Unsafe at any frequency

[bunsen_h]

Ralph Nader has announced that he'll be running for U.S. President again.

He was interviewed by Robin Brown on CBC Radio's As It Happens on Monday evening (Feb. 25th).  His comments were, um, interesting.

Though the interview is now available from the CBC as streaming audio and as an MP3, I thought it might be useful for people to have a transcription...

Barbara Budd: Some see him as a man of principle and integrity. Others think he’s a pain in the political behind. Ralph Nader is one of those “love him or hate him” kinds of people, and — love him or hate him, he’s in the race again. Mr. Nader announced yesterday that he’s running again for President of the United States as a third-party candidate. And we reached him in Washington, DC.

Robin Brown: Mr. Nader, most candidates run... to win. Why are you running?

Ralph Nader: To make it possible for future third-party independent candidates to win, by overcoming these ballot-access obstacles that Canadians would find absolutely startling and offensive, to the freedom to run for elected office. And to push for a federal ballot-access standard for federal office. Right now, I have to deal with fifty different state laws, county laws, petitioner requirements, whether they have residence, whether they have registered voters, whether they live in the right county, it’s a total nightmare designed to prevent the two parties from facing up to competition. If you had this system in Canada, you wouldn’t have had an NDP party, you might not have had universal health insurance.

RB: And what do you think is the reason people don’t want you to run?

RN: Because they’re Democrats who don’t want competition. They want to deny my voters the opportunity to vote for a candidate of their choice. It’s very politically bigoted, and that’s the word for it, I consider it a important civil right / civil liberties matter, because it’s not like the two parties are doing very well for the country. A recent Gallup poll showed 61% of the people believe the two parties are failing. We have a two-party duopoly that gerrymanders districts, so that one party dominates some districts and the other party dominates the others. So, 90% of the districts for the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress are dominated by one party or the other, they’re not competitive, the voters don’t have the two-party choice, and the election is like a coronation, not an election.

RB: Now, some of the people who supported your earlier runs... now view you as a spoiler, and judging from what I’ve read today on some of the blogs, even a joke. How do you overcome that?

RN: Well, it’s not a joke when I have succeeded in saving millions of lives and injuries, I’m used to that. I went to Washington after I did the CBC TV on the auto safety, because I couldn’t get on TV in Detroit, or anywhere else in the country criticizing the auto companies, by make and model name. And they all laughed, in Washington. So they’ve been laughing. The point is, as long as our citizen groups have a hearing, we can have a good chance of prevailing. But Washington shut down about twenty years ago, when both parties rolled over to big business, in a big way, and now we can’t get anything done. So these people who are using words like “spoiler”, which is a contemptuous, politically-bigoted word, those are the people who let the Democratic Party slide into the corporate abyss, with corporate cash in their pockets, these are the people who didn’t do anything when the Democratic Party pushed NAFTA and WTO through, and when the Democratic Party refused to support the health and safety regulatory agencies with adequate budgets, and refused to have campaign finance reform. You know, they should talk. I think they should look in the mirror, the Democratic Party, stop scapegoating, and get to work and represent the people for a change.

RB: You, yourself, were shut out of the debates in your past runs, and --

RN: Even though a majority of people in the Zogby poll and the Fox poll wanted me on.

RB: How can you get into the debates this time, how can you make a change?

RN: You can’t, because it’s a private company controlled, created and controlled by the Republican Democrat parties, and they don’t want people on, they don’t get people on. The networks should not really collaborate with that kind of exclusivity. They even left Perot out in 1996 after Ross Perot got 19 million votes in 1992. For heaven’s sake, why are we rationing debates in this country? We don’t ration entertainment, we don’t ration weather reports. We don’t ration sports. We’ve let these two parties restrict us to three very very orchestrated-type ritualistic so-called parallel press conferences in the fall of ’08.

RB: Mr. Nader, what do the American voters need to hear that they’re not hearing from the other candidates?

RN: Well, they need to hear a debate on single-payer health care, on an explicit way to get out of Iraq, on having the U.S. playing a major role in fostering Israeli-Palestinian peace instead of just knee-jerking support for the Israeli government and ignoring the broad and deep Israeli peace movement. They need to completely reform the tax system so it moves more of the burden on stock speculation. Things we like the least, like the addictive industries, tax pollution... I think your Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, had a very nice motto, and that was: “Tax what we burn, not what we earn.” And instead, we’re taxing human labor more than capital, imagine that? We should tax human labor and necessities as a last resort, not as a first resort. There’s no debate on that, there’s no debate on the bloated military budget, it’s full of documented waste by Pentagon auditors and Congressional investigators, and that’s now half of the federal government’s operating expenditures. Drawing money away from rebuilding our sewage treatment systems, drinking water systems, highways, bridges, public transit, the whole system is perversely controlled to benefit the few against the many. And so we need all the forces for justice, all the candidates for justice, we can possibly muster.

RB: Why did you wait until now, to throw your hat into the ring?

RN: Well, on the #1, I don’t like long campaigns. I think Canadians marvel at how long presidential campaigns are. And #2, I was testing the water for numbers of weeks. We have to raise funds, we have to get a lot of volunteers, we have to get technical people, to deal with the web, to deal with the arduous job of organizing petitions and petitioners in state after state, on street after street, and that took time. So, now we’re into the presidential race.

RB: In terms of the race for the Democratic nomination, this time around, people are seeing it as a more progressive race because there’s an African-American candidate, a female candidate. Is it more progressive, or is that a smoke screen?

RN: Well, corporate power has a way of transcending race, gender, creed... You can see it with women in Congress and the Black caucus. The Black caucus is not fighting for poor Black people in cities the way they should, with a few exceptions. The women in Congress, their vote on issues is largely pretty much the same as men. They really should have taken a huge, huge profile for the mistreatment of children, we talk about “children first”, but in many ways we have atrocious anti-children policies, including inadequate daycare, compared to countries like France, or Belgium, or Holland. I mean, there are always exceptions, one or two really stand up, but by and large power tends to reduce people to a common denominator in Congress if the people are not organized outside the Congress.

RB: Is running for the Presidency the way to effect change?

RN: Well, it’s certainly one way, because it has a high profile that reaches young people, it reaches people who have dropped out of the system and don’t vote, almost half of the people in this country don’t bother voting for the presidency, and fewer for members of Congress. It also tends to keep agendas on the front burner. You know, if you’re running for the Senate, or for the House, you’re not going to be able to reach a national audience here. And I like the idea of what the great essayist I.F. Stone once said. He said, “The history of social justice is that people try and lose, try and lose, and try and lose, and someday, because they’re willing to lose, somebody’s going to win.”

RB: Well, thanks for taking the time today, Mr. Nader.

RN: Thank you, and all Canadians.

RB: Good-bye.

RN: Bye.

BB: That is Ralph Nader, who we reached in Washington D.C., and he’s running for U.S. President.

Comments

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not particularly well-informed about the process of getting on the ballot either here or in the U.S., but I don't think the basic process works all that differently. You start locally, put together a good platform which appeals to people who aren't happy about the current political options, gather support, spread the word... over years and multiple elections. Our major public debates have the same "major-parties-only" limitations that Nader seems to think we'd find shocking, but that hasn't prevented the creation and success of a variety of new parties at the provincial and national levels. The Greens have been locked out of a lot of things because they're not "major" enough, but they've been growing steadily because they're picking up popular support. The last provincial election in Quebec was a big surprise, when the ADQ, which had never had more than 5 members in the Assembly, got 41 members and 31% of the vote.

I just don't see a good connection between Nader's stated reasons for what he's doing and the way he's doing it, and the way things actually work. I'm also slightly boggled by the way he throws around words like "bigotry". That's a really blinkered way of responding to the criticisms.

Thanks for the corrections/links.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

While I may applaud his call for reform of the US political system, I still don't think he should run again. This is partly because I think he's too old at 74 (and yes, I also think that John McCain, who is just 3 years younger, is also too old); it is also because he has tried too many times and too many would-be voters therefore have written him off. All his candidacy will do is encourage more Americans to give up voting as a waste of time -- not the message that someone should be sending.

I might add that I don't think the Canadian political system is any healthier. The Liberals have been far too successful at the federal ballot box for most of the 20th century; the current situation with the "Tories" in power was, historically, a rather rare exception. It does not help that the original Tory party was (IMNSHO) hijacked by neo-conservative "sheep" leaving those who preferred a more European approach to twist in the wind. That last is another reason why so many Canadians are following their American counterparts and giving up voting.

I really do not want the government that these non-voters so richly deserve.