Re: Analysis of the U.S. Greens

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Jay Moore crossposted:

> By Jerry White
>
> When they left the Democrats in the early 1980s, it was not from a
> theoretically clarified standpoint, based on an historical assessment of the
> class character of the Democratic Party. Instead their estrangement
> developed largely because they found it increasingly difficult to influence
> the party on such issues as women's rights, environmental protection and
> nuclear power.

Golly. So women's rights, ecoactivism and nuclear power have nothing to do
with the patriarchal division of labor and an underfunded welfare state,
greedhead corporations which dump toxic waste, and greedy utility
companies trying to screw their customers; apparently they're just the
paranoid obsession of a few petty bourgeois opportunists. The things you
learn from orthodoxy!

> I asked Resenbrink for his assessment of the political record of the German
> Greens, particularly their role as partners in the ruling coalition headed
> by the Social Democrats, which has slashed social spending and taxes on big
> business, and participated in NATO's war against Yugoslavia.

This is bullshit. The Greens were pretty vocal in their criticism of
the war, but make up only 7% of the parliament; the Soc Dems didn't pony
up fresh money for their much-vaunted education reforms, and passed a
bunch of tax laws which didn't change much of anything (a lot of tax
shelters apparently got axed, nullifying the fiscal effects). Mostly, the
German welfare state -- which comprises 49% of the total economy --
remains intact, functional, and immensely popular.

> What McLarty and the Greens are arguing for, in the name of
> anti-globalization, is a retrogression to a more primitive stage in the
> development of man's productive forces.

Cheap sexism yoked to a nonsequitur about one of the few parties to call
for ecologically sane development and appropriate technology. Yuck.

-- Dennis