Gaza Update 3 - Bush & Obama

In This Edition:

Forgive me--But I was wondering about your heart….

Ralph Nader - Letter to Bush on Gaza Crisis

Ali Abunimah - Inheriting Bush's blinkers

Obama remains Silent on Gaza Carnage - Completely Ignores Anti-Israel Demonstrators

Chris Hedges - Why I Am A Socialist
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I keep hearing that his ardent (spell-bound?) tentatively progressive, Democrat supporters want to give Obama a chance to be the "Change We Can Believe In!" It is apparently not polite to criticize his picks and appointments of right-wingers, religious zealots and war mongers, or his complete silence on the Israeli imposed siege of Gaza and slaughter of innocent Palestinians in violation of international law.

It still surprises me that someone who first gained traction from the anti-war and pro-peace progressive vote, who kept talking (endlessly) about hope and change and "Yes we can!" would completely ignore pro-peace demonstrators and have nothing to say about the carnage in Gaza, unless of course, he is simply more of the same sort of typical Democrat politician whose pragmatism allows him to ignore, if not condone or even perhaps commit, war crimes. The country doesn't need another Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi posing as a change agent. Obama needs to be held accountable now, even if it takes every hopeful progressive who put him in office to get back out on the streets to let him know what they think.

Please read the articles below, the first two of which counter the Bush Administration's and the Zionist propaganda machine's claims that Hamas was responsible for breaking the ceasefire. The third set of articles begs the question of what kind of change-agent Obama really is. Would a true progressive seeking to bring peace and change to our battered world simply ignore a small group of veterans and other folks peacefully demonstrating against Israeli war crimes while the "change-agent" headed out to play golf or run? Would same have nothing to say about war crimes if committed by any other country but Israel? Maybe speaking out against war crimes is not the kind of change you voted for. Maybe you have become enured to slaughter and war crimes over the last two decades and have given up on the rule of law in international relations. I haven't!

Forgive me--But I was wondering about your heart….

I had thought that your heart was pure…
You seem to be a decent human being.
You speak kind words—your smile is disarming.
But sometimes I wonder….

I read about the killings on daily basis.
The children who were blown to bits
because someone had a suspect…
but you turned from the question of justice.

Justice--such a foreign word.
Your news, it does not know it
except as used against the poor,
or to justify another war.

Your silence is so disturbing.
Your comfort so important.
Your face so full of kindness.
And I was wondering about your heart….

Chris
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Letter to Bush on Gaza Crisis
From the Nader Page
http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2092-Letter-to-Bush-on-Gaza-Crisis.html#extended

Dear George W. Bush---

Cong. Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama’s declaration that “there is only one president at a time” over-estimated the number. He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S built F-16s and U.S. built helicopter gunships.

The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5 million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he single handedly stopped the British, French and Israeli aircraft attack against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.

Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2000 so far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times greater then the casualties incurred by Israelis. But why should anyone be surprised at your blanket support for Israel’s attack given what you have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in Afghanistan?

Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals, pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities providing electricity and other necessities.

Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. You too have repeatedly violated international law and committed serious constitutional transgressions.

Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food, water, spare parts and electricity at varying intensities for almost two years. The depleted UN aid mission there has called this illegal blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising rapidly. UN rations support eighty percent of this impoverished population.

How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy or what you have called Christian charity?

What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?

Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Ha’aretz, called the Israeli attack a “brutal and violent operation” far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south. He added: “The diplomatic efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a new truce without this bloodshed…..to send dozens of jets to bomb a total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs—just today, they were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half years ago in Lebanon.”

Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy. However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the U.S. whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli prohibitions on the international press.

Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just twenty two percent of the original Palestine?

The “wildly inaccurate rockets”, as reporters describe them, coming from Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.

There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet the Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially occupied territory, still further entrenching its colonial outposts, still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints This is going on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza Rice?

Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government—even resupplying it with the still active cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the invasion of that country in 2006.

The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.

From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the origins of this conflict which was the dispossession of their lands. To afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann:

“There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis Hitler Auschwitz but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
Alfred North Whitehead once said: “Duty arises out of the power to alter the course of events.” By that standard, you have shirked mightily your duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.

The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor, President-elect Obama can inherit something more than the usual self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the national interests of the United States.

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Inheriting Bush's blinkers
Obama and American liberals readily adopt positions on Israel that they would deem extremist and racist in any other context

Ali Abunimah

guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 January 2009 11.30 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/israelandthepalestinians-barackobama/print

"I would like to ask President-elect Obama to say something please about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced right now by the people of Gaza." Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney made her plea after disembarking from the badly damaged SS Dignity that had limped to the Lebanese port of Tyre while taking on water.

The small boat, carrying McKinney, the Green Party's recent presidential candidate, other volunteers, and several tons of donated medical supplies, had been trying to reach the coast of Gaza when it was rammed by an Israeli gunboat in international waters.

But as more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured – the majority civilians – since Israel began its savage bombardment of Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media. This convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.

The Mumbai attacks were a clear-cut case of innocent people being slaughtered. The situation in the Middle East however is seen as more "complicated" and so polite opinion accepts Obama's silence not as the approval for Israel's actions that it certainly is, but as responsible statesmanship.

It ought not to be difficult to condemn Israel's murder of civilians and bombing of civilian infrastructure including hundreds of private homes, universities, schools, mosques, civil police stations and ministries, and the building housing the only freely-elected Arab parliament.

It ought not to be risky or disruptive to US foreign policy to say that Israel has an unconditional obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention to lift its lethal, months-old blockade preventing adequate food, fuel, surgical supplies, medications and other basic necessities from reaching Gaza.

But in the looking-glass world of American politics, Israel, with its powerful first-world army, is the victim, and Gaza – the besieged and blockaded home to 1.5 million immiserated people, half of them children and eighty percent refugees – is the aggressor against whom no cruelty is apparently too extreme.

While feigning restraint, Obama has telegraphed where he really stands; senior adviser David Axelrod told CBS on 28 December that Obama understood Israel's urge to "respond" to attacks on its citizens. Axelrod claimed that "this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks as Hamas began its shelling [and] Israel responded".

The truce Hamas had meticulously upheld was shattered when Israel attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinians, as The Guardian itself reported on 5 November. A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems, will not leave the White House with George Bush on 20 January.

Axelrod also recalled Obama's visit to Israel last July when he ignored Palestinians and visited the Israeli town of Sderot. There, Obama declared: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

This should not surprise anyone. Despite pervasive wishful thinking that Obama would abandon America's pro-Israel bias, his approach has been almost indistinguishable from the Bush administration's (as I showed in a longer analysis.

Along with Tony Blair and George Bush, Obama staunchly supported Israel's war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, where it used cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing more than 1,000 people.

Obama's comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There, he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children at "joyful play just like my own daughters". He saw a home the Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizbullah rocket (no one had been hurt in the incident).

Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children, while never having uttered a word about the thousands – thousands – of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always "terrorists".

The problem is much wider than Obama: American liberals in general see no contradiction in espousing positions supporting Israel that they would deem extremist and racist in any other context. The cream of America's allegedly "progressive" Democratic party vanguard – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman, New York Senator Charles Schumer, among others – have all offered unequivocal support for Israel's massacres in Gaza, describing them as "self-defence".

And then there's Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state and self-styled champion of women and the working classes, who won't let anyone outbid her anti-Palestinian positions.

Democrats are not simply indifferent to Palestinians. In the recent presidential election, their efforts to win swing states like Florida often involved espousing positions dehumanising to Palestinians in particular and Arabs and Muslims in general. Many liberals know this is wrong but tolerate it silently as a price worth paying (though not to be paid by them) to see a Democrat in office.

Even those further to the left implicitly accept Israel's logic. Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, criticised Israel's attacks on Gaza as a "reckless" and "disproportionate response" to Hamas rocket attacks that he deemed "immoral". There are many others who do nothing to support nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and colonisation, such as boycott, divestment and sanctions but who are quick to condemn any desperate Palestinian effort – no matter how ineffectual and symbolic – to resist Israel's relentless aggression.

Similarly, we can expect that the American university professors who have publicly opposed the academic boycott of Israel on grounds of protecting "academic freedom" will remain just as silent about Israel's bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza as they have about Israel's other attacks on Palestinian academic institutions.

There is no silver lining to Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but the reactions to it should at least serve as a wake-up call: when it comes to the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine, the American liberal elites who are about to assume power present as formidable an obstacle as the outgoing Bush administration and its neoconservative backers.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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Obama remains Silent on Gaza Carnage - Completely Ignores Demonstrators
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As War Ravages Gaza, Silent Barack Works on Golf Game

20 Days Ahead of Inauguration, President-elect Seems Distant From Growing Crisis

December 30, 2008
http://news.antiwar.com/2008/12/30/as-war-ravages-gaza-silent-barack-works-on-golf-game

With the death toll in the Gaza Strip still rapidly rising, incoming President-elect Barack Obama's initial reaction of "no immediate comment" has seamlessly segued into an official policy of no comment, period. As Obama and family continue to enjoy a luxurious vacation in Hawaii, his attention seems far more focused on his golf game than the foreign policy crisis he is poised to inherit.

The silence from Hawaii is almost deafening, with Obama's staff using the oft-repeated excuse that the US "has only one president at a time" to justify his lack of commentary. The silence, combined with his cabinet choices, has punctuated what many already believe: that when the Obama Administration takes the White House next month, little will have really changed.

A small group of protesters at his rented vacation home hope to ensure that the President-elect is at least aware of what is going on. But if Obama saw the protesters as his motorcade took him to play a game of basketball, he didn't show it. There was no word of how many points Obama scored, but it is unlikely to have rivaled the number of casualties in the Gaza Strip during the game. And the silence continues.
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Pro-Palestinian Activists Picket Obama Compound in Hawaii

Demonstrators walk near President-elect Barack Obama's vacation residence in Kailua, Hawaii, on Dec. 30, 2008.(Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg News)

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/12/30/pro-palestinian_protesters_pic.html?wprss=the-trail

Updated 4:23 p.m.
By Philip Rucker
HONOLULU -- It's a far cry from Cindy Sheehan's tent city near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., but a half-dozen pro-Palestinian activists demonstrated Tuesday morning outside the Kailua compound where President-elect Barack Obama is vacationing with family and friends.

Holding signs urging Obama to take a new approach to Middle East policy, the protesters gathered early in the morning just beyond the security perimeter of Obama's estate, hoping the president-elect would see them when he left for his traditional morning workout. But as of 9:20 a.m. Hawaii time, Obama had not left his residence.

It was the first time protesters had gathered outside Obama's vacation home during this trip. The activists represented several groups, including Veterans for Peace. They told a pool of reporters traveling with Obama that they want the incoming administration to make a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian territories a top priority, especially given the current strife in the Gaza Strip.

Ann Wright, 62, a retired Army colonel from Honolulu, wore a T-shirt that read, "We will not be silent." She carried a sign that said: "Change U.S. foreign policy. Yes we can."

"We feel there's a great need for change," another activist, Margaret Brown, 66, of Honolulu, told the Associated Press. "We need to stop giving Israel a blank check to do what it's doing. ... We just gave them a blank check to oppress the Palestinians, and this is the result."

The protesters said they planned to demonstrate later Tuesday at a federal building in downtown Honolulu, about 15 miles from the remote Kailua enclave where Obama is staying.

When asked about the demonstrations, Obama's chief national security spokesperson, Brooke Anderson, said, "The president-elect values citizen participation in our nation's foreign policy, but there is one president at a time, and we intend to respect that."
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Why I am a Socialist
by Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081229_why_i_am_a_socialist/
Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by TruthDig.com

The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism-one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars-or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.

The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," Orwell wrote, "that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.

There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist "Red" Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke's platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.

Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.

"By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water," Wendell Berry wrote in "The Unsettling of America." "Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat."

The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good or impact on the environment. Corporate laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make as much money as possible for shareholders, although many have moved on to fleece shareholders as well. In the 2003 documentary film "The Corporation" the management guru Peter Drucker says: "If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast."

A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, says in the film: "The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn't any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed." Ray Anderson , the CEO of Interface Corp., the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a "present day instrument of destruction" because of its compulsion to "externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize."

"The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction," Anderson says.

In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan's book "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," asserts that the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically defined as psychopaths.

Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists in the film psychopathic traits and ties them to the behavior of corporations:

callous unconcern for the feelings for others;
incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
reckless disregard for the safety of others;
deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;
incapacity to experience guilt;
failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.

And yet, under the American legal system, corporations have the same legal rights as individuals. They give hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates, fund the army of some 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation, drain taxpayer funds and abolish government oversight. They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newsprint and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. They have high-priced legal teams, millions of employees, skilled public relations firms and thousands of elected officials to ward off public intrusions into their affairs or halt messy lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed sources of information. A few media giants-AOL-Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney and Rupert Murdoch's NewsGroup-control nearly everything we read, see and hear.

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones," Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist.

"The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

Labor and left-wing activists, especially university students and well-heeled liberals, have failed to unite. This division, which is often based on social rather than economic differences, has long stymied concerted action against ruling elites. It has fractured the American left and rendered it impotent.

"Large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate not in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook," Orwell wrote in 1937 during the last economic depression. "Here I am, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I, personally, in any important issue, would side with the working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time-the office-workers and black-coated employees of all kinds-whose traditions are less definite middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a working class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist party."

Coalitions of environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, sustainable-agriculture and anti-globalization forces have coalesced in Europe to form and support socialist parties. This has yet to happen in the United States. The left never rallied in significant numbers behind Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it threw its lot in with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars, empowers the national security state and does the bidding of corporations.

If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class, especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism.

© 2008 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com . Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. "