Ralph Nader on the G-20, Healthcare Reform, Mideast Talks and His First Work of Fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”
 
As the United States prepares to host the Group of Twenty nations summit in Pittsburgh later this week, we speak with longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, author and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Nader discusses Congress’s failure to pass any meaningful financial reform on Wall Street over the past year and critiques Obama’s healthcare reform proposal. Ralph Nader also talks about his first work of fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” Nader describes the book in terms of a practical utopia, a fictional vision that could become a new reality.

       PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The first meeting of the G-20 nations in April came at the height of the global financial crisis, a crisis that required unprecedented international cooperation to jumpstart the world’s economies and help break the downward spiral that enveloped all our nations. At next week’s summit, we’ll have, in effect, a five-month checkup to review the steps each nation has taken, separately and together, to break the back of this economic crisis. And the good news is that we’ve made real progress since the last time we met, here at home and around the world.


Because of the steps taken by our nations and all nations, we can now say that we’ve stopped our economic freefall. But we also know that stopping the bleeding isn’t nearly enough. Our work is far from over.


We can’t allow the thirst for reckless schemes that produce quick profits and fat executive bonuses to override the security of our entire financial system and leave taxpayers on the hook for cleaning up the mess. And as the world’s largest economy, we must lead, not just by word, but by example, understanding that in the twenty-first century financial crises know no borders.


Not surprisingly, lobbyists for big Wall Street banks are hard at work trying to stop reforms that would hold them accountable, and they want to keep things just the way they are. But we can’t let politics as usual triumph, so business as usual can reign.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd is expected to propose a new plan to oversee banks that would merge the four banking agencies into a single regulator. His suggestion would combine the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency into a single agency. The plan is expected to run into opposition from House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank, as well as President Obama.

Well, for more on the ongoing fallout of the economic crisis, a look at healthcare, as well as his new book, I’m joined now by a leading critic of the existing financial system. Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, corporate critic, attorney, author, activist, former presidential candidate a number of times over. For four decades he has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, work in safer environments.

He’s the author of several books, including In Pursuit of Justice and The Good Fight. This time, Ralph Nader is out with a work—well, it’s not exactly fiction or nonfiction. He calls it a practical utopia. It’s called “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Ralph.

Well, let’s start on the economy, on this year anniversary of the collapse, and where you think we have come to in this year.

RALPH NADER: Well, President Obama is engaging in political progressive talk, but one year later, nothing has happened in Congress. There hasn’t even been a bill to financially regulate, bring under the rule of law and accountability Wall Street and the financial industry, hasn’t even gone to a committee yet. They’re just going to begin hearings in the Senate Banking Committee. There’s a massive attack on the consumer regulatory agency to protect people who have mortgages and credit cards and other financial instruments by the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbies. So you see the corporate lobbies swarming over Congress, political action committee money, but no legislative action whatsoever.

I don’t think this has a precedent in American history. There’s never been a criminal, speculative, massive collapse, such as occurred on Wall Street, affecting trillions of dollars of worker pension money, mutual funds, savings, jobs, affecting communities all over the country, and no action in Congress. That’s the test. It’s not the rhetoric. It’s whether these bills are moving through, by 535 men and women who put their shoes on every day like you and I do. And that’s not happening. And that’s the way you want to analyze it.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen? What is that legislation that needs to be passed?

RALPH NADER: Well, there’s a proposal crafted in part by Elizabeth Warren, who’s head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, to make sure that the Wall Street firms behave themselves. And she’s a professor of law at Harvard Law School. That’s a very well-drafted bill. There are some proposals to strengthen the organization of financial consumers, bank depositors, insurance policy holders, etc., that needs to be put in there. But the overall bill to repeal the Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagall, to repeal the Franklin Delano Roosevelt reforms—you have to repeal the repeal of those reforms, which set the stage in 1999 and 2000 for the rampant, wild speculation with other people’s money by investment banks and banks—Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and others, Goldman Sachs, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: The poverty rate, the number of people who are losing their homes, foreclosure, where do we stand?

RALPH NADER: Well, again, the administration cannot level with the American people, because whether it’s Obama or Bernanke or Secretary Treasurer Geithner, they cannot say anything negative, because they’re afraid of the markets. And so, all they say is mild positives. And so, they can’t level with the American people. So they use indicators that favor the corporate balance sheet, but not the worker balance sheet or the pensioneer balance sheet.

And so, poverty is going up, unemployment is shooting up, underemployment is massive. There’s probably 17 percent of the American people are unemployed or underemployed. Wages are stagnant or declining. And, of course, consumer debt is increasing. Home foreclosures are increasing. Those are the indicators you’ve got to put front and center. They’re the people indicators, not the corporate, business, economist indicators.

Hey, the banks are starting to make more profit. Yeah, but they’re being bailed out by Washington, and they can be technically insolvent and still make more profit, because they’re charging such high interest rates, fees and penalties.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, you talk about legislation saving us. A new report by the watchdog group Common Cause reveals the financial industry spent $42 million lobbying Congress during the first six months of the year and that nine of the top recipients of securities money so far this year are Democrats, like Senator Schumer of New York, topping the list, taking in something like $680,000 in campaign contributions.

RALPH NADER: It’s the same old rut. And that’s why I really wrote this work of fiction, because we are not imagining, Amy, what is necessary by way of money, organizers in the field, strategy, smarts, determination to break this massive corporate-state gridlock that’s put our country into a paralysis. Our country is stuck in traffic. It is being prevented from solving many problems or diminishing them—public transit, housing, consumer protection, living wage, universal health insurance, single payer, all these corporate crime crackdowns. All of these are problems that can be addressed and solved, but not when there’s too much power in too few hands, who make the decisions for the many to the many’s disadvantage.

So we have to—we have to ask ourselves the question: What will it take to break through? What will it take to put the people back into their sovereignty? What will it take to make sure that we enforce the Constitution and we don’t get in these foreign military adventures that are unconstitutional, violate statutes and violate international treaties, not just under Bush-Cheney, but there’s an unseemly continuity in this area under the Obama administration.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been talking about Congress. What about the G-20? I mean, you have world leaders gathering in Pittsburgh later this week. Also, many thousands of protesters are expected. But where does this story, whether we’re talking about the economy or healthcare, fit into the global picture and G-20? What can be accomplished there?

RALPH NADER: G-20 is a talk fest. It’s good for the Pittsburgh economy for about a week. The rallies are good, indicates that people are still trying to fight back. Nothing’s going to happen. We’ve seen this again and again with the G-20 and whatever G-number has had these meetings, whether in Canada or Europe or United States.

The issue again is, are we going to get the leadership from the enlightened super-rich to put the field organizers on the ground and to put the money into progressive campaigns and citizen action? For example, $1 billion will get us single payer in a year—that’s my sense—if we had field organizers and mobilization in every congressional district. I mean, if there was a private vote right now in Congress, about a third of them would support a single-payer system. But they are surrounded by these drug industry and health insurance lobbies and the money that’s dangled before them.

So we have to break through, and the only way we can break through is the majesty of our mind generating a higher level of imaginative “what if.” What if we have this kind of resource or these kinds of film organizers or these kinds of mass media attentions? Which is why I wrote this book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” And that’s in quotes. And it comes from a very interesting story at the beginning of the book that I can tell you, if you’re interested.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to hear that story after break. We’re talking to Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, ran for president of this country time and time again, raising issues like those he’s raising like right now. And he has a new book out. It’s not his typical book, not that any of them are, but this one is a—well, a kind of work of fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” Stay with us.