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'Our Democracy Is in Perilous Decay, and We Can Turn It Around' Janine Jackson ([link removed])


Janine Jackson interviewed Ralph Nader about organizing for the public interest for the December 10, 2021, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Science Friday: Ralph Nader Reflects On His Auto Safety Campaign, 55 Years Later

Science Friday (12/03/21 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: This year marks the 55th anniversary of the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. It came out at a time, as its author reminded in a recent interview ([link removed]) , when the official auto industry position was that all crashes were the fault of the driver.

Unsurprisingly, the book raised the hackles of industry owners. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, they thought a clever response would be, rather than address the concerns, to try and dig up dirt on the messenger. That backfired in a big way. Congressional hearings were held in March of 1966. And by September, there were new auto safety laws on the books.

I’m talking, of course, about Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, lawyer, author and radio host. He has founded many organizations, including the Center for Study of Responsive Law ([link removed]) , Public Citizen ([link removed]) , the Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety ([link removed]) , Clean Water Action Project ([link removed]) , the Disability Rights Center ([link removed]) , the Pension Rights Center ([link removed]) and the Project for Corporate Responsibility ([link removed]) , as well as the magazine Multinational Monitor ([link removed]) .

In the introduction to Center for Study of Responsive Law’s anniversary report ([link removed]) on Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader notes that in recent years, the auto safety beat has been neglected by the media, because official inaction in the arena of mandated duties is not considered news. Standards not issued or strengthened, recalls not ordered, penalties not applied, data not compiled, chronic secrecy do not qualify as newsworthy. “Media,” Nader writes,

seem to have forgotten or never known just how critical a role they played, in 1966 and later intervals, in getting legislators and regulators to do the safe thing for the American people.

Well, that’s an observation that might be extended to other arenas as well. You can find written work and also listen to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Nader.org ([link removed]) . But right now, he joins us by phone from Connecticut. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ralph Nader.

Ralph Nader: Thank you, Janine.
In the Public Interest: How the “Polarized” Political Parties Work Together Against the Public Interest

In the Public Interest (10/1/21 ([link removed]) )

JJ: I’d like to start with a piece ([link removed]) you wrote in October that gets at a widely shared frustration. You talk about the presentation of the Republican and Democratic parties as polarized, as fiercely oppositional, and how baseless that presentation is. What are some of the things that that picture of things obscures, or falsifies? What does it keep us from seeing, and consequently acting on?

RN: It keeps us from seeing that on the ground where people live, work and raise their families, there’s a tremendous convergence of agreement on where this country should go, what principles of justice and fair play should apply. But political leaders always try to divide and rule. That’s the way they get their support, by taking one side or another. In the present time, I would say the Republicans are more at fault in this, in finding constant issues at a very general, abstract level to divide people against one another. It’s one way they raise money.

But if you look at what is being obscured, you will see that there are large majorities, which include liberals and conservatives and people living in red and blue states, on major issues, major redirections that are not at the top of the news; they are not the subject of interviews, congressional hearings and the like.

For example, universal healthcare (Obamacare and Bidencare are not universal healthcare): That’s supported by 70% or more of the American people. Breaking up the big banks after the crash in Wall Street; that poll came in close to 90%. Living wage: For decades, there have been majorities. You think conservative workers in Walmart don’t want to put more food on the table for their family? And that has not been a major feature in the political campaigns even of most of the Democrats.
Unstoppable: THE EMERGING LEFT-RIGHT ALLIANCE TO DISMANTLE THE CORPORATE STATE

Bold Type Books (2014 ([link removed]) )

And in a book ([link removed]) I wrote, Janine, called Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, I just casually came up with over two dozen redirections, reforms, call it what you will, that large numbers of consumers support. For example, they are upset about the huge waste in the military budget. They don’t want endless wars. When you ask them, should Congress be the one to declare the war and not the president?, they would say the Congress. They want tax reform so that the rich and powerful and the multinational corporations don’t get away with a few percent of paying taxes, or not paying any taxes at all.

When you talk about the commons, you say, we all own the public lands, the public airways, all that trillions of dollars that built all these industries, from research and development, from the federal government. Don’t you think we should have more control over what we own? Of course, they say, we should do so.

There are large majorities for direct democracy—initiative, referendum and recall—both among conservatives and liberals. They love local community self-reliance. You think they like these long supply chains during the pandemic? Both left and right families are very disturbed by the commercialization of childhood, the direct advertising and selling to children. So that’s another left/right convergence.

They want lower drug prices. That has huge support, probably 90%. Big support by conservatives and liberals for safe drinking water, clean air, otherwise called environmental programs. And, of course, the more you talk to people about things that they haven’t heard in the news, the more they find they have things in common.

So why aren’t these things at the top of political campaigns, congressional deliberations, the media itself? Because the dividers and rulers set the agenda. And we sit around as citizens, as gazers, as spectators, instead of participating in the democratic process.

JJ: I want to bring you back to how we can engage people. But I did want to take a moment to say, one of the ways, an important way, that these supposedly polarized parties work together is in their shared avoidance of addressing corporate crime. That’s a disinterest shared also by corporate media, who talk incessantly about "crime," but only really mean crimes by individuals, often desperate individuals, and virtually never the wide-scale wage theft ([link removed]) , for example, of corporations. That’s almost defined out of existence. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the effect of that erasure of corporate crime, as even existing as worthy of our attention as a subject to engage.

RN: It starts, actually, with the law schools of America over the decades. They never taught corporate crime. They taught street crime. When I took a criminal law course at Harvard, it was all street crime and domestic violence. And we hardly even raised the issue of corporate criminality, which was widespread then as it’s much more widespread now. We’re living in a corporate crime wave. If you don’t believe it, just read, say, the Wall Street Journal or Barron’s financial weekly. You don’t have to read The Nation or the Progressive.

JJ: It’s right there. Yeah.

RN: Yeah. And so it translates into politics. I was just told that the first time a high official in the Justice Department used the words "corporate crime" occurred a few days ago. She used it in a speech. They usually use the words "white-collar crime," like a teller cheating a bank, instead of the bank, Wells Fargo, cheating their customers.

And the laws are antiquated. The penalties are ridiculously low and ancient on matters of corporate criminality. So you have payday loan rackets at the grassroot level, rent-to-own rackets. You have violation of building codes in tenements, leading to all kinds of health hazards, very rarely prosecuted.

At higher levels, you have monopolies gouging people. You have corporate criminals bribing politicians; they call it campaign contributions. (That’s another thing, by the way, there’s huge left/right support for, cleaning up the crooked way our elections are run.) You have all kinds of corporate criminality; violating tax laws. You have building fraud that’s staggering.

This expert at Harvard, Malcolm Sparrow, who’s an applied mathematician, and, by the way, years ago, a congressional report, estimates ([link removed]) that 10% of all healthcare expenditures by people are ripped off by billing fraud and abuse. That amounts to—pause for a moment—$360 billion this year alone. Billion with a B. Medicare is ripped off at the level of about $60 billion.

And what do you have in terms of the federal cops on the corporate crime beat? You have a tiny little office in the Department of Health and Human Services that deals with prosecution and investigation. They barely get $3 billion out of the $60 billion-plus crime on Medicare by the healthcare industry back in any given year.

So when we talk about the concentration of power in the hands of the few against the many, that’s what happens. You get corporate criminal immunity. Boeing engaged in criminal negligence, step after step, in the horrific crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia—which took the life of my grandniece, who was at 24 the emerging leader in global health—and it basically escaped prosecution ([link removed]) of the top officials. There was a sweetheart settlement by the Justice Department, just before the Trump administration left office. And it’s just a cost of doing business. It will hardly make a dent in terms of what they have to pay out to the victims.

The opiate promoters, the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma and others, they knew what they were doing. They were pushing with all kinds of seductive marketing and inducements, the overuse, overprescription. And you have over 600,000 people who have died in the United States alone, in the last 10 years ago. Nobody went to jail on that.

So we have a pattern of immunity on the part of the rich and powerful. After the collapse of Wall Street crashed the economy in 2008, and there were 8 million unemployed people, and all kinds of pension funds and mutual funds depleted, and a huge taxpayer bailout, there was no prosecution of any of these Wall Street crooks. There must have been 95% support in the country for prosecuting them. There weren’t any prosecutions at all.

One of Barack Obama’s first statements as presidents was he wasn’t going to look backward and criminally prosecute these crooks. Of course, every criminal prosecution involves looking backward.

So we have a two-party indifference here that requires much more grassroot mobilization. Because it’s eating the core of our rule of law. It’s eating at the core of public trust.

JJ: Let me ask you about how we work on that public engagement. Because it’s a big question. But we sense—and research, like some out of Northwestern and Princeton ([link removed]) , upholds it—that there is a fundamental disconnect—a non-relationship, even—between what people say they want and what elected officials do. Officials respond demonstrably to their donors above their constituents. And in light of that, how do we keep people invested in participating in electoral politics?

RN: It’s all Congress. We start with Congress. It’s really remarkable, Janine. You have all kinds of marches, demonstrations, protests. And they never direct this energy to 535 people, senators and representatives, who have been given enormous power, the sovereignty of the people in the Constitution. They’ve been delegated enormous power, and they turn around, and a majority of them sell that power to the highest corporate bidders and corporate lobbyists.

So if we really want to come down to a practical answer to your question, it’s to start small Congress watchdog groups in every congressional district. And of course that will spread to the statewide, and bring people together, where they summon their senators and representatives to their town meetings, to their agendas. It can be done easily now, because of Zoom. The logistics are simple. The excuses of members that they can’t travel here and there, they can do it right out of their desk in Washington.

JJ: Right.

RN: And that’s where it all starts. We, in the past, we would focus on Congress. We defeated the auto industry. We didn’t have a thousand people around the country supporting us regularly. But we had public opinion. So when you have about 1% of the people organizing congressional districts, and they pitch in and raise enough money to have two full-time people, say, in each congressional district, 1% of the people is about two-and-a-half million adults. And they represent public opinion, like this kind of convergent left/right support that I mentioned. And they know what they’re talking about, and they know who they focus on. So these protests don’t generate energy into the ether; they focus on 535 members of Congress. And you can turn Congress around.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Once you do that, the executive branch, the kind of judges we have, the impact on the state and local officials, is enormous. And it’s amazing how you can’t get people to focus on Congress, even though the history of change in this country has almost always had to go through Congress, whether it’s civil rights, expansion of civil liberties, environment, labor, consumer, the 19th century political reforms, the labor 40-hour week, the womens’ right to vote, they have to go through Congress.

And it’s amazing how hard it is to get active citizens, not just passive citizens, to focus on their senators and representatives, the huge lever to combat the corporate supremacists, the giant corporations who have created an ever-maturing corporate state, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938, in a message to Congress ([link removed]) , called fascism. That’s when private power, corporate power, controls government power, and turns it against its own people. So we need to start talking about corporate crime, corporate welfare, corporate supremacy, corporate tax evasion.

JJ: Let me bring you back, finally, to media. When you were talking about the financial crash, and all the suffering that came from that, I’m remembering the coverage that said: It might "feel good" to see people prosecuted for this, but, really, that’s not the right response.
Unsafe at Any Speed: 55th Anniversary

Center for Study of Responsive Law (2021 ([link removed]) )

In other words, the idea of treating corporate crime as crime is presented in corporate media as emotional, as somehow subrational, and we need to have wiser heads prevail. And there are so many things that elite media can do that undermine the public interest in that way. But, again, as you note in that intro ([link removed]) to the anniversary report on Unsafe at Any Speed, solid journalism has been and can be an important force for action in the public interest, right?

RN: When I was one of the lobbyists for public radio and public broadcasting around 1970, that’s what we thought we would get. And now you have an average of 30 advertisements per hour on NPR. I actually measured it once. And they’re always saying, “Support for NPR comes…” and then they start talking, and they list all kinds of big companies that support them. And that’s why they spend a lot of time on the victims, describing victims. But they don’t trace the victims back to corporate criminals.

So when corporations pollute air, that’s violence. That produces cancer, respiratory diseases. When they contaminate your drinking water, that is violence. When they have unsafe workplaces—60,000 workers ([link removed]) die from workplace-related diseases—that’s violence. There’s nothing philosophically abstract about corporate crime.

When Wells Fargo created millions of phony accounts ([link removed]) without their customers’ OK, that’s criminal appropriation of their economic assets. And when the insurance companies and banks redline low-income areas, they’re dooming those areas to lack of public services that are critical, and to widespread crime.

And you have now exploitation of tenants. Who gets the worst? Minority people get the worst. You have discriminatory housing. You have discriminatory healthcare. These corporations, they may now put full-page ads with Black models—

JJ: Right.
Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader: "We have to be more demanding as citizens. We have to raise our expectations about our own significance." (cc photo: Troy Page/Truthout)

RN: —and full-page ads saying they’re for civil rights. But in their practices, they can’t resist exploitation that maximizes their profits.

And we’ve got to demand that the media do a better job here. And we can start with public radio and public broadcasting, which almost escape entire criticism. I suggested a public hearing in Congress on the 50th anniversary of public radio and public broadcasting, and it was ignored. So I wrote an article. (I have a weekly column since 1971; people can get it free electronically by going to Nader.org ([link removed]) .) I wrote an article ([link removed]) on public radio and what I thought its failings were, and only one person, David Brancaccio, reacted to it. And he said he sent it around because he thought it raised serious questions about mission avoidance, that they’re straying from their mission.

So I think we have to be more demanding as citizens. We have to raise our expectations about our own significance as citizens. We have to become more informed.

And this feedback that we’re all getting, that when people are disgusted with the government under the control of the special interests, they withdraw. That is a quitting of democracy; that’s a dropout of democracy. That’s a reason to resurge. That’s a reason to take back the government, take back the Congress.

So our democracy is in serious and perilous decay, and we can turn it around. And as I’ve said again and again, it never takes more than 1% of the people knowing what they’re doing, reflecting public opinion and focusing on the key decisional arenas, whether it’s the state legislature, the city council or the Congress, to begin turning the government, so it becomes more by, of and for the people.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with consumer advocate Ralph Nader. You can find his recent written work and hear the Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Nader.org ([link removed]) . Ralph Nader, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RN: And thank you, Janine, for your work every week.


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