A Ralph Nader Meeting

The longer one participates in left politics, the more things start to flow together.

On Thursday evening,, I went to a Ralph Nader meeting at the Ethical Culture Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side sponsored by the Nation Institute, the Learning Alliance and the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

My mother's late guru Irving Levitas used to lecture there on Jewish religion and history occasionally. He was an anarchist who lost much of his hearing during the Spanish Civil War. Alan Wald, a like- minded Marxist literary critic, cited him once in an article on Jewish anarchism.

I spot Avis at the Nader literature table. She is married to Elliot, an old friend of mine from the Catskills who used to teach at Kent State in the 1970s. When I used to go out to SWP educational conferences (brainwashing sessions) at Oberlin University in Ohio in August, Elliot would come by to attend one or another discussion. His take on the SWP: smart people but sectarian.

Avis used to live with Ron Wolin, a SWP comrade of mine from the 1970s when I was assigned to the upper west side branch. Ron was a founder of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. After I got mugged in my apartment on the upper west side, I went to stay with Ron for a week or so until I got my head together.

One of the muggers had a pillow over my head and was saying, "This motherfucker is going to die." I pushed the pillow back and cried out, "I am a revolutionary. I sell the newspaper that Malcolm X used to tell people to read". He relented and my life was spared.

Nader was preceded by a number of speakers on a panel, each of whom got ten minutes. Nader was to get thirty.

One speaker was Arthur Cheliotes, the president of Local 1180 of the Communications Workers Union in NY and a delegate to the Labor Party Founding Convention. Arthur's vice-president is Ed Ott, a member of the board of directors of the Brecht Forum in NY where I give my Internet workshops.

Local 1180 invited me to give the workshop to their women's committee which is composed of 14 African-Americans and one Chinese woman. I was a big hit, especially when I talked about the nipple-piercing page on the Web.

Last month I spoke on Local 1180's radio show with Alfredo Lopez, the guy who designed the union's Web Page. We are speaking about the Internet. Alfredo and I are perfectly in sync about politics and the Internet. I made a mental note to myself that this is kind of person I want to have in any political organization I belong to.

For all of Local 1180s leftish credentials, I am disappointed in Arthur's talk. He announces his endorsement of Clinton, stating that it would be "disastrous" if Dole won the presidency while the GOP retained control of the Senate and House. His vision of a Labor Party is also a big let-down. He seems to see it as a pressure group within the Democratic Party. The role of the LP, he says, is to educate a backward union membership. Local 1180 members voted 40% for Republicans and 41% for Democrats. The clear implication is that the role of the LP is to increase the Democratic Party vote.

The next speaker is a black woman connected with the Campaign for a New Tomorrow. She is an utterly conventionally looking woman in her late 40s who is dressed like and looks exactly like the administrative workers who were just on strike at Barnard and not a Angela Davis lookalike. She is replacing Ron Daniels who had another last-minute commitment he had to keep. Ron ran for president in 1992 on a third-party ticket. He was one of the prime movers of the initiative for Independent Black Political Parties in the 1970s, an idea that Malcom X and the SWP helped to foster. Nowadays, the SWP is more interested in selling Malcom X literature than acting on his ideas.

She surprises everybody by delivering a fiery speech denouncing "lesser evil" politics and endorsing Nader. Cheliotes sinks deep into his chair. Since it is a steel folding chair, this is no easy trick.

Next to speak was Joanne Landy of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, who endorses Nader. The Campaign is a left social democratic formation that was key in agitating around the need for "democracy" in the Soviet world. It took up the cause of Soviet dissidents while protecting its left flank by supporting human rights in Central America. The Campaign is rumored to be getting huge hand- outs from George Soros, the billionaire investor who started anticommunist foundations throughout Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Soros has also adopted Bard College, my alma mater, as one of his pet causes. Bard College became a favorite of his after Leon Botstein, the president of the college, awarded the chair of the Bard College Decorative Arts Institute in NY after Cooper Union turned down a similar proposal from her. Rich people disgust me.

The latest Nation Magazine, given out free in the lobby, has a full page ad by Progressive Assets Management, a brokerage run by my old friend Peter Camejo. I owe my political orientation to him, but haven't spoken to him since the 1987 crash. He had me in stocks instead of cash due to negligence on his part. I had decided to move to cash after an article in the Monthly Review a month earlier had predicted a crash.

The last speaker before Nader is Micah Sifrey of the Nation, who, along with ace journalist Marc Cooper, has just endorsed Nader in the pages of the magazine. Sifrey appears to be in his early thirties with a buzz-cut and goatee just like mine. I take to him instantly.

He gives an electrifying speech. While starting off by making the record that a Nader vote is the only one that makes sense for progressives, he then proceeds to castigate Nader for the next nine minutes for running an uninspired, unprofessional and demoralizing campaign. Anybody with a brain in his head can understand that Nader's problem is similar to Jackson's. Both have tendrils into a funding base that is largely ruling-class Democratic. Jackson deals with this by running a "radical" campaign as a Democrat, while Nader compensates by hardly running at all. He doesn't want to seem to attract attention. It is obvious that the Greens should have run somebody more committed to the Left. Unfortunately, due to our weakness, we have nobody now who can serve as our Lula. This will come.

Nader's speech is wonderful. The high-point is when he says that we are saddled with powerful people running the country who are not content to be super-rich. They want to be hyper-rich. He lashes out at Clinton who has given the military 11 billion dollars more than it asked for but cuts back programs for employee health and safety, etc. Costs too much, that's Clinton's complaint.

The meeting testifies to the ineptness of the Nader campaign. There is no pitch made from the stage for volunteer campaign workers. A few day later, Avis calls to ask me if I would be willing to be able to pass out Nader brochures at the big AFL-CIO teach-in next week at Columbia since this meeting of thousands had not been able to recruit another volunteer besides her. I explain to her that I am already committed to handing out Brecht Forum brochures. Two of the major conveners of the teach-in are Columbia professors Eric Foner and Manning Marable, who is also a leader of the CofC. Foner is a frequent lecturer at the Brecht Forum. It pleases me to no end to be on the same payroll as these guys rather than stockbrokers.

I leave the meeting at 9:30 immediately after Nader's speech. As I walk up CPW I notice crowds of people on the sidewalk looking up into the sky. The lunar eclipse has just started and there, clear despite some cloudy haze, is a moon that has the bottom 1/3 blocked out by the shadow of our planet. It is impressive.