With the mainstream press focusing on Obama’s recent gains and McCain’s criticisms against him, you might want a dose of something different, like the Wall Street Journal interview that ran over the weekend with Ralph Nader.
I listened to Nader recently at a rally held for his 2008 bid and he sounded funny, smart, inspiring and determined as ever. Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ interview, in which he talks about Obama, corporate power and being called a ’spoiler’:
“The Democrats,” Nader says in the interview, “hadn’t been challenged from my side of the political spectrum since Henry Wallace,” FDR’s vice-president, who ran for president in 1948 as the nominee of the Progressive Party. “They’re not used to third-party challenges, while the Republicans are challenged by the Libertarians all the time. So they still scapegoat the Green Party, instead of looking in the mirror and asking, ‘Why didn’t we landslide this bumbling governor from Texas?’ And that’s what they’ve been doing for eight years!
“Some of them even tried to ascribe Kerry’s loss in 2004 to me, and I say, ‘Wait a minute, Kerry lost by three million votes’ . . . And he lost Ohio without my help, because the Democrats sued us: they got us off the ballot in Ohio, as they did in other states.”
Nader on the difference between he and Barack Obama:
“I think the central issue in politics in this country is the domination of corporations over our government, and over our elections, and over so many things where commercial values used to be verboten . . . I mean, they’re commercializing childhood, they’re commercializing universities. What’s happened in the last 25 years is an overwhelming swarm of commercial supremacy, and he, Obama, has bought into that.”
The reporter points out Obama’s opposition to Nafta; “that he’s chastised the Big Three in Detroit for opposing higher CAFE standards”; “and that he emphasizes at every opportunity that he takes no money from lobbyists.”
Nader:
“You see, that’s all permissible populist rhetoric that the corporations understand and wink at. …
“Obama’s taking large money from the securities industry, the health insurance industry . . . I’ve gotten used to this ritual where the companies give Democrats this leeway, and say, ‘Well, Obama’s gotta say that stuff, but he’ll come around. There’s no way he’ll touch Nafta or touch the WTO.’”
For more on Nader, check out the excellent documentary “An Unreasonable Man.”
