Did Nader Call It?

An interview with Ralph Nader on what an Obama presidency would be like - election night 2008

As a preface to the following remarks, I'd like to make it clear that I supported Obama for president in 2008. I still do. In spite of various disappointments, I'm thoroughly of the opinion that under McCain and Palin things would be a lot worse than they are now. For one thing, I'm convinced that they would have had us involved in a full-scale war with Iran by this point.

Nevertheless, when I look at a candidate who raised expectations so high by running under the mantra of hope and change, and look at how those expectations were disappointed, I think it's fair to be hard-eyed and to take stock of the man that we elected.

Granted, Obama stepped into as bad a situation as any President in living memory.

Still, as he embarks upon another miltary adventure without consulting the will of the people, freezes the pay of federal employees and fails in the following weeks to show anything more than the most tepid support for a public employees union fighting for its life, keeps Guantanomo Bay open despite his campaign promises to shut it down, signs free-trade agreements putting even more American jobs at risk, and escalates the war in Afghanistan, bleeding it even further into Pakistan, can we ask if this self-proclaimed conciliator is the man who was advertised to us in the campaign? Is Obama, whose biggest campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs, nothing more than a Corporate Democrat?

One person who seems to have had Obama completely pegged and sussed-out, even during the 2008 campaign, is the long-time consumer activist and Green party candidate Ralph Nader. He's getting too old to run for President anymore, and it saddens me to see that in the last thirty years or so he's come to be regarded as somewhat of an eccentric and sour crank. Ralph Nader has been a superb servant to the American public. Someday he will be remembered for the national hero that he is. Mark my words, in years to come he will be regarded as a towering figure in American history. For whatever people think of his views and positions, he is the real deal.

Nader gave an interview to Realnews on election night in 2008, and I though the remarks he made about the prsopects for an Obama presidency were amazingly prescient. Please see the video clip further below.

At 1:00 minute, he describes the apathy and resignation to be found throughout the country despite all the talk of "Hope and Change" during the campaign.

At 1:24 he asks, what is really still left for the American people themselves to decide?

At 2:50, he explains that at this point, with an Obama victory and a Democratic Congress, the Democrats will have no more excuses.

At 3:15 he describes corporate domination of society and points out that Obama was the candidate most heavily funded by Wall Street.

At 3:50 he finally gets to Obama himself, claiming that he lacks a transformative personality, and he decries Obama's lack of willingness to be confrontational, and his unwillingness to take on power, particularly corporate power.



In this second part, commentators Bill Fletcher and Tony Monroe show a bit of prophetic wisdom of their own, speaking about US adventurism, the meaning of the demobilization of the union movement during the Clinton years, and the difficulty that Obama would face in standing up to an entrenched national security and intelligence apparatus that is resistant to change.



What has Nader been up to lately? He seems to be sending out feelers to the right-wing populists who were stirred up by what he describes as a media-driven Tea Party movement. Not too long ago, he was seen on Andrew Napolitano's show on FOX with Ron Paul, discussing their shared conviction that the Federal Reserve needs to be reigned in, the troops brought home, and the corporatization of government resisted.



Will an alliance between progressive Ralph Nader Greens and libertarian Ron Paul Tea Partiers ever work? Meh. I doubt it. I think Nader and Paul are both more interested in seeing third party movements taken seriously rather than ever seriously working together. In the last two minutes of Napolitano's interview you can see the philosophical fissures between them on health care reform that would prevent them from ever really collaborating.

For his part, Ralph Nader has asked the Tea Party ten questions about the things they really care about, and speaking for myself, I don't think that he is going to find as affirmative a set of responses as he may hope for.

1. Can you be against Big Government and not press for reductions in the vast military budgets, fraught with bureaucratic and large contractors’ waste, fraud and abuse? Military spending now takes up half of the federal government’s operating budgets. The libertarian Cato Institute believes that to cut deficits, we have to also cut the defense budget.

2. Can you believe in the free market and not condemn hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare-bailouts, subsidies, handouts, and giveaways?

3. Can you want to preserve the legitimate sovereignty of our country and not reject the trade agreements known as NAFTA and GATT (The World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland) that scholars have described as the greatest surrender of local, state and national sovereignty in our history?

4. Can you be for law and order and not support a bigger and faster crackdown on the corporate crime wave, that needs more prosecutors and larger enforcement budgets to stop the stealing of taxpayers and consumer dollars so widely reported in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week? Law enforcement officials estimate that for every dollar for prosecution, seventeen to twenty dollars are returned.

5. Can you be against invasions of privacy by government and business without rejecting the provisions of the Patriot Act that leave you defenseless to constant unlawful snooping, appropriation of personal information and even search of your home without notification until 72 hours later?

6. Can you be against regulation of serious medical malpractice (over 100,000 lives lost a year, according to a study by Harvard physicians), unsafe drugs that have serious side effects or cause the very injury/illness they were sold to prevent, motor vehicles with defective brakes, tires and throttles, contaminated food from China, Mexico and domestic processors?

7. Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores? What Freedom do you have when you have to sign industry-wide fine print one-sided “contracts” with your banks, insurance companies, car dealers, and credit card companies? Many of these contracts even block your Constitutional access to the courthouse.

8. Can you be for a new, clean system of politics and elections and still accept the Republican and Democratic Two Party dictatorship that is propped up by complex state laws, frivolous litigation and harassment to exclude from the ballot third parties and independent candidates who want reform, accountability, and stronger voices for the voters?

9. If you want a return to our Constitution—its principles of limited and separation of power and its emphasis on “We the People” in its preamble—can you still support Washington’s wars that have not been declared by Congress (Article I Section 8) or giving corporations equal rights with humans plus special privileges and immunities. The word “corporation” or “company” never appears in the Constitution. How can you support eminent domain powers given by governments to corporations over homeowners, or massive week-end bailouts by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department of businesses, even reckless foreign banks, without receiving the authority and the appropriations from the Congress, as the Constitution requires?

10. You want less taxation and lower deficits. How can you succeed unless you stop big corporations from escaping their fair share of taxes by manipulating foreign jurisdictions against our tax laws, for example, or by letting trillions of dollars of speculation on Wall Street go without any sales tax, while you pay six, seven or eight percent sales tax on the necessities you buy in stores?