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.

———————————————————————-
Copyright 2009 AP

August 31, 2009
ARTS, BRIEFLY
Footnote
Compiled by RACHEL LEE HARRIS

The consumer advocate, author and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader has written his first novel,
“Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” Variety reported. The story about 17 wealthy figures, including Warren
Beatty and Warren Buffet, trying to turn around the economy in 2006, is to be released by Seven Stories
Press on Sept. 22. Mr. Nader calls the book his “answer to Ayn Rand.”

Nader goes hollywood
Advocate turns in first fiction book
By CAROLE HORST

Ralph Nader’s gone Hollywood. Sort of.

Nader, tireless crusader for the consumer, perennial presidential candidate and author of many nonfiction books taking on everything from General Motors to the government, has made his first foray into fiction. "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" due out Sept. 22, centers on 17 rich icons with a political bent, including Warren Beatty and Warren Buffet, and their fictional plan to turn the country’s fortunes around back in the year 2006. The book, from Seven Stories Press, is what Nader calls his "answer to Ayn Rand."The enigmatic Beatty even blurbed the book on Amazon.com, and pondered with Nader the what-ifs had his famously noncommittal stand on running for office gone a different direction: Nader asked Beatty how he would have fared running against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California’s governorship in 2006. To which Beatty replied, "I would’ve creamed him."

Nader goes hollywood

Advocate turns in first fiction book

By CAROLE HORST

Ralph Nader’s gone Hollywood. Sort of.

Nader, tireless crusader for the consumer, perennial presidential candidate and author of many nonfiction books taking on everything from General Motors to the government, has made his first foray into fiction. "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" due out Sept. 22, centers on 17 rich icons with a political bent, including Warren Beatty and Warren Buffet, and their fictional plan to turn the country’s fortunes around back in the year 2006. The book, from Seven Stories Press, is what Nader calls his "answer to Ayn Rand."The enigmatic Beatty even blurbed the book on Amazon.com, and pondered with Nader the what-ifs had his famously noncommittal stand on running for office gone a different direction: Nader asked Beatty how he would have fared running against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California’s governorship in 2006. To which Beatty replied, "I would’ve creamed him."

Personality Parade – Famous Fathers and Sons

published: 08/23/2009

Q I’m curious: Has Kiefer Sutherland ever acted in anything with his father, Donald?

—Camilla Klimkowski

Arlington, Va.

A The Sutherlands appeared together in Max Dugan Returns (1983) and in A Time To Kill (1996)—neither time as

father and son. Both were keen for Donald to play Jack Bauer’s dad on 24, but there were scheduling conflicts, to

their mutual regret. “He’s one of the most supportive people in my life,” Kiefer says. “I know I’ll probably always be

compared to him, but it didn’t seem to hurt my career!” See photos of other Hollywood fathers and sons.

Q How much do guests get paid to appear on The Tonight Show and Letterman?

—D. Edgington

Bowie, Md.

A American Federation of Television and Radio Artists pay range for such an appearance: not less than $470. That

amount, for most guests: pocket change.

Q What’s up with The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, with Bryce Dallas Howard? I never saw the film in

theaters.

—Ariana Bander

University Heights, Ohio

A The movies are a cruel business, Ms. Bander, and all the more so during a recession. Film distributors are notoriously picky, and more and more pictures are going straight to DVD—or oblivion. As for last year’s never-released Teardrop Diamond—which also starred Ann-Margret, Ellen Burstyn, and Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer—you may be able to rent it…someday.

Q Is Ralph Nader going to run for President again?

—Tom Chastain

Tampa, Fla.

A Maybe. “It’s too early to make any decision,” says the irrepressible Nader, 75. What he is set on is his new career as—ready?—novelist. “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!,” out next month, is “about 17 elderly, progressive, super-rich Americans who decide they’re going to, in one year, turn around big business and Washington, D.C.,” Nader says. “I know a lot of these people, and they’re very demoralized.” With all that dough? Yes, Nader insists. “They don’t want to leave their country the way it is, but they’ve persuaded themselves that what they have to look forward to basically is grumbling and golf. This says, ‘Snap out of it! You have enormous power!’” Billionaires unite!

Q When Stewart Cink won the British Open, he thanked his wife, Lisa, for introducing him to his faith. What is his faith?

—Barbara Thompson

Lakeland, Fla.

A The tall, quiet, and good-humored Cink, who recently presented a charmingly self-effacing “Top 10 Surprising Facts About Stewart Cink” on Letterman, credits his golfing success to his devout Christianity. “There are so many highs and lows, peaks and valleys, whether in golf or life,” he says. “My faith helps me to smooth them out.” Cink, his wife, and their sons, Connor and Reagan, are members of the First Baptist Church of Duluth, Ga.

Q Whatever happened to Donna Douglas, Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies?

—Terry Twickler

Marrero, La.

A The delightful Douglas, now 75, has led an active and happy post-Hillbillies life, spending time with her family and giving inspirational talks. “Elly was a wonderful little door-opener for me,” Douglas says. A country girl since her youth, she’s still involved with “critters,” tending to the many cats that drop by her farm on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, La.—“They think I have a resort here,” Douglas laughs—and working with the Capital Area Animal Welfare Society in that city.

Q I say Kevin Bacon was once on Guiding Light. My wife says it was another soap. Who wins?

—Jerry Hall,

Lincoln Park, Mich.

A Treat each other to BLTs. Bacon was on both Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81). And this industrious actor has played everything from a killer (The River Wild) to a Marine on coffin-escort duty (in HBO’s Taking Chance). Of the last, he says: “After it aired, the policy that caskets returning from war may not be photographed was changed. I’d like to think the film had something to do with this.”