Nader, Ralph

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see raiders

active on impeachment and boeing

uber 1 national city lines red car GM: 6pKXxB

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Trump lays bare his desperation as he hurls another whopper - Alternet.org

AN 7 26

RALPH NADER

After progressives, including self-described Democratic Socialists, won numerous primary victories in New York and elsewhere, President Donald Trump launched a whopper of a lie, even by his crazed standards. He declared that the “communist” Democratic Socialists are “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding…. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, it includes the Pearl Harbor attack.” This comes after his November 2025 White House meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, where Trump praised Mamdani strongly, saying they would work together to make a better New York City.

Trump is singing a different tune now. He is like Senator Joe McCarthy on steroids, who in the 1950s smeared political opponents, activists, and others, falsely accusing them of being communists. Snarling Joe then maliciously exploited the post-war fear of the Soviet Union. Today, Trump is just following in McCarthy’s footsteps by launching his latest BIG LIE yet to firm up his shrinking base of Trumpy MAGA voters.

Look for Trump, an authentic fascist, to dittohead himself on his “communist” tirade. He knows that the pro-Israel, corporate Democrats are distancing themselves from the rising new progressive candidates who, if they’re smart, will make populist domestic demands that are heavily favored in the polls.

These Democratic candidates should push for a much higher minimum wage than the present frozen federal minimum of $7.25 per hour; full Medicare for All; restore corporate and super-wealthy taxation to the levels of the prosperous 60s; crack down on corporate crimes against consumers, workers, and the environment; and adopt the long-time Western European social safety net of childcare, paid worker and family sick leave, and paid vacations. A real child tax credit would cut child poverty nearly in half and would benefit over 60 million children. They should raise the Social Security taxes on upper-income people to pay for raising Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years.

Jeffries and Schumer are perfect foils for Trump to pit them against the rising progressive revolt inside their party. Why? Because they will dig in their heels, reflect their paymasters’ demands against most of these reforms, and create the very cleavage Trump wants.

Candidates should push to cut the bloated military budget, end hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, and direct the savings to public works and safety net services in the community, USA.

These changes have substantial left-right voter support because they are concrete improvements for all families who need and deserve such social benefit returns from the tax dollars they send to Washington.

There are other left-right supported reforms, such as public funding of campaigns; ending the gross, corrupt selling of our elections to the highest toxic profiteering bidders; ending military arms shipments to countries that violate human rights (already federal law but unenforced); and stopping Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, committed with US weapons and unconditional political backing, which violates five federal laws.

All these measures should be integrated into a heavily publicized “Contract for the American People” and turned into a daily vocal call for a commitment to this agenda by these candidates. The classmessage is that corporations, all created by government charters, should be our servants, not our masters, as the Kleptocratic Trump regime continues to balloon the Trump Dump.

Bolstered by support of such concrete commitments, Trump’s “communist bellowing” will look ridiculous and will be ripe for the sharpest of counterattacks, dragging the GOP’s wreckage out into the open by comparison. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the Republicans will be hoisted by their own petard.

The real hurdle to this “Contract for the American People” are the corporate Democrats—indentured to the same Wall Street crowd and military-industrial Empire of war and vast profits. The chief corporate Democrats are the party’s leaders—Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. When asked by a reporter about impeaching Trump (the cruel, corrupt, violent, America-wrecking outlaw, using the White House as corporate-occupied territory to enrich himself), Jeffries replied, “I don’t want to get out ahead of that discussion.” What about getting ahead of Trump’s daily despicable efforts to destroy our democracy and wrecking America?

How about just representing the vast majority of the Democratic voters and about 60% of all polled Americans who think Trump is “a dangerous dictator” and want him impeached and removed from office?

If Trump does not steal the election with his many voter suppressions, redistricting, and other attempted usurpations of state election controls, he’ll work to paralyze a Democratic-run Congress. Jeffries and Schumer, to preserve their leadership, are susceptible to not rocking the boat and not fiercely rolling back all the Republican Party’s devastating enactments since January 20, 2025.

Let’s see if the incumbent and newly elected progressives know how NOT to marginalize themselves by pushing distractingly marginal ideas instead of showing just how popular the above components of this proposed Contract for the American People are with the voters.

These challenges should also focus on the growing drive for Impeachment around the country, which both Trump, Jeffries, and Schumer oppose (The Hill reports neither Jeffries nor Schumer have endorsed any of the removal efforts)—the latter two enforcing a “Now is not the time” policy. What smug insensitivity to the fears of millions of Americans hurting from Trump’s cruel decrees every day and night NOW!

Jeffries and Schumer are creating their own Achilles heels for emboldening their progressive Democrats to move to replace them in January 2027.

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The Ralph Nader Radio Hour - Bad Company | KPFA

4 20 heh

Ralph welcomes journalist and author Megan Greenwell to discuss her book “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.” Then, Ralph speaks to James Zogby (co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute) about the recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Megan Greenwell is a journalist who has written or edited for publications including theNew York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, WIRED, and ESPN. She is also the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, a workshop and college-access initiative for students from low-income backgrounds. She is the author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.

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an 9 25

The huge Labor Day banner outside the Labor Department building with Trump’s picture and the words “American Workers First” depicts one of Donald’s most disgusting lies.

With multiple factual examples, Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times, provides proof that Trump is the most brazenly “anti-worker” president in U.S. history. With his Big Vicious and Ugly Bill, barely passed by his fawning GOP in Congress, and dozens of illegal Executive Orders, he is smashing the American Worker beyond the avarice of the cruelest Plutocrat.

Quoting liberally from his Labor Day article in The Guardian, I urge labor union leaders and rank-and-file union members to absorb its contents. This article could make American labor angry enough to mount an unstoppable movement to tell Trump, “You’re Fired,” and fire up enough convinced or electorally scared lawmakers in Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office.

The aggregated madness from this failed gambling czar, wholly devoid of empathy, compassion, truth, while betraying his own voters and his oath of office, follows:

Trump put corporate interests first by “often cutting [workers’] pay or making their jobs more dangerous.” This includes gutting regulations that protect miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the top labor watchdog – The National Labor Relations Board, whose now stalled mission is to “protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics.” Then “Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.”

“Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage construction of factories that make renewable-energy products.”

Trump is pressing to end “minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers,” and has already ended a “Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.” Trump adamantly opposes raising this frozen minimum wage for 25 million workers who would benefit from a $15 federal minimum wage. He ended a “requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.”

Tariffs and reckless, wholesale deportations are “pushing up prices and slowing economic growth.” His big tax cut for the super-rich is being paid for by “millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage” (from Medicaid). As for deportation, it is “undermining their employers’ businesses,” and I might add closing down some of them and impairing farmers from harvesting their crops.

“In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president [Liz] Schuler said: ‘We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.’”

Trump is swinging an axe to end worker safety protections, cutting OSHA staff and pushing those still working at OSHA to weaken all kinds of essential safety and health protections, ranging from coal miners to workers under extreme heat, to reducing fines for violating safety rules, and much more. He “froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.” “…a major killer among coal miners.”

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) “forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9 million lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. ‘If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs.’ ‘Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers,’” and tens of billions of withheld tax revenues annually, one might add.

IFrame Content

The list of anti-worker cruelty goes on. Tyrant Trump always says, “This is only the beginning.” He acts like an imperious dictator because that is what he is, imposing burdens and pain on the American people – in red and blue states alike. The six rogue Supreme Court Injustices, who thus far know no limits, are enabling the madman in the White House. Before his sleazy conversion, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.” UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORST IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE!

The flip side of Trump’s feverish repression of worker rights, remedies, and existing protections is that there is no chance of reforming anti-union laws, such as the notorious Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, with Trump and his congressional cronies in power.

Readers may well ask why all these attacks on workers didn’t lead unions and their allies to launch a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS and insist that the feeble, corporate-conflicted Democratic Party adopt it authentically and replace their stagnant leadership with new, vigorous leaders. That is what they should have done right after their disastrous loss to Trump, the serial law violator, abuser of women, corrupter, daily, delusionary falsehood teller, shredder of the Constitution, greedy, egomaniacal, and seriously dangerous personality.

There is still one Labor Day before the 2026 midterm elections. Can Unions and the Democratic Party save our Republic from the rampaging daily Trump outlawry and viciousness (he is now invading American cities while wrecking our country)? It should be easy, just based on his failed record. (See my letter of August 27, 2024, to Liz Shuler).

As the economy worsens amidst the chaos, consumer prices rise, unemployment rises, and Trump behaves more like Captain Queeg (the fictional, cruel, and crazy skipper in the film, The Caine Mutiny), voters for Trump are starting to ask, “Did We Vote for This?” Non-voters, in turn, should resolve to head for the polls and reject what Trump is doing. The people who are the sovereign in our Constitution must start acting like they have power.

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russel mok

greenpeace Goes to Trial in North Dakota to Defend Against Energy Transfer SLAPP Suit

:{By Editor Filed in Uncategorized February 13th, 2025

On February 24, 2025, Greenpeace USA is scheduled to go to trial in state court in Mandan, North Dakota. Greenpeace is being sued by Energy Transfer – the operator of the Dakota Access Pipeline – for nearly $300 million related to the 2016 protests at Standing Rock.

Deepa Padmanabha

The stakes are high, and not just for Greenpeace USA as an organization. This trial is testing out legal tactics that, if successful, could be widely applied against protesters, and indeed, anyone who speaks out or criticizes a deep-pocketed corporation.

The lawsuit filed against Greenpeace has been called a SLAPP suit – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.

We rang up Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal advisor to Greenpeace USA, to get some details on the lawsuit and upcoming trial.

What are the allegations of the lawsuit?

“Both sides have said this is likely the biggest case ever in the history of the North Dakota state courts,” Padmanabha toldCorporate Crime Reporterin an interview last week. “It’s three buckets of claims. The first bucket of claims are claims of defamation. Energy Transfer alleges that the Greenpeace entities made false statements. And those false statements caused damages. In the state case, we originally started out with over 80 statements that Energy Transfer alleged were defamatory. And now we are down to nine.”

“Those nine statements fall into three categories. The first category of statements are statements that we made that the Dakota Access Pipeline crosses Standing Rock Sioux tribal ancestral lands.”

“The second category are statements that Energy Transfer deliberately desecrated Standing Rock Sioux tribe cultural resources.”

“And the third category of statements are statements that we made that Energy Transfer and its contractors used excessive force against peaceful protestors.”

“The important thing to note here is that by the time Greenpeace entities made any of these statements that are at issue, these were statements that were already widely circulated in the public. Anybody familiar with the resistance at Standing Rock had heard these statements. These were not statements that Greenpeace invented.”

“Yet Energy Transfer is suing the Greenpeace entities for these statements.”

“That’s the first bucket of claims. The second bucket of claims are claims of tortious interference. They are related to defamation. Energy Transfer alleges that Greenpeace made these alleged false statements to financial institutions – institutions that were involved with financing the Dakota Access Pipeline. And the allegation is that based on those statements, the financial institutions took action that cost Energy Transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in damages – lost financing, financing costs from delays.”

“We know that many of these financial institutions had their own commitments. They did their own due diligence to understand what was happening with the Dakota Access Pipeline. In fact, no bank or financial institution made any decision based on a Greenpeace statement.”

“That’s the second bucket of claims. The third bucket of claims are on the ground claims such as trespass, conversion, and aiding and abetting. This is a bucket that is quite dangerous for the movement. These claims make it clear that Energy Transfer’s target is much bigger than Greenpeace. It really is an attack on our First Amendment rights.”

“What they are trying to do is create this idea of collective protest liability where if you have any involvement with, for example, training at a protest, you can be held accountable for anything that happens there by unknown people.”

“For example, if you are engaged in training in principles of non-violence, de-escalation, principles of safety, you can be held accountable for the actions of unknown protesters who, for example, destroy construction equipment. This idea is dangerous – that you can be held accountable for anything that happens by unknown people, especially at a time when we know that many protests are being infiltrated.”

“And you can imagine that this would have a serious chilling effect on anybody who wants to engage in protests. This idea that you can be held accountable for anything that happens is quite a dangerous one. It’s very clear that Energy Transfer – and the larger fossil fuel industry – is trying to send a message to everybody – watch out, you could be next.”

This lawsuit has been going on for eight years. Have there been any settlement talks?

“I can’t get into too much detail about that. But I will say that we are prepared to go to trial, and we are expecting to go to trial. It’s very important for us that no matter the outcome of this lawsuit, our decisions will be in line with our values and our principles and our commitments to our own indigenous peoples policies.”

There have been public reports about settlement talks in this lawsuit. And last year, Greenpeace settled with Shell Oil over another lawsuit. Did you work on that lawsuit?

“That was not Greenpeace USA. That was Greenpeace UK.”

Greenpeace UK agreed to pay something like $375,000 to settle that lawsuit. What are the odds this case will actually go to trial?

“As of now, we are fully prepared to go to trial. Trial is in three weeks. That’s where we are headed.”

Will you be in court at trial?

“Yes.”

You say this is a SLAPP suit. What is that?

“SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. At their core, they are attacking First Amendment protected behavior. You look at the parties. It’s often activists, non-profit organizations, journalists, even concerned citizens who are speaking out about a matter of public concern.”

“In this instance, the concerns about the Dakota Access Pipeline, its routing and risks were absolutely a matter of public concern.”

“What is the nature of the activity targeted? Often the activity is First Amendment protected activity, such as free speech or non-violent protest. These lawsuits are often disguised as defamation lawsuits. That is very much the case here where many of the claims at issue are defamation claims.”

“The other issue is peaceful protest. Any involvement we had on the ground was 100 percent in line with our 50 plus year history of nonviolent direct action, bearing witness, and no property damage.”

“Another tell-tale sign of a SLAPP lawsuit is the power imbalance between the parties. To Energy Transfer, this lawsuit is just a drop in the bucket for them. But for Greenpeace, it represents a significant financial investment to put on this kind of defense.”

“Another tell-tale sign – the amount of damages. Energy Transfer is seeking $300 million. SLAPP suits have these huge damage claims to send a message. Even if they lack the evidence to support such a damage claim, which is absolutely the case here, just by making the allegation, it can have a chilling effect on anyone watching the case.”

“These corporations use the litigation process as punishment. This has been eight years. The first case was thrown out of federal court. But they kept the fight going.”

“When they filed the federal court action, they already had the green light to construct the Dakota Access Pipeline. It was constructed. So why would you still use the litigation process?”

“Because they know these kinds of lawsuits take years and years and years. You put a stress and burden on the powerful voice they are trying to shut down.”

“Even though it’s only the Greenpeace entities that have been served in this case, there have been a number of third party subpoenas. There have been wild attempts to draw in smaller groups and individuals into this lawsuit – not as named defendants, but to instill a sense of fear that they too are being watched.”

“As someone who has been involved in SLAPP lawsuits for a long time, this case hits every single aspect.”

The Wall Street Journal published an article last year titled – The Texas Billionaire Who Has Greenpeace USA on the Verge of Bankruptcy. That billionaire is Kelcy Warren. What did you make of that article?

“One of the most interesting points of that article was toward the end. The journalist wrote this: ‘The lawsuit poses its own risks for Warren. Some oil-and-gas investors expressed concerns about the claim, saying it makes the industry look vindictive and could result in a reinvigorated protest movement.’”

“Basically, some investors are concerned about a backlash. That is the truth. This lawsuit has galvanized the movement in a powerful way. Greenpeace is getting support from so many allies, allies we have never worked with before. They are now watching this case because they realize the implications this case could have.”

“There is what happens in court, but there is what happens outside the court. And corporations need to take the possible backlash into account. You could reinvigorate a movement. People have really come together to fight back against this kind of abuse of power.”

Were you able over the years to depose Energy Transfer executives, including the CEO Kelcy Warren?

“There were over 100 depositions in this case – Greenpeace employees, third parties, Energy Transfer contractors and Energy Transfer employees, including Kelcy Warren.”

Is the Kelcy Warren deposition public?

“I don’t know if that deposition is publicly available. There is quite a bit in this case that is subject to a protective order.”

Greenpeace wasn’t at the forefront of these protests. The native Americans groups were at the forefront of these protests.

“That is accurate. Greenpeace entities had limited involvement and that was intentional. This was not a Greenpeace campaign. This was a grassroots indigenous resistance. Greenpeace supported it by being an ally. Greenpeace supported the indigenous resistance in a very, very limited way.”

“Energy Transfer is trying to rewrite history. The first question I always get from people involved was – did Greenpeace have any involvement at Standing Rock? I had never heard about Greenpeace being involved. Greenpeace was really not involved.”

“Greenpeace was known for its big, bold campaigns. And that was not the case here.”

There were other major public interest groups who supported the resistance at Standing Rock. Why did Greenpeace get sued by Energy Transfer and not the other groups?

“Let’s go back to the first case that was dismissed, the RICO case. That was the second RICO case brought by the same law firm in back to back years. One of the lawyers made public statements and he was basically shopping this tactic around. There was this idea that civil RICO would be the new tactic used to go against advocacy groups.”

“Why Greenpeace? We are known for bearing witness, taking big, bold actions and not being intimidated. The idea was – if we can knock out Greenpeace, if we can scare them, then who else is going to step into their shoes? Who else will take on this level of risk?”

“We recognize that intention. And that also speaks to why we have been fighting the case the way we have been. We have been fighting this case for the movement. We know that the intent is to reach beyond the Greenpeace entities. And we take that fight seriously.”

*For the complete Interview with Deepa Padmanabha, 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 7(12), Monday February 10, 2025,[print edition only.

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The Progenitor of Inequalities – Corporate Personhood vs. Human Beings - Ralph Nader

Progenitor of Inequalities – Corporate Personhood vs. Human Beings

By Ralph Nader

February 3, 2023

The word “inequality” is everywhere in the media. It usually refers either to race, gender, rich vs. poor, or other differences between human beings. Absent from the public debate is the biggest perpetrator of “inequality” against human beings – the corporate entity itself.

Ever since 1886 when a U.S. Supreme Court reporter, in a headnote for the Court’s opinion, wrote that corporations possessed equal rights under the Constitution, judges and corporatist legislators have equipped corporations with an arsenal of inequitable rights. (The Constitution makes no mention whatsoever of “corporation” or “company”).

How is that possible with the 14th Amendment mandating equal protection under the law? Because this central provision for our alleged rule of law didn’t take into account the contrivances of corporate lawyers, corporate judges and corporate-indentured lawmakers.

Corporations that are created by state charters are deemed “artificial persons.” States like Delaware and Nevada have made a revenue business out of chartering corporations under permissive laws that concentrate power at the top of autocratic commercial hierarchies, leaving their shareholder-owners with very few options other than to sell. Since the early 1800s, states have chartered corporations giving their shareholders limited liability. The maximum they can lose is the amount of dollars invested in their company’s stocks or bonds. The modern history of corporate law is now aimed at maximizing the limited liability of the corporation itself.

The following twelve examples of inequality are shocking:

The corporate entity protects owners and shareholders from business debts and other liabilities. Yet, individual business owners are not personally shielded from business related debts or liabilities.

Bankruptcy laws favor corporations mightily over individuals. Bankrupt corporations can cancel their labor union contracts, are free from lawsuit liabilities against them, and can even get judges to grant retention bonuses for the culpable executives so they can provide parties with their alleged historical memory. Then under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company, having shed its liabilities, can reorganize and be back in business. If it is a giant bankrupt company like General Motors was in 2009, its recreation can get many billions of taxpayer dollars because it is considered “too big to fail.” Compare all these privileges with an individual going bankrupt no matter how wealthy he or she may have been. No contest.

Under criminal laws, corporations have huge advantages. Unlike most individuals who commit serious crimes, corporations have lawyers who shield them with “no-prosecution” or “deferred prosecution” agreements instead of criminal penalties. Unlike individual criminals, corporations cannot be jailed, and are almost never executed (that is having their charter pulled and put out of business, unless they are small business crooks). Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the big banks may even be too big to be prosecuted. While the big corporations, having cost the lives of many people and sickened more, continue on their merry profiteering ways. In this category are the large drug, chemical, auto, oil, coal and hospital chains.

Wrongfully injured people suing corporations under tort law find corporations can endlessly delay, with their insured or deductible legal expenses. Victims who are desperate for money to pay medical and other bills, cannot deduct their legal expenses and may not have insurance. Corporations can force low settlements because of their inequality of status and power.

Unequal taxation is a Niagara of inequality. The top federal tax rate for individuals is 37% and only 21% for corporations, before a plethora of loopholes. Why should an individual businessperson or any individual have to pay 37% and face an economic disadvantage vis-a-vis a competitor that only pays 21%? The baseless response is that there is a rational classification for this unfairness – nonsense.

Unlike individuals, corporations can create their own parents – (holding companies) for evasive purposes. They can also create hundreds of children (subsidiaries) to evade all kinds of law enforcement. The tax and non-regulatory haven of the Grand Cayman Islands has thousands of corporations “domiciled” there. One large building – Ugland House – “houses” 12,000 corporations. Real humans would be insufferably cramped if they attempted to quarter themselves with such inorganic efficiencies.

Until the decision last month by the Third Circuit of Appeals, saying no to profitable Johnson & Johnson’s corporate lawyers, corporations could create a subsidiary and put in it all the pending lawsuits by injured consumers, declare the subsidiary bankrupt and then leave the harmed plaintiffs with little recourse. This is called the “Texas two-step” a creation of corporate lawyers.

Corporations’ one-sided contracts requiring you to sign or click on, turn you into contract peons. Freedom of contract is gone. Your status is reduced to obeying the harsh impositions by banks, auto dealers, insurance companies, credit card companies, utilities, etc. Try to escape and go to a competitor. No dice. They all have the same restrictions, with minor variations. These long, inscrutable fine-print handcuffs require you to waive your right to go to court for a trial by a jury of your peers.

The antitrust laws, being little enforced over the years, have resulted in monopolies or shared monopolies, replete with manipulative powers that make a mockery out of an alleged free marketplace. How’s that for inequality – destroying the right to and benefits from a competitive market?

Corporations are given monopoly licenses by the FCC to control 24/7 what we own – the public airwaves. The radio and TV corporations get this bonanza free of charge along with the power to decide who gets on and who doesn’t. No individual could either have such a status or in any way challenge these license renewals made virtually automatic by the corporatized U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Emanating from these inequalities, embedded in corporate-lobbied unequal laws, are the realities of raw economic, political and cultural power that intimidate and coerce mere human mortals. Corporations are able to survive and thrive after horrendous overcharges, crimes and casualties – the opioid and other drug companies, the vast toxic pollution of air, water and food, the crimes of Wall Street and the exploitation of workers’ health and economic well-being. Corporations continue, as they are not human, without feeling the sanctions of social shame, guilt or ostracism. Mere humans have no such inherent escapes.

Other derivative political power allows corporations to strategically plan and control the lives of humans with algorithms and monopoly patents. They get away with direct marketing that exploits children and circumvents their parents’ authority, breaking long-held cultural barriers to mass gambling online, and continuing to discriminate against women and minorities, as workers and consumers.

The biggest prize of all for the uses of corporate-dominant inequality over real people is the control of the Congress, state legislatures, country boards, city councils, and elections along with the selection of judges. Their assemblage of ever larger entrenched legal and illegal inequalities produces a multiplier effect, achieving deeper inequalities as corporate control over capital, labor, technology and choice of jurisdictions here and abroad intensifies their privileges and immunities.

All these drives for maximum power and control are maturing the corporate state – as Wall Street and Washington merge. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a formal message to Congress in 1938, called the control of government by private power “fascism.” In 1933 Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote an opinion warning about big corporations becoming a “Frankenstein monster” in our midst.

So, all you fighters against inequality between people leap into the Big Leagues and confront the biggest progenitors of inequalities of all – giant corporations. Grab hold of the roots if you wish to prevent the bitter fruits. End cruel exploitation provided by these double standards.

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Ralph Nader: Indict Trump for insurrection, too - Alternet.org

January 6 indictment is solid as granite, but leaves out the sole criminal prohibition that would disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot.

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted former President Donald J. Trump for conspiring to prevent Vice President Mike Pence, through a blizzard of knowing “Stop the Steal” lies, threats, intimidation, and mob violence, from counting judicially vetted state certified electoral votes as stipulated by the Electoral Count Act and the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The January 6 indictment is solid as granite. All the incriminating testimony and evidence is from the former president’s appointees or political supporters, for example, former Attorney General William Barr and former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.Democrats are nowhere to be seen. Even lavishly compensated private investigators, hired by Trump himself to unearth electoral fraud, came up empty handed.

The knockout is from former Vice President Pence. He testified in various formulations that on January 6, 2021, Trump demanded that he “choose between [Trump] and the Constitution.” Trump’s demand showed his knowledge that he was haranguing the vice president to do something contrary to the Constitution. Trump was not presenting legal arguments in favor of an alternative constitutional understanding. Trump, a few days earlier, had similarly assailed Pence for being “too honest” in denying any constitutional foundation for a lawsuit claiming the vice president possessed the authority to reject state-certified electoral votes.

The uniform advice Trump received from his own lawyers was that the vice president’s constitutional role in “counting” state-certified electoral votes was ministerial. He was not empowered to question their validity. That had been the universal understanding for more than two centuries since the Twelfth Amendment was ratified in 1804. Even one of Trump’s co-conspirators, lawyer John Eastman, conceded Trump’s zany reading of the amendment would not command a single vote in the United States Supreme Court. J. Michael Luttig, former United States Court of Appeals Judge for the Fourth Circuit, a conservative jurist in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, scoffed at the idea of any role for the vice president in counting state-certified electoral votes other than a ministerial one.

Trump’s private lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and John Eastman face professional or court discipline for their “Stop the Steal” lies. Powell maintained in a defamation lawsuit that “no reasonable person” would have believed her lies were facts.

Historical practice and the Twelfth Amendment’s plain text are reinforced by the four-centuries-old Anglo-American axiom that a man cannot be a judge in his own case. Thus, former Vice President Al Gore lacked power to second-guess the state-certified electoral votes for Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election in which Gore was Bush’s Democratic opponent. Pence, who was Trump’s running mate, would have faced a similar political conflict if he decided on the validity of state-certified electoral votes cast in 2020.

Trump’s incorrigibly criminal, extraconstitutional state of mind was betrayed by his alarming proclamation on July 23, 2019, hoping to undo the American Revolution: “Then I have Article 2, where I have the right to do anything I want as president,” That is, the rule of law is no longer king, the king is law.Willful ignorance or stupidity is no defense to criminal action.

Any free speech defense mounted by Trump would be DOA. There is no First Amendment right to unleash a tsunami of “Stop the Steal” lies with the ulterior criminal motive of shipwrecking the peaceful transfer of presidential power under the Twelfth Amendment by intimidating the vice president from counting state-certified electoral votes that had survived 61 judicial challenges. Trump nearly succeeded. The indictment states that on January 6, 2021, “at 2: 25 pm, the United States Secret Service was forced to evacuate the vice president to a secure location [in the Capitol]. [There], throughout the afternoon, members of the crowd chanted, ‘Hang Mike Pence!’; ‘Where is Pence? Bring him out!’; and ‘Traitor Pence!’”

Free speech icon Justice Louis D. Brandies confirmed in a concurring opinion in Whitney v. California(1927) that the First Amendment is undisturbed by the prosecution of speech calculated to occasion imminent serious harm. It is difficult to conceive of any greater injury to a democracy founded on the consent of the governed than frustrating the peaceful transfer of presidential power in accord with judicially vetted and politically certified popular votes.

The probability that Trump will testify on his own behalf is zero—too great a risk of perjury. A former Trump lawyer, John Dowd, reportedly was convinced that his client was an inveterate liar.

Even if Trump is convicted of January 6 offenses alleged in the indictment before presidential balloting in November 2024, he could still be a candidate for the presidency. Socialist Eugene Debs, while imprisoned for making anti-war speeches and allegedly violating the Espionage Act, ran for president in 1920 and attracted one million votes. Debs’ sentence was commuted by President Warren G. Harding, who invited him to the White House saying, “I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally.”

The sole criminal prohibition that would disqualify Trump from the ballot, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, is “insurrection,” made criminal by 18 United States Code Section 2383.

Section 3 categorically disqualifies from public office at any level of government any official who, after having taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, engages in “insurrection” against it. Among other things, insurrection means seeking by force, violence, or otherwise to frustrate the ability of the United States to enforce the Constitution or laws. The narrative of the January 6 indictment makes clear that Trump conspired and directly engaged in insurrection against the Constitution on January 6 by attempting to obstruct the enforcement of the Twelfth Amendment and Electoral Count Act.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice recommending prosecution of Trump for assisting or aiding the January 6 insurrection. Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for inciting insurrection and a majority of U.S. Senators voted to convict (but short of the two-thirds majority constitutionally required). The Department of Justice has secured multiple convictions against Trump’s January 6 mob for “seditious conspiracy” under 18 U.S.C. 2384, whose elements of proof are virtually indistinguishable from insurrection.

Why then did the indictment omit an insurrection count to disqualify Trump for 2024? And was Special Counsel Jack Smith or Attorney General Merrick Garland the de factoor de juredecider? Under Department of Justice special counsel regulations, the latter is empowered to overrule the former in narrow circumstances.

Without exhausting all the hypotheses, Democrats might wish to see Trump nominated as the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 because they believe he is a sure loser against President Joe Biden and would convulse the Republican Party. Placing that political calculation above the Constitution, i.e., Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, we submit, would be too dismaying for words.

Alternatively, Democrats could believe that disqualifying Trump from the 2024 campaign would taint the outcome in the minds of the considerable number of his deceived supporters and compound political polarization. But to bow to such political calculations would erode the rule of law. The sole loyalty of federal officials from the highest to the lowest is to the Constitution, period.

Perhaps Garland and Smith had non-political legal rationales for their omission. If so, they have not explained it publicly—even though nothing forbids them from candor.

We urge Special Counsel Jack Smith to unilaterally, or with the approval of Attorney General Garland, return to the federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., and ask for a superseding indictment adding a count for insurrection in violation of Section 2383. Not a single word in the factual narrative of the preceding indictment need be changed.

The future of our Republic is too important to be left to shortchanging the fullest legal case against Trump.

---

https://www.alternet.org/stupefying-their-material-liberal-media/

an 7 23

'Stupefying their material': The problem with the liberal corporate media

Ralph Naderand Common DreamsJuly 01, 2023

It was bad. Now it's gotten worse.

David Ignatius, a long-time Washington Post columnist on military intelligence topics, probably never dreamed his newspaper would fill over three full pages serializing his latest work of thrilling fiction, “The Tao of Deception.” On June 28, 2023, the “Breaking news and latest headlines” in the A section of the paper featured the first installment. Part II appeared today, Friday, June 30th.

What’s occurring at the Washington Post, the New York Times and big regional daily newspapers is a flight toward stupefying their material in a desperate plunge to retain readers – print and online. Maybe surveys show a tsunami of aliteracy from the rising iPhone generations.

To adjust to digital age readers, the New York Times has replaced much of its content with gigantic photographs, graphics and other visuals, not just in its regular sections on style/arts, sports and food, but also in the daily news departments as well as the Sunday Business and Opinion sections.

The influential New York Times Editorial Page – once featuring some fifteen or more editorials a week – is now down to three editorials a week. Moreover, this space is now largely taken up by a handful of regular opinion columnists, many predictably redundant and tired. Imagine a historic newspaper intentionally diminishing its editorial advice to this country. There is no precedent.

It gets worse. Various forms of its daily features – entertainment, sports and style/arts – are given enormous space, while coverage of daily local and national civic activity is severely restricted. What used to be reported about the findings, litigation, lobbying and regulatory advocacy of national citizen groups in the nineteen sixties and seventies – leading to major betterment of consumer, worker and environmental health and safety – now is sharply curtailed. As a result, good members of Congress, seeing virtually no news coverage of vital citizen concerns, become indifferent to necessary public hearings and legislation essential to addressing the needs of the public.

Right-wing politicians have learned to game the vulnerable-to-sensationalism New York Times and Washington Post. Trump led the way in 2015-2016 with his presidential run. Most of his outrageous lies, deceptions and defamations were showcased by these two August newspapers. The Times would even reprint his tweets with their CAPITAL LETTERS verbatim without giving the falsely accused any right of reply. (Belated corrections by columnists could not keep up.)

This chronic tragedy has gotten worse in the last year. The Times can hardly resist making crazy politicians into Big Acts. The antics of switcheroo J.D. Vance was a regular news story, with huge photographs, while his Democratic opponent in prime position for the pivotal Ohio Senate race last year, Rep. Tim Ryan, was of little interest to the Times.

In 2021, the Times devoted eleven pages over three days to a mini-biography of Fox’s Tucker Carlson. As well, the Times seems strangely drawn to the profane and violent rhetoric of the ignorant junior Representative from rural Georgia, putting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on the cover of its Sunday New York Times Magazine, in addition to more frequent daily coverage of her outrages.

What’s wrong with this journalism? First, it does not give space to serious political opponents whose positions, by the way, are closer to the editorial stances of the Times. Second, these “in-depth” profiles, as well as regular columns, do not lay a glove on the featured miscreants who rush to use these articles in their publicity and fundraising. Third, the trivial crowds out more important, serious subjects with material that is mostly vacuous since it is about vacuous people that the Times grants greater celebrity status. (TV and radio pick up such coverage from the Times).

I remember years ago when members of Congress, working with civic leaders on important legislation, would drop their more expressive denunciations for fear that the Times and the Post would not cover them because they might appear too extreme. It is exactly the opposite today with crazed right-wing, political corporatists bellowing themselves into prime time.

The Washington Post Live podcasts long ago crossed the barrier between news and advertisers. The tilt toward corporatism, away from the liberal civic community, is pronounced. One example of many is Grover Norquist, the avatar of no-tax super-rich and corporations,who gets a big photo alongside the announcement of his interview by the Washington Post Live’s podcast while the paper ignores inviting civic leaders like Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, Jordan Davis or Marilyn Carpinteyro of Common Cause or Karen Friedman of the Pension Rights Center. Why? Because corporate advertisers do not find these people congenial to their sponsored topics. Sponsors get to approve or veto the participants, as with the participants in the recent Post podcast “Chasing Cancer: Equity and Disparities,” brought to us by the giant drug company AstraZeneca. You can be assured the discussion will not cover outsourcing cancer drugs to a single troubled corporation in India, now causing serious shortages in our country and risking people’s lives.

Both the Post and the Times reporters did report about the cancer drug crisis in their news pages, but didn’t deal with the question of why U.S. drug companies outsource such categories of drugs, which includes outsourcing virtually all antibiotic production to China and India. This is a national security risk if there ever was one. The Washington Post did, however, run an op-ed by Ezekiel J. Emanuel on this topic (See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/16/fix-drug-shortage-tax-breaks/).

Business ads in newspapers have been around forever, but until recent years, such ads did not openly and brazenly sponsor, engage and shape the content of the “news side” of the papers.

Unfortunately, journalistic critics of these concessions are few, whether in the publications at journalism schools or in liberal magazines. Certainly, the media critics for NPR and PBS do not see this as part of their beat, with very few exceptions. In-house critics or an ombudsman are long gone from the Times and the Post.

Would their editors have a greater estimate of their own significance to the unrepresented peoples of the United States? People deserve the empowering right to know about what the foundational civil society struggles daily to accomplish, at the local, national and international levels. (See, Reporters Alert: https://reportersalert.org/).

Coverage of active citizenry from the neighborhoods on up might even increase circulation.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Mitch McConnell gets torn to shreds as 'evil' and 'cruel' in local paper column ›

Ralph Nader: Some lawmakers want a remote Congress so they can remain AWOL. They should be on the job providing essential services ›

Ralph Nader: The rule of law overwhelmed by 'unbridled political power of corporatism and other lawless forces' ›

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Hedges:The total cost of the 2022 federal midterm elections is projected to exceed $9.3 billion. But what do we get from what must surely be the most expensive electoral system on the planet? There’s little real choice. The dismantling of our democracy which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich has been a bipartisan project, leaving only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch, and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’etat is over. They won. We lost.

The wreckage of this corporate coup is appalling, endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial complex that bleeds the US Treasury of half of all discretionary spending, de-industrialization that has turned US cities into decayed ruins, the slashing and privatization of social programs including education, utility services, and healthcare, which so over one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from COVID, although we are 4% of the world’s population.

Draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas, the largest prison system in the world, a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations, mone- saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery, and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.

How are we to interpret these elections which will create even more political paralysis with Republican control of the House, and what should we expect in the next presidential election? Joining me to discuss the political landscape and the wake of the midterm elections is former presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. You can find him at ralphnader.substack.com.

Ralph, let’s begin with the midterms. It wasn’t the blowout of the Democratic Party that many expected. How do you interpret what happened?

Ralph Nader:Well, coming off the list that you just described about the situation in this country and its impact on the world, my first reaction was there are 535 people in the Congress who could change it all,and they don’t all have to be unanimous. It could just be a plurality or a majority of members. So what are we waiting for? Check off your entire list, Chris, and we got the votes. The corporations don’t have the votes. They have money, but the members of Congress want the money to get the votes against their primary or general election opponents.

So it just is very intriguing that people thrash around groaning, moaning, being sickened, injured, blocked, discriminated against, deprived, andthey don’t focus on the Khyber Pass, which is Congress. Whether we like it or not, that’s the institution that has the greatest authority to take on these big corporations and take on the predators and to drive peace in the world instead of war and empire. We’re listening to all these recountings of the ills, ailments, and injustices and the brutish scenarios coming up in the future with climate disruption and reneging on any kind of compact with posterity, and we don’t focus on Congress.

So in the midterm election, they’re running around the campaigns like they’re ward bosses. We’re going to fix this pothole here and we’re going to make sure that there’s a public service there. Instead of looking at the big picture of the concentration of power, they’re doing this piecemeal retail assurances of the public, which of course drives the expectation of the people even lower. When you drive the expectation lower as to what members of Congress are running for election, or challengers running to defeat them, when you control those expectations at such a low level, the members of Congress get away with their responsibility for the country under the Constitution, we the people.

They’re the ones who get to tax new power in Congress, the spending power, the confirmation of judges and officials in power, the right not to go to war. There’s no end to it. So I keep saying if all of these efforts for justice around the country, small, large, national, local, do not focus on Congress and the state legislatures and the town councils, they’re going to be spinning their wheels forever as this country is driven into the ground.

Chris Hedges:I want to talk about the impediments, though. First of all, you haveredistricting. So most races are not actually competitive. The Democratic Party redistricted the seat that Dennis Kucinich had to drive him out. Number two, if you aren’t awash in moneyand you saw this in your own campaign, you were drawing crowds. I think you filled Madison Square Garden. Everybody had to pay $5 to get in. So I don’t know how many thousands of people, but you didn’t have access to television, which would’ve given you an audience of millions. So there are serious impediments to essentially breaking the power of this duopoly.

Ralph Nader:Yeah. But the impediments melt away if people organize in every congressional district to reflect the congruence of left-right opinion in this country, which is deleted from the news accounts who like to talk about polarization, red state, blue state, conservative, liberal. We know that on the fundamental necessities of life, there’s a huge convergence, 70, 80, 90% in the polls. There was one poll a few years ago, Chris, 90% of people wanted to break up the big banks. 90%.

You got 75% or so want universal healthcare even without a major party pushing for it. It just goes on and on. Whether it’s cracking down on corporate crooks, whether it’s changing the campaign finance system, whether it’s controlling what people own, like pension funds and mutual funds which together own three-quarters of the stock of the companies on the New York and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. So the people have the power, but they’ve allowed it to be seized because they don’t do their homework back home.

They don’t spend time on their civic responsibilities. They don’t say to the members of Congress, hey, we’re the ones who have the sovereign power. You’ve got it from us and you’re using it against us, and we’re not going to tolerate it anymore. So the only place where democracy comes before work is in a dictionary. So we have to stop spinning our wheels and recounting disaster after disaster when we can control the legislative bodies, local, state, and national. Look at the initiatives in Nebraska and right-wing states. They have passed minimum wage increases against massive corporate opposition, saturating the television, Florida, Arkansas.

In one conservative state, South Dakota, the Republican dominated legislature, the governor, and the corporations all opposed an initiative to constitutionalize Medicaid, not just to send a statute, but to put the Constitution of South Dakota. Who won? The people won. Because they started working. They rolled up their sleeves. Otherwise, all we’re doing is documenting despair, perdition, pessimism, which discourages people and turns them into cynics, which leads to withdrawal from the political arena and which makes the corporation’s life all the way to the bank.

Chris Hedges:I want to talk about fear because I think Matt Taibbi wrote that most Americans don’t vote for what they want, they vote against the political figure they hate. The divisions largely, as you point out, there’s a majoritarian opinion on many of the issues you just cited. But there is this cultural divide, and people employ fear. Biden’s own record in the Senate and even as vice president is pretty appalling, from supporting Anita Hill to I think five years before the invasion of Iraq he talked about taking Saddam down. He, of course, as rehabilitated Mohammed bin Salman, a fervent supporter of the apartheid state in Israel. He fought school busing.

Aggressively, he sponsored the 1994 crime bill and three strikes you’re out, third violent penalty law where you can’t get parole, NAFTA, Glass-Steagall. So these are not issues that we look back on and support, but the Democrats, like the Republicans, play on this fear, the fear of – And I do see, as you do, a figure like Trump to be frightening and these fringe candidates to be frightening, but it seems that that is the primary currency at this point of our political system.

Ralph Nader:Yeah. Well, there are millions of people who don’t buy it. We need tens of millions of people who don’t buy it. We need people talking to one another in the neighborhoods. We need people to turn out for town meetings. There are all kinds of jurisdictions in this country that allow for the referendum to be stocked with all kinds of progressive legislation at the state and local level. Most people don’t even know about it. They don’t even use it. Why? Because our schools don’t begin teaching these children civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic experience. Learn by doing.

All of this comes down to how much time do people spend to produce a deliberative democracy that wages peace and justice, equality and foreseeing and forestalling the perils for our posterity like climate disruption. That’s what it comes down to. If we don’t address it at that level, if we don’t highlight the victories of the people over powerful interests that occur from time to time in this country, we’re just documenting despair, producing discouragement, producing withdrawal from the political system, and people then just dive into their own discouraging lives and watch entertainment, bet on sports. We gotta turn it around.

The nice thing about this approach is you only have to turn around a supermajority of 535 people. You know what they want more than anything else. They want to win, and that means votes. So you focus votes to nullify the effect of money. I mean, look at the victory of Summer Lee coming out of Pittsburgh. She’s 32 years old and she’s going to be the next representative in the House from an area around Pittsburgh. She was opposed by corporations. She took on the dark side of the United Steelworkers. They opposed her.

APAC put $1 million to $2 million just before the election to defeat her. She beat them all. How? She developed a grassroots coalition based on the principle that they all bleed the same color. It doesn’t matter what labels they put on themselves. She forged this coalition and beat them all. It’s a spectacular story, which The New York Times is not spending much time reporting on. They’re too obsessed with Taylor Greene, the madcap representative from Georgia, putting her on the cover of The New York Times Magazine.

They give all kinds of attention to crazy right-wing groups and institutes. They give people the impression nothing’s happened on the progressive side during the election period. So Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is not Ann Arbor, it’s not Cambridge. It has a lot of conservatives, and she beat them all. Energy. Civic energy is what’s needed. You have 82% of Republicans against Citizens United, which is a Supreme Court decision over a decade ago that said corporations could give unlimited money for or against candidates in elections. Unlimited. A lot of it dark money.

You got over 80% of Republicans, when they’re polled that, are against. It has to be organized. Otherwise, the divide and rule strategy of the two-party duopoly fronting for giant corporations will forever control the people who are the only people who have the votes. I mean, bad as corporates are, Chris, they don’t yet have the vote. Not yet, at least.

Chris Hedges:Let’s talk about the inevitable paralysis with the Republican control of the House. Biden’s already been stymied by Manchin and Democrats who essentially vote as Republicans. What is that going to mean for going ahead?

Ralph Nader:Well, it’s going to mean that nothing’s going to be done other than the routine stuff of just passing budgets for government agencies. The Republicans have such a narrow margin. They’re not going to get anything done, and they’ll be blocked in the Senate. So it’s two years of very little being done. And it’s the Democrat’s own fault. I mean, it’s the worst Republican Party in history. You cannot find a Republican Party since 1854 that has so many positions that are against the health, safety, and economic interests of children, of women, of workers, of small taxpayers, of communities all over the country, of consumers, of patients.

This is a vicious, callous, inbred, ignorant, corporate indentured, corrupt party. What are the Democrats? They lose to them, and then they say, hey, look at the pundits. They said it was going to be a red wave and it wasn’t a red wave. So it’s a victory. That’s how they fooled the people. Victory? What would happen if there were no polls and no pundits? Would the Democrats have pleaded victory? They lost the House of Representatives, for heaven’s sake.

Chris Hedges:Right. Well, they lost because, on all of the issues they just cited, they have surrendered.

Ralph Nader:Yeah, they lost because it starts with the nomination process. They exclude third parties, okay. Who’s they? Who’s they? It’s the state legislatures. They have these ballot access barriers and allow this to happen. They lost for reasons of their own making. For example, John Larson of Connecticut wanted to increase the benefits of social security. It hasn’t been increased, he said, in 40 years. So he puts in a bill and it’s very comprehensive, and he’s sweet-talked by Nancy Pelosi and his chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the crypto Republican, but Democrat in name only, Richard Neal from Western Massachusetts.

He starts pressing. He says, why aren’t you passing this through the House? He says, well, it’s not the right time. We don’t want to be accused of excessive spending. So he drafts the letter, which he wants his Democrats in the House to co-sign. He drafts the letter accusing the Senate of sabotaging the whole process, the Democrats in the Senate using the filibuster as an excuse. He says, let the Republicans filibuster. Let them go on the floor hour after hour after hour on natural television against increasing the benefits of social security for millions of elderly Americans. He was blocked and stymied.

Now, any active citizenry, Chris, would’ve dug into that and made it a major issue inside the Democratic Party. That’s the way you start upending these indentured senior Democrats who have concentrated power in the hands of three members: Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the third one. And they control the subcommittees and the committees and all this started with Newt Gingrich, who did this when he was speaker in 1995, and the Democrats never changed it.

He cut budgets of committees, cut staff, cut the GAO, the monitor of spending, executive branch, waste, fraud, and abuse, eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment, which would’ve exposed some of these massive weapon and civilian technology boondoggles, and the Democrats inherited it. So you always have to go back to the people. What do they think? What do they know? What do they want for their families? You got to organize it. Look, labor never became unionized without rank and file people. Co-ops were never established without rank and file people. It never was top-down. It’s all bottom-up. So we got to focus on the people here.

Chris Hedges:Let’s talk about Trump, who’s just announced. What’s your read on the Trump candidacy and the future tactics of the Republican Party?

Ralph Nader:Well, first of all, under section 3 of the 14th Amendment, any state can ban him from running for election based on this Jan. 6 findings of insurrection. That’s the insurrection section of section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The Jan. 6 committee report is going to be out soon and they could recommend that to the states and say, start enforcing section 3 of the 14th Amendment. If he is banned from running for reelection in four or five states, he can’t possibly compete even at the primary level.

The second thing is, Jack Smith, the new special counsel, people have said that you couldn’t pick someone better for the Attorney General to pursue two criminal violations against Trump which could end in his indictment, and it’s very unlikely that he’s going to have much course to the primary victory if he’s under indictment from those two violations, not to mention the one that’s being prepared in New York state against him. One was stealing classified documents, that’s one that Garland is handing over to the special counsel to pursue. The other, of course, is the insurrection on Jan. 6.

Of course, Garland left out about 10 other violations of federal statutes, including the Hatch Act, which was designed to prevent presidents from using the power of the federal government and property against their opponents. He had campaign events on the White House lawn. He signed millions of checks, twisting arms over at the treasury for the pandemic relief programs. Garland just is giving him a free pass on one violation after another. Bruce Fein and I have written Garland listing all these violations more than once. Never get an answer.

However, two criminal statute violations are more than enough to retire Trump. Now, if that doesn’t occur, Trump is going to want a lot of competition at the primary level. That’s how he wins. He had 16 Republican opponents in the primary in 2016, and he is the best known. He’s the most egregious attention getter, and he would like that. He’d split it 10 ways. He’d say, okay, Youngkin, Virginia, come on board. Primary me. Okay, DeSantis, come on board, primary me. But I don’t think he’s going to get that far.

Chris Hedges:So what do you see happening?

Ralph Nader:I see he’s going to be indicted. There are civil suits against him, obviously, from assaulted women and other people that he’s fleeced. I think there may be a coordinated rebellion in the Republican Party itself. You just don’t get anywhere with other Republican candidates, senators, governors, if the head of the ticket is not only under indictment, but may have actually been convicted.

Chris Hedges:But the Republican Party, which has essentially become this proto-fascist entity, and certainly while Trump held sway, cultish, isn’t going to change its stripes, is it?

Ralph Nader:No, it changes its camouflage. They really pursue everything Trump has pursued, whether it’s immigration on the border. Wall Street, Trump and them are on the same page. The whole plutocratic system, the anti-union system, the tax cuts at an all time low for the super rich and the big corporations. But it’s the camouflage. He embarrasses them. He uses bad language. He attacks people specifically. He doesn’t have their style of control. But that’s serious. That’s a serious problem among politicians. That’s just not a matter of cosmetics. They know they can lose a lot of traction with his kind of blunderbuss and his lying and his mischaracterizing people and accusing people of homicides without a single bit of evidence like he has done in the past.

They’re also afraid of the violence of his audiences that he can unleash, and that can make you lose an election. That could scare a lot of conservative Republicans around the Midwest and elsewhere when they see the eruption of violence. He’s said there are going to be riots in the street if he’s denied the nomination. So there is a real deep conflict, not over economic issues, but over how the party presents itself to a public that it doesn’t want to scare. He scares people.

Chris Hedges:Does the inevitable paralysis now within Congress empower the Republican Party for the presidential elections?

Ralph Nader:No, because they’ll be viewed as the do-nothing House, can’t get anything done. If the Democrats are smart, they’d go on the floor of the House, as the Republicans did against them years ago, and throw the gauntlet down. Why aren’t you supporting Medicare, Medicaid, social security? Why are you against kids? Why don’t you extend the $300 a month child tax credit that went to 58 million kids from conservative and liberal families and you blocked the extension in January? Why are you freezing the minimum wage at a paltry $7.25 cents an hour when you’re making huge money in terms of what the taxpayer is paying you and all the benefits?

They could just throw one gauntlet: Why are you soft on corporate crime?Why are you letting these corporate crooks get away with ripping off the people and endangering their health and safety? That’s what they got to do. If they don’t do that, we’ll just have another very, very close election. Any kind of idiosyncratic event can tip it one way or another regardless of the left-right polls supporting basic change in this country coming in at 70, 75, 80, 80, 85%. I mean, you can’t stop that. That’s an unstoppable coalition.

If the Democrats will get rid of their corporate political media consultants who are losing race after race for the Democrats because they have corporate clients throughout the year and they’re conflicted and because they don’t want to do a ground game, which is what democracy is all about, and they want the 15% huge television buys. Right now in Georgia, there’s this runoff, Chris, between Senator Warnock and Herschel Walker. Warnock has spent $20 million already, charging that Walker is neither competent nor knowledgeable nor fit to be a US senator. Well, they’re going to put $200 million between them from Nov. 8 to Dec. 6.

Just imagine $200 million coming in there. How much of it is the ground game? Well, as little as possible, if the consultants have a say, which is what they do, they want the 15% commission. So Warnock should go around the state of Georgia and change his heavy focus on Walker, everybody knows about Walker now, and start saying, go vote for a raise. Go vote for universal health insurance. Go vote for cracking down on the corporate crooks that are on your back and in your pocketbook every day. Go vote for freedom to vote. Go vote for freedom for women, equal pay for equal work. Go vote for the children. Get that $300 back into poor families’ pocketbooks.

I mean, that’s the way you win an election. But the corporate consultants who should be the subject of major exposes by The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, they got the reporters. They’re the ones who are destroying the Democratic Party, and they’ve been doing it for years.

Chris Hedges:Well, if Walker or Warnock went around and called for those kinds of programs, that corporate money would dry up, wouldn’t it, Ralph?

Ralph Nader:There’s no time for it to dry up. They already got it. Dec. 6 is the runoff. By the way, the more you can get people on your side by your message and your policies, the less money you need. I mean, the money wasted on these TV and social media ads is just staggering. Not only is it wasted, it’s the same ad, it’s dull, it’s repetitious, it’s not authentic, and it irritates people. In other words, it boomerangs against itself. Summer Lee was tremendously outspent, but she had a ground game.

Chris Hedges:Right. That was former presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. You can find him at ralphnader.substack.com. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/capital/

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

This article originally appeared on ScheerPost.]

Preska's caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, "It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law"— capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant,"You really are a lousy piece of trash!"

Donziger, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has been fighting against polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador. His only "crime" was winning a $9.5 billion judgment in 2011 against Chevron for thousands of plaintiffs. The oil giant had bought Texaco oil company holdings in Ecuador, inheriting a lawsuit alleging it deliberately discharged 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. Since the verdict, Chevron has come after him, weaponizing litigation to destroy him economically, professionally, and personally.

The sentencing came a day after Donziger petitioned the court to consider an opinion by the United Nations human rights council that found his house arrest a violation of international human rights law. The U.N human rights council said his house arrest counted as detention under international law and it was therefore illegal for Judge Preska to demand an additional six months in jail. Amnesty International also called for Donziger's immediate release.

Donziger and his lawyers have two weeks to appeal the judge's order that Donziger be sent immediately to jail. Preska denied Donziger bail claiming he is a flight risk. If the Federal Court of Appeals turns down Donziger's appeal he will go to jail for six months. The irony, not lost on Donziger and his lawyers, is that the higher court may overturn Preska's ruling against him, but by the time that decision is made he will potentially have already spent six months in jail.

"What Judge Preska is trying to do is force me to serve the entirety of my sentence before the appellate court can rule," Donziger told me by phone on Monday. "If the appellate court rules in my favor, I will still have served my sentence, although I am innocent in the eyes of the law."

Donziger, his lawyers have pointed out, is the first person under U.S. law charged with a "B" misdemeanor to be placed on home confinement, prior to trial, with an ankle monitor. He is the first person charged with any misdemeanor to be held under home confinement for over two years. He is the first attorney ever to be charged with criminal contempt over a discovery dispute in a civil case where the attorney went into voluntary contempt to pursue an appeal. He is the first person to be prosecuted under Rule 42 (criminal contempt) by a private prosecutor with financial ties to the entity and industry that was a litigantin the underlying civil dispute that gave rise to the orders. He is the first person tried by a private prosecutor who had ex parte communications with the charging judge while that judge remained (and remains) unrecused on the criminal case.

"No lawyer in New York for my level of offense ever has served more than 90 days and that was in home confinement," Donziger told the court. "I have now been in home confinement eight times that period of time. I have been disbarred without a hearing where I have been unable to present factual evidence; thus, I am unable to earn an income in my profession. I have no passport. I can't travel; can't do human rights work the normal way which I believe I am reasonably good at; can't see my clients in Ecuador; can't visit the affected communities to hear the latest news of cancer deaths or struggles to maintain life in face of constant exposure to oil pollution.

In addition, and this is little known, Judge [Lewis A.] Kaplan has imposed millions and millions of dollars of fines and courts costs on me. [Kaplan is the judge for Chevron's lawsuit against Donziger; Preska is his handpicked judge for the contempt charges.] He has ordered me to pay millions to Chevron to cover their legal fees in attacking me, and then he let Chevron go into my bank accounts and take all my life's savings because I did not have the funds to cover these costs. Chevron still has a pending motion to order me to pay them an additional $32 [million] in legal fees. That's where things stand today. I ask you humbly: might that be enough punishment already for a Class B misdemeanor?"

Judge Preska was unmoved.

"Mr. Donziger has spent the last seven years thumbing his nose at the U.S. judicial system," Preska said at his sentencing hearing. "Now it's time to pay the piper."

The six-month sentence was the maximum the judge was allowed to impose;she ruled that his house arrest cannot be counted as part of his detention. From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.

When the law is neutered, judges become the enforcers of injustice. These corporate judges, who epitomize what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, now routinely make war on workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations.

Preska sent Jeremy Hammond to prison for a decade for hacking into the computers of a private security firmthat works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011, Hammond released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some three million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum Preska could impose under a plea agreement in the case. I sat through the. I watched Preska spew her bile and contempt at Hammond from the bench with the same vitriol she used to attack Donziger.

Preska is also infamous for her long judicial crusade to force New York public schools to provide tax-subsidized free space for evangelical churches based on blatantly illogical readings of the Constitution.

The persecution of Donziger fits a pattern familiar to millions of poor Americans who are coerced into accepting plea deals, many for crimes they did not commit, and sent to prison for decades. It fits the pattern of the judicial lynching and prolonged psychological torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. It fits the pattern of those denied habeas corpus and due process at Guantánamo Bay or in CIA black sites. It fits the pattern of those charged under terrorism laws, many held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan, who cannot see the evidence used to indict them. It fits the pattern of the widespread use of Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs, imposed to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail. It fits the pattern of the extreme sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation used on those in our black sites and prisons, a form of psychological torture,the refinement of torture as science. By the time a "terrorist" is dragged into our secretive courts the bewildered suspect no longer has the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. If they can do this legally to the demonized they can, and one day will, do it to the rest of us. The Donziger case is an ominous warning that the American legal system is broken.

Ralph Nader, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has long decried the capture of the courts and law schools by corporate power, calling the nation's attorneys and judges "lucrative cogs in the corporate wheel." He notes that law school curriculums are "built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense."

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first theNazis "changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret." And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

This redefinition of words and concepts has, as Klemperer witnessed during the rise of fascism, allowed the courts to twist the law into an instrument of injustice, revoking our rights by judicial fiat. It has seen the courts permit unlimited dark money into political campaigns under Citizens United, defending our money-saturated elections as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech. The courts have revoked our right to privacy and legalized wholesale government surveillance in the name of national security. The courts grant corporations the rights of individuals, while rarely holding the individuals who run the corporations accountable for corporate crimes.

Very few of the legal rulings that benefit corporate power have popular support. The corporate disemboweling of the country, therefore, is increasingly given cover by Christian fascists, who energize their base around abortion, prayer in schools, guns and breaking down the separation of church and state. These issues are rarely addressed in cases before federal courts. But they distract the base from the slew of pro-corporate rulings that dominate most court dockets.

Corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse have poured millions into institutions that indoctrinate [incubators] these Christian fascists, including Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. They fund the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned for Amy Coney Barrett's appointment to the Supreme Court. Barrett opposes abortion and belongs to People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices "speaking in tongues." She and the other far-right ideologues are hostile to LGBTQ rights. But this is not why she is so beloved by corporations, who are not interested in abortion, LGBTQ equality or gun rights.

Barrett and the Christian fascists embrace an ideology that believes that God will take care of the righteous. Those who are poor, those who are sick, those who go to prison, those who are unemployed, those who cannot succeed in society do so because they have failed to please God. In this worldview there is no need for unions, universal health care, a social safety net or prison reform. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge,Barrett "faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations."

The Christian fascists, allied with organizations such as the Federalist Society, under the Trump administration gave lifetime appointments to nearly 200 judges, roughly 23 percent of all federal judgeships. That included 53 to the nation's appellate courts, the court immediately under the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association, the country's largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers, has rated many of these appointments as unqualified. There are currently six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Nader calls "a corporation masquerading as a human being." Two Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, who was an original faculty advisor to the organization founded by conservative law students in 1982, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.

The stacking of the courts with corporate puppets, however, began long before Trump. It was carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Preska was appointed by Republican President G.W. Bush. However, the judge who preceded Preska in the Donziger case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, was appointed by Democratic President Clinton.

The targeting of the courts was one of the key goals of Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. In Powell's 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, a blueprint for the slow-motion corporate coup that has taken place,he called on business interests to pack the judiciary with corporate-friendly judges.

The courts in all tyrannies are dominated by mediocrities and buffoons. They make up for their intellectual and moral vacuity with a zealous subservience to power. They turn courtroom trials into opera buffa, at least until the victim is shackled and pushed out the door to a prison cell. They fulminate in caustic tirades at the condemned, whose sentence is never in doubt and whose guilt is never in question.

"It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador," Donziger told me for a column I wrote about his case a year ago. "Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing, and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning."

"The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries," Donziger told me. "That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015."

Chevron promptly sold its assets and left Ecuador. It refused to pay the fees to clean up its environmental damage. It invested an estimated $2 million to destroy Danziger. Chevron sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. But the oil giant, which did not want a jury to hear the case, dropped its demand for financial damages, which would have allowed Donziger to request a jury trial. This allowed Judge Kaplan to decide the RICO case against Donziger alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra's testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

John Keker of San Francisco, one of Donziger's lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt "like a goat tethered to a stake." He called the court proceedings under Kaplan "a Dickensian farce" and a "show trial."

In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud. He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger's appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with misdemeanor criminal contempt for this principled stance — carrying a maximum sentence of six months — as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron. When the U.S. attorney's office declined for five years to prosecute his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer, Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron.Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger's bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger's apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.

nader got jiu jitsued?

Trump makes a lame attempt on drug prices by requiring wholesale prices (?) in TV ads, sued by merck, Lilly and Amgen on 1st amend .

gutsy tho i guess he's on pacifica

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/npr/

ralph comm dr

This month is the 50th anniversary of National Public Radio (NPR). Knowing about my work back then with other advocates,to persuade Congress to pass legislation creating NPR and PBS, (which was opposed by most of the commercial radio/TV industry), a friend asked what I think of NPR now.

A few observations, drawn from listening to NPR largely over the WAMC station in Albany, New York during a Covid-19 year, are in order.

I find the features and the collaboration with other investigative groups, such as Pro Publica, very enlightening. One piece about Amazon's warehouses was especially memorable. Moreover, Scott Simon and David Brancaccio are so capable as to be considered under-challenged.
NPR's top-of-the-hour news amounts to little more than three minutes. It is repetitious and basically a minor headline service. This mimicking of commercial network radio news is not what we envisioned 50 years ago. The prolonged 6:15 pm evening weather forecasts on WAMC are often longer than the evening news briefs at 6:00 pm.
There is just too much weather forecasting throughout the day. On WAMC, around mid-day, they'll tell you about the weather in California and the mountain states before you hear the forecast for the local listening region. They even promote the weather forecasts. So obsessed are they that they repeat the forecast over the four adjoining regions they service preceded by an overall forecast. Think of the additional local news that could be reported instead.
The public radio/TV legislation from Congress did not envision advertisements. Public funding, audience, and foundation donations were seen as the way to reduce commercial pressure over this public institution, inspired in part by the more extensive BBC and CBC in the UK and Canada.
What started as a "just a little bit of commercial sponsorship," when Congress got tight some years ago, has now gone wild. Do we really need to be reminded that "support for this station (or for NPR) comes from x, y, z contributors," about thirty times an hour? Mind-numbing, hour after hour! NPR makes sure to identify corporate sponsorship such as Facebook or Amazon when they are doing reports affecting these companies. But top NPR management defiantly refuses to monitor the corporate character or respect for the law of these and other companies before they give them NPR's credibility.

The Corporate Crime Reporter provided NPR management with a list of law violations, such as those by Raymond James, an NPR "sponsor" pursuant to asking about any of NPR's Ad monitoring. NPR boss, the usually incommunicado John Lansing, essentially blew off the inquiry, saying there is no need for a filter to protect the audience.

A key reason for Congress creating NPR was to have its affiliates fill local news gaps, largely neglected by the commercial stations. WAMC has spent good money hiring local reporters in upstate eastern New York, western Massachusetts, and Vermont who know and stay on the beat. But national NPR has spent far too much time on entertainment subjects and interviews and not enough time on civic events, reports, and movements, aside from issues of race, gender, and police violence being covered by the mainstream media. Even NPR's daily birthday announcement almost always features entertainment or professional sports figures. National civic, labor or educational leaders are scarcely noted.
More civic news suffers not for lack of time. NPR and affiliates offer plenty of hours for music. Forget about Saturday and Sunday evenings. At some NPR affiliates, 6:00 pm on weekends is sign-off time in favor of entertainment time.
NPR often describes the personal plight of people in poverty or suffering from other deprivations, but rarely probes the structural causes or the role of concentrated corporate power in creating the problems. Increasingly, corporate power is shaping an evermore dominant corporate state that allows mercantile values to seriously weaken the social fabric and moral norms of our society.

Not many NPR reporters use words like "corporate crime," "corporate welfare," or cover the corporate capturing of agencies, the vast unaudited military budget, or many other realms of American life controlled by "corporatism." But then what can one expect when they ignore credible civic groups, who have timely evidence of such domination, and keep on interviewing one another inserting four-second sound bites to academics and consulting firms?

NPR's practice during election periods of having the anchors interview its reporters, who are often youngish, inexperienced, and bland, instead of skilled, fact-reliable outsiders is disappointing. NPR's election postmortems too often are superficial and lack rigor.

Just recently, an NPR report on the most recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline continued its repeated omission of how victims of hackers actually pay in ransom or why such payments can't be traced. And NPR's reporting on why our secretive government seems helpless in protecting towns, cities, hospitals, and others who have been hit by ransomware attacks is anemic.

Last month to the dismay of some NPR journalists, there was no national obituary on Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General and early civil rights and human rights leader. NPR did devote five minutes remembering a Rockstar.
NPR's blunders are well-known to local affiliates. WAMC, a mid-size station, pays NPR a million dollars a year. But on January 6, 2021, NPR Washington was AWOL – over an hour late in feeding its affiliates reports on the insurrection, which started getting reported by CNN around 2:00 pm. WAMC reporters were furious, and I was told this wasn't the first time NPR messed up.

There is an omnipresent air of smugness about NPR, such as their constant display of confident ignorance on Congress' constitutional authority, and Presidential/Executive Branch lawlessness. This shortcoming was especially troubling during Trump's impeachments. Where are you, Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, to give tutorials to your younger colleagues who need to be more sensitive to these issues and to their in-house ageism over the years?

Then there are the daily irritations. The interlude music is often inappropriate and too long. Marketplace at night with hyper-Jumping Jack, Kai Ryssdal has music as noisy background while he is giving the brief stock market numbers.

Unlike its commercial competition, NPR and PBS's News Hour start their news programs with ads, something commercial NBC, CBS, and ABC do not do. NPR has puzzles during prime-time evening news time, this itself is a puzzling fillip.

NPR has long had a Public Editor on staff. They almost always respond to listeners' substantive complaints by saying these are not matters within their jurisdiction. The new Public Editor is Kelly McBride. She insisted on not being on staff but instead on contract from St. Petersburg, Florida. This is the link for the public editor: (https://help.npr.org/contact/s/contact?request=Ask-the-Public-Editor-about-ethics) to protect her independence. After a few tries, she actually returned my calls and reassured me that she is looking out for the listener's best interest. We'll see.

It would be good if listener feedback to NPR was made easier and more regularly structured. WAMC has lots of listener feedback on issues chosen daily by its Roundtable and other interview shows. But as one might expect some questions, as about top management salaries and bad advertisers lunching off WAMC's credibility, seem out of bounds.

I have started a Reporter's Alert suggesting many kinds of stories that are not covered or only nibbled at by the media. You can see them aggregate at https://reportersalert.org/ and of course, this resource is available for perusal by NPR's editors and reporters.

There is so much more to learn about NPR. Since NPR gives plenty of time to conservative politicians, an educational bipartisan Congressional hearing and report would be a good way to celebrate the 50th anniversary. It's just not productive to give NPR a pass simply by comparing it to the rancid competition spoiling our public airwaves for free.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Ralph Nader ranks the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community.

When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough.

Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

These same companies then proceed to lobby any nation, including most prominently the United States. Congress and the White House are pushed to cut formal tax rates, pack the tax laws with loopholes, and lower further the effective tax rate. The formal top tax rate for billions of company profits is now 21%, while the actual tax rate is lower – much lower for banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and behemoth tech companies like Apple that master tax avoidance.

"Generous” is not a word one can associate either with Apple or it’s avaricious, CEO Tim Cook. One of the first moves Tim Cook made, after replacing legendary Apple Founder, the cancer-stricken innovator Steve Jobs, was to arrange a $378 million, 2011 compensation package for himself and launch the biggest stock buyback in corporate history. Apple, which is worth $1.5 trillion has spent $327 billion since 2013 to buy back 2.5 billion shares of stock. Yet Apple has done little to produce productive investments, remediation of used and very toxic Apple products when discarded, or increase pay for the 350,000 serf-labor workers in China toiling under its merciless contractor Foxconn.

Apple made $104 billion in the last 12 months, puffed up by tax-avoidance, tax cuts and a no tariff deal with Trump on its Chinese imports, yet Tim Cook has rejected pleas to spend a little over $2 billion (deductible) to award a full year’s pay bonus to the 350,000 Foxconn workers who build Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s massive stock buybacks have, however, increased the metrics to set compensation levels for Tim Cook and his executive sidekicks. Unfortunately, stock buybacks do little to tamp down excessive prices for Apple products. The massive stock buybacks also send a message that Apple’s management has no other uses for its corporate cash – not for R&D, not for improving the nature and security of its workers’ pensions, not for investing in curtailing the damaging side effects of Apple products on the environment and not for reducing other offloaded damage to society.

Tim Cook and Apple are also stingy, given their vast wealth, with charitable contributions. So stingy that Apple’s bosses do not even come close with the company’s charitable deduction limit of five percent of adjusted gross income. In 2018 Apple gave $125 million to charities. Apple’s net income for 2018 was $59.53 billion – a tiny fraction of one percent!

Recently, the New York Times published articles showing how tiny the executive pay cuts were by the very few executives who announced and declared sympathy for their laid-off and impoverished workers.The media has also been reporting illicit maneuvers developed by corporate attorneys to help chain stores get relief payments that should have gone to legitimate small businesses. (Why isn’t the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) speaking out against this abuse and avarice?)

Replacing some of their greed with generosity could be directed to the estimated $6 billion to $11 billion needed this coming school year to give low-income students full equipment and connectivity to the internet for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. States and localities need $4 billion to assure the voting process will be fair and that all votes be counted and on time. The Republicans in the Senate are blocking the money needed to guarantee free and fair elections. Four billion dollars for the profit-glutted Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, Apple plus Amazon, and Microsoft, is peanuts. These high-tech digital giants could easily contribute the money needed to avert a widely predicted election time disaster and weeks of understaffed counting after November 3^rd. Imagine such a show of patriotism from these companies.

Then there are the matters of woefully inadequate supplies, facilities, and training programs to counter the spreading Covid-19 pandemic that is crumbling the economy. These record-setting profitable companies, with soaring stock prices due to their monopolistic powers or consumer-gouging, should return some of Trump’s giveaway tax cuts of 2017 and the burgeoning corporate welfare payments from crony-capitalistic Washington, D.C. to help their afflicted or vulnerable fellow Americans. Many of these people are their own workers, friends, and relatives.

Economists should develop a “Hedonistic Index,” to rank the “greed-with-power” status of the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

People have the right to know how CEOs and major corporations do on the “Hedonistic Index” of greed and power. After all, at the end of the day, we are all paying the price of the full measure of the infinite avarice spiraling from these corporate supremacists and their private governments of control.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/ralph-nader-here-is-trumps-top-betrayal/

...Devastating critics like Dana Milbank, Republican Michael Gerson, Eugene Robinson, Margaret Sullivan, and conservative Max Boot of the Washington Post, or Charles Blow, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times have cogently taken Trump apart on very serious matters since 2017, yet they leave their readers without the obvious conclusion -Trump has to go. A clear daily peril to innocent Americans “I’m in total control”, why not try bleach, etc. The country cannot wait until January 2021 – assuming dictatorial Donald and his determined GOP don’t criminally suppress enough votes to postpone Trump’s departure until January 2025.

,,,

bktv 3 hr in depth PJ o'R car bk talk HS girls did not crash corvair (joke about killing nader?)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/ralph-nader-breaks-down-how-trump-is-letting-big-corporations-get-away-with-whatever-they-want/

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has allowed large corporations to run rampant, exploit people, and get away with it. Trump considers himself above the law, boldly claiming, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” For more information about Trump’s misdeeds, please see the Articles of Impeachment proposed by me and constitutional law experts Bruce Fein and Louis Fisher in the December 18, 2019 Congressional Record, page H 12197.

In 2017, Trump betrayed his own voters by giving the corporate rich a nearly two trillion dollar tax cutinstead of fulfilling his promise to invest in repairing infrastructure and expanding well-paid job opportunities.

These tax cuts for the rich and big corporations, which benefited the Trump family, ran up the deficit for our children and were largely used to give executives bonuses and let CEOs waste money on stock buybacks. In short, the corporate bosses lied to the Congress, saying they wanted these tax cuts to invest and create jobs, but actually used them to enrich themselves.

After his Trumpian giveaway, Trump crushed health and safety law enforcement, unleashing more disease-producing corporate polluters and corporate thieves. The result: harm to workers, consumers, and defenseless communities.

The New York Times reported 98 lifesaving regulations were revoked, suspended, or simply replaced with weaker versions. What remains on the books is not enforced.

Similar wreckage of corporate law-and-order has exacerbated the crisis of working people. Trump has worked to further punish student borrowers; diminish workplace and auto safety; and remove safeguards against banking, credit, and payday loan rackets.

Trump, during his failed business career and bankruptcies, saw the law as a nuisance and breaking and escaping justice as a competitive advantage.

While raising huge sums for his reelection campaign from business lobbyists, Trump keeps giving them no-law government, more loopholes for tax escapes ($170 billion more buried in the $2.2 trillion relief/bailout legislation),more corporatist judges to shut you down in the courtroom, and more of your taxes for their endless corporate welfare greed.

Big companies such as banks, insurance companies, real estate behemoths, and Silicon Valley giants have so many tax escapes and cuts that they’re moving toward tax-exempt status.

Howard Stern, a longtime friend of Trump who promoted Trump’s notoriety early on, has recently called on Trump to resign. Stern said that, in reality, Donald Trump was “disgusted” by his own voters. Why won’t more Trump voters realize that Trump has nothing but contempt for them? Trump will betray his followers at every turn.

During the Covid-19 virus pandemic—which Trump dismissed and scoffed for eight critical weeks, leaving the country defenseless—Trump has allowed a corporate crime epidemic. He has no qualms about aiding and abetting a corporate crime wave epidemic.

Trump, with Congressional Republicans, wants more legislation giving big companies immunity from lawsuits by victims for their negligently harmful products and services. Another rigging of the system.

Trump’s agencies actually announced that they’re putting their law enforcers on the shelf. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) astonishingly told foreign importers of food and medicine that inspections overseas are suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signaled similar retreats, as have other enforcement agencies. Why would the Trumpsters signal green lights for corporate crooks? Especially since corporate scams and other corporate crimes—some crude, others sophisticated—are exploding as trillions pour out of Washington.

A year ago, Public Citizen reported a steep decline in corporate prosecutions and fines under Trump. Now, compared to the size of the previous corporate crime wave, they’ve fallen off a cliff. You can ignore the stern warnings by Attorney General William Barr. He is a phony. He has neither allocated nor asked Congress for a budget that will provide the Department of Justice the capacity to crackdown.

In fact, Trump has fired inspectors general and not filled vacant inspectors general positions. Trump’s boasts bear repeating: Congress can’t watchdog him because “[he has] an Article 2, where [he has] the right to do whatever [he wants] as president.”

With vicious madness, Trump pushes for federal deregulation of nursing homes where residents are dying from Covid-19. He pursues court cases in attempts to end Obamacare, the result of which would be throwing 20 million Americans off of their insurance during a lethal pandemic. He is cravenly freeing corporate emitters of life-destroying mercury and coal ash in our air, condemned pesticides and toxins in drinking water, and whatever else is on the deadly wish list given to him by his corporate paymasters.

Trump’s actions that dismantled protections for all Americans families have been expertly documented. Yet, few critics are calling for his resignation or removal from office, despite the clear and present danger he poses to the American people and the Republic.

Trump is doing whatever he wants. He is getting away with abandoning the rule of law and the dismantling of crucial government institutions as he embraces American-style fascism and nepotism.

Perhaps people will learn how to effectively fight back against Trump, a delusional, flailing, ego-obsessed, foul-mouthed, self-enriching bully. The people must stand up to this corrupt politician who lies every hour and turns our government over to Wall Street. He sacrifices the people on Main Street to enrich fat cats and oligarchs.

One person, Eugene Jarecki, offers a rebuttal to Trump. In a *Washington Post*op-ed, Jarecki’s sources found that “had the guidelines been implemented earlier, a crucial period in the exponential spread of the virus would have been mitigated and American lives saved.” According to conservative estimates from epidemiologists, “had the Trump administration simply implemented mitigation guidelines by March 9, approximately 60 percent of American Covid-19 deaths could have been avoided.” On his website, TrumpDeathClock.com, Jarecki “displays both the number of people who have died in the country from Covid-19 and an estimate of that portion whose lives would have been saved had the president and his administration acted just one week earlier.” Jarecki has also erected a 54-foot high Trump death clock in New York City’s historic Times Square.

See the numbers yourself on TrumpDeathClock.com. Email DeathClock2020@gmail.com to see how Eugene Jarecki’s team can help you set up such an accountability clock in your community.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/ralph-nader-lunging-between-vitriol-and-flattery-trump-doesnt-know-how-to-get-out-of-the-hole-hes-dug/

dr david michaels sci bk triumph of doubt

David Michaels is an epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health of the George Washington University. Wikipedia

https://www.drdavidmichaels.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Doubt-Money-Science-Deception/dp/0190922664

https://www.foodpolitics.com/

marion nestle Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception. ... at stake here, and we all should be responding right away to David Michaels' call for action.

slaughterhouse crazy # cuts/minute 140--> 170 min

dupont texas pesticide 4 kia osha fine 90K --> 230K$ (dupont sells uits safety services?!)

$ to visit 1x 165 years; fines raised in 2015 to 12K$ (walmart sec guard crushed to death, fined 7K spent millions on liars, got nearly to scotus]

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-march-2-2020/

bill 1970 unions had in-house saFETY, NOW mostly gone; burton sp CA huge, not even on committee; nader big

Egomaniacal Trump’s petulant actions post-impeachment highlight his position as a vengeful, lawless and corporate toad: Ralph Nader

The day after his acquittal by the Republican Party in…

electability bogus, 7 of 10 commandments...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/ralph-nader-trump-should-be-the-most-defeatable-president-in-history-but-corporate-democrats-are-ready-and-willing-to-blow-it/

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-december-23-2019/

paul deloria inuit, hawaii, 7 steps to restor democ bk

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/ralph-nader-how-corporate-power-is-locking-out-experts-and-civil-leaders-and-winning/

no lnx

Ralph Nader: How corporate power is locking out experts and civil leaders — and winning

Written by Ralph Nader / Common Dreams October 27, 2019

The lawmakers are doing it. The candidates are doing it. The mass media are doing it. All are excluding from their arenas the leading citizen groups as never before, since the early nineteen sixties. The nonprofit national advocacy/research organizations that led the way for social reforms are being shut out of the political process. These groups were pioneers in consumer rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and whistle-blower protections. These groups fought for freedom of information laws and practices and access to justice in ways that have made our country better in so many ways.

Television anchors like Judy Woodruff (The News Hour, PBS) and Chuck Todd (Meet the Press, NBC) prefer to interview reporters, political consultants or tired columnists, instead of knowledgeable civic leaders who use facts and speak truth to power.

One result of this marginalization is that the public discussion of key services and safeguards for the people is often vapid and fact-starved. For starters, the talking heads who are invited on news shows rarely, if ever, speak of the corporate crime wave, the corporate welfare scandals, or many preventable mass casualties that flow from corporate negligence and cover-ups. The few news articles on such subjects are often thin and untimely because reporters are not in regular touch with citizen groups, instead choosing to rely on irregular official leaks and occasional insider information.

Take, for example, the current discussion on Medicare-for-All or single-payer health insurance. The Democratic presidential candidates and other progressive lawmakers who support catching up with dozens of other industrial nations are not making the strongest case for this basic human right. They say that all Americans should have access to health care, referring to the unaffordable price of care.

The corporatists and some of these Democratic presidential hopefuls attack Medicare-for-All, asserting that the program would be prohibitively expensive by citing wild projections from biased think tanks. Bernie Sanders rebuts by proposing overdue restoration of higher taxes on the wealthy and big business. He asserts that whatever increases there are on the middle class would more than be made up by no longer having to pay health insurance premiums and out of pocket costs.

Moreover, most advocates of single payer do not stress the millions of ailments and injuries which persist because people cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in a timely manner. According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly 30 million Americans are uninsured and 86 million Americans are underinsured. And about 40,000 of them die from that same deprivation each year. Such casualties due to lack of insurance do not happen in countries with universal insurance.

Furthermore, little mention is made of Canada’s far more efficient single-payer (public insurance, private delivery of care) that covers every Canadian at half the average per capita cost of that in the U.S. Canada also has free choice of doctor and hospital, in contrast to the cruel, narrow networks in the U.S.

Canada has better outcomes, less billing fraud by far and fewer casualties due to “medical error and negligence.” This is because the U.S. has a serious problem of over-diagnosis and over treatment, due to profit motives built into our chaotic, wasteful, corrupt, and profiteering system.

Single payer means one billing agent in Canada, not inscrutable bills from 1500 insurance companies with manipulated codes and discriminatory fees (for example, many hospitals charge the uninsured more in the U.S.).

In Canada, there is far less anxiety, dread, and fear about medical bills than in the U.S. Imagine what that is worth!

In the U.S. people worry that if they change jobs, they’ll lose their insurance. In Canada, physicians practice medicine, not complex bookkeeping. In the U.S., physicians plead for permission to treat their patients, while slow-paying insurance companies look out for their corporate bottom line.

The sheer administrative costs in the U.S. are, as a percentage of overall costs, more than double the administrative costs in Canada. Health care in Canada is on average less than $5000 average per capita per year; in the U.S. it has just soared over $10,000 per capita per year. Canada spends 10% of its GDP on health care and covers everyone; the U.S. is reaching 18% of GDP while leaving out tens of millions of people.

No one in Canada has to go bankrupt due to medical bills, as is the case half a million times a year in the U.S. Drug prices for the same drugs are lower in Canada than in the U.S. due to the bargaining power of Canadian single-payer system. Just in terms of correlating health care data, single payer detects what works and what doesn’t far better than the secret proprietary data of many U.S. insurance companies (which excessively compensate their executives). For example, in 2017, Aetna paid its CEO, Mark Bertolini, nearly $59 million as compensation (see the Hartford Courant article published on April 7, 2018). These salaries and compensation packages come out of your pockets, as do the co-pays, deductibles. The maddeningly complex fine-print exclusions add insult to injury.

In the U.S. people resort to GoFundMe campaigns to collect money for major operations that cost far more than they would in Canada. After all, to get the same procedures all Canadians have to do is show their Medicare card which is given to them at birth.

At the extreme, people in the U.S. commit minor crimes just to go to jail to get health insurance. Recently, a couple in their seventies in Washington state took their lives due to being so overwhelmed by their soaring medical bills.

These and other examples further illustrate the advantages of a single-payer system. These numerous points were conveyed in a printed pamphlet personally delivered to dozens of members of Congress (see “25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections” and singlepayeraction.org). Some of these deliveries were followed by my personal calls. To date, not one office, other than Congressman Jamie Raskin’s, acknowledged receipt. Nor have any of these lawmakers or the presidential candidates used such obvious arguments in this pamphlet or other available materials to rebut or to explain. Rarely do any media outlets present the overwhelming advantages of a single-payer health care system.

Recently, liberal columnist, Mark Shields appeared on the PBS News Hour and mindlessly characterized single payer as being too expensive.

When Medicare was established in 1965, the elderly had no trouble giving up their private health insurance plans that could at any time have been weakened, dropped, or not renewed. Just as today, workers with private company plans can be forced to accept less coverage or be laid off without any coverage. Mr. Shields seemed to have forgotten the fear that workers have about the unilateral power of companies to change the rules and delay or limit the benefits.

The foregoing case for a single-payer health insurance system is just one example of how corporate power prevails when there is media and political exclusion of the informed and experienced civic community. Speak up, people!

an 1019

no lnx

Ralph Nader: Here are 19 ways the 1 percent rules — and the 99 percent lets them

Written by Ralph Nader / Common Dreams October 6, 2019

There has never been more access to food—domestic and imported—yet hunger is an ongoing problem everywhere. In the U.S. alone, 16.5 million children go to bed hungry and 20% of community college students are experiencing “food insecurity.”

Never have there been more communications technologies, yet it is harder to get through to people personally than fifty years ago.

Never have people been able to use their right to free speech so unencumbered, yet a torrent of lies are now spread so freely and are often unchallenged.

Never have there been higher corporate profits, yet staggering amounts of poverty and near poverty remain along with stagnant wages.

Never have there been more medicines to alleviate pain, yet far too many of these pain killers have caused massive fatalities and addictions.

Never has there been more liquid corporate capital piled up, yet corporate investment is proportionately lower than before. Instead, CEO’s have burned over 7 trillion dollars in unproductive stock buybacks in the past decade.

Never have there been more exercise outlets, exercise machines and apps, yet obesity is still rampant.

Never have there been more tax breaks for big businesses, yet big businesses use so little of the windfalls for productive investments, good jobs and shoring up pensions.

Never has there been more free access to information, yet so little retained knowledge.

Never have there been more impressive muckraking film documentaries and books that expose corporate and government crimes, yet this media attention produces less impact and reform.

Never have there been more ongoing impeachable offenses and statutory violations by a president, yet the opposing Party in Congress have been reluctant to move on the many articles of impeachment. Remember how fast the unified House of Republicans moved to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice?

Never have there been more trainers, sports physicians, protective equipment and guards for professional athletes, yet there are far more injuries and days lost by players than was the case sixty years ago. Now there are helmets, gloves, pads, cushioned walls, better shoes etc. Why?

Never has there been more to read, yet there are so few readers reading. Historically, we have gone from illiteracy to literacy to aliteracy!

Never before has technology made it so easy for heads of government to meet, yet fewer international treaties are made. (Eg. Cyber, water, environment, consumer, labor etc.)

Never has there been such an outrageous corporate crime wave, yet law enforcement budgets have decreased! The more big CEO’s are paid, the worse is their management. (Eg. The big banks twelve years ago, General Electric for years.)

Never before have there been so many wrongful injuries, yet the court budgets are becoming tighter and the law of torts is being restricted. Without the defense of and use of our civil justice system, wrongful injury cases cannot go to court with a trial by jury.

Never before has there been more corporate fraud, yet agencies tasked with bringing this fraud to justice have smaller budgets and more limitations.The budget of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a third of one day’s worth of health care billing fraud, which is estimated this year to be $350 billion, according to Harvard’s national expert on the subject, Professor Malcolm Sparrow. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been straitjacketed by the evil corporate crime abettor Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House Chief of Staff for corrupt Donald.

Never has the drug industry accumulated more profits and government subsidies, yet so many patients cannot begin to afford lifesaving medicines.

Never have the under-taxed super-rich been so rich, yet on average give a smaller proportion of their money to “good works.” Actually, middle and lower income people give more proportionally than do the ultra-wealthy.

I could go on and on. Pick up the pace, readers. Senator Elizabeth Warren has correctly called for “big structural changes.”

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-9-2019/

interview

anti-trust // gilded age, inequality

Nader Says FTC Remains Largely Moribund Sluggish Frightened Alleged Watchdog for the American Consumer

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/ralph-nader-trumps-effective-intimidation-of-the-federal-reserve-threatens-monetary-stability/

no lnx

Ralph Nader: Trump’s effective intimidation of the Federal Reserve threatens monetary stability

"Truthout Interview Image Credits - Ralph Nader" by Truthout.org is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Written by Ralph Nader / Common Dreams August 2, 2019

The Federal Reserve (the Fed)he Federal Reserve (the Fed)—the United States’ version of a Central Bank—is a strange duck. It is the U.S. government’s most powerful regulatory agency. It, after all, regulates money and interest rates. Yet, its budget comes entirely from the banking industry and relationships with the financial industry. So Congress, which appropriates money for all other federal agencies, has little leverage over the Fed’s operations.

This independence—except from the big banks—is by design, when the Fed was devised by President Woodrow Wilson over one hundred years ago. The Fed, a secretive, private government inside a public government presents problems for a democratic society. The alternative was deemed worse by its boosters, allowing “politics” to determine the Fed’s Board of Governors decisions.

It is as if the Federal Reserve/banking complex does not deal with political power by its own definition. The Fed entrenches the power of the banks without accountability inside Washington. Ask Republicans in Congress whether they generally oppose government regulation of a business and most will say “yes.” Ask whether they want to deregulate the Federal Reserve and they will say “Of course not.” Somebody has to assure monetary stability.

But the Fed’s announced quarter of a percent cut in interest rates, which were already low by historical standards at 2.25 to 2.50 levels, will affect people, beyond abstract monetary theories. Tens of millions of Americans who rely on income from their savings accounts and money market accounts will receive less money. Some will jump into the high flying stock market, presumably to get more income and introduce real risk to their principal.

The $2.9 trillion Social Security trust fund will receive less income from lower yielding Treasury Bonds. That’s not good for seniors. It is also really bad for pension funds, not to mention the returns on certain life insurance policies.

The Fed mumbled something about the trade war and a recent small decline in manufacturing indices as reasons to head off trouble.

But companies are piling up idle capital without knowing what to do with it other than to spend trillions of dollars on unproductive stock buybacks. There is no shortage of capital. Lowering the interest rate will just encourage more unnecessary corporate debt, with its deductible interest payments, instead of corporations using their available equity.

Venerable business columnist Allan Sloan does not think that a quarter-point cut by the Fed “will generate job-creating investments in the United States by companies that are uncertain about the future because of trade wars, threatened trade wars, interrupted supply chains and other actual and potential instabilities”(See Allan Sloan’s article here).

Sloan gave other cogent reasons against a Fed interest rate cut, while conceding that it might help borrowers. That assumes gouging lenders (pay day loans, auto loans, credit card charges) pass the savings along.

Conventional critics of the Fed’s cut this week point to already low interest rates and what they call a hefty economy, modest inflation, and a low unemployment rate.

Some former Fed governors called out the Fed for not clearly and specifically explaining its decision to cut rates. As former Fed Governor and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Sarah Bloom Raskin, said: “The Fed has really had a bit of a communications blunder… If Americans don’t understand exactly what is happening and why, they may think that Chairman Jerome Powell is caving into presidential bullying.”

No kidding. Trump has been pounding the Fed and threatening to take away Chairman Powell’s Chair for months. He is demanding sharp reductions in interest rates. He renewed his denunciation after the Fed’s quarter of a percent cut this week, tweeting that it was nowhere near enough!

Presidents almost never do this publicly to the Fed. But Trump, the failed gambling czar knows better. Intimidation through the mass media again and again works for Trump.

Although the Fed wanted to resist his pressure, hey, why take greater chances with crazy Donald? Instead, they threw him a bone.

619 an

Ralph Nader diagnoses an America in rapid decay — but it might be the only thing to save us from Plutocracy

written by Ralph Nader / Common Dreams May 31, 2019

Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. While teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions more. Wells Fargo executives are cases in point. The vastly overpaid CEO of General Electric left his teetering company in shambles. In 2019, Boeing’s CEO got a bonus (despite the Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8 crash in 2018). Just days before a second deadly 737 Max 8 crash in Ethiopia.

This disparity is on full display in my profession. Public interest lawyers and public defenders, who fight daily for a more just and lawful society, are paid modest salaries. On the other hand, the most well compensated lawyers are corporate lawyers who regularly aid and abet corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. Many corporate lawyers line their pockets by shielding the powerful violators from accountability under the rule of law.

Physicians who minister to the needy poor and go to the risky regions, where Ebola or other deadly infectious diseases are prevalent, are paid far less than cosmetic surgeons catering to human vanities. Does any rational observer believe that the best movies and books are also the most rewarded? Too often the opposite is true. Stunningly gripping documentaries earn less than 1 percent of what is garnered by the violent, pornographic, and crude movies at the top of the ratings each week.

On my weekly radio show, I interview some of the most dedicated authors who accurately document perils to health and safety. The authors on my program expose pernicious actions and inactions that jeopardize people’s daily lives. These guests offer brilliant, practical solutions for our widespread woes (see ralphnaderradiohour.com). Their important books, usually go unnoticed by the mass media, barely sell a few thousand copies, while the best-seller lists are dominated by celebrity biographies. Ask yourself, when preventable and foreseeable disasters occur, which books are more useful to society?

The monetary imbalance is especially jarring when it comes to hawks who beat the drums of war. For example, people who push for our government to start illegal wars (eg. John Bolton pushing for the war in Iraq) are rewarded with top appointments. Former government officials also get very rich when they take jobs in the defense industry. Do you remember anyone who opposed the catastrophic Iraq War getting such lucrative rewards?

The unknown and unrecognized people who harvest our food are on the lowest rung of the income ladder despite the critical role they play in our lives. Near the top of the income ladder are people who gamble on the prices of food via the commodities market and those who drain the nutrients out of natural foods and sell the junk food that remains, with a dose of harmful additives. Agribusiness tycoons profit from this plunder.

Those getting away with major billing fraud grow rich. While those people trying to get our government to do something about $350 billion dollars in health care billing fraud this year – like Harvard Professor Malcolm K. Sparrow – live on a college professor’s salary.

Hospital executives, who each make millions of dollars a year, preside over an industry where about 5,000 patients die every week from preventable problems in U.S. hospitals, according to physicians at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The watchdogs who call out this deadly hazard live on a fraction of that amount as they try to save lives.

Even in sports, where people think the best athletes make the most money, the reverse is more often true. Just ask a red-faced Brian Cashman, the Yankees GM, who, over twenty years, has spent massive sums on athletes who failed miserably to produce compared to far lesser-paid baseball players. Look at today’s top ranked Yankees – whose fifteen “stars” are injured, while their replacements are playing spectacularly for much smaller compensation than their high priced teammates.

A major reason why our society’s best are so often last while our worst are first is the media’s infatuation with publicizing the worst and ignoring the best. Warmongers get press. The worst politicians are most frequently on the Sunday morning TV shows – not the good politicians or civic leaders with proven records bettering our society.

Ever see Congressman Pascrell (Dem. N.J.) on the Sunday morning news shows? Probably not. He’s a leader who is trying to reform Congress so that it is open, honest, capable and represents you the people. Surely you have heard of Senator Lindsey Graham (Rep. S.C.) who is making ugly excuses for Donald Trump, always pushing for war and bloated military budgets, often hating Muslims and Arabs and championing the lawless American Empire. He is always in the news, having his say.

Take the 162 people who participated in our Superbowl of Civic Action at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. in May and September 2016. These people have and are changing America. They are working to make food, cars, drugs, air, water, medical devices, and drinking water safer. Abuses by corporations against consumers, workers and small taxpayers would be worse without them. Our knowledge of solutions and ways to treat people fairly and abolish poverty and advance public services is greater because of their courageous hard work. (see breakingthroughpower.org).

The eight days of this Civic Superbowl got far less coverage than did Tiger Woods losing another tournament that year or the dismissive nicknames given by the foul-mouth Trump to his mostly wealthy Republican opponents on just one debate stage.

All societies need play, entertainment, and frivolity. But a media obsessed with giving 100 times the TV and radio time, using our public airwaves for free, to those activities than to serious matters crucial to the most basic functioning of our society is assuring that the worst is first and the best is last. Just look at your weekly TV Guide.

If the whole rotted-out edifice comes crashing down, there won’t be enough coerced taxpayer dollars anymore to save the Plutocrats, with their limitless greed and power. Maybe then the best can have a chance to be first.

519

Ralph Nader: We know exactly who gave us Trump

written by Ralph Nader May 25, 2019

Donald J. Trump’s presidential ambition has simmered for decades. He was and is a regular TV watcher and saw the changing political landscape. One by one, previous presidents diminished the…

Donald J. Trump’s presidential ambition has simmered for decades. He was and is a regular TV watcher and saw the changing political landscape. One by one, previous presidents diminished the integrity of the presidency and violated the rule of law, paving the way for Trump’s candidacy.

Bill Clinton was exposed for serial adulteries and abuses of women and lied under oath. This perjury led to him being impeached in the House (though he was acquitted in the Senate). “Hmm,” thought Donald, a serial abuser of women, “Clinton got away with it and was elected twice.” One potentially career-ending violation no longer had the weight it once did.

Then came George W. Bush – selected by the Electoral College and a Republican Supreme Court.“Hmm,” thought Donald to himself, “Even though Gore won the popular vote, Bush won because of Electors in swing states.” Despite Gore’s crushing loss, the Democratic Party refused to support ongoing Electoral College reform (see nationalpopularvote.com). Once in office, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied repeatedly to start an unconstitutional illegal war with Iraq, which caused huge Iraqi and U.S. casualties and wreaked havoc on the U.S. budget. Bush and Cheney not only got away with these atrocities, but were reelected. A majority of voters believed their lies. Violating the laws did not matter. “Hmm,” thought Donald to himself, “The President is above the law.” Positions of power and the trampling of laws appealed to Trump, a lawless, failed gambling czar.

Then along came Obama. He too got away with all kinds of slaughter abroad without authority of the Constitution, statutes, or international treaties. He too was reelected. Domestically, Obama did not prosecute any of the big Wall Street crooks that brought down our economy in 2008-2009, even though a vast majority of the population loathed these reckless financiers. With all of these misdeeds and violations of law on full display, Trump a big business crook himself, must have thought that he would not be held accountable. Even better, he knew how to use television to manipulate the media to his advantage. These examples are just some of the major ways that past presidents, Democrats especially, handed Trump his opportunity.I describe these and other presidential abuses of power in my recent book, To the Ramparts: How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why It Isn’t Too Late to Reverse Course.

Given these inoculations for breaking social norms and laws, Trump felt he could break additional norms and laws and still secure the Presidency. It almost didn’t work – Hillary Clinton’s campaign bungling lost three key states, which provided Trump a path to the White House. The crazy, antiquated Electoral College sealed the deal.

Trump has always known how to use power to get more power. He went after his opponents with harsh nicknames, repeated verbatim by a supine press. The name calling stuck and influenced voters. Democrats did not reciprocate with nicknames like “cheating Donald,” “corrupt Donald,” “Dangerous Donald,” etc.

Emboldened, Trump, with his television knowhow, grasped that many people prefer fiction to non-fiction. Fantasy is big business and it can serve to distract from grim real-life injustices. Day after day, the mass media proved this point by giving huge time to entertainment compared to news and civic engagements locally and nationally.

Donald, through his daily tweets and assertions, shaped a story – true or not, that would help him win the White House. Reporters have collected over 10,000 of Trumps lies and seriously misleading statements since he became President (see the complete list here via the Washington Post).

But Trump, with his 50 million Twitter followers, has his own media machine, which grows because the mass media replays so many of his fictions as if they were real.

Still, the Democrats should have defeated him handily and, failing that, should have since driven his poll numbers below 40 or 42 percent, where they hover.

Democrats having lost the crucial election of 2010 in Congress, most state legislatures and governorships, Democrats lost the gerrymandering battle. This set the stage for Republicans to seriously suppress the vote in many ways documented by the League of Women Voters and the Brennan Center. Some of this suppression occurred in key swing states like Wisconsin.

Today, Trump seems impervious to the many accurate accusations of corruptions and impeachable offenses. He ruthlessly scuttles lifesaving health/safety protections for the American people, undermines law enforcement, and breaks his repeated promises to provide “great” health insurance, “pure” clean air, and jobs for workers displaced by globalization. The norms that restrain politicians and their constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws” have been deeply eroded.

Trump is undeterred by the hundreds of syndicated columns and the regular television commentary by leading conservatives who despise him. George Will, Michael Gerson, Max Boot, David Brooks, Bret Stephens, and others have gone after Trump repeatedly. The attacks on the Prevaricator in Chief are like water off a duck’s back. Even Trump’s trail of broken campaign promises is routinely overlooked by the press and the Trump base.

Next week my column will address what to do to make Trump a one-term President. Only a landslide defeat in 2020 will keep Trump from tweeting “fake election” and demanding a recount.

interview jaczo sp gregory, new bk?

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-february-18-2019/

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-17-2018/

2012 corps are not ppl, new ed 2018 fwd bill moyers

https://www.amazon.com/Corporations-Are-Not-People-Rights/dp/1609941055

game over for democ and plane if they win; metaphor used by scotus

ralph: corps are doing comprehensive and long range strategy, want predictable environment, do propgnda of kids looking at screens...

const = DNA bit all the big right fights in history have been; we can't let those who won the fights before down

corps want us to be not cits but consumer, watcher, spectator, maybe vote every once in a while [but --> Like button?!]

fine print contract and tort DE-form are 2 big ways = CORP STRAT is "systemic," hijack childhood : sell junk food, violent media and __

this is RADICAL pgm

CU 2010 led to series of cases (powell wrote decisions) to get corp person, set in motion by Powell memo; kennedy wrote decision.

wiki

"Saturday Night Massacre"

On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was instrumental in the "Saturday Night Massacre", U.S. President Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, following Cox's request for tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon initially ordered U.S. Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson's top deputy, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, also considered the order "fundamentally wrong"^[15] and also resigned, making Bork the Acting Attorney General. When Nixon reiterated his order, Bork complied and fired Cox, an act found illegal in November of that year in asuit brought by **Ralph Nader**. The Justice Department did not appeal the ruling, and because Cox indicated that he did not want his job back, the issue was considered moot.^[15]Bork remained Acting Attorney General until the appointment of William B. Saxbe on January 4, 1974.^[16]

In his posthumously published memoirs, Bork stated that following the firings, Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court. Nixon was unable to carry out the promise after resigning in the wake of theWatergate scandal, but eventually, in 1987, Ronald Reagan nominated Bork for the Supreme Court.^[17]

hedges DLC

RMN used suppression against marginal eg anti war and no one cared but when he went after lib = democrats, problem 169

Zinn fbi file 423 pp 1948-74; 5 agents, never even suspected of crime, labelled high sec risk; jeh Res Sect A, pick up in nat;l emergency 170; served on SNCC, took students out to protest, fired for insubordination (he pled guilty ;) spoke at bobby seal rally at boston pol hq; testified for ellsberg (he and chomsky edited section on VN) 172

ref Dana P intel study; 1200 govt orgs 1900 pvt co, 850K w/ top secret clearance `173

Nader:pirgs found imp info, reporters publ, bills passed, life got better; corps fear, so they copied techniques of res and presentation; 1966- 73 25 consumer bills, nearly all b/c of nader; 1973 named #4 most infl in US; then NYT Abe Rosenthal (cda RW ~ commie came to US ~ progressive, ~ nader chomsky; rule that no story unless corp response, and corps played along; other papers felt no need/pressure to cover him.

GM hired dicks; tried to seduce in supermarket; 425K damages; 8 pp Pwl memo aug 1971: attacks nader marcuses, puzzled as to why TV partic in own destruction (ie cover VN protests, nader?); --> Biz rntable, cato, heritage, manh, CSE, Acc in Academe (sic) 176 monitor to press for good corp press, legal orgs bogus disciplines cost-benefit, risk magmt; shift story from health, labor, safety to cost of govt 177. Nader never met w/ BC or Gore as VP. gore camp never mentioned GW?! 178 Nixon last pres to fear libs.

last stand 1979 dereg nat'l gas, Consumer protection Agcy, nader put all in; one hose pass, then other next year; short 20 votes in hse but 2/3 in seate yes; JC ran on it, but did not help; then RR, pirg put out reports, but press ignored. 180; 1970 tony coelho showed dems how to raise $, no interest in nader issues; got little win, foia 1974, GSA buy airbag cars [graha?] so nader rn 1996 as none of the above; dems pull punches (eg gild war Kerry, so both can get worse if we keep picking least worst 9em)

MKL/macl X converged at end, both outcast (mlk ~ VN and called for econ justice) 187

Fred smith fdr of fedex, skull & b w/ dubya and kerry, McCain finance chair (has carveout ~ union, b/c inep contractors) trucks dangerous, 13 hrs no break; UPS is Teamster, fought exemption

new book 17 sol: more expose than ever, but also max apathy

MIC gross understatment, 1/2 fed budget w/ no enemy

http://nader.org/

Ralph Nader is a consumer activist long renowned for a career of exposing corporate deception and wrongdoing that result in human harm. Nader, who was a candidate for U.S. presidential election, 2004, is an Arab American, born February 27, 1934, in Winsted, Connecticut to Lebanese immigrants Rose and Nathra Nader. SourceWatch Resources

6 External links

Nader for President in 2008

Nader is running for President of the United States in 2008 and has launched a website to promote his candidacy.

Nader on Iraq

In a speech Monday night, May 24, 2004, at the Council on Foreign Relations, presidential candidate Ralph Nader "delivered a strong call ... for America to withdraw from Iraq by the end of this year, a stand that threatens to lure antiwar voters to his independent presidential campaign and away from Democrat John Kerry."

"Nader said Iraq faces a choice between two futures. In one, he said, Iraq could stay on its current course and remain a 'puppet regime' under Washington's control. Or, he said, 'we could declare a set date for corporate and military withdrawal - let's say the end of the year.'"

Nader "also called for replacing U.S. forces with a peace-keeping force from the United Nations - although the U.N. hasn't agreed to such a plan and Nader is in no position to negotiate it."

"Nader also called Monday evening for Bush's impeachment, saying he prosecuted a war under false pretenses. 'To say Bush has exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein is pretty much commonly accepted,' Nader said. '. . . The fabrications, deceptions and prevarications rise to high crimes and misdemeanors and warrant impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.'"

2004 Presidential Campaign

Democrats and progressives from around the country have asked for Ralph Nader to withdraw his bid for the WhiteHouse [3]. One group, StopNader.com, has started to air TV commercials warning voters that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.

"Ever since Ralph Nader announced his independent candidacy for president last month, both friends and critics have wondered why he is running -- and where the great gadfly will obtain the enormous resources needed for a national campaign," writes Joe Conason in his March 15, 2004, Salon article "Office Space. Ralph Nader's got some explaining to do. Why is his campaign headquarters housed in his nonprofit's tax-exempt offices?"

Nader's campaign for U.S. presidential election, 2004 is "presently headquartered at 1400 16th Street in Washington [which is] a modern, downtown office building where it shares a suite with an outfit called Citizen Works," a group that describes "itself as 'a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501c3 tax-exempt organization founded by Ralph Nader in April 2001 to advance justice by strengthening citizen participation in power."

Conason cites this as evidence that Nader's "organization may be cutting financial corners and skirting the dubious edge of federal election and tax laws."

Contact

2008 Campaign Website: http://www.votenader.org/index.html

SourceWatch Resources

Nader for President 2004
U.S. presidential election, 2004: Campaign Ads
Laura Nader - his sister
Todd Paglia
Joseph Browder

External links

Stop Nader Campaign.
Ralph Nader's Citizen Works biography.
Nader's impact on the 2000 election & the big names that no longer support him.
Harry G. Levine, "Ralph Nader as :{Mad Bomber:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:," Department of Sociology, Queens College, City University of New York, March 2004.
Joe Conason, Office space. Ralph Nader's got some explaining to do. Why is his campaign headquarters housed in his nonprofit's tax-exempt offices?, Salon, March 15, 2004.
Peter Montague, "Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner: strategies for public interest research, including three original case studies" (Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New Mexico, Dept. of American Studies, 1971).
William Kaufman, "Ralph Nader, Rocky Anderson, and the Green Party: A Political Un-Love Story", Dissident Voice, April 23, 2012. (Rocky Anderson)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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February 27, 1934 (age 78)

Winsted, Connecticut, U.S.

Independent

Green (affiliated non-member)

Reform (affiliated non-member)

Peace & Freedom (affiliated non-member)

Natural Law (affiliated non-member)

Populist Party of Maryland (created to support him in 2004)

Vermont Progressive Party (affiliated non-member)

Democratic Party (affiliated non-member)

Princeton University

Harvard Law School

Attorney, consumer advocate, and political activist

Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch ^[1] ^[2] ^[1][3]

nader.org

United States Army

1959

Ralph Nader (/:{ˈ:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}::{n:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}::{eɪ:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}::{d:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}::{ər:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}:/; born February 27, 1934)^[4][5] is an American political activist, as well as an author, lecturer, and attorney. Areas of particular concern to Nader include consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government.^[6]

Nader came to prominence in 1965 with the publication of his book Unsafe at Any Speed, a critique of the safety record of American automobile manufacturers in general, and most famously the Chevrolet Corvair. In 1999, an New York University panel of journalists ranked Unsafe at Any Speed 38th among the top 100 pieces of journalism of the 20th century.^[7]

Nader is a five-time candidate for President of the United States, having run as a write-in candidate in the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary, as the Green Party nominee in 1996 and 2000, and as an independent candidate in 2004 and 2008.

Contents

Early life and education

Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut. His parents, Nathra and Rose (née Bouziane) Nader, were immigrants from Lebanon^[8] and members of the Rûm-Antiochite Greek Orthodox minority.^[1] ^[2] His family's native language is Arabic,^[8] and he and his sister Laura have spoken it along with English since childhood. His father worked in a textile mill. Later he owned a bakery and restaurant where he talked politics with his customers.^[9] Ralph's sister Laura Nader became an anthropologist.

Nader graduated from the private The Gilbert School in 1951. He graduated from Princeton University in 1955 and then went on to Harvard Law School.^[10]

Career

After serving six months on active duty in the United States Army in 1959, he was admitted to the bar and started practice as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut. He was an assistant professor of history and government at the University of Hartford from 1961 to 1963.

In 1964, Nader moved to Washington, D.C., where he was appointed as a political aide to the Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and also advised a United States Senate subcommittee on car safety. Nader has served on the faculty at the American University Washington College of Law.^[11][when?]

Automobile safety activism

Nader began to write about consumer safety issues in articles published in the Harvard Law Record, a student publication of Harvard Law School. He first criticized the automobile industry in 1959 in an article, "The Safe Car You Can't Buy", published by The Nation.^[12

In 1965, Nader wrote the book Unsafe at Any Speed, in which he claimed that many American automobiles were unsafe to operate. The first chapter, "The Sporty Corvair - The One-Car Accident", pertained to the Corvair manufactured by the Chevrolet division of General Motors, which had been involved in accidents involving spins and rollovers. More than 100 lawsuits were pending against GM related to accidents involving the popular compact car. Nader based his initial investigations into car safety on these lawsuits.^[13]

In early March 1966, several media outlets, including The New Republic and The New York Times, reported that GM had tried to discredit Nader, hiring private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past, and hiring prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations.^[14][15] Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case for $425,000. Nader's lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover "overzealous surveillance".^[16] Nader used the proceeds from the lawsuit to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law.

Nader's advocacy of automobile safety and the publicity generated by the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, along with concern over escalating nationwide traffic fatalities, contributed to Congress' unanimous passage of the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. The act established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, marking a historic shift in responsibility for automobile safety from the consumer to the government. The legislation mandated a series of safety features for automobiles, beginning with safety belts and stronger windshields.^[17][18][19]

Several years later, in 1972 Texas A&M University conducted a safety commission report on the Corvair for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; it found that the 1960–1963 Corvairs possessed no greater potential for loss of control than its contemporaries in extreme situations.^[20] According to Crash Course by Paul Ingrassia, Corvairs were environmentally friendly due to their smaller size and lighter weight. Nader's safety-focused activism negatively affected the cause of eco-efficiency.^[21] In contrast, the former GM executive John DeLorean asserted in On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors (1979) that Nader's criticisms were valid.^[22]

Activism

Hundreds of young activists, inspired by Nader's work, came to DC to help him with other projects.^[citation ^needed] They came to be known as "Nader's Raiders" and, under Nader, investigated government corruption, publishing dozens of books with their results:

*Nader's Raiders* (Federal Trade Commission)
Vanishing Air (National Air Pollution Control Administration)
The Chemical Feast (Food and Drug Administration)
The Interstate Commerce Omission (Interstate Commerce Commission)
Old Age (nursing homes)
The Water Lords (water pollution)
Who Runs Congress? (Congress)
Whistle Blowing (punishment of whistle blowers)
The Big Boys (corporate executives)
Collision Course (Federal Aviation Administration)
No Contest (corporate lawyers)
Destroy the Forest (Destruction of ecosystems worldwide)

In 1971, Nader co-founded the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Public Citizen with fellow public interest lawyer Alan Morrison as an umbrella organization for these projects. Today, Public Citizen has over 225,000 members^[23] and investigates congressional, health, environmental, economic and other issues. Nader wrote, "The consumer must be protected at times from his own indiscretion and vanity."^[24]

During the Watergate affair Nader challenged the dismissal by Robert Bork of Nixon's special prosecutor Cox in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre.^[25]

In the 1970s and 1980s Nader was a key leader in the antinuclear power movement. "By 1976, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who later became allied with the environmental movement, 'stood as the titular head of opposition to nuclear energy'."^[26][27] The Critical Mass Energy Project was formed by Nader in 1974 as a national anti-nuclear umbrella group.^[28] It was probably the largest national anti-nuclear group in the United States, with several hundred local affiliates and an estimated 200,000 supporters.^[29] The organization's main efforts were directed at lobbying activities and providing local groups with scientific and other resources to campaign against nuclear power.^[28][30] Nader advocates the complete elimination of nuclear energy in favor of solar, tidal, wind and geothermal, citing environmental, worker safety, migrant labor, national security, disaster preparedness, foreign policy, government accountability and democratic governance issues to bolster his position.^[31]

Nader was also a prominent supporter of the Airline Deregulation Act.^[32]

Ecology

Nader spent much of 1970 pursuing a campaign to educate the public about ecology. Nader said that the rivers and lakes in America were extremely contaminated. He joked that "Lake Erie is now so contaminated you're advised to have a typhoid inoculation before you set sail on some parts of the lake."^[33]

He also added that river's state of contamination affected humans because many residents get their water supply from these contaminated rivers and lakes. "Cleveland takes its water supply from deep in the center of Lake Erie. How much longer is it going to get away with that?"^[33]

Nader told how some rivers are contaminated so badly that they can be lit on fire. "The Buffalo River is so full of petroleum residuals, it's been classified an official fire hazard by the City of Buffalo. We have the phenomenon now known as flammable water. The Cuyahoga River outside of Cleveland did catch fire last June, burning a base and some bridges. I often wonder what was in the minds of the firemen as they rushed to the scene of the action and pondered how to put this fire out. But we're heading in river after river: Connecticut River, Hudson River, Mississippi River, you name it. There's some rivers right outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Maine where if a person fell into 'em, I think he would dissolve before he drowned."^[33]

Non-profit organizations

Throughout his career, Nader has started or inspired a variety of nonprofit organizations,with most of which he has maintained close associations :

Citizen Advocacy Center
Citizens Utility Boards
Congress Accountability Project
Consumer Task Force For Automotive Issues
Corporate Accountability Research Project
Disability Rights Center
Equal Justice Foundation
Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights
Georgia Legal Watch
National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform
National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest
Pension Rights Center
PROD (truck safety)
Retired Professionals Action Group
The Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest
1969: Center for the Study of Responsive Law
1970s: Public Interest Research Groups
1970: Center for Auto Safety
1970: Connecticut Citizen Action Group
1971: Aviation Consumer Action Project
1972: Clean Water Action Project

1972: Center for Women's Policy Studies
1973: Capitol Hill News Service
1980: Multinational Monitor (magazine covering multinational corporations)
1982: Trial Lawyers for Public Justice
1982: Essential Information (encourage citizen activism and do investigative journalism)
1983: Telecommunications Research and Action Center
1983: National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest
1988: Taxpayer Assets Project
1989: Princeton Project 55 (alumni public service)
1993: Appleseed Foundation (local change)
1994: Resource Consumption Alliance (conserve trees)
1995: Center for Insurance Research
1995: Consumer Project on Technology
1997: Government Purchasing Project (encourage purchase of safe products)
1998: Center for Justice & Democracy
1998: Organization for Competitive Markets
1998: American Antitrust Institute (ensure fair competition)
1998: Commercial Alert (protect family, community, and democracy from corporations)
1999: Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest
2000: Congressional Accountability Project (fight corruption in Congress)
2001: Citizen Works (promote NGO cooperation, build grassroots support, and start new groups)
2001: Democracy Rising (hold rallies to educate and empower citizens)

In 1980, Nader resigned as director of Public Citizen to work on other projects, lecturing on the growing "imperialism" of multinational corporations and of a dangerous convergence of corporate and government power.^[34]

Presidential campaigns

Ralph Nader has been a frequent contender in U.S. presidential elections, always as an independent candidate or a third party nominee. His activism on behalf of third parties goes back to 1958, when he wrote an article for the Harvard Law Record critiquing U.S. electoral law's systemic discrimination against them.^[35]

Presidential campaign history

1972

Ralph Nader's name appeared in the press as a potential candidate for president for the first time in 1971, when he was offered the opportunity to run as the presidential candidate for the New Party, a progressive split-off from the Democratic Party in 1972. Chief among his advocates was author Gore Vidal, who touted a 1972 Nader presidential campaign in a front-page article in Esquire magazine in 1971.^[36] Psychologist Alan Rockway organized a "draft Ralph Nader for President" campaign in Florida on the New Party's behalf.^[37] Nader declined their offer to run that year; the New Party ultimately joined with the People's Party in running Benjamin Spock in the 1972 Presidential election.^[38][39][40] Spock had hoped Nader in particular would run, getting "some of the loudest applause of the evening" when mentioning him at the University of Alabama.^[41] Spock went on to try to recruit Nader for the party among over 100 others, and indicated he would be "delighted" to be replaced by any of them even after he accepted the nomination himself.^[42] Nader received one vote for the vice-presidential nomination at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

1992

Nader stood in as a write-in for "none of the above" in both the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic and Republican Primaries^[43] and received 3,054 of the 170,333 Democratic votes and 3,258 of the 177,970 Republican votes cast.^[44] He was also a candidate in the 1992 Massachusetts Democratic Primary, where he appeared at the top of the ballot (in some areas, he appeared on the ballot as an independent).

1996

Nader was drafted as a candidate for President of the United States on the Green Party ticket during the 1996 presidential election. He was not formally nominated by the Green Party USA, which was, at the time, the largest national Green group; instead he was nominated independently by various state Green parties (in some states, he appeared on the ballot as an independent). However, many activists in the Green Party USA worked actively to campaign for Nader that year. Nader qualified for ballot status in 22 states,^[45] garnering 685,297 votes or 0.71% of the popular vote (fourth place overall),^[46] although the effort did make significant organizational gains for the party. He refused to raise or spend more than $5,000 on his campaign, presumably to avoid meeting the threshold for Federal Elections Commission reporting requirements; the unofficial Draft Nader committee could (and did) spend more than that, but the committee was legally prevented from coordinating in any way with Nader himself.

Nader received some criticism from gay rights supporters for calling gay rights "gonad politics" and stating that he was not interested in dealing with such matters.^[47] However, more recently, Nader has come out in support of same-sex marriage.^[48]

His 1996 running mates included: Anne Goeke (nine states), Deborah Howes (Oregon), Muriel Tillinghast (New York), Krista Paradise (Colorado), Madelyn Hoffman (New Jersey), Bill Boteler (Washington, D.C.), and Winona LaDuke (California and Texas).^[49]

2000

Main article: Ralph Nader presidential campaign, 2000

In the 2006 documentary An Unreasonable Man, Nader describes how he was unable to get the views of his public interest groups heard in Washington, even by the Clinton Administration. Nader cites this as one of the primary reasons that he decided to actively run in the 2000 election as candidate of the Green Party, which had been formed in the wake of his 1996 campaign.

In June 2000 The Association of State Green Parties (ASGP) organized the national nominating convention that took place in Denver, Colorado, at which Green party delegates nominated Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke to be their party's candidates for President and Vice President.^[50][51]

On July 9, the Vermont Progressive Party nominated Nader, giving him ballot access in the state.^[52] On August 12, the United Citizens Party of South Carolina chose Ralph Nader as its presidential nominee, giving him a ballot line in the state.^[53]

In October 2000, at the largest Super Rally of his campaign,^[54] held in New York City's Madison Square Garden, 15,000 people paid $20 each^[55] to hear Mr. Nader speak. Nader's campaign rejected both parties as institutions dominated by corporate interests, stating that Al Gore and George W. Bush were "Tweedledee and Tweedledum". A long list of notable celebrities spoke and performed at the event including Susan Sarandon, Ani DiFranco, Ben Harper, Tim Robbins, Michael Moore, Eddie Vedder and Patti Smith. The campaign also had some prominent union help: The California Nurses Association and the United Electrical Workers endorsed his candidacy and campaigned for him.^[56]

In 2000, Nader and his running mate Winona LaDuke received 2,883,105 votes, for 2.74 percent of the popular vote (third place overall),^[57] missing the 5 percent needed to qualify the Green Party for federally distributed public funding in the next election, yet qualifying the Greens for ballot status in many states. A common claim is that Nader's candidacy acted as a spoiler in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, in which 537 votes gave George W. Bush a crucial and controversial victory in Florida (Nader received almost 100,000 votes in Florida, from which a slight disparagement in favour of Gore would have altered the outcome). Others, including Nader, dispute this claim.^[58][59][60]

The spoiler controversy

In the 2000 presidential election in Florida, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader received 97,421 votes, which led to claims that he was responsible for Gore's defeat. Nader, both in his book Crashing the Party and on his website, states: "In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all."^[61] (which would net a 13%, 12,665 votes, advantage for Gore over Bush.) Michael Moore at first argued that Florida was so close that votes for any of seven other candidates could also have switched the results,^[62] but in 2004 joined the view that Nader had helped make Bush president.^[63][64] When asked about claims of being a spoiler, Nader typically points to the controversial Supreme Court ruling that halted a Florida recount, Gore's loss in his home state of Tennessee, and the "quarter million Democrats who voted for Bush in Florida."^[65][66]

A study in 2002 by the Progressive Review found no correlation in pre-election polling numbers for Nader when compared to those for Gore. In other words, most of the changes in pre-election polling reflect movement between Bush and Gore rather than Gore and Nader, and they conclude from this that Nader was not responsible for Gore's loss.^[67]

An analysis conducted by Harvard Professor B.C. Burden in 2005 showed Nader did "play a pivotal role in determining who would become president following the 2000 election", but that:

"Contrary to Democrats’ complaints, Nader was not intentionally trying to throw the election. A spoiler strategy would have caused him to focus disproportionately on the most competitive states and markets with the hopes of being a key player in the outcome. There is no evidence that his appearances responded to closeness. He did, apparently, pursue voter support, however, in a quest to receive 5% of the popular vote."^[58]

However, Jonathan Chait of The American Prospect and The New Republic notes that Nader did indeed focus on swing states disproportionately during the waning days of the campaign, and by doing so jeopardized his own chances of achieving the 5% of the vote he was aiming for.

Then there was the debate within the Nader campaign over where to travel in the waning days of the campaign. Some Nader advisers urged him to spend his time in uncontested states such as New York and California. These states – where liberals and leftists could entertain the thought of voting Nader without fear of aiding Bush – offered the richest harvest of potential votes. But, Martin writes, Nader – who emerges from this account as the house radical of his own campaign – insisted on spending the final days of the campaign on a whirlwind tour of battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Florida. In other words, he chose to go where the votes were scarcest, jeopardizing his own chances of winning 5 percent of the vote, which he needed to gain federal funds in 2004.^[68]

When Nader, in a letter to environmentalists, attacked Gore for "his role as broker of environmental voters for corporate cash," and "the prototype for the bankable, Green corporate politician," and what he called a string of broken promises to the environmental movement, Sierra Club president Carl Pope sent an open letter to Nader, dated 27 October 2000, defending Al Gore's environmental record and calling Nader's strategy "irresponsible."^[69] He wrote:

You have also broken your word to your followers who signed the petitions that got you on the ballot in many states. You pledged you would not campaign as a spoiler and would avoid the swing states. Your recent campaign rhetoric and campaign schedule make it clear that you have broken this pledge... Please accept that I, and the overwhelming majority of the environmental movement in this country, genuinely believe that your strategy is flawed, dangerous and reckless.^[70]

2004

Main article: Ralph Nader presidential campaign, 2004

Nader announced on December 24, 2003, that he would not seek the Green Party's nomination for president in 2004, but did not rule out running as an independent candidate.

Meeting with John Kerry

Ralph Nader and Democratic candidate John Kerry held a widely publicized meeting early in the 2004 Presidential campaign, which Nader described in An Unreasonable Man. Nader said that John Kerry wanted to work to win Nader's support and the support of Nader's voters. Nader then provided more than 20 pages of issues that he felt were important and he "put them on the table" for John Kerry. According to Nader the issues covered topics ranging from environmental, labor, healthcare, tax reform, corporate crime, campaign finance reform and various consumer protection issues. Nader reported that he asked John Kerry to choose any three of the issues and highlight them in his campaign and if Kerry would do this, he would refrain from the race. For example, Nader recommended taking up corporate welfare, corporate crime—which could attract many Republican voters, and labor law reform—which was felt Bush could never support given the corporate funding of his campaign.^[71] Several days passed and Kerry failed to adopt any of Nader's issues as benchmarks of his campaign, so on February 22, 2004, Nader announced on NBC that he would indeed run for president as an independent, saying, "There's too much power and wealth in too few hands."

A Kerry aide who had attended the meeting had a different recollection. "He made more the point that he had the ability to go after Bush in ways that we could not, He did not at all say to Kerry, 'I'm here to make you better on things.' That was not his tone at all."

The New York Times quoted Nader saying after the meeting "Gore was petrified wood, He was stiff as a board, he didn't want to have these kinds of meetings. He didn't want to have meetings like this when he was vice president three years before the election. Kerry is much more open." Nader himself said he had deliberately steered clear of disagreement, telling the Times, "When you go in looking for common ground, it takes up most of the time, doesn't it?"^[72]

The campaign

Nader's 2004 campaign ran on a platform consistent with the Green Party's positions on major issues, such as opposition to the war in Iraq. He has detailed the legal reasons George W. Bush and Dick Cheney fit the criteria for war criminals, and why they should have been immediately impeached.^[73]

Due to concerns about a possible spoiler effect as in 2000, many Democrats urged Nader to abandon his 2004 candidacy. The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, stated that Nader had a "distinguished career, fighting for working families," and that McAuliffe "would hate to see part of his legacy being that he got us eight years of George Bush." Nader replied to this, in filmed interviews for An Unreasonable Man, by arguing that, "Voting for a candidate of one's choice is a Constitutional right, and the Democrats who are asking me not to run are, without question, seeking to deny the Constitutional rights of voters who are, by law, otherwise free to choose to vote for me." Nader's 2004 campaign theme song was "If You Gotta Ask" by Liquid Blue.

In May 2009, in a new book, Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny, Theresa Amato, who was Nader's national campaign manager in 2000 and 2004, alleged that McAuliffe offered to pay off Nader to stop campaigning in certain states in 2004. This was confirmed by Nader, and neither McAuliffe nor his spokeswoman disputed the claim.^[74]

In the 2004 campaign, Democrats such as Howard Dean and Terry McAuliffe asked that Nader return money donated to his campaign by Republicans who were well-known Bush supporters, such as billionaire Richard Egan.^[75][76] Nader's reaction to the request was to refuse to return any donations and he charged that the Democrats were attempting to smear him.^[75] Nader's vice-presidential running mate, Peter Camejo, supported the return of the money if it could be proved that "the aim of the wealthy GOP donors was to peel votes from Kerry."^[75] According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Nader defended his keeping of the donations by saying that wealthy contributors "are human beings too."^[75]

Nader received 463,655 votes, for 0.38 percent of the popular vote, placing him in third place overall.^[77]

2008

Main article: Ralph Nader presidential campaign, 2008

Wikinews has related news:

In February 2007, Nader criticized Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as "a panderer and a flatterer."^[78] Asked on CNN Late Edition news program if he would run in 2008, Nader replied, "It's really too early to say...."^[79] Asked during a radio appearance to describe the former First Lady, Nader said, "Flatters, panders, coasting, front-runner, looking for a coronation ... She has no political fortitude."^[80] Some Greens started a campaign to draft Nader as their party's 2008 presidential candidate.^[81]

After some consideration, Nader announced on February 24, 2008, that he would run for President as an independent. His vice-presidential candidate was Matt Gonzalez.^[82]

Nader received 738,475 votes, for 0.56 percent of the popular vote, earning him a third place position in the overall election results.^[83]

Involvement in 2012 presidential race

In December, 2010, Ralph Nader said in an interview that while he had not ruled out the possibility of running for president in 2012, he was encouraging people to identify and help another progressive willing to challenge President Barack Obama in the Democratic Party primaries.^[84] As the 2012 presidential race evolved, Nader continued to express hope that "outside democrats" would assert themselves to influence it.^[85] Meanwhile, he continued his customary writing and lecturing on a prodigious range of political and timely topics.^[86] In August, 2012, Nader has suggested to vote for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson.^[87]

Personal life

Nader was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church.^[1] He has never married. Karen Croft, a writer who worked for Nader in the late 1970s at the Center for Study of Responsive Law, once asked him if he had ever considered getting married. She reports: "He said that at a certain point he had to decide whether to have a family or to have a career, that he couldn't have both. That's the kind of person he is. He couldn't have a wife—he's up all night reading the Congressional Record."^[88]

While he believes that technology has no "moral imperative", Ralph Nader personally eschews using computers for writing with a trusted typewriter.^[89]

Personal finances

According to the mandatory fiscal disclosure report that he filed with the Federal Election Commission in 2000, Nader owned more than $3 million worth of stocks and mutual fund shares; his single largest holding was more than $1 million worth of stock in Cisco Systems, Inc. He also held between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of shares in the Magellan Fund.^[90] Nader said he owned no car and owned no real estate directly in 2000, and said that he lived on US $25,000 a year, giving most of his stock earnings to many of the over four dozen non-profit organizations he had founded.^[91][92]

Television appearances

In 1988, Nader appeared on Sesame Street as "a person in your neighborhood." The verse of the song began "A consumer advocate is a person in your neighborhood." Nader's appearance on the show was memorable because it was the only time that the grammar of the last line of the song—"A person who you meet each day"—was questioned and changed in the show. Nader refused to sing a line which he deemed grammatically improper, so a compromise was reached such that Nader sang the last line solo, with the modified words: "A person whom you meet each day."^[93] In the same episode, Nader tests "Bob"'s sweater, with permission, and destroys it, telling Bob "Your aunt . . . knitted you a lemon!"

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Nader appeared on NBC's Meet The Press, CNBC with John Harwood, CNN with Rick Sanchez, PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Fox News Channel with Shepard Smith.^[94] He was interviewed by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2008. Also that year he appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Works

Main article: Bibliography of Ralph Nader

	Biography portal
	Politics portal

Notes

*An Unreasonable Man* (2006). An Unreasonable Man is a documentary film about Ralph Nader that appeared at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
Burden, Barry C. (2005). Ralph Nader's Campaign Strategy in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election 2005, American Politics Research 33:672-99.
*Ralph Nader: Up Close* This film blends archival footage and scenes of Nader and his staff at work in Washington with interviews with Nader's family, friends and adversaries, as well as Nader himself. Written, directed and produced by Mark Litwak and Tiiu Lukk, 1990, color, 72 mins. Narration by Studs Terkel. Broadcast on PBS. Winner, Sinking Creek Film Festival; Best of Festival, Baltimore Int'l Film Festival; Silver Plaque, Chicago Int'l Film Festival, Silver Apple, National Educational Film & Video Festival.
Bear, Greg, "Eon" — the novel includes a depiction of a future group called the "Naderites" who follow Ralph Nader's humanistic teachings.
Martin, Justin. Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon. Perseus Publishing, 2002. ISBN 0-7382-0563-X

References

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^ ^a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-Washington_Times_2-0) ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-Washington_Times_2-1) "Nader a Winner This Day — Ralph Nader". Washington Times, March 18, 2002.
^ "Washingtonpost.com". Washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Ralph Nader Biography – Academy of Achievement". Achievement.org. Retrieved 2011-01-01.
^ "Ralph Nader Biography". Biography.com. Retrieved 2011-01-01.
^ "Seth Gitell "The Green Party gets serious" ''The Providence Phoenix'' June 29, 2000". Providencephoenix.com. 2000-07-06. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ Barringer, Felicity (1999-03-01). "MEDIA; Journalism's Greatest Hits: Two Lists of a Century's Top Stories". NY Times: p. 2.
^ ^a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-RJLiban_8-0) ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-RJLiban_8-1) "Ralph Nader's Childhood Roots".
^ ‹The template Cite video is being considered for deletion.› Mantel, Henriette (Director) (2006). *An Unreasonable Man* (DVD). IFC Films.
^ "2004 Presidential Candidates — Ralph Nader". CNN.com Specials.
^ "Washington College of Law Faculty".
^ Mickey Z. 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed To Know. New York: The Disinformation Company, 2005. p. 87 ISBN 1-932857-18-4
^ Diana T. Kurylko. "Nader Damned Chevy's Corvair and Sparked a Safety Revolution," Automotive News (v. 70, 1996).
^ "Ralph Nader's museum of tort law will include relics from famous lawsuits—if it ever gets built". LegalAffairs.org. December 2005.
^ "President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Role in Highway Safety: Epilogue — The Changing Federal Role". Federal Highway Administration. 2005-05-07.
^ Nader v. General Motors Corp., 307 N.Y.S.2d 647 (N.Y. 1970)
^ Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite. The Impact of Publicity on Corporate Offenders. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983.
^ Robert Barry Carson, Wade L. Thomas, Jason Hecht. Economic Issues Today: Alternative Approaches. M.E. Sharpe, 2005.
^ Stan Luger. Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
^ Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite, The Impact of Publicity on Corporate Offenders. State University of New York Press, 1983. p.30 ISBN 0-87395-733-4
^ Ingrassia, Paul (2010). *Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster*. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6863-0.
^ Wright, J. Patrick; De Lorean, John Z. (1979). On a clear day you can see General Motors. Grosse Pointe, Mich: Wright Enterprises. ISBN 0-9603562-0-7.
^ Weissman, Robert (2011-01-05), Letter to Darrell Issa, http://www.citizen.org/documents/Issa-Letter-20110105.pdf
^ Sowell, Thomas (2004-03-03), "Nader's Glitter", Jewish World Review
^ Noble, Kenneth B. (1987-07-26), "New Views Emerge Of Bork's Role in Watergate Dismissals", New York Times
^ Nuclear Power in an Age of Uncertainty (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-E-216, February 1984), p. 228, citing the following article:
^ Public Opposition to Nuclear Energy: Retrospect and Prospect, Roger E. Kasperson, Gerald Berk, David Pijawka, Alan B. Sharaf, James Wood, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 5, No. 31 (Spring, 1980), pp. 11–23
^ ^a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-wr_28-0) ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-wr_28-1) Wolfgang Rudig (1990). Anti-nuclear Movements: A World Survey of Opposition to Nuclear Energy, Longman, p. 402.
^ Steve Cohn (1997). Too cheap to meter: an economic and philosophical analysis of the nuclear dream SUNY Press, pp. 133-134.
^ Justin Martin (2002). Nader, Perseus Publishing, pp. 172-179.
^ "Ralph Nader interview transcript". Frontline.
^ Thierer, Adam (2010-12-21) Who'll Really Benefit from Net Neutrality Regulation?, CBS News
^ ^a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-1970review_33-0) ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-1970review_33-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-1970review_33-2) "Ecology: 1970 Year in Review", UPI.com.
^ "The Nader Page | History". Nader.org. Retrieved 2011-01-01.
^ Two party ballot suppresses third party change, including an excerpt from Nader's 1958 article and analyzing the lack of change in ballot access law since. Published in the Harvard Law Record, December 2009
^ Vidal, Gore The Best Man/'72, Esquire
^ "Coalition Party Opens Conference". Spartanburg Herald-Journal: pp. 2A. October 2, 1971.
^ Gore Vidal. "The Best Man /'72: Ralph Nader Can Be President of the US." Esquire, June, 1971.
^ Peter Barnes. "Toward '72 and Beyond: Starting a Fourth Party". The New Republic, July 24–31, 1971:9–21
^ Justin Martin. "Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon". Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002. ISBN 0-7382-0563-X.
^ Smithey, Waylon (September 23, 1971). "Spock Shares Youths' Views". The Tuscaloosa News: pp. 2.
^ "People's Party Nominates Dr. Spock for President". Spartanburg Herald-Journal: pp. B5. November 29, 1971.
^ The 1992 Campaign: Write-In; In Nader's Campaign, White House Isn't the Goal February 18, 1992
^ "1992 Presidential Primary". Sos.nh.gov. 1992-02-18. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Politics1.com". Politics1.com. 1934-02-27. Archived from the original on March 16, 2008. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Uselectionatlas.org". Uselectionatlas.org. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Leftbusinessobserver.com". Leftbusinessobserver.com. 1984-06-28. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Votenader.org". Votenader.org. 2001-09-11. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens By Greta Gaard, page 240.
^ Common Dreams Progressive Newswire (July 11, 2001). Green Meeting Will Establish Greens as a National Party. Retrieved 8-28-2009.
^ Nelson, Susan. Synthesis/Regeneration 26 (Fall 2001).The G/GPUSA Congress and the ASGP Conference: Authentic Grassroots Democracy vs. Packaged Public Relations. Retrieved 8-28-2009.
^ Ballot Access News (Aug. 1, 2000). PROGRESSIVES NOMINATE NADER
^ (2000-08-01) United Citizens Party Picks Nader, Ballot Access News.
^ "Nader 'Super Rally' Draws 12,000 To Boston's FleetCenter". Commondreams.org. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ CNN.com – Loyal Nader fans pack Madison Square Garden – October 14, 2000^[dead ^link]
^ "Nader, the Greens and 2008". Socialistworker.org. 2008-01-25. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2000
^ ^a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-Burden_673.E2.80.93699_58-0) ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-Burden_673.E2.80.93699_58-1) Burden, B. C. (September 2005). "Ralph Nader's Campaign Strategy" (PDF). American Politics Research: 673–699.
^ Varadarajan, Tunku (2008-05-31). "Interview: Ralph Nader". Wall Street Journal.
^ "Nader on the Record". Grist. 2008-03-19.
^ "Dear Conservatives Upset With the Policies of the Bush Administration". Nader for President 2004.
^ "Michael Moore message". Michaelmoore.com. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ Convictions Intact, Nader Soldiers On – New York Times^[dead ^link]
^ Greenhouse, Steven (2004-07-28). "The Constituencies: Liberals; From Chicago '68 to Boston, The Left Comes Full Circle". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ Varadarajan, Tunku (2008-05-31). "Interview: Ralph Nader". Wall Street Journal.
^ "Nader on the Record". Grist. 2008-03-19.
^ "Poll Analysis: Nader not responsible for Gore's loss".
^ "Books in Review: | The American Prospect". Prospect.org. Retrieved 2011-01-01.
^ knowthecandidates.org.The Nader Debate with the Sierra Club about Gore and the Environment
^ Pope, Carl (October 27, 2000)"Ralph Nader Attack On Environmentalists Who Are Supporting Vice-President Gore." CommonDreams.org.
^ An Unreasonable Man, Ral
^ Halbfinger, David M. (2004-05-20). "Kerry Woos Nader, Who Declares Him 'Very Presidential' – New York Times". Nytimes.com. Retrieved 2011-01-01.
^ Kugel, Allison (October 22, 2009). "Howard Dean Talks Healthcare Reform in the Age of Hardcore Party Politics". PR.com. Retrieved 2011-06-16.
^ Kumar, Anita; Helderman, Rosalind S. (2009-05-29). "Nader: McAuliffe Offered Money To Avoid Key States in '04 Race". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ ^a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-SFGOPmoney_75-0) ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-SFGOPmoney_75-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-SFGOPmoney_75-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#cite_ref-SFGOPmoney_75-3) "Nader defends GOP Cash". Carla Marinucci (San Francisco Chronicle). July 10, 2004. Retrieved 2008-07-06.
^ "Nader Republicans". Nathan Littlefield (Atlantic Monthly). September 2004. Retrieved 2008-07-06.
^ Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. "2004 Presidential General Election Results". Retrieved February 24, 2009.
^ Winter, Michael (February 5, 2007). "Nader in '08? Stay tuned". USA Today (Online). Retrieved 2008-12-31.
^ Nader Leaves '08 Door Open, Slams Hillary Reuters, February 5, 2007.
^ Ralph Nader: Hillary's Just a 'Bad Version of Bill Clinton' Feb. 16, 2007
^ "DraftNader.org". DraftNader.org. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Nader names running mate in presidential bid". CBC News. 2008-02-28. Retrieved 2008-10-30.
^ "2008 Official Presidential General Election Results". FEC. 2008-11-04. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
^ Viebeck, Elise. "Ralph Nader: I am looking for someone to challenge President Obama in 2012". Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.. The Hill. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
^ Nader, Ralph. "Jolting the Democratic Party from Its Stupor". Nader.org. The Nader Page. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
^ "The Essential Nader". Nader.org. The Nader Page. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
^ "What Ralph Nader Is Thinking About the 2012 Election". Alternet.org. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
^ "Candidate Nader", Mother Jones. Retrieved February 1, 2009.
^ Victor, Kirk. "Typewriter Man". National Journal Group Inc.. NationalJournal. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
^ Tapper, Jake (28 October 2000). "Inside Nader's stock portfolio". Salon. Retrieved 15 August 2009.
^ "Nader Reports Big Portfolio In Technology". New York Times. 2000-06-19. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
^ "Ralph Nader: Personal Finances". Center for Responsive Politics. Retrieved 2008-10-28.
^ David Borgenicht, Sesame Street Unpaved: Scripts, Stories, Secrets, and Songs, 1998 and 2002 reprint, ISBN 1-4028-9327-2
^ "Nader on CNN, FOX, CNBC and PBS NewsHour Tuesday". Nader for President 2008. 2008-10-13. Retrieved 2008-10-23.

External links

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (March 2012)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ralph Nader

Nader.org official website
Nader / Gonzalez '08 campaign website
Appearances on C-SPAN
- *Booknotes* interview with Nader on *Crashing the Party*, February 3, 2002.
- *In Depth* interview with Nader, August 1, 2010

Ralph Nader on *Charlie Rose*
Ralph Nader at the Internet Movie Database
Works by or about Ralph Nader in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Ralph Nader collected news and commentary at The New York Times
Ralph Nader at the Notable Names Database

Articles and interviews

Kugel, Allison (May 14, 2008). "Ralph Nader Goes to Washington... Again – The PR.com Interview". PR.com.
"How Winstedites Kept Their Integrity," article by Nader in the September 1963 issue of The Freeman
Ralph Nader Goes to Washington... Again – The PR.com Interview
Digital History Ralph Nader
Nader, Rare Among Candidates May 5, 2008

new book 17 sol: more expose than ever, but also max apathy

MIC gross understatment, 1/2 fed budget w/ no enemy

http://nader.org/

Nader, Ralph

Progenitor of Inequalities – Corporate Personhood vs. Human Beings

TRANSCRIPT

Ralph Nader ranks the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations

"Saturday Night Massacre"

Nader for President in 2008

Nader on Iraq

2004 Presidential Campaign

Contact

SourceWatch Resources

External links

Early life and education

Career

Automobile safety activism

Activism

Ecology

Non-profit organizations

Presidential campaigns

Presidential campaign history

1972

1992

1996

2000

The spoiler controversy

2004

Meeting with John Kerry

The campaign

2008

Involvement in 2012 presidential race

Personal life

Personal finances

Television appearances

Works

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

Attachments