Ralph Nader has worn many hats in his life: firebrand consumer advocate, three-time independent presidential candidate, author of more than a dozen books, Harvard Law School educated attorney, radio show host—the list goes on and on. His best-selling book “Unsafe at Any Speed” revolutionized auto safety standards that led to mandatory seat belts.

Over the years, he’s also been a powerful critic of America’s broken two-party system and a champion of local politics. Now, as many Americans increasingly despair at the Biden administration’s policies—and lack thereof—and both Republicans’ and Democrats’ unwillingness to stand up to Big Money or the Military Industrial Complex, Nader joins “Scheer Intelligence” host Robert Scheer to talk about what’s left of their country’s democracy.

Congressional Democrats’ recent votes to increase military spending by billions more than even President Biden had intended highlights that there are few—if any—differences between the two political parties when it comes to funding the American war machine, argues Scheer. Meanwhile, corporations like Apple—where CEO Tim Cook, Nader points out, makes $50,000 an hour while his shop employees  are only beginning to make $22 an hour—continue to wield disproportionate global power, completely unconstrained by the U.S. government as dissidence and regulation become distant memories. In the face of such grotesque imperialism and inequality, what are everyday citizens to do? Can they put their last hopes in the Democratic Party despite these disappointments?

To Nader, the answer is simple.

“We need a grassroots movement,” the lawyer tells Scheer. “When democracy is dying, the only way to get around it is to get out there and start meeting with people—not through screens or emails or text message, but just the way the populist did it in the 1880s: so-called door-to-door, small meetings, larger meetings, creating our own parties—are all necessary at the local [and] national level.”

Listen to the full conversation between Nader and Scheer as they grapple with the concept of Democrats as “the lesser evil” and explore whether Americans can find optimism in local politics. 

Robert Scheer

Joshua Scheer

Robert Scheer:

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, I always say the intelligence comes to my guess. Everyone will know that my guest Ralph Nader is the source of wisdom here. I must say Ralph single-handedly did more. I’ll go real further at least in the modern period to advance a sense of individual power, control over our lives. I’m not just going to talk about consumer power, but how government works, what the ordinary person can do to gain control, not just of government, but of the private sector. And it is really one of the great stories of American history.

Unfortunately, that power, it seems to me has been reduced. And yes, we still have a lot of consumer awareness about issues ranging from climate change to the safety of cars and seat belts, which Ralph pioneered, but we also live in a world where the big corporations have more power than ever. Their influences global and income inequality has never been so high, both in this country and between the advanced economies as they’re called and the rest of the world. So Ralph, first of all, give us a report card on what happened to your efforts? Where are we?

Ralph Nader:

Well, they’ve been overwhelmed when we started out in Washington to regulate these companies, starting with the auto industry, which didn’t attain much level of safety, fuel efficiency, or pollution control. There were no lobbyists from GM in Washington. They didn’t even have a law firm. So we caught them napping, as the saying goes, and we got- –

Robert Scheer:

This in the fifties, right?

Ralph Nader:

This is in 1965, 66, Unsafe at Any Speed, came out 1965. It only took nine months Robert, for Lyndon Johnson to invite me to the White House, to sign the bill, regulating the most powerful industries in the country. You can’t even get a hearing in nine months if you’re lucky today. So we caught them napping. Big companies weren’t ready for the environmental consumer and labor efforts that ended up with OSHA EPA, product safety commission, auto safety legislation. And of course the air and water pollution laws.

And there’s never been anything since, that has been successfully legislated through Congress. There have been little amendments here and there, cause the corporations woke up, they beefed up their lobbying. They hired influential corporate lawyers. They expanded their political public relations. They increased by hundreds, the political action committees to buy members of Congress or rent them.

And so we held the line for about 10 years, 1965 to about 1975. Then Carter was elected. We had a breather, at least he appointed some good regulators and then Reagan won and then it was all downhill. And you could see it. The Democrats decided they were going to raise money from corporate sources, just the way the Republicans in 1979 under the tutelage of Congressman Tony Coelho from California. And you could see year after year under Reagan and then later George Herbert Walker Bush, fewer hearings, fewer good judges confirmed fewer regulatory actions, but now it corporatism and corporate power, corporate coercion have turned our country into a very deep corporate state, period. There’s not one single federal agency, not even a department of labor about which can be said that the corporate influence is not primary, not one. And even department of labor. There’s more corporate influence over department of labor by far than the AFL-CIO and its member unions.

But it’s in the private sector as they say that corporations having dominated the three branches of government and got them to be willing to subsidize handouts, bailing out Wall Street in 2008, 2009, for example. It’s just normal practice now. The mayor of New York just said, well, he wants $3.4 million to help the marijuana industry get underway in New York city with the passage of the legislation, the Buffalo bills want a new stadium, no problem. Another almost billion dollars appropriated by the governor and the state legislature. And there’s no quote unquote for this. We’re not getting lower prices in the sports arena. We are not getting any return in terms of dividends or paybacks when we bail out these big corporations like General Motors when they went bankrupt, but it gets even worse.

The media now doesn’t even have challengers, the corporate media. You have the public airways being owned by the people. The federal communication commission is the real estate agent and it charges nothing for the biggest TV and radio stations license. Your auto license personally is more expensive than the biggest TV station in New York. And they have allowed the tenants, namely the corporations. We are the landlords to use 24/7, the airwaves radio and TV, and decide who says what and who doesn’t, who gets on and who doesn’t. As if that’s not enough, now the corporations are technologically hijacking our children.

They now have in tens of millions children’s hands the iPhone and they are getting credit cards and they are being incarcerated in the credit card economy and in the corporate internet Gulag, hours and hours during the day. So the parents have lost control over their own children. They used to be able to look at what the children are watching on TV in the living room and say, oh no, you can’t watch that you’re too young or that junk food, you shouldn’t hear the ad about that. That’s not going to be good for you. They can’t do that now because these kids have the iPhone.

So the corporations are raising the children. I mean, if you just ask how much time is in the corporation’s hands every day by the children. Well, they’re looking 68 hours. They’re looking at screens. And what are they getting? They’re getting terrible advertisements that are not good for them. Like junk food, junk drink, violent programming that they engage them in, et cetera. And they’re getting everything we know they’re getting on the internet or what they can get on their own that is not barred because there are no barriers.

Robert Scheer:

Let me jump in on that Ralph, because I happened as a grandparent to be in that situation. And I just ordered an autograph copy. I hope of your sister’s book. You have two brilliant sisters. And the one I’m referring to Claire Nader is someone I’m personally grateful, because I once debated you on a nation cruise to Alaska and I was wrong. You were right. I’ve said this over and over again because I thought you shouldn’t have challenged Al Gore in the 2000 election and blah, blah, blah. And yes, it was one of my most egregious mistakes.

But nonetheless, at that time, Claire Nader told you to be nicer to me. I recall that. And so I was able to return the favor by buying her new book. I want to give it a plug because it’s addressed to people, not just grandparents, obviously parents who are raising kids who are now between nine and 12, and really warning us about these insidious forces that educate, that shape their whole sensibility. So let me throw that in Claire Nader’s new book, but let me get back to you in this- –

Ralph Nader:

Well yeah, as you say, it’s called You Are Your Own Best Teacher and it’s directed to these nine to 12 year olds before they become completely embroiled in the commercial adolescent culture.

Robert Scheer:

Right. And they probably have more good questions about it than their parents or grandparents who simply- –

Ralph Nader:

Oh, spectacular.

Robert Scheer:

They’re simply- –

Ralph Nader:

They’re at their idealistic and imaginative peak.

Robert Scheer :

You’re right.

Ralph Nader:

That’s why she focused on it.

Robert Scheer:

Let me get back to the main theme here because you mentioned Reagan, we always mention Reagan and we always mentioned Bush and so forth. You got a little bit of controversy when you dared challenge the two party system. And that’s what I was apologizing about. I was with the lesser evil, the Clintons and all that and what would follow. And I must say, one reason I wanted to have this conversation. When I look at what’s happening with this world now in corporate power and so forth, I am shocked at the performance of the Democrats in Congress.

And I want to bring up one issue and that has to do with our global relations because certainly one of the major ways we disenfranchise people around the world is with war and cold wars, hot wars, spending on the military and so forth. And at least when the Republicans were in power, you had one or two or few people in Congress who voted against war. We just now had an incredible appropriation of military money relating to the Ukraine and Congress without a single hearing opted by seven, eight billion more than president Biden wanted. And there was not one single Democrat announcer Senate who voted against this. I don’t think we’ve been in a moment like that.

Ralph Nader:

Totally stunning. We haven’t. There have always been dissenters like Senator Wayne Morris, Senator Barrow, Senator Fulbright, Senator Proxmire. No, there’s no dissent, $40 billion, no hearings, no built in auditing. The Ukraine, before the invasion was known for its corruption and its cronyism and smuggling weapons that were heading to Ukraine out to sources around the world. And so we’re sending them all these weapons without any monitor. There isn’t even an inspector general the way there was in Afghanistan, but it’s all part Robert of the Democrat, Republican surrender on the military budget.

They don’t even argue over it because they all want to increase the military budget, even though the overwhelming number of Democrats in the latest poll around the country. So they do not want to increase. And it’s now skyrocketing and it is unauditable, it’s the only budget in the federal government And the biggest that is violating a federal law of 1992, requiring all departments to submit auditable budgets to the U.S Congress. And the Pentagon has not done it ever.

So they’re in constant violation because they don’t know where the money’s going. They had a temporary audit. You’ll love this of the Marine Corps a few years ago, just to get started, it costs $400 million and they didn’t finish it. The money is sloshing all over the world, black budgets, you’ve written on all this. And so now we don’t have any countervailing force at all, no restraining chairman of a committee or anything to slow down this monster that is funding this global empire that like all empires, eventually devour themselves.

And they’re well along while our infrastructure’s crumbling bridges, roads, sewage, drinking water systems. What are we doing? We’re blowing up these systems in these third world countries illegally, unconstitutionally, whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat in the White House, it doesn’t matter. They think they can be the prosecutor, judge, jury, and execution of anybody in the world that they suspect and that they can put drones and blow up people anywhere in the world. And they can invade like Iraq under Bush and Cheney, a criminal invasion of aggression for which they have not been held accountable at all.

So all this is by saying the one institution that can turn all this around has only 535 people called the Congress. It’s well equipped under the constitution to be the primary branch of government that declare war, the appropriations, the tax, the investigation, the confirmation of executive branch officials, nominations of the judiciary. And that’s where we come in. We’ve got to organize in every congressional district. We start maybe with 10, 20, 50, a hundred. There is a lot of issues in this country that come in at 70 to 90% support, which means a lot of conservative voters, as well as liberals. If we allow the divide and rules strategy and the word polarization to be used every other hour on the TV or radio or in the newspapers, we’re falling for the 2000 plus year trap where the ruling classes rule by dividing people.

But when it comes to uniform healthcare, when it comes to corporate crime enforcement, when it comes to breaking up the big banks, when it comes to living wage, when it comes to rebuilding America and taxing the wealthy in the corporate, you’re coming 70 to 90% support. So that’s where the hope comes from. And that’s what we have to push the elections towards in the campaigns, the agenda where people live, work and raise their families is a left, right unity agenda. When you get 70 to 80%, you’ve got a lot of liberal and conservatives workers in Walmart who are not going to ideologically cut their own budget and say, “Yeah, we like to work for 10 bucks an hour.” No, they want a living wage regardless of the label they put on themselves.

Robert Scheer:

All right. Well, Ralph let me challenge you. I noticed we always end up having this kind of argument. Look, I’m not going to tell a guy that I described as the most useful citizen maybe we’ve ever had in the modern period regarding corporate power, regarding the… I don’t know. I guess, we have had people who are very powerful organizers, but certainly you’re really up there in the Pantheon of people who have told us how our democracy was fretted away, bought, sold and everything. But we are at a moment where a handful of billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the people. And we go through this charade, we pretend, oh, there are Democrats, MSNBC. They’re enlightened. Rachel Mado, they’re wonderful. Who owns MSNBC? Who decides what they hear? They’re same people who own Fox and everything else.

I get letters all the time from Democrats. Now they need five bucks, 10 bucks. Nancy Pelosi writes me all. I think every day I must be on all of those lists. That’s not where she’s going to get the money to win elections. The Democrats are totally locked into wall street, into the big corporations. They betrayed us on banking. And then how are you going to do anything for those Walmart workers if you’re spending $40 billion without even thinking about it? Where are you going to get the money? How are you going do the infrastructure repair? They’re lying to us.

And I would argue Ralph Nader, God, I never thought I’d give you this lecture. I think you’re underestimating the chicanery of the Democrats. I think the Democrats are the war party. I think the Democrats are more dangerous because they can more effectively disguise their corruption and they can talk a good game about helping Walmart workers, but they don’t give a damn about them. Because there’s one good example, if they cared about the wages of Walmart workers, they would be interested in raising the wages of Chinese workers.

They’d be interested in as a human right, the right of Chinese workers to organize and have free speech. They don’t ever talk about that. They don’t ever talk about what Apple pays in China. Then why are we shocked that Apple could crush a union organizing effort here in the United States, as it did a couple of weeks ago with the communication workers union? So there’s totally hypocrisy. And they say they want to back NATO because they want rule of law in order. They don’t want that. They want the rule of privilege. And it’s a great hoax. Ralph, made or being lectured by Bobby.

Ralph Nader:

I’ve written tons of material that agrees with you on this. But what I’m saying is, the last gasp of any dying democracy is rendered by a resurgence of the people and they got to have their own candidates. They got to have their own precincts, get out to vote and get it done. Now you mentioned Apple instead of using words like inequality, Robert, we got to bring it down. This is going to stun you, Tim Cook of Apple is being paid $840 a minute, a minute, $50,000 an hour. And his workers in the stores just got raised to 20 or $22 an hour, even though they bring in more sales per worker than any other retail store. Now that’s the way you got to talk to people.

Hundred thousand people are dying at least because they can’t afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time. That’s 2000 a week. And there’s all kinds of injuries and illnesses that add to that total. So we need a grassroots movement. When democracy is dying, the only way to get around it is to get out there and start meeting with people, not through screens or emails or text message, but just the way the populist did it in the 1880s so-called door to door, small meetings, larger meetings, own parties, necessary at the local level, national level. There’s nothing else unless you have some other way to turn it around.

Robert Scheer:

Well, I think the first way to turn it around is to be, and I think you’re certainly honest. I’m not challenging your honesty, but I think we have to begin by talking to people how desperate the situation is and it’s desperate because we are so effectively manipulated, those workers in the Apple store, they’re smart, they’re well educated. They know how to do all kinds of things, fix all kinds of things. So they are wonderful products of the meritocracy and the fact that they think they have interesting and good jobs where they could not possibly live in most cities, they could not afford it. They have false consciousness.

That’s what we teach in the schools. That’s what MSMB teaches and MSMBC. They have actually taught us that Tim Cook is a good guy. First of all, he’s a gay man who made it to the top of the corporate letter. And that is a victory. Yes. And he is a guy who talks about privacy and the need for consumer protection and so forth. And you’ll get some of that from other of these, you got it from Bill Gates in his foundation, but no people have ever been as thoroughly as effectively co-opted propaganda as the American people, never. And right now you have large numbers of them think that- –

Ralph Nader:

He’s quite remarkable. He’s got a million surfs in China building his computers and iPhones through a subcontractor. And they’ve got nets on the third, fourth, fifth, sixth floor of the factory because people are so desperate they could try to commit suicide. And if Apple is buying back billions of dollars of their stock, which is like burning money, except it increases the metrics for the executive compensation. And for two to $3 billion, out of the 400 billion that they’ve already bought back in the last 10 years in stock, that’s B with a billion, for two to $3 billion a year, they could have doubled the pay of those million workers and he doesn’t get any accountability. You’re right. He’s not held accountable for this kind of slave labor.

And that’s why you got to break it down and you got to talk. You got to talk to people constantly. That’s what the lecturers in the Populist Movement in 1880s did, they went farmhouse to farmhouse and they built up this power against the big railroads and the banks. And that’s what we got to do. And if we don’t do it, we’re going to end up in a corporate serfdom, the road to corporate serfdom is well paved and we’re well along with it. And we’re losing even our children to these corporate profit gears>

Robert Scheer:

You’ve lost your own Nader generation. I teach with these people, Ralph, I hang out with them, the people who were in law school and they were Nader Raiders, and they were great. The Clinton people, when I covered the Clinton administration, the whole place was full of people who had been great Nader admirers, and that’s how they got their chops and their reputation, everything. And what they learned is how to lie to us more effectively and how to betray us more effectively. And let’s take China, for example, right now, why aren’t we in our trade agreements and everything else? Raising the question of workers’ rights and minimum wages, an international minimum wage, they don’t do any of that.

They bring up issues like Tibet and the Wegars, they’re important issues, but they’re very marginal to the 1.4 billion people in China or the well over a billion people in India. Those people, their working conditions are only going to improve when we have international standards that you can’t import stuff made by people who can’t join a union or have free rights or so forth. There’s no talk about that. And that’s, what’s happening with the Ukraine and Russia. Now they’re saying we’re going to make the world safe. What, for NATO, for big corporations?

And anybody who thinks that they could be part of another center of power and come up with some other way, we’re going to crush them and what I’m trying to get through, we’re both two old guys here now, Ralph, but I don’t want to lie to people. First of all, we’re not where the populists are. The corporations get into people’s homes, a hell of a lot more effectively than we could ever get in there. We’re knocking on the door. They’re already inside shaping everything.

And I want to ask you a pointed question, your biggest influence was getting a new generation of lawyers, professionals, college graduates to give a damn. And those people have ended up, and this is why I bring up the Clinton phenomena and the democratic party. They have betrayed us more effectively than the right wing guys who you could see right through. And it’s shameful that not one, not Bernie Sanders, not AOC, not one of them raised a question, why are you sending $40 billion for more military equipment when you can’t even afford to pay school teachers more? Or put more money into medical care? Or what have you, nobody raised that.

Ralph Nader:

Or put the money into the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, they didn’t pass $14 billion bill to keep the materials flowing and the services flowing, but they had 40 billion for Ukraine. And that’s not the end of it either. I think there’s a story behind the story. How could they get people like Bernie Sanders and AOC and others to vote unanimously? That something must have happened behind the closed doors here. That’s very see me.

Robert Scheer:

Yeah. It’s called a love of power. And you are the exception, Ralph Nader, you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. You said, “Okay, I’ll learn how to do law. I’ll be a brilliant lawyer, brilliant writer, thinker. I’m not going to sell out.” Had you sold out, you’d be the secretary of commerce. And that’s the whole thing of American culture, which I think we have to talk about it. And it’s depressing in its effectiveness. People talk about, all world, they ought to talk about Huxley a little more. They ought to talk about the manipulative skills of this culture. These guys like Z and Putin, they don’t hold a candle to any of this stuff.

The modern totalitarianism that’s what Huxley warned about was probably not going to come initially with the booted glove fist or come with the glove fist. And that’s what we’re seeing. People are being sold to bill of goods. They’re being told the real battle for freedom is spending $40 billion until we killed the last Ukrainian. And the idea maybe that’s money that should be considered to be spent elsewhere. You’d be challenged as being a trader. Now, that’s why we didn’t do it. They’re scared. Bernie Sanders he’s chicken. He’s chickening.

Ralph Nader:

Millions of people say they know exactly who’s controlling them. They don’t know how often, they’re very resentful, whether they’re in these food chains, or wherever they’re working, hospitals and so forth. But they’re being told you got nowhere to go. We’re not going to let you create a union. We’re not going to use the courts. We’re not going to let you elect honest legislators. So shut up and get used to it. And that’s what we call apathy. It’s coerced apathy, induced or coerced apathy. But I see a lot of resentment. And unfortunately it’s often taken out on people, fighting people, which is exactly what ruling groups have accomplished over the centuries. But in all my writings and people can get my column free by going to nader.org. Just sign up, get it free every week.

Robert Scheer:

Or ScheerPost.com. I publish it every week.

Ralph Nader:

Yeah. I always propose ways out. There’s always got to be ways out. There’s an excellent situation that went out in Maui, which you ought to put in your program in Hawaii. A man left the mainland to live in Maui and he saw it was completely controlled by the plantation owners and the tourist industry. And the county council was completely controlled, 15 out of 15. Where toes of these corporations, Maui’s a beautiful island, gets a million visitors a year. He mobilized the people.

The first election in 2018, he got nine out of 15 seats. Next election, they fought him tooth and nail the big companies, all the ways on TV, money, et cetera. He and his associates rounded up the votes and they got 13 out of 15 city council, county council. And one of the first things they took on was the control of water distribution. Can you believe it? By these big companies, they control the water distribution around the island, who gets the water and who gets less water. And so they did it and he’s written a couple books on it to show how they did it.

Robert Scheer:

Give us, what’s the name of- –

Ralph Nader:

No publicity in the mainland at all.

Robert Scheer:

I want to read one of his books, who is it?

Ralph Nader:

I’ll have to get you his whole contact, all email, all the context. He’s very happy to be interviewed. He’s a, I think Californian and he’ll tell you exactly how they’re doing it. So he started with nothing. He had no name recognition, nothing, but he was actually a consultant on turning around corporations when he was working in New York, in California. And so he came with a sense of strategy and he knew who he was fighting against.

Robert Scheer:

All right, well, let you know, what I love is your optimism and you don’t lie to people. You tell them what’s happening. I just want to and we’re going to end this now. I’m really happy to have this wake up. And because obviously, if we can’t do anything about it, we’re going to be demoralized and we’re going to go under. But what I think people should take away from you, Ralph, is you’re optimistic. You think people can make the difference and you think we can win. You have one, we have seat belts because of Ralph name, but we got a hell of a lot else. We got concern about improvement in healthcare and everything else because of Ralph Nader.

Robert Scheer:

So somehow the trick has to be that you can look at a very dismal situation, which is, I think the United States at this point, and I think dismal precisely cause we’ve been so co-opted, so manipulated, so effectively lied to, but yet you’re absolutely right. Things start to crumble and people ask important questions. So let’s just shift it maybe to a proactive movement. We know global warming has gotten our attention and we’re not doing very much about it. Certainly not by wasting a lot of money on the military and blowing up a lot of stuff.

And we know we haven’t really done healthcare improvement. We know the whole Biden program from immigration, every which point has come to a stall. So the big argument we’re going to have to face with, and this is my last question to you. How are we going to resist that lesser evil argument? How am I going to tell people who now say, I have to send money to Nancy Pelosi who has betrayed us in every respect that I can see. And yet why? Because we’ll get Trump again. And we went through this period of Trump washing that made the Democrats all smell like roses when they should have smelled like fertilizer. So how are you going to handle that one in the next election coming up? And then the presidential election? How do you deal with lesser evil?

Ralph Nader:

Well, since there’s no viable third party movement, which I would prefer to displace the two parties, and we only have a few months, you have to choose between genuine fascism on the way that gets the worst out of the people and lies to them and refuses to stop their predatory activities on behalf of wall street, or you get the Democrats who are not going to turn the country into a dictatorship where you have to shut up. So it’s a very crude comparison, but right now, with a few months left, if you don’t vote for a third party, you got to vote for the Democrats and give them an agenda when you vote. So you say, we’re demanding.

Robert Scheer:

Ralph, you say they don’t shut the people up. You got Julian Assange, sitting there in jail for year after year, and it’s a Democrat who’s keeping him there. We’ve had whistleblowers like John Kukawski who serve time in jail because people, Democrats like Barack Obama were perfectly happy to have them jailed for revealing torture. The torturers didn’t go to jail. The people who blew the whistle on torture, they served time.

You had the banks were bail, who freed the banks from the decent restraints that we had in the new deal? The financial services modernization act, the commodities futures modernization. Those were bill Clinton. Yeah, there were Republicans who supported him, but Ronald Reagan couldn’t get that through. So in terms of why we have this huge income disparity, it’s because of the Democrats. And we’re afraid to say that because over then, what are we Trump supporters? And that is a horrible position to be in now. Horrible.

Ralph Nader:

Robert, I wrote an article recently. It’s going to be in our new pilot newspaper, which is called the Capitol Hill Citizen, which has 12 major areas where the Democrats and Republicans converge, including the war empire and many others, corporate welfare and many others. But there’s one big difference that is that the Trumpians, the Trumpsters want to repress the vote and they want to turn Congress into an ear drop. And that’s the main difference right there. And that’s what we have to dig our heels in order to try to turn the process around in future years where we’re not held hostage by this two party corporate duopoly.

Robert Scheer:

Yeah. But if you keep telling people that there is a profound difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and that makes the compelling argument against third parties. This is the trap we’re in. You are talking about somebody in Maui, in a county. Yeah. They can do something because it’s not the whole ball game and everything, but how do you do that on the mainland? How do you really convince people when these elections are nothing but arguments about who’s the lesser evil? And by the way, it works on the other side too, they convince a lot of otherwise more reasonable Republicans that their guys are the lesser evil. And it seems to me, I don’t want to be giving you lectures, Ralph, but it seems to me, this is the trap that is destroying us.

Ralph Nader:

It is a trap most pronounced at the national level, Robert, but at the local level, all over the country, a lot can be done by new political energies, new local parties, new candidates, because it’s right at scale, there are places where you don’t need big money. You can canvas everywhere. So there’s a big lever that can come from local politics as well. That will reverberate, hopefully in a short time at the state and federal level. So it’s got to be like a chess game. You got to think of all kinds of approaches. And don’t neglect the young, don’t neglect these young people who have moral authority because they have no power, the tweens and the teenagers, got to enlist them before it’s too late.

Robert Scheer:

Well, you have been far more effective, far, far more effective than I have in trying to change America in a good way. You’ve probably been one of the most effective humans we’ve had in the last hundred years. You stand out as somebody who really got a lot done that dramatically improved the level of freedom and accountability in the United States. So I’m hoping you’re right. I’m hoping I’m absolutely wrong in my pessimism, but I’d like to check in with you another six months or a year. We’ll get another report card. But that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. I want to thank you.

Ralph Nader:

Let me just say one last thing. One last thing. It’s my experience, Robert, that where you have public opinion behind you in congressional districts, it doesn’t take more than 1% of the people. That’s two and a half million people, organized to attain control of their senators and representatives on one major redirection issue after another, as long as you know what you’re talking about, you’re factual, you’re focusing on two senators and a representative, and you represent public opinion on so many areas where people are on the same page, like full health square, and living wage and cracking down on corporate crime, et cetera, you can win. So it’s the 1% against the 1% at the top. I’ll bet on the 1% at the bottom reflecting public opinion, that is what has been shown throughout American history whenever we broke through against entrenched injustice and political corporate corruption, never has taken more than 1%.

Robert Scheer:

Yeah. But what about the other 1% having 80% of the wealth on their side? I’m not going to push this. I hope you are right, Ralph. I really do. And there’s almost, I can’t hardly think of anyone I admire more as a public force, public intellectual in our modern American history. I think there are others, but you’re certainly right up there in the Pantheon. So let’s leave it at that and hope Ralph Nader’s got it right. And anyway, join that 1% at the bottom to get something done.

And meanwhile, I want to take some care of some housekeeping here. I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW for getting these shows posted. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, for putting it all together. Natasha Hakimi, our introduction writer. And I want to thank the JKW Foundation, which in the memory of a very terrific journalist Jean Stein helps fund these shows. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. 

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https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/10/ralph-nader-is-there-any-hope-left-for-democracy/

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