two parties — run our society.
The totalitarian rule of money is a self correcting mechanism. It has flexibility which is part of why it is so powerful.
The two-party system allows the appearance of differences and adjustments to public sentiment. It has become the single most successful political form for the rule of a minority over a majority in the history of the world. How this system of control developed, consolidated, and has survived through the years will be studied for years to come.
The front line in this denial of democracy is the Democratic Party because it is the instrument that controls, channels and co-opts the forces that otherwise could challenge the rule of concentrated money.
It is precisely the “differences” between the two major parties that makes the system effective.
And the front line in the battle for the control of money over people are the so-called “progressive” Democrats who talk the talk. They confuse people, prevent free elections, and fight hardest to undermine a Nader/Camejo candidacy or a Nader/Gonzalez candidacy or any other candidacy whose voice for democracy begins to be heard.
They may think they are helping move the country toward a more progressive agenda. But in fact, they are deepening the illusion that answers can be found through the Democratic Party. In turn, this reinforces the two-party domination over the United States, making possible the horrendous policies we have seen over the last eight years.
You — Medea Benjamin — are now one of those on the front lines defending the two-party domination, and as a direct result, defending the rule of concentrated money and other illegalities and injustices of our present system.
You can’t have it both ways.
In 2004, the Democrats went further than just supporting Bush’s policies.
They led a massive campaign to silence the only well known candidacy that opposed Bush’s policies. They did this by manipulation.
They sent representatives into the Nader/Camejo campaign to disrupt it, to seek to prevent his supporters from getting Nader/Camejo on the ballot. They actively sought to prevent those who disagreed — and favored peace, social justice and democracy — to have a voice.
They harassed people trying to petition for Nader/Camejo. They brought at one time over twenty lawsuits to try to block Nader/Camejo’s campaign from state ballots. They spent tens of millions of dollars in their battle against free elections and against voter choice.
Even today they are trying to “fine” Nader/Camejo tens of thousands of dollars for merely seeking ballot access in the State of Pennsylvania.
I personally had to pay them $20,000 not to have a lien put on my home for having been Ralph Nader’s Vice Presidential candidate.
The Democrats, especially the people you, Media Benjamin, call “progressives,” were the most vicious in their endless diatribes against Nader calling him “crazy,” “ego maniacal,” “stupid,” and “agent of Bush.”
Media Benjamin you are now shocked that the Nader/Gonzalez campaign used the term “shameful.”
Where was Medea Benjamin during the Democrats hate campaign against democracy in 2004? You were campaigning for a pro-war candidate and supporting the vicious anti-Nader/Camejo campaign.
Medea Benjamin in her effort to support John Kerry helped successfully to manipulate within the Green Party support for David Cobb, the anti-Nader pro-voting Democrat candidate who favored US occupation of Iraq in two public debates with me.
She worked to get the Green Party convention to prevent Nader/Camejo from being endorsed after Nader/Camejo representatives won a number of Green Party primaries and state conventions, including California.
During the 2004 campaign, there was a letter on David Cobb’s web site titled “Vote Kerry and Cobb.” And it was signed by Medea Benjamin, among others.
If you are going to seek fairness and oppose “trashing,” why don’t you start with all your friends whose extreme public attacks on Nader/Camejo you never protested?
Why not promote among your Democratic friends the publishing of ads apologizing to Nader and the American people for the twenty-four harassing lawsuits in twelve weeks filed by Republican corporate law firms like Reed Smith and Kirkland & Ellis and abuses they committed in 2004 against the rights of the American people to have free elections and voter choice?
Yes Medea Benjamin you have the right — like so many before you — to seek to reform the Democratic Party. The truth is, however, that what you actually achieve is to give cover for this pro-war anti-labor political organization. Millions upon millions have tried to reform the Democratic Party for decades.
The AFL-CIO went in to reform the Democrats with millions upon millions of supporters only to be reduced from 33% of the work force to 12% — a submissively controlled force ineffective in defending even their own existence — unable to even get the Democratic Party to repeal the notorious anti-labor Taft Hartley law of 1947.
The generation of progressive “leaders” that capitulate in 2004 will have to be replaced by a new generation that will stand by principles like the early abolitionists of the Liberty Party, the Populists who led the uprising of 1890s, the Debsian socialists and Women’s Party activists of the early twentieth century — and yes like Ralph Nader who refuses to capitulate to a Democratic Party that has and is selling out the American people.
Making personal attacks on Ralph Nader is starting to get a little old. Maybe it’s time for your Democratic Party friends to end their political bigotry against Nader/Gonzalez.
Yes we should all work together on issues we agree on. Yes we should try to get people regardless of what party they are registered with to support specific objectives.
That is how the most massive peace demonstrations ever were organized in the 1960s and 1970s or the millions who marched together for immigrant rights just a couple of years ago. Of course none of those actions were ever supported by your Party, the Democrats.
The ranks of the Democratic Party are desperately seeking change. In time they will see that the Democratic Party cannot be and will not be the agency through which peace, social justice and saving our environment will come. On this issue you and I remain divided. On the debate about this issue Nader and those supporting him have been saints in their language in comparison to your friends in the Democratic Party.
The Nader/Gonzalez campaign has nothing to apologize for. Nader has been one of the most beautiful examples of showing respect for all including those who disagree with him.
It is time for you and your Democratic Party associates to show respect and apologize to Ralph Nader.
The Hunger Site
April 29, 2008 at 7:45 am
Independent progressive, radical groups always attract failed sectarians like Peter Camejo. As ultra leftists, their main goal is to prove themselves more left, more progressive, more correct politically than their perceived competition – as if there is some great book in the sky where all of this will be written down and there will be prizes awarded in the afterlife for he who is most left.
Karl Marx said, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.â€
Gonzalez is now in farce mode, Camejo is a study in post-farcisism and Nader, well, Nader has squandered all the good he’d built up in a lifetime of public service, all to soothe his crescendoing ego and is now deeply in the karmatic hole.
Nader is so trapped in the past that he’s whining about high gasoline prices, as if the notion of people as consumers is so seared into his brain that he doesn’t realize that, like the left, conceptualizing ourselves as subordinate to power, as consumers or workers, rather than empowered human beings confines us as much in the cubicle or the checkout line as any prison could.
It is good that gas prices are rising. The solution to high gas prices is kicking that petrol habit, not looking for another cheap fix. Unless Nader can obviate peak oil or wave a magic want to recreate a productive, substantial domestic economy, then the dollar is going to continue to weaken and so long as petroleum is denominated in dollars, the relative price to us will continue to rise.
And where is Camejo insisting on Nader committing ot an immediate withdrawal from Iraq? On delivering Bush, Cheney, the cabinet and and the congressional leadership which has authorized the US to commit serial war crimes in shackles to the Hague to stand trial? Thus is the tactic of the ultra leftist, arguing about political perfection while unable to do anything about it.
Medea Benjamin is in her own world where carbon footprints are meaningless and the world’s problems would be solved if everyone in the world could enjoy a late 20th century middle class existence. The notion that jetting middle class white women around the world to witness injustice really belittles the dignity of the people used as draws for political tourism. Most importantly, like Camejo’s best practices, it accomplishes nothing.
The idea that protesting, a once noble practice which has been reduced to ineffective, ritualized non-confrontations with power might still be effective and that the carbon footprint of incessant jet travel to deliver the celebrity to a place where she might speak the truth power, a truth which it already knows, is worth the effort other than in creating a glow in which the celebrity might bask is one that fails on cursory analysis.
The problem here is the cult of celebrity and the need for humans as sheep to offload their aspirations onto a totem. Frequently these individuals are so insecure that the drive to be taken under the wing of a leader or a celebrity is so powerful as to occlude real grassroots radical, independent politics. So many “on the left” are afraid to walk in power, too imbued with being “the opposition,” to effectively articulate a positive, popular vision that magnetizes people.
Whether ultra leftist sectarians or liberal protestmongers, neither has a grassroots base and, more importantly, we’ve seen that neither is capable of advancing our common agenda to any meaningful extent.
Someone get a sheep’s crook and yank these jokers offstage.
-marc
April 27, 2008 at 10:42 pm
The day that Peter Camejo actually gets himself elected to public office (how many times in the last 30 years has he run for something???), maybe then I will actually be willing to listen to what he has to say. Until then, he’s nothing but a gadfly who just writes sectarian crap like this to attract attention.
As an old professor of mine at UC-Berkeley once said, “LOSERS is not strong enough a word to describe people like this.”
Seriously, Peter, if you want to build the Green Party — or another left-wing 3rd party — why not run for City Council or School Board? Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s too beneath you. A lot easier just to berate other people who actually try to work to get results in this world.
April 26, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Apologize to Ralph Nader? The Democratic Party should spend money publishing ads apologizing to Ralph Nader?
You should submit this to The Onion for publication.
April 26, 2008 at 11:50 am
I’d like to make a correction to Peter Camejo’s response to Medea Benjamin. He writes of the 2004 Green Party nominating convention in Milwaukee:
“Medea Benjamin in her effort to support John Kerry helped successfully to manipulate within the Green Party support for David Cobb, the anti-Nader pro-voting Democrat candidate who favored US occupation of Iraq in two public debates with me.
“She worked to get the Green Party convention to prevent Nader/Camejo from being endorsed after Nader/Camejo representatives won a number of Green Party primaries and state conventions, including California.”
In 2004, Camejo was one of a number of individuals running for president in the Green Party primary. He won that primary in California and elsewhere, but two days before the nominating convention in Milwaukee, he announced that, in fact, he had only been running as a stand-in for Ralph Nader (who has never been a registered Green). In other words, no Nader/Camejo representatives had won any primaries because Nader had not been running for president with Camejo and thus was on no ballots as a presidential candidate with Camejo as his running mate.
Delegates at the convention rejected the Nader/Camejo ticket, partially on the basis of the manipulations and deceptions that Nader and Camejo had engaged in. Delegates nominated David Cobb to be the Green Party candidate instead.
Nader, who had not even bothered to grace the convention whose support he sought, nonetheless came to California that summer and, with Camejo, attempted to reverse the outcome of the Milwaukee convention by holding another state Green Party convention — to take away the ballot line from David Cobb.
I did not support their efforts, though I did sign the petition to get them on the ballot (but not as the official Green Party candidates), as I believed then and believe now that they had the right to run and that people have the right to choices.
While so many of us laughed when Ralph Nader announced his choice of Matt Gonzalez as his running mate, I thought some good could come out of their campaign if they went around to college campuses and elsewhere and talked about electoral reform.
I’m now sorry to see that Peter Camejo is back in the mix with Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez, as I find the triumvirate of Nader, Camejo, and Gonzalez, at the very least, gives the impression of perpetuating the old patriarchal paradigms that have been so bad for humanity for thousands of years.
I will acknowledge that Matt has brought some excellent people into the San Francisco Green Party — Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim (is she still Green?), and others to name a few. But I remain sorry that none of these three have otherwise given much thought to the grassroots and supporting efforts to build the Green Party from the bottom up — other than to foment dissent within our ranks. They must know that running for the presidency is unrealistic, and yet they continue to bat at windmills anyway, while we struggle at the local level to pay rent for an office well-utilized by numerous grassroots activists, to print slate cards and election newspapers, and to on other ways build the multi-party system.
April 26, 2008 at 8:30 am
I love it when “progressives” talk nasty to each other. Sorta makes me wish dueling wasn’t illegal, ya know?
April 25, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I think I read about this in “Who Gives a Frak” magazine…..Camejo should apologize for being such a shrill jerk.