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Date Posted: 09:07:46 01/12/02 Sat
Author: Jack Ross
Subject: Re: ATTACK ON THE ANTI-GLOBALIST MOVEMENT
In reply to: Jack Ross 's message, "Re: ATTACK ON THE ANTI-GLOBALIST MOVEMENT" on 09:04:56 01/12/02 Sat

JACK ROSS: INTERVIEW WITH PRAVDA.RU'S BILL WHITE

That said, I still managed to win just under 10,000 votes and placed fifth in a nine-way race with two winners, despite being 22 and having no real history of ever having achieved anything in the mainstream world. I took 7% of the vote overall, but it wasn't an even 7% -- it was 2% and 9th place in Bethesda and 15% and 3rd place in Laytonsville. The differences between the bourgeois liberal strongholds and the neighborhoods of working people was like night and day.

Because of that I'm very positive about the prospects of winning a legislative seat this year. I need to take about 16% of the vote to win one of the three available in the district, and I've come very close to that in the past. Also, my name recognition and the amount of funds I have available have increased dramatically.

Right now I have two confirmed candidates who will be slating with me for other offices -- John Latham in the Bethesda district (ironically), and James MacArthur for County Council in Silver Spring and Takoma Park. Given what I managed to do with the Saunders campaign last year (the Constitution Party candidate for Congress), I'm very hopeful.

I'd like to see a third party alternative emerge, and I think it will. I think that the approaches that have been taken in the past -- establishing the party as a kind of social club and not running candidates -- is wrong. I think a party emerges from its candidates, so I have been involved in organizing candidates. What comes from that in the long term we'll have to see.

I have tried working with other groups, the Buchanan campaign being the best example, but I find that most political organizations are intensely focused on appealing to some imagined "middle" that lies somewhere within the confines of the mass-produced debate that the national media enforces, and not on real truth or the real interests of the people who are out of power. I focus on truth, and I'm not very interested in biting my tongue. I'm also not afraid of much -- the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had a very strong influence on me in me early life and I am a confirmed Stoic. I also know, having weathered it in the past, that every newspaper and television station in the country can denounce me, and their total sum ability to have an impact on my life is absolutely nil -- no matter what they do, my friends aren't going to leave me, I'm not going to lost my job, and I am much more experienced with political violence than they are, so I'm not really afraid of that either.

As to them saying nasty things about me, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, if bad people don't say bad things about you, you are doing something wrong.

(11) In the 2000 election cycle you actively worked on the Buchanan campaign. Tell us about that experience and about why you left the campaign. what did you learn from that experience and what do you think is the best way of rebuilding the independent movement and moving forward from there?

I was an early non-right-wing supporter of Buchanan, having been impressed with the way he conducted himself during the 1999 Battle in Seattle World Trade Organization riots. I thought his message of socialism for working people -- what he called "economic nationalism" -- was an excellent one, and one with broad appeal. What I discovered in working for him is that his organization was not very interested in the message or in winning votes, but seemed to be focused more on turning a profit for themselves at the expense of the campaign proper.

Political campaigns are not profitable ventures. They are, and should be, the opposite --opportunities to spend tons of money trying to make the world a better place. Buchanan's staff, however, did everything they could to screw everyone they came into contact with in order to get that $12 million dollar federal grant, which they immediately embezzled. Bay, for instance, in the 1996 campaign, not only paid herself a $100,000 a year salary every year through 1998 -- paying herself for two years after the campaign had ended out of campaign funds -- but set up a dummy corporation to do media buys and pocketed, if I recall, something like $600,000 or $800,000 in the process. The breaking point for me in 2000 was when the Buchanan campaign cheated the Reform Party primary -- an event I was witness and privy to, because, being the Maryland coordinator for the Reform Party's ballot access and membership drives, I had all the membership records that in theory someone should have requested for the purpose of sending out ballots. When they weren't requested, I made inquires, and discovered the Bob Bowes, an aide to Buchanan, had arranged to substitute Buchanan contributors from 1996 in place of Reform Party members for the primary vote. That was the real reason that Buchanan won that primary and got that $12 million dollars.

As to the independent movement in general, I don't really think there is much of a movement. There are a lot of folk who want some militantly mediocre alternative to the Republicans and Democrats -- the mediocre middle -- but they aren't going anywhere with that idea because when they start trying to define themselves, they realize that there is no real ideological difference between themselves and the mainstream of either party's power structure. They, ironically, are more opposed to the "extremists", the people who are the actual "independents" within the two parties, then they are opposed to the bourgeoisie themselves.

Then there are the extremists, and I like working within that mile. I am hoping one of them -- any of them -- will break out and become a real organization. Once there is something, then I think its important to start looking at and criticizing what it is, but as long as there is nothing, almost anything will do.

I think it's going to take some more events like September 11 to weaken public confidence in the government to make real change in the American political structure. Until then, Americans are going to happily wonder around, not thinking, assuming everything is okay. September 11 woke up some people, proving that there is a silver lining to every cloud, but not enough -- yet. The question is whether those people can establish enough of a sub-culture to challenge the false reality crafted by the mainstream press and the culture industries, and to lay a foundation to grab the people that become disillusioned by the next big event.

There is certainly a lot more death and destruction awaiting America. I don't know if it will take a nuclear bomb to fix it, or if the nuclear destruction of an American city will be enough -- the drugs that most Americans slumber under are so powerful, I'm not sure if anyone more than 100 miles away from a nuclear blast will care about it any more than I or anyone around here care about the destruction of New York. The radio will play some pre-fabbed songs, tell everyone to be unified, the danger won't rear its head for a month, everyone will go back to sleep, and then a few more thousand more die.

Independent politics can really only be understood in the context of revolutionary politics. Anything else is really just more of the same crap, playing into the same spectacle, achieving the same nothing.

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