Ralph Nader discusses Barack Obama
Amy Goodman recently interviewed Ralph Nader at DemocracyNow. Nader was not sold on Obama:
Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully. He has worn out the word “change.” We now want to know what change is involved. And it’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z. In his voting record, he voted against reform of the Mining Act of 1872, which gives away our hard rock minerals. He voted for a terrible class-action restriction law that the corporations wanted him to vote for. He, in many ways, has disappointed people who had greater hopes for him. He’s voted for reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. He refuses to even discuss—he’s vigorously against impeachment of Bush and Cheney. He won’t even support his colleague Senator Russ Feingold motion to censure the Bush administration for systemic repeated illegal wiretaps. He—you know, he’s letting the corporate-dominated city of Washington, the corporations who actually rule us now in Washington, determine his agenda. And that does not augur well.
If that sounds harsh, Nader was even more critical of John McCain.
When asked what Ralph Nader would offer, if elected, here’s what he said:
if you look at our website, votenader.org, you’ll see why: because we have a shift of power agenda. We want to galvanize the citizenry. We want to get them involved in shaping the campaign in city after city by getting citizen coalitions together to invite these candidates as they go through the city to their own auditoriums to respond to their own agendas. And when we talk about aggressive crackdown on corporate crime, fraud and abuse, that’s on our table; it’s not on McCain/Obama’s table, not on the corporate media’s table to discuss, although the corporate media reports it every day.
We have a security speculation tax. $500 trillion in security derivatives are going to be traded this year. A tiny tax on those transactions would relieve the federal income tax up $100,000 on American workers. We have solar energy, instead of nuclear power. We have single-payer health insurance, which replaces the health insurance moguls and their enormous administrative and bureaucratic waste and their denial of doctor discretion and their “pay or die” policies in America, unlike all Western democracies.
