Nader in Chicago
Press Action
Thursday, April 08, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mclellan04082004/
The Definition of a Public Servant
By Tracy McLellan
It was odd listening to Ralph Nader speak at Columbia College in Chicago Tuesday because you only realize how self-evident and rare is his political discourse upon hearing it at all. If this be egotism, I say more, more, more. This kind of honesty and integrity, full of truth, hope, freedom, and the real concepts of democracy, is once-in-a-lifetime. It is mystifying that his candidacy does not resonate with 95% of the electorate.
Bush and Kerry consistently seek to convince with the gesture. With Bush it is a patrician sneer that scans the audience like a searchlight, while he stumbles over his tongue and lies with a broad smirk; or the bouncing shoulders as he sniggles disarmingly. With Kerry it is the grandiloquent windmill gesture or the fist thrusting heavenward that accompanies the same threadbare rhetoric. Nader needed not a single gesture, and merely spoke truthfully, forcefully, for an all-too-short-hour.
Nader announced that it was important to come to grips with our political situation instead of allowing cheap political mantras to further lower our political aspirations. He ripped into Bush for the fiasco in Iraq, calling him a messianic militarist while claiming we are on the verge of another Vietnam. He said Bush lied and deceived to plunge the country into a war which many top-tier advisers said was imprudent and would undermine the war on terror, and that Bush was guilty of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” constitutionally required for impeachment; sins far worse than those for which Clinton was impeached, although lying under oath was not to be underestimated.
To listen to Nader and share his vision is to realize what is possible in the political sphere, in life itself. He pounded the corporate ethic as anathema to the people and their needs. Corporate charters were once granted by states to serve people’s interests alone, said Nader, and in the early days corporations were kept on a tight leash. Their charters were subject to recall and renewed only if they were benefiting people. That has changed, he said, and corporations have now become our masters rather than our servants.
It is the drug and insurance companies and health care providers that say no to universal health care, said Nader. Coal, oil and gas, petrochemical and pesticide companies say no to a clean environment. Wal-Mart, fast-food conglomerates, and every business that profits on the minimum wage says no to a living wage. The politicians who are paraded on stage and the corporations that buy them say no to publicly financed campaigns, which, Nader claims, save the taxpayer a hundred dollars for every dollar spent. Real estate and banking interests say no to affordable housing. The oil and gas, coal, and nuclear energy industries say no t solar power, the technology for which has been available for decades and which is clean, cheap, plentiful and renewable.
Consumers, said Nader, are losing their defenses and control over the marketplace in the face of absurd new fees, charges, and costs to which they are subject. Aventa recently made a unilateral decision to charge anyone who closed their account a $25 fee. Everyone knows about paying late fees for late payments, said Nader, but now GE Credit has announced a surcharge for paying accounts on time.
Nader questioned why there is so much poverty in this country. America is far wealthier than Europe he said, but in Europe you don’t see the slums and the homeless that we do here. Thirteen million children are going hungry in this country, disgraces perpetrated by the CEOs that make $200,000 a week.
Why does our foreign policy reflect the fact that our tax-dollars allow the big defense (sic) contractors -McDonnell Douglass, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman -to send their deadly weapons to brutal and repressive regimes around the world? Because these corporations, says Nader, want the world for themselves. Our politicians are complicit in the tobacco companies that want to addict people around the world to their deadly product and to replace indigenous diets with that of fast food companies. They are not interested in nutritious food, but rather tricking our taste buds into an addiction, and it is an addiction, said Nader, to their so-called food.
With the demise of the Soviet Union, said Nader, the United States has no major enemy. Yet half the discretionary budget goes to the military. That is why there is no help for our cities, clinics, environment, public transit, and the rest of our social infrastructure. Why is this? asks Nader. Because it’s all going to the military. It’s going to amass the greatest hoard of weapons ever. Our weapons can blow up the world 300 times over. Many admirals and generals are fed up with defending countries across the globe against a non-existent enemy, said Nader. They are fed up with buying weapons systems like the F-22 or Missile Defense that are redundant, obsolete and unneeded. We are spending enough money on the Iraq war alone, says Nader, to send everyone who wants to, through college.
“The airwaves that the corporate media control,” said Nader, “are ours; they belong to the people. And yet, we can’t even get them to offer a single half-hour show of what’s going on culturally, academically, or in the arts in our universities. Not a single show, except for sports.” He looked directly into the local news cameras and announced to the audience that they could be sure we wouldn’t see this on the evening news when he said, “the airwaves belong to the people. The people control them and the networks ought to pay rent on them. When programming is determined by some small-minded executive in New York based on what will sell product, as it is too often today, the franchise ought rather be offered to those who would produce real programming that is the product of a rich culture and benefit to the people, with a wide and varied offering and accessibility to those who would learn to direct, produce, staff cameras, and write programming for television and radio.”
“We own the commonwealth,” Nader continued. “This is a rich treasure that includes the public airwaves; one-third of this country is public lands, national parks and preserves that belong to us; there are $5 trillion in pensions that are owned by the peoples; hundreds of billions in research and development, through NASA, defense (sic), and the like, is ours although it has been given away to corporations for free; the public works: the highways, bridges, schools, libraries, and roads all belong to the people. We own it. But we don’t control it. Who controls it? Other than the public works it is all controlled by corporations, by the huge banks, the realtors, the mining, energy, and timber industries. The United States is the only country in the world that gives away its hard rock minerals.”
For example, he alluded to the Noranda Corporation of Canada, which bought a stake to lands in the West under the 1872 Mining Law for $5 an acre, $5,000, which returned TEN BILLION DOLLARS in gold. Noranda didn’t even have to pay royalties on this windfall, and, as if that weren’t bad enough, left the land around the mine to the taxpayers, an environmental catastrophe that included acidic streams and deadly cyanide runoff. Nader suggested that questioning why we the people do not control these resources we own is policy that even conservatives should find as congenial as those who claim to be liberal.
Along with rhetoric that should resonate with the vast majority of the electorate, Ralph Nader is the very definition of a public servant for going on four decades. In a real democracy, there wouldn’t even be a contest to his candidacy and the citizens would be scrambling for a way to overturn the Twenty-Second Amendment, allowing him to serve more than two terms. That the office is held by an oaf, and Clinton before him, and is being contested by the likes of John Kerry is worse than alarming.
Tracy McLellan is a writer and activist living in the suburbs south of Chicago, and can be reached at tracymclellan@netzero.net.