Unstoppable
Page 1
PRAISE FOR UNSTOPPABLE
“One of Ralph Nader’s finest efforts. A bold and lucid handbook for the future.”
—Patti Smith
“Conservatives and liberals both look askance at the Leviathan state and realize that promises of ‘doing good’ often obscure the reality of ‘doing well’ at taxpayer expense. Those looking for opportunities for bi-partisan cooperation should look at the nexus of statism and cronyism. Unstoppable shows that opposing such corruption can bring activists of the right and left together to fight side by side.”
—Grover Norquist
“Ralph Nader’s timely book once again makes him prescient in his insights about American politics. His against-the-grain predictions of a Left-Right alliance is not just a hope, but it is grounded in emerging evidence.”
—Cornel West
“Nader at his best-original, indignant, idealistic, and on the lookout for new political alliances and possibilities. A tonic for the cynicism that’s poisoning the groundwater of our democracy.”
—Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley
“No American in recent decades has done more than Ralph Nader to construct a workable alliance between the principled Right and the sincere Left to salvage our country and our national prosperity, and Unstoppable outlines his vital mission.”
—Ron Unz, former publisher of the American Conservative
“Even-handed, erudite, practical, and necessary, Unstoppable is Ralph Nader’s most broadly accessible book yet. Harnessing his lifelong crusade for the public interest over the corporatist agenda, Nader’s convergence manifesto wisely calls for Left-Right alliances with similar goals to shun abstract labels and unite for the common good. Nader’s treatise is optimistic and patriotic. He demonstrably shows that effective Left-Right alliances aren’t pipe dreams, but historic realities in need of strategic cultivation, for the sake of our future.”
—Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents’ Bankers
“I read Ralph Nader for the same reasons that I read Tom Paine. He knows what he thinks, says what he means, and his courage is a lesson for us all.”
—Lewis Lapham
“Thomas Jefferson fretted that, with the passing of the founding generation, the truer patriotism that he knew as the ‘Spirit of ’76’ would be lost. He need not have worried. Ralph Nader has recaptured the founding faith with an inspired call for a Left-Right coalition of conscience on behalf of democracy, liberty, fairness and peace.”
—John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation and coauthor of Dollarocracy
UNSTOPPABLE
ALSO BY RALPH NADER:
Told You So:
The Big Book of Weekly Columns
Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism
The Seventeen Solutions:
Bold Ideas for Our American Future
“Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”
(political fiction)
The Seventeen Traditions:
Lessons from an American Childhood
The Good Fight:
Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap
In Pursuit of Justice:
Collected Writings 2000–2003
Crashing the Party:
Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender
No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the
Perversion of Justice in America
(with Wesley J. Smith)
Winning the Insurance Game
(with Wesley J. Smith)
Unsafe at Any Speed:
The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile
Copyright © 2014 by Ralph Nader.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nader, Ralph.
Unstoppable : the emerging left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state / Ralph Nader.
pagescm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56858-455-3 (e-book)
1.Business and politics—United States. 2.Corporations—Political activity—United States. 3.Right and left (Political science)—United States. 4.Democracy—United States. I.Title.
JK467.N342014
322'.30973—dc23
2014001991
10987654321
To the memory and writings of Jonathan Rowe—insightful skeptic, optimist, believer in the potential of Left-Right coalitions, and a practitioner of what he preached
and to John Richard, networker and extraordinary advisor to civic reformers.
Contents
Introduction
1Convergence: The Sporadic Coming Together of Right and Left Against Corporatists
2Conservatism’s Authority Figures: Principles Versus Dogmas
3Hands Reach Across the Aisle, Though Often Slapped Back by Wily Corporatists
4Twenty-Five Proposed Redirections and Reforms Through Convergent Action
5Getting to the Actions: Convergences Ahoy!
6Obstacles to Convergence and How to Overcome Them
7Who Owns America? A Light from the 1930s Illuminates Now
8Common Ground for Common and Uncommon Causes, Found in the Thoughts of Much-Cited but Little-Read Conservative Icons
9What of the Liberals? And Populist Conservatives?
10Dear Billionaire
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
When thinking about the genesis of this book, I remember the days working in my family’s restaurant. The premises were spacious: a long lunch counter and many booths filled with townspeople and jurors from the local county courthouse, summer residents at the local lakes and camps, salespeople and travelers driving along busy Route 44 in Connecticut. In those non–fast food days, family restaurants were conveners of talkers, not just eaters. There was much ado about local and larger politics, and lots of free associative talk about the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry or what was going on in the many factories lining the town’s streets.
Working the counter and the booths was a great education. It was conversation central, with humor, ribbing candor, and the famous Winsted raspiness. People didn’t hide their party affiliations, mostly Democrat and Republican, but they didn’t pigeonhole themselves when they gave their opinions or rendered their judgments. They weren’t all friends by any means, but they weren’t enemies either, all speaking as companionable individuals in a small town where everyone knew each other’s ethnicity, religious denomination, and business. I listened more than I talked; therefore I learned.
As a college student, I was a serious, inveterate hitchhiker, eventually using my thumb to cover thousands of free miles
in many states to reach my destinations. Once I was in the front seat of the truck or car, it would have been discourteous to promptly fall asleep, no matter how tired I was. Besides, I found talking with the drivers was a way to learn. They each had their expertise, working experience, and homespun life philosophy.
Years later, in 1992, stereotyped politically as an ultraliberal, I ran a brief none-of-the-above presidential campaign in the New Hampshire primary. I had no ads and little money to spend on the four or five trips I made to the Granite state, but of the 342,131 total votes given in a crowded field, I received 6,312, or 1.85 percent. Here’s the funny thing: there were slightly more Republican than Democratic votes in my total.1 People were surprised and kept talking about this unexpected dual appeal. I wasn’t surprised. I spoke specifically, naming names, and asking for improved health, safety, and freedom of information laws, to be provided by accountable government and corporations in a society where freedom and justice discipline each other, so we can escape license and tyranny. My positions were largely for the benefit of everyone, regardless of creed, ideology, color, race, or gender.
It is with this experience in mind, the fact that my campaign appealed strongly to people in both parties, that I wrote this book to explore the topic of convergence, which I take to be voluntary alliances for the common good by positive-spirited persons of the Right and of the Left. A major area of potential for building alliances comes from the deep aversion many people have to the wars of empire and corporate control over their lives, particularly the ever-tightening influence of Big Business on the mainstream media, elections, and our local, state, and federal governments. These power grabs are then turned against the people themselves in harmful and lawless manners. If you are looking for more explicit labels for who would be attracted to these alliances, I see them as a coming together on various specific objectives of people who call themselves conservatives, libertarians, liberals, progressives, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Third Partiers, capitalists, socialists, or anarchists, or use any other labels free-thinking Americans choose for themselves.
Aren’t such alliances doomed? The enduring but surpassable obstacles to such convergences will elicit rejections from people who think such alliances are foredoomed to failure. Such naysayers have not yet experienced the exuberance of seeing through the divide-and-rule tactics that tell us we are a sharply divided “red state–blue state nation.” This book is addressed first to those people who are not knee-jerk rejectionists. It’s meant for those who want to explore another beckoning pathway—one that can rescue our country from being driven further into the ground and turn it into a nation where many more of its inhabitants can fulfill their potential.
A danger that skeptics—but not only skeptics—promulgate is complacency, the idea that political divisions are set in stone, so rightists and leftists, for example, could never join hands no matter how bad things get. But maybe these people don’t realize how bad things have already gotten in our country. After all, most people want safe food and drugs. They want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. They want their work to be rewarded with adequate returns for the necessities of life. This is true, for example, among Walmart workers, whether they label themselves as “liberal” or “conservative.” They want clean elections and competitive candidates, who provide perceived differences and choices in their platforms. They want their taxes to be reasonable and used well for the common good in an efficient manner. They want some voice in decisions that affect them. They want peace, justice, and public safety.
Yet they don’t believe they can do much to get these desirable things. Too many do not believe they can fight city hall, Washington, or Wall Street. Large majorities tell pollsters, including 74 percent of those polled in a 2000 survey conducted by Businessweek, that Big Business has too much control over their lives and that the Big Boys will always get their way in Washington.2 Therefore, as if the culture has taught them helplessness, they have ceased to believe in themselves. Or at least they act that way: they don’t spend any time and energy with others to acquire some knowledge and skills with which to restore the sovereignty and rights of the people. The instructive American history of triumphs over abusive power, usually against the odds, is lost to them.
These are generalizations about people’s attitudes, but they are fairly accurate about tens of millions of honest, humane, hardworking, self-described powerless Americans. I say “self-described” because this is how people have been taught to depict themselves. Years spent in our educational system, our culture, and our political structures nurture a sense of powerlessness from a young age. We neither learn civic skills nor experience civic practices in our schoolwork—classroom to community—nor do we think of ourselves after our school years as possessing any “freedom to participate in power,” to paraphrase Marcus Cicero. Yet, as I shall strive to demonstrate, there is a consistent, profound consensus among the American people as to the many directions our society must pursue. To be sure, there are consistent and profound differences as well, but the former far outweigh the latter and should not be subordinated to them. We can move areas of consensus into realities once we deliberate at the concrete levels of daily life and experience. That is where the widespread understanding and belief in fair play comes into formidable focus.
At this point, readers may say that while people do have wide agreement on many ends, they often disagree vigorously on the means to those ends. They think this is what keeps people from getting together. After all, this disagreement spills into our elections and our councils of government, such as Congress and state legislatures. How you reach agreed-on ends is the devil in the details.
Well, let’s get underway and see.
1
Convergence: The Sporadic Coming Together of Right and Left Against Corporatists
A Signal Convergence
“Strange Bedfellows” was the way the National Journal in 1982 described the coalition of environmental and conservative groups opposed to the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee.1 The Breeder Reactor Project seemed unstoppable from the time it was first authorized by Congress in 1970. It soaked up money as if there were no tomorrow. A total of $1.3 billion was spent before a tree was cleared at the ninety-two-acre site.2 No matter, the project had powerful backers from the Nixon and Reagan White Houses to the enthusiasts on Capitol Hill. They were buttressed by legions of lobbyists from the nuclear industry and its construction and engineering allies spread over three states, all intent on partaking of this taxpayer honeypot.
Once underway, the Breeder Reactor became a classic juggernaut of the corporate state, protected by the secrecy of the Atomic Energy Commission and its officious patron, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. Designed to breed its own electricity, the project was treated like a military endeavor. It was protected from open debate and any disclosure or oversight, lest it give credence to the critics who called it a “technological turkey” that bred runaway economic costs instead of electricity. These critics’ doubts were enough to persuade President Jimmy Carter—who was a nuclear engineer—to cancel the Breeder because of the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. The Breeder lobby, however, continued to push to restart the project through Congress while Ronald Reagan was president.
But in the early eighties, Arkansas Democratic senator Dale Bumpers had the political nerve to encourage a liberal/conservative coalition. Until then, environmentalists were active, but conservatives had not focused on the issue intensely, since it was somewhat distant from their usual concerns. Once they did focus, they formed a group with liberals, which named itself the Taxpayers Coalition Against Clinch River. That umbrella organization included the Friends of the Earth, the National Taxpayers Union, our Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, the Council for a Competitive Economy, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the National Audubon Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.3
Washin
gton hands saw this as an improbable combination of Left and Right. Members of Congress—who might have been reluctant to support the campaign—realized this combo gave them cover from their ideological and political opponents back home, since they couldn’t be targeted as identifying with either a liberal or a conservative side of the issue. Meanwhile, estimates of the project’s total costs were going through the roof. Congress’s own General Accounting Office reported them as $8.8 billion. A House subcommittee predicted a cost range from $5.3 billion to $9 billion. Both figures were a few light years from the official $400 million estimate in 1970, even allowing for inflation.4
The anti-Breeder coalition was uniquely operational. We met regularly; this was not a mere petition drive or open letter to Congress with no follow-up. The conservative/libertarian members reached their fiscally conservative friends in Congress with arguments about runaway costs, while the environmental/consumer groups were arguing that Clinch River would create a “plutonium economy,” which would generate large quantities of that lethal product in forms that could be diverted for crude nuclear weapons.
On October 26, 1983, this coalition won a stunning victory. The Senate voted 56–40 against any further funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project, thus beating a furious lobbying effort from a corporate–government combination on the other side.5 The civic coalition against the Breeder Reactor triumphed over the corporate state. On the losers’ side, no one was more taken aback than the project’s leading booster, the powerful, well-connected Republican senator from Tennessee, Howard Baker. On the winners’ side, archlibertarian Fred Smith, one of the coalition leaders, told me that the decisive impact came from the linkage of economic and security arguments, together with the energetic idealisms of the two camps.
Three years later, another Left-Right coalition broke through the immense lobby of government contractors to enact a revised False Claims Act with the False Claims Amendment Act of 1986. In the words of its key sponsors, Republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic congressman Howard Berman of California, the 1986 law “provides a means and an incentive for reporting fraud against the public treasury. For thousands of individual whistle-blowers, it offers the only alternative to fearful silence or the near certainty of terrible consequence. It protects and rewards those with the courage to cast their light in dark places. It levels the playing field in the contest between corporate greed and personal conscience.”6