Ralph Nader, "Return to Sender"

Ralph Nader really needs no introduction but that's my job to give an introduction he through his work with Public Citizen and other organizations and interest groups as well as his his presidential campaign he's been one of our most active citizens challenging government and corporate abuse and urging all of us to participate in political action his books include the 17 solutions the 17 traditions and unsafe at any speed about the American automobile industry with unrelenting persistence humor and wit he continues to call our presidents to accountability even as they are ignoring the critical issues of our time and this current collection returned to sender unanswered letters to the president 2001 to 2015 is his writing over the last several years so thank you all for following his blogs his email his posts in The Huffington Post and without further ado I give you Ralph Nader thank you thank you very much Andrew can you all hear me in the back okay thank you for being here I think one way to support independent bookstores by the way is for all of us whenever we want to go to a book signing to pledge that we'll bring someone half our age there one of the things they don't teach us in elementary school in high school is how easy it is to turn the country around on major issues assuming that it represents majority opinion and even though we can quote Abraham Lincoln who said with public sentiment you can achieve anything and without it you can't achieve much of anything at all we still convey to young people that it's really impossible you know you can't fight city hall and can't take on ExxonMobil and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and they internalize their own powerlessness so I have written a lot of these books seventeen solutions most of them are majoritarian supported most of them are completely ignored by presidential candidates and candidates for Congress it's quite interesting disconnect that most of these issues are off the table they're not even discussed and of course if you don't discuss it it doesn't go anywhere you can't mobilize the diet the dynamics and then there's a long strategy for 2,000 years or so of divide and rule by power structures so here we are told were polarized were were liberal conservative blue state red state you know they have all these names and we're gridlocked and we're paralyzed and if you say well where are we divided and they you know they put the list out reproductive rights and school prayer and deregulation things like that and then you say well where are we on the same page between left-right and silence you see so I did this book 24 major areas you name it where you get a majority because of left-right support and it's not just civil liberties in the Patriot Act it's a military budget it's juvenile justice and prison reform now the death penalty adopt abolished in Nebraska with left right legislators making own arguments some of them are the same some of them are different we see a huge left-right convergence against crony capitalism or what we call corporate welfare bailout of Wall Street for example the Main Street versus Wall Street on and on and but it's not it's off the table you know it's not there's no nonprofit citizen advocacy groups just focusing on left-right convergence so you see you get a lot of demoralisation around the country people get discouraged and they can do one of two things they can get upset and roar back or and the majority get cynical think they're intellectually smart by being cynical you know pox on all our houses they're all crooks you know two easy ways to go through life one is to believe everything and want us to believe nothing right you know I have to think either way and then they withdraw and there were draws more than just half the electorate and doesn't vote or more than half in primaries and congressional midterms but it's a total withdrawal where people don't even show up and you know this I mean you show up so you know exactly what I'm talking about how many times you're on the phone begging people to come to neighborhood meetings town meetings to vote and you're not trying to persuade them on the issue they agree with you and you're calling your list and just to get them to break their routine and stop making excuses for themselves that they don't have time for a democratic society and all that it brings us or they're watching the screens and now they don't just have to watch the TV screens in my frustration I believe in frustration by the way because it's it stimulates creativity we have we have a way of trying to bring people out we give them $2 bills the $2 bill has Jefferson can you imagine relegating Jefferson to a $2.00 bill and Jackson is you know and on the other side is it is a gathering of the white males who came together on July 4 1776 to sign the Declaration of Independence and you know you can say all about it some of them were slave owners and so on but they thought they were signing their death warrant because they were challenging the most powerful military in the world King George and his Redcoats and so you show it to people today young people you say you like this yeah yeah that's cool he says it's cool yeah aren't you glad they showed up yeah I guess so well don't you think you should show up you know they're not around anymore you know you got to show up you try everything we plaster these Unwin she on wind windows you know big blown-up $2 bills by the way the nice thing about it is cuz nobody uses it it's brand new when you ask the bank for a packet so it's like it's just printed all right so why why would I want to deflate my ego and put out a book entitled unanswered letters to the president 2001 to 2015 hundred and three letters unanswered someone said why didn't you stop at four because there's a larger issue here and the most democratic media is when you write a letter to an elected official because it can't be censored and it can't be distorted it's you to your delegatee you know to you it's you to the Centers and representative president you invested huge power and it's being disrespected we're at a low point at getting politicians at all levels even to acknowledge that you wrote them a letter just the courtesy of saying thank you receive the letter taken in consideration what you wrote and so after a while the few people who do write letters don't bother let's take let's take a little poll here how many of you this is not a typical audience how many of you have ever written a letter to the president can you see even here it's it's a pretty small percentage to be generous is probably 20% and how many of you keep writing letters to presidents okay now the problem is it's a little more complex than it was years ago because the email I understand the White House is like a limit on email you can't go on and on it's like twenty four hundred characters which I don't know these were all sent by postal and by email and by fax and then they the last year they stopped the fax machine to the White House you can't fax it I did get to be fair I did get one letter from President Obama and one letter from President Bush and they both asked asked me for money so I took an opportunity to respond and mr. Bush asked me contribute to his library his Presidential Library and he made flamboyant representations about what the library was going to do for America and so I wrote him a letter reminding him of some of the things he did as president but I said I do want to make a contribution so I sent him a copy hardback of Clyde Prescott's book rogue nation thought it would be a good good contribution to the library so the the the idea here is one the letters are very substantive and there aren't almost everything you could be concerned about probably domestic international and they were designed to do one of four things to tell the president what I thought he should do to tell the president what I thought he shouldn't do or continue doing to tell the president something going on in his government that he might not know about and to tell the president what people are doing around the country that he might not know about and that's I think our responsibility to do that now when President Obama was president elect he talked about a bubble in the White House and he was gonna he was gonna break the bubble no he did not want to have a bubble in the White House so he announced that he was going to be given ten letters to read at night and just before he goes to bed be selected by his correspondence chief so I got ahold of the correspondence chief trying to elbow in here and this was three months into his administration and I said what is your policy on correspondence I mean all kinds of different letters you know they're the vituperative six six word letter there's the thoughtful letter this is a letter from a contributor there's a letter from the eleven-year-old that might be used as a political prop by a president and then there the high profile issues that people write a lot of letters on so I could GM bailout during that period where they have foreign letters and and and then there's a letter inviting the president tend to your daughter's high school graduation and they that's the one a category they always reply to you know they give their regrets and they wish well now there are large numbers of volunteers who go to the White House every day they're cleared and they separate the letters into these categories apparently they get about a half a million letters a week and in Canada you can write to your Member of Parliament free you don't need a stamp so there's a two-way franking privilege but but not here but so it's a lot of letters but you know it's people who get a lot of letters know that a lot of letters are some of them are just burps burps of rage or incomprehensible sequences and so they don't spend much time on those but they do categorize them so you get some sense there they're receiving them but you never know if you don't fall in the category the high school graduation or a high profile issue for example I wrote a substance of letter on the GM bailout and I got a form letter that had the it was like this you know it didn't it didn't reply to my letter it was just a form letter it was funny the way it assumed that I had said something which I I didn't say in the letter so as these developed I began to see other values to letters because if you write a lot let's say you're concerned about a public issue okay but if you write a letter on it it commits you more it commits you more I mean you go to the next step which is good so you push yourself to the next step if you've got a civic sensitivity and you get ignored it makes you angry which is good it's good you know you become morally and digna or whatever which is a motivation and if you do that with children at a young age for example there's a flurry of letters from 10 year olds to President Bush and the letters basically said we do want to ask you some question the Iraq and Afghan Wars are costing 100 billion or whatever so many months and our question is simple simply why don't you pay for why are you making us pay for it in the next generation because there was no taxation for the wars these wars they were put on a credit card you know I think that might have made an impact if they were each released to the price even just one sometimes it flares and press grabs it now the press has some responsibility here because years ago we would write letters to Senator Magnuson asking him for a hearing on some consumer environmental worker issue or and the post would pick it up or The Times would pick it up I remember once I I wrote a letter on what I called white white lung disease which is a the analog to coal miners black lung disease by textile workers they would breathe in the tiny fibers from the dust the cotton dust in the carding rooms North Carolina South Carolina and the post wrote it like was a major piece because it had new material in it and that doesn't happen anymore some of us remember that scientists at MIT and Harvard would collectively write a president urging faster movement toward nuclear arms-control and that would be considered news the press now is and the White House press they just have no interest whatsoever in diversifying their boredom as they go up to the White House every every day so that's another blockage so I I decided I needed some comparative information so I wrote I wanted to do this anyway but I had a answer effect I wrote two critical letters to Prime Minister Harper of Canada they were really critical and I got back a nice recognition of the letter they acknowledged receipt by the chief of Correspondence and they said we've absorbed your message and we're referring it to the respective ministry now you know who knows what how much they absorbed or what wanted to absorb but at least you know I got there and you you know somebody read it even if they may not have liked to read it the second time I did this I released it's a media and it made CBC News as well as a major radio program in Toronto so while Canada ISM is unfortunately being dragged down by its mimicking of the US under conservative governments there is still lessons to be learned from Canada as well as as as other countries where you don't get any of an acknowledgement anymore which raises the question of courtesy I'm trying to get Judith Martin who's Miss Manners to do an article on this you might want to email her and ask her it's a bit of a stretch conceptually from some of the things she's written because it isn't that a personal affront you know at some restauraunt with bees flying around or somebody so now the other thing that was quite serious is on the eve of the Iraq war we totaled up about 300 retired generals Admirals Colonels diplomats national security people people like four-star general head of the NSA formally head of the NSA Howard Odum general Anthony Zinni marine general retired Admiral Shanahan head of the Pacific Fleet retired the two major security advisors to George Herbert Walker Bush Bush John Jim Bakker Brent Scowcroft they all did what almost has never been done as the u.s. beats the drums to its Wars they they spoke against it and they wrote our beds some of you remember they they really stood tall and then you know nothing happened because they didn't have an infrastructure they didn't have a Secretariat and they went back home and they couldn't multiply their numbers and you remember at that time the media was really a patsy on this and you know you had poor Ted Koppel you put the helmet on and went in with the tanks I mean when you look back on it they've got to be embarrassed including the New York Times and what they did the phony articles on weapons of mass destruction struction and so we we tried one last move with a letter we sent a letter to george w bush's mother and his father and his wife and baek's he said you got a control this boy you know and and that's in here and and one of the things that prompted us to do this was that in the prior three months four months maybe about a dozen groups with millions of members begged to see Bush in the White House because some had been to Iraq they didn't agree with the scenario it was coming out of the White House and it was an amazing situation where they they these were veteran a veteran group a business group a retired intelligence officials group the National Council of Churches a women's peace group a student group even a labor group and they never even got acknowledged these people had millions of members out there never got acknowledged never mind come on in let's hear your point of view so this is a very serious syndrome isn't not in terms of the deterioration of our of our political system and what are we doing about it and why don't we ask ourselves what can we do up to a point where nobody can stop us what is it that we can do and nobody can stop us from doing and to take a baseball analogy nobody can really stop us from getting at least a second base no stop us mobilizing ourselves and marching and starting groups you have someone like George Soros who is dead set against the Iraq war you know he's very rich now he's maybe thirty billion if he keeps up counting he's made about two-three billion and each year in the last few years and he probably didn't think of it but I I couldn't get my message returned from him but if he set up a secretariat for these 300 retired military diplomatic and national security he staffed them in other words and he media he provided gave him media and put the heat on Capitol Hill for hearings to expose the lies and the deceptions for a few tens of millions of dollars it would have turned the tide because first of all they would have tripled their number almost immediately from three hundred to a thousand and who's gonna be able to stand up against these people are they going to question their patriotism are they gonna question their experience are they're gonna question their bona fides these retired former high officials of Republican Democrat it was just a and then the next year he spent millions of dollars trying to help marches and rallies and so on but it was too late so always ask ourselves are we making excuses for ourselves why don't we talk to our friends and neighbors serious talk in the middle of all the small talk you know how many times people come up to you and say how are you and you know no matter how you are you say okay feeling okay how are you okay what a waste of salutations I mean just think what you can say and say or someone comes up and says how's business or how's your love life or how's the family and you come up say instead how's your civic life you know how's my civic life that starts a conversation doesn't it but we're inhibited we are enormous ly restrained from the kind of dialogue that our forebears had during the committee's on correspondents the farmers and in Massachusetts in 1774 Seamus as the book written on this called the firt the first American Revolution and it wasn't Lexington and Concord in Boston they got all the credit it was 70 74 when King George ordered the replacement of their court officials their sheriff's and their town officials with Tories and the farmers organized at levels and self-restraint didn't use violence that is a great lesson today for example in towns like Worcester and Springfield one thing they did when their court officials were replaced and the sheriff as they stopped using the courts they boycotted the courts and they would surround with five hundred to a thousand farmers they would surround the house of the Tauri and they would say we want you to recant and they would just stand there silently and the story is looking out to see a farmers you know and they're not going away and and when they did recant they made him repeat like five times come out they'd have a path and they would recant or if they didn't recant they'd flee to Boston where there was a Redcoat garrison they did the discipline and how they decided on a rotating spokespeople a basis and so on at one point they had 5,000 people show up this is you know when Massachusetts was small population and so I think we we've got to stop making excuses for ourselves and we've got to join the existing groups we believe in who want more supporters want people more engaged more advocates or start our own groups there's a little book that came out in nineteen forty one by the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and when he retired he's trying to figure out honey how do things change for the better what's the ignition what works so he goes all over the world trying to learn he goes to India he goes to Europe and South America and he comes back and he writes a book called the small community and his conclusion was everything big starts with very small civic energies and now we know that but he wrote a very nice book elaborating that which should be reissued last point I'd like to make for discussion is there were times when the frustration with our perverse priorities really got to me as the war on terror so the war on terror has now cost us trillions of dollars thousands of lives here millions of casualties over there the socio side of these countries and has resulted in a more monetized political system than can be imagined its enormous ly strengthen giant corporations and its chilled descent which is the mother of asset right I mean when you chilled the Sun it's not just a mere inconvenience even chilling the descent of the opposing party and so I I've been involved a lot in non anthropomorphic preventable violence otherwise known as viruses bacteria silent violence of corporate crime pollution toxic defective products you know they don't come with an anthropomorphic image and we're very susceptible to focusing on anthropomorphic crime for example will spend infinitely more time on massively fewer casualties from street crime very well from crime into sweets even though far more people die far more people lose their savings far more people are injured made sick by corporate crime Russell milk I / who's the editor of the corporate crime reporter put this in a book called corporate crime and violence and the key thing is preventability know there are varieties of intent monetary intent vicious criminal intent negligence but the key thing to make you given a priority is how preventable and when the Centers for Disease Control says that 200 to 250 American's die every day from hospital induced infections how many people don't know people who didn't get an infection that's serious violence and now the hospitals are starting to require doctors and nurses to wash their hands more frequently and it's working but just think of that 200 250 and when you have 60,000 people dying from workplace related diseases mostly silent violence mostly toxics and dust levels and so on and OSHA gets a budget less than the budget to guard the US Embassy in Baghdad and its personnel imagine that 550 million is oceans budget 650 million are the contractors budget to guard the giant embassy in Baghdad and its personnel you start looking for more than just the phrase perverse priorities and again and again you see very little money very little law enforcement is a why'd to corporate sourced violence whether it's occupational disease whether it's product defects whether it's medical malpractice hospital infections whether it's denial of health insurance and people died when they can't get health insurance to diagnose get money to have doctors to diagnose their treatment and treat it by the way before Obamacare it's down a little now 45,000 American's die every year because they can't afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time that's a peer-reviewed Harvard Medical School study that appeared in the Journal of Public Health 2009 December if you're interested just imagine compare that with 911 just in terms of casualty levels and that's just one sector so what I what I do is I wrote President Obama a letter from a particularly virulent ecoli that was in a petri dish in Austria so e.coli in effect writes President Obama and says that I am about to expire I know I lived a despicable life and the minds of human beings there were casualties from this you bought this you coli but I do want to redeem myself and then equal I lectures President Obama about who the real terrorists are in terms of global epidemics and so on and the need to do something about it no answer from the White House I sent it and this is the power of this is the uses of letters you send these letters around you don't just send it to the elected official you send the letters around so I sent it to the Centers for Disease Control and the feedback was that they really got a kick out of it I mean they sent it around and and so when you do write letters to elected officials it's always good to put CC interested parties so they don't know necessarily who it's going to but it's going to people right or if you want to summon them for a town meeting back home which people should do citizens summons you basically say well only ten people signed this letter senator you may not think this is enough you want another 100 just call me we'll get it to you in a week and this person is a real networker so there is there is ways to write letters in in more effective manner but I did write both Bush and Obama asking them what their policy after a number of unanswered letters what their policy was on answering letters and I got no answer so I did want to give them one last opportunity the letters they don't take that long to write when you're working in an area and because you think about them ahead of time and the the important thing I hope in this book you know it was mentioned in the New York Times recently but in this book that that people will say I'm gonna do the same thing and I'm gonna send this letter around so if they don't acknowledge it there are a lot of people who are going to learn about it and and maybe I'll turn it into a letter to the editor or what have you I read the letter Harvey your letter in the post that you wrote yeah all right so that's you know basically I'm not going to bore you by reading a letter or two but if you can if you can leave leave this gathering with the greater resolve to put your put your thoughts on paper the book would have been would have been a success thank you very much so we have we have two microphones the gentleman in the purple shirt over here he can start but if the people want to line up here with questions then everybody in the audience can hear you it'll be recorded for our our audio recording which we can make available to you and please feel free to engage in the Civic discourse thank you thank you for coming tonight I just had a question I grew up in Florida I was I was a teenager in 2000 during the 2000 election of course we all know Bush became president by 537 votes you received 97 thousand votes in the 2000 election I feel confident in saying most of them probably came at the Al Gore's Al Gore would have gotten most of those votes do you have any regrets 15 years out for in effect putting george w bush in the White House see see this is this is what destroys liberal politics in America first of all he's factually wrong and if you ever took a statistics course you would flunk it because you want me to give you 10 senior Kwan owns any one of which would have put Gore in the White House let's start with winning the popular vote have you spoken out against the electoral college lately where you can come in second and win the presidency okay now let's start with let's start with 250,000 Democrats who voted for Bush in Florida let's start with Kathleen Harris Jeb Bush who stole the election in so many ways let's start with the 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court blocking the Florida Supreme Court decision to have a full recount which would have turned differently let's start with Gore losing his home state of Tennessee alone would have put him in the White House losing Arkansas its Clinton alone would have put him in the White House let's start with these why do you pick on the Green Party and my campaign because the Democrats first of all they don't understand the dynamics of campaign whenever this is a third party challenger assuming it isn't as big as Perot you know 19 million votes we were chicken feet and in terms of responding to it the Democrats did a lot of things they wouldn't have done to get more votes for two reasons one is Buchanan was on the other side you know in Florida he got a lot of votes you'd you like Buchannon and Ronnie it's okay for him the right okay he took it from Bush right and the other thing is that and this is the most fundamental thing if you agree that we all have an equal right to run for public office then we're all spoilers of one another or none of us are spoilers because what you're telling me is I should have aborted my First Amendment rights to speak petition and assemble and you're telling me I should have kept my mouth shut and you're telling me that I should not have been concerned about all these other people who are dying and getting killed and injured that the Democrats Republicans are ignoring of a few which I alluded to that's what you're telling me you know I would never tell you not to speak not to petition not to assemble even if I despised what you said the other point is aren't you glad that the people in 1840 a few thousand of them voted for the Liberty Party the first party to come out against slavery aren't you glad that there were some women's suffrage parties weren't you would you say they shouldn't have voted they shouldn't have taken votes away from the Republicans and the Democrats or the Whigs you see you have to do your homework the fundamental mistake you made is basically to say that even though the Democrats aren't all that great the Republicans are worse therefore we should let them both become worse every four years under the pull of the corporations and shut up you see what you don't understand is that my my motivation comes from those people out there that both parties are ignoring and are being disrespected and and unemployed and uninsured and harmed and not protected from avoidable violence now I don't think I'll ever convince you about I'm glad you just stood there and listened to it okay yeah yes go ahead what would it take for you to become President of the United States what would it take it would take enough people whether it's me or some other progressive it would take enough people to take control of a major party at the precinct level back home the way the Tea Party has influenced the Republican Party so you start where you they can't really stop you they can stop you at more advanced levels if you intersect at that level like ballot access obstacles but every the two major parties had these little town committees you see and that's where you just start and and the right wing understands that far better than liberals okay Ralphy I would like you to come to bat for just about every kind of issue except say Bryce Harper coming to bat for the Washington Nationals lately yeah lately but my question to you has to do with Hillary Clinton and running for president she doesn't seem to have much competition from any other women and I don't like the idea of having to vote for her because she's the only woman running it's like endorsing a dictator you know the dictator is the only person that's gonna get voted for so if the dictator gets a lot of votes so what where is the competition are there some other women that to me would be more attractive well I mean we shouldn't think that way anymore you know the the the the coronation syndrome or the dynasty of Bush and Clinton Clinton and Bush demeans the talent pool in this country I mean imagine over 300 million people with all kinds of capable people whose names we don't know because we're a celebrity culture and we're down to a handful so I would go beyond just the business of being a woman being the first president far more important to get the right president and that's that's what's really at stake I mean I think Hillary is not the Hillary of when she was 30 years old she made peace with the power structure and she is a a deep core partisan and deep militarist I mean one can almost forgive the corporatism she moved to New York was built because that's where the power is in Wall Street about his militarism is absolutely shocking and I mean she almost single-handedly did the Libyan war I mean Defense Department was against it gates and she persuaded the White House that it was an easy topple without knowing in a tribal society with nothing to replace it you would have civil war sectarian killings spilling into Africa weapons everywhere Mali Central Africa and she's beeping she's being accused of Benghazi you know that the big thing is the huge amount of geography now has been destabilized and because as a Libyan overthrow so she's and when she was on the Senate Armed Services Committee she never met her weapons system she didn't like she's you see this is the problem of women trying to overcompensate and becoming more aggressive and macho so they're not accused of being soft on need to kill war right instead of taking the tradition of women of peace and turning into a muscular waging of peace and conflict prevention she the dissent of the reverse and Albright did the reverse and anne-marie slaughter did the reverse and you know it's a and some of Obama's advisers did the worst we have to be transcendent on this we have to really go right to the core what people are standing for fighting for and fighting against now O'Malley's gonna announce in four or five days you'll have Chafee former governor of Rhode Island he'll go in probably former Senator Jim Webb but unlike the Republican counterparts they don't have billionaire patrons like twelve Republicans have you know literally they all have their patron now and so I don't know how long they're gonna last and of course is Bernie Sanders who made a good speech I hear just now in Vermont so we'll see a lot of it is the absurdity of shaping the candidacies through Iowa and New Hampshire I'm you start with conservative states I mean what if they started with Massachusetts and California for example it would be different and I was just a caucus it's how many buses you can you know bring in and how good the food is you know the whole thing is you know I had a publisher a publisher of unsafe at any speed Richard Grossman this is a great man and he once developed this phrase you know I said you know satire is what we need in this country right he said he says no he says the big problem is how do you satire satire that's so we really got to get very serious and it's like the country's being twirled around in a tiny pivot by a few self-selected politicians who make their peace with the with the power structure the 1% yes yeah um two questions the first question pertaining to your book I do not know if you know anything about obviously people have been sending letters to the president from the very beginning okay what you're confronting here is a non-response has this non-response developed during a certain amount that you want to join the last 30 years I mean does it you know does it come together with neoliberalism or was this development that was taking place for a long time and now it's basically you know plateaued well the non acknowledgment is relatively recent this technology in the letter so you get the feeling at least it reads layer and in terms of responding yeah i my experiences it's getting worse I mean I get responses from Joe Califano sometimes from Jimmy Carter nobody expects them all to respond but they have a lot of staff and departments and agencies that they can refer to for a substance that responds so I think it is getting worse yeah the second question you know I'm always a when I'm an audience or must be honest with you about this a little bit irritated wins a speaker says you know you know after you give the presentation tell the people like well just get together and revolt right and you are obviously a too complex for that and too sophisticated for that because you point out some facts or fractures right education propaganda etc etc but I mean I'm sure you have thought right I'm fundamentally sure about that that but why I mean the people are not stupid the people have no no number in United States I'm not for me nice is from work I'm from Caribbean but people know here the same thing is going on you up where I grew up people know they are being at at this point in time excuse me for what ya know they're being taken advantage of the issue is why not revolting why not rising up why not saying you know enough is enough you know in Spain the whole notion was a you know the protest the system is the problem right and that's what it is the system is the problem at this point in time why are in people revolting is it a fear that if they really would revolt an American in a massive way they would be facing massive massive and and and genocidal violence from the from the political class I mean you know see what was going on in nineteen sixties I believe the killing of Martin Luther King are these are the guys must have had some type of freezing you know people have a sense like well maybe you know maybe you know as if I'm not drowning completely you know I'll keep my head down and just going so what do you believe is stopping people I mean beyond the competition beyond over working beyond you know no time etc etc the fracturing of community what is stopping people from the lack of any type of ideological real alternative put forward to the people right although they are attendants put forward but not a broader alternative in the media what what do you believe is stopping people from welding after World War two with Europe Western Europe destitute they worked through unions they worked through multi-party systems they worked through coops and they developed a social democratic state of full health insurance and public transit and free university tuition and four weeks paid vacation and better pensions and better public transit better labor laws in this country we couldn't do it we didn't have a multi-party system we have a winner-take-all we don't have proportional representation we have weak labor unions even weaker now and our co-ops are almost invisible so the difference is that when people think they can get a toehold they will go for a toehold if they don't think they can get a toehold they'll say why should we beat our head against the wall and be ostracized in it's not worth our risk so in in Germany if you get over five percent of the vote you get over five percent of the Parliament in the u.s. you can get forty nine percent of the vote someone gets 51 you get nothing so that's why the Green Party is influential and the jury in Germany and here it cannot get a toehold because of the winner-take-all not too many in the electoral college huge ballot access laws it takes more effort to get on North Carolina it does to get on seven European countries ballots so you see it's it's the genius of the of the plutocracy oligarchy here is you keep the people from being able to get a toehold so they can build on it and so that takes care of the political system economically you have a situation of globalization now that stripping people of what remains of their bargaining power not just union bargaining power they're waking up and whole industries are being exported abroad and their communities are being hollowed out that in implodes their attention survival they don't have time for for resistance it's just survival in Spain and Greece things have got so bad that people lost a lot of what they had they had their oligarchies and so on that they reached a breaking point of resistance I mean that could happen here you can see certain things bubbling up around the country the minimum wage saying was pulled off by fewer people than live in Waterbury Connecticut I mean just you know people who picketed a few hours in front of McDonald's Burger King SEIU involvement a few think tanks our efforts of people writing letters to the editor and they take an issue like this where 30 million people are making less today than 1968 inflation-adjusted I mean they're making it a front-burner issue now instead of saying holy smokes less than a hundred thousand people pulled us off part-time you know a few hours here and there what else can we do that lesson is not driven home so when you say people are not stupid it's there's something worse than being stupid and that is being powerless feeling they're powerless feeling that they are powerless is worse than being stupid because that internalizes debility who are being stupid you can go to a meeting you can connect with the Internet you can inform yourself what was going on yes thank you thank you thank you so much for coming always a volunteer reader of mail in the White House during Clinton's terms and there's a woman here who was a reader in Obama's administration - so what you say was true and it was a lot of fun and you can anybody can volunteer my question was many of the community active activism starts at the local level like you said can you give us some examples at the state and county level where letters have been pivotal or started some social change yeah well what for example on pay pay raises by less state legislators you get a flurry of letters talk show hosts that's an easy one because it's very personal and and the politicians don't like to be nailed on voting to increase their pay but yeah I mean like Louis Gibbs who came out of Love Canal and never did anything Civic and her kids were getting sick up in Niagara Falls and came to Washington and started a network of small groups who were fighting toxic contamination I mean they're sellers in their streets and protecting their families she had several thousand groups and they would come in every two years at a big rally convention and they would talk about their victories their victories and so you know it's pretty routine there are manuals on you know how do you put pressure on how do you keep people from being discouraged how to put on news conferences and make petitions get referendums under way so that if anything goes on it's a local level it's because of those you know tried ancient ways of protesting we we now have a bigger mountain to climb nationally and we've got to be more creative to add to that thank you I really I really enjoyed your book only the super-rich can save us and I know you've spoken with Ted Turner since then but I was wonder if you spoken to any other billionaires and that books impacted them at all yeah I had breakfast with Warren Buffett you liked it and Peter Lewis progressive insurance he was my classmate we actually had a debate we shouldn't have been a debate but it turned into a debate as sponsored by the New York Public Library its online with Ted Turner Peter Lewis and and me a number of others acknowledged it you know the the rich aren't all AI different from us in their inability to make social change that you would like one of them told me you know Ralph we all know how to make a lot of money but none of us has a clue what to do with it and unfortunately I didn't say well I can give you some ideas it was on the phone I think seriously there should be a conference of the tiny fraction of billionaires that are really enlightened then get it or mega mega millionaires just round the table a couple days with people who know what what it takes to get things changed and one of the things it takes is money it took money from rich Bostonians to fund the abolition movement money for the women's suffrage movement all the way down you know we don't like to acknowledge it but it's true the curry and Stern families were the early funders of the latest civil rights wave that started in 50s so what we really need to get them together and that may happen there's a fellow in Seattle who he claims he's not quite a billionaire but he wrote two articles in in let's see what so yeah in Politico do you remember his name yeah yeah Hanauer you I mean nobody could have written it better I mean he took down his business compatriots on the minimum wage like you can't believe he starts out saying you know I go to all these gatherings said these big business types and they're talking trends you know they're talking inflation they're talking they're talking capital accumulation they're talking debts and and what do I see I see pitchforks that's what he sees so it's you don't want to write off a hundred percent of anybody even though they give you a good reason to because there's always one percent or so you talk about the one percent Wall Street well one percent of people mobilized in reflecting public opinion can turn around enormous redirections in our country that are long overdue yeah that's three million people you know you ask anybody who's under ramparts who are who's making headway on certain things how many people you have I mean they're lucky if they can say twenty thirty thousand and what am i mean by active just the equivalent of someone has a serious hobby you know two three hundred hours a year you know like a serious bird watch or bridge club member bowling league that's the suit you're talking about you have any one percent route was reflecting public opinion and you can turn it around and that's what the young have to be told and you can give historical examples of that I mean let's face it the anti-tobacco fight I don't think there were more than 20,000 people seriously involved in that but they represented they are they were they represented and aroused the non-smokers starting with Airlines and you know public accommodations and they were called every name in the book denying my constitutional rights I was on a plane once sat down a guy he lit up a cigar you know what happens in your kitchen when one toast burns the guy lets up a cigar he says excuse me he said that's my right he said to do that so you know the blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow right most people under 30 today I would say what you went into a classroom at college and people were smoking you went on a plane or our train and people were smoking see how things change and is same with nuclear arms control and cutting back on weapons US and Soviet Union people I never thought that would happen and you have the gay lesbian oh and that never happened and it never took more than a few thousand people who really put their sleeves up to to get it done as they aroused and transformed public opinion how about disability rights no talk about they sat in Joe Califano secretary hgw with their wheelchairs and so on a handful of people turned that around I never went to school with a disabled child because they weren't going to pick the child up the stairs that they couldn't be bothered I never saw a disabled physically disabled child and I'm sure a lot of you didn't either now look at I wasn't long ago I saw four people in wheelchairs having a race down Connecticut Avenue on the sidewalk who would ever have dreamed that we would cut we've cut into the the curbs all over our country so why don't we learn from history you know to get going here and stop letting corporations take over our public airwaves and fill every slot Saturday in Sunday Monday and Tuesday with cheap entertainment advertisements and and guys already know somersaulting with better with bikes you know you got to say that's our property and we want it to be dedicated once in a while every week to serious things about what people are doing how they're mobilizing so we can learn from one another is oh they're doing it in Seattle well we can do it elsewhere you can learn from them upping expectation levels is the first dynamic for Democratic Change because and if you have low expectation levels of your politicians they will oblige you so you gotta up the expectation one you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 15,468

Rating: 4.8931751 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Ralph Nader (Politician), Return to Sender (Book)

Id: PhY2dW__PqE

Length: 59min 24sec (3564 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2015