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.