At 90-years-old, Ralph Nader, America’s leading public interest lawyer continues to dedicate his life and energy to the struggle for social justice and making the concept of democracy real for all Americans. Nader, a best-selling author who ran for president four times as both a Green Party and independent candidate, has always used his platform to advocate for consumer and worker protections, and environmental stewardship while demanding responsible regulation of corporate America’s massive power.
In his 60 years of activism, Nader has been instrumental in passing automobile safety laws that have saved countless lives, and called for the creation of government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Nader also founded a wide range of civil society groups which have organized citizens to take a direct role in demanding corporate and governmental accountability.
Nader’s newest book is titled, “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.” Here he talks about the book which focuses on how the Democratic party’s reliance on corporate campaign funds isolates it from the priorities of America’s working families, and his prescription on how to counter Donald Trump and the Republican party’s phony populism.
RALPH NADER: So this book is really a very, very practical 2024 book for any candidates that want to subordinate corporate power, corporate coercion, corporate domination of our political economy and culture and families to the supremacy of citizens who are everyday people, workers, consumers, communities. And so it’s a very, very practical book. It goes through the history of how the Democratic party kept scapegoating everybody but themselves for their inability to landslide the worst Republican party in history, abandoning half the country to turn it into red states — imagine that, starting out abandoning half the country. Losing the gerrymandering race surrounding the candidates with corporate-conflicted political consultants and on and on.
So we’re in this predicament where these races are razor thin, decided presidentially by the Electoral College, where the Democrats have lost twice, 2000 and 2016. They won handily the national votes, but lost the Electoral College vote.
And they still didn’t pick up to try to neutralize the Electoral College, which is this independent movement started by Stephen Silberstein (National Popular Vote) and San Francisco, which gets laws passed, including Connecticut and New York, I might add, to say that they will give the Electoral College vote to any presidential candidate on the ballot that wins the national vote. And they still won’t get behind that.
So this book is a long series of stories and recommendations how to have a progressive agenda. It doesn’t just address the Democratic candidates. Any candidate would benefit from this book if they run or want to run with the people, for the people, of the people, by the people, instead of by giant corporations and their doctrine of supreme commercial corporatism.
SCOTT HARRIS: And Ralph, you address in your book the concern that the Republican party and Trump — this precedes Trump before he entered politics — that the GOP has promoted a form of phony populism, emphasizing family values while actually waging war on families in the form of defunding, you know, valuable government programs that are genuinely helping families. At the same time, they’re advocating huge tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in these profitable corporations.
Tell us a little bit about what your advice would be to Kamala Harris running against Trump this year, and what prescription in terms of countering this phony populism that seems to capture millions of votes.
RALPH NADER: Well, it’s pretty easy to expose the Republicans. I mean, the fact that they’ve stolen the word populism from the Democrats is just an example of how weak the Democrats are. Populism arose in the 1890s with the farmers agrarian revolt against the big railroads and the banks. The essence of populism is to take away power from giant corporations and put it back into people’s hands.
The sovereignty we the people that the preamble the Constitution starts with and the populism of the GOP is just rhetoric. They’re trying to basically say, you know, “Hey, these elites and so forth.” They don’t get very specific who say to these Republicans, okay, so you say your purpose. Why are you freezing the federal minimum wage at $7.25? Why are you cutting corporate taxes far, far more than the taxes on individuals. Even working people, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc. pay a higher tax rate than the most profitable giant corporations by a long measure.
You’ve got southern Republican governors who have deliberately stripped people from having Medicaid for their family and kids that the federal government is paying 90 percent of. And then you you say, populism is supposed to encourage people to vote. Instead, you’re doing everything to purge votes, to obstruct voters, to make it harder to register voters, harder to do absentee ballots, harder to vote in any way.
You’re basically corporatism. You’re the party of corporatism. You believe corporations should decide everything for ourselves, including the government.
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