In reply to the Monthly Review article, "Confronting Bipartisan Empire: The Case of the Iran Freedom Support Act, at:

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/furuhashi290606.html

Thank you, Yoshie, for the informative "Confronting Bipartisan Empire: The Case of the Iran Freedom Support Act" and, too, for the appalling statistics in regards to what we might begin to call the "Iraqi Nakba", and for much the same causative reasons. In relation to the American Left, it is important to have the concrete facts in hand.I find it interesting to note that two favorite Democratic progressive icons, Barbara Lee (CA, Berkeley/NW Oakland) and John Conyers (MI, Detroit) do not show on the list of nays. Could it be positively confirmed that they have actually voted for this bill? Or were "absent"? It does seem somewhat incongruous, since Lee acquired a bit of fame in being the sole No vote on either the first "Patriot Act" or the first Iraq war authorization bill, I don't recall which. And Conyers is the House repository - or morgue, perhaps - for Bush/Cheney impeachment efforts. This is asked not out of some silly "faith in the icons", but because if they did vote for this bill, it should - and should be used to - provoke quite a scandal within the otherwise somnolent "progressive left", sharing as it does the senility of late American imperialism. For the American Left as we know it(and in my case as I positively do not love it) did quite a bit more than make the mistake of putting all of its eggs in the one basket of electoral politics. In its successful suppression of any visible mass public expression of opposition to Washington's Middle East aggression - a suppression whose effects continue until the present - the Left engaged in a historic betrayal on the scale of 1972 or post-1948. The result is the current spectacle of a fraudulent Democratic Party manufactured "progressivism" parading itself before the eyes of young activists. I wager that it will be its last such betrayal. Much of what we see of the American progressive left can be safely written off as irrelevant for the future. This is not intended as a sectarian prescription, by the way. The issue is not the electoral venue versus the street. The question is, first, what exactly is capitalist and imperialist electoral politics, and therefore what is the role of a determined opposition to capitalism and imperialism within such a venue and how does that role relate to the various other functions of opposition? For if electoral politics is but the political form of abstract (alienated) labor, clearly this is not the way to power no more than is "pure" trade unionism, but rather it is the way to build a public "wedge" faction with a persistent presence in order to daily expose the real workings of the ruling regime and, in the particular case of the U.S., to disable, hopefully permanently, the viability of the Democratic Party as a "lesser evil". Without this electoral faction, "street" movements such as that of the immigrant rights movement will always be hijacked into the Democratic Party.

As of late we have seen once again Democratic Party "progressives" in action in regards US Middle East Policy, this time with the roaring salute given to Israel's Lebanese aggression by the US Congress: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll391.xml

Note that Kucinich, Lee and Waters simply answered "present"! As in "just us chickens"? Certainly not in the spirit of "Presente!".

The paltry Nays:

Abercrombie Conyers Dingell

Kilpatrick (MI) McDermott Paul

Rahall Stark

Stark is the other California East Bay congressperson next store to Lee. Conyers and Dingall are pretty well known. Ron Paul is the Texas Republican libertarian.