Q & A Ralph Nader: Describing his vision for America — and why he uses fiction to explain it

Ralph Nader, 75, has been an outsized figure in American political and civic life for more than four decades. Consumer advocate, lawyer, citizen activist and former presidential candidate — perhaps most notably in 2000, when as a candidate for the Green party, he received nearly 3 percent of the vote — he has also written or co-authored 34 books. Among them: the influential “Unsafe At Any Speed,” the 1965 best-selling indictment of the auto industry and its lax safety standards. In his latest book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” (Seven Stories Press, $27.50), Nader envisions what could happen if some of the country’s richest people pooled their resources and led a drive to get many changes Nader has long sought — curbs on corporate power and big insurance companies, for instance, and third-party victories. In the novel, characters based on real people such as Warren Buffett and Ted Turner in fictional roles mobilize the people for fairness and justice.

Here are excerpts of a question-and-answer session that Monica Hatcher, The Herald’s residential real estate writer, recently had with Nader:

Q: What advantage did you see in using fiction to explain your ideas in Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, and at 733 pages, why is the book as long as it is?

A: Fiction allows one to imagine real possibilities for the future, and the only nonfiction analogy is if you have a wonky-type list of proposals for reforms, which often makes for tedious reading. With fiction, you can drop an exciting imaginative scenario that provides a vision for real possibilities for what our country can become. I had real people in fictional roles, drawing on their background and greatly expanding their impact for good as well as providing humor, and tensions and power collisions with a beginning and an end. You can’t do that in nonfiction.

Why was it this long? It’s this long because I want the reader to be able to say, `This could happen,’ from step to step, March, April, May, June. I didn’t want any magic wands or leaps of disbelief from one action sequence to another. I had to provide a lot of realistic detail which I hope is instructive as well as entertaining

Q: Can America save itself without the super-rich, in other words, without the kind of power money buys in our society?

A: The super-rich in this case are enlightened, older [people], which reduces the percentage of potential advocates from that group of wealthy people quite dramatically. I carefully selected them. What they provide are resources, a catalyst and a shoehorn and the ability to provide opportunities for tens of thousands of people to improve their country. You can’t have organizers unless they can feed themselves; you can’t have them go around the country without transportation, communication, housing, etc. What the super-rich in this book do is fill that last equation which is money and media. I think we have a lot of people in this country who want to work for the same kinds of changes, roughly, — in fairness, equity for workers, taxpayers, consumers — but there is no money to fund them. The book basically reflects changes that were made possible, not just by good strategies and a lot of good people in neighborhoods and communities who came out, and rallied, organized and elected, but it represents a civic investment of $15 billion, which is a fraction of the fortunes of the 17 older super-rich in the book.

Q: In the book, the character Max Palevsky, venture capitalist and computer technology pioneer, has an obsession with what is called civic anomie — or, as you describe, the failure of citizens to exert even minor efforts to combat injustices they perceive as harming them. When and how did Americans become so complacent?

A: Part of it is growing up with many hours of television that empties the sidewalks and the town meetings and city council meetings. Then there are the long commutes, low pay and often having to take a job and a half; people don’t have time. Also there are very few civic skills and civic experiences provided in our schools. If people don’t spend time on their civic responsibilities, they don’t spend time on making a democracy function. They feel powerless. They don’t like what they see — politicians are in low repute, political parties always grubbing for money, major necessities of the country are not addressed, major possibilities like efficient and renewable energy over the years until recently are not addressed and people get frustrated. Many become discouraged and they realize because they haven’t put in the time in organizing the neighborhoods and all that, they don’t have much power with city hall. That turns into apathy and resignation and withdrawal.

Q. In light of the near collapse of the financial system and the scandal involving corporate bailouts and large executive bonuses, if Americans were to ever snap out of this anomie, wouldn’t this be the time? Do you see any signs of significant civic uprising?

A: No, because the money is not there. I keep emphasizing the resources. If 10 multibillionaires of advanced age really want to turn the healthcare system around and they put a billion dollars in meticulously organizing the 435 congressional districts for full Medicare for all and exposing even more the horrors of the present system of so many peopledying who can’t afford health insurance, we would get it. What is a billion dollars for a group of billionaires who together are worth $70 billion? That’s the biggest single message of the book: You have to have smarts, good people, good strategies, good timing — but little happens if there is no money.

As we speak, 2,000 lobbyists are coursing over Congress from the drug industry, the health insurance companies and the hospital chains. They are working full time to try to get their way, and there isn’t one full-time lobbyist for the most popular reform — single-payer, full Medicare for all — on Capitol Hill. So you can multiply that — military budget, preferential taxes for the rich and the powerful, lack of attention to public service repair and modernization of infrastructure. There is almost nobody there, no citizens organized back in the congressional districts.

Q: What do you hope your legacy might be 50 to 100 years from now? From a business perspective and from a political one?

A: [To bring attention] to the need for multiparty systems, for a competitive democracy, instead of a two-party tyranny that works overtime in enacting state laws to exclude independent and third party candidates and ballots. We’ve done our bit on that. To give the voters more choices beyond just the increasingly corporatized Republican and Democratic party choices.

The second is to give people the chance, by example — you know, motivate people — to think they can make a difference in their neighborhoods, communities, state and nation.

Then, the third is to build more and more democratic institutions. I think or civil liberties and civil rights have been hugely protected by the ACLU and NAACP, formed about 100 years ago, and the environmental groups and consumer groups. They’ve done a lot and gotten tough laws enacted through — in my case, auto safety, cleaner air and water, meat and poultry inspection, radiation standards, Freedom of Information Act. But we need far more because as democracy becomes more complex and as power becomes more concentrated in the hands of the corporate and the rich with their influence over Washington and state governments, we have to keep up by creating more civic institutions at all levels. Nanotechnology doesn’t have one nonprofit advocacy group monitoring it, like the Sierra Club does the environment.

Ralph Nader’s Flight of Fantasy
An Interview With Chris Lydon

Posted November 2, 2009

Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair.
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

Citizen Nader is feeling isolated and stymied these days in the Age of Obama. It’s been 50 years now of his reform drive for home virtues and people power, and there have been many victories along the way for safer cars and cleaner air and water. Leaving aside the fact that his third-party presidential campaigns have left him a pariah in the Democratic Party (and the Obama White House), the healthcare fight and others tell him that money power rules Congress as never before.

So in a sort of novel, “Only the Super-Rich can Save Us,” Nader has fantasized that the money is in his pocket. It’s a sort of dream that Ralph’s lifelong agenda has been bought out by Warren Buffett, Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, Bill Cosby, Ross Perot and a dozen other patriotic billionaires. With their money, his whole program has been enacted. Ralph speaks (a little disconcertingly, perhaps) as if it’s actually happened. But if it had, would we call it good news or bad? Democracy, or Bloombergism — built like so much else in our world on the charisma of money?

RN: The problem is the nature of power, and the corporate entity controlling government, which Franklin Roosevelt, in 1938, called fascism… The global corporate model is all powerful, has no competition in terms of a model… They have nationalized the savings of the American people. They are too big to fail, so that they are bailed out, as Wall Street is bailed out. They have monetized elections, nullifying effectively people’s votes. They select the politicians, put them in office, and when they retire they hire them and give them a half a million dollars or more a year as lobbyists. It is the most clever, dynamic, creative system of controlling power in the history of the world. And they give people entertainment, and they allow people to confuse personal freedom with civic freedom. So you’ve got a lot of people in this country who say, “what do you mean we don’t live in a free country?” That’s right, you have personal freedom, you can eat what you want, buy whatever clothes you want, date who you want, divorce who you want, choose the friends you want, pick the music you want, get the bicycle you want, get into a five-thousand pound vehicle and go three blocks and buy chiclets if you want. That is personal freedom. It’s not civic freedom. Civic freedom is what’s been shredded. As Cicero said “freedom is participation in power.” What kind of freedom do we have by that standard?

… Right now we have a dystopia on the ground. It’s called the liberal progressive intelligentsia and their flock. They think if they keep writing more books (the way Bill Greider and Bob Kuttner and Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader and others keep writing, exposing, proposing, diagnosing, denouncing and suggesting) that something is going to happen. We have hit a stone wall — one reason I ran for President three times. Congress has shut down. Washington is corporate-occupied territory. That’s the dystopia on the ground… Between that real life dystopia of the progressive liberal intelligentsia and their world, and their least-worst voting for the Democrats over the Republicans and never pulling the Democrats in their direction — between that and my practical utopia I’ll take my proposal as more realistic.

CL: That’s a very serious question you’re talking about. And we all know it intuitively around health care. We all know that what Congress is doing has almost nothing to do with what people want, or even what the wonks say are the best provisions of the best policy. it’s about what the healthcare industry will let us have.

RN: That’s been documented in books from A to Z. Here’s where this book kicks in. Let’s say ten elderly super-billionaries get together and they say look, enough is enough. 45,000 Americans are dying every year because they can’t afford health insurance. Trillions of dollars lost, claims denied, anxiety, grieving, it’s an incredible mess, a pay or die system in the richest country in the world. Suppose these guys get together at the Four Seasons. They’re on their third martini. They say, “you know, I met a couple of great organizers… and they said if they had a billion dollars they could organize every congressional district and move the thirty-percent of congress who’s already privately for single-payer health insurance to a majority. Obama will sign it because he’s for single-payer, but wasn’t willing to take on the drug and health-insurance companies. That’ll happen in eighteen months.”

You wanna argue that with me? A billion dollars organizing the congressional districts the way Donald Ross and others know how to do it. Eighteen months, we’d have single-payer. Eighteen months. No one will die in America because they can’t afford health insurance. Just like no one dies in England, Germany, France, Sweden or Canada because they’re insured from day one when they’re born. That’s what I mean about money. You’ve got people all over the country — the majority support single payer; a majority of doctors support it; even larger majority of nurses support it. And it’s going nowhere because there isn’t one full-time lobbyist on capital hill for single payer, and there are 2000 corporate lobbyists for the drug companies and the Aetnas and the hospital chains. When are we going to face up to the money issue? Money is not enough. You have to have smarts, strategy, determination, humanity, time, diligence — but you can have all those, and if you do not have money it goes nowhere.

Ralph Nader with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.

Novel comparison: Ayn Rand and Ralph Nader
October 23, 2009
By Justin Moyer

Ralph Nader — capital-L Liberal, safety-fetishist, and presidential-election spoiler — might not want to share a bookshelf with Ayn Rand — small-l liberal, objectivist, and all-around mean girl. Yet, both authors felt it necessary to produce lengthy works of fiction to present their fuming ideologies: Rand’s published the 1088-page “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957, and Nader put out the 733-page “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” this past month. Other than high page counts, do these two novels have anything in common?

Atlas Shrugged: Features John Galt, a fictional, super-rich inventor who organizes a strike among the entrepreneurial class to protest the American government’s burgeoning collectivism.

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!: Features Warren Buffet, a real-life, super-rich investor who organizes an intervention by the entrepreneurial class to protest the American government’s laissez-faire love affair with capitalism.

Shrugged: Gathers like-minded objectivists in “Galt’s Gulch,” a remote valley, to plot overthrow of the government once “the code of the looters [i.e., the paying and/or benefiting from taxes] has collapsed.”

Super-Rich: Gathers like-minded “strong-willed, nonconforming successfulists” — including Ted Turner, Bill Cosby, and, of course, Yoko Ono – in a “high mountain redoubt” on Maui to plot “an entire sub-economy that builds markets and employs solutions kept on the shelf by vested interests.”

Shrugged: Presents Galt’s objectivist philosophy in a 56-page radio address. Memorable line: “I swear – by my life and my love of it – I will never live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” Galt says.

Super-Rich: Presents Nader’s meliorist philosophy in a speech given by Buffet to 16 other “megamillionaires.” Memorable line: “I had planned to go on increasing the value of my estate and use it to establish a huge posthumous charitable foundation, but now I realize that’s just a rationalization for continuing to do what I do best while escaping responsibility for what’s done by others.”

Shrugged: Frets over intervention in the free market. “Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent,” an industrialist who has ignored governmental regulations tells a judge. “Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter.”

Super-Rich: Frets over the erosion of judicial review. “And don’t forget the diminishing freedom to sue the bastards, a freedom curtailed under the guise of controlling a phony ‘litigation explosion,’ ” complains “lawyer of the centuy” Joe Jamail.

Shrugged: Looks forward to an objectivist “utopia of greed” where men of ability can freely use their gifts to benefit themselves and, hopefully, everyone. Closing line: ” ‘The road is cleared,’ Galt said. ‘We are going back to the world.’ He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.”

Super-Rich: Looks forward to a remaking of government where the “rebellious rich take on the reigning rich.” Closing line: “Yoko laughed and gave [insurance magnate] Bernard [Rapoport] a confident hug. ‘It’s time for a little pathos…I’ll just say that wonderful Hawaiian word that means both hello and goodbye, greeting and farewell, gratitude for the past and hope for the future. Aloha.’ “

October 19, 2009

Nader Adds Novelist to Résumé
His utopian fantasy is flying at author events
By Claire Kirch

Ralph Nader has racked up a long list of achievements as a consumer activist for the past 40-plus years: thanks to his dogged advocacy for citizens against both politicians and corporations, Americans now drive safer cars, eat healthier foods, drink cleaner water, work in safer workplaces and breathe less-polluted air. Already a published author, who’s written or co-written more than a dozen nonfiction books, including the 1965 classic that made him a household name, Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader, at age 75, has just added one more literary accomplishment to his list: novelist.

Nader’s debut novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! was crashed by Seven Stories Press with a September 22 laydown. Despite no pre-pub buzz or early reviews in the trade publications, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! already has sold 35,000 copies of its 40,000-copy first print run in hardcover, with no signs of sales slowing down. While Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! has sold steadily into the chains, according to Seven Stories’ distributor, Consortium, it has sold “really well” into the independents and into airport stores as well, where it’s one of the top 10 bestselling books on a per-store basis.

“We sold it on the blurbs,” Jim Nichols, Consortium sales director, explained, citing promotional endorsements of the book from a diversity of well-known public figures, including business management guru Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence), actor Warren Beatty, Prince-ton University professor Cornel West, rock-and-roller Patti Smith and former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham.

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! is, in Nader’s words, “practical utopian fiction in the tradition of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.” Nader weaves a tale of 17 real-life billionaires and other influential social elites, including Yoko Ono, Bill Cosby and Bill Gates Sr., who, led by one of the world’s two wealthiest men, Warren Buffett, respond to the ineptitude of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by leading the charge to wrest the government of the United States away from out-of-touch politicians and greedy corporate interests and return power to the people.

“This could become the most important work of practical utopian fiction in our history,” Nader insisted. “No one else has done it this way. I use real people who were picked very carefully, and I show how [a progressive, top-down, social movement] develops and emerges. There’s enough in it to be a civics course on power.”

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! has received much attention in the consumer media this past month, to be expected by a celebrity writing a topical novel about other celebrities. An AP report was followed by articles in the Washington Post, Variety, San Francisco Chronicle and the Nation. Radio and TV interviews include NPR’s Weekend Edition, The Tavis Smiley Show, ABC radio, Fox Business News, Democracy Now! and Minnesota Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

But Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon attributes much of the unexpected success of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! to Nader himself “generating momentum the old-fashioned way, with a lot of shoe leather and travel miles.” This fall, Nader has discussed his book and signed copies at 34 different venues in 14 cities across the country to date, including bookstores, libraries and book festivals, with attendance at each event ranging between 100 and 300, with an average of 65 books sold at each site. Half of all his public appearances are held at independent bookstores (either in-store or off-site), and he’s even had scheduled signings at four Hudson Group airport bookstores (at Baltimore-Washington International, O’Hare, Denver, and Omaha, Neb.).

Leonard Riggio-himself a character in the novel-introduced Nader at the Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! book launch at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Union Square in New York City on September 23. Riggio insisted to the 600 people attending that he was “not at all like the person that bears my name in Ralph’s far-fetched story.” But he added, “The fact that he respects my interest in social justice is reason enough to thank him.”

Expressing his hope that people with very deep pockets who read Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! will then be inspired to put forward the money to make his vision a reality, Nader declared, “People are looking for something like this. People are discouraged about the state of this country. Even the super-rich are discouraged.”

Nader’s Road to Utopia
By Richard Lingeman

Not content to foment a consumer revolution, to start up policy-action groups like Public Citizen, to write and publish a string of investigative reports and, oh yes, to run for president, Ralph Nader has written a novel–his first. The title is Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

If you’re thinking the peerless organizer of popular movements has sold out to the big bucks people, well, the book is fiction, see. It’s the story of social upheaval catalyzed by a team of progressive-minded billionaires. As Nader tersely explained to me: “Reform can only happen top down-bottom up. Not bottom up alone. You’ve got to have the big boys to take on the big boys.” You need money to make change.

The protagonists in Nader’s novel are seventeen elderly billionaires who invest their fortunes to bring about a more just and humane America. As you’ve probably guessed, this is a utopian novel. Why utopian? Having seen so many worthy nonfiction muckraking books ignored, Nader says, he decided fiction would be a better way to draw attention to his ideas. He also felt that the honorable tradition of utopian novels (Looking Backward, A Traveler From Altruria, News From Nowhere, Walden Two, Always Coming Home) had fallen into desuetude. In their day, such fictions inspired concerned citizens with powerful alternative visions. But in the 1950s the genre came under attack by conservative academics and ideologues, who charged that socialist utopias were a fast track to totalitarianism (see Russell Jacoby’s The End of Utopia for details). Also, reformers lost confidence in their dreams.

Of course, the right has its utopian novels. Witness the continuing popularity of Ayn Rand’s tracts The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (the latter has sold 300,000 copies so far this year, presumably to Glenn Beckheads arming themselves to resist Obama “socialism”).

For his progressive purposes Nader finds that the utopian novel allows one’s imagination to forage freely in policy pastures for down-to-earth solutions. “There’s a utopian novel in every civic practitioner,” he says. Meaning: political activists who know a lot about social problems and solutions can fruitfully imagine fictional scenarios of how they would be achieved. In the past Nader might have sat down and written an investigative book. Now he is presenting his ideas as fiction grounded in reality.

Nader’s novel differs from traditional futuristic utopias in that his seems to be set in a vague, pre-Obama present; also, it describes the process of successful change rather than the new world that results (success being utopian for the left). And the seventeen billionaires in the novel are named after real-life superrich folk and their character traits are drawn from the counterpart’s biography. The ring leader is the Daddy Megabucks of them all, Warren Buffett, whom Nader imagines being radicalized by the suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He ships food and medicine to the victims and then travels to the scene to direct rescue efforts. When an old lady cries out, “Only the rich can save us!” he has an epiphany: he will enlist progressive billionaires to rain money on the American desert of indifference.

So he recruits a team of power hitters, including George Soros, Ted Turner, Ross Perot, Barry Diller, Bill Cosby, Yoko Ono and others. At secret meetings at a five-star resort in Maui they plot a host of citizen-action programs to tackle the problems of dirty elections, paid-for politicians, corporate arrogance, dysfunctional schools–and down the list. Then they put their “dead money” to good work, supporting an armada of citizen groups with names like Citizens’ Utility Board, People’s Chamber of Commerce, National Trust for Posterity and Congress Watchdogs, which implement smart reforms. There’s a Clean Elections Party, which runs third-party candidates, and Sun God demos for green energy. Individuals form themselves into Delaware corporations, with all the excessive privileges of corporate personhood. And oh yes, another group unionizes Wal-Mart by setting up competing stores on decaying Main Streets.

Well, as the man says, it’s a utopia. You gotta believe.

About Richard Lingeman
Richard Lingeman is a senior editor of The Nation. His books include Small Town America: A Narrative Hisory, 1620-Present; Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945; An American Journey: Theodore Dreiser (a two-volume biography, now available in one abridged paperback edition from John Wiley & Sons); Sinclair Lewis: Rebel From Main Street (Random House) and, most recently, Double Lives: American Writers’ Friendships (Random House)

Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Ralph Nader, Fiction Writer
By Tim Morrison

Ralph Nader has been many things: lawyer, consumer-rights bulldog, political activist, and perennial third-party Presidential candidate. He’s now added a new title to his business card: fiction writer. His latest book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! is a 700-page populist fantasy in which a small group of billionaires and media moguls — led by Warren Buffett and including Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Cosby, Yoko Ono and Phil Donahue — pool their massive resources to reform America. With the help of a $15 billion war chest and a P.R. campaign starring a talking parrot, the group successfully unionizes Walmart, ends corporate influence on Congress, makes Warren Beatty the Governor of California and legalizes industrial hemp. TIME talked to Nader about the origins of his book, its celebrity characters and America’s real-life political battles. (Read TIME’s Fall Preview: 50 things to read, hear, see and do this autumn.)

You say in your Author’s Note that this book is not a novel, but it’s not nonfiction. So what is it?
In the literary world, it’s either called a work of speculation — “What if something happened?” “What if somebody did this?” — or a practical utopia. We haven’t had many practical utopias. Russell Jacoby, a professor out in California, wrote a book called The End of Utopia in 1999, which argues the idea of imagining better futures has diminished, as we wallow more and more in our desperate state of societal and governmental decay. So I tried to revive the genre, so to speak.

Was that your goal in writing the book? To create a practical utopia?
No. As you go through year after year, as many civic advocates do, being overwhelmed by the corporate lobbies and their allies in government, you say to yourself, ‘If we only had more media, if we only had more money, if we only had more field organizers, if we only had better ideas and strategies.’ That’s what produced the book. What if we had a collection of super-rich elderly retired people who are very dismayed at the state of their beloved country, and what if they got together and really poured money in. What would happen? And what would happen is a major power collision with corporate goliaths and their government allies. (See photos from a summer of Tea Party protests.)

You mention your group of the super rich. How did you come up with that idea, with those characters?
First of all, the civil rights movement, contrary to popular impression, was funded in significant part by super rich people. The right wing movement in this country is funded by people like Richard Scaife, who’s put in a quarter of a billion dollars at least. I decided to pick [my characters] because they all brought something to the table: Barry Diller, media; Ted Turner, media; George Soros, the Open Society Institute and institution building; Peter Lewis, insurance; Joe Jamail and Bill Gates Sr. on access to justice. They all brought something to it.

How does Yoko Ono fit into this group?
First of all, I wanted to have more women than I could find who were older and quite well known. She brings moral sentiments and aesthetics. Aesthetics is a very under-stressed dimension of civic action: music song, beauty, posters, logos, all these things.

Have you met the people you based these characters on?
Oh yes. I’ve talked to or met a lot of them: Barry Diller, Phil Donahue, Bernard Rapoport, Leonard Riggio…

Have you said to any of them, “I’m writing this book about you?”
Not until I finished it.

What did they say?
Well I got through to eight of them; they were bemused, but obviously they weren’t going to say much until they saw the book. But some of them were very pleased.

Did you ever consider making yourself a character in the book?
That’s what Warren Beatty wants. He wants to make this a movie, but only if I’m in it.

The jumping-off point for this story is the government’s response to hurricane Katrina. Was that the genesis of the idea for you as well?
It was one of them, yeah. Another of them was how demoralized they were, these super rich older people that I talked to. I said to them, ‘How could you be demoralized? You’re sitting on five, six eight billion dollars. For a billion dollars, with field organizers in every congressional district, you can get a single payer health care system.’ What’s a billion dollars to these people?

The events in the book read like this unstoppable wave of progressivism. Isn’t it kind of a fantasy to expect that to actually happen?
Well, I tried to unleash almost everything short of detonations [on the main characters]. I mean, the other side really unleashed about everything they had, but you see, they weren’t used to being taken on by the big guys or in ways they’d never seen before. They’re used to meat and potatoes lobbying: put the ads on, get the think tanks going, throw more money in the PACs. Very traditional.

And you think that would be their response in real life as well?
Well, if they were caught by surprise, sure.

What do you think about the current fight over health care reform?
Well, it’s going down heavily. Obama’s not going to get a public option. By the time the thousand-page monstrosity of complexity and ambiguity gets to his desk, it’s going to be a shred of what the majority of doctors, nurses and the people in this country want — which is full Medicare for all.

What’s your take on Obama so far?
Weak. Waffling, wavering, ambiguous and overwhelmingly concessionary.

Is any of this enough to get you back into the political arena yourself?
It’s too early to say. One thing is I always want the progressive agenda represented on the ballot, even in a rigged two-party tyranny. I wish other people would do it, but as far as me, it’s too early to say.

Do you think third parties have a shot in the next elections?
Sure. They’ll be called the Bloomberg Party. Some billionaire will come in like Perot and turn it into a three-way race. There’s so many billionaires, and a few of them are quite enlightened. You don’t need a right wing billionaire because they’ve already got the Republican Party.

THE WASHINGTON POST

September 21, 2009
Ralph Nader, Following His Muse

The Reliable Source
By Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts

Last May, independent publisher Dan Simon received a manuscript from a first-time novelist. It took two weeks to get through the tome, after which he called the author.

Would the novelist be willing to make any changes? Absolutely not, the man replied.

When did he hope to publish it? In June, the man said.

In June?!? Simon told the writer it would be physically impossible to turn around before September.

All right then, said Ralph Nader: “September is okay.”

Yes, Nader is now a novelist, and his quirky fiction debut — a 733-page “utopian fantasy” starring Warren Buffett and Yoko Ono — is as earnest as his legendary consumer activism and as unpredictable as his presidential runs. “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us” opens with an imaginary meeting of multimillionaires at a Maui resort where Buffett exhorts the likes of Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Cosby, Barry Diller and Ono to use their collective influence and wisdom to transform the country.

“In this book, they’re all good guys,” Nader told us — and indeed, the cover art has them duded up like superheroes.

“Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us,” a new work of fiction by Ralph Nader.

The bad guys, in Nader’s vision, are corporate CEOs and their allies in Washington, led by Lancelot Lobo (a composite character, Nader says) and sidekick Brover Dortwist (any resemblance to anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is entirely intentional.)

Nader started the book three years ago, but “then I was busy running for president.” Why so long? “This is a very detailed battle-for-justice plan,” he said.

Simon, who runs the independent Seven Stories Press, said he was energized by the big ideas of Nader’s story. “This book reminds me that change really could happen.” Also, he noted, Nader is a dogged book-tour self-promoter, with a history of bestsellers. Seven Stories did an initial printing of 40,000 copies for Tuesday’s release, and it’s already printing an additional 5,000.

Will it help that Len Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble, is one of the novel’s beneficent titans? Nader told us he sent copies to all the real-life heroes from the book. No reviews yet, although Turner told him he was delighted to be included.

NADER’S BLUEPRINT

DEMOCRACY NOW
THE WAR AND PEACE REPORT

September 21, 2009

Ralph Nader on the G-20, Healthcare Reform, Mideast Talks and His First Work of Fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”

Amy Goodman Interview with Ralph Nader

AMY GOODMAN: Your book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, it’s just out. Kind of fiction, not really nonfiction, you call it a practical utopia. Where did you get the title?

RALPH NADER: The title came from—Warren Buffett was watching post-Katrina in his living room in Omaha, and he saw these streams of poor people fleeing the floods and the winds, and no food, no water, no shelter, on the highways north of New Orleans. And no one was helping them. And so, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he got a whole convoy of supplies, and he took them down to the New Orleans area. He went down himself and distributed all the food and the tents and the medicine to these desperate families and came across an African American family, who was helping, and the grandmother grabbed his hands, looked up at him and said, “Only the super-rich can save us.”

And that haunted him all the way back to Omaha, where he developed a plan to get seventeen older super-rich enlightened Americans at a hotel on a mountaintop in Maui, Hawaii, and basically asked themselves, what is it going to take to turn this country around? It’s going to take mass media. One of the seventeen is Barry Diller. And it’s going to take a reversal of the insurance industry. It’s Peter Lewis. It’s going to take dealing with deficits and subsidies and organizing the veteran and veteran groups and the women’s clubs around the country. Ross Perot. It’s going to take a real coordination and putting in a lot of money. That’s what they all represented. Bill Cosby is one of them. Phil Donahue is one of them. Yoko Ono is one of them. William Gates, Sr., Leonard Riggio, Bernard Rapoport. These and others get together, and it all happens in one year, 2006.

When you read this book, you’ll not only get a lift in terms of the feasibility of change, if we only change the predicates and stop trying to go after trillion-dollar industries with a few million dollars of citizen group budgets, and you not only get a lift, but you can see, step by step, the strategy, the tactics—how they set up a People’s Chamber of Commerce with tens of thousands of progressive small businesses around the country; how they set up a sub-economy, where they bought all kinds of businesses and got inside the corporate beast, because they own these companies; how they developed mass media; how they got people’s attention through the use of, for example, this parrot, Patriotic Polly, which got on TV early in 2000 and got millions of emails when it kept saying, “Get up! Don’t let America down! Get up! Don’t let America down!”

You know, in the early part of the twentieth century, Amy, and the latter part of the nineteenth, there were practical utopias, or there were just plain utopias, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, that really infused and raised the horizons of the progressive movement and people like Eugene Debs. In fact, that book sold a million copies, Looking Backward. We’ve stopped doing that in the last two generations. Our imaginations have been stifled by the grim reality of concentrated corporate power.

But when you see how these Meliorists, which is what these seventeen super-rich elderly progressive Americans called themselves, when you see how Sol Price, who started the Price Club, took on Wal-Mart to unionize Wal-Mart, you will see what happens when there’s smarts, determination and adequate money to take on a behemoth like Wal-Mart. You’ll also see how entrenched right-wing politicians, when they’re surrounded with mass movements back in their congressional district, and they’re basically confronted with ultimatum in this climactic scene in Congress at the end of the book, how they react.

And it’s important, I think, for all of us to stop just documenting and documenting and diagnosing and proposing these things, when there’s no power behind, there’s no juggernaut, there’s no pressure to organize the mass of the citizenry in the directions that really reflects their public sentiment, to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, why fiction?

RALPH NADER: Because nonfiction prevents you from imagining. You have to, in effect, document Blackwater. You have to document the atrocities in Iraq, the military-industrial complex. All of these books, wonderful books, are coming out, more than ever in American history. You’ve had many of the authors on your program. But they are bound by nonfiction. They’re bound by the realities of concentrated power, which they are exposing in terms of their abuses. So you have to have fiction to raise the imaginative capability, what is feasible to fulfill life’s possibilities for people in this country and abroad. And that’s why fiction is so important.

I didn’t take the novel approach, because that’s very restrictive. That’s why it’s called a practical utopia. A professor in California, Russell Jacoby, wrote a book in 1999 called The End of Utopia, and I picked it up. I said, “What’s this all about?” because, you know, utopia, in most people’s minds, is like off-the-chart science fiction. It turns out he documented how, even in the academic world, the capacity and ability to imagine has been frozen. It’s been stuck, just like the society is stuck in traffic. So that’s why the fictional approach was used.

And also, look, you have a mega-billionaire. His name is Jerome Kohlberg. He was a big acquisition, merger person on Wall Street. His passion is election reform, which is part of this book. And while he started it a little bit, and then nobody, you know, rallied to his cause, but the key is, was he willing to spend a half-a-billion dollars getting it underway? That’s the key here. This entire redirection of our country embodied in this fiction of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” was pulled off not just by smart strategies, legions of organizers, legions of grassroot lecturers, but the whole thing cost less than $15 billion.

And you know there are people—Bloomberg is worth more than that. Carl Icahn is worth more than that. One multibillionaire. We have to imagine, step by step. So there are no magic wands in this book. This is a very realistic, month-by-month strategy for a titanic power collision with the entrenched CEOs and their political allies.

Leslie Stahl read this on her vacation in August, and she wrote me a very nice letter. You know, she’s the correspondent for 60 Minutes. And she thought the book was engrossing, creative and funny. And I said, “I’ll take all three, Leslie.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, why do you call these people “Meliorists”?

RALPH NADER: Because they were trying to figure out what they were going to call themselves to avoid a Bush Bimbaugh-type smear. One of the characters in the book is Bush Bimbaugh, who we all know is a takeoff on Rush Limbaugh. And a wonderful scene there when he invited Ted Turner into his studio, because he was losing ratings because of the growth of the progressive movement. They were saying, “What do we call ourselves so we’re not smeared, you know, by the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal or others?” And they came up with this word Meliorist, which means betterment. These are retired, progressive, enlightened billionaires and mega-millionaires who want to better the country. That’s what they called themselves.

But they didn’t go public until the mid-year, as they—that they were a coordinated effort. And as a result, they were able to engage in a strategy of coordinated surprise when they took on the CEOs.

And the Darth Vader in the book, who’s called Lobo, retained by the CEO Goliaths, represents every conceivable effort to stop the Meliorists. This is a titanic power collision. It’s not philanthropy. It’s not soft charity. It’s shifting power from the few to the many, top down, bottom up. That is, top down from the mega-rich, enlightened older people who are the Meliorists, down to the low [inaudible].

There’s a very good section in the book on how they did it in southwest Oklahoma to take on a thirty-eight-year-old veteran, House Rules Committee veteran, Republican—remember, the scene takes place in 2006—how they mobilized it in very practical ways. It eliminates all the stereotypes that we’ve learned to swallow as progressives about red state, blue state. It gets down to the concrete lives and the concrete hopes and the concrete capacities of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, have you lost faith in grassroots movements making that difference, making that change?

RALPH NADER: No, they can’t make it without very significant resources. If you want to set up 2,000 people organized in each congressional district, as the Meliorists do, you’re going to need tens of millions of dollars to get the staff, the offices, to find those 2,000 people, to root them so they go beyond the first year and they institutionalize themselves.

And this book, I hope, will be read by mega-billionaires. I hope they’ll say, “You know, all this time we wanted to do something about the crazy war on drugs or the prison reform or tax reform”—it’s inside their heads, but they’re very discouraged. I’ve talked to a lot of these super-rich, enlightened people over the years. I’ve never seen them so demoralized about the state of their beloved country. And in their advanced years, they don’t want to just watch it decay. But they’re all very egocentric, in a way. I mean, they’re entrepreneurs. They’ve done it, you know, without great help. And they don’t collaborate. And that’s the key, that the seventeen Meliorists are far more powerful than the sum of their parts, in terms of what they bring to this gigantic battle with the corporate and political power structure.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you gotten reaction from any of them, since this is a fictional account, but you’re using real people, real descriptions, real super-rich in the book?

RALPH NADER: I think they’re starting to read it now. They’ve had it for a couple weeks. It’s going to—you know, it’s a pretty hefty book, and the whole reason is because it’s all in the details. And the details are not dull. The idea here is to make apathy boring and to make civic action exciting. There are parades and bands, and the activity is in the rhythm of people’s cultural habits as they’re eased out into the public arena from the desperation of their private lives, economically and otherwise.

The full interview is available at: http://www.democracynow.org

Friday, September 18, 2009 (AP)
Novel approach: Ralph Nader turns to fiction
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

(09-18) 06:53 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) –
Ralph Nader, the consumer activist and corporate scourge, is saying nice
things about the kind of folks you’d expect him to despise.
“Never in America have there been more super-rich people with relatively
enlightened views,” says Nader, lean and hopeful at age 75, dark eyes
aglow as he speaks at the offices of Public Citizen, the progressive
research and advocacy group he founded nearly 40 years ago.
“Not all the super-rich are craven greedhounds, dominators and bullies.
Some of them take on their counterpart greedhounds, dominators and
bullies.”

It’s as if Glenn Beck had found the bright side of socialism.
Nader hasn’t turned conservative and he isn’t making this stuff up,
although he is, in a way. After decades of speeches, articles, policy
papers and policy books attacking corporations and politicians, Nader has
turned to fiction.

“Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” is more than 700 pages, worthy of a
billionaire’s portfolio, and its heroes are a gang of 70-something
plutocrats, from Warren Buffett and Ted Turner to Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono,
who conspire to set off a progressive revolution.
The story begins in 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina. A secret
gathering is convened by Buffett at a Maui mountain retreat, where 17 very
wealthy people agree to take back the country they think has been
betrayed.

They give speeches, write books, organize community action groups. They
infiltrate corporate boards of directors, stage demonstrations for the
environment and better wages. They start a People’s Chamber of Commerce,
advocate changing the national anthem to “America the Beautiful” and dream
up a politicized parrot, “Patriotic Polly,” that becomes a media folk
hero.

“Fiction is a way to liberate the imagination,” Nader says, “to see what
could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people really put their
minds to it, along with a parrot, and took on the existing business power
bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve (it).”
The super-rich name themselves “Meliorists,” believers that people can
make the world better. They persuade the elusive Warren Beatty to run
against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor. They conspire to
force Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to allow its workers to unionize. They push for
universal health care. They start a new political party, dedicated to
publicly financed elections. They are so quick, and clever, their foes
can’t catch up.

The masses respond. Conservative smear campaigns fail. The corporations
and the politicians retreat, powerless against the joy and fire of an
engaged public.

It all works.

“In the real world?” asked Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The
Nation, the liberal weekly where some of Nader’s early writings appeared.
“In the real world of satire I can imagine it, but not in the other world,
the one we inhabit. But Ralph is a prophet; he has been right about so
many things the rest of us couldn’t imagine.”

“The cast seems a bit like People magazine, doesn’t it?” said
author-journalist Alexander Cockburn, who supported Nader’s 2000 and 2004
third-party presidential campaigns and has frequently published his essays
in Counterpunch, a left-wing newsletter Cockburn co-edits.
“Good luck to Ralph. God knows how he found the time to write a 700-page
novel. … But the use of billionaire’s money for anything other than
malign purposes is extremely rare, as Ralph well knows.”
Nader teases, but doesn’t kid. He believes the top can motivate the masses
and wants very much for the people mentioned in his novel to read it. He
already has some success: Early blurbs came from Beatty (”With this
utopian fantasy, he shows us how good he thinks things could be”) and from
Patti Smith, whose “People Have the Power” becomes a progressive theme
song in the book.

Messages left with Buffett and fellow Meliorist Barry Diller were not
immediately returned. Spokesmen for Ono and Turner each said their client
had yet to read the book and would have no comment.

Since the days of Karl Marx, revolutionaries have debated how much, if
any, help from the top was needed to overthrow the ruling class. Nader
thinks that the aging rich make for ideal instigators — wise and
wealthy, beyond accusations of personal ambition, people of the highest
achievement, yet also frustrated.

“They’re very demoralized as to the state of the country,” Nader says.
“They play golf and they grumble and they’ve persuaded themselves that
they’re powerless, which is absurd.”

His book includes pages of detailed policy proposals, Nader’s common
literary format, and draws upon public and personal observations. He
believes each of the super-rich included is capable of the actions taken
in his novel, citing as an example Turner’s well-documented interest in
the environment.

Nader says his decision to write a novel was in part a response to the
nonfiction books he had read in recent years. The corruption of
politicians and financial institutions is diligently investigated and
revealed. But only the problems are addressed; solutions either are not
provided or are too dull to inspire.

“You can see it on TV,” he says, “when (liberal author-journalist) Bill
Greider gets on Bill Moyers, for example, and he talks about the failure
of the Federal Reserve and the Wall Street collapse and that’s all very
interesting.

“And then he gets to, `Here’s one thing you can do about it. You can
re-enact the usury laws and control the skyrocketing, gouging interest
rates that fed all this speculation.’ People look the other way.”
Greider, whose books include “Come Home, America” and “The Soul of
Capitalism,” countered that he had received strong, positive reaction for
his advocacy of usury laws, which set maximum interest rates for loans.
“But I agree, in general, about what happens with exposes,” he says. “It’s
a basic complaint, that there’s not a follow-through of outrage and action
to books like mine, and to his, I might add.”

Parts of the novel are now physically impossible. The super-rich crusaders
include Paul Newman, who last year died of cancer (Nader says he was
already well into the book, and that Newman’s role was too important to
remove him from the story).

Another Meliorist is Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc.,
whom Nader places in charge of organizing street rallies. The reason:
Riggio once told Nader that he had a lifelong dislike of bullies, strange
comfort for the many independent booksellers — retailers long
championed by Nader — who blame Barnes & Noble for helping to drive
them out of business.

“I’m pretty sure that’s accurate, what he feels about bullies, but it’s
still ironic,” says Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers
Association, which represents the country’s independent stores.
“There are ironies,” Nader acknowledges. “These people are not angels. And
that’s one reason they’re so effective, because they’re not angels.”
The son of Lebanese immigrants, Nader was born in Winsted, Conn., in 1934,
and remembers that as a teenager he finished “dozens” of socially
conscious works such as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and the muckraking
of Ida Tarbell. He would read and listen to the radio, to baseball games
featuring, irony again, those ultimate underdogs, the New York Yankees.
“That’s my only Yankee imperialism,” he says. “But that was before (team
owner George) Steinbrenner. I was coming off the image and history of Babe
Ruth and my hero, Lou Gehrig … because he showed me stamina.”
His education was pinstriped: Princeton University as an undergraduate,
then Harvard Law School. In his 20s, he taught and worked as a lawyer in
Hartford, Conn., and freelanced articles, notably a 1959 piece for The
Nation in which he charged the leading automakers with caring more about
design than about safety.

Six years later, he published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a slow seller at
first that helped launch the modern consumer movement, thanks in part to
those he attacked. General Motors, builder of the Corvair, the “sporty”
little deathtrap that was the main target of Nader’s book, assigned
private investigators to dig up dirt. The resulting publicity propelled
the book onto the best-seller lists, got Nader a personal apology from the
president of GM, and pushed Congress to pass new auto-safety laws and
regulations.

“Ralph Nader became famous 40-plus years ago operating on a fairly
straightforward logic, that if you expose wrongdoing and get attention, it
will produce a political reaction,” Greider says. “And that’s what his
campaign was about, and it was successful, and helped lead to laws for
clean water, clean air and a rather long list of legislation.”
Nader said it took just months to finish the novel, “the words flying out”
of his Underwood typewriter, a process so flush that when an occasional
thunderstorm knocked out the electricity he would continue to work, by
candlelight.

He cites a couple of reasons for waiting until now to try fiction:
“insufficient” imagination and a stubborn belief, now worn down, that the
truth was enough, that “around the corner we’d have a breakthrough in
health care, we’d have a breakthrough in corporate accountability.” His
mind was not changed by the election of Barack Obama.
Even Utopia isn’t perfect. Of all the hurdles cleared and miracles
realized in his novel, one great leap is never considered:
Ralph Nader becoming president.

“Fiction has some boundaries,” he says with a laugh.

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Copyright 2009 AP