This one is worth reading: Scheer interviews Nader
[Warning: Long]
Nader: "the Democratic Party is on an infinite journey of cowardliness ... You don’t talk about tax increases; you don’t talk about tax increases on the wealthy; you don’t talk about restoring enormous tax reductions over the years, on Wall Street, on the superrich, on the multinational corporations. "
"a Democratic Party taboo on the military budget. It used to be they would talk about it ..."
"we are at a stage that I would call a corporate state, that is exactly the definition of fascism"
"The Democrats now are so weak and cowardly that they can’t even protect what’s left of Medicare. The corporations now own 40 percent of the beneficiaries of Medicare."
"they’re too busy catering to the corporate state. They’re too busy marginalizing progressive Democrats. They’re too busy destroying any kind of alternative political electoral competition. They’re too busy to clean up campaign finance corruption, which they benefit from just like the Republicans."
"they’re terrified of Nancy Pelosi. She is running a one-person rule in the House of Representatives, just the way McConnell was running a one-person rule, until he was displaced, in the Senate. "
"So we have here what’s called the symbol of democracy after January 6: how dare these rioters desecrate the symbol, the core of democracy. But as an institution, it’s run as a consummate autocracy, run by four people: the Democratic and Republican heads in the House, and the Democratic and Republican heads in the Senate. They’ve stripped the committee chairs of the power they had, and whether they’re Democratic or Republican."
" if you don’t persuade Nancy Pelosi, you don’t get anywhere in the U.S. Congress ... nobody dared oppose her. They call her the commander in chief. "
"Obama ... refused to prosecute any of the Wall Street crooks that destroyed the economy in 2008, 2009. And he spent his political efforts bailing out, as you indicate, Wall Street. Whenever the Democrats go corporate, they succeed, because the Republicans gleefully jump on board. "
"corporate capitalism is basic corporate socialism. Because without socialism in Washington bailing out capitalism, capitalism would have collapsed a long time ago ... Every time Wall Street gets in trouble, every time the banks overreach and speculate, Washington bails them out. Every time there’s a major industry deep in trouble, like the auto industry, General Motors, Washington socialism bails them out. And that’s what’s going on now. All these big corporations are in Washington desperately demanding, desperately pleading for socialism–to bail out the big drug companies, demand advance payment in the billions for producing drugs that make them a colossal profit with no price regulation. All over, they want bailouts everywhere, bailouts, handouts, giveaways, subsidies. It’s half of what Washington does every day, shovel out more of the money, the guarantees, the overblown contracts, to the military contractors ... The tax code is a massive regular bailout for these multinational companies, who can pretty much park their profits abroad in tax havens, build up the expenses here, and then pay virtually nothing to support the public works and the public services in the United States"
"an entrenched corporate socialist state, where Wall Street controls government and turns it against its own people ... They’re commercializing childhood, they’re strategically planning higher education, they’ve planned our tax system, they’re strategically planning our electoral and political system, our public budgets, our military foreign policy. They’re strategically planning the public land and its disposition daily, one-third of America. They strategically planned the epidemic of obesity, which they knew full well was the result of their high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt diet, that they’ve seduced young people with billions of dollars of TV advertising over the last 40 years. And this young generation that calls themselves progressive and changed, or change agent, they just don’t have a clue. They don’t read. You don’t read, you don’t think. You don’t think, you don’t read. You don’t do those things, you don’t set the stage for social justice movements. "
"the energy goes into the ether instead of latching on to a laser beam focusing right on Capitol hill. It’s Congress that should be the focus. Congress is the only Constitutional authority that can control runaway corporate power, discipline it, break it up, challenge it, displace it with cooperatives and other economic institutions, and render it subordinate to the power of sovereign human beings. These corporations, as we all know, are artificial entities; they have no sovereignty under the Constitution; they’re not even mentioned in the Constitution, the word “company” or “corporation.” The Preamble starts “We the people,” not “We the Congress” or “We the corporations.” "
"Well, we’ve been distracted massively. The necessities of life are not treated by Google, Facebook, and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple. They don’t provide food. They don’t provide shelter. They don’t provide the mechanics of transportation. They don’t provide healthcare. They don’t provide children’s support services. They don’t provide for retirement income, based on productive factories that used to give pensions to their workers. What they do is control our time and shovel before us ways to shift around and search and look for information, which they make sure is never connected to power. And they provide us with a massive advertising media on the internet."
"we need to organize Congress ... to take back control of Congress–which isn’t all that big a deal; we’ve got the votes, the corporations have the money but they don’t have the votes. And redirect national policy to raise the empirical reality of livelihood and opportunity in the country. Health, safety, economic well-being, public services that work ... that’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve been distracted by these illusionists. These corporations are basically illusionists. "
Scheer: "we basically have a proletariat that is rootless ... that is kept ripe for plucking, for deception ... You don’t have a United Auto Workers that can hold the Democratic Party responsible, as it held Franklin Delano Roosevelt responsible ... Or the steelworkers ... The coal miners’ union–that was what was pressuring Roosevelt and the Democrats. That pressured Truman, it pressured–you know, but then it ended. "
Nader: "We won all our victories without really electing anybody in Congress in the sixties and seventies. We won because between elections we put great pressure on key members of Congress ...Let’s just start with the necessities of life and aspire to bring the livelihoods of people and the reliability of economic expectations of people, say, to the level of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark and Finland. We can do that with less than one percent of the people organized in Congressional districts. Because look, health insurance is now supported, single-payer, without even the Democratic Party pushing it, by 70% of the people. That’s a lot of conservatives, not just liberals."
"The greatest foothold we have are the state legislatures and the Congress. OK–if that’s the foothold, what’s the fulcrum? The fulcrum is about two and a half million organized people out of 225 million adults, reflecting on many turnaround issues in Congress, majority opinion with significant inputs from conservative voters as well as liberal."
Scheer: "it’s delusionary to say oh, let’s just work harder in these Congressional districts and get people elected. Because those people will end up selling out. Because they’ll sell out to the people who can keep reelecting them and have the big money."
Nader: "things are going to get worse and worse, and pretty soon there will be either total surrender and narcissistic mass suicide, or people will say that you cannot have a moral and humane economy and government when you have artificial entities that are inherently irresponsible and unaccountable subordinating human values and civic values to the imperial commercial values. "
"you look at the future, and you see serfdom everywhere ... what door is still open? Members of Congress want to get reelected. They don’t get elected by corporations. They get funded by corporations in order to intimidate potential opponents ... you can pry open Congress in a whole variety of techniques and ways, from civic strategies to primary challenges, to using the leverage of your hard core supporters in Congress ... that’s the only tool we have under our Constitution to turn around. "
"When you go to legitimate credit unions, you weaken Bank of America. When you improve your health with diet and exercise, you weaken the drug companies and the health so-called care companies. When you develop solar energy you weaken ExxonMobil. "
Scheer: " a significant number of the people in the public that should know better, sell out, in a way that I’ve never seen before ... You try to sell out–how can I sell out? ... Your children can go to private schools and avoid all the problems of the real world of public education ... You can wall yourself off and live in gated communities ... they can buy people off. Most of the people who work in your groups, the Nader leaders and so forth, ended up selling out. They’re the liberal class now ... "
"the appeal is of Apple, of Google and so forth; they seem enlightened on civil rights, and even workers’ rights and lifestyle differences and identity politics ... which as I say is what Huxley was warning about ... And what you have left–and that’s what you see in the Trump base ... the most alienated, the people that believed, because of their being white and their being rural ... that they could survive. They’re the angriest, because they’ve been the most blatantly betrayed, and they’re not given the legs up in the meritocracy "
Nader: "we need a new drive of people–who don’t have this baggage, who aren’t the Ivy League sellouts, who aren’t the Hillary and Bill Clinton empire advocates and warmongers ... It can be done ... The politicians, fortunately, are still afraid of the people. They’re afraid of corporate retribution, to be sure, but the corporations don’t have all that many votes. Not yet, at least."
"we should analyze the successes, not just deprecate our failures and our downward trends, to see what works and what doesn’t work."
Read the whole thing:
https://scheerpost.com/2021/03/19/ralph-nader-democrats-ushered-in-an-era-of-corporate-fascism/sidd